LENT DAY 10: Repenting by Dying

Day 10 Saturday - Mar 4, 2023; Feb 24, 2024; Mar 15, 2025

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. -Romans 6:3-4

As we talked about repentance this week, we talked about daily death. Here now we can see just why baptism would be so closely associated then with repenting. In fact, when our catechism told us that the daily significance of baptism is found in repentance, this was the scripture lesson it teaches us to associate with it. That means that we can learn something of repentance from this text.

In the hit series Game of Thrones, the people of the Iron Islands practiced a baptism in which the person would be drowned and need to be resuscitated. My old mentor, Steve Paulson once wrote that baptism was an attack on the sinner. It drowns us. There the sinner dies. But it’s ok to die there because we die there with Jesus. And to die with Jesus, Paul says, means we will rise with Jesus.

What does this all have to do with repentance? First, when you understand yourself as dying with Christ and the sinner as drowning in baptism, there is no room for the person who lived that way anymore. She’s gone. Paul begins this chapter with the rhetorical question “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?” (Romans 6:1) to which he answers, “By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized…” Baptism is a definitive end. You can every day leave the sinner behind, drowned in those waters. And yet you can come away alive and new through Jesus. “So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Romans 6:11). 

The second thing then that this passage makes abundantly clear is that repentance relies on the power of God. More than our ability to change, is Christ’s ability to take our sin upon him, and make us alive toward God. The only way a person can move from death to life is by resurrection - and you don't have that power. God does. He worked that power when he raised Jesus Christ. And baptism joins you to that moment. Thus baptism goes hand in hand with repentance because baptism ties us to the One who can move us from dead in sin to new life.

Lord, I am dead in sin. But by your promise I ask to be dead to sin and alive to you through Christ. Let me live out the life you baptized me into today, and grant me the freedom to live for you alone. Amen.

This post is a part of my daily Lenten devotional on Baptism. You can read more about it here.