It isn’t there. You can read the New Testament end to end and never find the prayer, and you will never find anyone told to pray one so that his sins will be forgiven. That’s no knock on anybody who has prayed it, and prayer is no small thing. But most people answer this question from memory, and the text answers it differently.
The Prayer People Mean
You’ve probably heard some version of it. A person admits he’s a sinner, asks God to forgive him, and invites Jesus into his heart. Sometimes a preacher leads the words from the front of a room. Sometimes they’re printed on the last page of a pamphlet. The wording moves around, but whoever leads it, the prayer’s last word is treated as the moment a person is saved.
Plenty of people have prayed it and meant every syllable. The narrower question is whether that’s what the New Testament tells a person to do.
Three Thousand People Asked That Exact Question
The first time anybody raised it after the resurrection, they raised it in a crowd, and Peter answered on the spot. These were people who had just learned that the man they helped kill was Lord, and it leveled them. “Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, ‘Brothers, what shall we do?’ And Peter said to them, ‘Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit’” (Acts 2:37-38).
Read the question again. It’s the same question a sinner’s prayer exists to answer, put to an apostle by people who had just heard the gospel preached. The answer came back in two pieces, and neither piece was a prayer to repeat after him.
A note on the Greek: Peter’s phrase “for the forgiveness of your sins” translates eis aphesin hamartiōn — the same words, in the same order, that Jesus used over the cup at the Last Supper: His blood “poured out for the forgiveness of sins” (Matthew 26:28, eis aphesin hamartiōn). Nobody reads that verse as “because sins were already forgiven.” It states what the blood was poured out to accomplish. Some have argued the preposition eis in Acts 2:38 can mean “because of” instead — pointing backward at a forgiveness baptism merely displays. But that reading has to treat the identical Greek phrase two different ways in two places written by two authors describing the same gospel. Read plainly, and read the same way both times, Peter is telling the crowd what baptism is for, not what it commemorates.
Then What Is Romans 10:9 Doing There?
This is the verse the practice usually leans on, and it shouldn’t be brushed past. Paul wrote, “because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9).
Confessing Christ is real, and it’s required. What Paul isn’t doing is writing out a script for someone to echo. He’s describing the faith Christians hold and say out loud, in a letter addressed to people who were Christians already. Then, a few lines on, he adds that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved (Romans 10:13). That phrase is the one worth following, because the Bible doesn’t leave it to us to define.
“Believe, and You Will Be Saved” — What About the Philippian Jailer?
If there’s one passage that looks like it settles this the other way, it’s this one, and it deserves a straight answer instead of a detour around it. A jailer in Philippi, moments from taking his own life, asks Paul and Silas the same question the crowd in Jerusalem asked: “What must I do to be saved?” Paul answers in five words: “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household” (Acts 16:30-31).
Read no further, and the sinner’s prayer looks vindicated — believe, and it’s finished. But read the very next verses, because Luke did not stop there and neither should we. “And he took them the same hour of the night and washed their wounds; and he was baptized at once, he and all his household” (Acts 16:33). It’s the middle of the night, in a locked prison, and baptism could not wait for morning. Paul’s short answer to “believe” was never meant to stand alone — Luke shows us, within the same breath, what believing looked like the moment it had the chance to act. It looked like water, immediately.
Saul Prayed for Three Days and Waited
Saul of Tarsus had already met the Lord on the road. He believed. He went three days without food, and heaven’s own report on him was, “behold, he is praying” (Acts 9:11). So he believed, he fasted, and he prayed.
Nobody had told him yet that his sins were behind him. Ananias reached him and said, “And now why do you wait? Rise and be baptized and wash away your sins, calling on his name” (Acts 22:16). Look at where that phrase sits in the sentence. Calling on the name of the Lord wasn’t the praying Saul had been doing for three days. It was what he did when he was baptized.
A note on the Greek: “calling on his name” translates a participle — epikalesamenos — not a separate command. Grammatically it describes the action happening together with “be baptized,” the way “get up and lock the door, turning the key as you go” describes one motion, not two. And it’s the same verb, in the same voice, that Peter had already used to describe how anyone is saved: “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Romans 10:13; Acts 2:21, quoting Joel 2:32). Three places, one Greek word — Ananias isn’t introducing a new idea to Saul. He’s telling him where the calling he’d read about actually happens.
Cornelius shows the same thing from the other direction. He was a devout man whose praying God took notice of (Acts 10:1-4). He was still told to send for a preacher, and he was still commanded to be baptized (Acts 10:47-48).
God Does Hear a Broken Man
We’d never say otherwise, and it would be a hard-hearted thing to suggest. Jesus described a man who couldn’t even raise his head: “But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’” (Luke 18:13). Jesus said that man walked home justified.
Worth saying plainly, though: this parable was told to correct how a self-righteous Pharisee prayed (Luke 18:9-11), and it was spoken before the cross, before the New Covenant took effect (Hebrews 9:15-17), before the Great Commission, and before Pentecost. It teaches something true in every age about the posture God honors in prayer — humility over self-congratulation. It was never offered, by Jesus or by anyone since, as instructions for how sins are forgiven under the covenant His death would go on to establish. Reading it that way asks the parable to answer a question it wasn’t asked.
God listens to an honest prayer. What is in question is what He answered when people asked how their sins could be forgiven, and that answer was never filed away somewhere hard to reach. A person hears the good news, believes it, turns from his sin, confesses Christ, and is immersed for the forgiveness of sins, and then keeps walking with Him from there (Acts 2:38; Acts 16:31-33; Acts 22:16; Romans 6:3-4; 1 Peter 3:21).
A note on 1 Peter 3:21: Peter is careful here in a way worth pointing out. He doesn’t say baptism washes dirt from skin — he says it up front, ruling that reading out. What saves, he writes, is baptism as “an appeal to God for a good conscience” (the Greek word is eperōtēma — closer to a pledge or a formal request than a passive rinse) — “through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” It’s the same gospel the rest of the New Testament describes, in one more author’s words.
Sit Down With the Book of Acts
If this has left you uneasy, that’s a fair reaction, and we’d rather you feel it than get a quick pat on the shoulder from us. Read Acts straight through and watch what happens every single time somebody believes. And take this for what it is: we’re one independent congregation with no denomination and no headquarters standing behind us, so all we can tell you is what we’ve found in the text. Nobody handed us a position to defend. Go slowly. This is worth being right about.
Work Through Acts With Someone
If you’d like to walk through those conversions with someone, we’d count it a privilege to sit down and do it, at whatever pace suits you, with your questions running the meeting. Nothing gets sold and nobody keeps a tally. Ask us for a free Bible study, read a bit about who we are, or drop us a note before you come.
Our schedule:
Look for 416 Main Street, Suite D, Honesdale, PA 18431. Parking sits at the rear, and the back door is the one to come through.