Baptism Adult Quotes

In its mythology, Mithra, the Persian god of light and wisdom, was born of a virgin in a cave on the 25th December and later, as an adult, undertook long voyages for the purposes of illuminating mankind. His disciples were twelve; he was betrayed, sentenced to death, and after his death, he was buried in a tomb from which he rose from the dead. The Mithrian religion also states that at the end of all time, Mithra will come again to judge the living and the dead. In this religious cult, Mithra was called the Saviour and he was sometimes illustrated as a lamb. Its doctrine included baptism, the sacramental meal (the Eucharist), and the belief in a saviour god that died and rose from the dead to be the mediator between God and mankind. The adherents of this religion believed in the resurrection of the body, universal judgement, and therefore in heaven and hell.

Very occasionally, a simplified form of communion and of adult baptism for new members of the church would be enacted but no Separatist was ever married in church, because there is no hint of a marriage ceremony in scripture and the primitive church had not considered marriage a sacrament before AD 537.

She climbed down the cliffs after tying her sweater loosely around her waist. Down below she could see nothing but jagged rocks and waves. She was creful, but I watched her feet more than the view she saw- I worried about her slipping. My mother's desire to reach those waves, touch her feet to another ocean on the other side of the country, was all she was thinking of- the pure baptismal goal of it. Whoosh and you can start over again. Or was life more like the horrible game in gym that has you running from one side of an enclosed space to another, picking up and setting down wooden blocks without end? She was thinking reach the waves, the waves, the waves, and I was watching her navigate the rocks, and when we heard her we did so together- looking up in shock. It was a baby on the beach. In among the rocks was a sandy cove, my mother now saw, and crawling across the sand on a blanket was a baby in knitted pink cap and singlet and boots. She was alone on the blanket with a stuffed white toy- my mother thought a lamb. With their backs to my mother as she descended were a group of adults-very official and frantic-looking- wearing black and navy with cool slants to their hats and boots. Then my wildlife photographer's eye saw the tripods and silver circles rimmed by wire, which, when a young man moved them left or right, bounced light off or on the baby on her blanket. My mother started laughing, but only one assistant turned to notice her up among the rocks; everyone else was too busy. This was an ad for something. I imagined, but what? New fresh infant girls to replace your own? As my mother laughed and I watched her face light up, I also saw it fall into strange lines. She saw the waves behind the girl child and how both beautiful and intoxicating they were- they could sweep up so softly and remove this gril from the beach. All the stylish people could chase after her, but she would drown in a moment- no one, not even a mother who had every nerve attuned to anticipate disaster, could have saved her if the waves leapt up, if life went on as usual and freak accidents peppered a calm shore.

The practical reasons invoked against legal abortion are completely unfounded; as with moral reasons, they are reduced to the old Catholic argument: the fetus has a soul, and the gates to paradise are closed to it without baptism. It is worth noting that the Church authorizes the killing of adult men in war, or when it is a question of the death penalty; but it stands on intransigent humanitarianism for the fetus.

Dost thou renounce Satan, and all his Angels, and all his works, and all his services, and all his pride?" ... The first act of the Christian life is a renunciation, a challenge. No one can be Christ's until he has, first, faced evil, and then become ready to fight it. How far is this spirit from the way in which we often proclaim, or to use a more modern term, "sell" Christianity today! ... How could we then speak of "fight" when the very set-up of our churches must, by definition, convey the idea of softness, comfort, peace? ... One does not see very well where and how "fight" would fit into the weekly bulletin of a suburban parish, among all kings of counseling sessions, bake sales, and "young adult" get-togethers. ... "Dost thou unite thyself unto Christ?

Present the sacraments so as to make the gospel clear. Baptism, and especially adult baptism, should be given great significance in evangelistic worship. Consider providing an opportunity for the baptized to offer their personal testimony as well as to respond to certain questions. Make the meaning of baptism clear through a moving, joyous, personal charge to the baptized (and to all baptized Christians present). In addition, the Lord’s Supper can also become a converting ordinance. If it is explained properly, the nonbeliever will have a specific and visible way to see the difference between walking with Christ and living for oneself. The Lord’s Supper confronts every individual with the question, “Are you right with God today? Right now?” There is perhaps no more effective way to help a person take a spiritual inventory. Many seekers in churches in the United States will only realize they are not truly Christians during the “fencing of the table.”12

Theological controversies over the centuries have sometimes been treated as if they were really important even though they were also often arcane. For instance, a Trinitarian conflict split the Western and Eastern churches in 1054: Does the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father and the Son, or from the Father only? In the 1600s, “supralapsarianism” versus “infralapsarianism” almost divided the Reformed tradition. At issue was whether God decided to send a messiah (Jesus) before the first sin (because God knew it would happen) or only after it had happened (because only then was it necessary). More familiarly: infant baptism or adult baptism? Christians have often thought it is important to believe the right things. In a broader sense, theology refers to “what Christians think.” In this sense, all Christians have a theology—a basic, even if often simple, understanding—whether they are aware of it or not. In this broader sense, theology does matter. There is “bad” theology, by which I mean an understanding of Christianity that is seriously misleading, with unfortunate and sometimes cruel consequences. But the task of theology is not primarily to construct an intellectually satisfying set of correct beliefs. Its

The promises in baptism indicate a very different theology of the family, which recognizes that ‘families work well when we do not expect them to give us all we need.’”14 But whether we baptize our infants or not, the principle is the same: our active participation in the church—and our willingness to see it as home—relieves some of the onerous burdens of childrearing, often made heaviest by our sense of limitation. We can’t parent alone. And we aren’t meant to. We have friends—better, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles—to help carry some of the worry and weight of the family housekeeping. And as I’ve learned from recent research, the most important predictor of whether children from Christian families keep their faith into adulthood is the number of multigenerational connections they enjoy at church. Teenagers may not need a youth group populated by hundreds of peers, but they do need other Christian adults in their church to take an interest in them and communicate that they belong.

Bossuet. ‘Experience has shown that all the attempts of the Reformed to confound the Anabaptists, by the scripture, have been weak; and, therefore, they are, at last, obliged to allege to them the practice of the church.’161 Chambers. ‘As none but adults are capable of believing, they’ the German Baptists, ‘argued, that no others are capable of baptism; especially, as there is no passage in all the New Testament, where the baptism of infants is clearly enjoined. Calvin, and other writers against them, are pretty much embarrassed, to answer this argument; and are obliged to have recourse to tradition, and the practice of the primitive church.’162 Also the Oxford Divines, in a convocation, held one thousand, six hundred and forty-seven, acknowledged, ‘that, without the consentaneous judgment of the universal church, they should be at a loss, when they are called upon for proof, in the point of infant baptism.

St. Paul. ‘As many of you as have been baptized into Christ, have put on Christ’.182 Erasmus. ‘Paul does not seem,’ in Rom. v. 14, ‘to treat about infants.—It was not yet the custom for infants to be baptized.’183 Luther. ‘It cannot be proved by the sacred scripture, that infant baptism was instituted by Christ, or begun by the first Christians after the apostles.’184 M. De La Roque. ‘The primitive church did not baptize infants: and the learned Grotius proves it, in his annotations on the Gospel.’185 Ludovicus Vives. ‘No one, in former times, was admitted to the sacred baptistery, except he was of age, understood what the mystical water meant, desired to be washed in it, and expressed that desire more than once.’186 Chambers. ‘It appears, that in the primitive times none were baptized but adults.’187 Bishop Barlow. ‘I do believe and know, that there is neither precept nor example in scripture, for pedobaptism, nor any evidence for it, for about two hundred years after Christ.’188 Salmasius and Suicerus. ‘In the first two centuries, no one was baptized, except, being instructed in the faith and acquainted with the doctrine of Christ, he was able to profess himself a believer; because of those words, He that believeth, and is baptized.

Joshua and Caleb stayed outside the camp of Israel for seven days of purification, along with Othniel and all the men who had killed anyone in the destruction of Midian. It was required of Yahweh as a consecration of his holiness. Even the spoils that they captured would have to be purified. They killed every male, adult and child, and every woman who had lain with a man, since these were the ones who had seduced the sons of Israel into their idolatry. The young girls who had not lain with men were taken as captives. These captives as well as their clothes, and personal items were all cleansed in the waters of baptism, along with the Israelite soldiers.

In the sacrament of Confirmation, the Holy Spirit comes with new strength and power to confirm the baptism often received as an infant. One’s baptism is sealed, and the one confirmed takes his or her place as a witness to the risen Lord in the world. Sometimes this is explained as “becoming an adult Catholic.”Adults, of course, have responsibilities to others; and the confirmed Catholic has a responsibility to worship God in spirit and in truth and to witness to Christ, to evangelize and transform the world.

The fundamental fact about baptism will always be its involvement with the death of Christ ... The prevenient aspect of the grace of God lies ... in the temporal priority of the cross of Christ with respect to the baptized person, whether child or adult.

The fundamental fact about baptism will always be its involvement with the death of Christ ... The prevenient aspect of the grace of God lies not in the temporal priority of the acts of God in baptism in comparison with the conscious acceptance of the divine promise, but in the temporal priority of the cross of Christ with respect to the baptized person, whether child or adult.

Baptism into the church is one of the foundations of Amish faith. It was their desire to fulfill the believer’s baptism as adults that first distinguished our ancestors from other believers.

I don’t think it matters much. Believer’s baptism strikes me as something of a misnomer anyway, suggesting far more volition in this circumstance than most of us have. Whether you meet the water as a baby squirming in the arms of a nervous priest, or as an adult plunged into a river by a revivalist preacher, you do it at the hands of those who first welcome you to faith, the people who have—or will—introduce you to Jesus. “In baptism,” writes Will Willimon, “the recipient of baptism is just that—recipient. You cannot very well do your own baptism. It is done to you, for you.”7 It’s an adoption, not an interview. The

The average reader of the New Testament reads Matthew before Mark and then goes on to Luke and John. Matthew gives him the impression that Jesus was born God's Son in a miraculous fashion. Mark begins only with the baptism, but the reader will think little of this: perhaps Mark begins in medias res. With Luke we are back to a miraculous nativity for one born the Son of God. In John the reader learns that Jesus had already been God's Son from all eternity. But suppose one read Mark by itself, as its first readers did. What impression would one receive? Surely in a book where the main character shows up as an adult and, right off the bat, experiences a vision of divine calling in which he and no one else is told that he is God's Son, the natural inference would be that the baptism was the beginning of an honorific Sonship. If he were already God's son, wouldn't he have known it? And then why should God tell him what he already knew? It seems that Mark might believe what others in the early church did, namely, in Jesus' adoptive Sonship. Ebionite Jewish Christians and Cerinthian (also Jewish) Gnostics were adoptionists, rejecting any miraculous generation of Jesus Christ from the deity. [...] Once we know this was a popular, though eventually controversial, option among early Christians, it begins to make a new sense that the earliest gospel, Mark, sounds adoptionist but is flanked and overwhelmed by subsequent gospels that have moved the Sonship further and further back, attributing to Jesus some degree of divine nature in the process.

The Anabaptists’ rejection of infant baptism and their insistence upon adult baptism after an individual profession of faith grew out of a desire to distinguish Christianity from state citizenship, as well as from a fresh interpretation of teaching about baptism in the New Testament.

The covenant is formally inaugurated with disciples at Baptism. An analysis of the rite of Baptism shows that this same covenantal order is present: The child (or adult) is called by God. He is then separated from his old way of life (natural parents). God takes hold of the person being baptized, tearing him from his old world and bringing him into a new life in the Church. United to Christ and his Body, the Church, the child is given a new name (disciple/Christian) and placed under the authority of the pastors and elders of the church. As a disciple the person now learns to listen to and heed God’s Word. He is admitted to the covenant memorial meal where he must learn to live faithfully and experience the blessings of the covenant. Finally, he grows to learn the importance of perpetuating the covenant by means of evangelism, marriage, and the faithful nurture of covenant children.

In baptism, adults and infants are pledged to Jesus, sealed by the Spirit as soldiers, slaves, and sheep of God's pasture. The gift of baptism awakens faith, loyal allegiance to the one whose name we bear. If faith is loyalty, by definition it persists through thick and thin. A soldier who shrinks from battle isn't keeping faith with his commander. The Spirit gives the gift of faith and keeps us in faith; he keeps us loyal to our commander. What's crucial is not the size of our faith before baptism but the Spirit's gift of persevering faith after.

Hello! My name is Patricia Herdoiza Hernandez and I am a professor of psychology and published author. Teaching is my passion and I believe everyone is a lifelong learner. As human beings, it is always important as well as fascinating to learn more about ourselves and each other. I'm also a very spiritual person, being raised Catholic and being baptized a Christadelphian at the age of twenty-seven. A few years after my baptism, I discovered another specific passion of mine, writing fan fiction accounts of the Bible stories as seen through my eyes. As a child, my Nonna (grandmother) taught me these stories and I always loved them. As an adult, they have taken on even more meaning for me as I have learned and grown in life and in faith. I am blessed to have a wonderful, loving husband and our beautiful daughter. We speak Spanish in our household and I am thankful for our rich heritage. Anything I have and anything I am I wish to share with the world to help others while also teaching about God, His son Jesus, and the soon coming Kingdom of God on earth. I've written many fan fiction accounts of various Bible stories including the entire life of Jesus Christ as recorded in the New Testament. My published book, "Esther; Queen of Persia" brings together all my loves: my faith, the study of psychology, and a beautiful love story which reflects the story of God and His people. May you be blessed as you read my book. Thanks for reading! <3

When Christ said, concerning little children, that ‘of such is the kingdom of heaven,’ (Matt. xix. 14,) it appeared to me; that his comparison had respect, not to the age or size of little children, but to the humility and docility which distinguish them from adults. This seemed to be put beyond a doubt, by his own explanation, in a similar passage, in which he says, ‘Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.’ (Matt. xviii. 3.)

The Church is a group of individuals who have made sacred covenants with God through his divine authority. When individuals cease to keep those covenants, they remove themselves from the Church whether or not the Church formally removes them from the rolls. We need to help youth, young adults, and ourselves make sacred covenants in the waters of baptism and the temple. We need to remember those covenants by reviewing records of those covenants (scripture study) and communicating with the author of those covenants (prayer). We need to form our families by covenants and center them in covenants. We need to renew those covenants by regularly partaking of the sacrament. We need to keep those covenants and repent when we stray from those covenants. If we keep our covenants, the statistics will take care of themselves.