My First Baptism - Expositor Podcast with Steven J. Lawson

[Music] welcome to the expositor podcast with dr stephen j lawson dr lawson is the founder and president of one passion ministries the expositor podcast is focused on taking your preaching to the next level now here's dr lawson [Music] i'm steve lawson and you've joined us for expositor podcast thank you for joining us and in this podcast i'd like to talk about my first baptism the first baptism that i performed on someone else i was a college pastor in a in a baptist church and so on sunday evening evenings we had baptismal services and the senior pastor said to me why don't you do the baptisms this sunday night which i accepted a whole new experience for me i had no idea really hardly what to do and so i remember putting on the uh the it's like fishing waders that uh are rubber rubber eyes and cover your suit pants and it comes all the way up you've got suspenders and you put a white robe on over that and you you weighed down these steps and you stand in this baptistry and you look out over the choir loft into the congregation and it's kind of an unusual sight line to be honest as everyone is staring at you as you're standing in water and you say a few introductory words about what the biblical meaning of what baptism is what it's not and what it is and then you call the person's name the first person to be baptized and so they have the same paraphernalia on and they come walking down the steps and they stand there and their name is put on a little card and it's pinned to their white robe so if you go blank you would remember their name and so i gave the person's name and i summarized their their testimony and so i turned the person around so that i could lean him back into the water as i had seen it done many times before and i thought you know this has got to be a pretty easy move pretty easy procedure and i had never practiced this before and so when it came time to baptize him i was consciously aware like i don't want to submerge him too long or i i don't want him to come up hacking and coughing and the whole thing so i put him down and as soon as he hit the water i was aware of bringing him back up pretty quickly in fact too quickly and as i brought him back up he was as dry as when he walked down into the baptistry he wasn't even wet and so he looked at me and i i looked at him and i'm thinking now what do i do and the whole church is looking at us and after all this is a baptist church and i have not yet immersed this man so the only thing i knew to do and instinctively i i just took him down again very quickly and this time i just like plunged him all the way to the bottom of the baptistry to make sure that he was soaking wet and then brought him back up and he was rather startled and astonished he had no idea i was going to take him back down um a second time and i think he actually probably thought that i'm going to take him down a third time now once for each person in the trinity you know which i didn't do but it was a startled moment i remember looking out at the congregation that was the only baptism that night and people did not know really how to even respond to this it was something they had never seen before and they didn't know whether to laugh they didn't know whether to amend they didn't know whether to just be still and it was just uh quite the moment and so that that was my first baptism well i did my second baptism and when it was announced i would be performing the second baptism trust me this news spread throughout the whole church well that sunday night the place was packed it was packed people coming to see me baptize someone so the person comes down the steps into the baptistry and while he's standing there i begin to feel something warm inside my pants and there was a hole in the fishing gear that i had on that was to keep me dry and water was pouring into one leg of my uh of my of my pants and it was going up my leg while i'm talking about what baptism is what it's not it keeps coming higher and higher well then it crosses over and begins to fill the other leg with water and i'm trying to keep my composure well i should have just been quiet but i announced to everyone of course i've got the microphone that water has now filled one leg and it is now crossing over into the other leg through my midsection and it is filling up well by this time people are laughing so hard that there are people bent over in the pew and and it was quite the experience and so i baptized this person i had just been married my wife had to go home and get another suit because i was preaching that night i was actually preaching that night remember my parents came to watch the to hear my sermon and so we had the delay in seeing several more hymns well my wife's bringing me another suit to put on dry clothes and so you can imagine the third time i did a baptismal service it was standing room only people could hardly stay at home they had to come and see this next baptism well that's that's my first baptism my second baptism i share that as an example of what not to do in pastoral ministry well the lord bless you maybe it's every reason to be a presbyterian and just to sprinkle people instead blessings to you you

Channel: OnePassionMinistries

Views: 455

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: 9Zz0CooAqxI

Length: 7min 25sec (445 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 15 2021