Why Every Believer Should Be Baptized

Acts 2:38
By Harold Dinsmore, M.Div.
© 2007 Harold Dinsmore

I would like for us to take some time to look at the subject of baptism.  Our central passage of scripture today is taken from the sermon of the Apostle Peter on the day of Pentecost, just after the Holy Spirit indwelt and filled the believers that had gathered in the upper room.  Acts 2:38.  Please stand and read it with me. 

            The word to baptize or baptism comes to us from the Greek words BAPTSIMA BAPTIZO  (baptisma and baptixw).  The first is used concerning the process of immersion.  To dip.  And the latter was used among the Greeks to signify the dying of a garment, or the drawing of water by dipping a vessel into another.    Thus for the believer it is the dipping of oneself into a body of water.  Nowhere in scripture does it speak of a sprinkling in this type of context.