Imagine a child is looking at a wrapped gift sitting under a Christmas tree. It is from an uncle to whom the child is hostile. He looks at the gift suspiciously, and then announces he will not open it. It either holds nothing or else holds something worthless. It certainly couldn’t contain anything that would compensate for being in the uncle’s debt.

So what should a parent say to convince the child to open the present? Consider these two options:

• “Oh, if only you will believe, you will receive wonderful grace!”
• “You’ve misjudged your uncle. He loves you. He is quite capable of giving you more than you can ask or think!”

The second option does not even mention words like “trust” or “faith” or “believe” and yet both options call for faith and the first one does so quite lamely.

If you want someone to trust God, then you should extol God’s trustworthiness, not the alleged power of faith. “God is faithful,” Paul wrote the Corinthians (First 1.9). And that is the only message that can elicit faith. “By faith Sarah herself received power to conceive, even when she was past the age, since she considered him faithful who had promised” (Hebrews 11.11).

Thus, it is absolutely true that baptism will have no saving benefit apart from faith. But degrading baptism as a sure (albeit conditional) promise from God can only encourage suspicion rather than trust in God’s Gospel as it applies to the recipient. Here’s a better way:

I know it is a common belief that forgiveness, which at our first regeneration we receive by baptism alone, is after baptism procured by means of penitence and the keys. But those who entertain this fiction err from not considering that the power of the keys, of which they speak, so depends on baptism, that it ought not on any account to be separated from it. The sinner receives forgiveness by the ministry of the Church; in other words, not without the preaching of the gospel. And of what nature is this preaching? That we are washed from our sins by the blood of Christ. And what is the sign and evidence of that washing if it be not baptism? We see, then, that that forgiveness has reference to baptism… But if repentance is recommended during the whole of life, the power of baptism ought to have the same extent. Wherefore, there can be no doubt that all the godly may, during the whole course of their lives, whenever they are vexed by a consciousness of their sins, recall the remembrance of their baptism, that they may thereby assure themselves of that sole and perpetual ablution which we have in the blood of Christ (John Calvin, Institutes, IV, 15, 4).

via Theologia » Baptismal Theology Within Reformed Evangelicalism.