Specifics

My youngest daughter, now a college grad, was really a funny kid. I can remember sitting at the dinner table where on frequent occasions she would say something so funny I would just break up. The whole family would be in an uproar. Sometimes her comment would be right in the middle of a bite of food or a drink of the beverage of the meal, and I’d end up choking or spouting liquid through my nose like a whale. But I never journaled the things she said. “I’ll never forget that,” I thought, “it was too funny.” However, over the years I did forget, and now I have the general memory but no specifics.

Christians, and in our case American Baptists, want to be careful that we don’t treat what the Bible says in the same way. To walk in the way of God we need the specific teachings of scripture not just a general feeling of religion. That is one of our reasons for seeking God’s will in His word.

There are some American Baptists who will tell us that they love God, or revere Jesus (I heard one leading light of ABC say “Don’t mess with my Jesus!”), or we enjoy the feeling of being Baptist, but they don’t want to observe (or expect from those declaring faith) the specific behavioral teachings of the New Testament. Without obedience to what the Scriptures specifically state regarding sin versus purity they have a general positive feeling for Christian faith if it can be defined without letting the Scripture dictate a lifestyle. They are missing the point, and the denomination, by accepting their redefintion, seems to have lost its way.