One in Baptism, Not Flesh!

 

I believe my childhood baptism was a christening instead of baptism. I believe childhood baptism or christening worked to promise me to God's care, no matter what evil would happen in life. Then, in older years, I was baptized in whole. My whole life became God's through new faith in Jesus. 

The day I was baptized in wholeness (fullness) of faith, there were a number of strangers who received the alter call at the same time I did, and who went on to be counseled a little. A few of those strangers made a Spirit-led decision, like I did, to be baptized. We received the Holy Spirit, like the first of the church at Pentecost.

When I stood waiting at the baptism pool, a member of the church told me she sensed the Holy Spirit on the baptismal water. And, before that, an associate pastor had counseled us a long while, unlike the brief counsel after we had left the prayer alter.

The pastor didn't only talk about simple faith in God through Jesus. He counseled against any hell and temptation that might be problems or obstacles.

In effect, that day, I was baptized in the name of the Father (God), the Son (Jesus), and His Holy Spirit. That day was among the first in passage to being born again through my Savior.

Now my reason for testifying to this isn't to brag about what God has done for me. But it's to bring light to a scripture I'm tired of being misused.

Galatians 3:26-28 (NKJV) says

26 For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. 27 For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. 28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

One problem this world has brought to the scripture is in quoting verse 28 in isolation. To claim, wrongly, that God has given us a call to absolute "unity," some folk have claimed, wrongly, that it is God's will to have us all be one nationality under world rule; one ethnicity; and even for no one to be of a distinct gender (not for anyone to be a "eunuch" in the biblical sense of sexless for the sake of devotion, but for masses of souls to become transgender!).

How twisted and evil that is.

It's not only that God, in the flesh as Jesus, told us plainly that people would be divided because only some would believe on Him; and it's not only that prophecy tells us government will "rest" on "His shoulders"; and it's not only that the bravest of the church is actually being persecuted by a divided world today, just like Jesus said: it's that it is plain against the Holy Spirit to change one iota of the meaning of that one scripture in the book of Galatians, regardless of whether we know anything about what Jesus said!

All God is telling us in a message to the Galatian church, is that when we have that baptized life in Him (baptized being the operative word), there are no more arguments about gender, no more arguments about whether believers who are in bonds are cursed, and no more arguments about one ethnicity nor one nationality versus another.

It's a simple message, easy to understand. In fact, what the Holy Spirit is saying, should be enough to correct even conceitedness in church, not just enough to correct blasphemous people: for example, where the church is tempted to believe in a mantra that says womens' role is to be on mission to empower quality women.

Clearly, God never said He empowers nor punishes based on gender, nor perceived quality. No, but the Holy Spirit does say He is God to us, "without respect of persons."

In Jesus, those of us baptized, through a call to be delivered, don't seem like strangers one to another, any more.