your congregation, we would like to consider this morning this question that we've looked at on a past occasion also. The question, what is the status of the children of believers in the New Testament church? What is the status of the children of believers in the New Testament church? Now, on a past occasion we We looked at the subject of infant baptism, and we came to this basic, you know, if you want the argument in a nutshell, in its basic form, then this is it. God put children into the church in the time of Abraham. They must remain there unless God puts them out. And then thirdly, God nowhere has put them out. And that's it. That's the basic argument. God has put children into the church at the time of Abraham. They must stay there unless God puts them out, and God has nowhere put them out. Now, what we'd like to do this morning is look at this concept of the household. God is a God of families, we are told in the Bible, and we want to consider this concept of the Christian household, or even household baptism. So we speak about infant baptism, and that's fine. Perhaps a better way of speaking about it, though, would be covenant baptism or household baptism. And I want to seek to, with God's help this morning, show you that how this is a very biblical idea. It's certainly clear in the New Testament, you see households being baptized. So Acts 16 verse 15, you have Lydia, the seller of purple from Thyatira, she's over in Philippi, she hears Paul, she's Her heart is opened, and we read in Acts 16, 15, she was baptized and her household. Later on in that same chapter, you have someone else in Philippi. He's a jailer. He's going to take his own life, and yet he cries out. Paul tells him, do yourself no harm. What must I do to be saved? He says, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. and thou shalt be saved, and thy house." And verse 33, we read, the jailer was baptized, he and all his, straightway. Acts 18 verse eight gives you another example. Crispus, a man called Crispus, believes with his house and is baptized. First Corinthians 1.16, you've got a man called Stephanos, He believes and His house is baptized. So, you have this concept of the household in Scripture. And it's clear the apostles baptized households. Now, at this point, we want to be Berean. We want to look at that and say, okay, let's not just look at these sort of in isolation. Let's be Berean. Let's go to the whole Bible. Let's look at the whole Scriptures. Let's go back to the Old Testament scriptures. Let's see where God began. Where does this concept begin? And so we're going to be Berean. We're going to search the scriptures this morning and ask, you know, is this a biblical concept? What can we learn about this household idea from the scriptures? And the thing is, you can go all the way back to creation. Remember children, when God created Adam firstly on the sixth day, and everything's very good. And then God comes in Genesis 2 and he says, but there's something before sin that's not good. There's something that before sin is not good. It is not good for the man to be alone. So from his rib, he creates Eve, and Adam says, this is now bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, and Adam and Eve become one, they marry, they become one. For this cause a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they too are now one flesh." There's the beginning of the house or the household idea. The word's not there, but the concept clearly is. And after this, wherever in Scripture you find house, you have the idea or you have children there as well. The household always includes children. Even the way we speak today. How many people are in your house? You count father, mother, you count children. In the language of the Bible, one man said, a person's house does not refer incidentally, but primarily to the children. You're thinking house, you're thinking children. You're thinking family. It even includes the stranger. We read that this morning in the fifth commandment from Deuteronomy 5. Remember, you keep the Sabbath day. Who keeps the Sabbath day? Well, the father and the mother. Who else? And your children, and even the stranger, the person who comes in from the outside, they keep it too. If they're in your house, they keep the Sabbath day. Even your animals keep the, you know, are not to do work on, unnecessary work on this day. And you might think, well, come on, this is a really obvious point, of course household includes children and all that's in it. Well, it is an obvious point, but why then, the question is, when you come to a passage like Acts 16, verse 15, and you read about Lydia, whose heart the Lord opened, and then you read, she was baptized and her household. Why then, at that point, would we say, here household must mean something different? Why would we say at this point, this must mean, household here must mean believers in the house. That this must mean those who have intelligently come to understand and have believed and repented and trusted themselves to the Savior and profess saving faith. That's what the household must mean here. No, household means household. Household means everyone in the house. Now here's a very clear point today and certainly in the Bible too. The idea of representation. So children, if we as pastor, elder and congregation, we say we're building a new church building over here. You know, and we get our new church and we build our new church. You know, you're moving too, right? You're moving too because we represent you. And you could say, well, I want to stay here in this gym. Well, it's kind of too bad. We're going over here. You know, we represent you. Or your father says, for example, we're going to go on vacation over here. At the end of the day, you might say, well, I wanna go there instead. That's fine, you can ask. But at the end of the day, your father's decision, your parent's decision, that's where you're gonna go because they represent you. Now that's true biblically here. You see this all the way throughout. What the father does affects the whole house. If the father believes, same for the mother too, of course, 1 Corinthians 7 makes that point. If one parent believes, there's a blessing upon the whole house. But if the parents do not believe, if they're not Christian, they're not gonna go to church, they're not going to believe in the God of the Bible, if they don't believe, the whole house is affected. Children, if your parents did not go to church, if your parents said, we're not gonna believe in God anymore, we're not gonna go to church anymore, think about what that would have meant for you. You'd have grown up without church. So the point here is that what the father does, what the parents do, affects the whole house, either positively with blessing or negatively with cursing. And you see that throughout the Bible. You see that in the chapter we read with Abraham. Remember what happens to Abraham? Abraham, he was an idolater. He was in this pagan land. They did not worship God. They did not worship Jehovah. But the Lord comes to Abraham, He speaks to Abraham, He preaches the gospel to Abraham. Abraham believes the gospel and it's counted to him personally for righteousness. And then the Lord comes and He covenants with Abraham. Abraham with thee, you singular. I am going to make a covenant with you, you singular. And Abraham, I'm going to give you a sign and a seal, circumcision of this covenant that I'm making with you. But this same covenant sign that is a picture of the gospel, Romans 4.11, of the righteousness which is by faith, that same sign, the Lord says, now you give that sign to your infant children. He that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every man, child in your generations that is born in your house or bought with money, any stranger which is not of your seed. So very clearly, because of Abraham's covenant relationship with God, God was pleased to come and to covenant with the eight-year-old son and the children of the house as well. The children of believers were put into the church at the time of Abraham. And you've got to say there, what a God this is. What an overflowing fountain of all good this God is. He's a God whose grace super abounds. He's coming not only to us, He's coming to our children. He's coming to our house. He's coming to that which is most precious to us. It's telling you that this God, He is a God of families. He's a God who loves the families of his people. We speak of the family as the building block of society, and so it is. But the building block of the church is also the family. The families here are the building blocks of the church. The church of God is not merely the sum of its individual converts." Douglas Bannerman. The church of God is not merely the sum of all the individual converts. God had promised to Abraham, in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed. And so, you could go forward to the time of Joshua. And remember children, Joshua, Joshua comes and they've crossed the Jordan and they're into the promised land. And some of the people want to go back. They kind of liked it over there with these gods that they liked it. And Joshua says, no, no, no, no. You cannot sit on the fence. You can't sort of be in this border land. I want to be part of the God of Israel, but I also want some of this over here. No, says Joshua, you cannot do that. Make a decision. Choose you this day whom you will serve. whether the God's over there. If they're God's, go give it their all. Give it your all. If they're God's, serve them. Or if God is God, serve him. Choose this day whom you will serve. But as for me, he says, and my house, we will serve the Lord. So he says to the other families, you go over there if you want. If that's your decision, you want to serve these wicked gods, you take your families over there and you go there. He does not say that to his children. He does not say to his children, children, if you don't want to be part of the religion of my home, you can go over there too. No. He says that to the other heads, but he says to his family, my family, my house, we serve the Lord. And the house of Joshua becomes this house of God-fearing, God-loving, God-worshiping family. Think of the opposite. Think of the opposite of this. Just a few more years later after Joshua, you've got a man and children called Achan. And Achan, you know, he says something different to Joshua. He might not have said it out loud, but this is actually what he said. As for me and my house, we want to serve money. We're going to serve the world. We're going to be in the church here. We didn't go back to the other gods. We're still worshiping Jehovah, but actually, we want to serve money. And so he sees the goal that God says, you do not touch that stuff. That is curse. Don't touch it. He looks at it and he goes, just a little bit, I can hide a little bit. He takes some of it, he hides it in his house. Now remember what happens to Achan. Achan is stoned to death. Not just Achan, the whole household, the wife, the sons, the daughters. God deals with his people in terms of family. So there you see Joshua, what he does positively affects his whole family. Achan, what he does wickedly, affects this whole family. This representative principle is seen throughout the Scriptures. Now, you can actually go to every single covenant you can find in Scripture. And what you find in each one is God covenanting with someone and Always with children, or it might not always say children, but sometimes it might say seed. Sometimes it might say family. But there's always this representation. God, covenanting, and then people who are represented. Children, seed, family. So you can think of the covenant that God makes with His Son before the world was, the Lord Jesus Christ, often called the covenant of redemption. And there He makes a covenant with His Son and with His seed. He will see His seed, Isaiah 53 says. You can go into the Garden of Eden, and there's another covenant there. We call it the covenant of works. You've got Adam. And God comes and He covenants with Adam. Adam, don't touch that tree. You touch that, you will surely die. But who else dies if he touches the tree? Everyone else who comes after him. Because Adam represents all humanity that comes after him. So 1 Corinthians 15, 22, as in Adam, all die. So again, God covenant, one man, one person. and his seed after him. You come into the covenant of grace in time, and you can go through all these covenants that you find. They're all different parts of the same covenant of grace. Noah, who goes into the ark? Noah, his wife, and his family, his household go with him into the ark. And God covenants with him, with Noah, and says, I will establish my covenant with you and with your seed after you." And you can do that with Abraham, with Moses, with David, all the way down. And so now here's the point. Has this clear covenant structure changed? God covenanting with Abraham, Noah, Abraham. Moses, David, their seed after them, their children after them, very clear. Has that now changed? Is there something different now? Was that just the Old Testament? Is God now saying to believers something very different? Is God now saying, I will be God to you only who believe? I will be God to you, but no longer to seed family, children, household. No more covenant, no more promises for them until they take the initiative and believe in me, then they can have it. That would be a massive change. That would be a massive change in the way God is dealing with his people. Well, again, let's be Berean. and ask, is that what you find? Is that what the Scripture teaches? If you look at the Old Testament and you say, well, is there anything in the Old Testament that tells us that God in the future will no longer covenant with the household? Is there something in the Old Testament that speaks about the new covenant, that the gospel age, the times we live in right now, that God will only covenant with individuals No longer with families. Well, the Bible does speak about the new covenant. Jeremiah 31, verse 31, behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel. And in this new covenant, he says there in Jeremiah 31, I'm gonna put the law in their hearts. And you go all the way to Hebrews chapter eight, verse six, and it calls this new covenant a better covenant. Okay, so there is in the Bible a new covenant that's a better covenant. But what's better about it? Is it better because now only those who profess to believe are in it? Is it better now because only believers are in it? It's impossible to say only believers are in it. Even those who practice, you know, adult or believers only baptism. There's always gonna be people who profess to believe something and yet are not true. So you can't have a totally pure church in that sense in this life. But so what's better about it? But really the question then is, What place do children have in the new covenant? Well, let's be Berean. Let's search the scriptures. What place do children have in this better new covenant where the Lord puts his law in their hearts? There's loads of texts. Isaiah 54 verse 13, Isaiah 54 is a hugely covenant chapter, right in between Isaiah 53, the suffering of Christ, Isaiah 55, the gospel that goes to whoever's thirsty, and in between it you have this covenant chapter. And speaking of this covenant, the Lord says in verse 13, all thy children shall be taught of the Lord, and great shall be the peace of thy children. In Isaiah 59, the Lord speaks about this covenant. He says, this is my covenant with them in these days, saith the Lord. My spirit that is upon thee, speaking about the coming of the spirit, Pentecost. My spirit that is upon thee and my words which I have put in thy mouth will not depart out of your mouth, nor out of the mouth of your seed, nor out of the mouth of your seed's seed, says the Lord from this time forth and forever. Isaiah 61, eight and nine, I will make an everlasting covenant and their seed shall be known among the gentiles and their offspring among the people. They are a seed which the Lord has blessed. Jeremiah 32, the chapter after the new covenant chapter, after saying I'm going to make a better covenant, a new covenant, I'm going to put the law into their hearts, in the next chapter, They shall be my people. I will be their God. I will give them one heart. There you go, there's the heart. I will give them one heart, one way that they may fear me forever for the good of them and of their children after them. Now, you're a believing Jew. You're reading your Bible. What is the impression you have? Do you read this Bible and think, God has come to me, he's come to my family, he's covenanting with us as a family, and you read these kinds of verses and hundreds more like this, what's the impression do you have? Do you think God's going to do something in the future where it's going to be purer, it's not going to be my children? It's unthinkable. It's absolutely unthinkable. And so if you sort of come to You know, let's imagine you're from Corinth, that wicked city, right? And you're in the Old Testament, and you hear about the God of Israel, and somebody comes, an evangelist comes, preaches the gospel to you in Corinth, and you hear it, and you hear about this Messiah who's going to come, this Savior, this way of dealing with sin, the sacrifice for sin that takes away my sin, and you look to it, and by faith you believe in it, and you believe in the Messiah who's to come. You're a Greek, you're a Corinthian, And you're converted, and you come and you say, I've been converted. I've believed this gospel. I've repented of my sins. And you receive the sign and the seal of the covenant of grace, circumcision. And you think to yourself, my children, my children in my home, I hope one day that they will believe this God too. I'm going to teach them. I'm going to pray over them. I hope one day they can believe and be circumcised. And then, you know, a few months later, you've got the feast, one of the feasts in Jerusalem, let's say the Passover feast, and you go up to your first Passover feast. And before you go, you say to your children, you know, one day, sons, I hope you can come with me. I hope you can believe in this God, profess Him by faith, be circumcised, and come to this feast with me. Do you know what would happen to you when you arrive in Jerusalem, they'd send you back home. They'd send you back home. Exodus 12 verse 48, when a stranger, like the Corinthian, will sojourn with you and will keep the Passover to the Lord, let all his males be circumcised, and then let him come near and keep it. Quoting Douglas Bannerman, speaking of this man's children, this man could not get into the feast without his children. The father who wants to come in by himself is very clearly told that his profession of faith in the God of Abraham looks suspicious. If your faith was the right faith, you would have brought your household with you, they would say. The Lord will not be the God of any man who does not desire him to be the God of his seed with him." He's saying it's absolutely unthinkable for the Old Testament. But, okay, the Old Testament Jew, come into the New Testament and say, okay, what place do children have here? Is there anything in the New Testament that states or even hints that this covenant household is now completely broken up for something better. Is there anything in the New Testament that says this covenant household is now broken up for something better? Luke 10 verse five. Okay, believing Jew, you're reading your New Testament now. With all this, what you've learned about the Old Testament God, to Abraham and his children, and now you're reading Luke, you're listening to Dr. Luke, "'Into whatsoever house you enter, first say, "'Peace be to this house.'" Or then you're walking along and you see a man on a tree, he's a little man, he's called Zacchaeus, And you hear Jesus of Nazareth speaking to him, and Jesus of Nazareth says, Zacchaeus, come down, for salvation has come to you. You've gone up the tree, you've been looking for me, salvation has come to you. No, he doesn't say to you. This day, he says, salvation has come to your house. You go into Acts. Acts 5, 42, Acts 20, verse 20, and you do not find the apostles going from people to people. You don't find them going from believer to believer. You find them going from house to house. This concept is still there. And so Cornelius, another pagan, he, comes to believe and sends for Peter, and Peter will tell you words whereby you, Cornelius, you devout God-fearing man, you and your house will be saved. Think of the qualification for eldership, 1 Timothy 3, 4, one that rules well his own house, having his children in subjection. You think house, you think children. There's so much more you could look at in the New Testament. Jesus taking the little children in His arms and blessing them. Paul saying in 1 Corinthians 7 verse 14, if there's one believing parent in the house, the children are holy. It doesn't mean they're regenerate. It doesn't mean they've professed saving faith. It means they're sanctified. It means that God is coming in covenant to them as well. It doesn't mean they're not believing, by the way, it's just, it doesn't necessarily mean that they are. Think of the way in which the epistles speak to the saints at Colossae and the saints at Ephesus, to those who have believed, and then you keep going on and you read and you read and you find children, don't you? Children, children. Hold on a minute, I thought you were speaking to the saints. I thought you were speaking to those who have believed. Yes, I am. And I also speak to the children. Children, obey your parents in the Lord. Whatever does that mean to a child who's outside of the church? There is not one instance, David Silverside said, there is not one instance in Scripture of children of believing parents who are spoken about as though they were outside of the church. The only references to children are of children within the church. Now, a warning here, grace doesn't run in the blood. So children, because you have a believing father or mother or grandparent, does not mean automatically that you're believing too. It doesn't mean automatically that you will believe too. But grace does not run in the blood. So to our children, we say you must be born again. We preach the gospel to you. Repent and believe the gospel. There's nothing automatic about this. But children in the church are not the same as children in the world. God has covenanted with you children. He has covenanted with you. God has come to you, and He's not saying, listen, if you decide to covenant with me, I'll be a God to you. No, that's not what He said to you. It's not what He says to you. Children, what God says to you is this, I am God, I am the God of your father, I am the God of your mother, and I am covenanting to be your God too. I promise you with my own name, I promise you that you repent, you believe the gospel, I will do everything for you. I am your God. I will be God to you. Look unto me and be saved." So let's just wrap this up and try and put all of this together. We see nothing in the Old Testament, nothing in the Old Testament that predicts the breakdown of the covenant household. We see nothing in the New Testament that even hints at the breakdown of the covenant household. On the other hand, we see everything that speaks of the same or continuity. It's better, it's bigger. Girls can now receive the sign of the covenant and baptism. It's not so much restricted to Jews. Now you can go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. All you need is water. All you need is a little water to baptize anyone. So there's nothing in the New Testament that speaks of the breakdown, only what speaks of the continuity. So you're not surprised when you go to Acts 16 and you see Lydia, whose heart the Lord opened, and then you read, she was baptized and her household. You're not surprised when you come to the Philippian jailer, again in Acts 16, and he cries out, what must I do, me, me personally, me before the Holy God, what must I do to be saved? And the Lord comes, or Paul comes and says, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou, singular, you, jailer, thou. you will be saved, period. There's no period there. There is no period there. You can put a comma there if you want, but you don't even need one. Thou shalt be saved and thy house. And so there's no surprise then that when Paul comes in, preaches to them. Verse 34, when he had brought them into his house, he was baptized the jailer, he and all his straightway. And just by the way, verse 34, it doesn't come out in English, but it's absolutely there in Greek. Verse 34 of Acts 16, when he had brought them into his house, he set meat before them and rejoiced, believing. That word believing, masculine singular. He believing. It's emphasizing the jailer. He believing in God with all his house. So the whole matter, Lenski writes, is rather simple. The apostles and their assistants baptized whole households and by baptism received them into the Christian church. This was the apostolic practice. Well, in all of this, what a God we serve. What a God we serve, a God of families. A God who is coming to you children as well. When I preach to the congregation, I'm not just preaching to the old people. I'm not just preaching to the believers even. I'm preaching to you all. I'm preaching to you children as well. Even if you don't understand everything, that's fine. You can ask questions later. You don't need to understand everything. but I'm still preaching to you, because you are part of the church, you are part of the covenant community. And you are, the Lord is saying, when you look at people like Lydia, and you see, okay, the Lord opened her heart, then you can say, Lord, open my heart. You look at the jailer, and he's saying, what must I do to be saved? Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. You can say, Lord, what must I do to be saved? And you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved, and your house. The Lord Jesus says, I love them that love me, and those that seek me early shall find me. Well, may the Lord bless this word. Let us pray.