Baptism

Here are a few pictures from flying.I am getting dangerously close to being able to take my test (and hopefully pass), which means, I need to hit the books hard because I have been neglecting that more than I should. We will see how long it takes, but hopefully in the next month or so, I'll have my private pilot's license.

On a different note, in the past month, our church has baptized several little children. I kind of like it when the baby cries. :) I don't say that to be mean or anything of that sort, but isn't that what been washed by the blood of Christ is? Pain. In the Heidelberg Catechism, which is a great tool, it says that, "as surely as water washes away the dirt from the body, so certainly his blood and his Spirit wash away my soul's impurity," and then goes on to describe the washing of Christ's blood as atonement and to be washed by Christ's Spirit means that "the Holy Spirit has renewed me and set me apart to be a member of Christ so that more and more I become dead to sin and increasingly live a holy and blameless life." (Heidelberg Catechism, Q.A. 69-70).

Both of those describe pain. Christ suffered and died to give us atonement and send his Spirit. Now, we are dying to the sins in our lives, which is much more than scrubbing ourselves in the shower. It is a daily act of asking God to cut a piece of flesh from my sinful heart.

I love the description C.S. Lewis gives in "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader." In the story, Eustace finds a treasure and his heart desires to hoard it all for himself. Well, he falls asleep and when he wakes up, he has become a dragon. "Sleeping on a dragon's hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself." To keep the long story short, Aslan comes to him and takes him to this pool to ease his pain but Aslan points out that he must undress Eustace before he could enter the pool. So, Eustace started scratching at his flesh and scales would come off until he could crawl out of his dragon skin, only to find, he was still covered by scales. He did this three times, but still was a dragon. Aslan said, "You will have to let me undress you."

Here, C.S. Lewis describes baptism of the Spirit, or sanctification, marvelously...

"I (Eustace) was afraid of his claws, but I was pretty hearly desperate now. So, I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it. The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I've ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure ofeeling the stuff peeel off...Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off and there is was, lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been. And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch...Then he caught hold of me...and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment...I turned into a boy again."

This short passage is chucked full of great stuff to bring out, but I wanted to emphasize the pain Eustace felt when Aslan was cleansing him. He clawed and tore at his very flesh until there wasn't a scale left on him and this is what we all need to allow Christ to do to us every day until we are clean. This is living a sanctified life. Sure, the baptism of Christ's blood instantly removes sin, but the baptism of the Christ's Spirit is a battle cry coming from the lungs of a crying child.