[Transcript provided for copying and pasting for your own use: No attribution necessary on anything I personally write or say. Just spread the love. :D]

Today, by choosing to be baptized, you show that you have received into your good heart, the seed of God’s word. Acts 2:41 “those who had received his word were baptized; and that day there were added about three thousand souls.” 

Today you will be saved. 1 Peter 3:21 “ baptism now saves you -- not the removal of dirt from the flesh, but an appeal to God for a good conscience -- through the resurrection of Jesus Christ..” Mark 16:16 "He who has believed and has been baptized shall be saved; but he who has disbelieved shall be condemned.” 

Today your sins will be washed away. Acts 22:16 "Now why do you delay? Get up and be baptized, and wash away your sins, calling on His name.” 

Today at your baptism God promises your sins will be forgiven. Acts 2:38-39 “Peter said to them, ‘Repent, and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.  ‘For the promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off, as many as the Lord our God will call to Himself.’" 

Today when you arise from the waters of baptism, you will have a brand new, spotless life. Romans 6:3-8 “Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”

Today when God removes your sins, He says those sins will be removed from you as the far as the East is from the West. “As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us”. Psalm 103:12 

Today you will clothe yourself with Christ. This means you will spend the rest of your life adding all the qualities and characteristics to your own life that make Christ so beautiful Galatians 3:27 “For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.” 

Today you become as a bride to Christ. Christ will love you sacrificially as a good husband does his family. As you submit to His leadership, He in turn promises to save you, his bride. Ephesians 5:23 “For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body.” 

Like an Israelite fleeing through the parted Red Sea, today you flee from the wrath of God and enter the new promise land of freedom from slavery to sin and from Satan as a taskmaster. Matthew 3:7 “But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them... who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”  1 Corinthians 10:1-2 “For I do not want you to be unaware, brethren, that our fathers were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea; and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.” 

Today as you are baptized you will have pleased God in this righteous act, as Jesus pleased God at His own baptism. Matthew 3:15-17 “But Jesus answering said to him, ‘Permit it at this time; for in this way it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.’ Then he permitted Him.  After being baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water; and behold, the heavens were opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove and lighting on Him,  and behold, a voice out of the heavens said, ‘This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased.’" 

When we live a life of faithfulness, and all this remains ours. May we both grow day by day in our love for God and live our lives from this day on, in light of eternity.

God created a world of possibility, volition, hope, and the freedom to craft our future. 

In this podcast we set before you what He says are the blessings and the curses that await each of us, according to what we do with our "ifs".

According to the word of God, He has not selected just ONE component to save us, but rather a variety of factors to accomplish our rescue. 

Some of the factors are all the working of God. They are bolded below. 

Some of the factors are up to the free will of the individual. They have been left unbolded. 

His plan is that we participate together with Him to accomplish our soul’s salvation in preparation for an eternity with Him. 

Here are our notes for this podcast:

What God Says Saves Us

The Word of God:  James 1:21; Acts 11:14; 1 Thess. 2:16; 1 Cor. 15:1-3

Loving the Truth:  2 Thessalonians 2:10

Turning Back From Error:  James 5:20

Baptism:  1 Peter 3:21; Mark 16:16

Enduring to the End:  Matthew 10:22

Faith:  Mark 16:16; Acts 16:31; Romans 10:9

Sacrifice of Jesus:  John 3:17; Romans 5:9-10

Calling on the name of the Lord:  Acts 2:21; Romans 10:13

The name of Jesus:  Acts 4:12

Grace:  Acts 15:11; Ephesians 2:5,8

Confessing Jesus as Lord:  Romans 10:9-10

Faith, love, sanctity, self-restraint:  1 Timothy 2:15

What God Says Justifies Us  [“Justify”: “To declare just, right and freed”.]

Our Words:  Matthew 12:37

Humbling Ourselves/Repentance:  Luke 18:14

His Grace:  Romans 3:24; Titus 3:7

Faith:  Romans 3:28; Galatians 2:16; 3:8

The Blood of Christ:  Romans 5:9

Works of Obedience:  James 2:21-25

Forgiveness:  Romans 4:6-9

What God Says Forgives Us

If we forgive Others:  Luke 6:37; Matthew 6:14

Repentance:  Acts 8:22; Luke 24:47

Prayer:  James 5:15; Acts 8:22

Confessing our Sins:  1 John 1:9

Jesus:  Acts 13:38; Colossians 1:14

Turning from darkness to light:  Acts 26:18

The Blood of Jesus:  Matthew 26:28; Hebrews 9:22

Repentance and Baptism:  Acts 2:38; Acts 22:16

Faith in Jesus:  Acts 10:43

In less than five minutes, learn the solution to much of what ails us:

It would raise the standard of living for the very poorest, and every taxpayer. 

My idea would ensure that virtually every child has all the emotional, financial and spiritual advantages that come along with having both a mom and a dad. 

It would eventually vacate orphanages. 

My idea would remove the strain of the foster care system. 

In fact, it would end child molestation and prevent every future case of sex trafficking and exploitation. 

My idea would save us the $16 billion we spend annually treating the 20 million new STD infections.  (Then we could put the savings to more research in curing heart disease, cancer and diabetes – the leading causes of death for around 3 million people every year!) 

My idea could wipe out AIDS in one generation --- an expenditure that averages $380,000 per case over a lifetime and the new 40,000 cases annually.  

My idea would unintentionally result in the replacement of every strip club and porn shop from coast to coast with businesses that actually improve our communities. 

Businesses could recoup the estimated $16.9 billion in  productivity they presently lose when they think their employees are working, but they are really watching porn. 

My idea would even lower the divorce rate. 

 It would end the abortion debate because my idea would virtually end abortion. 

The positive ripple effects of my idea are immeasurable and incalculable.

Conversation is the fertilizer of intimacy. The honest and open exchange of the things closest to our hearts is what builds closeness. We know it to be true. We have experienced it in our marriages, we have found such to be the case with our best friends, and we know the more our children confide in us, the closer our connection. It is no different in our relationship with the Lord. Conversation fosters and sustains intimacy when God speaks to us through His word (Hebrews 1:1-2), and we speak to God in prayer (1 Peter 5:7). 

The Psalms can be a wonderful tool for drawing closer to God than you have ever drawn before. Penned by the shepherd-king David, Psalm 103 is a song of praise for the Lord’s benevolence toward those who love and fear Him. God called David “a man after my own heart”, and we have in this Psalm just what such a heart sounds like word for word. As David pours forth his heart, I invite you open to Psalm 103 now as you listen to this podcast, so you can practice with me in responding, from the heart, to the inspired phrases of the Psalms. 

 My hope is that this form of prayer may become to you a new source of blessing and closeness with the God who so adores you.  Truly, “He is intimate with the upright” (Proverbs 3:32).

Today we offer some scriptures that bring clarity around popular denominational doctrines that would be wise to reconsider.

Relative truth creates chaos and anarchy on every level.  The firmness of the Laws of nature is evidence that there is firmness in the Laws of good and evil.  Every police department enforces laws of behavior based upon what it has determined to be destructive, because, in practice no one is actually a moral relativist. No one has ever really lived by moral relativism because every human, by nature, realizes injustice is evil, especially when someone they love is treated unjustly.

It is illogical to think that in a universe governed by laws as mathematically mind boggling and artistic as ours has no absolute moral laws. Every day the laws of nature are so predictable we can send people into space. Everyone acknowledges Newton's law of universal gravitation and every other physical scientific law. This universal acceptance of physical scientific comes in handy moment by moment, for example around the standards of measure and weight. Because of our all acknowledging truth in the physical world, we are able to trade fairly. No one says “What is a pound to you?” “How long do you feel your inch is?” On a planet like this, certainly there also exists absolute moral truths, especially given the fact that when we disregard the moral laws given by the Creator of the universe,  peace and beauty with sexually transmitted diseases, cruelty, addictions, drunk driving, stealing, laziness, murder, violence, adultery, divorce, lying, abortion, cheat, greed, pollution, rape and more.  

To the degree a culture lives life according the Bible, virtually every social problem evaporates. The collective result of living by the New Testament would be that crime would disappear, healthcare would be more unburdened to fund finding more cures, the economy would soar because productivity would go through the roof, security systems would be obsolete, the Internet safe, prisons emptied, children cherished, the earth kindly stewarded. Our national budget, freed from the financial costs created by social problems that result from sin, could use the savings to accomplish more benevolent humanitarian efforts all over the world.

We all want the children we love to do the right things for the right reasons for their own wellbeing and bright futures. When they don’t, anger, empty promises, empty warnings, and threats don’t help. Anger and frustration only feed misbehavior. What DOES heal hearts and help kids do the right thing for the right reason? Human relationships that feel safe and build trust. And HOW is trust built? This podcast will dig into that question and more as I share the wisdom that I gained from a training I was given in the course of helping an organization that was assisting young girls exiting trafficking in Portland, Oregon. I learned a lot and hope you will find their ideas I share with you today as enlightening and helpful as I did.

Our children will not gain strength if we protect them from such things as...

Knowing how much you love them

The acknowledgment of your own imperfections and mistakes

Challenges

Hard work

Decision Making

Sacrifice

Necessary Confrontations/Standing Alone

Consequences

Noticing the consequences of sin in other’s lives

False teachings (Compare instead what man says to what God says in scripture)

People from other ethnicities or cultures or other income levels

People who are grieving or people who are dying

...and of course wise parents much mindfully select when it is safe and compassionate in the above circumstances to bear the weight of the situation...

But does God recommend exposing our kids to the evils of the world in order to somehow build some kind of immunity?”  Actually, God says “Do not be deceived: "Bad company corrupts good morals." 1 Corinthians 15:33 and  “He who walks with wise men will be wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm.” Proverbs 13:20

Of course, no amount of sheltering takes away the free will of a child, but with some creativity,  one can provide for their children a very active social life while putting forth our most conscientious efforts to provide an environment where souls can flourish.