Hi, my name is Jessica and I recently got married to John Yang and started coming out to Bury Inn last year and this is my testimony of why I would like to get baptized today. I grew up as the only child in a Christian family with a God-fearing father who served the church as an elder and a very sacrificial mother who was a great helper to my dad in both the church as a deacon and the home as a wife.

Until this day, two of God's greatest blessings in my life are giving me such godly parents who are able to show me every single day what it means to truly live a life honoring Christ. As a result of growing up in a Christian family, I was baptized as an infant and then confirmed again at a later age.

However, it wasn't until I completed the session on baptism through BCC membership I started really considering the importance of a believer's baptism as compared to an infant baptism. Although I was baptized as an infant, I was not at an age where I could profess with my mouth that Jesus is Lord and make the conscious decision to offer my life up to him.

Looking back, it's hard for me to pinpoint the exact moment that it came to faith, but it most likely did not happen before I was infant baptized. From an early age, I remember learning about who Jesus is, that he died on the cross for my sins, then rose again three days later, and with a very childlike faith, I took that knowledge and just accepted it as the truth.

So although I did not have a defining moment that I can call out as the exact instance I accepted Christ, I do have several milestones in my life that I would define as pivotal moments where I consciously made the decision to repent of my sins, take up the cross, and follow Christ.

And one of those moments happened during the summer of my sophomore year of college when I decided to go overseas on a short-term missions trip to India. To be honest, I think a huge reason I went on missions was simply because it just seemed like the right thing to do.

I've always grown up trying to do the right thing, whether that was in school, at church, relationally, or even thinking towards a career. Now reflecting back, I very much based my salvation on my works and had a lot of pride in the fact that I grew up living my life as a pretty good Christian.

But once I went to India, God opened my eyes and humbled me to see for what felt like the first time the true depths of my own sins and my desperate need of a savior. In India, God gave our team opportunity after opportunity to evangelize and even teach the Bible to students of all ages during our English camps.

It was during this time that I really dove into reading scripture and praying because I realized that I could not love, let alone teach, about a God that my mind did not know. And in order for my mind to know Christ, I needed to diligently and consistently be studying God's Word, something I had previously never done because I did not have as high of a view of scripture as I should have.

I began to realize that although I had grown up as a Christian my whole life, there were so many areas in my life that were lacking and in desperate need of repentance. I never really considered how prideful I was in highlighting all the good works in my life and just how comfortably I'd been living my life, always straying away from the difficult conversations around faith and Christianity.

I thought about all the times I served in church or in my campus ministry for my own glory and recognition rather than for God's glory because I truly wanted to give Him all the honor and praise. India was the first time I genuinely learned to repent to God because I understood the breadth and depth of my sins.

Since India, I have tried to the best of my abilities to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to Him, bearing fruit in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God, as Colossians 110 says. But after completing my membership sessions at Berean, I started to think about the definition of baptism and how it is a believer's act of publicly committing him or herself to Christ and His people, thereby uniting a believer to the church and setting themselves apart from the world.

Because I was infant baptized, I never had the chance to publicly commit myself to Christ and profess my faith and submission to Christ on my own accord. This led me to do more research on what Scripture had to say about baptism and the validity of my infant baptism. So based off my readings, I came to believe that baptism truly is only reserved for those who are known to be disciples of Christ, as taught in Matthew 28 in the book of Acts and assumed in Romans 6, where it talks about our old self being crucified with Christ so that we would no longer be slaves to sin and become obedient from the heart and become slaves of righteousness.

As an infant, I did not make the conscious decision to follow Christ or be baptized and live consistently with an earnest confession of sin and repentance. But today, as an adult, I have a greater grasp as to what baptism is. As stated in Romans 6, it is a ceremony that symbolically unites us with Christ in His death and resurrection and also signifies rebirth.

I understand that baptism in and of itself does not save me, but my genuine profession of faith has led me to making the conscious decision of getting baptized today, which will testify that I have received a new self, have been renewed, am spirit and dwelt, and have received complete forgiveness of sins, and I'm united to Christ in His death and resurrection.

Thank you.