It's important for us to understand when we look at Acts 2, 38 and 39, who Peter is speaking to. He's speaking to Jews. The entire group. He is speaking to Jews of the dispersion. He's speaking to Jews from Jerusalem. And he is preaching that Jesus has come, that Jesus has fulfilled everything that the Old Testament talked about. That this is the zenith of redemptive history. This is the fullness of time. As he talks to them and he proclaims Christ as the Redeemer and the Messiah, and he goes to apply to them what they need to do in calling them to repent, he then tells them that they are to repent and take the sign of the covenant of grace to themselves, the new covenant, and the promise bound up with that sign is to them and to their children and to everyone who is afar off. Now, if you were a Jew, living at this time, and we sort of touched on this briefly the last time we were together, one of the questions you would have if baptism was completely foreign, or if it was something completely new, and never even dreamt of as a concept in the Old Testament, none of these people would have received what it was. They would have said, what is this? Instead, the apostles, who are Jews themselves, come straight out and say, be baptized. When Jesus departed and he gave his disciples those final instructions, and he said, going into all the world, preach the gospel, baptizing in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, making disciples, teaching them everything that I've commanded you, the apostles understood that baptism was crucial to the new covenant mission for the church. Jesus had given these instructions. Peter now, following through with the Great Commission, tells these men and women who are cut to the heart, notice verse 37, They are convicted of their sins. They know that Jesus is who Peter is saying he is. And they ask him, what do we need to do? And Peter says, repent and be baptized. Now, our Baptist brethren love to go to that verse, repent and be baptized. Believers, baptism only. But Peter says to this group of Jewish new converts, they had been old covenant members, they were apostate, now they're on the brink of being the first converts in the New Covenant era, and he says to them, the promise, and you might insert the word still, the promise is still for you and for your children, and as many as are far off, as many as the Lord our God will call. Peter is, in a sense, presuming that those to whom he's preaching understand covenant theology. He's presuming that they understand who the covenant Lord is. He's presuming that they understand that what he is proclaiming about Jesus is no different than what God said to Abraham. When God said to Abraham, I will be a God to you and to your descendants after you, here's the sign for you, Abraham, and I want you to give it to your children. I want you to train your children in the home, instructing them in the fear of the Lord. I want you to teach them my promises, my word, my commandments. And Peter is presuming that the Jews to whom he's preaching right here, they know that, they get that. And he is assuming that they're going to understand he's not preaching a different message. It's not another gospel. The new covenant is not a different gospel than the Abrahamic covenant. Actually, if we want to understand baptism, we have to understand Abraham. And I understand this is difficult for many people, but in the book of Galatians, the apostle Paul says, if you are Christ, then you are Abraham's, right? That's why we sing Father Abraham had many sons and I am one of them. And so are you. Paul said that the scriptures preach the gospel to Abraham saying in you shall all the nations be blessed in your seed, who is Christ. It was never about the physical descendants of Abraham as the central part of the Abrahamic Covenant. It was always about the spiritual promises. And those spiritual promises were there at the beginning. There are not two ways God is dealing with Abraham and the Abrahamic Covenant. There is one gospel. There is one promise. He is forming a visible church out of Abraham's descendants. We are part of that visible church now because we've been grafted in. Romans 11, we haven't replaced Israel, we've been grafted in, Paul says. Some of them were cut off because of their unbelief. We who were Gentiles have been grafted in. Peter's saying that very thing when he says to these Jews here in verse 39, the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, the Gentiles. Now the gospel promise to Abraham that the nations are gonna be brought in is being proclaimed and it's being fulfilled before your eyes, this is it. This is what God spoke to Abraham. And so in some way, Peter is linking baptism to the Abrahamic covenant and to the covenant promises of God in the most natural way possible. He's not doing some kind of exegetical trickery or sophistry to get there. He just leads with it. The promise is still to you and your children. And here's the sign. This sign is the new covenant sign because everything's been fulfilled. Now, when we spoke about circumcision and Passover, we said there are two old covenant sacraments, two new. What's the big difference between the old covenant sacraments and the new? There's one big difference. Circumcision and Passover were what? Bloody. Baptism and the Lord's Supper are what? Not bloody. Why? Because the blood was shed. Right? The blood was shed. They're pointing to the same Christ. In one sense, they're the same signs. They're just different forms of the sacrament. One anticipating the bloodshed, one looking back on it. I do think it's interesting that baptism, and maybe just to help us with this, a lot of people who hold to believers baptism only will say, that baptism is essentially something I do, and it was important for me, and it is. And we never want to be people that downplay that. Baptism is an important thing for us. When we have our children baptized, that's important to us as Christian parents. But if we make it something that we're doing, as if this is my decision, my sign, we can inadvertently miss the point of baptism. And I've always thought it interesting, you can't tell who's baptized because it's an invisible sign. Because the New Covenant is more spiritual in nature. You could see who was circumcised in the Old Covenant, and that was the whole issue Paul was battling in Galatia with Titus and Timothy. You can't look at people and see if they've been baptized. The New Covenant is more spiritual in nature. It's less external. It's pointing to the age of the Spirit. It's pointing to the outpouring of the Spirit. It's not coincidental that Peter says these words here at the point when the Holy Spirit is in the fullest way being poured out on people in human history. The end of the sermon, matching the coming of the Spirit, Peter is reflecting on what baptism is pointing to, right? The washing of the Holy Spirit. The the glorified Christ has sent the spirit and he's washing his people and he's cleansing them and they're gonna take this sign That's not pointing to the sign. It's not pointing to the baptism. It's pointing to what it symbolizes the washing of the blood of Christ the washing of the Spirit of God the outpouring of the Spirit of God the cleansing of his people and In that God is putting his name on his people now I Baptism doesn't save us Simon the sorcerer a couple chapters after this Will have been baptized and then remember what did he do? What did Simon the sorcerer do? He's kind of the prime example that someone can be baptized and not converted. He tries to purchase the Holy Spirit from the apostles, right? He's a magician. He wants to be able to give the Holy Spirit like a magic trick. And Peter said that his heart was full of wickedness, yet he was baptized. Baptism doesn't save us. What baptism points to saves us. And yet God commands baptism, and it's not an empty sign. It's not something that's just a bare memorial. It's not just me saying, well, look, I'm going to do this, and it's sentimental. It is God commanding his people to take that sign, and it's an act of faith that we take that sign. And in that sign, God is sealing his promises to us. Now, That becomes important for us as Christians. It also becomes important for us as Christian parents because we do believe that the sign indicates the promise of God and seals the promise. And Peter says here in verse 28, the promise, the promise, the one promise that God's going to save a people for himself, that he'll be a God to us and to our descendants after us. I will be your God. You will be my people. That's the promise through the whole of the Bible. Genesis to Revelation, I will be a God to you. You will be my people. I will be a God to you and your descendants after you and At that point Peter says the promise is still for you and for your children That's important because God wants us as Christian parents and maybe now as Christian grandparents to trust him for the salvation of our children and our grandchildren and all the descendants that he gives us until Christ comes again and Now, turn to Isaiah 59-21. There's no way we're going to be able to cover all of this, but I do want to just touch on a few things that helped me as a young Christian. Isaiah 59-21, this is in the context of the New Covenant prophecies, right? 53, suffering servant, 54, God's reiterating His covenant promises. Everything through the end of Isaiah is looking forward to the new covenant era, right? The coming of the Spirit, the new creation, everything God's gonna do in Christ. And somebody read verse 21 to us. Or two people at the same time. As for me, this is my covenant with them. Okay, that's a very clear promise that really helped me when I was wrestling with should the children of believers receive the covenant sign when you look at the covenant promises and in the prophets, and Jeremiah is going to say the same thing, that the promise is still to you and to your children. God is promising to be a God to the whole family. Several things that may help you as you think through who are the recipients, because clearly if someone's unconverted and they make a profession of faith in Jesus Christ, they are to receive believers' baptisms. Sometimes Presbyterians So when we're not Believers Baptist, we're Paedo-Baptist. Well, no, we're Believers Baptist and we're Household Baptist. So we're not pedobaptists. I actually don't think that's a helpful term. We are oikobaptists, household baptists. But we are believers baptists. If someone's a far off and they're not part of the covenant community, and they haven't grown up in the visible church, and they hear the gospel, and we should be outward focused, we should be praying for conversions, we should be sharing the gospel with the hope that we see people who have never been baptized and never made a profession of faith come to know Jesus. That should be a vital part of our lives and our ministry and the church's ministry, they are then to receive believers' baptism. But what we see time and time and time again in the scriptures is that the covenant is more expansive than just an individual who professes faith in Christ. It is corporate and collective in nature, as the church is, and it is families, and it is single individuals, it is widows, it is a litany of people in different social settings and cultural and circumstantial settings, and yet we see how important the family is to God, and how important the covenant sign is to the family. I think often of the account, and this is one of those things in Scripture that just seems so obvious, but I think it's missed on quite a lot of people, that when parents come to Jesus in the Gospels and they bring their little children and their infants, in one of the Gospels the word is probably best translated, infant, and he's holding them in his arms. They're small enough for him to hold. And sometimes churches will have that sentimental stained glass window of Jesus usually a very frail and white Jesus, but holding a little child. And it's this sentimental picture of here's Jesus. He loves the children. He's holding the child and it's really sweet. This is the covenant Lord. This is God. This is the God that came to Abraham and said, I'm going to be a God to you and to your descendants after you. And at that point in his ministry, so late in his ministry, when so many in Israel have rejected him, For those parents to come to him and bring their children, that's an act of faith. And they're actually saying to Jesus, we believe that you're the covenant word, and we want you to give the covenant blessings to our children. And even though Jesus doesn't mention baptism there, and the point of that is not about baptism, it is the point that Jesus is the covenant word to us and to our children. So that everything else we see in the New Testament, especially the household baptisms in the book of Acts, are indicators that God is not done with the family, but that he's incorporating more families into his church, and he is expanding the Abrahamic covenant to include the Gentiles, and to include our children, and to include their children, hopefully, by God's grace, through faith, so that the covenant keeps expanding. People will sometimes say, well, I don't see any infant baptisms in the New Testament. That's fair. There's not one infant baptism in the New Testament that we know of. There are a litany of household baptisms, and no one can tell us that infants weren't in those households. No one can tell us that there were infants at that moment in time. But what we can be sure of, there are children And they are receiving the covenant sign. And the language that Luke tells us in the book of Acts is everyone in the household was baptized. The most interesting one is the Philippian jailer. And Chuck, maybe you'll correct me on this. I think it's the Philippian jailer. It says he believed and they were all baptized. The Greek is very specific. It doesn't say they believed. It says he believed and they were all baptized. That's that particular time where Peter says to the jailer, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved and your household, right? He's not saying everyone who believes it's a guarantee that all your offspring's gonna be saved, but he's saying God is working in the covenant home. He wants salvation to run through our families. By the way, maybe an obvious aside, Why does God work in the family, the Christian family, the way I'm suggesting he does? It started in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve, essentially be a family. Yes. Multiply. That's good. That's very good. Why else? Any other I think, very simply, this is one way God has built in the preservation of the truth of the gospel into the fabric of this world. So you see it, right, with the intermarriages in Genesis 6, and you lose pure religion. This is why God doesn't want believers to marry unbelievers. That's a big deal. I'm surprised how few Christians think that's a big deal today. we've almost lost the sense of Christian marriage. Believers marrying believers is not just so that you'll have a good long marriage. It's for the vitality and the spread and the preservation of the gospel. God says in Malachi, why did he make the two one? He seeks godly offspring. Isn't that an interesting verse? Why did he make the two one? He seeks godly offspring. He wants He wants the truth to just continue spreading and growing. Now, again, we all know that doesn't mean every child in a Christian home is going to be saved, and it's tragic. I pray for the salvation of my children almost every day. I can't save them. You can't save them. There's no guarantee. But we pray for that, and we should labor for that, and we should be zealous for that. We should be hopeful. for that. However, Abraham had Ishmael. Jacob had many really messed up kids. I mean really messed up. David, his then son tried to kill him. It's heartbreaking that even in the covenant home, but that goes to the principle of election, doesn't it? Right? It's not the children of the flesh, but the children of promise. Nevertheless, and this is very important. Why, if that's the case, if, if baptism doesn't save and, and my best friends in the world, several of them are reformed Baptists. So. This is not a snarky comment at all, but oftentimes people say, well, if it's only the elect, then why would we give the covenant sign to our children? Well, I think we need to think about Christian baptism and the visible church together as one, right? Because Christian baptism initiates us into the Christian church, right? When someone is baptized, they are brought into the church. That's why in the PCA, we should not admit someone to the Lord's table if they've not been baptized. because they should be part of the visible church. And then they receive the other sign, which is confirmation, covenant confirmation for the believer. But when we think about baptism, we should think about the visible church and we should think about what is the purpose and what is the place of my children as it is for myself in the visible church? Well, it's the place of nurture, isn't it? This is the place where we are nurtured on our way to heaven. That's why forsaking the assembly is such a big deal. I was telling some friends that are here with us a story. When I was 19, I went out on the Okefenokee Swamp. It's in Waycross, Georgia. And I was 19 and foolish, very foolish. And we were supposed to stay with these little boats. and not deviate from them because there's gators everywhere and snakes hanging from trees. And I saw some little lily pad fields over to the side with do not enter signs. And so I being the really wise and smart 19 year old that I was said to my friend, hey, let's go down into one of those lily pad fields. So we left the boats and we went out there and the boat stopped. And I thought, oh no, it's like 115 degrees, and nobody can see us out here. This is how I die at 19, on the Okefenokee Swamp. And by God's grace, we got out of there. But I've often thought it's a good picture of what the apostles say in Hebrews, don't neglect the assembly. If you depart, if you were Israel in the wilderness, and you wandered off, what happens? You die. So the church is a nurturing safe place where we and our children are nurtured by God's word, his promises, his gospel, so that we grow up into Christ. This is why, by the way, you have direct addresses to children in the New Testament epistles. Ephesians 6.1 doesn't say, believing children, obey your parents in the Lord. That would be awful, by the way, if I could only tell my kids, you know, God has told you, you need to obey me if you're a Christian. Now, I know they can't obey. if they're not truly regenerated. But the covenant children are part of the visible church. They've been brought in, yes, on the profession of faith of their parents, but they are there to be nurtured. This is why God commands us to bring up our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. And I want to be able to say to my children, God, the triune God has put his name on you in baptism. That's a great blessing to be able to tell our children, you know, you may not have remembered being baptized, but here's the really important thing. The triune God put his name on you and set you apart in the visible church so that you would come to know him. I like to think of baptism for the children of believers as sort of an engagement ring. And maybe this will be helpful. So the Westminster Confession of Faith says that our children are engaged to be the Lord's. They're engaged to be the Lord's. So the goal is to raise them so that they will marry Jesus Christ savingly. So they'll become part of the bride of Christ. And what God has done to our children is he has put, as it were, an engagement ring. on our children. Now, can a woman break an engagement? Yes. Many have broken off engagements, right? So our children can become covenant breakers. They can cast off the covenant promises. They can cast off the truth. They can leave the faith. It happens all the time, sadly. But the goal is for that engagement ring to become the wedding band by them coming to know Jesus savingly having been nurtured under those promises. So if someone says to me, well, what's the difference? My neighbor, who's not a Christian, has children, and I can give them the gospel just like I can give my children the gospel. Here's the difference. My children will grow up every day of their life hearing the truth in some way, shape, or form, hopefully seeing their dad and mom repent of sin, confess their sins. They'll be instructed in the word. They'll be taught to worship God. They are taught to call God their father. We pray the Lord's Prayer with our children, we teach them those for whom Christ has died, and unbelieving homes don't have that nurture. Now, it will be worse for our children if they don't repent and believe in Jesus. Jesus says that, doesn't he? In his address to Capernaum and Tyre, he says it'll be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah than it will be for those cities because they saw his great works. They had more light. They had more nurture. They had the incarnate Christ in front of them. And so anyone that sits under the preaching of the gospel, who hears about Jesus Christ constantly, who has the light of the truth before them and then rejects that, it's going to be worse for them. So it's, in a sense, we can think about it this way. When we and our children are baptized, everything is heightened. All the benefits are heightened, and all the warnings are heightened. Because we're part of the kingdom of God. We've been brought out of the kingdom of Satan. We've been brought into the church. Absolutely. So I had the privilege of baptizing 250-something year olds in the early years of church planting. never been baptized, never been in a Christian church, and they had a 16-year-old son and a 14-year-old daughter who I don't think understood the gospel clearly, but they weren't kicking against what their parents were doing, and they were professing to be with their parents and coming to the church, and we baptized them, and we had a bit of a a bit of a debate over that on my provisional session because there were several who had never seen that. And they said, no, they're too old. They need to make a profession of faith. Well, the goal was to work with them toward that end, but we believe to be consistent. I mean, everyone in Abraham's house was circumcised. Ishmael was 13. His servants were circumcised, everyone in the household. So I thought if I'm going to be consistent, we're going to baptize the whole family, and we did. Other questions? That's good. That's good. Penny and I were not Christians when our children were baptized. And we weren't Christians for many years after that. And I just think of just the incredible teaching opportunity than pastors or elders have in sitting down with somebody who's getting ready to baptize their children. And it's just a critical time, even during the sacrament, except the teaching opportunity for those that are present is just real important. That's very true. I found, too, that a lot of people were in churches where baptism was performed or administered, but there wasn't a lot of teaching about it, and they were just looking at it almost as ritual. So when we would teach at New Covenant, as I'm certain the pastors here do, we tried to use that, and I would have person after person come up to us and say, we've never heard this, and we've been in the church. So you're right, it's very important. Very important. I'm gonna pray for us. Father in heaven, would you please give us grace to reflect on the great privilege that we have to have been baptized, to have your name put on us. Lord, would you also give us grace to understand the great responsibility we have with our children, to bring them up in the training and admonition that you have instructed us to do. We thank you that this church is committed to nurturing both adults and children. We pray that you would bring to fruition your promises in all of our lives. We pray for the children of believers here this morning who may be grown and who may not know you, who may be wandering. We pray that, Lord, you would still be the covenant Lord to them, that you would bring them to saving faith and repentance. We pray that you'd help us prepare our hearts to worship you this morning. We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.