A Special Watering

Where to start... I have just gotten home from China 4 days ago. It was such a wonderful trip full of glimpses of the Kingdom. I have so many stories and things to share that God taught me, I am going to start with one that I just got to witness on this trip.
Sunday night, I got to witness a beautiful reminder that halfway around the world there are believers trusting in the Lord, growing in their faith and living their lives for Christ. We called it a watering, instead of a baptism, for safety of the group meeting together. Four young women and one man had chosen to be baptized after about a year of choosing to believe and receive Jesus. So a small group of us joined together to celebrate in an apartment in Baoding, unlikely of places, for these five to be baptized. It was so powerful to witness these five young men and women join together and profess their love for their Father, and have the desire to follow his commands, even as their families, friends, and even the government is so against the life they have chosen.
You could just see in each of their faces how this decision to be baptized stemmed from their faith and belief in their Savior and desire to walk in their newness of life as Mark put it this morning. I cannot wait to hear and see how God uses each of them because there is no doubt of their strength and reverence for their Creator and Savior.

A little less than a year ago, God was calling me to start studying his word and search for the desires of his heart. And this lead me to start studying what I believed and why. He was convicting me to learn about baptism during this time, which completely flipped everything I had thought up to this point upside down. As a baby, I was baptized in a Methodist Church and had not thought much about it since, so why was God convicting me to study this: well because I do believe now, he did not want me to be ignorant to his commands any longer.
               The Cross is enough

               The Cross is enough

I fully believe that Salvation was given to those those who choose to believe and receive Jesus Christ through Grace. And baptism is the way we can as believers outwardly and inwardly show that we trust fully in Christ and have chosen a new life over our old. And when Peter was asked in Acts 2 how to respond to this message full of Grace he answered "Each of you must repent of your sins and turn to God, and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ."
God commands us to be baptized with the decision to follow him, and why would we not choose to follow this command?? It seems like one of the easier ones, just like telling our closet family or friends we love them. And I want to follow Jesus on his path, so I chose about a year ago to baptized. My friend Paul got to dunk me, and also my friend Jon being baptized too. God calls us to follow in Jesus' footsteps, even if I may have waited 11-12 years after receiving Jesus due to my ignorance, it was still a special watering for me responding to being God's chosen and God responding "Always and forever."

'What are you waiting for? Get up and be baptized.Have your sins washed away by calling on the name of the Lord.' (Acts 22:16)