Did All Your Sins Go Down the Drain?

A few years ago Hai and Gina Pham came back home from south Texas on a visit. They wanted Beverley and I to talk to their daughter, Syrene who wanted to know about being baptized. They had studied with her but wanted someone else to talk with her since she was only ten years old. I had the privilege of baptizing both of Syrene’s parents years earlier and was delighted to learn of the next generation preparing to obey the Gospel. After an hour and a half we all agreed she was a scriptural candidate for baptism. So off the baptistry we went where her parents had been immersed some twenty years earlier.

While her father was baptizing Syrene I could not help but remember a conversation I had with her back when she was four years old. Hai and I were working around the baptistry when she asked if she could come up and sit on the steps and watch us. I told her it would be okay as long as she stayed there. Her father and I had been working in the ceiling above the baptistry earlier in the day and some white flakes from the ceiling tiles had peppered the water surface of the baptistry. Syrene asked, “Mr. Dan, can I ask you a question?” “Sure. What’s up?” I responded. In a serious tone she asked, “That white stuff floating on the water. Is that people’s sins from when they got baptized?”

Well, that is something to think about. What happens to our sins? The preacher Anaias told Saul the persecutor, “And now why are you waiting? Arise and be baptized, and wash away your sins, calling on the name of the Lord” (Acts 22:16). So where do they go when God washes them away. Below are just a few verses which will help tell us what God does with those sins.

    • “‘Come now, and let us reason together,’ Says the Lord, ‘Though your sins are like scarlet,
    • they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall be as wool” (Is. 1:18).
    • “I have blotted out, like a thick cloud, your transgressions, and like a cloud, your sins. Return to Me, for I have redeemed you” (Is. 44:22).
    • “He will again have compassion on us, and will subdue our iniquities. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea” (Micah 7:19).
    • “Their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more” (Heb. 10:17).

So based on what we have learned, God removes, makes them white as snow, blotted out like a thick cloud, cast into the sea, taken away, remembers no more, and cleanses all our sins. Sin is gone forever from our soul. That does not mean we can never sin again. It does mean that sin has not gone down the baptistry drain. After all I have never had to call a plumber out to clear the sins that were stopping up the church plumbing.

– Daniel R. Vess


2020-04-10 - The Stay in Place - Weekday Touch Base #5
2020-04-14 - The Stay in Place - Weekday Touch Base #7
Categories: The Forum