Welcome to Apostolic Life in the 21st Century, a podcast dedicated to helping modern-day believers live out the teachings of the First Century Church.

This podcast is part of the teaching ministry of Dr. David K. Bernard.

Dr. Bernard is dedicated his life to studying the Bible and helping believers apply its message to their daily lives.

In apostolic life in the 21st century, Dr. Bernard answers your questions about what the Bible

teaches and how those teachings apply to everyday life. Thank you for joining us for this episode.

Pentecostals are accustomed to seeing converts baptized by full immersion in water.

In other words, if you're not familiar with that term, we dunk them underwater.

So people who visit a Pentecostal church for the first time, they may be surprised to see that

most Pentecostal churches are going to have what we call a baptistry or a baptismal tank.

Usually it's a, we might even call a giant pool or our bathtub.

Or if that's not available, we'll baptize them in a swimming pool, like a river, just anywhere

where somebody can be completely immersed.

Now, people who come in from different faith traditions, different Christian traditions,

that might be a real surprise for them.

Because in some churches, the priest or pastor will just sprinkle water on a convert's head, which is

sometimes called sprinkling. And in those cases, of course, it only requires a little water.

So the question is, does it really matter if somebody's fully immersed at baptism or if they're just sprinkled with water?

Does God honor both methods?

What's the right way?

I want to make two points.

First of all, it's absolutely clear that in the New Testament, people were immersed when they were baptized.

In fact, the word baptize is transliterated from the Greek baptizo,

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