Reliving Your Baptism Every Day

You can celebrate the day you were born with cake. Perhaps people will sing, “Happy birthday to you.” Perhaps you will pull out a photo album and stroll down memory lane. You can and should celebrate the day you were born. However, you cannot actually relive the day you were born. (Nor would your mother want you to try!) Yet, we need to relive the day we were reborn in Baptism every day. Not in the sense that we go to church, stand by the font, and have the pastor pour water over our head. That only needed to happen once. But when we repent of our sins, it is like reliving our baptismal day. Our sinful nature, which was buried with Christ in our baptism, is reburied through repentance.

In the first of his 95 Reformation theses, Dr. Martin Luther wrote, “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.” The entire life! This week we see the joy and the need to relive our baptism every day through repentance.