The Baptism He Canceled

It was a Tuesday morning and it took forty seconds and he has thought about it every week for two years.

He got the number off the noticeboard photo on his phone, and he called, and a woman answered who did not know him well, and he said his name and said he needed to come off the list for the twelfth. And she said oh, and then, kindly, is everything all right, and he said yes, just a change of plan, and thanked her and hung up.

That was it. Forty seconds. He was not asked anything else, and he has never been able to decide whether that was a mercy or the loneliest part of the whole business.

Because it was not a change of plan. On the Saturday he had done the thing he had not done in eleven months. Not a slip in any real sense; he went to it, and he knew what he was doing while he was doing it, and afterward he sat in his kitchen with the light off and did not feel dramatic at all, which surprised him. What he felt was a kind of clerical certainty, like a man discovering an error on a form: well, that settles the question of the twelfth.

Dean is thirty-nine. He had been coming for a year and a bit. He had told his sister. He had bought a towel, which is the detail that gets him, a stupid, specific, hopeful thing to have done.

He has not been back to that church since. Not because anybody said anything, because nobody knows. He took his own name off the list and then he took himself off the list, and both were done quietly, by him, on the assumption that he was doing the honest thing.

If you have withdrawn yourself from something after a fall, then hear the question, and take your time with it. Whose work did you think you were withdrawing?

Who began it, and who is doing it

Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.Philippians 1:6

Read the two verbs and notice that neither of them is yours.

He which hath begun. Not you which hath begun. Paul is describing something that started in these people that they did not initiate, and he traces it back past their decision to God's action.

Will perform it. The word means to carry through to completion, to finish off properly. The one who started it is the one on the hook for finishing it, and Paul says he is confident about that, which is a word about somebody's expectation, and his expectation is not resting on the Philippians' performance.

Now hold that next to a Tuesday morning phone call.

Dean rang to remove himself from a work that he did not begin, on the grounds that he had failed at a job that was never assigned to him.

You are inside a work that somebody else began, and it is already His to complete, and the completing was never handed to you. I am not talking a man out of taking his failure seriously. It is written in Philippians 1:6, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence about confidence and lays it on a man who has not been back for two years.

What the honest thing actually was

Here is the part I want to be careful about, because Dean was not being cynical. He was being scrupulous, and that matters.

In his mind, going through with the baptism after the Saturday would have been dishonest. A man does not stand up in water in front of a church and say a thing about his life when the previous weekend says something else. That is not cowardice. That is a real conviction about integrity and it is the same conviction that made him worth watching in the first place.

But look at what he assumed baptism was. He assumed it was a statement about his consistency. It is not. It is a statement about a death and a resurrection that are not his own, which he is being joined to, and the only thing he brings to it is the fact that he belongs to Christ.

Which means his Saturday made him more suited to it, not less. A man who knows exactly why he needs a Savior is the ideal candidate for a rite that is about needing one.

You are qualified by belonging to Him and not by the state of the previous weekend, and it is already His work that the water speaks about. Scripture says we were buried with Him by baptism into death, and raised to walk in newness of life (Romans 6:4), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes the water a testimony about Christ rather than a report on a man.

Two years is not a verdict either

And here is the second withdrawal, which is bigger than the first.

The phone call was forty seconds. The staying away has been two years, and it has quietly hardened into a story with a shape: he was doing well, he failed, he removed himself, he is now outside. And every week that passes makes the story feel more like a settled fact and less like a decision he made in a kitchen with the light off.

But nothing in heaven ratified that. Nobody agreed with the withdrawal. It was one man's ruling on himself, made on a bad weekend, and it has been in force for two years by nothing but momentum.

You are still the one He began the work in, and it is already going on, and no phone call ever transferred it out of His hands. It is written that He who has begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been performing it for two years in a man who thought he had left.