Welcome
Bible Classes:
-Adult Class 'Leadeship Training'
We have morning classes for children as well:
-Youth Class (ages 7-12)
-Toddler Class
-Infant Room
Be sure to watch 'In Search of the Lords Way' on Channel 6, Sunday morning at 7:30 a.m.
May - June
Accept Jesus Into Your Heart
You may have noticed that at the end of our worship, we don't encourage you to “accept Jesus into your heart” and be saved by him through saying a little prayer, what is usually called The Sinner’s Prayer. There are a couple of reasons we don’t do that. One is that you will not find the Sinner’s Prayer in your Bible. It’s a prayer that was written to encapsulate some people’s understanding of how salvation works.
But more than that, saying a little prayer silently, even anonymously, fails to capture what welcoming Jesus into your heart and life really means or requires. After the death of Jesus, for the rest of the New Testament, you will read that every time his disciples convert someone into the Christian lifestyle, they baptize that convert. Here’s what those first Christians understood baptism to be:
Romans 6:3-7 (NIV)
3 Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.
5 If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection. 6 For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin— 7 because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.
2 Cor. 5: 17 (NLT)
“What this means is that those who become Christians become new persons. They are not the same anymore, for the old life is gone. A new life has begun!”
When you decide you believe in Jesus and want to obey his plan for your life, you are not just adding Jesus to your life. He’s not just another source of positive thinking or self-improvement. When someone dies, we bury him. That’s what baptism is: a burial. We bury the person we don’t want to be anymore, the sin and habits we want to die to, and we rise out of that water as someone new.
The problem with just thinking that accepting Jesus through a little prayer is all he asks of us is that there is no death there. You didn’t bury anything. That’s why Christ, in his wisdom, made baptism our connection point to his death, and burial, and resurrection. Baptism sums up so beautifully what we are doing when we become Christians. What we are about to witness is a burial of a dead life, a joyful funeral, as someone buries what they were to become what they can only be in Christ – forgiven, free, and forever alive.
~Scott Franks
