An Appeal for a Clean Conscience (Part 2); and why teach children to pray?

So now I'm here: married to a credo-baptist who is crowned with the fruits of the Spirit and who possesses a warm and generous heart. We attend an SBC Reformed Baptist church. I had to receive believer's baptism before I could join. And from my solid upbringing, church membership is a vital ingredient for spiritual maturity.

As I started spending more time with Baptists, I started wondering why Presbyterians (of a certain sort at least) seem to continually harp on baptism -- even to the point of implying that Baptists can't fully grasp the Gospel because they don't subscribe to infant baptism. My Baptist husband and friends seem somewhat bewildered by the vehemence over paedobaptism.

Michael Bull over at Bully's Blog has been invaluable at pointing out something so simple, I can't believe I overlooked it: Baptism is not the new covenant equivalent of circumcision, because the "circumcised," transformed heart is the sign of the new covenant. It also answers the long held question: if circumcision is the sign of the old covenant and women don't have foreskins and baptism has been subbed in for circumcision then why are women included? Because my premise was all wrong.

Now that I have a child, I'm now on the other side of the rhetoric. Baptists hate their children ... but "thankfully" they're "inconsistent" in their theology. It's "inconsistent" to teach children to pray before they're baptized. I hope my son doesn't overhear these comments too early. A few years ago the Baptist emphasis on conversion distressed me greatly. Now it's the other way around. Both cause little ones to stumble.

Tedd Tripp's Shepherding a Child's Heart had an answer to "What if my children are not believers" that is equally applicable to "Can I teach my child to pray?":
Do you suppose we should teach unbelievers to disobey the law of God? Is not God's standard applicable to all, regardless of whether they believe? Do we dare give the mechanisms and approaches that help them learn to manipulate their world without God? Such things will only drive them away from Christ.

 Jesus is King. We bear His image. Render to God the things that are God's. Therefore we are obligated to offer Him obedience. Every knee shall bow, whether willingly or unwillingly. We teach our children to pray because He is God and they and we are dependent upon Him for all things. We have no one else to appeal to.

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