Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9097. How often should a church observe communion? Weekly, monthly, quarterly, or whenever the diary allows? I have been asked this by members moving between congregations and startled to find the practice completely different from what they were used to, and by leaders wondering whether their own habit has any basis beyond inheritance. The…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9094. The phrase breaking bread appears often enough in the New Testament that people assume it always means the same thing, and that assumption causes a good deal of confusion about whether the Lord’s Supper was originally a full meal. It is a fair question, and the answer is more interesting than a simple…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09057. The two ordinances given to the church are baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Jesus instituted both, commanded both, and gave the church no others. Everything else that congregations do, however valuable, is either an application of Scripture’s general instructions or a matter of Christian liberty. That claim needs defending, since Rome counts seven…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 09014. Baptismal regeneration is the teaching that the new birth is conveyed through the water of baptism, so that a person is regenerated in and by the act itself rather than by faith in Jesus prior to it. It is held in various forms by Roman Catholics, the Orthodox, many Lutherans and Anglicans, and…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 09000. Believer’s baptism is the immersion in water of a person who has already trusted Jesus, as their public identification with His death, burial and resurrection. That sentence contains the whole argument, and every phrase in it is doing work. I want to open it up properly, because baptism is one of those subjects…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7094 Whether water baptism is necessary for salvation is a question that has divided sincere Christians for centuries, and it is not settled by quoting one verse loudly. There are passages which appear at first glance to make baptism part of the transaction, and any honest treatment has to deal with them rather than…
Reading Time: 10 minutesQuestion 07023. Is water baptism necessary for salvation? My answer is no, and I hold it firmly, but I want to reach it the long way round because there are passages that appear to say otherwise and they deserve to be taken seriously rather than waved past. Anyone who tells you this question is simple…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4075. Spirit baptism and water baptism are related but distinct realities, and confusing the two has caused more pastoral trouble in Baptist churches than almost any other misunderstanding in this area of doctrine. One is an invisible act performed by the Spirit at the moment a person believes. The other is a visible, physical…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4191. Ask most people what the Holy Spirit has to do with believer’s baptism and they will picture the water and stop there, as though the Spirit were a spectator at the side of the pool. That gets it exactly backwards. The water is the picture; the Spirit is the reality the picture points…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4190. We rarely stop to ask what the Holy Spirit is doing at the Lord’s Supper, and I think that is because we have quietly assumed He is not doing much. The bread and the cup are on the table, the words of institution are read, we eat and drink and go home. Yet…