Few subjects are as important as children in the church, for they represent her future. Matthew Henry (1663-1714) said God has “appointed that parents should train up their children in the knowledge of his law ... that, as one generation of God’s servants and worshippers passes away, another gen­eration may come, and the church, as the earth, may abide forever, and thus God’s name among men may be as the days of heaven.”¹ Very soon everyone you see today will be gone. Who then will praise God on the earth? Who will be His salt and light in our cities, towns, and nations? Christ has guaranteed the church will continue by His divine power and faithfulness; yet He accomplishes this by human means, often through our ministry to children.

Our topic is also of critical significance for the future of our children. Henry wrote to Christian parents, “Con­sider especially what they (the children) are designed for in another world: they are made for eternity. Every child hath a precious and immortal soul, that must be for ever either in heaven or hell, according as it is prepared in this present state, – and perhaps it must remove to that world of spirits very shortly.” ² This is true not only of our own dear chil­dren, but also of the children in our neighborhood and non­-Christian friends whom we invite to church with us. They too have souls; they too need the Savior. Do our churches care for these tender and impressionable souls whom God has entrusted to us?

Tremendous privileges⤒🔗

The children and young people who grow up in the fellow­ship of the church enjoy tremendous privileges through God’s covenant of grace. We may say of them, as Paul said of ancient Israel in Romans 3:2, “Unto them were committed the oracles of God.” They grow up reading the Word of the covenant, singing the Word of the covenant, absorbing the preaching of the Word of the covenant, praying the Word of the covenant back to God, and seeing the Word of the covenant made visible in the sacraments, the signs and seals of the covenant.

We might say that children growing up in a biblical church are embraced by the arms of the covenant Word of promise, nursed on the milk of the covenant Word of instruction, and buckled in by the covenant Word of command for safety as they begin their journey in life. What an amazing privilege it is for children to grow up in the church! While we grieve over her failings, let us never forget the unspeakable blessings that belong to children in a true church of Christ, as opposed to the lot of those who grow up “having no hope and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:12). Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 7:14, “For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband: else were your children unclean; but now are they holy.” Never begrudge a child his place in the meetings of the church. God calls your children holy because when God saves a parent, He puts His hand of blessing and consecration on the family.³

Tremendous needs←⤒🔗

But covenant privileges do not negate or diminish the need each child has for God’s particular grace to make him a liv­ing, spiritual member of the church. We have every reason to believe that David was circumcised on the eighth day and raised in a pious home. Boaz and Ruth were his godly great-grandparents (Ruth 4:21-22). His father, Jesse, participated in daily sacrifices, honored God’s prophet, and sent his sons to fight for God’s anointed king (1 Sam. 16:5; 17:13). Nevertheless David confessed in Psalm 51:5, “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.” Since the fall of man, sin and its doleful effects have been a plague upon every child born into the world (Rom. 5:12). As the Belgic Confession of Faith (art. 15) says:

Through the disobedience of Adam original sin is extended to all mankind, which is a corruption of the whole nature and a hereditary disease, wherewith infants themselves are infected even in their mother’s womb, and which produceth in man all sorts of sin, being in him as a root thereof; and therefore is so vile and abominable in the sight of God that it is sufficiency to condemn all mankind. Nor is it by any means abolished or done away with in baptism, since sin always issues forth from this woeful source as water from a fountain.⁴

Covenant children must be born again. Our Lord Jesus Christ said in John 3:3, “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” He said this to a man who had participated in all the external forms of the covenant in force at the time. He was a renowned teacher of Israel (John 3:10). But in order to “enter the kingdom of God” (3:5), this teacher still needed to be “born of the Spirit” (3:8). In faithfulness to Scripture, we must view our children as “heirs of the kingdom of God and of His covenant,”⁵ who nonetheless were born in sin and need a supernatural rebirth from God in order to come into full personal possession of their inheritance.

We must therefore view our children as sinners who need to hear the gospel and respond to it with the gift of faith. God’s usual way of saving the seed of His church is through the call of the gospel. Certainly God may regenerate a soul in the womb, as He did with John the Baptist (Luke 1:15, 41-44), but God’s ordinary manner of working faith in our hearts is through the preaching of the Word, as well as by the faith, example, nurture, and prayers of believing parents.

Peter described true Christians in 1 Peter 1:23 and 25 as “being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incor­ruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever ... And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you.” So Paul writes in Romans 10:17, “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.”

The Westminster Confession of Faith (7.3) says that in the covenant of grace, God “freely offereth unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ, requiring of them faith in Him, that they may be saved.”⁶ Reformed Christianity is evangelistic Christianity, and Reformed evangelism begins with our own children.

Reformed Christians sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that we may presume that covenant children, being members of the church by baptism, are regenerated by the Holy Spirit unless they openly reject the covenant.⁷

The promise and the sign of the covenant become poor substi­tutes for its requirement of saving faith in Jesus Christ as the only ground of justification and salvation. When the covenant is abused in such a way, parents and children alike are lulled into a false sense of security and any serious effort to lead little ones to Christ is given up.

Tremendous responsibilities←⤒🔗

The covenant demands the conversion of all to whom its promises are made, parents and children alike. “Therefore are we by God through baptism admonished of, and obliged unto new obedience,” the Reformed Liturgy says, “namely, that we cleave to this one God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; that we trust in Him, and love Him with all our hearts, with all our souls, with all our mind, and with all our strength; that we forsake the world, crucify our old nature, and walk a new and holy life.”⁸ How then can we assume that a child is born again without these evidences of that life?

So it is necessary to affirm the blessings and privileges of covenant children while insisting on the need to respond to the covenant with faith in Christ and repentance from sin, gifts God the Father has provided in His beloved Son (Acts 5:31; 11:18). On the one hand, we must not treat our children as if they were so many “little heathens” who have no rightful place in our well-ordered church services. They belong there. On the other hand, we must not assume they are saved simply because they have been born into Christian homes, have been received into the church by baptism, and are being instructed in the doctrine of salvation. With faith in God’s promises, we must use all the means of grace, seek­ing the regeneration, justification, and sanctification of our covenant children. In particular, we must pray for the con­version of our children.

Listen to how Alexander Whyte (1836-1921), a Scottish divine, prayed for children:

O Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, give us a seed right with Thee! Smite us and our house with everlasting barrenness rather than that our seed should not be right with Thee. O God, give us our children. Give us our children. A second time, and by a far better birth, give us our children to be beside us in Thy holy covenant. For it had been better we had never been betrothed; it had been better we had sat all our days solitary unless our children are to be right with Thee ... But Thou, O God, art Thyself a Father, and thus hast in Thyself a Father’s heart. Hear us, then, for our children, O our Father ... In season and out of season, we shall not go up into our bed, we shall not give sleep to our eyes nor slumber to our eyelids till we and all our seed are right with Thee.⁹

May God teach us to pray like this for our precious children while they are young, pleading for His promised covenantal blessings to rain down upon them by His gracious Spirit, for Christ’s sake.