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paperback, 10 chapters, 106 pages
What do you say when your children start asking questions about baptism?
Most young people in our congregations can quote the verses. They have heard Acts 2:38 since they could talk, and they can find Romans 6 without looking at the table of contents. What almost none of them have had is somebody sit down and walk them through the whole subject from one end to the other, so that the verses stop being a pile of memorized fragments and become a picture they can actually see. In the gap, two things happen. Some go into the water at nine because an adult kept asking, and spend the next twenty years wondering whether it took. Others wait and wait for a feeling that never arrives, because nobody told them that understanding is what makes a person ready.
What Is Baptism? was written to close that gap. Its voice is a parent’s, unhurried and direct, and it refuses to do the two things that damage young people on this subject. It will not frighten anybody into the baptistery, and it will not soften what the New Testament plainly says. It simply opens the passages in order, explains what God promises to do in that water, and then steps back and lets the reader decide in front of God.
Across ten chapters, this volume covers the ground a young person actually needs:
The passages that settle the question, worked through one at a time, including Acts 2:38, Romans 6, Acts 22:16, Titus 3, Colossians 2, Galatians 3, and 1 Peter 3:21
A full chapter on the grace objection, answering the friend at the lunch table who says that baptism for salvation means earning it, with an answer a young person can actually carry back to that table
A chapter of hard questions asked out loud, covering infant baptism, the thief on the cross, sincere people who were sprinkled and never immersed, and what to do about a baptism that happened too young to understand
Every chapter closes with four points of application anchored in Scripture and five discussion questions built for a kitchen table, a car ride, or a Bible class.
Whether your reader is standing on the edge of the decision or living years past it and quietly unsure, this book hands them the same thing: the plain teaching of the New Testament, the reason God chose water deep enough to disappear into, and a day your reader will be able to point back to for the rest of his life.
paperback, 10 chapters, 106 pages
What do you say when your children start asking questions about baptism?
Most young people in our congregations can quote the verses. They have heard Acts 2:38 since they could talk, and they can find Romans 6 without looking at the table of contents. What almost none of them have had is somebody sit down and walk them through the whole subject from one end to the other, so that the verses stop being a pile of memorized fragments and become a picture they can actually see. In the gap, two things happen. Some go into the water at nine because an adult kept asking, and spend the next twenty years wondering whether it took. Others wait and wait for a feeling that never arrives, because nobody told them that understanding is what makes a person ready.
What Is Baptism? was written to close that gap. Its voice is a parent’s, unhurried and direct, and it refuses to do the two things that damage young people on this subject. It will not frighten anybody into the baptistery, and it will not soften what the New Testament plainly says. It simply opens the passages in order, explains what God promises to do in that water, and then steps back and lets the reader decide in front of God.
Across ten chapters, this volume covers the ground a young person actually needs:
The passages that settle the question, worked through one at a time, including Acts 2:38, Romans 6, Acts 22:16, Titus 3, Colossians 2, Galatians 3, and 1 Peter 3:21
A full chapter on the grace objection, answering the friend at the lunch table who says that baptism for salvation means earning it, with an answer a young person can actually carry back to that table
A chapter of hard questions asked out loud, covering infant baptism, the thief on the cross, sincere people who were sprinkled and never immersed, and what to do about a baptism that happened too young to understand
Every chapter closes with four points of application anchored in Scripture and five discussion questions built for a kitchen table, a car ride, or a Bible class.
Whether your reader is standing on the edge of the decision or living years past it and quietly unsure, this book hands them the same thing: the plain teaching of the New Testament, the reason God chose water deep enough to disappear into, and a day your reader will be able to point back to for the rest of his life.
