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Transcript

[00:00:03] Remy: I would love to just keep geeking out with you all night.

[00:00:08] Chris: Anytime.

[00:00:09] Remy: Chris, welcome to the show, man. Thank you for being here.

[00:00:12] Chris: Thank you.

Glad to be here.

[00:00:16] Remy: So I think we have a pretty comprehensive talk tonight. I've got my show notes up here in front of me. We have a pretty comprehensive talk tonight about all sorts of things, I guess just your own sort of journey to Lutheranism and then to, you know, leading your family and. And, you know, father led faith formation, things like this, which is wonderful and something I really want to discuss. Overall.

[00:00:47] Chris: I. I actually grew up in the ELCA Lutheran Church.

[00:00:52] Remy: Okay.

[00:00:53] Chris: Which wasn't the nightmare that it is now, but it was still. I mean, you know, we had some female pastors, like, associates growing up. Right. And I remember even back in Sunday school, you know, my, My teacher would take biblical stories and try to give scientific explanations for things. And so, you know, I. I remember one time she had this story how, you know, Moses led the Israelites across to the Sea of Reeds rather than the Red Sea, and that it was much easier to cross.

And so, you know, my teenage mind, I was like, well, you know, that doesn't really solve your problem because then you have Pharaoh and his armies drowning in a shallow sea of reeds.

[00:01:45] Remy: Yeah.

[00:01:45] Chris: So one way or the other, you know, something miraculous had to happen.

And it. It was definitely miraculous that I kept my faith during that time because, you know, it just. It seems like everything was going against it. But as. As I grew up, I. I started to question infant baptism. That was probably the. The biggest struggle I had.

And I decided I wanted to go look for a different church because I just didn't like the direction the ELCA was going. Sure. So I ended up at a Mennonite Brethren Church, Anabaptist.

And there, I mean, they welcomed me in.

And it. It's still a church that I love the people there. And, you know, there's a few guys that I'll meet with every week for Bible study. So, you know, I keep in good contact with them. I. I actually just saw the pastor that church about a week ago.

But over the course of, like, the last or the. The. I was there about 17, 18 years, and I just struggled with this idea of someone being baptized and saved as an infant. And it. It got to the point where my main struggle was, you know, when do we enter into this covenant? You know, do you enter into the covenant upon baptism as a baby or upon profession of belief? You know, because Jesus had talked about being born again. So I was like, well, you Know, if you're born again, that means that at some point you make a decision for Jesus. And is that the point that you enter into the covenant?

And that's.

[00:03:43] Remy: That's fascinating. If. I'm sorry to interrupt, but if I could. Why.

I mean, why is that the conclusion, you know, that if you're born again, it means you must make a decision. And I don't know, maybe it's just my own post Lutheran mind, like, now that I'm like a Lutheran, I can't wrap my mind around that thinking. But, like, you didn't make a decision to be born, why would you make a decision to be born again?

You know, it's weird that at the.

[00:04:17] Chris: Time, I mean, you're.

Well, you're led through this idea that baptism is your public profession of faith. It's your first act of obedience. So it's. You look at it entirely from the perspective of this is something I'm doing for God instead of something God is doing for me. And I think that was sort of the key thing that had to open up in my mind was realizing that, hey, baptism is not my work. It's the work of the Holy Spirit. And then, you know, the thought of what a beautiful picture it is that an infant can be brought into the kingdom having done no works on their own. Yeah. So they. They truly can't boast, you know, because their. Their salvation was entirely a gift of God. And I. I guess once I started seeing it from that perspective, you know, the.

It. It started getting a lot. A lot easier. I started seeing baptism, you know, pretty much everywhere in scripture. And yeah, you know, Chris. Chris Roseborough was probably one of the keys to that because, I mean, it's kind of a long story. But, you know, one of my business partners that I went into business with was an atheist.

And it's funny, the other business partner was Jewish. So it kind of sounds like the beginning of the joke when you have a. A Christian, an atheist and a Jew going into business together.

But he and I, the atheist, we'd get together and play chess every. Every week or a couple times a week, especially, you know, once, you know, once we went into business for ourselves, you know, he could find excuses to take breaks pretty easily. So every time we got together, we'd get into discussions. And I mean, he's super intelligent guy and he's an honest guy. So when we'd have discussions, he'd actually think about stuff.

[00:06:30] Remy: Right.

[00:06:31] Chris: And so over the course of time, you know, he eventually came to faith, and he ended up joining a Lutheran church.

And so he was the one that introduced me to Chris Roseborough.

And at the same time, well, I listening to Chris and I got to tell him this at the issues etc. Conference. I was, you know, it's is. It's not often that you get to, you know, go up to someone who's had such a. An influence on you and actually let them know, hey, you've had this influence on me, especially without sounding really corny.

But the thing that he really helped me with was the idea that God had means of grace that he used even in the Old Testament.

[00:07:27] Remy: Yeah.

[00:07:27] Chris: And so, you know, he talked about, you know, Naaman being baptized, and so I had to really go back and study that. That passage.

[00:07:36] Remy: Yeah. And you know what?

[00:07:37] Chris: You know, you come to realize Naaman not only got healed from his leprosy, but he came to faith. And what an amazing, you know, thing that was. And of course.

[00:07:49] Remy: What'S amazing about Naaman, I'm sorry, in that story in particular, is that the healing for him is an afterthought. Right. It's not even the primary thing.

[00:08:01] Chris: Right.

[00:08:02] Remy: He comes up out of the water and the first thing he says is, surely your God is God. You know, like, amen.

So sorry.

[00:08:12] Chris: Anyway, well, and then.

No, well, I mean, the. The thing is, is the fact that the Lord, you know, made him use the Jordan river instead of the rivers in Damascus. You know, there was nothing magical about the Jordan river itself. So it's obviously the Lord's, you know, word upon the water.

And.

And then, of course, you know, Moses lifting up the bronze serpent.

[00:08:38] Remy: And you said, there's nothing magical about the drilling river. You said, there's nothing magical about the Jordan river in and of itself. There's dispensationalists everywhere right now losing their mind.

Like, all the people at the church I grew up in are like, wait, there's a disturbance.

[00:08:57] Chris: Yeah, I know. I have friends that take great pride in the fact that they've been baptized in the Jordan River. And I mean, nostalgic wise, I.

Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't call it a baptism. I'd be like, okay, I went swimming in the same place that Jesus got donked.

[00:09:17] Remy: I wouldn't mind waiting in it, you know?

[00:09:19] Chris: You know.

Yeah, I figured I already got re baptized once. I don't want to do that again. I kind of feel. I kind of feel like Timothy, you know, getting circumcised and baptized. Well, I was baptized, you know, twice.

[00:09:35] Remy: The Mennonites re baptized you.

[00:09:37] Chris: So, yes. In order to join the church, you had to be re baptized.

I looked at it as a. Since it was a public profession of faith, that was an opportunity to invite my non Christian friends and relatives and we got to do it in a lake.

When I was getting baptized, there was a thunderstorm. So that was interesting.

[00:10:02] Remy: Wow.

[00:10:02] Chris: You know, I kept thinking the entire time I could be going home right now too, in the spiritual sense.

But yeah, being baptized in the lake is, it's kind of a cool experience. You know, nothing to take away from the baptismal font inside the, the nave of the church, but definitely the lake with everybody, you know, standing on the shore. You know, there's, there's a, a nostalgic experience to it. I think one of the, the issues though is then you can only get baptized when it's warm out. And you know, generally there's only a couple times, you know, a year that groups of people could be baptized. So it's like you're pushing it way off.

[00:10:51] Remy: Yeah.

[00:10:52] Chris: You know, where I, I think, you know, if someone's going to get bapt...

Reforming Faith: Chris LaBelle