Baptism Testimony of Edward
64 years ago I was christened in the Presbyterian Church in Ottawa, Canada, three months after I was born.
Exodus 19:1 reads, “In the third month after the children of Israel had gone out of the land of Egypt, on the same day, they came to the Wilderness of Sinai” (NKJV).
I was born in July, so my October baptism at Wooridle Church will be an anniversary of my first baptism.
I am like the Israelites going to meet God and make a promise.
But mostly I’m repenting my sins and seeking a new life in Jesus because I’m 100% sinner and I can’t save myself.
The sin I see most clearly right now is that I have held back a part of me from God.
I haven’t given all of myself to my Lord. I’ve worshipped little gods beside the Lord God. I am one of those little gods.
I was a slave to my independent life in which I could plan and organize things, pretend I was in control, and be blind to what I didn’t want to see.
Basically, I didn’t trust God with my life.
Because I wasn’t obedient and responsible to God as a baptized member of his body, the Church, I wasn’t truly responsible to anyone in my life.
I didn’t love and care for others#8212;not my parents, my wife, my children, my riends#8212;the way a man of God ought to. I
was selfish, making a god of myself and of knowledge, which I lust after.
My mother made me into a prince, the favorite son.
Even though I saw what she was doing and disapproved on the surface, in my heart I accepted her version of me as a prince.
Everywhere I go, I want to be a prince.
I desire a special life even though my head agrees with Pastor Kim that there is no special life, and my bankrupt life in a room in the YMCA showed me the truth of it.
I feel like the Israelites who lived 430 years in slavery but didn’t know their history.
How could I be a Christian leader in the Anglican Church in Ottawa and a mokja in Wooridle Church without my own baptism?
Why did I avoid it?
The answer is fear of responsibility.
I was afraid to be responsible for my own faith.
I am like the Israelites who told Moses to talk to God for them because they were afraid.
I wanted others to be responsible for me because I was a prince.
Being a Christian without having my own baptism or confirmation ceremony was like saying I was married to my wife without going through the marriage ceremony.
That happened in my life.
My daughter Tess was born out of a false marriage, two people living together but not married.
In Pastor Kim’s Wednesday sermon on Sept. 30, she said that as we cross the Red Sea we know what redemption is.
With my baptism I am crossing my Red Sea.
God did not let me take a shortcut to my Canaan redemption but led me the long way through the desert and faced me with a crisis I could not solve and no one else could do for me.
He used my daughter Tess as his crisis messenger.
I hoped she would meet Jesus and be baptized while she stayed with me for three months.
But because of my crippled faith, I couldn’t present Jesus’ gospel of love to her.
I emphasized sin, not love.
Through her, God showed me the hole in my faith.
I can’t control anything, I’m powerless to change my daughter.
But God can change me in baptism.
I expected my daughter to get what I didn’t have#8212;repentance, redemption and a responsible life in Christ.
But I made my daughter feel guilty and threatened.
Her feeling was a big surprise to me.
And when she didn’t respond the way I wanted, I got angry, not a red hot anger but the anger that pretends it’s not anger.
Everyone feels it but you pretend you’re not angry.
Now the Red Sea waters are a wall on my right hand and a wall on my left (Ex 14:22). With baptism, I begin to understand my redemption history.
I have withheld myself from God,
I wanted to be a prince without responsibility, and when responsibility got too close,
I ran away in a hundred different ways: I traveled in hopes of never returning, I made myself blind to the obvious, when I didn’t want to attend to something I needed to, I got tired,
I escaped into acquiring knowledge of all kinds, reading more and more books and lusting after new skills.
My applications are to lovingly accept my daughter and joyfully share QT with her, and to offer all of myself to God each morning, seeking his guidance.
