Baptism services remind us of what the Lord has done in the life of each follower of Jesus. The testimony below is from Creed Bielss who was baptized on April 30, 2023.
I’ve grown up in a Christian family and I went to church growing up, and I attend a Christian school. I’ve been a believer for as long as I can remember and my faith feels genuine, but there was a time that my faith felt inactive and didn’t truly impact my life. I would go to church often, both on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights, but I went more to hang out with friends than to grow my relationship with Jesus. Somewhere around my Sophomore year of high school, my friends either changed churches or stopped attending as many services, and so I did the same. If there was ever a conflict on Sundays, whether it was sports or homework, church didn’t always get the precedence.
As I got older, I felt like I was learning more about Jesus from my classes in school than I was from a church. I spent the next year going between churches with different groups but never really committing to one because I was never sure about what I was looking for. As I started to prepare to move away for college, I began to feel a strong urge to find a renewed connection with my faith. As I thought about ways to pursue this path and talked with people about it, I was referred to Romans 10:9, which says “If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” I am declaring my belief in Jesus through baptism as part of the process of becoming active with my faith again and ensuring that I am spiritually prepared to move out on my own and find a church community in college.