Baptism now saves you

Non-Catholic Christians will say that as long as we have faith and confess with our lips that Jesus is our personal Lord and savior that we will be saved. Catholics do agree with that but that is not the whole story.

Does baptism save us? Yes.

Where in Scripture does it say baptism saves us?

1 Peter 3:20-21

“…in the days of Noah during the building of the ark, in which a few persons, eight in all, were saved through water. 21 This prefigured baptism, which saves you now. It is not a removal of dirt from the body but an appeal to God for a clear conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ…”

John 3:4-5

Nicodemus said to him (Jesus), “How can a person once grown old be born again? Surely he cannot reenter his mother’s womb and be born again, can he?” 5Jesus answered, “Amen, amen, I say to you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water (baptism) and Spirit.

For clarification purposes I inserted the text in parenthesis.

Romans 6 tells us that in our baptism we died with Christ but just as Christ was raised from the dead in glory, we too might live in the newness of life.

Or how about Acts 2:35 when Peter says, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit”. See here, repentance and baptism is necessary for the forgiveness of sins and receiving the Holy Spirit.

There is nothing symbolic taking place here. Something happens when we are baptized.

What about if I am not baptized? Am I saved? Short answer: depends.

We can even loose our salvation after we are baptized.

What baptism does is cleanse us from our sins. But as time goes on, we sin again and just because we sin again does not mean that we need to be baptized again because as mentioned above, Christ died once and was raised and we die once with Him in our baptism. In order for us to be reconciled to Him again we need the sacrament of reconciliation.

Each time Jesus institutes a Sacrament, he is not telling us, you must obtain this sacrament or else you are going to hell. Rather he tells us, here is a way to receive sanctifying grace in other words here is what you will need to have supernatural life, the “equipment” necessary to live in Heaven. God is not bound by the sacraments so the un-baptized will not go to hell just because they lack that sacrament.

I always refer people to the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church - Lumen Gentium when they have questions on salvation, specificlly paragraphs 14 though 16. http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html

There is also so much more that needs to be said about baptism besides the cleansing of personal and original sin. One example, why catholics Baptize babies and how when we are baptized we become a member of the body of Christ which is His Church. I will have to post that later.