My Greatest Joy

Ask any church minister, and they’ll tell you without hesitation, a high point in their ministry is baptising people. Pastor Graeme Loftus shares a few of his experiences.

At a baptism, emotions run high in the heart of a minister—as they do in the heart of the person being baptised.

In my thinking, there are two reasons for this. First the implications for eternity are enormous.

When someone is baptised on earth, it is party time in heaven. It is a hard person indeed who, looking into the spiritual realm and seeing the “rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents,” is not moved by that same spirit of joy.

But then, second, the joy unlocked in the heart of the person being baptised is incredibly infectious. That joy, often mixed with tears, has its source in as many different reasons as there are different journeys that led to that moment, and as many different personalities that it is filtered through.

Let me share with you a few cameos of baptism that have stuck in my mind over the years of my ministry. I’ve changed the names of the people involved, but if they read this they will probably recognise themselves anyway. I’m sure they won’t mind me sharing their joy with you.

Jim was a widower from New Zealand in his 70s. His wife had been a Christian all her life and had not ceased praying for her husband. She contracted cancer and when she was confined to bed, her friends, who had met with her over the years in a regular small group to study the Bible, continued to do so on a weekly basis around her bed, praying for him. He was grief stricken when she died and could not face life without her.

Standing by her grave, he made a vow to get to know her God and began attending her church. At his baptism he expressed a sense of peace, knowing that on the resurrection he would see his wife again. Somehow the symbolism of death, burial and resurrection implied in completely immersing him beneath the water was very meaningful.

Anne, on the other hand, who was a student from Perth, was only a teenager when she stepped into the baptismal font with me. She’d grown up in a Christian home and never known anything different than the values that had surrounded her all her life. Some young people in her situation choose to be baptised because they think their parents expect it of them or because all their peers are all doing it. Not Anne.

Before I immersed her totally underneath the waters, she wanted to say something to her mum and dad. In deeply moving genuineness she thanked them for modelling faith to her and said she was taking this step because she wanted to follow the same God they had shared with her from the time she had been a baby. To her, baptism involved joining a wider family of God.

With Anne there was an innocence of youth. Janet was quite the opposite. Her father had sexually abused her from the age of three. As she grew into a teenager in a small country town in New Zealand, she turned to prostitution out of hatred for men and a desire to earn enough money to escape home. With that lifestyle came a further pattern of alcoholism, and at 50 years of age she bore in her body and on her face the hallmarks of a hard life and premature ageing.

When she met Jesus, He introduced her to His own Father, who is far better than any human father could ever be. It broke her rebellious heart and gave her a new perspective on life. Just as the prophet Isaiah described his impure speech being cauterised by the Holy Spirit, Janet described how the Holy Spirit had washed away her sexual defilement. She was standing before God as a virgin again, and to her, baptism was like a cleansing and a marriage ceremony. She was joyfully entering into a covenant with someone who was like a bridegroom to her.

Emma was a black American in her 60s when she was baptised. She had been a singer in her youth and as we stood together in a font with the water up to our waists, she asked me whether she could sing a song. I had never heard her sing before and wondered how it would go. She hit only each second note, but it was such an outpouring of joy that no-one watching minded. Baptism for her was a symbol of becoming one of God’s children and nothing would keep her quiet about that.

I’ve noticed that sometimes people take a long time to make a decision to follow Jesus into baptism, while others can’t wait.

Barry, for example, was completing his PhD in physics at a university in Sydney.

He was a very rational person and had been brought up in a sceptical home.

As I studied the Bible with him it was a long, drawn-out process, which gradually built up a solid foundation for him to have faith in Jesus. I guess he will always operate mainly in life from a rational basis; that’s just part of his personality.

But when he was finally baptised he did so because he was settled in a conviction that Jesus was the Creator and Author of the world he was studying as well as the one who died to save him.

Brian, on the other hand, had met Jesus while he was in the grip of a drug habit. He had been drawn into that destructive lifestyle at a school on the Central Coast. He was so rapt with the Lord when he received deliverance from his life of hell that he wanted to be baptised straight away.

At the time I wondered whether he was acting out of purely impulsive emotionalism, and I had fears that his decision would not stand the test of time. I tried to defer his baptism until he had become more grounded in the teachings of the Bible. In retrospect, I believe now that I made a mistake. I would now choose to let him be baptised into a union with the One who had delivered him and then seek to disciple him afterwards.

Jenny, a housewife from Newcastle, came to me requesting that I baptise her a second time. When I asked her for the reason behind this request, she replied that she had been baptised as a child at 12 years of age and had attended church through the years that followed with no real appreciation of what it meant to be a Christian. She had recently fallen in love with Jesus for what seemed like the first time and wanted to mark that experience by being baptised again.

I explained to her that so far as the Bible was concerned, one baptism was sufficient.

Baptism was like a marriage in many ways.

After marriage we can have many arguments with our spouse, but they do not make us unmarried. It is only when we consciously choose to divorce our partner that remarriage is legally significant.

It’s just the same with baptism. We can grow in our love for Jesus over the years, but rebaptism is really only necessary if we intentionally sever our saving relationship with Him and deliberately renounce our covenant.

Because of the emotional dimensions of her experience, I did rebaptise her in front of her closest friends. She explained that what she was doing was not renouncing her childhood baptism, but rather something like a re-enactment of her original marriage vows. Her love for Jesus just beamed from her face.

Being a pastor is something like a midwife bringing a baby safely into the world.

It is something that never loses its sense of wonder. Even if you never have the privilege of personally baptising someone, you can share that joy by leading someone to Jesus, knowing that God has used you to facilitate the most important thing that can ever happen to a human being.

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