Baptismal meditation

3 John 2, 11: Beloved, I pray that in all respects you may prosper and be in good health, just as your soul prospers. Beloved, do not imitate what is evil, but what is good. The one who does good is of God; the one who does evil has not seen God.

3 John 2 has been an important verse in the history of modern American Christianity. It was the verse that young Oral Roberts suddenly discovered one morning as he hurriedly read the Bible before going to class. He had read the New Testament a hundred times before, yet he hadn’t noticed that verse. He concluded that he had been preaching the gospel all wrong, and that this verse taught a gospel of health and prosperity, that God didn’t want his people to be poor and sickly. Looking back, he saw this verse as the thing that launched a world-wide ministry that continues to this day.

We, of course, don’t follow Oral Roberts in that conclusion, but the main thing he learned from that verse is more orthodox. At the time, he said to his wife Evelyn: “We haven been wrong. I haven’t been preaching that God is good. And Evelyn, if this verse is right, God is a good God.”

God is a good God. We can’t approve all that Oral Roberts concluded from that premise, but the premise is profoundly, eternally, thrillingly accurate. God is a good God. God is good to all He has made. He gives gifts to all. He cares for all He has made. He opens His hand and gives food to every living thing. He cares for the sparrows, the lilies of the field, the wild animals as they search for food. He is the midwife for all the wild animals with young. God’s goodness is extravagant. The English poet Christopher Smart put if very precisely when he wrote “God is an extravagant BEING and generous unto loss.”

Your first daughter is being baptized today, on the first Sunday of Lent, and it may seem that a meditation on the goodness of God doesn’t fit the season. Lent is supposed to be sackclothily somber, agonizingly ashen. Lent begins in purple but eventually darkens to the black of Good Friday. But the goodness of God is actually the central reality of Lent. This is what Lent is about: God is extravagantly generous; God is good unto loss. God gives and gives and gives, He gives nothing but good. He holds nothing back. He gives even at the cost of His own Son.

This is the declaration that God is making to you and to your daughter this morning. And that is the faith in which you are called to raise her. In baptism, God claims her, promises her all good, promises to be her God and that she will be His daughter. The good God offers her eternal good, the eternal good that He is, in baptism, and calls her to respond in faith. Train her to love and trust the good God who has given her life, and new life among His people.

But this also is a challenge to you. Don’t teach your children by your words or actions that God is stingy. This baptism is a sign of God’s goodness to your daughter, but also a sign of His great goodness and kindness to you. Your daughter is a member of God’s family, and that is a sign of His kindness to you as well as her. Rejoice today, and rejoice always, because God has show Himself to you and your children to be “an extravagant Being and generous unto loss.”