Does Baptism Only Count If You’re Genuinely Repentant?
Q: If someone was baptized while still living in open sin, should they consider being baptized again after genuine repentance and spiritual change?
A: This is a question that only you and God can answer. God knows your heart, and perhaps you know your heart. Sometimes we don’t even know our own heart. This really depends on whether or not you truly trusted Jesus Christ – who He is and what He did to rescue you, especially what He did at the cross and in the empty tomb and His resurrection. Did you really trust in Him at the time of your baptism, and had you really repented? Now, obviously, your repentance wasn’t perfect, but was it real? In some way, maybe there was a real repentance and a real faith, even if it was not a great repentance or a great faith.
Please understand that we are not saved by the greatness of our repentance or the greatness of our faith. We are saved by grace, through faith. Even an imperfect faith can lay hold of a great God.
If you know that you were a believer at the time of your baptism – even if you were a weak believer or even in some measure a compromising believer – then I would say you don’t have to be baptized again. Now you can be baptized again, if you wish. I don’t think re-baptism is something that the Bible prohibits, even though there are good brothers and sisters from different traditions in the Christian world who would strongly disagree with my opinion on that. I understand that, and I respect them, but I don’t agree with them. I don’t think there’s any inherent sin in repeating a baptism. Ultimately, it really depends on where you were at spiritually when you were baptized the first time.
When I say, “baptized the first time,” I mean baptism as a cognizant believer. I do not count infant baptism as a true believer’s baptism. Someone who was baptized as an infant should be baptized again. If I can lay my cards on the table, I don’t believe that paedobaptized infants were truly baptized the first time. They might have water sprinkled on them; maybe they were dunked as a baby in the water, but that is not believers’ baptism. An adult who never truly put their faith in Jesus Christ at the time of their infant baptism is not getting rebaptized; I think they’re being baptized for the first time.