Posts in Baptism
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Is getting baptized a big deal? It all depends on what it means. To get an idea of its importance, think about the following.
What if you’re attending a wedding ceremony, and the pastor asks the groom, “Will you take this woman to be your wife? If so, say ‘I will,’” and the groom responds, “Do I really need to say that?”
Or, let’s say you’re at a ceremony for new citizens, and the judge says, “Please rise to take the Oath of Citizenship and allegiance to the U.S. Constitution,” and a non-citizen immigrant says to the judge, “I want to have the benefits of being in America, but I really don’t want to be called an American citizen. Can I…
Monday started with not enough time with God. I spilled my jaded, exhausted, questioning heart to Him and ran out the door to go work at the church. Yes, you read that right…go work at the church. Part of my prayer was that God would show me that He is at work. My quiet time was pathetic, incomplete with no adoration and a list of frustrated demands. Yet, apparently God received my honest mess and that was exactly the prayer He chose to answer that day.
I went to the office, wrestled through my day with as much faith as I could muster and decided I would attend our Arlington campus for service that 
Racial divides and cultural conflicts have been the cause of human tragedies around the world for millennia. Ethnic cleansing is but one horrific example of one group’s attempt to completely expunge another from the face of the earth. The root of such atrocities isn’t mere preference, not even prejudice, but what the Bible calls “partiality”, the looking down on one group while looking up to the other. Taken to its extreme, mixed with fierce pride, hearts of people seethe with anger and resentment towards others. Devastation and destruction, enmity and hostility––sometimes raging for hundreds of years––are the results.
What is powerful enough to break down the entrenched barricades separating people, and at the same time build up strong…