Baptismal Commitments, Part 2 (May 23, 2004)

Last week I wrote about the first of five commitments that I give young people to consider before I baptize them, namely, "I will be a Christian all my life." Here are the remaining four commitments:

2) I will attend church and worship God regularly all my life.

I think it used to be more generally understood that it was a Christian's duty to meet with other believers, at least weekly, to worship God. But nowadays it doesn't seem that enough people get this. A pastor friend alerted me to a statistic that even "highly committed" Christians attend church only about 35 times a year. The other 17 Sundays they find something else to do.

This is a scandal, and reflects a distressing trend that, I fear, will shortly lead us to Western-European decadence where churches are mostly empty and less than five percent of the population attend them at all. Nearly everyone in Western Europe, even those who claim to be Christians, "find something else to do" on Sunday mornings. Even here, I see that fewer and fewer Christian homes resemble the one in which I was raised, where church attendance was a given - neither a virtue, nor a sacrifice, but a simple fact of life. On rare occasions my father had to take care of an emergency at work (he fixed two-way radios for ambulances and police cars), but other than that he was in the house of the Lord with the rest of us.

Nowadays just about anything keeps people away from church, and so the message needs to be made explicit and unmistakable: Christians worship God together with his people. They pray, praise, give thanks, receive instruction, participate in holy communion and offer their gifts. They do not look for reasons to stay away. They do not hold God in contempt by denying him their part of the worship that is his due. If a person wants to be baptized as a follower of Christ, I make it clear that we'll expect to see him in church regularly, worshiping the Lord, till death or the Second Coming.

Commitments #3 and #4 have to do with our communication with God: (3) I will talk to God by praying to him, and (4) I will listen to God by learning from the Bible.

I purposely leave out details about the timing, duration and frequency of prayer and Bible study. I don't time my own prayers, believing that that practice ministers more to pride than it does to discipline. I also say "learning from" rather than "reading" the Bible to allow leeway for believers who are illiterate, or poor readers, or who benefit more from listening than from reading.

But the general point is this: Christians have a devotional life in which they talk to God and listen to him. By talking to God I mean prayer - giving thanks and praise, confessing sin and offering requests. By listening to him I don't mean dreaming up a dialogue in our heads and labeling one of the voices "God" (a baneful practice that results in some of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard Christians say). I mean simply listening to his voice in Scripture. He speaks through that. Christians study the Bible to understand the will and ways of God.

Finally, #5: If I get married, I will only marry another Christian.

I like to get this point in early, to middle school students if I can, before they are even thinking of marriage - before any serious, marriage-tending relationships start. Plant the seed early, so that the disobedient act of marrying an unbeliever becomes unthinkable before it ever becomes a temptation. 2 Corinthians 6:14 insists that we not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. Finding oneself unequally yoked is never a reason to terminate a marriage (see 1 Corinthians 7:12-13), but a single believer must never knowingly enter into such a marriage.

Our relationship with Christ supersedes all other relationships. Fewer repudiations of this union are clearer than the decision to commit to a life-long, intimate union with someone who rejects him. Don't get baptized in the name of Jesus if you plan to, or think you could, be yoked to someone whose unbelief might drag you away from the Lord.