Buried with him

Baptism means to plunge, to immerse. Whether you have already gone under the water or you are getting ready to, Paul tells you what it is: a burial. "We were buried with him by baptism into death." Your old life, the one dead through trespasses and sins, was put in the ground with Christ. That is why baptism is by immersion. You cannot bury someone with a sprinkle.

And something happened in the water that you could not see. Peter said to be baptised "so that your sins may be forgiven". Ananias told Paul: "Get up, be baptized, and have your sins washed away, calling on his name" (Acts 22:16). Peter writes that baptism "now saves you", and then explains that it is "not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ." Self-reformation cannot do that. Good works cannot do that. God does it, and he has chosen to do it there.

Now the name. Every time the book of Acts tells us what was said at a baptism, it was the name of Jesus: in Jerusalem, in Samaria, in the house of Cornelius, in Ephesus. "There is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12). Jesus is the name given from heaven before he was born, the name that is above every name, and the power of his blood is wrapped up in it. That is why you were baptised in it, and why Apostolic churches will not baptise any other way. If you were baptised before in another form, this is why we baptised you again, as Paul did at Ephesus in Acts 19.

Baptism must be mixed with faith to work. Paul says you were "raised with him through faith in the power of God" (Colossians 2:12). A dunking without faith is a bath. But faith with baptism is a burial, and a burial is the first half of a resurrection.