It's often said that seeing is believing. Things which we might struggle to believe or understand

if we only heard about them, become much more compelling when we're actually there.

My father has always been a fan of the football team Tottenham Hotspur. Yes, we call it football

and not soccer. Come on America, you can't just go around rebranding sports, you didn't invent.

Anyway, being the reckless parent that he is, he encouraged my sister and me to become

fans ourselves. I'm not sure any of his talking about Tottenham made much of a difference

until Dad actually started taking us to games and then it hits you. That smell of cheap burgers

and freshly printed programs, that first glimpse of the floodlit green turf as you walk up the stairs

to your seat, the sound and the sight of tens of thousands of people all crammed into the stadium.

It just swallows you whole, it's captivating and that's before the game even kicks off.

I became a lifelong fan for better or for worse and that's the difference between being told about

football and the pair of actually seeing it with your own eyes. In a similar sort of way,

sacraments help us to see spiritual realities that would otherwise be hidden from us

and the seeing of these things helps our believing. Sacraments and not only visual

demonstrations of our faith in Christ, they also help to feed that faith, just as going to

football matches has kindled and kept to flame my lifelong love of the game. Sacrament isn't a

word that appears in Scripture, it's a short hand way of referring to particular practices

that Christ has commanded the Church to do. For that reason, they're sometimes called ordinances.

The vast majority of Protestants recognize two sacraments, baptism and the Lord's supper.

They recognize those two because they were both explicitly commanded by Christ.

So baptism, the use of water to represent a person's dying to their old life and being raised

to a new life is explicitly commanded by Christ in Matthew, chapter 28. He says,

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