Baptizing Homosexuals ?
Monday Morning Insights posted an excerpt from Brian Jones yesterday on baptizing homosexuals. Here’s a shorter excerpt. You can read the rest at Brian’s sight.
“How can we expect an openly homosexual person to even want to change their life without their minds and hearts being born again?
That’s like a doctor telling someone with radically spreading lymphoma to show signs of remission before he’ll give them chemo. What we do here at CCV is allow anyone to make a declaration of faith and get baptized. There’s no ‘sin litmus test.’
We don’t check to see if anyone is shacking up, or look for heroin tracks on their arms, or condoms in their back pockets. We assume that everyone is as screwed up as I was before I came to Christ.
Now, we make it clear before baptism that Jesus asks us to forsake everything that is out of line with his will expressed in the Bible, but we don’t stand at the baptismal with an exhaustive checklist in hand.
Afterwards, however, that’s when the work of discipleship begins – teaching people how to obey everything that Jesus commanded (Matthew 28:18-20). People must be taught how to obey following baptism, not before it. That’s when the subject of someone’s specific sin comes up. And not before.”
Brian makes a lot of sense. I won’t venture to agree or disagree with him, but I have to wonder how Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount applies here.
“Let’s not pretend this is easier than it really is. If you want to live a morally pure life, here’s what you have to do: You have to blind your right eye the moment you catch it in a lustful leer. You have to choose to live one-eyed or else be dumped on a moral trash pile. And you have to chop off your right hand the moment you notice it raised threateningly. Better a bloody stump than your entire being discarded for good in the dump.” – Mat 5:29-30, The Message
I’ll also throw in Adam Clark’s commentary on those verses for thought. “It is not enough to shut the eye, or stop the hand; the one must be plucked out, and the other cut off. Neither is this enough, we must cast them both from us.”
What do you think?
from my notebook 