Church Membership and Our Children

Driving home: So the children of the covenant are by baptism distinguished from the world and solemnly received into the visible church.

Martin quotes from an older edition of the Trinity Hymnal, detailing the order of service and language used for infant baptism in Presbyterian churches, to illustrate the practice he is critiquing regarding covenantal birthright to church membership.

First, we do not regard them as having a covenantal birthright to membership in the church and therefore we do not sprinkle them as infants. That's the first indication. We do not regard our children as having a covenantal birthright to membership in the church and therefore sprinkle them as infants. When many of our Presbyterian friends have a service that they call the baptizing of their infants and a little one is brought to the front of the church and the minister holds that child, the language used is found in the early editions of the Trinity Hymnal which is in the pew.

8:37 - 9:21 Read in full sermon

In this part of the sermon: The second manifestation is not encouraging baptism or church membership for children and adolescents, even with apparent evidences of grace, because not all general duties are…

An analogy of a 14-year-old boy, showing signs of grace and struggling with sexual urges, who reads 1 Corinthians 7 and believes he should get married. His father explains that while the desire to obey is good, it's not the timely obedience, illustrating that not all general duties are timely duties, especially for children.

He shows a heart turned to God and to his people and to his ways and to his church. And all of the marks of a converted young man. He's come into puberty and he begins to feel these powerful engines of sexual urges surging through his being. And one day he's having his devotions and he reads in 1 Corinthians 7, 1 these words, concerning the things whereof he wrote, it's good for a man not to touch a woman, but because of fornication let each man have his own wife and let each woman have her own husband.

26:21 - 26:52 Read in full sermon

Driving home: I believe that's the greatest danger facing the future of Trinity Church. It is what I regard as the Trojan horse that will bring about the demise of Trinity Church.

Martin uses the Greek myth of the Trojan horse to illustrate the danger of admitting decent, orthodox, but unconverted young people into church membership. He explains that these seemingly harmless individuals will eventually open the gates for worldliness and spiritual destruction within the church.

will assume that those who grow up among us, having the nurture of Christian home, of a biblical instruction, whether by homeschooling, Christian school, who grow up under a sound ministry of the word of God in the Sunday school, in the church, that when they come to adulthood, and they are decent and orthodox, if they apply for membership, how can we keep them out? I believe that's the greatest danger facing the future of Trinity Church. It is what I regard as the Trojan horse that will bring about the demise of Trinity Church. You know what the Trojan horse is?

46:14 - 46:51 Read in full sermon