Thursday, November 11, 2010

Pt.3 Solving the Man-Made Riddle

One final notation needs to be made here and then I will make some closing thoughts. 

 Acts 4:1-3 says, “When therefore the Lord knew how the Pharisees had heard that Jesus made and baptized more disciples than John, (Though Jesus himself baptized not, but his disciples), He left Judea, and departed again into Galilee.  Jesus came to this earth for 2 main reasons:  1. To pay the price for our sinfulness, and 2. To model for us how our ‘newness of life’ should look

HE lived a life without sin, HE paid our penalty on the cross, HE rose again, HE showed us prayer, HE showed us good works, and HE preached His gospel wherever He went.  However, HE did not perform the physical act of baptism, He had His disciples do it.  This shows us two things about baptism – 1.  Baptism must be of great importance because He Himself was baptized and He honored the practice, and 2.  The importance is found in terms of the witness of baptism because baptism could NEVER save anyone.

My closing thoughts to kind of bring this issue to a summation are:  It is faith/trust/belief (whichever word you’d like to use and ALL genuine of course) that saves a person.  Upon this genuine faith/trust/belief, certain things occur such as “repentance” which means ‘a turning/changing of the mind’ in the Greek…..receiving the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:13 – baptism by the way still meaning the same in the Greek as stated above), and THEN following the Lord in obedience through baptism as Scripture so states and as Jesus modeled for us.  Adding anything to salvation other than true faith/trust/belief in the blood of Jesus and His resurrection is blasphemous and it states that Christ’s sacrifice wasn’t good enough.  I truly hope that through this study anyone who has these questions or who needed some true answers as I did can benefit from this and come away knowing what the Scripture truly says.  Never get tired of studying the Word we’ve been given.  God bless you.

PS – other issues were brought up such as “security of the believer” and “the Holy Spirit”, which I will do another write-up for later on.  I wanted to go ahead and stop here on Baptism for length issues.


Ryan is not only a gifted writer, he is also a phenomenal Preacher! I will be posting his sermons on here for you to watch and I hope you will, you will be extremely blessed. The first two sermons are from his series titled, "Defending the Faith" it is four part series consisting of; 

1. Evolution
2. Islam-
3. Political Correctness- Part A-Homosexual Movement
4. Political Correctness-Part B-Secular Humanism (truth is what I want it to be)