The Bible says more than you've been told.

Week 16  |  Issue #16  |  Accept Jesus Into Your Heart Series (4 of 4)

Notice first that Peter did not ask for a response. There is no invitation in this sermon, no appeal, no bowed heads and closed eyes. He preached that God had made the Jesus they crucified both Lord and Christ, and the crowd broke in on him. 

Luke says they were "cut to the heart." The verb is katanussomai, and it means to pierce or to stab through. It appears nowhere else in the New Testament. And the organ it pierces is the kardia, the word we took apart three issues ago: not the seat of the emotions but the seat of the will, the place where a person decides. Peter's preaching went through their defenses and reached the faculty that makes choices. 

Then comes the question, and the exact wording of it matters enormously. Ti poiesomen. "What shall we do?" Not what shall we feel. Not what shall we believe. The verb is poieo, to do, to make, to perform, and it is the plainest word in the language for taking action. 

Here is the part worth stopping on. Peter had every opportunity to correct that question. If the right answer were that there is nothing to do, that a man only receives, that any action would be an insult to grace, then this was the moment in all of history to say so. An apostle full of the Holy Spirit, on the day the church was born, facing thousands of people asking the wrong question. 

He did not correct it. He answered it. 

Peter gives two commands, and the grammar of each one is worth seeing. 

metanoesate (μετανοήσατε) — Repent. Aorist imperative, second person plural. A command, addressed to all of them, calling for a decisive change of mind that turns the direction of a life. 

baptistheto (βαπτισθήτω) — Let him be baptized. Aorist imperative, third person singular, and passive. Paired with hekastos humon, each one of you. 

That passive voice is easy to skim past and it settles an argument we will come to later. Peter does not tell them to baptize themselves. He tells each of them to be baptized, which is something that happens to a person at the hands of somebody else. It requires a second party, water, and witnesses. There is no such thing as a private, unobservable baptism. 

And hekastos, each one, individualizes it completely. Three thousand people were there, and Peter does not address them as a crowd that can respond in bulk. Every single one of them, one at a time. 

Two issues ago we looked at Romans 10:10, where Paul says that with the heart it is believed eis righteousness and with the mouth it is confessed eis salvation. Unto. Resulting in. Nobody disputes the direction there. 

Peter uses the same preposition here. Be baptized eis aphesin ton hamartion humon, for the forgiveness of your sins. And a great deal of effort has gone into arguing that eis must mean "because of" in this one verse, so that the sense becomes "be baptized because your sins have already been forgiven." 

There is a straightforward way to test that. The identical phrase occurs in the Gospels, on the lips of Jesus, at the Last Supper. 

"For this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins."— Matthew 26:28 (ESV) 

Eis aphesin hamartion. Word for word, the same construction Peter uses, spoken about the blood of Christ. Nobody has ever suggested that Jesus meant his blood was poured out because sins had already been forgiven. Everyone reads it the natural way: the blood was shed in order to bring about forgiveness. 

One phrase. Two verses. The preposition cannot point forward in the mouth of Jesus and backward in the mouth of Peter because a doctrine needs it to. 

Luke does not leave the response to inference either. 

"So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls."— Acts 2:41 (ESV) 

Received the word and were baptized, in one sentence, on one day. Luke does not describe a decision followed by a later ceremony. He does not describe a prayer at all. He gives you a sermon, a question, an answer, and three thousand people in the water before the day ended. 

And the verb behind "were added" is prostithemi, also passive. They did not join anything. They were added, and six verses later Luke names who was doing the adding: "And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved" (Acts 2:47, ESV). Man obeys. God adds. 

Acts is the only book in the Bible that records conversions as they happened, and it records them repeatedly. If there were a second pattern, this is where it would show up. 

In Samaria, when they believed Philip preaching the kingdom, "they were baptized, both men and women" (Acts 8:12, ESV). The Ethiopian official, riding in a chariot with Isaiah open on his lap, hears Philip preach Jesus and interrupts with a question of his own: "See, here is water! What prevents me from being baptized?" (Acts 8:36, ESV). He stopped the chariot. 

Saul of Tarsus, three days blind and praying, is told to stop waiting and get up. At Cornelius' house, with the Holy Spirit already fallen on Gentiles in front of everyone, Peter asks, "Can anyone withhold water for baptizing these people?" and commands them to be baptized (Acts 10:47-48, ESV). Lydia and her household were baptized the day her heart was opened. The Philippian jailer, who had been ready to kill himself hours earlier, "was baptized at once, he and all his family," and Luke specifies the hour: "the same hour of the night" (Acts 16:33, ESV). At Corinth, "many of the Corinthians hearing Paul believed and were baptized" (Acts 18:8, ESV). At Ephesus, twelve men who had known only John's baptism "were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus" (Acts 19:5, ESV). 

That is every conversion account in the book. Different cities, different preachers, Jews and Gentiles, a treasurer and a jailer and a merchant woman. Every one of them ends the same way, and in most cases within hours. Not one of them ends with a prayer. 

This is the fourth issue in this series and the trail should look familiar by now, because it runs through the same country. 

Two texts are usually offered. The first is the tax collector in Luke 18, who beat his breast and said, "God, be merciful to me, a sinner!" and went home justified. The second is the thief on the cross, who asked to be remembered and was promised paradise that day. 

Both are real, and both are being asked to do a job they cannot do. Each happened before the cross, before the resurrection, before Pentecost, and before the gospel Peter preached in Acts 2 existed to be obeyed. Jesus forgave sins directly and personally while he walked the earth, which is precisely the authority he was demonstrating when he told a paralyzed man his sins were forgiven. Neither passage is a conversion procedure for the Christian age, and neither man was given a prayer to repeat. 

The actual origin is the one we traced in the first issue of this series, #13. Finney's anxious seat in the 1830s created a designated moment of decision. The mass-meeting era formalized it into the altar call. The twentieth-century tract printed the words on the back page so that anyone could lead anyone through them. What emerged was a sincere, well-meant procedure that appears nowhere in Scripture, taught in place of one that appears in Scripture nine times. 

And it carries the same defect as the phrase we started with. A prayer prayed silently has no date, no witness, and no external referent. It cannot be pointed back to, which is why so many people end up praying it again and again. 

These are summaries rather than direct quotations, and here, unlike the previous three issues, the commentators divide. That division is worth watching, because of where the pressure falls. 

John Gill on Acts 2:38: Gill affirms that baptism follows repentance and faith, but resists reading the phrase as making baptism the point at which sins are remitted, preferring to attach the forgiveness to the name of Christ rather than to the act. 

Albert Barnes on Acts 2:38: Barnes acknowledges the plain force of the language and the universality of baptism in the apostolic accounts, while arguing that the remission is connected with repentance and faith, with baptism serving as the appointed profession of them. 

Matthew Henry on Acts 2:38: Henry treats repentance and baptism together as the terms on which the gospel offer was made that day, and takes the remission of sins and the gift of the Spirit as the blessings promised to those who complied with both. 

Notice what none of them does. Not one suggests Peter meant something other than water, or that the command was optional, or that the crowd could have gone home unbaptized and been saved anyway. The disagreement is over how the forgiveness is connected to the act. Nobody disputes that Peter commanded it and three thousand people obeyed it that day. 

Matthew 26:28 — "My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins" (ESV). Eis aphesin hamartion, the identical phrase Peter uses. The direction of the preposition is not in question here, and it cannot reverse two books later. 

Romans 6:3-4 — "All of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death... in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead... we too might walk in newness of life" (ESV). Paul locates the burial and the rising at the same point the crowd at Pentecost reached that afternoon. 

Galatians 3:27 — "For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ" (ESV). Paul names the moment a person is clothed with Christ, and he does not name a prayer. 

1 Peter 3:21 — "Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ" (ESV). Peter says it saves, and then says exactly why, and the reason is not the water. 

Four issues ago we started with a sentence that is not in the Bible. We end with one that is, spoken on the first day of the church, to the first people who ever asked. 

This series has not been an attack on anybody's conversion. It has been one argument made four ways. "Accept Jesus into your heart" is not false per se, it is incomplete, and incompleteness is dangerous, because a man handed three parts of a five-part answer has no way of knowing what is missing. Hear. Believe. Repent. Confess. Be baptized for the remission of sins. Every one of those is commanded, every one is something a person can actually do, and not one of them requires him to search his memory for a feeling he had years ago. 

Peter did not send three thousand people home to wonder. He told them what to do, they did it that day, and the Lord added them. 

Next month, a new series: "Once Saved, Always Saved." If a man can be added, can he be removed? We will take the strongest texts on both sides, honestly, including the ones that make our own position uncomfortable.

No verse in this series draws harder fire than this one, and the two objections come from opposite directions. One says the command asks too much. The other asks far too little of the person obeying it. 

The objection is serious and it deserves to be stated at full strength. Paul writes that we are saved by grace through faith, "and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast" (Ephesians 2:8-9, ESV). If a man must be baptized to be forgiven, has he not contributed something? Has grace not been reduced by exactly the amount he supplied? 

The fear underneath that question is a holy one. The Judaizers nearly destroyed the first-century church with the idea that a man could put God in his debt, and Paul fought them for his entire ministry. Anyone who has watched religion turn into a ledger should be suspicious of anything that looks like a wage. 

But look at the grammar again, because it answers the objection by itself. Baptistheto is passive. The man being baptized is not the one acting. He is the one being acted upon, lowered and raised by somebody else, contributing nothing but submission. Of all five parts of the answer, this is the least work-like. Hearing takes attention. Believing takes conviction. Repenting takes a wrenching change of the will. Confessing takes courage in front of witnesses. Being baptized takes yielding. 

And notice that the objection is never applied consistently. Nobody argues that believing is a work, though believing is something a man does. Nobody argues that repenting earns salvation, though repenting costs a great deal more than getting wet. The category is applied to one item on Peter's list and to nothing else on it. 

The opposite error treats the water as the thing itself, as though the act carried power apart from the faith and repentance that bring a man to it. On that view what matters is that the ritual was performed correctly, and the state of the person in it is secondary. 

Peter closed that door himself, in the one place where he says outright that baptism saves. It saves "not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ" (1 Peter 3:21, ESV). He anticipates the misunderstanding and rules it out in the same sentence. The water washes nothing. The power is in the resurrection, and what the man brings is an appeal. 

That also settles the question of who is a candidate. Peter's command at Pentecost was addressed to people who had heard a sermon, been cut to the heart, and asked what to do. Repentance comes first in the sentence, and repentance requires a mind capable of changing. An appeal to God for a good conscience requires a conscience that knows what it is appealing about. Every baptism recorded in Acts follows preaching that the person heard and believed. 

Strip both errors away and what remains is remarkably plain, which is probably why it has needed so much explaining. 

Thousands of people heard the gospel preached and asked a direct question about what to do with it. An apostle filled with the Holy Spirit gave a direct answer containing two commands. They obeyed both the same day, and the Lord added them. That happened once, in public, in front of a city, and Luke wrote it down. Then it happened again in Samaria, on the Gaza road, in Damascus, in Caesarea, in Philippi twice, in Corinth, and in Ephesus, and Luke wrote all of those down too. 

Set that beside the alternative. A prayer that appears in no sermon, no epistle, and no conversion account in the New Testament, that no Christian prayed for eighteen centuries, and that produces no moment anyone can point back to. One of those two things is in the Bible. The other was assembled by sincere men within the last two hundred years and has been taught as though it were. 

This is where the whole series has been going. We are not saying that everyone who prayed a prayer is lost, and we have said so in every issue. We are saying that nobody should have to guess. Peter gave three thousand anxious people an answer they could act on before sundown, and every person in that crowd went to bed that night knowing exactly what he had done and when he had done it. 

If you have never been able to answer the question of when you obeyed the gospel, that is not a failure of your faith. It is the consequence of being handed a procedure that was never built to be answerable. The remedy is not more certainty about your memory. It is what Ananias said to a man who had already seen the risen Christ with his own eyes: "And now why do you wait?" (Acts 22:16, ESV).

The lesson: Always check the original language. A single English word choice can build or demolish an entire theological framework. That is why tools like BibleWord.ai exist.

metanoeo (μετανοέω)

Transliteration: met-an-o-EH-o

Strong's Number: G3340

Definition: To change one's mind — from meta (a change, an after) plus noeo (to perceive, to think), built on nous, the mind. A reversal of thinking that produces a reversal of direction. 

English hears "repent" and thinks of sorrow. Tears, guilt, an apology. The Greek word says nothing about feelings at all. It is a word about the mind, and about the mind changing so thoroughly that the feet follow. 

Greek had a separate word for the feeling, and the New Testament uses both. Metamelomai means to regret, to be sorry afterward, to wish a thing undone. That is the word Matthew uses for Judas: when he saw that Jesus was condemned, he changed his mind in that sense, brought the silver back, threw it into the temple, and hanged himself (Matthew 27:3-5). Judas felt everything a man can feel about his sin. He never turned around. 

Paul draws the line between them in a single sentence: "For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death" (2 Corinthians 7:10, ESV). The grief is not the repentance. The grief produces the repentance, and the repentance is the turn. 

This is why Peter could command it. You cannot command a feeling into existence, and no honest preacher would try. But you can command a man to change his mind about who Jesus is and to walk in the other direction, and that is exactly what an aorist imperative does. Metanoesate. Turn. 

It also explains why repentance and baptism sit side by side in this verse without any friction. One is the turn of the mind, the other is that turn made visible. Peter names the inward reversal and the outward act in the same breath, and gives no hint that a man might have the first without proceeding to the second.

Until next time,