Believer’s baptism should be the one Christian practice we can all agree on — Jesus himself modeled it for us. And yet a sermon clip about baptism went viral for all the wrong reasons, with hundreds of comments and even accusations of heresy. In this episode, we tell that story and then walk through what the Bible actually says about baptism: complete immersion, always after salvation, with no saving power of its own.
We take a quick historical survey through Qumran’s purification washings, John the Baptist’s call to repentance, and Jesus’s own baptism, and land on Romans 6 and what it means to be immersed into Christ’s death. The episode closes with a story Dr. Abidan Shah has never fully told on the show — his own father’s baptism, turned away by an established church afraid of the consequences, and finally immersed in a river by a street evangelist who had never baptized anyone before in his life.