In God’s good design for this world, there is a covenantal relationship between parents and their children, in which the decisions of parents automatically affect the children.

Children, while individuals, are not merely individuals, but members of a family, a people, a nation, and so on. This is how we should see our world of relationships, for it is how God sees the world. 

As the Princeton theologian A.A. Hodge once wrote, “God has in all respects made the standing of a child depend upon that of the parent. The sin of the parent carries away the infant from God; likewise, so the faith of the parent brings the infant near to God.”

This is simply how it is. Even parents today who militate against this, who wickedly desire for their young children to somehow independently “choose their own identities,” are still teaching and applying their own ideologies to their children. It is inescapable. 

And so here this morning, we are baptizing our little brother James, acknowledging that we live in a covenantal world, and that by God’s grace he has been born into a Christian family. He is a Kramer, and by this baptism, he is received into the church as a Christian.

And so we pray that the faith of his parents, his family, and this church, will bring him nearer and nearer to God, all the days of his life. Amen.