Baptism

The act of being baptized is a very interesting thing. In the New Testament, baptism is a symbol for cleansing oneself from the sins of their life and being born into the new life they have in Christ Jesus. Throughout the New Testament, the apostles of Jesus usually baptized a person or a group of people soon after they had accepted Jesus as the Messiah prophesied in the Old Testament.
Now when I speak of Baptism, I am referring to water baptism, and when I speak of water baptism, I mean full immersion of a person who is consciously and willingly participating in it. For instance, in Catholicism, children are usually baptized while still infants, and it is merely just dripping water on their heads. But when I speak of baptism, I am speaking of Biblical cleansing of ones soul.
The tradition of baptism began during the times of the temple when to go in to sacrifice to God, you had to immerse your entire body in a bath of water that had not been collected mechanically. So that meant that it was usually rain water or from a spring of some sort. There were many of these baths near the temple. Anyways, baptism came from this idea that you had to purify yourself to come before God. However, when Jesus came along, it became a cleansing from sin so that a person could enter God's presence and stay there. We know that this does not literally cleanse you from your sins, but symbolically we are cleansed. And the reason that we do this is because by doing so, we are being obedient to God and following what Jesus wanted us to do to show that we have accepted him and are now washing away our old self and becoming who we are in Christ.
So baptism is really about obedience and showing God that we want to live for Him.