Salvation is personal.  It can be no other way.  Jesus does not save collective groups of people; He saves individuals.  He is, in every sense of the phrase, a personal Savior. 

 

That being the case, we must think of salvation and speak of salvation from a personal perspective.  “What must ‘I’ do to be saved” indicates that I understand I’m lost and that I have certain requirements to fulfill in order to meet the Lord’s terms of forgiveness.  No one can do that for me; it is my personal responsibility.  Faith must spring from my own heart.  Repentance is necessary because I am a sinner.  Confession of Jesus as my Lord has to come from own lips.  And baptism must flow from my desire to have my sins washed away.  It just makes sense.  If we are going to stand before God in judgment as an individual, we have to be individually involved in our obedience to Him.

 

The Christian life has its share of heartaches and difficulties.  There will be times on our journey that we will stumble, fall, and perhaps even leave the path for a little while.  We need a solid foundation, the place we can return to again and again and have confidence in what we did to be saved.  To put it on a personal level, we need to remember that happy day when Jesus washed our sins away.

 

What, then, does baptism mean in all of this?

 

It means that our salvation is connected to truth.  Many people in the religious world want a “salvation experience.”  Some describe it as being overcome by an emotion or a feeling of “I just know that I am saved.”  But how can you have confidence in something so subjective?  Years later, how can you be certain about what you were really feeling?  

 

The Scriptures give us much more.  “The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ” (Rom. 8:16-17).  We can know that we are children of God because what we did to be saved is in agreement with what the Spirit revealed in the word of God.  We can read and “understand what the will of the Lord is” (Eph. 5:17).  Our decision to obey Him in baptism was not rooted in emotions that come and go.  It was based on the changeless, abiding truth from God that will stand forever.  That means we have something firm to hold on to. 

 

It means that we can teach someone what we did to be saved.  Again, if this was a decision based on emotion, how is it possible to transfer that feeling from one person to another?  But since our salvation is based on truth, we can share that same truth with someone else.  The New Testament pattern is one that can be followed and repeated in every generation.

 

This reinforces the importance of personal conviction in conversion.  How can we persuade someone if we were never persuaded ourselves?  But we can show someone the passages that helped us first understand that we were sinners separated from God (Isa. 59:1-2; Rom. 3:23).  We can point them to the verses that caused us to see God’s love for us and what He did for our redemption (John 3:16; Rom. 5:6-8).  We can take them through the conversion accounts in Acts which proved to us that God’s will for man’s salvation is the same.  Because we are personally convicted, that means we are personally accountable to share our convictions.

 

It means that we can trust God to keep His promises.  Everything we read about baptism in the 1st Century still happens when people are baptized in the 21st.  After the day of Pentecost, the 3,000 people who obeyed the gospel were “praising God” (Acts 2:47).  After all, He saved them; how could they not?  When Philip baptized the Ethiopian eunuch, he “went on his way rejoicing” (Acts 8:39).  Certainly there is emotion involved in being saved.  But this is a joy founded in faith in Jesus as the Son of God.  Peter wrote that “baptism now saves you—  not the removal of dirt from the flesh, but an appeal to God for a good conscience—  through the resurrection of Jesus Christ” (1 Pet. 3:21).  One man dies and is buried.  Another rises to a new life.  We trust God who said this is so.

 

Because of our connection to the death and resurrection of Christ, we await another promise:  “Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the tree of life, and may enter by the gates of the city” (Rev. 22:14).  Personally, I believe it!