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I’ve heard Mr. MacArthur enough to know that he doesn’t believe Acts 2:38. To me that is terribly vital.

Nevertheless, I listened to him get as far as ‘the definitive text in the gospels’, concerning the new birth. That’s just the start of the Lord’s definitive texts on the subject. Among other places, He teaches about it in his commissions. While the Lord made clear that HE would be sending (baptizing with)the Holy Ghost, he hammered home to his apostles that THEY were to baptize, that they were to preach repentance and remission of sins, that “whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted..”.

They followed his rebirth instructions to the ‘t’, with Peter preaching them first in Acts 2.

These ‘ever learning’ men, such as MacArthur, can’t teach the Acts 2:38 experience because they haven’t experienced it themselves.

I don’t believe the words of Acts 2:38 are authored by Peter. I believe they are authored by the Lord, and only spoken by Peter.

The dogged effort to dodge, all the detailed conversions in Acts, by these acclaimed ‘Drs of Divinity’ is telling. If they do attempt to deal with those accounts it’s ‘divide and conquer’: saying, that is water, but that isn’t. It’s important, but it’s not for remission of sins. And on and on.

The only way for me to REALLY make it plain is to tell my story. I usually avoid to, because it has a lot of ‘I’s in it, and I just related it yesterday on this forum. But, hopefully you can bear reading it.

For my first 28 yrs I was a Calvinist, but not so different from many other groups that professed a faith that Jesus Christ died for my sins, was buried, and rose again. The big difference was this: The biblical rebirth experience.

While I had done, as a teen, the ‘give my heart to Jesus’, ‘accept him as my personal Savior’, moments, that are so commonly used as conversion ‘proofs’, deep down I just knew there HAD to be more. It was something that would enter my mind during a church service, or funeral, or just when I would dwell on thoughts of spiritual things.

My step-mother, an attractive but very worldly woman, stole my dad from my mother. My dad, while an adulterer, was conservative in every other way. I was 23, and figured I understood women enough by then to make a educated opinion: There’s no way the marriage would last a year. I was wrong.

She visited a church (independent, but like United Pentecostals) simply because it was nearby their new (to them) home. She felt the tug at her heart while there, and refused to go back. But, staying away didn’t fill the hole either. She eventually went back, and had a biblical conversion, following the Acts 2:38 formula. She spoke in tongues as the Spirit gave the utterance. I wasn’t present, but through the days and weeks saw her change dramatically in almost every way. Her joy was constant. I remained skeptical.

In the meantime, I married a very lovely woman. She was always curteous to my dad and step-mother, but was adamant: “I’m not going to their church!” That was no problem, for I was in total agreement.

Then ‘idiot president 1.0’, already letting the economy go out of control, embargoed grain to Russia. Reagan steps in and hits inflation with a sledge hammer. The combined chaos was financial hardship for many, and not just farmers.

It knocked down my trust in the wisdom of men across the board, myself included. Even made me take a hard look at my church’s leadership. As my studying expanded, I thought it strange that the miraculous experiences of rebirth in the book of Acts were not happening in mainline churchs in my area.

Then one of my brothers received the same Acts 2:38 rebirth as my step-mother, ONLY, he lived 900 miles away. That wasn’t all, as a couple of months later it happened to my youngest brother, that lived with my dad. I decided I had to step in and ‘save’ my family.

My wife and I made an exception to our rule, and visited my dad’s church on Father’s day, 1982. We DID have to admit that the people there were genuinely happy, the preacher very neighborly, and not at all pushy. We felt that we were believers, and repentant in our walk with God, so we felt a church change was completely unecessary.

We didn’t go back for a few months, but only then because of our seeing the command of baptism in the name of Jesus for the remission of sins. Our Calvinist church didn’t meet on Sunday nights, so we went to the other church at those times for a few weeks.

My wife and I were baptized, by immersion, in the name of Jesus for the remission of sins. We felt glad, and praised God. We still wanted that biblical Spirit birth, that the Lord promises (Acts 2:38) “to them that obey him” (Acts 5:32). A week later, in prayer, my wife began praising God in a language she had previously never spoken, lasting about a minute or so. It was so smooth, as if she had spoken it all of her life. It happened to me almost five months later, during a revival service.

That was our ‘beginning’, our being born again. It changes your life like nothing else. In my previous years, my reverence for the Word of God kept me from many troubles. The Word is wisdom (that’s why so many can put the scriptures in their own words, call it a commentary, and possibly get paid well for it).

If you made it this far,
God bless you