At James’s baptism last night, Garry asked the question ‘What’s your profession?’ Most of us are often introduced to others by our name and profession (‘This is Garry; he’s an engineer’), and so often our identity is bound up in our jobs (nurse, teacher, shop assistant, lorry driver) or roles (parent, grandparent, husband, wife.) There is another meaning to the word ‘profession’, however: a profession can tell you about what someone feels, believes or intends to do. As Christians, we are making these kinds of professions all the time and in baptism, we declare (or ‘profess’) that we are followers of Jesus Christ.
In everyday life, we make professions all the time. For many, there is a belief that God does not exist and that science has proved this. Science cannot prove the spiritual, since it only deals with the material world, but one of the proofs of God’s existence is in the transformed lives of people from different times, countries, cultures, backgrounds and circumstances, all declaring that God’s love and life have transformed them. At a baptism, we declare our belief in the transforming power of God to change the direction of our lives entirely.
Another profession is that the Bible is a fairy tale, written by men with no more worth than any other book. Christians believe the Bible is God’s word, that it is historically accurate (corroborated by other sources such as the Papyrus Anastasi 6 which talks of the ‘Semites’ coming for water and grain, just as the Old Testament testifies to the Israelites going to Egypt during a famine or the 1906 archaeological discovery east of Ankara that the Hittites really were an ancient people as described in the Bible.) It contains statements which made no sense at the time of writing (e.g. about the valleys of the deep oceans in Job 38:16 when ancient society believed the ocean bottom was sandy and saucer shaped), but which have since been corroborated by scientific discovery. Statements about the numbers of stars being countless (Gen 22:17) have also been demonstrated through modern astronomy. Christians believe the Bible is God’s inspired word to us and gives us direction and helps us to understand spiritual truths.
At a baptism, we are professing faith in Jesus Christ, the One who came to save us from our sins. As we are immersed in the water, we identify with His death for our sins and wrongdoing and as we rise from the water, we identify with His resurrection from the dead. Many people may believe Jesus was crucified, but to believe in the resurrection is to believe in a God of miracles. The Bible confidently affirms this miracle, reminding us that the Jewish authorities could not produce Jesus’s body to refute this claim and that the lives of fearful disciples were transformed by His appearances to them. We are excited to have the opportunity to tell others that God forgives our sins, that we have decided to follow Jesus and that our obedience to Him is shown in getting soaked through baptism! (see Acts 2:38)
This is our profession. What’s yours?