BAPTISM SEMINAR: Session 3 (Objections To Covenant Baptism)

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.