Without Holy Baptism and the Lord’s Supper no one can be a Christian. As the Ten Commandments, the Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer are gifts given by God, so also Holy Baptism. What it benefits, gives, and works is all summed up in the fact that it saves. To be saved, we know, is nothing else than to be delivered from sin, death, and the devil, and to enter the kingdom of Christ and live with Him forever. Where God’s Name is, there must also be life and salvation. “Baptism is not a work which we do, but a treasure which God gives and faith grasps, just as the Lord Christ upon the cross is not a work but a treasure, comprehended and offered to us in the Word and received by faith. […] Therefore every Christian has in baptism enough to learn and to exercise all his life long. There he has always enough to keep him going, firmly believing what it promises and brings—victory over death and the devil, forgiveness of sins, God’s grace, all of Christ and the Holy Spirit and His gifts. […] We have, therefore, no greater jewel in body and soul, for by it we are made holy and are saved. There is no other life, never a work on earth that can obtain this.” (Large Catechism IV: 37, 41, 46) A Christian life is nothing else than a daily baptism, begun at a particular point in time and to be exercised always.
Norman Nagel
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