...by the way you live...

It's been another hard week. I have fallen behind in my reading, and this fact reminds me that I have been allowing life's temporal issues to crowd out that which is the foundation of my life. Without repairing the foundation, how can I hope to persist? Time to get serious again.

So, I am writing in arrears, a bit. This NT discussion is from the 3/18/10 reading, Luke 3:8.

"Prove by the way you live that you have really turned from your sins and turned to God."

This is a quote concerning the teaching of John the Baptist. John goes on to say that the people of Israel should not just say they are saved because they are descendents of Abraham. In effect, John is saying that actions speak louder than words. It is by our acts that we are judged, and our salvation is therefore not assured simply because we belong to a certain genetic offshoot. Our actions are in our control, and how we control those actions affects our salvation.

This has personal ramifications in my life currently. I have finally decided to get baptized. I had held off on baptism for a long time, even though I believe in Jesus, and profess to be a Christian. I grew up in Nashville, surrounded by these odd people I knew as Christians, and often seeing very un-Christ like behavior relative to the church. All my life, I met "legalists" who behaved any way they wanted because they were "saved." I started going to a church where the pastor worshipped the non-legalism of Christ's teachings, partly because legalism breeds sectarianism, excluding people from the community of faith. As he was a non-legalist, I had a hard time reconciling the legalistic point of view of the church that one had to be baptized in order to be saved. If I wanted to discuss the wonderful non-legalism of Christ with others, as a way of bringing them to God, would I appear to be a hypocrite by teaching non-legalism, yet having done something as legalistic as baptism was described to me?

So, I felt baptized in my heart and did not want to pursue the legalistic sacrement of physical water baptism, as a way of pursuing a non-legalistic faith for myself. Following Christ has definitely changed me as a person. Praying, reading, eschewing temporal things in favor of spiritual realities, have all changed me from the horrid person I was. It has taken me a long time to consider water baptism, but now it is starting to feel right, because it will be an expression of faith rather than a response to a legalistic recipe on "how to be the right kind of Christian."

So, I went to my first baptism class, and now I am relatively worried about it again. I was told about the "reasons for baptism" coming from Acts, and Peter's instructions at the Pentecost. It was described to me in very concrete-operational, legalistic terms. And then I was instructed that if I didn't behave right after I was done, then Hell was my destination.

So, I finally come to an understanding of the process of faith, and John's perspective on right actions and non-legalism, even while he was baptizing people, and I then get instructed on baptism in a highly legalistic manner.

At this point, my desire to be baptized remains, but it remains secondary to the common sense, anti-legalist stance of the main hero of baptism in the NT, John the Baptist. His approach to baptism was an anti-legalistic stance against people who thought they were saved by genetics and following the rules. He preached that it is in the way you live that salvation arises. Similarly, Jesus quotes Hosea 6:6 to counter the Phariseeical legalism of His day. I wish that churches could extend the anti-legalist interpretation of baptism also. It would definitely have helped me.