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 power 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 are 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 aflame my lifelong love of the game.

Sacrament isn't a word that appears in scripture. It's a shorthand 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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