The Reason We Let Children into Lord's Supper

Please turn with me to Acts chapter two this morning. We're going to start reading from verse 22. Acts two, verses 22 to 41. Before we do that, maybe just to introduce today's topic. It's come in light of what Tony has shared with us this morning because our eldership wanted to communicate how we understand younger people participating in the Lord's Supper, how that fits within our understanding of scripture and what God has told us.

This morning, we're going to look at the Lord's Supper to talk about it within the covenantal background, as Tony has already mentioned, in which it falls. In order for us to do that, we're going to read from Acts two, verses 22 to 41, which will act as a bit of a springboard into that covenantal understanding so that the understanding of God's covenant of grace and how that works with the Lord's Supper becomes clear. So let's have a look at Acts 2:22. Peter in his great sermon at Pentecost said, "Men of Israel, hear these words. Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst as you yourselves know. This Jesus delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men."

"God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death because it was not possible for him to be held by it. For David says concerning him, 'I saw the Lord always before me, for he is at my right hand that I may not be shaken. Therefore, my heart was glad and my tongue rejoiced. My flesh also will dwell in hope. For you will not abandon my soul to Hades or let your holy one see corruption.'"

"You made known to me the paths of life. You will make me full of gladness with your presence." Peter continues, "Brothers, I may say to you with confidence about the patriarch David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. Being therefore a prophet and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants on his throne, he foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption. This Jesus, God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses."

"Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, He has poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing. For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he himself says, 'The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.' Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified." Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, "Brothers, what shall we do?" And Peter said to them, "Repent and be baptised, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit."

"For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself." And with many other words he bore witness and continued to exhort them, saying, "Save yourselves from this crooked generation." So those who received his word were baptised, and they were added that day about 3,000 souls. This is the word of the Lord. In order for us to understand what we're talking about this morning, the Lord's Supper, we need to understand what is called the covenant.

And in order to understand the covenant, we need to understand baptism, which, as Peter was indicating here, is entry into a promise. There are only two rituals in the Christian church. These are called sacraments. They are holy rites celebrated by the church to remember and proclaim the salvation of God in Jesus Christ. Before we understand the Lord's Supper, however, we need to talk about how baptism works within the covenant promise of God.

We need to understand how it fits within the covenant community, which, as we see alluded to here in Acts two, includes our children. The promise is, Peter said, for you and for your children. So very briefly, hopefully, we'll look at baptism first as an initiation into this promise, into the covenant. First question we have to ask is, how do we enter into the community of God? How do we enter into the community of God?

If you've been at Open House Church for a while, you will have heard me say many times the phrase "the covenant of grace." And you would have heard me talk about how it is the golden thread of the entire Bible. It holds the story of the Bible together, this promise, a covenant. In Genesis 12, 15, and 17, God made a promise to a man named Abraham that he was going to cause Abraham to become a father of a great nation, and that through this nation, the world would be blessed. These people would be known as God's people.

They would be His people, and He would be their God. This is a solemn promise that God makes to Abraham and invites Abraham to respond to that promise. This serious and solemn promise is known as a covenant. In order to remind this people, Abraham's people, of the covenant, they are to receive the sign of the covenant, which according to the Bible is circumcision. They are to receive in their bodies every male circumcision.

Genesis 15:6 famously tells us that Abraham believed God and that this faith was credited to him as righteousness or as right standing with God. But the sign of circumcision and the reward of faith from the very beginning is not only for Abraham, it is for his sons and for his children to come. In fact, even the servants in Abraham's house are to be circumcised as they come into that community of faith. When we come to the New Testament here, we find the sign of circumcision swallowed up by the sign of baptism. That is what Peter calls for in Acts two. But in Colossians two, we see it most visibly connected, or the connection between circumcision and baptism is made there.

Colossians 2:11-12. Paul says, "In Him, in Jesus, also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ. Having been buried with Him in baptism in which you were also raised with Him through faith in the powerful working of God who raised Him from the dead." There you see all those elements: faith, baptism, circumcision. In the New Testament, in other words, baptism replaces circumcision.

Now you could do a study of ritual cleansing in the Jewish faith, and you would see that the sprinkling clean as part of a Jewish celebration of cleansing before participating in worship of God was a common practice. But I think that the change of circumcision to baptism is a change that is tied to this widening of the new covenant. The fact that everyone, now not just every male, but men and women receive the sign of the covenant is commensurate, tied to this understanding that the kingdom of God is available to all. The world is blessed through the people that God chose in Abraham. So for example, the fact that men and women receive the sign means that they have moved together into this greater understanding, this greater appreciation of the worldwide work that God has done in Jesus.

This morning, I want to ask the question, when it came to your baptism, when it has come to your understanding of baptism, how do you think of it? Do you think of it in these communal terms? Do you think of it as being an initiation into God's family? Our Western obsession, I think, will probably cause us to think, or to be tempted to think, differently about it. Our obsession with that expressive individualism that marks Western society has caused all sorts of problems with our understanding of baptism.

For many, baptism is a personal thing that I do to show God that I believe in him. That's how many people understand baptism. People assume that it's a sign of your faith, but that understanding sits outside of scripture. When you participate or witness a baptism, what is being shown to you there is a promise, and it is not a promise of the person to God. It's a promise of God to the person.

What is that promise? It's the covenant promise. I will be your God, and you will be my people. I'd like to explain, therefore, why our church holds to what I call a covenant understanding of baptism and why, in turn, I'm incredibly motivated to baptise children of believing parents. It's for this reason.

Circumcision and baptism point to the same thing: the promise of God's salvation. It's not our promise to receive that salvation. It's not our promise to believe in that salvation. Think back to circumcision. Romans 4:11 explains it, sums it up really powerfully.

It's called a sign, Paul says. "He, who is Abraham, received the sign of the circumcision as a seal of the righteousness he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised." In other words, as a sign, circumcision points to the imputed, the passed on or given, righteousness Abraham received from God through faith. This righteousness, this right standing with God, is sealed by faith. Righteousness is placed completely, in other words, irreversibly, irrevocably on Abraham.

That is his. He is sealed with righteousness. Having showed faith, Abraham is told in Genesis 17:12 that he must now circumcise his sons, and they are only eight days old before they are to even express faith. And this is to remind them, God says, of the same promise. I'm going to be your God, and I want you to be my people.

So the covenant sign is not given to Abraham in response to his faith, as some Baptists may argue. Circumcision is a sign pointing to the promise that God has made. I will be your God. From Abraham and his sons onward, we see throughout the Old Testament that children of believers are then entitled to the covenant sign of circumcision. They are treated, in other words, as insiders to God's community.

As part of God's people, these children are entitled to take part in the worship of God in the temple. Now before they can express, before they do a public profession of faith, they can participate in temple worship. They are allowed to participate in the festivals and in the sacrifices alongside God's people. In Exodus 12, for example, we see that children were told to ask their fathers why they celebrate the Lord's Supper as a ritual. They have to ask, what does this supper mean?

What does the Passover mean? In today's Judaism, in fact, you'll find that that ritual continues, that it's a very honourable thing to be the child that gets to ask that question of the father or the grandfather, the patriarch of the family, to explain when they celebrate the Passover meal together. In Deuteronomy 12, we see families with children participating in the Jewish festivals and the sacrifices. In 1 Samuel 1, we see Elkanah's wife and children share in the fellowship meal at the tabernacle. Why is this allowed?

Because the children of believers are considered insiders to the covenant community. On the other hand, people who are not circumcised, the Gentiles, are barred from those privileges. They are not allowed to enter the temple. They are not allowed to eat the Passover. They are outsiders, but Israelite children are in.

Is it because of their faith? Not necessarily. It's because they have the sign of the circumcision. But coming back to our passage in Acts two, in the New Testament, in verses 38 and 39, Peter says to the crowd, as this is the call to action for them. He says, "Repent and be baptised every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit."

And then he says, "For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself." The promise is for you and your children. That's covenant language. So what we see with the dawning of the new covenant established in Jesus' work, Peter says that the promise is still going to continue being carried from family to family even as this call is now extended to the whole world. It applies to the individuals hearing it when Peter preaches, but it extends in some way to their family as well.

So the question is, are our children at Open House insiders or outsiders? And I think even my Baptist friends or my Pentecostal friends who have children will say, my kids are holy. They are insiders, even though I will only baptise them as adults. And I think they are sort of displaying already a covenantal understanding. They are special.

They are insiders, and therefore they should receive the covenant sign. It's a significant problem to overcome or to answer. Do you treat your children as a believer as though they are merely visitors in this church? Do you see them or treat them as rebels to God's kingdom up until 18 or whenever they will be baptised, or do you disciple them with the assumption that they know God and are closer to Him than someone outside the church? Shouldn't we treat them as though they know God until they prove themselves to be rebels, covenant breakers?

This is what the Heidelberg Catechism gets at when it gives us this answer in question and answer 74. It asks, "Should infants also be baptised?" And it responds, "Yes. Infants as well as adults are included in God's covenant and people, and they, no less than adults, are promised deliverance from sin through Christ's blood and the Holy Spirit who produces faith. Therefore, by baptism, the sign of the covenant, they too should be incorporated into the Christian church and distinguished from the children of unbelievers.

This was done in the Old Testament by circumcision, which was replaced in the New Testament by baptism." I mean, I could have just read that instead of giving you ten minutes of explanation, but there's the summary. As a side note, I also want to say that if you've grown up without believing parents, if you grew up outside the church, the great news still is that the promise is for you. Remember, Abraham received the sign of circumcision after faith because he didn't have a believing parent. The people here in Acts two received baptism as adults because they've been brought into that covenant promise.

They've been grafted in. But we subsequently see in Acts that entire households are then also baptised. It isn't just for the adults. Entire families, including, again, like Abraham, servants, presumably, are included into this profession, this faith. Does this mean our children are automatically saved? Can someone be saved based on their parents' faith?

No. These children, like the children of Israel, must have what Paul calls that internal circumcision of the heart. They must believe for themselves and take up the promise that is given at baptism. Baptism is a sign that as water washes away dirt from the body, so the blood of Jesus has washed away their sin, and they must receive that truth to be their own. Okay.

So having laid that groundwork as our initiation into the covenant, complementing baptism is the second sign of the covenant, which we call a sacrament as well, which is the Lord's Supper. The Lord's Supper is that habitual participation in the salvation of Jesus. The night before going to the cross, Jesus took a glass of wine and said to His disciples, "This wine is the sign of the new covenant in My blood." With that language, the Lord was linking baptism and the Lord's Supper as the two signs of God's covenant of grace. These two things, baptism and Lord's Supper, aren't just sentimental rituals that we do.

They are important marks to experience afresh the grace that we find in Jesus Christ. Whereas baptism, we've seen, is a sign of the entry into that covenant agreement, the Lord's Supper is the sign of the renewing of that covenant. Now, again, Open House differs from other churches on how we offer the supper, and it's based on the same theology. The apostle Paul calls eating and drinking the supper as a participation in the flesh and the blood of Jesus. That sounds so visceral and almost, you know, cannibalistic, which was what people accused early Christians of being.

But we participate in the body of Christ. The Heidelberg Catechism sums up Lord's Supper in this way: that in participating of the supper, Christ wants to assure us by this visible sign and pledge that we, through the Holy Spirit's work, share in His true body and blood as surely as our mouths receive these holy signs in His remembrance, and that all of His suffering and obedience are definitely ours as if we personally had suffered and paid for our sins. In other words, for those who have come to understand that their sins are great, but that Jesus' death and resurrection washed them clean, the Lord's Supper is a joyful reminder that they sit at a victory banquet with Jesus. When we share in the Supper, we do so as a family celebrating something amazing. In that moment, in three weeks' time, we will proclaim to each other, to the watching world, that our salvation has been found in Jesus, and we will remind each other that His kingdom is being established every single day. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 11:26, "For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until He comes."

It's habitual. How does the Lord's Supper fit into the covenant alongside baptism? Back in the Old Testament, there was the Passover. That remembered the great salvation of Israel from Egypt. The Passover was the defining act of salvation. But that act of salvation, God says, was based on the very same promise that He had made to Abraham hundreds of years earlier.

"I will be your God. You will be my people." And God saves Israel from Egypt because they are His people. The Passover remembers that act of salvation, but it also remembers the promise that God was their God. When Jesus inaugurates the Lord's Supper, what happens there?

Well, it happens when? During the Passover celebrations. Jesus is linking His coming death to the death of the Passover lamb, and as the Jews are remembering their salvation from slavery in Egypt, Jesus is reconstituting the celebration to remember a salvation from slavery and death. Once again, this understanding has clear implications. It means that at Open House, we have what is called a fenced table or a guarded table.

We take seriously the idea that the Lord's Supper is offered only to insiders of the covenant. It is for God's family only. We don't throw open the Lord's Supper to just anyone. Practically speaking, you won't see our elders snatching bread out of people's hands or knocking the glass out of their hands if we don't know them or if they haven't come up to say, "Yes, I am a believer," or not. But we are tasked with being careful about who receives the bread and the wine.

In order to fence or guard the table to some degree, our elders might, for example, see a visitor on a Lord's Supper Sunday and come to them before the service to explain that we are celebrating the Lord's Supper. And can I ask you, are you a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ? And if they say no, then we'll ask them to refrain from taking the Lord's Supper. Why? Because if you live outside of God's covenant and His community, you shouldn't participate in the covenant meal.

This is why one of the key levers of formal church discipline, when the church elders are compelled to chastise, to correct a believer in the church for continuous unrepentant sin, one of the recourses is that they are barred from receiving the Lord's Supper. Before making any public pronouncements of condemning a certain person, the elders are to privately go to that person and say that we are withholding the supper from you. Why? Because it shows to them in no unclear terms that they are regarded as being covenant breakers.

They are not living the relationship they profess with their mouth, that they are living with God. But if you are inside the covenant community and you can articulate a faithfulness to Jesus and you have a lifestyle to match that profession, then the Lord's Supper is for you. Coming back to what Tony explained to us earlier this morning about the change in our practice, our churches have taken very seriously that guarding of the table and have said for the sake of wisdom, we're not going to allow children of a certain age to participate because we don't know how they can, we're not sure to what extent they can understand and believe. But that has been changed. Now parents and children may decide to wait until that child is older, or they can decide in consultation with their elders that this young person understands in an age appropriate way, a way that they can articulate as an eight year old, "I believe in Jesus. I believe He died for my sin."

And that allows us to grant them their participation in that meal. So I want to say to you, if you are a young person here and you believe in Jesus and you're willing to share that with your parents and have an elder come and perhaps talk with you about that, I want to invite you to have that conversation with your parents and discuss that with them. This morning, we are reminded that God's salvation is greater than our own willpower. God's salvation is greater than our willpower. It is sealed to us in a promise.

His promise, not ours. That He will be God to me, that He will save me, that He will restore me through what Jesus has done. My prayer is that as we come to see and understand our lives as part of this great story of a promise that I will be your God and you will be my people, as we understand this, we will find the strength to remain His people, that we will have the strength to live for and serve Him joyfully and to be reminded of all the great benefits every time we witness both a baptism and as we participate in the Lord's Supper. Our God is magnificent. Our God is powerful and perhaps most precious to us.

He is incredibly loving. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for these tangible ways by which we see your grace acted out in front of our eyes. So much of our faith can seem conceptual. So much of our walk in our life is tied up in words.

But here, in baptism and in Lord's Supper, we see actions. We see physical material. And we thank you, Lord, that you understand us, that you know that we need these things to continually and habitually enter into and remind us of what you have done for us in Jesus Christ. Thank you, Lord, for our kids who are special in your sight. They are not merely regarded as little creatures to be heard and not seen, little rebels that need to be endured for a time until they come of age and then preached to.

Thank you, Lord, that they are already regarded as holy by you. And as we take on that title by faith and as we work towards confirming their calling in Jesus by discipling them now, we pray, Lord, that you'll be faithful to those promises that you have made, that those children will come to a saving faith in you. Lord, that you will cause them to, at one point, understand what their baptism was showing. Lord, for those of us who have come to know you, who believe in you, we thank you for the baptism that has washed us white as snow, that our hearts and our minds have been sprinkled clean, that we have died with Christ, that we have been raised in Him, and that, Lord, forever we are yours and your family. Cause us, Lord, to have that with renewed understanding and a great joy and confidence this morning. In Jesus' name. Amen.