Dear Baptized Ones,

    This Sunday we will have the joy of seeing Anthony John DeMar baptized. His parents, James and Catie DeMar, desire for him to know and live in the covenant promises of God and respond to God’s call to faith in Christ. They confess both their and Anthony’s helplessness in being reconciled to God apart from His grace and the application of Christ’s finished work by grace alone.

    In contemplating Anthony’s baptism and our need for encouragement to prepare, I have gone back again and again to Job’s confession after the first wave of disaster has struck in Job 1:21

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

We all come into this world not of our own doing or according to our own design or desire. We will exit much in the same way. The beginning and the end are set within the mysterious workings of the Lord our God. Everything that occurs in between, all that is given and all that is taken away, are within the sovereign control of our gracious Heavenly Father. The result of any and all of these things is that the name of the Lord should be blessed which provides the utmost continuity to our lives from start to finish. This is the confession at the heart of baptism. Pray that Anthony would come to confess God as Sovereign Savior in Christ and bless His name in and through his own life.

    As you prepare for Anthony’s baptism on Sunday, consider your humble beginnings and all that God has brought you through over your life. How many times was His hand gently at work even in the midst of dark and difficult circumstances over which you had little to no control? How many times did the result far exceed the beginning though it may have been forged in pain? How worthy is God’s name to be blessed given all that He has gifted to you and even all that He has taken away? May the Holy Spirit be kind to each of us as we consider these questions and help us to answer them to the glory of God!

In Christ,

Cameron