About a year ago, we were reading Philippians in our Sunday Bible Study, and I underlined “continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling” and put a blue question mark next to it. It seemed a strange injunction at the time, and I couldn’t even begin to understand it.
I love how you can go over your old question marks in the Bible and find that the Lord has been making them clear in the meantime.
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The Lord has been showing me today more clearly my position as one unbaptized.
This “not knowing,” or having misgivings about where I stand with God has been with me all along as a vague Hmmm, and a wrinkle of hte brow, but it’s only really within the past week or two–really, it began to cement on Sunday–that things have begun to come clear enough to articulate.
If I am not yet baptized into the name of Jesus, can I pray in Jesus’ name? It sounds like a rhetorical question, but I have only just been able to realize the correlation. It seems like every evidence I have (and, oh! they’re great!) of God hearing my prayers and answering them is a gift and a mercy beyond measure.
“Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” Romans 6:3
“For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin–because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.” Romans 6:6-7
So. If I have not been baptized, I have not yet been baptized into Christ’s death. If my old self has not been crucified, then I am still a slave to sin. Alive to sin, and dead to God. It is a maddeningly easy logical flow.
But I am still a little curious about my own position. Am I saved or not? At first, I was regarding baptism as a seal, but now it looks more like an opening flourish. Does the fact that I’m going to be baptized mean I’m as good as baptized right now? Rationally, it kind of seems not.
God most decidedly said that I’m to be baptized on April 23rd. At first, I was puzzled by the long wait, but content and satisfied to obey his (mysterious) will. I am coming to realize, though, that this wait has been to more clearly reveal what is gained by baptism and how bereft I am without it.
It mystifies me, though, to think of how gracious God has been to reveal Himself to me already and hear my prayers though I’m, quite frankly, dead. (This would be a harrowing thought without the promise of April 23rd!) It seems like I have had a level of communion with Him greater than my situation ought to permit.
Can the Holy Spirit come to you before you’ve been baptized? If I have not yet died with Christ, I can’t be alive in Him, or Him in me, can I? Certainly, He can operate outside of a person to influence them, but can He indwell someone not yet baptized? Again, it would seem not. So I can only marvel that what I’ve tasted already is only the faintest, faintest hint of what is yet to come!!
“You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourself with Christ.” Gal 3:26-27
If I am not yet clothed in Christ, how can I dare to come into the presence of the Lord? I am as naked as Adam and Eve. 2 Cor 5–I was reading the other night about being clothed with our heavenly dwelling.
I have been in the habit of reading the Bible as if it were addressed to me, but the Epistles, especially, are addressed to those “in Christ”–the elect, the saints. Those washed in the blood of Christ.
If I’m not yet baptized then. . .I must still be on the outside, right? To know you are on the outside, and only the great, unfathomable love and mercy of the Father and Son can bring you inside–this must be what it is to work out your salvation with fear and trembling–to begin to, anyway, for it says we are to continue even as we live as Christians. I don’t know how that works, though, because I obviously haven’t gotten that far yet. . .
I long for baptism now. I would run over to Ellerslie this instant and insist upon it immediately to be removed from this false position. And yet, God has said April 23rd, so I am constrained to wait. He must have more to teach me. I long for the day, and yet I am content to obey His will.
It does merit questioning, though. How am I to act until I am baptized into Christ? I can’t very well go on in this boldness while I am still on the outside. Only in Christ can we dare enter the presence of the Lord, right?
How can I pray? Only with the deep humility of the Syrophoenician woman who begged the crumbs from the master’s table.
So. Christians commonly use the rhetoric, “is so-and-so saved?” Quite simply, I find that I am not. I’m not saved.
It is the most obvious thing in the world, and yet the hardest to accept, especially being brought up as a Christian. Suppose I died before April 23rd? What would happen?? But that’s a silly devilish whispering, for what the Lord has ordained, He will also accomplish.
I think I must drink deeply of the abjectness of being at the gate and yet on the outside, of being bereft for this time. (How can God stand to look at me while I am still so dead in putrid sins without being washed in Christ?? It’s a miracle.) My soul has to shudder in its naked, filthy state. And then, how much more highly may I be able to esteem life in Christ! How sweet and precious will it be to be washed clean in His blood and clothed in Him.
Oh, dearest! I love you so. I deeply believe that you ARE saved, beloved. But I have not wrestled with these things as you have, nor studied them, so it isn’t for me to speak foolish words to you.
What of the thief on the cross, though? It’s used to make that point so much that it seems flimsy. And yet, in some ways, it just seems obvious. It is what it is, isn’t it?
I don’t know. I don’t know how to respond to this. But I will confess that it troubles me, and so I want to study this and seek God on this matter, too. In the meantime, anything I say will probably ignorant, arrogant foolishness.
I love you, my precious Rissa-my-Rissa.
Hmm. I hadn’t thought of the thief on the cross.
There is, though John 3:5 which has been pivotal in my study of baptism. Jesus says, “I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit.” etc. “You must be born again.”
Maybe with the thief, it’s because Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection wasn’t accomplished yet, so the new way of things hadn’t entirely come in yet? Then again, we don’t know much about the thief. What if he had been a baptized believer and then fell into some stupid sin and got crucified for it? Because it seems to me that he recognized Jesus as who He was, right, because he called referred to His kingdom? I’m not quite sure what to think.
There is, on the other hand, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.” Romans 8:28-30
That’s a tricky verse and I’m still puzzling over it and dont’ want to drift into Calvinism, but . . .Perhaps. . .If time is a created thing and God exists outside of it, in His vision, I have been predestined, called, justified, glorified. . .”Saved.” But since I exist IN time there may be an “in process” facet to it as far as I can perceive?
Anyway, I am quite sure that He has given me to understand that my position at the moment is that I am saved by promise, though not yet in fact. And I consider this a blessing, so He can teach me more fully about the wonderfulness of baptism and the blood of Christ than I otherwise may have been able to understand if I felt already “secure.” Hmm. . .I don’t know if I’m making a whole lot of sense, but it makes sense in my own mind, and I am content.
Love you, dear heart!
I’m sorry to trouble you unless it’s for God’s greater good.