As long as men desire to be as god they will find themselves disappointed, unable to receive the place they want for themselves. However, when we hear what Jesus is teaching His people, that recognizes who we truly are, sinners saved by grace, those who have received by gift and grant the benefits won by the Messiah who humbled Himself, even to the point of the cross, and was obedient not out of hope of gaining back His place, but knowing that the promise had already been made. Not my will, but thy will be done summarizes the difference at a foundational level between those who go back to their house justified, and those who continue to, in anger, lash out against the love of God found in Christ Jesus the perfect Son and Redeemer.

The blessings of God include clarity of mind and soul. There is freedom from the oppressing power of sin, and its influence to destroy. While the old man within us yearns to drag us back into the clutches of death and Hell the assurance we receive in Christ is that if we are united to our Lord by faith no created person or affect can separate us from the love of our glorious Redeemer. These truths allow us to receive an understanding of the world around us that should change the way we see the fallenness of man and all that takes place downstream from sin’s wages. In some measure this has the possibility of increasing our lamentation for the reality of the world as it is. When you know the way things ought to be it exacerbates the bother when men choose to do otherwise. There is a meme around that images a Ph.D Historian sitting in a comfy wingback that contains a tagline which reads:
Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it.
As we continue to look at and consider paganism and all its tricks and trades there is a need for Christians to read and learn about these things with discernment. We need to not only take honestly their teachings, but warn with wisdom those caught in the thought patterns which inhabit the blindness operating within false religions. As has been noted before that begins first with better comprehending what the true religion teaches. I’ve heard catechisms referred to in the past as the skeleton upon which to hang the meat of the word, and there is a lot of truth to that.
To illustrate this let’s take a look at what the Children’s Catechism does when it declares to our elementary kids in questions 4 and 5 the reasons why we are to love what God loves:
Q. 4. How can you glorify God?A. By loving him and doing what he commands.
Q. 5. Why ought you to glorify God?A. Because he made me and takes care of me.
Training the minds of young ones to see the relationship they have with the one who made the Heavens and the Earth, and how He made them to be His, is helpful in then teaching them why because of this mercy our response is to first love and then obey. Getting things in that order is what really maintains the wall of separation between paganism and Christianity. While we can make the love of God for His people into a saccharine humanistic mess it doesn’t need to be so. When the apostle John defines Jehovah as love it is in the context of him saying, “. . . and everyone that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God”.
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Our culture is telling us that it’s “okay to be gay,” and that virtually every kind of “sexual orientation” should be affirmed. It’s telling us that “gayness” is unalterable, except perhaps when it’s not because of “gender fluidity,” and it’s increasingly hostile to “heteronormativity.” By now, it should be clear to anyone who takes the Bible and Christianity seriously, the real issue is, to flip the terms in Niebuhr’s first category, “Culture Against Christ.”

[Note: This article is Part 1 of a projected series.]
Currently, a battle is being waged for the soul of my home denomination. In the theologically conservative Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), the question is being asked: What did Paul mean when he wrote, “such were some of you,” and how should we apply it in the life of the church?”
On one side are those who say, “This truth must govern how we both think and speak about ourselves. We are no longer ‘sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers.’ True, those were things that dominated the cores of our beings before we came to Christ. They were even things that people called us. So, they became de facto names for us—i.e., how people identified us. But they are no longer who we are. It was who we were but is not who we are, and we should no longer identify ourselves by any of those terms.” (1 Cor. 6:9-10 ESV)
On the other side are those who say, “Wait a minute! We still struggle with these things. The temptations have not gone away. We doubt they ever will. So, we think we should speak as if we still are those things—as if they identify us. And besides, we want to communicate the Gospel to our culture in a winsome and welcoming way. We want to be like Jesus, and didn’t He identify with sinners? So, why can’t Christians who struggle with same-sex attraction while remaining celibate refer to themselves as ‘gay Christians?’”
These are the two sides in the battle or at least the two most vocal ones. I hope I’ve represented them accurately. If not, I’m sure someone will let me know.
Perhaps at one time, this was a cordial debate or even a minor fraternal squabble. It seems those days are now past us. I will spare you the details, but on various fields, the calls have gone out, the troops have been marshaled, and the battle has been joined.
“Haven’t you heard it’s a battle of words?”1
One of the first objections many conservative believers raise in response to the idea of anyone identifying as a “gay Christian” is, “We don’t allow people to identify as ‘adulterous Christians,’2 so why in the world would we let them identify as ‘gay Christians?’ Why would believers think they can make sin part of their Christian identity?”
Those who raise this objection would say 1 Cor. 6:9-10 teaches that all Christians who came to Christ out of homosexuality are fundamentally “ex-gay,” just as all who came to Christ out of a pattern of adulterous behavior are “ex-adulterers.” As Al Mohler put it, “The larger problem is the idea that any believer can claim identity with a pattern of sexual attraction that is itself sinful.”3 Regardless of how much we continue to struggle with temptation, our union with Christ is what identifies us now and that union entails a decisive break with sin—a past-tense crucifixion of it, in fact: “…those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” (Gal. 5:24, ESV, italics added, cf. Rom. 6:6.) Those things no longer represent us.
Triggered
As we might have expected, comparing “gay Christian” to “adulterous Christian” has generated pushback from the other side. One “LGBTQ Christian leader,” wrote, “Please, please, please don’t use this analogy. I know what you mean, but this one really ticks gay people off, and it gets you nowhere.”4
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↑1
“Us and Them,” song by Richard Wright and Roger Waters, from Dark Side of the Moon, by Pink Floyd, 1973.

↑2
Examples could be multiplied here: “promiscuous Christians,” “pedophile Christians,” “drunkard Christians,” “thieving Christian,” “murderous Christian,” and so on.

↑3
R. Albert Mohler Jr., “Torn Between Two Cultures? Revoice, LGBT Identity, and Biblical Christianity,” August 2, 2018, https://albertmohler.com/2018/08/02/torn-two-cultures-revoice-lgbt-identity-biblical-christianity.

↑4
Justin Lee, “Questions from Christians #5: ‘Isn’t calling yourself a gay Christian like calling yourself an adulterous Christian?’” August 5, 2013, Geeky Justin, https://geekyjustin.com/questions-from-christians-5-isnt-calling-yourself-a-gay-christian-like-calling-yourself-an-adulterous-christian/.

Written by Rev. Dr. Andrew W.G. Matthews |
Tuesday, March 29, 2022
It is time for Presbyterian ministers, along with elders, to affirm their ordination vows by using the right and biblical administration of baptism. As for me I am done with dunking, and I will boldly proclaim that “baptism is rightly administered with pouring, or sprinkling water upon the person.”

The dipping of the person into the water is not necessary; but baptism is rightly administered by pouring, or sprinkling water upon the person.—Westminster Confession of Faith, Ch. 28:3
I’m done with dunking. I will never again perform an immersion baptism for a Christian, but will henceforth be true to the biblical and confessional standards of my Presbyterian faith. To say this is the final step on my long sacramental journey from being a credo-baptist to being fully Reformed. I myself experienced an immersion baptism in a charismatic Methodist church a year after my conversion and spent the first decade of my Christian life in churches that only did immersion baptism.
As a Presbyterian minister, I once borrowed the baptismal facilities of a Baptist church in order to immerse a family of teenagers who attended my church. In my last Presbyterian parish in the country, I was willing to accommodate the preferences of Baptists in my church and go down to the local lake to immerse their believing children. I’m done with that now.
The Baptist belief is that immersion (the total submerging of the person underwater) and emersion (the coming up out of the water) is necessary in order to have a true baptism. Presbyterians hold an immersion baptism is valid before God when it meets the essential criteria of water applied by a minister in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but that it is unnecessary. The correct administration of baptism actually is “by pouring, or sprinkling water upon the person.” For me, to practice immersion baptism is to replace a superior mode with an inferior one and to endorse error.
The Baptist contention that the only valid mode of baptism is by immersion rests upon three flawed lines of argumentation: the meaning of the word “baptism” itself, New Testament accounts of baptisms, and the imagery of death, burial, and resurrection.
First, Baptists hold that the Greek word baptizo, “to baptise,” exclusively means “to dip” or “to immerse,” thus all baptisms must be by immersion. As with most words, baptizo has a range of senses, one of which is “to dip.” Baptists argue that “to dip” is the core meaning of the word which controls every use. I will spare you an exhaustive exposition on semantic theory, etymology, and every example of baptizo in the Bible and ancient literature and simply state, in contradiction, that baptizo primarily conveys the senses of wash, cleanse, or unite which can take place through dipping, pouring, sprinkling, or wiping.
The main point is to apply water to something or someone to cleanse it. The Baptist might say then that only bathing or immersion truly conveys the cleansing of a person, and that sprinkling or pouring water over the head does not cleanse the body. Really? In that case, we should get rid of all our bathroom showers and commit to taking baths every day. Using showers, faucets, basins and towels, as well as bathing in rivers and lakes, has been used to wash bodies for millennia. Jesus seemed quite satisfied with a few wet teardrops and some long hair when his feet were cleansed (Luke 7:44).
Secondly, the supposed New Testament accounts of immersion baptism in the Gospels and Acts are examples of the use of sloppy eisegesis. When Jesus came “up from the water” (Matt. 3:16) or “up out of the water” (Mark 1:10) he was not necessarily emerging from beneath the water but walking out of the water or up from the river bed. The same action is enacted with Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch who saw water and stop the chariot. The text says “they both went down into the water” and then “they came out of the water.” (Acts 8:38-39). Did Philip perform a tandem baptism by both going beneath the water?  Obviously not, they both walked down into the pool of water and then both walked out.
In both the cases of Jesus and the eunuch they could have stood or kneeled in the water while water was poured over them. It is supposed that John the Baptist chose the desert of Aenon near Salim because the “much water” or “plentiful water” provided deep water for immersion (John 3:23). A better reading is that these many springs of waters were where people gathered to retrieve water—and were usually quite shallow—but the springs also served John’s purpose for baptizing.
Other baptisms in the book of Acts were more likely accomplished by applying water than by immersing people. The three thousand at the feast of Pentecost could have been baptised using the lavers of water used in Old Testament ceremonial cleaning. Paul and Cornelius and his Gentile guests were baptised inside houses where it was uncommon to have a deep bathtub.
Within the house of Cornelius the question, “Can anyone withhold water for baptising these people?” (Acts 10:47) implies that water would be brought to the new converts. Lydia’s baptism does allow for an immersion baptism in a river (Acts 16:13-15), but the Philippian jailor was present in his house, not the river when he and all his household heard the word of God and were baptised (Acts 16:32-33). The New Testament Christian baptisms simply do not prove a case for exclusive, immersion-only baptism, but instead, demonstrate the probability of a pouring or sprinkling mode.
Thirdly, and most importantly within the Baptist perspective, the act of baptism supposedly depicts the imagery of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. The go-to verse for Baptists to prove that baptism is essentially an immersion and emersion act is Romans 6:3, “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” When the convert goes down into the water his old man dies with the crucified Christ, but then he rises up out of the water as a new man with the resurrected Christ.
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