And just how can you earn being with God? Can you become good enough to enter Heaven, as Rome holds you must, or are you saved by recognizing God is so holy that you could never earn being with Him, and instead you are damned for your sins.
Thus you must come to the Lord Jesus as a contrite damned+destitute sinner, trust Him to save you by His sinless shed blood, and be baptized and live for Him.
The latter confessions do not earn you salvation, but testify, justify that you are of faith, and fit to be rewarded under grace, (Heb. 10:35) which God does for souls who really have earned only one thing: eternal damnation, while eternal life is a gift. (Rm. 6:23)
Abraham was not justified by the works that he did prior to Gn. 15:6, but his faith was counted for righteousness. But his works justified him as being a saved soul, as God worked in and thru him, to the glory of God.
Amen to all you said, but I may, emphasis on may, differ slightly on one point if I correctly understand your position in re water baptism.
As a long time Baptist descended from a long line of Baptist pastors and horseback evangelists I fully agree that baptism by immersion is the biblicaly correct follow-up to acceptance of Jesus as Lord and Savior. However, and here's where may have to agree to disagree, I don't believe that it's necessary in order to gain salvation. For just one well known example,the thief on the cross wasn't baptized in water because of his horrible situation, but he had the Lord's promise of Heaven that very day.
OK, perhaps he was granted an exception by Jesus himself due only to his horrible situation. But I have trouble believing that because there are quite a few New Testament passages in which the writer states the essential requirements for salvation, Romans 10: vs 9&10 for one and verse 13 for another, and water baptism is not mentioned.
To put it as briefly as I can, I firmly believe that everyone who comes to Jesus Christ for salvation should by all means be baptized by immersion after attaining salvation through faith alone. However, if circumstances make water baptism impossible or extremely difficult to perform, or if the new convert is taught otherwise, he or she is still a born again child of God from the moment he or she came to faith in Jesus Christ and entrusted his/her eternal life to Him.
I think we can probably agree on the essentials of salvation, and I'm not interested in arguing with a brother or sister in Christ. I just wanted to make it clear to other possible readers that salvation comes by faith alone, not by any works of righteousness that we may do after that decision, water baptism included.
BTW, my belief on this subject may have been fostered by the beliefs of my old-time bible believing Methodist paternal grandparents. No two people who I have ever known were any more devout born again Christians than those two saints, and they were sprinkled, not immersed. My devout Baptist grandparents who knew them very well would heartily agree with my rock solid conviction regarding their salvation without immersion.
Come to think of it, I'm sure they all four now agree on every point of doctrine. They have been closely associating with each other in Heaven for well over one half century, and I can hardly wait to be reunited with them along with my parents and the rest of my born again family. I'm now well into my 78th year on this sin-cursed ball of dirt with quite a few health issues, so I probably don't have long to wait. And that prospect frightens me not one whit, just the opposite. And that's only because my beloved Savior waits for me with open arms.