Happy New Year! May this new year of 2025 be a year of grace and blessing for us all. The new year is all about making a fresh start. Lots of resolutions out there as people commit themselves to eating less and exercising more; engaging in more healthy and meaningful things in life. For many different reasons, though, these New Year’s resolutions often fall by the wayside before too much time has gone by. We become distracted and lose focus. We get busy with other things that pull us away from what we had committed to doing. We get overtaken by events in life. Despite our best intentions, it happens. I think about this at the start of this New Year.

Early on in the New Year, we celebrate the Baptism of Our Lord. On the church’s calendar, this is always on the Sunday after Epiphany, and the date for Epiphany is January 6. Epiphany celebrates the coming of the Magi, those mysterious wise men from the East, who came searching for him who was born as King of the Jews (see Matthew 2:1-12). Their extravagant gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh were literally gifts fit for a king! But it’s the Sunday after all of this that interests me here. That’s when we remember and give thanks for Jesus’ Baptism by John at the Jordan River.

Many years ago, I had the privilege of traveling to the Holy Land, and among the many places that our tour group visited was the Jordan River. As rivers go, the Jordan resembles more of a small stream than a river. It is nowhere as wide and deep as the nearby Potomac River is. Still, with so many events in Biblical history having taken place at the Jordan River, Christian pilgrims continue to visit here. If you have the opportunity to do so, it’s very possible that you’ll witness people being baptized there. People come from all over the world to be baptized in the waters of the Jordan. Among the many items you can purchase in the Holy Land, water from the Jordan River is one of them.

It was at the Jordan River that John the Baptist called God’s chosen people to repentance through his fiery preaching. John called the people of his day to a baptism of repentance, looking ahead to that One whose sandals he was not worthy to carry (see Matthew 3:1-12). It was there, at the River Jordan, that God’s people of old crossed over into the Promised Land after their wilderness wanderings (see Joshua 3:1-17). God made a new beginning for His chosen people after delivering them from slavery in Egypt, and sustaining them for forty years with manna from heaven and water from the flinty rock. In Jesus, God was making a new beginning once more. Because Israel of old failed to keep God’s covenant, God’s own beloved Son would, like Israel of old, pass through the waters of the Jordan River. Jesus, the new Israel, would rise up from the waters of the Jordan to fulfill all of God’s will and purpose. He would live that life of perfect obedience to the Father’s will. His baptism was not for His sake, but for ours. As the sinless Son of God, Jesus’ baptism was not for the forgiveness of sin like our own, but to mark Him as the fulfillment of what John and all the prophets had foretold. Over the waters of the Jordan, the Father’s voice declared: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17; Mark 1:11; Luke 3:22). The descending dove, the Holy Spirit, came upon Jesus at this same time, and so all three Persons of the Holy Trinity were revealed at this sacred moment. This is what we celebrate each year on that first Sunday after Epiphany, the Baptism of Our Lord.

Recently, I read something written by a man from India, Sadhu Sundar Singh (1889-1929). Although he was brought up as a Hindu, he became a believer in Jesus Christ following a dramatic conversion experience in which the living Christ appeared to him as he contemplated suicide. Following his conversion to Christianity, he became an evangelist and wore the saffron robe of a Sadhu; that is, someone within Hinduism or Jainism who is a religious ascetic, having renounced the worldly life. He did this in order to make Christianity more acceptable to the people of his own nation.

The connection between this individual and the Jordan River is described here in his own words:

In Palestine, I was standing near the River Jordan and thought: “This water, this fresh, sweet water is flowing all the time into the Dead Sea, but that sea still remains dead, because it is not sending out streams.” So there are some Christian churches which are dead. The fresh water from Jesus Christ is flowing into them all the time, and still they are dead. Why? Because they are not giving out to others (“The Cross is Heaven,” as found in “For All the Saints: A Prayer Book For and By the Church,” Vol. I. Delhi, NY: The American Publicity Bureau, 1994; p. 150).

To be sure, those are very convicting words. At the start of this New Year, we would do well to consider them carefully. Have we, who have received the fresh water of Jesus Christ, who have been baptized into His own death and resurrection (see Romans 6:1ff.), become like the Dead Sea, which only takes, but never gives? Have we become like the church in ancient Sardis, one of the seven churches named in Revelation? Here, the Lord Jesus Christ speaks to his people:

I know your works. You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up, and strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your works complete in the sight of my God. Remember, then, what you received and heard. Keep it, and repent. If you will not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come against you… The one who conquers will be clothed thus in white garments, and I will never blot his name out of the book of life. I will confess his name before my Father and before his angels. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches (Revelation 3:1b-3, 5-6).

At the start of this New Year, this is a call for every believer to reclaim our Baptismal identity in Christ. It is a call for every believer in Christ to recommit ourselves to “giving out to others,” as Sadhu Sundar Singh put it. Having received the gift of forgiveness of sins, eternal life and salvation through the redeeming work of Jesus, how can our lives not show these gifts to others through our words and actions? As we daily die to sin and rise to new life in Christ, every day becomes an opportunity to lay hold of all that God has done for us in His beloved Son. Baptism is a one-time gift, but it has ongoing and daily significance for our lives as we become conduits and streams of that living water that is Jesus.

As this New Year begins, I can think of no better way to begin than with water – the water of our own Baptism. In the final book of Scripture, we are told of another river – not the River Jordan, but the river of the water of life:

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nation. No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever (Revelation 22:1-5).