In every household there are many significant and meaningful events and days that stand out from all the rest: birthdays, Christmas, Thanksgiving Day! So life, with the passage of the swift years, becomes a treasure house of memories. Happy is the child who has a great store of them. Blessed is that family that has its own" great occasions," its own holidays and holy days!

 

The day of a baby's Baptism is one of these great occasions. Friends and relatives gather to participate in the occasion. But Baptism is more than family jubilation. In this, as in all life's deepest experiences, we reach out hands of faith toward God and seek his blessing. Here is dedication, bringing the child to the very altar of God. It is more than a significant event; it is a sacrament.

 

The covenant-keeping God of our fathers, who is our God, is the God of our children also, "to thousands." God, our Heavenly Father, claims our children as his children, and Baptism is a divinely appointed ordinance of recognition of that fact. "I will establish my covenant between me and you and your descendants after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God to you and to your descendants after you."

 

So for long centuries it has been the Christian practice to present little children in dedication to God in this holy rite. Sometimes this is done as perfunctory duty, just a custom; but Baptism is intended to be meaningful in the highest possible measure. It is an ordinance that under a simple form has a deep spiritual significance; it is a true sacrament.

 

We are thinking, not of magic, but of a profound experience, when we affirm this. It has been tried and proved by scores of Christian generations.

 

Parents who desire the best for their children (and who does not?) bend their efforts to make that best possible. More lasting than toys are memories. As the years pass, men and women fmd themselves living by the things that their fathers and mothers did even more than by what their fathers and mothers said. Baptism is a sacramental symbol of the many hopes and spiritual ambitions entertained by parents for their children. Water, indispensable to life; water, the symbol of cleansing, is used in this sacrament even as bread and wine are used in the Lord's Supper. The outward form is important because it is symbolic, not because it is magical. Christian growth is a lifelong process. But its natural and resolute beginnings are undertaken on behalf of the child by his parents in this solemn and joyous act of holy Baptism, in which Christian ideals and standards are recognized as of supreme value.

 

II. WHAT BAPTISM MEANS

1. A Recognition of a Covenant Relationship

We have all known of babies, born in a foreign land, who are Americans just the same, simply because their parents are Americans. These children are not aliens but "fellow citizens." Thus it is with the children of Christian believers. Since they are children of believing parents, they are born members of God's family.

 

Baptism is our recognition of this fact that our children are God's children, and that he claims them as his own. We become children of God, not by our own act or choice, but by his. He has made a covenant with us to be our God as he was our father's God. His promises are "to us and to our children." Hence, children of believers are regarded and treated as within the pale of the visible Church and are properly consecrated to God in Baptism.

 

The Sacrament of Baptism-“is usually to be administered in the church, in the presence of the congregation." The officiating minister addresses the congregation, saying: "This Child is now received into Christ's Church: And you the people of this congregation in receiving this Child promise with God's help to be his sponsor to the end that he may confess Christ as his Lord and Savior and come at last to His eternal Kingdom. Jesus said, 'Whoso shall receive one such little child in My name receiveth Me.'" The Church thus has a special concern and responsibility in that all baptized persons are members of the Church and under its watch and care.

 

The child is, of course, not yet a "communicant member," and will not be one until he arrives at "the years of discretion" when he is admitted by the session to communicant Church membership upon profession of his faith. His name, however, is at once recorded in the church's records as a baptized person. He is subject to and the beneficiary of the church's discipline and fellowship.

 

If the parents are granted a letter of dismissal to another church, the names of the baptized children are recorded on the back of the church letter. Thus these children are transferred with their parents to the care of the new church.

 

2. An Expression of Thanksgiving

Baptism is an expression of gratitude to God for the gift of new life; it is praise for all the lovely hopes that cluster around birth--reverence for the mystery of our being and the wonder of life, thanksgiving to God, in whom "we live and move and have our being."

 

A young woman who had lost her faith in God came, with the advent of her first baby, into a rapture of joy. She said that she must find God again, if only to say, "Thank you." God comes near to us in new blessings. Through Baptism we look up to him in humble gratitude.

 

3. A Symbol of Cleansing

Baptism is also the seal of cleansing. It implies human frailty. "Our nature must be renewed in order to have entrance into the Kingdom of God." Children do not become sons of God through this sacrament, but through the redemptive grace and power of God. Baptism is the outward sign of God's cleansing, regenerating, and renewing grace.

 

4. Acknowledgment of an Obligation

All normal parents feel new responsibilities asserting themselves as they face the obligations and privileges involved in the rearing of children.

 

"Heaven lies about us in our infancy!" That is poetry--and near kin to religion. Moreover, it expresses our feelings when we take a baby in our arms. Responding to this natural and lovely emotion, we recognize that the training of a child is serious business, and that our poor best needs reinforcement. We need God. Conscious of that need, we engage in this God-given rite, by which publicly and in a way that is hallowed by long custom we say that we accept all our God-given responsibilities. Gladly, in God's presence, we pledge ourselves to such self-discipline and devotion as will make our lives a real example to our children, and dedicate ourselves to such Christian activities as will help them in their Christian living.

 

5. An Act of Dedication

In Baptism we dedicate our child to God. We consciously and willingly consecrate him to His will and purpose. The child belongs first of all to God. So we present him to God to be employed as God pleases as a part of his great plan. But Baptism means more than consecrating our child. In it we dedicate ourselves to all the high and holy duties of parenthOL~. We affirm our desire to live, by God's grace and help, at our very best, for our children's sake and for Christ's sake. We pledge ourselves to perform "with pure and steadfast affection" those things which, maintained through the years, will make our family a center for spiritual development, a real Christian home. In this service we register before God and in the fellowship of Christ's Church our resolution and purpose to be God's agents in creating a home that will become the dwelling place for Christ's Spirit.

 

III. THE PARENTS' PART

Infant Baptism is primarily an act of faith on the part of the parents. In it we claim all the riches of God for our child. We recognize that apart from God the child cannot enter into his spiritual heritage and become a "child of the covenant." We declare our faith in the redeeming grace of Christ and acknowledge our own need of his salvation and a like need in the life of our children. So we present the child to God as a recipient of his grace.

 

But how is the child to enter into his Christian heritage? It must be mediated to him primarily through his father and mother. This is the reason why only the children of believing parents may properly be presented for Baptism. A child, if he is to have the largest opportunity for spiritual growth, needs the influence and example of both a Christian mother and a Christian father. In and through the exercise and the expression of the parents' faith the child is afforded the greatest help to a Christian faith of his own.

 

In this rite of Christian Baptism the parents accept for their child, and accept anew for themselves, the covenant of God. Then they promise, according to the words of the baptismal service, "in dependence on the grace of God," to bring up their child "in the nurture and admonition of the Lord." In other words, in presenting a child for Baptism, parents take upon themselves consciously and deliberately the obligations of their high privilege in training their children as God's children in the way of Christian faith and life.

 

This means that we will, by precept and example, give expression to our own Christian faith and will realize that our example will count even more than our precepts.

 

Earnest parents will teach their children to pray, by praying with them and for them, by saying grace at the table. They will read aloud the Bible, that great source of wisdom and of knowledge, to their children. They will take them to church and to the Sunday church school. They will thus maintain their own covenant with God and his Church, and fulfill their promise to teach their children after them.

 

With grateful hearts we will say to ourselves in the words of John Calvin, "how unjust shall we be if we drive away from Christ those whom he invites to himself, if we deprive them of the gifts with which he adorns them; if we exclude those whom he graciously admits!" We will in turn avail ourselves of the rite which expressed the faith of our fathers, which they believed and we believe to have them divinely instituted, this sacrament of Christian Baptism.

 

We too will keep and transmit the faith and avail ourselves of Christian Baptism as a means to that end.