Well, to me, Baptist is an identifier that sets us apart from all the different Christian
churches that are out there.
There are so many different churches, and if you went to a city like Phoenix with four
million people, and you're looking for a church, and there are just so many thousands of churches,
how do you know where to even begin?
So at least the word Baptist identifies some basic doctrines, at least when you go to a
Baptist church, no matter what style of Baptist church it is, you can pretty much be sure
that they're at least going to give lip service to the fact that the Bible is the inspired
word of God, they believe in the eternal security of the believer, that salvation is by grace
through faith, that the Bible is the final authority.
So to me, the word Baptist is a label that helps identify churches that believe like
I believe, churches that believe that the Bible is God's word, that everything in it
is true, that it's the final authority for all matters of faith and practice, churches
that believe salvation is by faith alone, and that believe that you can't lose your
salvation.
It's important to have the term Baptist in the name of your church just as an identifier
to set it apart from all the other thousands of churches out there.
For example, if you were to just open the pantry at home and have a bunch of just silver
cans with no label, you wouldn't know what you're even eating.
What if you were to go into your food pantry and just remove all the labels and just write
with a Sharpie, food?
Well, that doesn't help because you'd be a little more specific.
So the labels on the cans tell us what's in the can.
They help us to know what food we're eating.
Well, the labels on churches help us to find the church that we're looking for.
I don't want to have to go through thousands of churches that are just called Christian
Church to try to figure out which one believes the gospel, which one's baptizing by immersion,
which one is using a King James Bible.
At least Baptist is going to get me into the ballpark.
At least it's a place to start.
Not that all Baptist churches are good, but at least it lets you know at least certain
things you could count on.
Well, the problem with non-denominational churches is that you don't know what they
believe, and the whole purpose of them being non-denominational is because they don't want
people to know what they believe because they want to just bring in as many bodies as they
can in order to bring in as many offerings as they can and just have a big church, and
they claim that they're just trying to reach everybody.
But in reality, they want to just string along people of all different beliefs because all
their money's green.
So just bring in everybody.
Who cares?
Whereas the church is supposed to be a place of born-again baptized believers.
It's supposed to be a place where we get together with people that are like-minded to serve
the Lord with unity and in one accord.
How can you have unity in these non-denominational church where people are coming from all different
beliefs, all different denominations, they've all got a different version of the Bible.
There's no unity there.
So everybody shows up, their money's green, they get a 20-minute sermonette that doesn't
really go deep on doctrine just to string everybody along, keep everybody happy, a feel-good
sermon that everybody would agree with.
As an independent fundamental Baptist, if I walked into one of these non-denom churches,
probably most of the message I would agree with because they're not really saying anything
except just love your neighbor, don't sin, be good, love Christ.
They keep it vague to string everybody along.
Well I'm not trying to just fill up our church with bodies, I'm trying to fill it up with
Baptists, people who actually believe the Gospel, believe the Bible, love soul winning.
We're not just trying to see how many people we can put in here, we're trying to put serious
Christians in here.
And so that's the difference between the non-denom philosophy and the independent Baptist philosophy.
And people say, well, but you've got to bring all these people in to get them saved.
But our philosophy is to go out and get them saved.
Being in church doesn't get you saved.
We're going to go out and knock their doors, preach the Gospel, get them saved.
But the people that are actually a part of our church, we want them to be Baptists.
We want them to believe like a Baptist believes.
Baptist is just a label that describes what we are.
Jesus said, seek and ye shall find.
And I think that if somebody is truly saved and believes that the Bible is God's word,
I don't think it's going to be very hard for them to figure out that the Baptist church
is the one that's preaching the true word of God.
And the one that actually believes the Bible and is lining up with the Bible.
I mean, use the process of elimination.
You look at all these other Protestant denominations, right away the fact that they baptize babies
should just show you how far they are from Biblical Christianity.
So I don't think it's very hard for someone to come to the conclusion that Baptists are
the ones that are preaching what the word of God actually says and practicing what the
word of God actually says.
And people who actually desire to find a church that lines up with Scripture are eventually
going to end up in a Baptist church.
God bless.