[Steve Myers] Have you ever baptized anything? I have and it was an interesting experience and I'll tell you about it in just a minute. But what does baptize really mean?

For someone, you say that it means to sprinkle or to others it means to pour as they make a commitment to God. But did you know that the word that baptize comes from in the Greek is not a word that means sprinkling or pouring? It means to immerse, completely immerse.

We had talked the other day about the example of Jesus Christ—that we need to be baptized following His example. And He set that example even in the way that He was baptized, in the method that He was baptized. We can read about that over in Matthew 3:16. It says, "When He had been baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water." So here was Jesus Christ, He was completely immersed. He was completely under the water. And that word in the Greek, baptizo, means to be immersed.

Now, one of the interesting things that I had happen to me was is I had some clothes baptized. Now, you might say, what in the world are you talking about? Well, I was washing some white clothes, trying to do a favor for some of the family members. And I had accidently got a red shirt in with the white clothes. And of course you wash those things on hot, you know what happened. Everything turned pink. Did you know, I baptized those white shirts, turning them pink. What do I mean by that? Part of the way that the Greeks use this word, baptizo, was to dye clothes. They would take some material, whether it be cloth or a shirt, or whatever, and they would dye it by totally immersing that garment or that piece of cloth in the dye, totally changing its color.

And so they couldn't just put a part of it in. They just couldn't pour the dye over the cloth. They had to totally immerse it. And there's a connection there in the way that word baptizo was used for the Greeks and the way that it's used in the Bible. We need to be totally immersed because we need to change who we are. And that has everything to do with the meaning and the method of baptism.

Now, there's a lot to talk about this subject and we'll get into this more in future BT Dailies. Thanks for joining us.