Covenantal Child Development (Infancy), 3

Lesson 3: Baby Faith

But you brought me out of the womb.
You made me trust at my mother's breasts.
I was thrown on you from my mother's womb.
You are my God since my mother bore me (Psalm 22:9-10, WEB).

The people of Old Covenant Israel sang the Psalms, including the one above, as a normal part of their worship. This inspired song led them to believe that they each enjoyed a personal, faith-based relationship with God from the beginning. In this lesson, I want to answer the questions:

1.     How such a thing can be?
2.     Can this be true for Christian families today?

Let me begin by saying that I know that Psalm 22 is a Messianic Psalm, so first and foremost, it's about Jesus. On the other hand, it also has an historical application, and ancient Israelites sang it in the first person. Therefore Jesus is not the only one who can claim He trusted God at His mother's breasts.

Before I ask you to examine this issue of faith, however, I want to remind you of the main point of the last lesson. The infant in the cradle has to grapple with a deep spiritual reality. He must begin to put together the rudiments of his worldview, and he must either use self or God as the orientation point for that worldview.

Another way to put this is to say that a baby has to decide how it's going to relate to the God who confronts him, even in the cradle. I know it seems strange to think this way, but we accept the fact that beings without the power of language or reason form fundamental relationships all the time. Think of a puppy or a kitten.

The puppy wags its tail as it licks the face of anyone who shows it attention. The kitten purrs as you stroke its fur. These little creatures have no words and no reason, yet they orient themselves to people in these ways.

As the puppy or kitten can relate to humans, so baby humans can relate to God. God is simply there, and they must orient themselves to Him one way or another. They will either trust Him or try to shut Him out.

The Bible tells us that, "The wicked go astray from the womb. They are wayward as soon as they are born, speaking lies" (Psalm 58:3). On the other hand, a man from a covenant family may say, "I have relied on you from the womb. You are he who took me out of my mother's womb. I will always praise you" (Psalm 71:6).

These verses provide additional evidence from Scripture that children make their fundamental orientation toward God even from the womb.

The best word I can think of for this kind of fundamental orientation is "attitude". Your attitude is how you relate to someone [or some thing] in the inmost part of your being. You can relate to someone with an attitude of kindness or contempt, trust or suspicion.

Your attitude, then, refers to the way that you, in the inner man, relate to another. This manner of relating is so basic, that it can exist apart from language or reason. That is why I call attitudes "fundamental" orientations. And when it comes to saving faith, the indispensable dimension is attitude.

The word "faith", as used in the Bible, actually has three dimensions. One is the cognitive or intellectual dimension. This aspect of faith affirms certain facts as true (e.g., I believe that Jesus rose from the dead).

Another facet of faith is behavioral, for the word translated "faith" in the New Testament can also mean "faithfulness". I think this is what James was getting at in his epistle when he said that works makes faith perfect. This is the outward visible part of your faith that testifies to the reality and presence of the inward aspects.

Finally, there is the dispositional or relational dimension of faith. It is an attitude of trust. Preachers appeal to this when they say that it's not enough to believe THAT the bridge can hold you, but you must commit your weight by stepping out onto the bridge (a behavioral response that confirms an inner attitude).

The word that best describes this innermost dimension of faith is "trust". That is the word used in Psalm 22:9, quoted at the beginning of this lesson. And that is the dimension of faith that determines the difference between saved and lost.

Now I would like to apply all this to your your baby. I am writing this to Christian parents of very young children. Your infant child right now is either a believer or an unbeliever. What, ultimately, makes the difference? I can answer in one word: GRACE!

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God . . . (Eph. 2:8, WEB).

Faith -- particularly, faith as an attitude – is a work of God's grace in the human heart. That is the same no matter what the age or mental development of a person is. Faith is a work wrought in the human spirit by the grace of God alone.

Do you remember how in a previous lesson I mentioned that all children come with an inborn bias against God (Original Sin)? Well, apart from His grace you relate to God according to that bias. Grace is the free gift of God that gives you the ability to relate to Him in a better way than your bias dictates.

At the end of yesterday's lesson, I challenged you to begin praying about your child's spiritual state. Not what he may do at some date in the dim future, but about the spiritual issues he's dealing with right now. From today's lesson you can see that you may pray specifically for God's grace to intervene with the gift of faith RIGHT NOW.

You do not need to wait five, eight or twelve years to pray that your child come to Christ. The Holy Spirit is with the child, confronting him even from the womb. John the Baptist, while still in Elizabeth's womb, recognized the presence of Jesus and leaped for joy (Luke 1:43-44). That demonstrates a fundamental orientation of trust in God.

Moreover, even if your child does not become a believer from infancy, you have many reassurances from the Word of God that your child will receive that special grace to believe -- if you, as a parent fulfill the covenantal conditions for the promises God has made.

The good news is that the key to claiming God's covenantal promises regarding children lies in something we have been discussing throughout this lesson, namely faith. Only here, it's your own faith that makes the difference.

In the next lesson, I want to present to you the Biblically warranted parental faith that will lay hold of God's trans-generational covenantal promise.

Covenantal Child Development (Infancy), 2

Lesson 2: Born to Interpret, part II

In the previous lesson, you saw that an infant in the cradle is not intellectually idle. He is busy putting together the fundamental interpretive standards around which he will continue to construct his worldview. Today, I want you to consider the spiritual implications of the baby's worldview activity.

You and I have become so accustomed to language and rational thought that it's hard for us to imagine the baby's consciousness. No words… No concepts… Nothing but you. . . AND GOD.

The Bible makes it clear that God confronts every person in the world. We can see this plainly in Psalm 139.

YHWH, you have searched me, and You know me.

You know my sitting down and my rising up.

You perceive my thoughts from afar.

You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.

For there is not a word on my tongue, but, behold, YHWH, You know it altogether.

You hem me in behind and before. You laid your hand on me.

This knowledge is beyond me. It's lofty .I can't attain it.

Where could I go from Your Spirit?

Or where could I flee from Your presence?

If I ascend up into heaven, You are there.

If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, You are there!

If I take the wings of the dawn, and settle in the uttermost parts of the sea;

Even there Your hand will lead me, and your right hand will hold me.

If I say, "Surely the darkness will overwhelm me; the light around me will be night;" even the darkness doesn't hide from You, but the night shines as the day. The darkness is like light to you.

For you formed my inmost being. You knit me together in my mother's womb.

I will give thanks to you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Your works are wonderful. My soul knows that very well.

My frame wasn't hidden from you, when I was made in secret, woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my body.

In your book they were all written, the days that were ordained for me, when as yet there were none of them.

Imagine how hard it would be to ignore God if all thoughts and mental concepts were wiped away. Nothing left, but the reality of you and Him. Nevertheless, apart from His grace, everyone suppresses that knowledge. Look at Romans 1:18-20 (WEB):

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known of God is revealed in them, for God revealed it to them. For the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity; that they may be without excuse.

Rejection of God is the core and essence of sin. I came into this world a God-rejecting sinner, and so did you. The Psalmist says, "Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity. In sin my mother conceived me" (Psalm 51:5, WEB).

This means that from the beginning – even before birth, going back to conception -- a child exercises an anti-God bias. Theologians have named this inborn bias "Original Sin". The question before us is how that bias affects the origin and development of a child's worldview.

You have already seen that a newborn does not have the ability to make sense of what he encounters in the world around him. But because of an innate drive, he starts making mental connections that will help him understand the input from his eyes, ears and other sensory organs. For a worldview, it's rudimentary, but it fits our definition of a worldview, nonetheless.

The point I now want to make is that every worldview has an ultimate reference point. Your worldview is either rooted in yourself or in your Creator. No exceptions. (Even the ancient pagan religious worldviews started with gods that resembled man -- Rom. 1:22 23.)

This means that as little Junior coos in his cradle, piecing together the beginnings of his worldview, he has a choice to make. A deeply spiritual choice with far-reaching implications. He must choose whether he will orient his interpretation of the world around the Creator whose presence he cannot escape, or around himself.

Let that sink in a moment. Long before he ever learns to read the Bible, or to sing "Jesus Loves Me", or to understand a gospel message, your baby has made a choice. The choice is real, and God recognizes the choice and its eternal implications as valid. He has chosen himself as the reference point for his worldview. Or has he?

Our God is a gracious God, and He does not leave His people without hope for them or for their children. "For the promise is to you, and to your children . . .” (Acts 2:39) The vehicle for these intergenerational blessings is something the Bible calls a covenant.

Christian marriage is a covenant before God. The LORD instituted the marriage covenant in order to raise up godly offspring. In the Bible we read, "Did He not make one, although He had the residue of the Spirit? Why one? He sought a godly seed" (Micah 2:15).

God is not limited in the free exercise of His grace. He confronts your child, even from the womb. And if the baby has the ability to reject God from the beginning, then He can give the child grace and ability to make the right choice, as well.

While these teachings may sound unfamiliar to you, I invite you to search the Scriptures to see if these things be so. If you are a Christian, your child is holy (literally, "a saint" I Cor. 7:14) before God. He never meant for you to consider that the salvation of your child is random or uncertain. It rests upon conditional promises just as certainly as your own salvation does.

We are coming to the end of this lesson, but before I close I want you, as a parent who loves and nurtures a little child to ask yourself how you pray for that little one. Do you pray that your child will "someday" come to Jesus? What about now?

Under the fluffy blankets, and beneath the soft flannel sleeper, a mighty conflict rages for the soul of your child. You have strong promises from God to claim. Do you pray about what is happening even now in your child's heart?

"Heavenly Father, we thank You for the great and wondrous salvation which You wrought for us in Christ. Right now we pray for our children and grandchildren of all ages. Fulfill your covenant promises; bring our children to repentance and saving faith in our Lord Jesus. Help us, as parents and grandparents to learn all the conditions you place upon us, and give us the grace to fulfill those conditions that we may see our children grow up as godly people. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen."

In the next lesson we will talk about the various facets of faith, and how old your child must be to have saving faith. In the meantime, if you'd like to know more about what the covenant means to you and to your child, why not order a copy of "Rearing Faithful Children" and read the chapter entitled, "Life in the Covenant with Father"?


Copyright 2006

By Craig Mutton

Standard Copyright License

Whole Person Discipleship

Did you know that the word soul as used in the Hebrew Scriptures often refers to the whole person? Consider Genesis 2:7 where you can see that body + breath (spirit) of life = soul.

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. 

Keep that in mind as you read the following passage.

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD: And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. Deuteronomy 6:4-8

Although I have seen this scripture applied to both Christian schools and home education, too often, I have failed to see the text fully implemented by teachers or parents in an educational context. The Reason?

We have inherited from the ancient Greeks a cognitive model of learning. In contrast, look at the total involvement of parent/teacher and student/disciple modeled in Deuteronomy 6: sitting, walking, lying down, and rising up.

Thus, when we engage our student-disciples on spiritual, emotional and physical levels in addition to the mental, we will find that two things happen. 1) Boredom evaporates as they fully involve themselves in the process, and 2) they LEARN as they assimilate your teaching into the totality of their experience.

In future posts, I want to explore how to use Whole Brain Teaching as one tool to achieve your goal of Whole Person Discipleship.