The Sinner’s Prayer And Baptism (February 13, 2005)

Have you ever heard an invitation to say a prayer to receive Jesus as your Savior and Lord?

Sure you have. Pick up any gospel tract and you will find a "sinner's prayer" at the end of it. Go to a Billy Graham crusade and it will culminate with a model prayer to mark your decision to follow Christ. Examine the curriculum of any evangelistic program ("Evangelism Explosion", "The Four Spiritual Laws") and there will be a prayer to get saved. Get the videos for Bill Hybels' Becoming a Contagious Christian or Rick Warren's Purpose Driven Life and you will hear more prayers to receive Jesus. These invitations are absolutely everywhere in the land of evangelical Christianity.

But they are not in the Bible. I know. I looked. If you don't believe me, spend some time studying the passages below, where I list every conversion in the book of Acts. In not a one of them will you find that the saved person ever says a prayer when he becomes a believer. Maybe some of them did in fact pray, but the text never records that. Nor do the apostles or preachers ever tell them to pray to receive Jesus. Here's the list:

Acts 2:38-41
Acts 4:4
Acts 5:14
Acts 6:7
Acts 8:12-13
Acts 8:36-38
Acts 9:17-18
Acts 9:35
Acts 9:42
Acts 10:44-48
Acts 11:21
Acts 13:12
Acts 13:48
Acts 14:21
Acts 16:14-15
Acts 16:33-34
Acts 17:4
Acts 17:12
Acts 17:34
Acts 18:8
Acts 19:4-5

What you will find in the biblical preaching of the gospel is a call to (1) repent, (2) believe, and (3) be baptized. You can do all of these without saying a prayer! Don't get me wrong - prayer is good, I like prayer, I have nothing against signaling your conversion to Christ with a prayer. I am merely pointing out that this practice is nowhere to be found in the Bible. It comes from evangelical tradition, not the Word.

What bothers me in today's standard Christian evangelism procedures is that the "prayer to receive Christ" has become a substitute for baptism - an unsanctioned alternative to the one true biblical way to mark conversion. Peter said, "Repent and be baptized" (Acts 2:38), not, "Repent and say these words after me." Now repentance involves one's behavior over time, and belief involves internal adjustment to one's convictions - but the specific act that flags our entrance into a new life with Christ is always baptism. In the Bible, new believers get baptized in a flash, within moments of their coming to faith. It
is never a social event. They don't wait for Sunday. They don't wait for a worship service. The baptizers do not take time to find out first how sincere their converts are (see Simon in Acts 8:13-23). People get baptized in the middle of the night (Acts 16:33 ), by the side of the road (Acts 8:36-38), or before they break a three-day fast (Acts 9:18-19). Often the only ones present are the baptizer and the baptizee. (Spectators are strictly incidental.) In short, people get baptized precisely under those spontaneous and abrupt conditions in which we are accustomed to have people say prayers to receive Jesus into their hearts.

It is simple. We “pray to receive Christ”; they got baptized. One of my pastoral burdens in life is to nudge people into biblically correct practice regarding this matter of how to express conversion, so that they will know exactly what it is they are supposed to do when they get saved. They’re supposed to get baptized.