S7E55: Awakening to Baptism (Awakening/Becoming pt. 3, Easter 2017)

Sermon #224

Baptism is our entry into the Christian faith. It is often described as an outward sign of an inward reality, that we have died to Sin and are reborn in the Spirit. Though Baptism had been, since its earliest observance in the Christian church, sacramental in nature, after the Protestant Reformation it was often relegated to a ritual most commonly associated with the Catholic church, at least as far as the baptism of children is concerned. Yet Christ said that He is the gate (in our reading in John today), and that all who enter come through Him. So the sacramental nature of Baptism, the real presence of God through the Holy Spirit, has been largely restored at least in the Methodist church since the publishing of the 1964 Methodist Hymnal in which the ritual of Baptism is presented. Today we Methodists recognize the presence of God's Spirit in the act of Baptism and observe it as a holy sacrament.

John 10:1-10

Recorded at Hudson UMC on May 7, 2017 (Originally published May 6, 2020)

S.D.G.