Ephesians 1:7-8
In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace which He lavished upon us.
It is perhaps harder for those who were baptized as infants to grasp the awesome nature of the miracle that takes place when a person is baptized. For Paul, who was, like most of the first generations of Christians, an adult convert, the miracle of baptism is still fresh: to have toiled your life long with a burden of sin on your conscience, to have, worse still, added to that burden by “kicking against the goads” and persecuting innocent people in your zeal to defeat what your conscience told you was the Messiah, and finally, at the end of it all, to receive, not a fiery curse from the heavens but complete forgiveness of sins. But that is precisely what baptism confers: the forgiveness of sin. It’s still amazing!
