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In our final session, Dr. David Booth answers common objections to the position of covenant baptism. Join us as we conclude our seminar with an excellent session!
During this session, we're going to talk about common objections, or actually unique objections, if you have any, to baptizing our covenant youth. And the honest truth is, is your objections or your questions are much more important than any that I could have prepared, because we want to answer things that you're actually thinking about.
Nevertheless, it'll be helpful to start out with five very common objections that people raise all the time that are Baptist, objecting to baptizing our covenant youth. So I'm going to present those first, and then we're going to just open it up and take any questions.
You can go as far afield as you like on those questions, hopefully related to baptism. And I will do my best to answer them with the help of my brothers. But before we do that, let's go before the throne of grace in prayer.
Let us pray. Father, we are so grateful that you have not left us to grope around in the darkness, trying to figure out everything on our own, and to know your will on our own. But you have given us your word as a lamp onto our feet, and as a light onto our paths.
We thank you for that. We also thank you that in your word, you have called us to learn to love one another, even as Christ loves the church. And so we pray as we discuss some of these areas where brothers and sisters disagree, that you would remind us that a big part of the life you've called us to live is to love one another, even when we don't have all the answers.
To love one another, even where we disagree. That by our love for one another, people would see that we are disciples of Jesus Christ. We ask these things in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, Kendall and I have thrown an awful lot at you already.
I did say this is drinking out of a fire hydrant this morning. And we're going to slow down just a little bit here to address some of the common objections that people raise to covenant baptism. But before we do that, I just want to give a very short summary of some of the positive reasons why we do this.
And I'm doing that intentionally. I've discovered if we just dive into objections, it can make it seem like the basic pattern in church history is that of only baptizing those on a profession of faith.
And that somehow those who baptize their covenant children are in a defensive posture trying to say, oh yeah, yeah, but we have some answers to that. And that's actually not the way it's worked out. Throughout church history, the vast majority of Christians have baptized their covenant children.
I think we can miss that to some degree in the United States where we have a lot more Baptists and because of the modern evangelicalism that we're immersed in. But even today, the vast majority of Protestants in the world practice the baptism of covenant children.
And so I just want to give you a quick summary of why we do that. Just two things. First, the straightforward logic that is followed in baptizing our covenant children is what you've already heard this morning.
Once we understand that there is one covenant of grace that extends throughout all of history and our children are members of the visible church, therefore objects of the privileges and held responsible for the obligations of the covenant, and you understand what the meaning of baptism is, you put those two things together, you inevitably are going to end up with we ought to be baptizing our covenant children.
Now, that's going to take more thought for some of you that may take weeks, even months, as you try to wrestle through in your own mind and with scripture, what exactly does baptism mean according to God's word?
But if you put those things together, that's what you're going to end up with. I can simplify that a bit because I can tell you in the history of the church, the nub of the issue is simply this. Are the children of believers, members of the covenant community, members of the visible church in the new covenant?
If you go back and look at confessional standards, like if you compare the confessional standard of the Reformed Baptist churches, the London Baptist Confession, to the Westminster Confession of Faith, you'll see that the London Baptist Confession says that the visible church is made up of all the believers in true religion, and the Westminster Confession says believers and their children.
That's just really where the divide comes, so if you can answer that question, you're going to come over on one side, and if you answer it differently, you're going to come over on the other side of the issue.
So just seven quick bullet points, I've already said much of this, or has Kendall, is kind of a summary. A lot more could be said, but just to have this in your mind about why we think the children are always members of the visible church in every administration of the covenant of grace.
The first hardly needs argument. You read the Old Testament, the children are included. They are, in fact, objects of circumcision, the sign and the seal of the covenant. The promises are made to them and so on, so that's straightforward.
The question is, does that carry over to the New Testament? Well the New Testament is an administration of the promises that God made to Abraham. When I was in my early 20s, I was going to a dispensational church, I don't know if that word is familiar to you, but it's a church that tended to break everything up into these distinct chunks and separate them from each other, as though the New Testament was an unforeseen parenthesis from the standpoint of the Old Testament.
And then I'm just reading the New Testament going, this doesn't work. Because the promises that are made to Abraham are applied to the church. There's clear continuity there. And we see that, of course, in many places.
For example, in Galatians 3 .29, Paul writes, and if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise. There's a unity. Or in Romans 4 .11 -12, we read, Abraham received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised.
The purpose was to make him the father of all who believe without being circumcised. Right? Father Abraham had many sons, we sometimes teach children to sing. And I am one of them by faith in Jesus Christ.
Or consider 1 Corinthians 10 verses 1 -4. Paul writes, for I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.
So what were they doing in the ancient world? What were they doing in the Mosaic administration of the covenant? Well, those who were actually getting spiritual nurture, they were getting it from Christ.
But did you notice actually how they were called? Our fathers. He's writing to Corinthians who are almost all Gentiles, and he says they are our fathers. There's one family that is the visible and the invisible church in all generations.
Third, as I mentioned earlier, the fifth commandment incorporated the children of Israel right into the chief covenant document. But Paul actually uses the same commandment in Ephesians chapter 6 and shows continuity between the old and new covenants.
Fourth, 1 Corinthians 7 .14, which we've quoted a number of times because it's really explicit. The children of one or more believing parents is holy. That's God's word. They are set apart as belonging to God in a special way.
Fifth, someone brought this up, Jesus calls the children onto himself. But please notice he doesn't just call children in general. They're all Jewish children. They're all members of the visible church.
And he does not tell people. I've heard sermons on this. Thankfully, I've never preached one. Sometimes I have to go back and say, boy, I might have taught this 30 years ago. But I've heard sermons on this that say you need to become childlike in order to be part of the kingdom of God.
But that is not what Jesus says. Jesus says the kingdom of God is of such. That is, even though they're little children, they can be carried in their mother's arms, they are part of the kingdom of God.
To put that simply, the kingdom of God is not just for big people. It's not just for smart people. It's not just for educated people. God in his grace has brought children into the visible church. Sixth, the covenantal transition that occurs at Pentecost, that's the big shift.
You don't want to think the shift starts at Matthew chapter 1, verse 1, because you really still have the old covenant there. You still have the old traditions going on there. But it really takes place at Pentecost.
That's the key break. And when the covenant shift takes place at Pentecost to the New Testament era, we are explicitly told this promise is to you and to your children. And seventh, the pattern of household baptism suggests a far greater solidarity of the nuclear family as a covenant unit before God than our Baptist brothers and sisters allow for.
Okay, so I know a great deal more could be said. Trust me, Kendall and I could get together and do this for hours. But I think if you just take this, this little summary, there's a lot of evidence. So the question comes up, why doesn't everyone agree with that?
And some of you, and certainly many of our Baptist brothers and sisters, they actually have objections to making these connections. We'd like to spend our time in this section talking about what those objections are and why, at least from my standpoint as a Presbyterian minister, I don't think they work.
And I don't think this is a hidden agenda. I'm going to try to convince you of that fact. So what do our brothers and sisters object to? Well, the first argument, I'm actually going to divide in half to two parts.
I want to be upfront and say it's not a very good argument, right? So not every argument is a good argument or one that you would take seriously on an academic level. Nevertheless, this is the most common argument against baptizing children in our own day, at least in my own experience.
The argument goes like this. Since baptism is a testimony of the faith of the person being baptized, obviously only those professing faith and repentance should be baptized. Now, since we're talking about objections, it's really important you all get what the objection is.
So I want to give this to you again. Since baptism is a testimony of the faith of the person being baptized, obviously only those professing faith and repentance should be baptized. Now if you've grown up in a church and you've heard that over and over again, you probably take for granted.
Sure, the person is testifying to their faith. And where you won't find that is in the Bible. Now I should say, this isn't just a popular notion. I mentioned this earlier on, the Southern Baptist Convention recently, this is not the history of the Southern Baptist Church, but in 2000 when they wrote this new statement of faith, the Baptist Faith and Message, they actually have a definition that agrees with this.
Christian baptism is the immersion of a believer in water in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. It is an act of obedience symbolizing the believer's faith. And a little bit later again, it is a testimony to his faith.
The problem with that is it's simply unbiblical. If you read all the examples, this is what I want you to do, go home and open up your Bibles and you read all the examples of being baptized in the New Testament, what you're going to discover is we are not the subjects.
We are the objects of baptism. We are not the ones that are testifying to our faith, rather there's passive verbs for us. We get baptized. It is Christ who baptizes his church. And therefore this objection can't really stand.
Now regrettably, I think the majority of people in the United States, I think even secretly a lot of Presbyterians, they kind of think this is true, just because you've heard it a lot. It's just not what the Bible teaches.
The Bible teaches that we are in fact the objects of baptism. I should tell you that historically, Baptists have had better theology than this. I mentioned the Reformed Baptists. We have many dear Reformed Baptist brothers and sisters.
If you go back to the London Baptist Confession of Faith, they define baptism like this. Baptism is an ordinance of the New Testament, ordained by Jesus Christ to be unto the party baptized a sign of fellowship with him in his death and resurrection, of his being engrafted into him, of remission of sins, and of giving up into God through Jesus Christ to live and walk in newness of life.
But as our Reformed Baptist brothers and sisters understand that you are an object in baptism, which by the way means that simply moving this objection off the table doesn't mean you should be baptizing your covenant children.
It just means this isn't a good argument. You could in fact end up being a Reformed Baptist. But it's important to be able to realize that doesn't really work. Let me just ask if there are questions or discussion on this issue before we move on.
I think it would be more helpful for us just to do these objection by objection. To understand that you are the object of baptism, that God is the one who is putting the covenant marker, his promise upon you.
It is not fundamentally about you testifying to your faith. Any questions or comments about that? And we can do it later too. I can repeat the questions too if you don't get this.
For everyone who's going to watch it. So for that whole, what's it called, analogy about baptism being like you put a ring on your finger, it's signifying a ring. Like it's a physical marker to indicate an inward faith.
You would say that that's a, like radically that's not an honest analogy to make.
Well it doesn't symbolize an inward faith. So let me come back to that. There is an analogy you can use with signs and the things that it signifies. So a ring actually is a way of doing that. But you want to realize that it's not signifying what you've done, it's signifying what God has done.
So in that case it's God who's putting the ring on you. But let me come back to the meaning of baptism which ties into this. Baptism is not about your faith, it is about God's promise. The righteousness which comes through faith.
Those are two different things. Now they're related, right? When you believe you receive the righteousness of God. But the sacraments themselves are signs and seals of the righteousness that comes through faith.
This will be really helpful to you because when you read Romans 4 you're going to see that that's precisely what Paul says circumcision is. It's a sign and a seal of the righteousness that comes by faith that's put on Abraham.
It's not a sign of Abraham's faith. It's a sign of the righteousness that comes by faith. So the problem with that analogy is you're already making the assumption that it's about my faith rather than about God's faithfulness.
The sacraments are about God's faithfulness. Other questions about this particular issue about baptism being a testimony of your faith, a very popular tradition, and the word of God which says it's actually a sign of God doing something.
You're the object, you are passive, God is the one who's the subject. We come back to this later so I just wanted to give you a second to do this. Kendall?
One, maybe something that we haven't talked a lot about is why does God institute covenant signs? What is the purpose for those?
That's a great question. So why does God institute covenant signs? It's because he loves you and he wants to give you assurance of his faithfulness. So when you look at circumcision, because this is where we need to start, is where Abraham is wrestling is he's an old man.
God has promised him, I'm going to give you this land, I'm going to give you a seed, I'm going to make you great. And Abraham's gotten older and older and older and he says to the Lord, how can I know?
That's the question. How can I know I'm going to have all this happen? And God cuts a covenant with him. So the way covenants work in the ancient world is if it was a really serious covenant, you would divide animals in half.
And the idea would be is you divide the animals in half and the two parties would walk through the divided animals together. Or perhaps if you had a great king and a lesser king, only the lesser king would go through.
And what they would be saying is, if I don't fulfill this covenant, then what happened to these animals being torn apart happened to me? It's a very strong self-maledictory oath. Well God does that with Abraham, but if you remember the story, Abraham doesn't walk through the animals.
Abraham divides up the animals and he's like as it were falling asleep and then God shows up in a theophany. And he has this burning lamp symbolizing his deity and God goes through the animals alone. And what God says is, by doing that symbolically, may the curses of these animals being torn apart happen to me, something that can't possibly happen, it's not possible for God to die, but may they happen to me if these promises aren't kept.
And then he gives them the sign and the seal of circumcision to strengthen Abraham's faith. So Abraham would literally have in his flesh and all his children would have in their flesh the marker that one, you can't accomplish this in your own flesh, the flesh gets cut off.
Two, it points forward to Christ being cut off on the cross on our behalf. That's actually at the root, we talk about Colossians, about the circumcision of Christ. You don't want to make that primarily about Christ being circumcised on the eighth day, it's Christ being cut off on the cross on behalf of his people.
And so we have this tangible sign and seal so that we can say God is faithful, God is faithful. That's what you ought to do at your baptisms as well. Now if you think of your baptism primarily as about your own faith, you're going to look back at the time when you were baptized as an infant, but true enough, if you were twenty or thirty or forty when you got baptized and go, that's a really weak reed to lean on.
What I had in my heart when I got baptized. But if you look at your baptism and say that's God putting this sign and seal on me to give me assurance that he is faithful and he will keep his covenant promises, well that's a reed you can build your life on.
Let's move on to the second half of this objection because it's a little bit more nuanced. Okay, yes, we are the objects of baptism, but there are passages in scripture that link repentance and or faith with baptism.
This is what Peter says at Pentecost, repent and be baptized. Right, so it does seem to be there's a pretty clear connection between repentance and faith and baptism. What do us crazy reformed people do with that?
Well, the first thing I want to tell you is I joyfully practice believer's baptism. You remember that everybody does this if you're a faithful Christian. The first baptism I ever performed as a minister is I baptized someone based on their public profession of faith because they were coming from outside the church.
I later on, just about my third or fourth baptism, I did that again because if you're evangelizing people, please keep evangelizing people and you're telling them the gospel. You're going to talk to people that are outside the covenant community.
They're going to come to faith and when they come to faith, God says because of their faith, they are members of the covenant community and they deserve the sign and the seal of the covenant. You baptize them, right?
So this all fits. This isn't new. Second, I do wish, I say this very gently because I know some of you probably are still going, yeah, this is right. This is right. I do wish that my Baptist friends would keep reading because right after Peter says repent and be baptized, he says this promise is for you and for your children.
Third, the fact that baptism is a sign and a seal of promises that must be received by faith is no objection at all to applying such a sign to the children of believers. In fact, that's precisely what God himself does in circumcision.
We're going to talk about this in a little more detail when we get to a later objection, but I want you to realize that part of the problem we have because we don't live as Jews, we often misunderstand what circumcision is all about.
But what is the meaning of circumcision? Paul tells us in Romans 4 .11, I say Paul, but I mean God, God through Paul. This is God's own definition. He tells us that Abraham received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised.
That's what circumcision is about. It's a sign and a seal of the righteousness that comes by faith. And then God said, do this to your children. So if you're going to object to baptizing children because of the connection between faith and repentance and receiving the righteousness of God, that exact same objection goes against circumcision and then your argument is not with the Westminster Confession of Faith or an OPC pastor in North Andover, it's with God.
That objection just doesn't work. See, our Baptist friends are assuming that if the sign and the seal is related to the righteousness that comes by faith, then it can only be applied to those who have received this righteousness by faith.
But the Lord commanded Abraham to apply the sign and seal to his children. So Abraham received circumcision after he believed. I trust that many people in your church in the future are going to receive baptism after they believed.
But Isaac received it before, as many children in your church will as well. Questions on that part of it? Or objections? I think that's actually a pretty straightforward thing. But Kendall has a question.
Good.
All right. Here I am. Such a good point. And I want to ask a question that builds on that. It's not directly related to that. We hear all the time in the Baptist circles and in Pentecostal circles and in other evangelical circles, there's no Bible verse that commands infant baptism.
And the objection is that this is an argument from silence. But I wondered, and I would ask if you could maybe break this down for us a little bit, how does the argument from silence fall apart? And how does it cut both ways?
Let me start with the second one. Obviously cuts both ways because there are no Bible verses that say don't baptize your children. Right? So as I started out in the first lecture this morning, we make a lot of decisions from the Bible by reasoning from what's there.
But the reason why that's actually an incredibly weak argument from the view of those who don't want to baptize covenant children is we assume covenant continuity. Even if we didn't have the New Testament, remember the very first believers don't have a New Testament yet.
They have an Old Testament. And so when they're going and starting their churches and the apostles are doing this, they may have one letter from Paul. If you're in Galatia or Thessalonica or something, you may have one or two letters.
They were quickly passing them around. The churches were very connected with each other. But at first they don't have that. So the word of God they have is the Old Testament, which clearly makes the point that just children of believers are members of the covenant community.
So it would be strange for them to say, what do you mean they're not? And if they were going to be, you would think the apostles would have had to make it really clear to them. We've got a break here.
We've got something very different going on here. Now please don't get into long arguments, either with yourself or other people, arguing about silence and so on. We don't need to do that. If you actually take what the Bible does say about what baptism means, about children of believers being members of the covenant in both communities, that's going to bring you over to this other side.
You don't have to wonder about what would people that you're imagining think. So I would just encourage you to step away from that, but do realize the fact that there is no verse that explicitly says baptize your children now is not actually a very good argument.
It's not any better of an argument than saying, therefore, we shouldn't have women participate in the Lord's Supper, also something for which there is no explicit command or verse. I want to move on to another argument, which in one sense may not actually be an argument, but I actually think it's very powerful in our lives, and that's emotion.
Sometimes Reformed people are guilty of not paying enough attention to emotion. If you were baptized as a teenager or an adult, and particularly if it was connected in some way to your making a public profession of faith, it was probably a very meaningful experience for you to do that, and I say praise God.
But then you look at the child and you say, that child's not going to remember any of this. So what's the point? Well, we do realize, of course, that that sort of argument's not a biblical argument, but we should deal with it honestly.
What's the point of baptizing a child who doesn't understand yet what is going on? Now in terms of arguing against baptizing covenant youth, you could take the same argument with circumcision and say, the child's not going to remember that experience either, and he's going to be grateful if he doesn't remember the experience.
There are some benefits to being circumcised on the eighth day that adults getting circumcised would appreciate. But I'm going to be curious to hear what you think about this, but I want to relate an experience to you, because I want you to realize that being baptized as an infant, as a covenant child, also has experiential categories to it.
I have a dear friend of mine, a dear brother, Silic Shryack. Silas has been my intern for this past year, and we're going to ordain him and install him to be associate pastor in our church. I hope he comes out here and preaches for you sometimes when your pastors are away on vacation or something, or maybe even when they're here.
He's a wonderful preacher. And Silas has three children, and I think of his daughter Elizabeth, who's five years old. Now if you go talk to Elizabeth and you ask her, Elizabeth, does God love you? She will say, yes.
And you say, Elizabeth, how do you know God loves you? And she'll say, I've been baptized. You know how that works? She's growing up in the church, and every time she sees someone being baptized, we tell her, remember God put his name on you.
You were baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. God set you apart from conception in your mother's womb as being holy, 1 Corinthians 7 .14. God loves you. He's blessed you. He's given you these privileges.
Furthermore, baptism is a sign, a seal of the righteousness that comes by faith. So as she looks to Jesus, she's actually fulfilling the promise. And so you have children growing up in the church who their parents talk to them about it.
They hear it in sermons, but they also witness it in the life of the church as people get baptized and they go, God did that before I chose him, precisely the way we come to love God. What does the Bible say?
Not that we loved him first. We do love God by God's grace, but we loved him because he first loved us. There is an experiential and emotional aspect if the parents and the church are rightly teaching baptism.
There is an experiential aspect for children growing up in the church as covenant members as well, and it actually matches the theology of the Bible. That's not really an argument, but I do want you to realize that emotional things often drive us as well.
So would anyone like to emote a bit or maybe ask a question about emotions?
Okay, so what if a couple who become Christian and now they have like 12 year old children and their children want nothing to do with it, what would you say on that?
That's a fantastic practical question. And it's going to be one that you're going to have to deal with as a church. What I would tell you is every child who's under the leadership of their parents, they're living in the home, who is not actively objecting to being baptized, I would baptize them.
So if I had a 12 year old who's telling me, I don't want anything to do with this Jesus stuff. Well, I wouldn't baptize him because the next thing I'm going to have to do is discipline him for rebelling against the covenant, right?
So that doesn't make any sense. But there isn't an age limit per se here, right? So the 12 year old is a covenant child as well. You are going to have to work through this in your own church. Thankfully, you don't have to do it in isolation.
You could talk to other churches and get input and wisdom, right? But yeah, so I don't have a problem. I wouldn't have a problem with them being 12 or 6. I'll tell you as a practical matter, I have never baptized an older child simply on their parents' profession of faith.
Because also what gets wet up in here too is what do the parents think, right? Do I want my child to make a decision for themselves and how does that all play into it? It can get pretty complicated. Yeah.
But it's a good practical question to ask.
Age isn't what I mean. It's basically what could happen or what does happen. Oh, what could happen if you're baptized? Oh, no. Just parents coming later, having children of different ages. You might have a 5-year-old who's great and a 16-year-old who's like, no, I want nothing to do with that.
Yeah.
So the family's all... Yeah. In that case, I'd baptize the 5-year-old, right? Not because of age, but because the 5-year-old says, I'm fine with this. And I don't need them to make a positive affirmation.
I need them to simply not be intentionally rejecting Jesus and that would justify me baptizing them. Yeah.
I was up with the kids for a bit, so this might have already been answered. But along the lines of that question, if you believe that in the covenant baptism, do you then believe that the children that are baptized into the covenant are able to then take the Lord's Supper?
That's a big question for another debate. So I'm going to give you the short answer to this. But honestly, it's a question worth considering. The short answer is the vast majority of Christians who practice covenant baptism do not practice what is known as, actually mistakenly, as paedo-communion.
I say mistakenly. Paedo-communion means child communion. What they actually mean is covenant communion. Same thing with baptism. We often wrongly call it believer's baptism and infant baptism. But actually, Baptist churches don't baptize believers.
They baptize people based on a profession of faith. Every Baptist minister knows, but that means some of those professions are going to be spurious. So there's a baptism based on the profession of faith, and then we baptize them because they're members of the covenant community.
We don't baptize infants in general. So terminology can get fuzzy here. So what I want you to realize is those who practice that say, children are members of the covenant community, therefore we practice covenant communion and children should be available to come to the Lord's table.
There are good, faithful Christians who believe that. Most Christians in Reformed tradition don't. The reason is the New Testament makes a distinction between baptism and the Lord's Supper. In baptism, we're passive.
In the Lord's Supper, we're active and passive. That is, Paul calls us in 1 Corinthians to examine yourself and then come. And so therefore, most Reformed Christians will say, you have to be able to examine yourself enough to know about Jesus, to know that I have faith in Jesus, that I've gone to the elders of the church and I've talked about this.
We're not talking about passing a big theology exam and to understand that this supper is a celebration of Christ's life-giving death. So you can't just jump from one to the other. There is a distinction between them.
And yet, there are good, faithful brothers and sisters who practice covenant communion even though they know those things and there's a big discussion about that. That will be 2023. 2023. Yes.
That's a great question though. David, also, can I add this? Jonathan Edwards, in one of his writings, describes this little girl named little Phoebe Bartlett and he talks about how, to his conscience, at three years old, she was a sincere believer who should take of the Lord's table.
So we're not saying that 15, 16, 17 years old, they can't take communion until they reach that age. This is about what they, like you said, not a massive theology exam either, it's sincerity and they know Jesus.
Yeah. So there is no biblical age limit. I grew up in a church that basically said when you're 13, I'm sure some of you grew up in that church, you had like a confirmation class and you graduated from the class and you became a communicant member of the church.
A little dangerous to say on tape here, but my two brothers became communicant members of the church and they were not believers when they were that age. They just certainly weren't. And I had been a believer for many years before I came to the Lord's table.
By God's grace, I do not know a time in my life that I did not know Jesus as my own Lord and Savior. So it's not an age thing in the Bible. Now the problem for us as a church is, I would take some exception to Edwards, I don't know how you can tell that a three-year-old believes.
We're not saying the three-year-old doesn't believe. You know, you can have a little baby reaching out for its mother and you can say, he loves her. She loves her. Well, that baby could be reaching out to their father in heaven saying, you know, showing that they love God.
God has changed their hearts by regeneration. John the Baptist, after all, is regenerated in his mother's womb and he jumps for joy at the voice of the mother of his Savior, right? So age isn't the issue.
But how can we as elders know that they're making a public profession of faith? That usually comes later. And I would say in my own church, it's normally not before about 10, but it might be. And I've met with, we don't just do individuals, and Presbyterianism is always a group of people.
So me and one of my elders were meeting with a girl who was nine years old and I was a little skeptical actually that we would know for sure. And she just blew us away with an extraordinary personal testimony of faith.
Now practically one of the things you have to do, I'm going to point to your ministers here, one of the things you have to do as ministers is you have to remember to talk on children's level. You do not want to ask questions that assume theological knowledge and you also don't want to just hear them echoing things they've heard.
It's a beautiful thing that they echo things they heard, that they heard their parents say, they've heard religious language in class. But instead of talking about sin, you're talking to young children, you say, you ever do anything bad?
What do you do? You realize, like you picked on your sister, what do you do when you realize you were wrong to pick on your sister? And if they get back to, well I go apologize to my sister and I apologize to God, oh they've got it.
They don't need fancy language for that. Actually that's better than getting them simply repeating some pre-stated language where you can't tell whether or not they really believe it. Complex question, I mean a good question, it's one of your pastors and then eventually maybe the whole congregation has to wrestle with just a little bit.
Sure.
How would you handle an objection from an older child that, because if their argument is well, isn't God sovereign, doesn't he already, isn't he already in my heart? Doesn't he already, and he asks these questions, and then why is this, why is this, I hesitate to call it a ritual, but it is a ritual.
And so, not just to be ritualistic, how would you answer that?
That's a great question and it doesn't just apply to older children, it applies to adults. The question is, is if what matters is, is I love Jesus and I trust him, why should I get baptized? And I would ask, what in the world do you mean by trusting Jesus if you're not going to do what he tells you to do?
God after all is the one who creates baptism. Baptism is not a clever idea that came up in the Middle Ages and the church started saying, hey, this would be a cool neat practice we could do. So you need to be baptized.
It's actually even part of the Great Commission. We need to be doing this as we're going out, right? We're going to disciple the nations by baptizing them and teaching them to obey. Oh, by the way, very important word there.
I've noticed that American Christians often say, teaching them everything Jesus taught. Jesus says, teaching them to obey everything I taught you. There's a call to a changed life and that applies to adults as well.
But it also comes to another meaning here, which is, what difference does it make if you're baptized? And I want to say it's a means of grace. It's not just a bare sign. God uses means when he works in your life.
No, a very obvious means he uses is the hearing and preaching of God's word. Now, theoretically, God could save you without you ever hearing a sermon. He totally could. He saved John the Baptist, right?
Regenerated him in his mother's womb before John ever heard a sermon, ever spoke a word. God could do that. But we know from scripture that ordinarily the way that God saves people is, someone else comes to them and announces the good news, right?
God uses means. Baptism is one of those means. It's a means of grace. It marks you out as being part of the covenant community and it seals God's promise on you. Now, remember someone asked us earlier, I think it was Kendall actually, about what was the point of the sacraments in the first place?
And I said, it's to give you assurance. If you're saying, I don't need the assurance, you're kidding yourself. Don't be smarter than God, right? God says you need the assurance of my promise being put upon you.
Take what God is giving. By the way, in Isaiah, you'll see it's actually the rebellious king when the prophet comes and says, ask for a sign as high as the heavens, and he says, I'm not going to demand a sign of God.
You know what the prophet says? You weary men, are you going to weary my God too? If God says you need this assurance of this sign, it's presumption of you to say that I don't. Yeah. More could be said, but I'm going to move on from that.
Let me move on to other cluster of arguments. Arguments are often built on the misunderstanding of circumcision. That is, there's going to be a big gap between what does circumcision mean in the Old Testament and what does baptism mean in the New.
And so many people make this argument. And I've heard this actually from professors of theology at the Southern Baptist Seminary, which is a very good school. It's where Al Mulder is the president. There's a number of really fine faculty.
What happens is, is if you hear things and you just keep retelling the same stories, and you're in the same closed circle so no one challenges you, you can pass on bad arguments without even realizing they are.
Derek pointed this out earlier with this issue of, well, Jesus was baptized by immersion in the middle of the river. It turns out the New Testament doesn't say that. It doesn't tell us anything about his mode of baptism.
But in your head, if you have a picture in your head of Jesus being immersed by baptism in the middle of the river, every time you hear the story, you see the picture. You assume that he's being immersed.
That's the same sort of thing with these arguments about circumcision. And so there's a strong version of this. And I don't mean that's a better version. I just mean it's a very bold statement of it. And then there's a more nuanced version.
The strong version is simply this. Circumcision is about physical promises to an ethnic people. Baptism is about spiritual promises to a spiritual people. And therefore, of course, you'd circumcise the children of the Jews because it's physical promise about physical man in the Middle East.
And when you come to the New Testament, it's spiritual promises, so the sign on which you go to those who believe. Have you ever heard that or thought that? I mean, it's a pretty common sort of notion.
The problem is it's not true. What you have to do is go through the Bible and look at what circumcision means. And in the Bible, circumcision is a sign of life, and it's fundamentally spiritual. Now, you can see this by the connection between being circumcised and circumcising the foreskin of your heart, circumcising your lips, that there's a connection there.
But you can also see it expressly taught to us in the words of Scripture of what circumcision means. Let me give you just a couple of verses. Deuteronomy 10 .16. Circumcise, therefore, the foreskin of your heart and be no longer stubborn.
Quite clearly, we're not talking about merely physical issues. Deuteronomy 36. And the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, that you may live.
Someone brought up Romans 2 .28 earlier. I don't know which one of you did this. For no one is a Jew who is merely one outwardly, nor is circumcision outward and physical, but a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter.
His praise is not from man, but from God. The outward sign was pointing to the spiritual reality of Christ being cut off in our union with him. So you can't just say it's about land promises. Ephesians 2 .11 -12.
If you're taking notes, because I didn't give you a handout, you might want to write this verse down. Ephesians 2 .11 -12. Paul is talking to Christians who are primarily Gentiles in Ephesus. And he says, Therefore, remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh called the uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands.
Remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world. Please don't rush over this.
Prior to Pentecost, that's what the Gentiles were. Now you notice what Paul says is, he doesn't say, because you weren't circumcised, you're cut off from physical promises. But don't worry, you still have spiritual blessings.
He says, back then when you were not circumcised, you were without hope, without God in this world. Rather than saying it's just these physical things, he's saying it's the most important spiritual things.
Quite literally, everything. You were at enmity with God. Without hope, without God in the world. Romans 4 .1 -12. I'm not going to read this all to you. But let me just say, this may be the most important passage in the entire Bible for understanding circumcision.
If you're taking notes, you probably want to write verses 11 and 12 and make it a shorter section. Paul tells us what circumcision means. Abraham received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith, while he was still uncircumcised.
The purpose was to make him the father of all who believe without being circumcised, so that righteousness would be counted to them as well. Now, according to God, circumcision is a sign and a seal of the righteousness that comes by faith.
What does baptism mean? Well, you know, actually it means more than one thing. That's what makes this a little tricky. Symbolic acts are often rich in meaning. So if someone said, what does a wedding mean?
Well, you might say love or something, I don't know. But you wouldn't be able to encapsulate it all in one thing. It's about a husband and wife coming together and becoming one flesh and uniting in a body.
But you also have to say it's a symbol of what Christ does with his church. And you can talk about many different things. So when you think about baptism, as Kendall started pointing out, you have washing of your sin.
You have union with Christ. Those are very important truths. But I want to say kind of at the heart of that, when you pull it all together, is it's a sign and a seal of the righteousness that you receive by faith.
By God's grace from beginning to end. And of course the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. If you say that, you realize that circumcision and baptism essentially mean the same thing. According to God's word.
Not according to some confession of faith other than it copying God's word. According to God's word. Now why are there differences? One was pointing forward to Christ being cut off. One comes afterwards.
Have you ever stopped to ask yourself what's primarily new about the new covenant, the new administration of the covenant? Well, what's primarily new is the greater outpouring of the Holy Spirit. So we're not surprised that the symbolic act that marks you out as being members of the visible church would be connected to the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
Right? But realize that they're both fundamentally spiritual. I'm not going to ask questions from that because I want to give you a more nuanced version of it first and then I can take questions on these together.
There is a more nuanced scholarly version of this because keep in mind there are Baptist professors that are thoughtful, godly people who go, yeah, they make a good point there. So there's a man who's known as a real expert on this that was teaching at Fuller Theological Seminary.
His name is Paul King Jewett. And he's written extensively on this. He taught at Fuller Theological Seminary in California. And Paul Jewett says, well, yeah, there are spiritual aspects of circumcision.
I can see that. I read the same Bible you Presbyterians do. But there are both. There are physical ethnic aspects to circumcision and spiritual aspects, but there are only spiritual aspects to baptism.
And based on that, we're not going to... We understand you circumcised children of the Old Testament because it was both, but you only baptized adults in the New Covenant because it's only one. Do you understand his point?
You see, it's more nuanced. He's saying circumcision is both. Baptism is only spiritual. It's a more nuanced version, but it doesn't work. This is a point that will help you when you read the Bible in general because I've noticed that many American evangelicals, just lumping myself in there, but just broadly speaking, we often, when we talk about the Old Testament, we talk about it as though it was all under the Mosaic Law.
And we forget that for hundreds of years before the Mosaic Law was given, there's the Old Testament. There's all the patriarchs and everything. And circumcision was not given on Mount Sinai. It was given to Abraham before there is a Mosaic Covenant.
So you don't have all those extensive ceremonial laws that you have that go with circumcision. Tuck this away in the back of your head because that one truth will help you when you wrestle through what are frankly difficult subjects like, does the Sabbath apply today?
And if it does, in what way? Or does... What else do I want to throw in that category? Oh, tithing. Does God expect me to tithe today? And what you'll see is that many people talk about this as though it was part of the Mosaic administration and it passes away with the end of the Mosaic administration.
What you need to realize is is both tithing and Sabbath observance were before the Mosaic administration. Therefore, they may not pass away with those distinctive aspects of the Mosaic administration when we come to the universal church.
That doesn't answer your question. But it does say you've got to rule that out as an explanation. You have to actually think through it and wrestle through it. Thankfully, you have good teachers to help you with this.
So that's the first thing. The second thing is that while Jewett acknowledges that circumcision is both spiritual and physical, the texts he gives don't support him on this. And also, all the texts that we've already looked at that show that circumcision is spiritual kind of apply to him.
So this really leads to the third issue. I'm not going to go through all those texts with you. And just realize that he's saying that there are physical promises with circumcision that are not repeated in the New Testament.
And it turns out he's wrong. There are only two physical promises given to Abraham that are connected with circumcision. The land and the seed. And they are both continued in the New Covenant. The land and the seed.
I wonder if you've ever thought about this. Let's look at the land. Two passages on the land. This is from Romans 4 .13. For the promise to Abraham and his offspring that he would be heir of the world did not come through the law, but through the righteousness of faith.
You understand that God did not simply promise Abraham a little tiny strip in the Middle East. What he said is that through your seed, that is Jesus Christ, you are going to inherit the entire earth. Right?
And we actually have Jesus saying the same thing. What do the meek inherit? Purely spiritual blessings? No, the meek will inherit the earth. So actually where Jew it is seeing discontinuity, the New Testament itself gives us continuity.
The effort to detach the land promise from faith in God also leaves those who make this argument with no explanation for the Assyrian and Babylonian exiles. Why is Israel sent into these exiles? Why is Israel sent into Babylon?
If it was just a physical promise, they should have stayed in the land. But the point is, is the promise was always connected to their faith in God. Through their lack of faith and not trusting God, God spits them as it were out of the land.
You just can't separate these two things the way Jew it is. Then, of course, in terms of the seed, we're told that Abraham received the sign of circumcision as the seal of the righteousness that he had by faith.
While he was still uncircumcised, the purpose was to make him the father of all who believe without being circumcised. We have the promises you go through to your offspring and so on throughout the New Testament.
As Paul says, the law which came 430 years after could not annul the promise that God had already made to Abraham. God gave it to Abraham as a promise. You might want to consider Romans 9. Romans 9 shows that only the children of the promise were ever counted as the true offspring of Abraham.
So now we have this distinction between the visible and the invisible church. So you have language like not all Israel is Israel. Paul writes, it is not as though the word of God has failed for not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel and not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring, but through Isaac shall your offspring be named.
This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring. Okay, I know that's a lot. My wife actually told me not to give you that.
She said, okay, you're moving too far up. Maybe she's right because she's usually right. But I thought I'd share it with you. What I want you to think though is circumcision and baptism fundamentally mean the same thing.
And if you simply look up all the passages in the Bible that talk about circumcision, easy to do in online Bible, type in circumcised, circumcised, you get all the scriptures, you'll see that that's true.
Questions on this or pushback on this where you're going, yeah, I got another text here in Ezekiel. Anything at all? Oh, if you go to an online Bible, so if you like type esv .org, you'll get a Bible on the internet and it's an easy way to search for things because you'll get a search box and you can type words into that box and it'll give you every verse that has that word in it.
Now, the reason why that could be really helpful is, I'll give you another one. You can go in there and type something like fulfilled and look at the New Testament verses and you'll see all the verses that use the word fulfilled in it that are fulfilling Old Testament promises and you'll get 25, 30 verses and you go, hey, guess what?
The New Testament is built on fulfilling Old Testament promises. The only thing tricky about that is that search engines are dumb. And what I mean by that is you can't just assume it's only one word. So you might have to do fulfilled, fulfill, completed, whatever it happens to be.
But if you play with it a bit, you'll get a lot of verses. Circumcised, circumcised is easy. And throw in uncircumcised. You'll end up getting all the verses in the Bible that have those passages, those in it.
That could be helpful to you.
Yeah. You mentioned the spiritual aspect of it. The Jewish Christians saw circumcision as a spiritual rite.
I think they didn't, actually. Oh, so we had disagreement here between two pastors. Well, let me say, individual Jewish Christians, just like individual Christians today, are gonna disagree with each other because we're gonna sometimes get things wrong.
I am not infallible. I think you all know that. Your pastors are not infallible. So there may have been Jewish Christians in the early church who thought their circumcision still had spiritual meaning.
What they should have seen is their circumcision before the coming of Pentecost had spiritual meaning. But it doesn't anymore. Because if they think it still does, they're thinking the uncircumcised children of the Gentile Christians have a lesser privilege than the Jews do.
It's kind of like Gentiles get one stroke, Jews get two. And the point you're gonna see when you read through particularly Paul's epistles is there's no distinction between Jew and Gentile. They are together in Christ.
So I don't think they would have. So the question then is, is it okay to get circumcised as a Jew? Yes. As long as you're not putting faith in the circumcision. Because it could be a tradition for their families.
Actually, many of you men were probably circumcised because they did it for health reasons or other reasons. There's nothing wrong with that. But you can't say that's the covenant marker anymore. Baptism is the covenant marker after we get to Pentecost.
Have you been baptized or not? By the way, that means, of course, someone asked about covenant communion. To come to the Lord's table, you need to be baptized first. You need to be made a visible member of the visible church before you come to the Lord's table.
Other thoughts or questions? And by the way, you can ask anything now. We're gonna go just free range until Kendall cuts me off. Or everybody walks out and it's just me here.
You'll be here tomorrow morning. I will not be. I will be in my own church tomorrow. Yes. Before we get to just final round of questions, I just want to say thank you to David for the time that he put into both of these talks and also in helping me even in preparing my own.
I know we're over time, which if you're a member of the Shepherd Church, you're already used to that. Over time just means we're being normal. But, yeah, I just want to say thank you to David. So if you would join me in thanking David for that.
It's a joy to be here, and I'm gonna do something very uncharacteristic for me. I'm gonna tell you a joke. This is a joke from David Haney who regrettably passed away a year ago, but he was a member of our denomination.
And he brought an unbelieving friend to church one day, and his friend kept asking him questions like, what does this mean? Why do they do this? What does this mean? And so on. And he's going through, and he'd ask a question, and David would explain something to him.
David would explain something else to him. And then about 15 minutes into the sermon, the pastor took his watch off and placed it up on the front of the pulpit. And he says, well, what does that mean?
And David said, absolutely nothing. So that's for the sake of your pastor, but also for me as well. Other questions, yes.
Is there, can you explain, is there, are all Reformed people, sorry, are all Presbyterians considered Reformed? Are all Reformed considered Presbyterian? I know there's a lot of different topics that go into that outside of baptism, but primarily is it Presbyterians and Reformed people that do the paedo-baptism?
Yeah, that's a great question.
So the answer is actually almost all Christians practice paedo-baptism outside of the Reformed world as well. So for example, Lutherans do, the Greek Orthodox do, to the extent you want to grant the Roman Catholics are Christians, the Roman Catholics do, it's actually almost everybody practices it.
So the distinction about Reformed and Presbyterian, when I say Reformed, I mean Bible-believing Reformed. In all denominations today, there are lots of people that still carry the flag of the church and you find pastors that don't believe the Bible is the word of God, don't believe Jesus rose from the dead, all kinds of crazy, heretical stuff.
I'm not talking about them. But there is what we broadly call the Reformed tradition and it has two main streams to it, if you don't count the Anglican church, which was at different times a Reformed church as well.
And that's you have a Scottish Reformed movement, those are called Presbyterians, and you have the Dutch Reformed movement, who still today get called Reformed. So I'm a pastor in the Orthodox Presbyterian church, one of my former interns is now a pastor in the United Reformed churches of North America.
Dutch Reformed, Scottish Reformed. We believe exactly the same thing. So I don't know if you still have this, but I know in the past on your website, it talked about the historic Christian confessions of the Westminster Confession of Faith, the larger and shorter catechism, that's the Scottish Presbyterian side, and then the three forms of unity, that's the Dutch side.
We believe the same things. Right, so it's actually a much bigger group in the world than, for example, Baptists. So the largest Protestant community in the world, believe it or not, is Anglicanism. That's because, we can miss that, because in America, the Episcopal Church is a dying, horrible, I'm sorry, it's on tape, but it is, it's really a horrible, horrible group.
Thankfully there are conservatives, there's a group called the Anglican Church of North America that is planting churches and teaching the Bible. And if you look at England, there's only like 300 ,000 people go to the church in England on Sundays, so it seems like it's really small.
But in Africa, Anglicanism is thriving. So there'll be 20 million Anglicans go to church in Nigeria tomorrow. Praise God. And to the largest extent, they're Bible-believing. So you have all these Bible-believing Anglicans in Kenya and Nigeria, Uganda, where we do some work, also in Southeast Asia.
So there's over 100 million Anglicans in the world. It's easy in America to start thinking the big groups are the Southern Baptists. But actually, that's a small part of worldwide Christianity. Did I get at your question?
I'm not sure. Maybe. So all the Reformed churches, other than those who call themselves Reformed Baptists, it's a very, very small group today, practice covenant baptism like I've told you today. That's what you wanted.
Other questions or pushback? Strong objections to anything I've said?
Let's see. I feel like I was in a Spanish class. Yes. But that's all right. I get it. I get the covenant baptism. I got it. What about, you know, baptized. I was baptized in a Baptist church, and it was the baptism of repentance.
Did you accept Jesus? Yeah. Do you repent of your sins? Yeah. Okay. I baptize you in the name of the Father and the Son. So why was there John's baptism of repentance? Oh, that's great. And why did Jesus do it?
Well, I know he didn't repent, but why in the same body of water did he follow suit?
Those are two fantastic questions. So the first thing about John the Baptist instituting baptism gets really complicated. There's a lot of details there that we just don't know because there's very little told to us in the Gospels.
And remember, when we move away from what God is saying to what I imagine God was doing, I get in trouble. So we have to acknowledge there's some difficulties about exactly how do we connect John's baptism to later Christian baptism.
But we know it's preparatory for the coming of Christ. And it turns out that Jews practiced a type of baptism before the coming of Christ. They would take Gentiles who were converting to Judaism. This is not in the Bible, but it is a tradition.
They take Gentiles who were coming into Judaism, and they would ceremonially be cleansed because they were filthy Gentiles now becoming part of the covenant people. And when John calls Jews to do that, he's saying, you're just like the Gentiles, and you need to repent and get right because the kingdom of God is at hand.
It's great news that Christ is coming, but it also brings a crisis into the world. Now that the king's here, you better get right with the king. Why does Jesus get baptized? I think it's helpful for us to realize that it's a mistake to say that I follow Jesus in baptism because I come to the baptismal waters needing to be cleansed.
Jesus, as it were, approaches the river from the other side. I don't mean that physically. Jesus, as Kendall was talking about, would have gone out into the wilderness and come in. But I come to the baptismal font to be cleansed.
Jesus comes to cleanse the water. So that by him choosing to identify with us, he would wash you free of your sins. That actually points to this whole mystery, a mystery that's been revealed, of the incarnation where God came.
Just think about this. God came into history and he took to himself a true human nature. Why would he do that? What's the wages of sin? Wages of sin is death. Can God die? No. So the only way God can pay for your sins is by him taking to himself a true human nature so that he could live the life that you and I should have lived and therefore die the death that you and I should have died.
So Jesus came and identified with us. That's why he chose to get baptized. He identified with sinners to fulfill all righteousness. Remember, John didn't want to do it. John's preaching a baptism of repentance.
He's going, not you. I need to be baptized by you. And Jesus says, let it be for now that all righteousness would be fulfilled. Because he's identifying with us as though he had lived your life so that for all eternity he could treat you as though you had lived his.
That's really good news.
I could be way off base, but we couldn't say that we are following in Jesus' footsteps with our baptism, linking up to his baptism anyways because part of Jesus' baptism was God using that as a sign to John that this was the Messiah.
He says somewhere in the I couldn't find the exact verse off the top of my head, but John says when the dove comes, when Jesus comes out of the water God speaks from heaven and the dove lands on Jesus' shoulder.
That was what God told him would be a sign of the Messiah. So to say that we could then imitate that in any way is just untrue because that was way more meaningful and specific to God and his deity Jesus and his deity than what we could do at all in any immersion, sprinkling, whatever.
I think that's an excellent point. I think the bigger point is Jesus is sinless and we're sinners and his union with us is coming from the other side. But that's also an excellent point and yet because I'm riddled with ADD, I'm going to make a slight connection to something that Kendall was talking about earlier.
So just imagine we have the Jordan River in front of us here and John's in the river doing baptisms and Jesus comes up to the edge of the river and we're told that Jesus goes into the water and he comes out of it and one of the questions is coming out of the water, he's baptized here and he comes up out of the water, which would imply Jesus was immersed, or is it he steps into the water, goes into the water and then when he comes out of the water, he comes out the side.
There's actually two options. As Derek pointed out if you have a picture in your head of what happens you're going to assume the picture is true. But actually you're not given the answer yet. And yet as Kendall alluded to, there's good grammatical reasons, but the reason why I'm following up on this is there's good theological reasons as well to see that it's actually referring to Jesus coming into the water on the side and going out.
There's a Greek word, there's two Greek words that are used for out of. One is ek. That's like if you had something in a bowl of water and you pulled it out, it would be ek. And the other one is apa. And apa means away from.
That's actually the word that Matthew uses. That only makes good sense if it's stepping out of the water and moving away from the river. But here's the theological thing I want you to see because you put it as though when John baptized Jesus the spirit descended upon him like a dove right there.
It's really helpful for you to realize it happens when Jesus is coming out of the water on the side because God is not creating a word picture so that we imagine that the Holy Spirit is given to Jesus through the administration of John.
It's given by the Father. The Father pours out the Holy Spirit on Jesus separate from John after he had been baptized. There's actually practical ramifications for us in terms of our own baptism because it reminds us that the sign and the thing signified are not necessarily at the same time.
If you chose to get baptized by faith after you believed the time is separated. I believed first and then I was baptized. If you baptize your covenant children and then they later come to faith there's a separation in time.
That goes all the way back to Jesus. There's a separation between the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and the water baptism in time primarily to make clear that it's the Father who's pouring out the Holy Spirit.
John is not giving the Holy Spirit to Jesus. That's my ADD. Sorry.
I wanted to ask a question. I don't think this has this is not intrinsically related to what you're talking about right now but I think you made a peripheral remark about not using the text in Matthew 19 14 where it says let the little children come to me.
You said you praised God that or to your memory you didn't preach a sermon regarding we have to become children to become we have to hum ourselves like children to become to receive salvation. By the way, that can be true.
It's not what that passage is teaching. There's another text in Matthew 18 obviously considering the larger context of both passages Matthew 18 talking about truly unless you are converted and become like little children obviously regeneration preceding that regeneration is the byproduct of that is regeneration.
So that's what I wanted to ask you about like God does use the fact that God has used the humility and the childlike likeness of children as a rich depiction of what we must be like to be as disciples of Christ.
Yeah, so that's really helpful. I'm going to say two things on that. The first is he means children in a specific way. You know if you've been a parent that children often can be rebellious and cry and whine and do all manner of things that he's not saying you need to be like that.
What he's talking about when you have little children and the parents say I'm going to go get you a glass of water they don't go I don't know dad might not get me water. He might bring me poison. They trust their parents.
Right? And that's actually what he's picturing there. He's saying the way little children just instinctively know their parents care for them, love them, are going to take care of them. You have to be that way with your father in heaven.
But I do want to tweak something you said. Regeneration is not a consequence of your humility. Your humility is a consequence of your regeneration. Oh I'm sorry I had it backwards. Thank you. We're on the same page.
It's very important to remember regeneration comes first. You are born again and therefore you believe. You don't believe and therefore get born again. God's grace comes first. Someone just scratching heads.
Last shot for today.
I have a question too but I'll ask mine after Haley. Oh I'm coming. Not as fast as I was 10 years ago but goodness. I wanted to make a comment that might be helpful.
The point that you said don't let the picture you have in your mind of baptism dictate your theology on it. That really stuck out. I grew up with Catholic family and actually the first picture of baptism that if I close my eyes and try to remember is a depiction of John with some weird jug looking thing pouring water over Jesus' head in a river.
Which goes very closely in line with what Catholics do during baptism. It's the pouring of the water over the head and the baby and all that. That is a key point. Not until I was baptized and getting ready to be baptized in a Baptist church did I see immersion and that was weird to me.
I think we all can have that picture and there are different pictures across the different types. Obviously the Catholic one went with their style and then Baptist with theirs. Just as a backup.
To that point. I think that's really important. By the way, it has much broader applications in your thinking beyond baptism. I don't know how many of you saw what was Mel Gibson's movie on Jesus? Passion of Christ.
How many of you saw it? I refused to see it even though all of you very godly people did. Here's why I chose not to see it. I didn't want to come to the Lord's table with Mel Gibson's idea of Christ in my head.
When you get a picture in your head, it really does frame how you think. You don't just see pictures, you see through them. I'm not saying you did anything wrong or anything like that. Fine. Maybe it was helpful to you.
Just be careful when you get these very vivid moving images with a lot of passion attached to them. No pun intended there. There's a lot of emotion attached to them. It gets fixed in your mind and you can think that's true.
What you're actually thinking is a movie not what Matthew or Mark or Luke or John or Paul says in Romans and so on. Just be careful with that. Such a good point, brother.
Final question. We can hang around afterwards and ask more questions, but final one for the microphone. As a church, we're moving in this direction. What are the things as a pastor, you've been a pastor for a lot longer than I have.
You've been thinking about this a lot longer than I have. What are some things that you would challenge us to do? What are some things you would encourage us to do? What's your pastoral counsel to us as a church as we continue to be faithful to the Lord and seek His will through His word?
It's more important to be righteous than to be right. What I mean by that is you know, every one of you knows God is calling you to love one another. You don't want to get to the place where you're going, I've got six arguments you haven't answered.
I'm right. You're wrong. That is not what God is calling this church to do, not only on baptism, but on any other issue. A big part of your life together is that people of God is loving one another as Christ loved you while disagreeing about some minor issues or even some major issues.
Baptism is actually a pretty significant issue. It really is. If you believe that Jesus is the Christ who's come to the world to save you for your sins and the person you're disagreeing with that believes too, you are going to spend all eternity together.
You better start loving them now. Second, have some humility. I've often thought about this. I mentioned earlier, I've been a by God's grace, I've been a Christian since as early as I can remember. I don't know, two, three years old maybe.
You know how many things I've changed my mind on in 60 years? I've changed my mind on a lot of things. So when I talk to a young Christian who sometimes will say things that, you know, look I have eight years of graduate school in theology.
I have two master's degrees and a THD and I'm a pastor. And I've been doing this for a long time. And I'll hear someone say something that just sounds crazy. Really it's true. You know what I think? Yeah, I could have said that when I was 16 or 18 or 22.
And the fact that I now realize that's wrong just means that God has equipped me to help that person grow. It doesn't mean I look down and despise them because we disagree. That's really important. And the third one is obvious.
I know you're committed to this. You would not be here. I hope the rest of your church is too. The question always has to come back to what does God say? Traditions are helpful. It's useful for us. You know what, if you're a brand new Christian, I don't know if any of you have been Christians for less than a year, you're going to start approaching the Bible from a standpoint of a system of theology in your head.
You will. Everyone does that. And you read the Bible with those presuppositions and as you read, you're refinding those presuppositions and you're growing and growing. It's actually a pretty good idea if you're a young Christian to start with.
Hey, you know what? A lot of really gifted Christians got together in churches over hundreds of years and agreed on things like the Westminster Confession of Faith. Right? That's very close to bedrock.
It's reformable. It is not the Word of God. But if all these godly men and women could agree to this for hundreds of years, they're probably right. Even if I don't see it yet. That's a useful thing to do.
But the goal is always to move beyond that and to say, I don't believe it because it's in the Confession of Faith. I don't believe it because I heard my pastor say it. I believe it because God says this in His Word.
And then one last thing. Remember that you're never going to get there in this life. You're going to get there in part. Right? But now we see in part, only then, when Christ returns, will we see face to face.
So don't imagine that you're close to the top of the mountain. One of the things that will happen to you, if you really dig in and start studying, and some of you already have, but you really dig in and start studying the Bible, and you've read it 20, 25, 30 times, and you're reading commentaries and great systematic theologies, you know what you're going to do?
You're going to see the mountaintop and you're going to say, I'm still down here. In fact, I used to think I was up here. Now I realize I'm down here. Because God is infinite. There is so much more for me to learn.
But praise God, I'm not what I used to be. So that would be my broad encouragement for you. Derek, did you want to sharply rebuke me for something? Oh, in private. Let me pray for you before I go. Father, I am so grateful for my brothers and sisters here and for their children that you've set apart as being part of your people.
I pray that in your mercy that you would cause them to draw near to have a unity of faith. That as each one of them grows closer to your truth with a deeper faith in Jesus Christ and a fuller understanding of the whole counsel of your word, that that would be manifested in increased agreement with one another.
But help them not to become a holy huddle, a group of people that thinks they have it right while everyone else has it wrong. Rather, out of the grace that you've shown them, give them a heart for their communities, for their family members who do not yet know you, for their workplaces, that you would use them not as the original light but as reflections of the light of Christ to draw many people out of the kingdom of darkness and into the kingdom of your beloved Son.
And so I pray that you would glorify yourself in this way through this church. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.
Alright, so we're definitely way over time, but I just want to remind everyone that if you still have questions, this is something that we want to teach and something that we want to continue to have great conversations about.
So this is a starting point. If you have questions, ask. If I can't answer them, I'll point you to David. But I just want to say, last of all, thank you so much for coming. You're investing in your own walk with Christ by learning about what the word of God says, and I'm so thankful that you came today.
So with that, I hope I'll see you tomorrow.