Baptism Saves You - John William vondra

John William vondra

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Baptism Saves You<br>This is the best explanation of why-

John William vondra<br>Jul 11, 2026

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By Fr. Dwight Longenecker • 3/1/2008<br>Even though I was brought up in a devoutly Evangelical home, I wasn’t baptized until I was 21 years old. We attended an independent Bible church with an essentially Baptist theology, and the irony about this Baptist theology is that it actually de-emphasized baptism. What mattered was being “born again” or “saved,” if we had responded to an altar call and “accepted Jesus into our hearts.” This personal experience was all that was necessary to assure us of eternal salvation. Baptism and communion (while they were not dispensed with altogether) remained unnecessary symbols of our inner faith.<br>Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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As a college student, I became an Anglican, and before I could be confirmed, I submitted to baptism . Later I went to teach in a Christian school attached to a Baptist church, and even then the pastor seemed more concerned about the mode of baptism than baptism itself. He insisted that I be re-baptized by total immersion since he didn’t think my Anglican baptism (with water poured over my head) counted.<br>Travel the Romans Road

I lived in England for 25 years and had little contact with Baptists. Now our family has moved to South Carolina, and recently two Fundamentalist Baptists came around to discuss theology with me. They proceeded to take me along the famous “Romans Road.” This is a simple Evangelical process that leads a person to salvation through the most basic Christian truths taken from St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans.<br>The first verse is Romans 3:23, “for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” After establishing that you are a sinner, in Romans 6:23 St. Paul reminds you that “the wages of sin is death.” The second part of that verse gives the promise that “the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Romans 5:8 tells us that “while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.” Romans 10:13 says that “Whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved,” and Romans 10:9 says that “If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Jesus from the dead, you shall be saved.”<br>My visitors took me through the Romans Road and were a little nonplussed when I agreed with them on every point. I then asked them why they didn’t go any further along the road. They asked what I meant. “St. Paul goes on to say just how this salvation happens,” I replied. “He gives us an objective and solid way to know that we really have been made one with Christ. But first, we agree, don’t we, that salvation means we die with Christ so that we may have new life?”<br>They agreed.<br>“How does this happen?” I asked.<br>“You have to accept Jesus. Believe in him in your heart and confess with your lips.”<br>“Yes, we Catholics believe that is necessary, but there is more to it than that. In addition to believing and confessing with our lips, we need to be baptized. At the beginning of Romans 6, St. Paul actually explains how we share in the death and new life of Christ: It is through baptism.”<br>The beginning of Romans 6 says, “Don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 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.” This idea that we are made one with Christ through baptism is reiterated by Paul in Colossians 2:12, and in Galatians 3:27 he likens baptism to “being clothed with Christ.”<br>Furthermore, the fuller idea of salvation being a union with Christ fits with much more of the New Testament, which speaks time and again of being in a profound union with the living Lord—rather than simply being saved or justified by a personal belief in Christ.<br>The sacrament of baptism takes the believer from the simple repentance, belief, and profession of faith into a more mysterious identification with Christ, in which he is the vine, and we are the branches, in which we die with him so that we might rise to new life. Baptism is not simply the addition of a meaningful symbol to the act of faith: It is an action which takes the believer’s whole body, soul, and spirit into a new relationship with God.<br>Born of Water and the Spirit

The passage in Romans 6 (backed up by Colossians 2) is not the only evidence from the New Testament that baptism is effective and therefore necessary for salvation The apostles Peter and John confirm St. Paul’s teaching. In Acts 2, when St. Peter is preaching at Pentecost, his hearers ask what they must do to be saved, and he replies, “Repent and be baptized.” In 1 Peter 3, Noah’s ark is referred to as a type of baptism, and Peter writes, “In it only a few people, eight in all, were saved through...