This was a declaration of the acceptance of Christ as Savior and Redeemer! This took place when we were infants and the Church appointed for each of us a "godfather or godmother", that is a person who would bring us up in the faith, teaching us while we were children the bases of the Christian faith and of the life of the Holy Church. And Now What is required of us now that we
have grown up and matured is that we repeat, with complete awareness and sincere faith, those very words many times. (I urge you to look at them again now in order to perceive the meanings
inherent in them) and to ask yourself: Dear Reader, Baptism is a free gift; in it we die with Christ to rise with Him in a new life. It is a holy anointing that makes of us a new kind of
human being, through the Spirit of God which lives within us. We go into the baptismal font as children of Adam and we emerge as children of Christ by the renewing of the Holy Spirit. "Therefore we were buried with
Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life." (Rom. 6: 4).
Baptism is a new birth that is renewed daily through the tears of repentance! Would that you would sit quietly with the Lord and wash your sins away with your tears.
Would that you would enter into a new and eternal covenant of love, into the side of Christ which was pierced for you. "For what advantage is to a man if he gains the whole world, and is himself destroyed or lost?"
(Lk. 9: 25). Will you start? The Lord be with you! END
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Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate
Bishopric of Youth Bookstore
THE NEW BIRTH
Number 38
by HG Abba Moussa The Bishop of Youth
Dear Reader, When we
were infants, our mothers carried us in joyful celebration and went with us to Church to be baptized. The priest asked every mother to carry her child on her left arm and to look to the west, which symbolizes the darkness of
Satan, and to repeat the following words: " I This was a declaration made by our mothers on our behalf that we reject
Satan, his ways and methods. Then the priest asked each mother to transfer her child onto her right arm and to face the east, the symbol of the sun of righteousness, and to repeat the
words: "I confess You, Christ my God and all your faithful laws, all you loving ministry, and all your life-giving works. I believe in one God, God the Father, who controls everything, and
in His only Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, and in the life-giving Holy Spirit, in His glorious resurrection, and in the one and only Holy Evangelical and Apostolic Church. I believe, I believe, I believe." |
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