Pastor's Weekly Word

When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ’s! (Romans 8:11, The Message)

Christians are weird. These few words from Paul prove it. Here he speaks of what Christians do all the time, speaking of things that remain unseen to the naked eye, things that need the eye of faith to see and believe in. “You are delivered from death,” Paul says. “Your body will be as alive as Christ’s.” Paul is talking about baptism. When we baptize a baby with water, we speak not of water but of death and new life. We actually believe that the visible water is a sign of an invisible reality, that reality being the baby’s real death and real new life given in Christ. We believe it’s really happening even though we can’t see it.

I recently heard a pastor define a Christian as someone who “stands in between the seen world and the unseen world. They see one, believe in the other, and experience both.” I think Paul is getting at the very same thing. After all, who would do something as simple as sprinkle water on a baby’s head and believe they are dying a real death and being given a real new life? A Christian would, and so we do. We believe in new life for real as a gracious gift of God. How crazy is that? How odd and weird? How beautiful and powerful and faithful.