@Mr. Great-Heart;
@Lowlander
Jake,
I appreciate your vehemence and zeal about your position as a Baptist. I used to be right there, saying just what you are saying to shore up Elijah, your fellow Baptist.
Elijah, however, is finding your articulation of the Baptist position, which I think is accurate, inadequate to account for matters as he has come to see them. It's your fellow Baptist, Jake, who has raised the concerns that he has and who admits that the P/R position can account for what he finds lacking in his own position.
You are quite right, Elijah, about what you can press home with your own children, as you speak to them of the undoubted love of God for them and encourage them in the never-failing care that He has for them. You speak to someone out of the church about Christ as the only hope, to be sure, and encourage them to believe and repent very winsomely
as they are open to it. If they are not, you don't throw pearls before swine.
But you speak to your child,
even in his rebelling, entreatingly and tenderly in a way that you'd never speak to an unbeliever who "doesn't want to hear it." It's hard even to fully describe this, but we intuit, as you are doing in this thread, that our children whom we are to nurture for Him are clearly not the same as the unbelieving world that lies outside our doors, even when those children have not yet professed their faith in Christ. Not only do we expect and anticipate them to do so, but we also wait, perhaps through turmoil and struggle, always pleading to God his promises to them, and never failing to point them to Christ, however far away they may be, or seem to be, from Him.
Your basic sense, Elijah, is that the child in the next room of your house is not to be treated by you spiritually as the unbelieving man next door and you are precisely right about that. Don't move away from this insight, my dear brother.
Peace,
Alan