When you wash your face, remember your baptism!

By Eric Bradley, Head of research and instruction, Good Library

At baptism, a person is made a new creature as they die with Christ and rise in his resurrection. They are forgiven of their sins, given the Holy Spirit, made Temples of the Holy Spirit, and receive the Holy Spirit’s fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Best of all, they become adopted sons and daughters of God, co-heirs with Christ.

It sounds pie-in-the-sky, right? However, as baptized Christians we often don’t feel like a new creature, and sure don’t feel full of love, joy and peace. Also, it is easy to be disgusted with the countless number of baptized individuals who sure don’t show this in their lives. Anyone look at the news within the past twenty-five years?

When I was in high school I spent a lot of time at my best friend’s house. On the bathroom mirror in their house was a small note with the quote: “When you wash your face, remember your baptism.” This was during a season of life where I wasn’t practicing Christianity at all, although of course I would have called myself one. Baptism opens us to cultivate a life of grace and a life of prayer, it opens us to these opportunities if we take them, and often times we don’t.

Lent is an annual opportunity to remember our baptism through acts of prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Regardless of how far we have strayed, God continues to call out to us. “Deep calls to deep” (Psalm 42:7). The voice of God pierces the deep, calling us to deep relationship.

I still remember affectionately the first Lent I took seriously. Mid-afternoon of Ash Wednesday I snuck out to my car and curled up in the back seat, feeling crippled by fasting my “must have” item. While starting Lent obsessed with “giving up” something, by the time Maundy Thursday arrived I was awestruck at the grace of love from God I experienced at that time. While it was overwhelming at the time, that Lent provided me a wonderful opportunity to grow closer to God.

May God richly bless you this Lent. When you wash your face, remember your baptism!

Scripture: 1 Peter 3:18-22 (NRSV)

For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, ¹⁹in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, ²⁰who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water.
²¹And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you—not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, ²²who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers made subject to him.