Today our church celebrated our 3rd Annual Baptism. We met this morning on the boardwalk at Coney Island Beach and made our way down to the water where we stood as one body, to witness our  brothers and sisters make public their identification with a crucified Christ.

Baptism is one of the two commandments that Jesus left us. The other is the Lord’s Supper. Wayne Grudem explains the significance of baptism like this: “When the candidate for baptism goes down into the water it is a picture of going down into the grave and being buried.  Coming up out of the water is then a picture of being raised with Christ to walk in newness of life. Baptism thus very clearly pictures death to one’s old way of life and rising to a new kind of life in Christ.” (Systematic Theology, page 968-969).

If you have any sense of the eternal implications of such an amazing thing, you will understand why this was a day to rejoice!  And rejoice we did!

In the book of Acts the believers who repented and were baptized went on to “devote themselves to the apostles’ teaching” (Acts 2:42).  If you remember, would you pray that the believers who were baptized today in NYC would continue in the faith just like the believers in Acts Chapter 2?

“Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”

Romans 6:3-4