Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast, and this is a story of how I became a Christian and got baptized. When I was real little, we went out and we went trick-or-treating for Halloween one time. I dressed up as a superhero. I don't think it was a real superhero. I think it was one that I just made up from a couple things I saw on the covers of comic books and the line at the grocery store. But my mom was like, cool, that sounds like a could be a real thing. So she dyed a pair of my old underwear, gold, and then put them on the outside of a red unitard and maybe took a towel, tucked it into the back of my neck, and I was like, eh, it's superhero flying man. That seems like it could be something. But it, I mean, it worked. Everybody bought it when I went to people's houses and they were like, that seems real. Here's some candy. So I got a bunch of candy and I came back and I stored all the candy in my pillowcase, which was indistinguishable from my sleeping pillowcase. My parents were like, Well, you can't, you know, can't just eat all the candy. We're gonna dole that out to you at appropriate increments. But I was like, well, I'll just do the old switcheroo with the filling of the normal pillow and the filling of the candy collecting pillow. And so I just went to bed with all that candy one night and indulged like a greedy little hobgoblin. And then my parents were smart and they figured things out, and my dad came up and he's like, that's bad. And I was like, Yeah, it's probably bad, huh? I felt pretty bad. And he was like, You deceived us, and I was like, Yeah, I think I'm deceiving you. That's bad. And then he just laid out the whole guilt, grace, Jesus Bible thing. Dad was a pastor, still, I mean, that was his career thing, and uh he he just did a really good job of making it make sense, and it really made sense to me. In that moment, uh I believed. I was like, Yeah, okay, cool, I get it. And in that moment, I responded to the work of God in my life. That's how I understand it. And I became a Christian, and very shortly after that, I was like, you know, I I was a kid, but I could read the Bible, and I inquired about baptism. And my dad, and I think one of the elders, even of the church, sat me down and we talked about what all of that meant. And then one Sunday I went up to the front of the church and they had like this little kind of white gown thing that everybody got baptized wore. It was really cool because it this church, it was a Baptist church that I grew up going to. They had like this cubby hole behind like where the choir sat and everything. I knew water could go in there. That's enchanting for a kid, right? Like there's a pool back there, but there's never water in it. So I was really excited because you know they filled up the water, and that's pretty interesting. And there was this cool painting that somebody in the church had done. It's like a big mural of Bethany beyond the Jordan in the background. And so if you're sitting out in the congregation, the way the little baptism cubby hole opened up, it looked like, you know, it's just like a window outside, like you're just looking out into nature, and that what's out there is springtime on the eastern bank of the Jordan River, five miles north of the Dead Sea, where the Bordeaux pilgrims had gone and found the site of the freshwater springs of Bethany beyond the Jordan, where John baptized and where Jesus had been baptized. It looked like you were there, at least it did, you know, to my kid imagination. I walked down the steps and my dad took the opportunity of my baptism to explain to the congregation that I was already a Christian by the work of God in my life and by my faith in the redeeming work of Christ, and that this baptism was a quick-to-follow expression of obedience to Jesus. And uh, you know, I don't remember exactly what words he used, but it was an articulation of an already existing faith by the grace of God. And then he asked me to tell my story, and I told my story, and then my dad, my very own dad, and the pastor of my church, said, Matt Whitman, upon your profession of faith in Jesus Christ as your Savior, I now baptize you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. And then he baptized me all the way under the water, and I came up spitting and sputtering and probably looked pretty stupid, but everybody clapped and it was an incredible moment for me. It was, I think, a meaningful moment for my church. I think it was a meaningful moment for my dad. It's a gigantic win in the history of my faith. And my faith, as we've talked about before, you know, did not go perfectly at every turn after that. I mean, a big reason why we even know each other and have this, you know, this thing that we do together is because of not only that origin story, but also the twists and turns and bumps along the way. So when I say this podcast exists, kind of, you know, is that it's born out of this story that we kind of know each other out of, is because, you know, coming out the other side of the tumultuous stuff that I think so many of us have gone through, there were a lot of people who invested in me and a lot of things from the Bible and how to approach the Bible that I found to be very clarifying and very helpful and very grounding and very orienting. And a while back, or many years it's been now, I was like, okay, there's a lot of people like me, and I would like to have conversations like this with other people because of how helpful it's been to me. And really, that's kind of the origin story of these conversations that we share together. You know, I am of the generation who was brought up around Christian faith in the West before the age of the internet in a little bit simpler time. But then when the internet and social media happened, I was still very young, so I fully have a foot in that world as well. And there's a whole lot of you listening to this who are in the same boat or who raised someone who's in the same boat who, or who are being raised by someone who's in the same boat. And I'll just tell you, people who are in that boat, this weird generation, it's tough. It's a lot of opportunities with it, but it was hard for most of us because the world changed so quickly. It was just weird. There was a bunch of stuff from pre-internet church that maybe needed to be healed up or relanguaged a little bit. Maybe the language just needed to be oriented more directly back to scripture and the historic church. But it took a while, I would argue, through the 2000s and the 20 teens, and maybe this project is still going for us, that generation of people to kind of find our feet. And so somewhere in all of that, you know, my faith took a lot of hits and stuff was pretty difficult for a while. And then coming out the other side of that, by the grace of God, with you know, whatever you want to call my adult faith, I didn't feel the need to go get like rebaptized. Um I'm still a Christian, even though I went through a period of some might call it tremendous doubt, some might call it like straight up not belief, if that's even possible. I don't know really how to characterize that very quiet, difficult chapter of faith in my life as I contended with what so many of us have contended with. But I think what happened when I was a kid, I still look at that and I'm like, well, that's when I became a Christian. And that baptism was real. It was in the form of exactly what the Bible says baptism looks like. I mean, Matthew 28, what does Jesus here at the end of all of that tell everybody to do? I mean, then the eleven disciples went to Galilee. There's only 11 at this point because Judas is gone. This is right at the end of Matthew. So these 11 disciples, they uh go to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go, and when they saw him, they worshiped him. But some doubted. I mean, they worshiped him, and Jesus received it. He is God. No one's worthy of worship except God. Wow. But some doubted. Okay, who are the some? Maybe Thomas, but uh, maybe at this point it's not even Thomas here at the end of Matthew. I mean, he put his he saw the wounds of Christ and exclaimed, My Lord and my God. So that proclamation of Jesus' full deity had already happened with Thomas. I suspect that the one who doubted might have been the guy who's writing the book. My namesake, Matthew. Hey, if so, we have that in common. Faith is sometimes difficult. Then Jesus came to them and said, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, that's one, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, that's two, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you, and surely I am with you, always to the very end of the age. And that's a pretty spectacular verse that involves baptism and like the whole point of the age in which we live. Jesus' instructions right there at the end of Matthew anticipate that weird age in which I lived, that very trying and testing age where social media and the internet and being in a global community really scrambled the radar. It really put a magnet to the compass for a lot of us and made it very difficult. But this much more timeless thing of the work of Christ and the age of the church and the authority of Christ and the presence of Christ, who's with us always to the very end of the age, and of a baptism that is in the name of the triune God, very specifically, not a nebulous baptism of just sort of like vague spiritual feelings. No, it's a very specific baptism that Jesus commissioned and that was handed down from person to person to person to person through the church for generations and generations, all the way up to my great-great, great, great, great-granddaddy George Whiteman, who got baptized and then who got burned by people who didn't like him for believing the wrong stuff about the Bible way back in the 1600s, and then handed down all the way through all the different people, through Roger Williams in Rhode Island, where my family migrated to back in the 1600s, all the way up until right now, to my dad, to me, to my kids, that's the baptism that was handed down. Exactly that. I am a direct descendant of Jesus' baptism from John the Baptist and a direct descendant of Jesus' commissioning to his baptized followers to go and baptize. So my baptism did not happen in a vacuum. And if you're baptized, neither did you. That's who we are. They had weird, tumultuous things in their moments on the stage of history. We've had really weird, tumultuous things in our moment, and yet this signature of something so big, something so redemptive, yet so simple and so translatable from culture to culture and generation to generation, that baptism persists, and there's the story of how I received that as a kid. So we're on this baptism week. Here's where this fits. If you're this is your first time here, you're probably like, what even is this podcast? We're working on the book of John, and at the beginning of the book of John, we get the scene surrounding Jesus' baptism. We don't get specifically a description of what Jesus' exact baptism looks like in the Gospel of John, but we do get a description of what that looks like in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. We've been thinking about that. We've been envisioning the scene of what John the Baptist's baptizing looked like. We've tried to graciously look at how ideas about baptism have remained very faithful to what's in the Bible and what's here, but how maybe circumstances over time have morphed a little bit in terms of the means. Today, I just wanted to butt in and tell you my experience with baptism. And tomorrow, I want to look more closely at Jesus' experience with baptism. We'll go to Matthew, Mark, and Luke and see what details we can glean about what his baptism looks like. So I hogged it today. It's all about me. My little story. Well, not all about me, but thank you for indulging that. Right on. I think that's plenty for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.