I have had a tussle or two with the "Dippity-Dips": individuals who believe that you have to be baptized in water to be saved, having lost sight of the regeneration by faith which makes the witness of water baptism meaningful.
I give this group of people special attention because this heresy is pernicious as well as pervasivein the Body of Christ. I am still grieved when I recall when one man told me that he used to believ the simple truth of saved by grace through faith, but then someone else had showed him "the truth", in truth another nasty lie that creates bondage in putting man in the positions of determining his salvation.
Without the Spirit of God within to make a man a new creation, a dip in the water makes him nothing but a wet heathen. I am most amazed and disturbed by the insistence of this sect in taking the Sermon on the Mount as a call to live up to the standards laid out by Jesus, standards which no man can keep, which was precisely His point, to bring the law back to its pristine, absolute, and impossible standard.
The men and women who believe that water baptism is a requirement for salvation, as opposed to a profession of the saving faith, have fallen for the same fleshly folly that a man can work to be saved. IN many cases they have been deceived through fear and misinterpretations of scripture that a believer can lose his salvation, that we are not born sinners, but rather become sinners, and other perverse doctrines which run contrary to scripture.
Yet the men whom I have engaged will fight me to the end arguing over these issues, completely missing Christ and Him Crucified. The smugness on display in these men does not testify to the fruit of the Spirit which every man will exhibit if He is led by the Spirit.