The Blessings of Being a Covenant Child March 2, 2008
Posted by Anya in : I won't keep things purposely vague , 3commentsI was (obviously) thinking about this today, perhaps because I ended up sitting with Beka during church. She’s four, her dad was sick, and her mom was playing the piano, and thus it seemed prudent for someone to be keeping an eye on her. 
One of the blessings, of covenant children, is the funny things they say from time to time. New Horizons, the magazine of the OPC, actually contains an “Out of the mouths of children” section. 
Anyway, today it was Beka’s turn. As our pastor and the elders walked out of his study, Beka said to me, “There’s my friend, the pastor. He’s the real pastor; the other one [one of the elders] just pretends to be the pastor.” Apparently she was a bit confused by the fact that an elder has been leading worship since our pastor had been on vacation… however, I don’t think she managed to top what Elpinoine said at about the same age. The guest pastor stood in the pulpit and Elpinoine looked horrified. “Where’s God?” she asked.
But there are many other, richer blessings than the interesting questions children come up with. I think that one is an assurance of faith. And this isn’t some “assurance” that just comes from faith being something your parents have, but it comes from being brought up in the truth. Perhaps it is comparable to your native language. You learn to speak it with confidence, because you’ve been speaking it all your life. And you get better at it, too, finding the meanings of words, learning correct grammatical structure, in the same way that you learn to research and defend your faith. You can grow up trusting in God, which makes an enormous change in your worldview and mindset.
These are a very… few… of the blessings. They’re hard to put into words. I know I’ve had even many more, due to being classically homeschooled and everything else — that has left me well equipped in matters of faith, and (I think! I hope!) really for all of life. But the blessings more than amply make up for the fact that many covenant kids can’t point to a particular date and say, “Oh, I became a Christian then. And before I was a Christian I did drugs and…” We want boring testimonies, really. They’re good things. It is far better, far more natural, for children to grow up in a covenantal relationship with God than for it to be something dragged in from the outside, something added on after years of living in other ways. (That is a major reason I support infant baptism: I believe that it is much more in keeping with the covenantal way God works, through families and communities of His chosen people.) Far better for us to never have to deal with having to deal with addictions to sin. And I am certainly not saying that covenant children don’t sin. We do. We definitely do. But being brought up in the church as children of God does dissuade from much sin, because from when we are very young, we are given the identity as children of God. That is a beautiful and precious blessing.
So I’m very interested in your perspectives on these things! Infant baptism, being (or not being) covenant children, blessings which you’ve found from the way you were brought up in the church.
