Episode 117: Let the Children Come to Me (Part 1)

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Welcome to the Ruled Church Podcast. This is my beloved son, with whom

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I am well pleased. He is honored, and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better, because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas?

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You see that one in Pechote, Mexico? Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres, down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it.

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The church is not a democracy. It's a monarchy. Christ is king. You can't be

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Christian without a local church. You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the

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Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible -believing church, and spend your life serving

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Jesus in a local, visible congregation. Welcome to the Ruled Church Podcast. I am your host,

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Alan Nelson, one of the pastors of Providence Baptist Church in Perryville, Arkansas. My guest today,

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Michael Coghlan. And I'll get into the episode quickly, but I will just say this.

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We did wind up turning this discussion into two episodes, but I think you're going to enjoy them both.

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Here we go. Mike Stockwell, do you know that name? I do know that name. I wonder how many listeners know that name?

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That would be interesting. It'd be interesting to see, like if people would comment. Yeah. They know that name.

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Do they know him personally, or have they just somehow heard of him and followed him online?

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How many people does it take before they know him? Right? Probably a degree or two of separation between everyone and Mike Stockwell.

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Oh, yeah. At most, at most. Yeah, he's the Kevin Bacon of Christianity. I'm just using him as a scapegoat this morning because I worked out a little later than I was going to with him because he said he didn't want to work out that early.

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So we started this podcast like almost 15 minutes late. And it's really my fault, but I'm trying to blame

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Mike Stockwell. But when you're up late studying scripture and praying fervently like he is, it's hard to get up early.

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Hey, we are with one of the founders of Things Above. Us, Michael Coghlan.

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Welcome to the show, brother. Thank you for having me back. I'm about to say that you're not a stranger.

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And then you and I did a little, we did a little podcast experiment there for, I guess, what, a few months or I don't remember.

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But we did some videos on Things Above Us that are still still on the

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YouTube. And then we did about 45 episodes of the Things Above Us roundtable.

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Yeah, that was fun. That was good. That was good. So I was thinking about this morning, knowing that we were going to interview.

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And I thought about the fact that you and I have known each other. Was it at the end of 2017 or the first of 2018?

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Either way, that's a little over seven years, almost seven and a half years. Yeah. So if Things Above.

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Us started January of 2018, that's probably when we first were introduced.

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Yeah, we've both. And we've hung out multiple times at each other's homes, gone preaching.

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Amen. You really, you are one of the main influences, not the only influence, but certainly one of the main influences in my life on getting me out to street preach.

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In fact, one of the first times I really, I did a little bit of preaching like that in Romania, but it was different.

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But one of the times I really first officially street preached, it was with you in 2021, and we were at the abortion clinic.

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So yeah, that was, was that in what? Tell me, was that in Cincinnati or no? No, Columbus, Ohio.

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Columbus. Sorry. Columbus. And you came in January, right? No, that was

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June. And the only reason I know that is because it was right after the convention. It was June because it was

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Father's Day. Yeah. Yeah. But it felt like January. Remember it was like raining and grizzly cold that day.

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Well, I'm not trying to hurt your feelings with this brother, but no one cares about our nostalgia or our memories.

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They've tuned into this episode because they want to hear about us preaching to children.

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You know, all the, we have dozens of listeners. And so they've tuned in today because of the title, which

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I haven't come up with yet. But Michael and I have known each other. Except for the little children.

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There you go. So we've known each other a little while now. I've been blessed.

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We have grown in our, both of us have grown in our Reformed Baptist convictions over that time.

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And I think that we can honestly say we have grown there and we have also lessened in our physical appearance.

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I feel like I'm a little healthier and you look a little healthier than we were a few years ago.

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So praise God for both of those things. But really, I want to put this in a context. You know, we don't have to chase the rabbit trail of covenant theology, but we probably need to start with a little foundation there about how we view children and children of Christian parents.

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And then of course, children of non -Christian parents. So why don't you just, you want to give a little spiel for that?

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Like, let's set a foundation when we're talking about children. What is the

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Reformed Baptist position? And of course, with Reformed Baptist, you gotta be careful because by our nature, there's not just a one position,

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I guess. But I would argue there is a faithful biblical position on children. And what would you say that is?

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We believe that in the new covenant, only those who have trusted

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Christ are truly in the new covenant. And this is in contradiction or contradistinction to Presbyterian covenant theology, which would include basically the entire household of a believer in the new covenant.

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So that would include servants, slaves, and their children, right? Even unbelieving wives. I mean, if you kind of press that.

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I mean, they wouldn't talk about it that way, but that's consistency. Yes. And so we believe in the new covenant that believers are those that enter the new covenant, and they're the ones that properly attend worship and sit under the prayer and preaching of the word and worship

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God in spirit and truth on Sunday mornings, for example. So wait a second, Michael.

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You're telling me that the children in the Old Testament were in the covenant of grace, but now in the

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New Testament, they're not? No. Oh. Well, what are you telling me?

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Because as particular Baptists, we believe that the Old Covenant, the

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Mosaic covenant, was a covenant of works. And it was distinct from the covenant of grace, which was revealed in that covenant of works through types and shadows.

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So in the Old Covenant, you had Israelites and their children were all basically part of that covenant community of God.

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In the New Covenant, we don't carry all of that over. We believe it's a distinct covenant, different in substance is the way that we would phrase it, whereas Presbyterians would say it's the same in substance, and it differs only in its administration.

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So that's why Presbyterians sprinkle their babies and call it baptism. It's why they say that they have a mixed multitude in the covenant, basically, of New Covenant.

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New Covenant people in Presbyterian theology includes believers and non -believers intentionally, whereas as Baptists, we bring into the

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New Covenant, or we believe that we recognize those that are actually in the New Covenant, which includes only people who are faithful to Christ.

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And that's why we are called Credo Baptists, because we believe that when you exercise faith in Christ and profess that, the church should baptize you in water as a sign that you've been identified with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection.

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So I read a man one time, he said, I'll just see if you agree with this or not, but he said that it's not the children of the flesh or the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring.

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Would you find yourself in agreement with that? I'm gonna have to say yes.

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Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay, so that's Paul, Romans 9, 8. Yeah, I'm in agreement with that, brother.

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Sounds to me like those under the banner, under the schoolmaster, if you will, of the

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Old Covenant, you have believers and unbelievers.

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And believers are those who are, by the way, born again. Yes, even in the

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Old Testament, they're born again. And that's the only people that have been in the Covenant of Grace, which we equate with the

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New Covenant. The only people that's ever been in that are those who have been regenerated. And so that just kind of lays a foundation.

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We could talk all day about that, but that lays a foundation. So now, practically, brother, you have a choice.

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Real quick, one of the reasons why I think if somebody's confused by this, so this is getting into things maybe people haven't thought through.

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If you think about an Old Testament believer, you cannot be in the

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Covenant of Works and the Covenant of Grace at the same time. You have to be in one or the other.

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And so when you're looking at the Old Covenant, you have to understand that that Old Covenant is itself its own covenant of works.

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There it is. And you're in that covenant. You're hanging out. And then also at the same time, these

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Old Testament saints, they could be regenerated and believe in the Messiah that was to come. And so that transfers them from being under Adam to being under Christ.

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And yet at the same time, they continue to exist in that Old Covenant as a separate thing from the new

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Covenant of Grace that they were experiencing. Does that make sense? Yeah, and then you have, which is going to come out well after Easter, so people have to go back and relive in their minds the

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Passion Week. We have this very interesting episode in the Passion Week where Jesus, you know, if you didn't confess the impeccability of Christ, if you didn't confess his sinfulness or sinlessness, if you didn't confess his sinlessness and his perfect righteousness, you would almost be tempted to say, did he get hangry because he sees the fig tree and there's no figs?

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You know, it's like, but the writers are careful to say it's not the season for figs. And then he curses that.

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They're like, well, hey, what's going on here? You know, and if you don't understand covenant theology, you completely miss the fact that that is a representative of the, of course, the formal end doesn't happen, but that is a representative of the end of the

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Mosaic Covenant and Christ's fulfillment of that as he dies and raises again.

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Anyway, we're not talking about covenant theology, though some of our most popular episodes have been on covenant theology, so always happy to talk about it.

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And we'll just say on X, what is Brandon Adams handle on X? Is it just Brandon Adams?

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I don't remember. I have to look it up, but I would encourage anyone to follow him for sure. And then there's several, he could point you in good directions.

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I've always appreciated his work there. So yeah, he's the best.

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Brandon underscore Adams. So give him a follow. Follow him and learn.

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And if he says anything that's contradicted what we say, he's probably right. So, but laying that as a foundation.

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Okay. So covenant theology has to be a foundation here for what we're about to say, because the next thing we're going to say is

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I have children in the home who are unbelievers. They're not converted. They're not born again.

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And I haven't checked with this with you in a while, but you have at least one, right?

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Or are both your children in the home converted? I have two children at home who are unbaptized.

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One would pretty adamantly profess the Lord. Yeah. The other one, he hasn't done that in a believable way yet.

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So what is our position then? Okay. Because a few months ago,

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I think it was Anonymous was a good brother, but I might push back a little bit on the way he said it.

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But basically he said, our children, the children of believers are pagans. The unconverted children of believers are pagans.

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And I probably want to nuance some things and talk through that. But the substance of what he says,

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I do agree with. The children of unbelievers, they're not in the covenant. The children of believers who are unbelievers are not in the covenant of grace.

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Help me because I'm tongue -tied. Well, I agree. And I understand why you'd want to nuance that because there's an implication to certain words, you know, like paganism.

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So when we talk about people who are in the church, but not believers, okay, so you have this problem if you're a

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Baptist or if you're a Presbyterian, there's people who are regular attenders of the church.

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In our circles, in Baptist, we wouldn't allow them to be members, but there's people who are really part of the culture who are expected to be there.

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And in fact, as Christian children, they're expected to pray, participate in the singing.

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They're expected to listen to the scripture reading and when the pastor preaches. And we somehow can see that in scripture, those people do have privileges and expectations of them that go a little bit above and beyond, you know, the atheist in a jungle somewhere.

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And so we recognize that our children, although unbelievers, I don't know if I'd equate them, you know, with those marching in a gay pride parade down the street, just because they're both in Adams still.

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I think there's distinctions we can make. Is that what you were getting at? Yes. Yeah, exactly. Because I actually,

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I just don't want to take away from the rank paganism that has made a strong comeback in American culture.

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And so I kind of am scared if you say if everything's pagan, it almost minimizes it.

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You know, so I take my child to church and yeah, like that's the same as this guy that's transgender, you know, reading stories to children.

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I want to guard against that. But again, I would say that the substance of the position, absolutely we affirm, and that is children, according to Ephesians 2, children are unbelievers, are dead in their sins.

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They're followers of the prince of the power of the air. And so we absolutely understand that.

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I would say this and see if, you know, you can push back or work through this a little bit, but, you know, we believe that the law of God has a restraining effect.

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And so if the children of believers, the unconverted children of believers are constantly being exposed to the law of God, well, we would expect that there is, even though they're not in the covenant, that there is a measure of restraining grace there that's different than the rank pagan.

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So that would be, you know, that would be my position, while carefully and unapologetically saying they are not in the covenant of grace, and they absolutely should not be treated as a

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Christian in terms of their need to repent of their sins and look to Christ.

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Yeah, I agree. I agree on the latter portion, and I would parse out what you said earlier slightly in that the law of God, we'll say the

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Ten Commandments, actually, according to Romans 7, will incite sin in them.

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Mm -hmm. And I've noticed it with my younger children, especially, that it seems like they're more tempted because they have more knowledge, and the sin in them wants to act out.

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It's the terrors and the threatenings of the law, the punishments that accompany the law that act to restrain, right?

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I mean, telling people murder's wrong doesn't deter them from murder, but having a penalty for murder is part of how society functions, right?

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And so with children who are, you know, so everybody's under authority. And the question is, if you're under an authority that is a man of God and a woman of God, and they are regularly trying to follow the

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Bible to teach you as a child, hey, here's the right thing to do, and oh, you didn't do it, so now there's a consequence.

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That is a God -given help to even an unbelieving child. Mm -hmm.

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And so we can expect our unbelieving children to respond to discipline, not because we think they have changed hearts or because we presume upon some kind of regeneration that will occur later, but because we believe that those are the means

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God gave us to lead our children to Christ, but even in the meantime, to teach them that human beings can have self -control, even to some extent, even apart from becoming

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Christian. Yeah. I think that's good, and if I could just not push back or anything, but just basically maybe clarify.

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So I think about Paul. Paul calls himself the chief of sinners, and in that whole context of Romans 7, obviously we're talking about Paul.

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And the manifestation of Paul's sinfulness was really self -righteous, and Paul's manifestation wasn't paganism, so there was a measure of the law of God that even though absolutely it did awaken sin in him, because he was exposed to it, there's a sense that it didn't manifest itself in paganism.

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That's all I'm trying to say. So I just want to try to carefully, I guess, nuance that, even though I appreciate

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Anonymou, by the way, got a ton of people lashed out on that, and he pretty well stood his ground.

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I'm proud of that and encouraged by that. But we're really defending the position, even though we kind of nuanced that, that what our children need from their parents, and I hope that we have this expectation of our pastors, is for people to tell them that they are sinners and that they need

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Christ. You know, thoughts on that, and then we'll kind of transition to what we want to talk about particularly with preaching.

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But anything you want to say with that? David No, that's the summary, and I would just add that where I personally want to take the discussion is outside of the church walls.

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Yeah, part of your role on Sundays, of course, you're preaching and you're teaching during the week is to keep the children in the service and to have them hear the preaching of the

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Word, right? We're going to go over that. And I think that that extends to when we're street preaching.

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And when we start preaching to children of unbelievers, children that have never set foot in a church,

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I think that's part of our call. And I think the same theology we've discussed dictates that we do that and actually hope in that work to have an effect.

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Mike Do you know Al Martin? David I know of him. Mike So I know of him, and I was going running yesterday, and I didn't run very long, and his sermon was long, so I didn't hear much of it.

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But it was a sermon from 1981 on what is a

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Christian. And in his sermon, he specifically addressed children, little boys and little girls.

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And so I'll just start here and just keep it brief. But I would make an exhortation and a plea to pastors to be not only willing, but to see it as a necessary part of their preaching.

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I'm not necessarily saying it has to happen every single sermon, but there would be a part of their preaching that they would address specifically children in the church and specifically address them as unbelievers and specifically make an application from the text of why they need

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Christ. Thoughts on that? I mean, you've kind of hit that already. So you're talking about…

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David In the normal, regular church is getting. Mike Yeah, in the normal course of preaching a sermon, trying to find opportunity to get the kids attention that maybe you've lost at some point.

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And like, do you mean actually changing, in a sense, your cadence in the way you even the vocabulary you'd use to ensure that the younger kids are able to pick that up?

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David Yeah, yes. I'm not trying. I'm not making a new… I'm not making a law here for preaching. I'm not saying that like X amount of every single sermon has to have this.

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I'm just saying in the scope of six months of preaching, you would expect that there are regular times that you could think back and say, oh, yes, there was a specific application made to children here from this text.

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Sometimes there are believing children, and that might be made, but specifically in this episode, we're talking about unconverted children, but there's a specific application made, and children are actually called outwardly by the means of heralding the

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Word of God. Children are specifically outwardly called from the pulpit, little ones, you need to look to Christ.

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You have no hope in your parents. You have no hope of the fact that you're just sitting here.

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Your hope is in Christ alone, and you must repent of your sins, turn from them, and believe the gospel.

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Yeah, so that's my position there. Yeah, and if you think about the

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New Testament, if these letters that Paul wrote were letters to be read to congregations on Sundays, then you have children obey your parents in the

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Lord, for this is right, in Ephesians 6, and you have in Colossians 3, children obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the

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Lord. You have the idea that we stop, and we address the different people in different ways.

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You have bondservants, slaves, wives, husbands. It seems to be a pattern of the New Testament that you would do that.

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I would also piggyback on what you said to say it's a particular concern in the church to address people the way you just said, and actually challenge them to believe, because so many people grow up in the church thinking because they grew up in the church, they're

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Christian, and because their daddy preached, or their mommy preached.

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I hear that a lot. There's a lot of people with that false sense that that's just their religion, and so I think addressing them as such is important.

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Yeah, maybe I should have prefaced, like I hold that position that we should have a gospel call in our sermons ordinarily.

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There should be a gospel call. I mean, for us, we have in every sermon that, and by gospel call, just to clarify, that's not tacked on at the end, let's walk the aisle kind of thing.

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It's tied to the text, because every text is going to take us to Christ, and when we get to Christ, there's an encouragement for believers, but there's also a necessary call of, you need to listen to this.

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You need to repent, believe the gospel. So if there is that call, and I'm arguing there should be that gospel call, then it should also specifically stoop down, brothers, to the little ones and plead with them.

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Come to Christ. Let the little children come to me. Suffer the children to come to me.

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Yeah, so that's kind of in the church. Anything else you want to flesh out or talk about that?

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I think it's important for a number of reasons, but one of them is that you love the children of your church.

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You should. We should love all the children in our church, and I bring my children to church with me, and one of my hopes is that they will be influenced for Christ by everyone they meet there.

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That other adults will reiterate for my children the things that I would be teaching, you know, with obvious exceptions to some of the secondary issues, right?

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That people in church would be telling my kids that they ought to obey their parents.

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Trust in Christ. Encourage them to memorize Scripture and to sing songs and things like that.

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That's really what a good youth pastor would do. But everyone should do that, right?

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So that's your hope, but other than the pastor should lead the way, too.

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Amen. So from the pulpit, you're exhorting children, and that should really relieve the hearts of parents—parents who watch their kid every day and have given their kid the gospel hundreds of times now, and they're just waiting for that spark, right?

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And to know that that kid is hearing from the pastor also, you must believe.

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You must receive and rest upon Jesus Christ yourself. You don't have any hope in yourself.

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And I know that it's always been that there's difficulties in life and there's traps for sin and bad behavior, but I'm going to argue that when, you know,

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I'm 49, you're 36? I turned 39 in June.

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That's right. You're 10 years younger. So you and I weren't kids.

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You and I were kids a long time ago now. Whoa, whoa, whoa, yeah. I'm going to argue even for a 39 -year -old guy like you,

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Alan, that the types of devastating, permanently damaging dangers that are out there and available for younger people are a several degrees worse than when we were kids.

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And so we want to see children converted at young ages, not just because we want them to go to heaven—yeah, we do—and not just so we can say, hey, we got another baptism.

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You know, that's great, but I would like to see some of the young people of today putting on Christ, walking as God's chosen ones, and avoiding a whole lot of pain and devastation.

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There are things that kids can get into now at age 13 that I couldn't have dreamed of at 13, things that will really damage a soul.

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Even, like, I think it's Colorado. I could be wrong. But I think

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Colorado just passed some sort of law that you can't misgender your child. So theoretically, you have a child in the church, brother, that goes down this road, and then all of a sudden, according to the law of Colorado, the parents in the church and all of that little boy says,

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I'm a girl. Then according to the law of Colorado, you're—I mean, obviously, you should not cave into that, but you're not allowed to say anything otherwise.

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And so it's like—and I think that goes to your point—like, when we were growing up, that wasn't a thing.

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I mean, transgenderism was still around in more of its infancy, but like the laws and stuff, that wasn't a thing.

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Well, it was even among nonbelievers that transgender, transvestite -type stuff was all looked down upon.

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Yeah. I mean, it was really exceptionally bad back then. If we're going to try to teach children the law, and we're going to try to teach them to obey authorities, obey their parents, we're going to try to teach them you need to do all these right things.

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We want you to be able to wake up every day and work and make money. I mean, that's a pretty common thing.

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Even if your kid's an unbeliever and doesn't get saved for a long time, you want them to be able to do that, right?

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All of those things become easier when you have a regenerated heart, and you only get a regenerated heart if you hear the gospel.

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And so the gospel has to be preached because faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ.

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And so we preach to children in the church, for sure. And of course, neither one of us is saying that's all with our children.

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So, for example, you've alluded to this and just assumed it, but let me just go ahead and spell it out clearly.

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You're not just bringing, if you're believing parents, you're not just bringing your kids and saying, man, we got to get to church

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Sunday so little Johnny can hear the gospel. I hope our pastor will address him personally

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Sunday because he needs to hear the gospel. Like, well, amen, that's good, except he better be hearing the gospel the other six days of the week from you and from mom and dad in regular times of family worship and even just times of just driving down the road.

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And now this was my wife and I, we were driving down the road, and so we didn't have any kids, but the other day we were driving down the road, and I was just like,

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God must have an infinite number of shades of green because springtime in Arkansas, there's so many shades of green, you know, and we were just like,

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God is so good to us and all the colors of green. And that was just my wife and I, but of course, if you have children, there's a way to get to that, to the gospel, you know, and so the point is, yes, pastors address to children, parents address to children because laying the foundation, they need

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Christ. Now, if they say, if my child says that they're a Christian, my response is not, no, you're not, you unregenerate rebel.

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My response, yeah, you pagan, my response is, okay, let's talk about this and let's work through it.

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And my exhortation is, this is what believers, this is what a believer will look like.

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And you should keep, if you say you trust in Christ, keep trusting Christ. And then when we're able to work through, okay,

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I can see the tangible fruit and give a credible affirmation of this conversion, well, then we will talk about, you know, baptism, but we're not keeping our kids from the

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Lord. By not baptizing our children, we're not keeping our kids from the

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Lord. In fact, it's the opposite. We're exhorting in the Christ and not assuming they're in the covenant.

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And then we'll deal with that, you know, at an age appropriate time. If you really believe the church is the building, the church is the house, the church is what

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God's doing. This is his work. If we really believe what Ephesians says, we are the poemos, the masterpiece of God.