Today was the first opening of the CEM Box of Questions. We are going to open and unleash our questions upon the CEM teaching staff almost every Wednesday, starting today.
The French do not have an idiom equivalent to "Opening a Can of Worms." They say "Opening Pandora's Box," an ancient Greek mythology reference that doesn't appeal to my love of ridiculous folksy sayings.
Here is a sampling of today's questions and responses. Perhaps it will encourage you. If anything, I think the questions asked really display the raw hearts of the CEM students; their desire to follow God as best as they possibly can.
As my readers, let me know if you have any big (religious-related) questions you'd like me to pose to the CEM staff and students!
Q: How do we know if we love God? What if we are motivated to serve God/be baptized/become a Christian because we are afraid of God’s wrath or because we want to go to heaven?
A: Fear: fear is not necessarily a bad thing.
Desire for heaven: What is there in heaven besides God? A desire to be in heaven is a desire for God.
To answer the question with an illustration from marriage: When I got married, I thought I loved my wife. Looking back, I see how imperfect my love was and how much of my own egoism was in it. My love is imperfect because I am not perfect. But over time, we LEARN how to love God.
Our baptism question, after being read, spawned live class participation and further questions posed by class members, the dynamics of which is somewhat conserved here:
Q: Is baptism essential for salvation? What purpose does it serve?
A: John the Baptist preached a baptism of repentence and conversion in preparation for Jesus’ kingdom. AFTER Jesus has resurrected, in the great commission and in Acts 2:38, Jesus commands the disciples to baptize for the forgiveness of sins.
Q: Do we have to be baptized to be saved? Is baptism the only way to be saved? Do we have to be baptized in water to be saved?
A: (Avoids saying Yes or No) First, I AM SAVED BY CHRIST. It is the work of Christ that saves me. Let’s look at what the apostles taught, and follow that as closely as possible. In the early church, baptism always meant immersion and was used to represent the death, burial and resurrection of Christ. There weren’t unbaptized Christians in the New Testament Church. Believers were baptized.
Q: If you are a baptized Christian and fall away into sin, are you still saved?
A: Grace before and after baptism. What if our theology is wrong? We will be saved by grace.
Q: Can we be Christians without being baptized?
A: This was not even a question until after the reformation. Protestants questioned baptism and every ritual of the Catholic church. Baptism had become a magical ritual. It had nothing to do with faith. The Protestants wanted to get rid of all rituals. They reacted too extremely in the opposite direction. Let’s look at the principal question: When you are before the throne of God, will you say, “God, I am before you because I had faith” or “because I was baptized”? You are going to say “Jesus has saved me!"
We still don't have a straight answer to the above question: perhaps we will receive an answer next Trimester when we study the book of Acts, or perhaps there is not a "straight answer."
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