“What is the appropriate age to baptize believing children?”

Here’s a question that’s been asked more than a few times by Baptist pastors and churches seeking to be faithful to Scripture and responsible in their discipleship. Broadly speaking, you might take one of two positions: either you baptize believing children upon a credible profession of faith, or you delay baptism until they’ve matured as individuals — whether that means they pass subjective milestones (e.g., understanding or increased independence) or objective milestones (e.g., moving out from under their parents’ authority).

The tension has existed for centuries because Scripture doesn’t give us a simple and neat answer key — but it also doesn’t leave us without any direction.

What Is Baptism?

As with many disagreements, the first critical step is to get the question right. In this case, before wading into any issues related to the practice of baptism, we should ask, What is baptism anyway?

For more than three centuries, the first paragraph in chapter 29 of the 1689 London Baptist Confession has articulated the fundamental conviction of believer-baptism:

Baptism is an ordinance of the New Testament, ordained by Jesus Christ, to be unto the party baptized, a sign of his fellowship with him, in his death and resurrection; of his being engrafted into him; of remission of sins; and of giving up into God, through Jesus Christ, to live and walk in newness of life.

“Baptism is a sign of the believer’s faith-union with Jesus.”

In short, baptism is a sign of the believer’s union with Jesus by faith. It is a sign for those who are in Christ, and in order to be doubly clear, the second paragraph of chapter 29 tells us who qualifies for such a sign: those who actually profess repentance toward God, faith in Jesus Christ, and obedience to him as Lord.

The three words mentioned here — repentance, faith, obedience — are the ingredients that contribute to that good Baptist phrase “credible profession of faith.” The little adjective credible means more than simply believable. In light of the confession, we might say a credible profession is one that appears genuine because of discernible repentance, positive faith, and practical obedience — markers that we can reliably, but not infallibly, read. This inevitably determines how we practice baptism, and these three elements are so essential in one’s profession that our local church (along with many other Baptist churches) reflects each of them in baptismal vows.

Unadorned Union with Jesus

As an example of baptismal vows, our local church has our pastors ask the baptismal candidate three questions just prior to immersion in the triune name:

Are you now trusting in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins and the fulfillment of all God’s promises to you?
Do you renounce Satan in all his works and ways?
Do you intend now, with God’s help, to obey the teachings of Jesus and to follow him as your Lord, Savior, and Treasure?

Previously, the pastor has met with the baptismal candidate and discerned a genuineness of faith. Then, through these questions, he invites the candidate to extend this profession to the watching congregation, showing himself to be among the “only proper subjects of this ordinance.” The baptismal candidate makes his profession by simply answering “I am,” “I do,” and “I do” to these questions.

These direct questions and simple answers are meant to be straightforward and plain, not requiring the candidate to have public-speaking skills or theological acumen, but only what is sufficient to convey a manifestly genuine faith. This is why, following the candidate’s three affirmations, the pastor declares, “Based upon your profession of faith, I baptize you . . .”

In the moment of baptism, it should be clear to everyone that the immersed individual is appropriately receiving the ordinance as one who is in Christ. The sign of the believer’s faith-union with Jesus, conveyed in the moment of immersion, is the “featured presentation” of the baptism, and so we administer the ordinance with unadorned simplicity (without need for video assistance, strobe lights, or confetti cannons).

Getting the Question Right

As straightforward as the ordinance may be, the biggest challenge comes in how pastors might discern a manifestly genuine faith in someone who is emotionally immature or inexperienced in life, such as a child — which gets back to the question at hand.

“Remember, you are attempting to discern genuine faith, not maturity.”

Asking how we discern genuine faith is the best way to approach the question of when to baptize believing children. To start with the question, “What is the appropriate age to baptize believing children?” may get us off on the wrong foot if it already assumes that a church may delay baptism to a believer, a practice for which Scripture gives no example and which the theology of baptism does not allow.

Discipleship concerns aside, I believe that hindering baptism to believers on the basis of age (rather than the inadequacy of a credible profession) is as sub-biblical and systematically compelled as paedobaptism. It seems especially strange in light of Jesus’s words regarding children, “Let the children come to me; do not hinder [kōluō] them” (Mark 10:14), and the Ethiopian eunuch’s question, “What prevents [kōluō] me from being baptized?” (Acts 8:36). As we answer the latter question, we cannot disregard what Jesus himself says.

So then, how might a pastor recognize discernible repentance, positive faith, and practical obedience in a child who claims Christ and desires baptism?

Discerning Genuine Faith

In most cases, the process of discerning genuine faith, as best we can, involves pastors conducting a “baptism interview” with the candidate. A similar kind of interview would apply to a believing child, except that pastors should also consult with the child’s believing parents. (I recommend that pastors employ the assistance of the child’s Christian father in the interview if possible.)

Without duplicating a template for these interviews in the present article, pastors should keep in mind at least three key principles.

1. We are attempting to discern genuine faith, not maturity.

The first line of questions for the child should be related to positive faith. These would be questions essential to understanding the gospel: Who is Jesus? What is sin? What does God think about sin? Why did Jesus die? Where is Jesus now? How do we know about any of this?

One might call these basic grammar questions. The pastor is looking for evidences of faith that go beyond inferences of natural revelation. While the pastor doesn’t expect the child to recite the Nicene Creed, he is looking for more than vague references to a “higher power.” We want to see if the child has an understanding — childlike as it will be — that our knowledge of God comes from the Bible, and we’re not free to just make up what we believe. Common sense may be our best tool here. In some of the answers, the child might giggle or say something silly or look over at his dad for help. That doesn’t mean the child is unregenerate; it means he is a child.

Because the child’s life experience is so short, we shouldn’t expect the testimony to be a Damascus Road page-turner. Rather, we’re looking for the child to have a sense of the wrongs he has done — white lies, harsh words with siblings, refusal to share toys, and the like. The pastor should help children connect the dots that these sins (commonly tolerated as they are in the lives of many adults) are actually in the service of Satan himself, and our faith in Jesus means we renounce the devil (as stated in many baptismal vows).

This is where the presence of the child’s father in this interview can be especially helpful. While some might think involving a parent provides a crutch for the child’s profession and spoils the process, it actually becomes a line of deeper accountability. In questions related to repentance and obedience, imagine having the same interview with an adult candidate in the presence of someone who has basically observed the candidate’s entire life. We don’t need the children to act like adults, but to manifest genuine faith as children.

2. Address false assurance with robust discipleship.

Many churches delay baptism for believing children because they want to avoid giving false assurance of salvation to an unregenerate child. While I understand the concern, I think there is a better way to address it, and one that doesn’t require us to sidestep the pattern of baptism in the New Testament. In general, rather than churches making it difficult for anyone to take the first step of obedience to Jesus (through baptism), they should make it difficult for individuals to take steps away from Jesus.

The antidote for false assurance is not sub-biblical hurdles to baptism, but thick community within the local church and a culture of discipleship. The members of the church should know one another. This doesn’t require that every member know every other member well, but that every member is known well by many, having been plugged into discipleship structures that encourage shared stories and openness. Local churches can build a culture where it’s hard to not walk in the light. And cultures like this, together with regular teaching and resourcing from the word of God, will go further in preventing false assurance than forbidding a believing child from the baptismal waters (not to mention the Lord’s Table).

3. Pastors should recognize their worst-case scenario.

Our consideration of this topic would be served if pastors and churches checked our worst-case scenario right away. What is the worst we can imagine — that we accidentally give an unregenerate child false assurance? That we unhinge baptism and church membership? That we allow immature persons to become church members? Or is it that we hinder baptism to a person who is regenerate and genuinely manifests that reality?

I believe only one of the scenarios above is expressly unbiblical. As Peter once put it, “Can anyone withhold water for baptizing these people?” (Acts 10:47). What is hindering pastors from hindering believing children to do what should not be hindered? That is the real question.

Regardless of where your church lands on when to baptize believing children, any tensions related to faithfulness to Scripture and responsible discipleship are worth facing. And more than that, the fact that there are individuals in your church, and especially children, who are turning to Jesus is something for which to give thanks. Such is God’s will.

Over the course of five decades, the late J.I. Packer (1926–2020) wrote hundreds of articles for Christianity Today, but perhaps none ruffled more feathers than his 1991 piece “Let’s Stop Making Women Presbyters.” It was no secret where Packer stood on the issue, but this piece presented a penetrating analysis in which he summarized how “the present-day pressure to make women presbyters owes more to secular, pragmatic, and social factors than to any regard for biblical authority.”

Packer came out and said what could not be more obvious, on the one hand, but also, for egalitarians, more bothersome, on the other.

Women’s Ordination Made Plausible

Matthew Colvin belabors a similar point in his 2020 review of William Witt’s Icons of Christ: A Biblical and Systematic Theology for Women’s Ordination. Colvin, an ordained presbyter in the Anglican Church in North America, explains that a shift in plausibility structure, brought on by modernity, is the key influence for those who advocate for women’s ordination — by which is meant affirming women to the office of pastor and elder (presbyter). Colvin writes, “Charity toward our forebears in the faith ought to lead us to ask, ‘What has happened to make women ordination seem plausible to people in our day, even though it was unthinkable to all past ages of the Church?’” (“Reviews of Icons of Christ”).

That is a good question, and one that Michael Novak swiftly answers in his 1993 First Things article “Women, Ordination, and Angels”:

This [women ordination] is doubtless because of the intellectual shift in our thinking from “natural law” to “natural rights.” In natural law thinking, natural differences between males and females (“natural” both in the biological-neurological and in the cultural-symbolic dimension) offered sufficient reason for accepting a differentiation of functions and roles. For centuries, the prevalence of organic, role-differentiated thinking allowed the traditional practice of excluding women from the priesthood to seem fitting and right. In the light of doctrines of “natural rights,” by contrast, according to which equal rights inhere in all persons qua [acting as] persons, this exclusion has come to seem arbitrary, and in the end unjust.

In short, the new plausibility structure in which women eldership is embraced, as Colvin describes, is a mixture of the secular egalitarianism Novak chronicled in 1993 and the disregard for biblical authority Packer cited in 1991.

Office for Manly Men

Swimming in such a plausibility structure for so long, many today might actually find a line in Packer’s article almost unbelievable, if not just simply backwater. Writing with his vintage clarity, Packer states,

The argument here is this: presbyters are set apart for a role of authoritative pastoral leadership. But this role is for manly men rather than womanly women, according to the creation pattern that redemption restores. Paternal pastoral oversight, which is of the essence of the presbyteral role, is not a task for which women are naturally fitted by their Maker.

“Manly men.” That’s hard to miss.

Some voices today even claim uncertainty about what men and women are, but thirty years ago Packer doesn’t just say men, but he even qualifies it with manly.

Christian Scripture is clear about male-only eldership, both in its propositions and story line, but Packer is extrapolating a deeper point. The pastoral office is not for males in general, but for qualified and duly appointed men — which Packer understands to entail their exhibiting masculine traits summarized by the adjective manly.

The office of elder is intended for manly men, and for good reasons — reasons that require unhurried reflection on the text of Scripture and unclouded attention to the natural world. Such unhurried reflection takes us deeper than biblical minimalism and arguments of silence are willing to go, and the unclouded attention is able to re-recognize what human history has always assumed, that manly means something.

Defending Packer and building upon his 1991 article, I’ll try to state the matter as straightforwardly as he would.

What Is the Responsibility of Elders?

“Elders teach and exercise authority in the local church,” writes Greg Gilbert. “That’s what they do; that’s why the office exists” (Can Women Be Pastors?, 23). Put another way, elders feed and lead — and the two are inseparable. The leading comes primarily through the feeding. This ensures that all oversight and care for the flock, including guarding the church’s doctrine and worship and mobilizing her for mission, is in constant submission to the word of God.

Paul requires that the elder “must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it” (Titus 2:9; see also “able to teach,” 1 Timothy 2:3). Centered on the Bible, then, the elder builds (he instructs) and defends (he rebukes). He both pastors the flock to still waters and fends off wolf-like intrusions — by telling the church what God says.

This concept for elders didn’t pop out of nowhere, but its roots go back to the work of the Levites, the Old Testament priestly tribe, which travels back to Adam.

Adamic, Priestly Duty

In Numbers 3, when God issues the duties of the Levites, he tells Moses that they shall guard the people and their worship. One of the Hebrew words behind “guard” (shamar) in Numbers 3:7–10 is also used in Genesis 2:15 when God gives Adam, the man, his Edenic duties:

“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep [shamar] it.”

The Levites related to the temple and congregation the way Adam was supposed to relate to the Edenic temple and Eve. This tells us both about their work, that it’s fundamentally masculine, and the expectation on Adam, which he failed to meet. Whereas Adam should have guarded Eden and Eve against that which contradicts God’s word, he failed to rebuke the serpent’s lies.

This is what Paul refers to in 1 Timothy 2 as his ground for why women should not teach or exercise authority over a man (that is, perform Adamic duties). Paul explains, “For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor” (1 Timothy 2:13).

Insufficiently Masculine

Paul’s guidance for the church in 1 Timothy comes from his own (inspired) unhurried reflection on Genesis 1–3. When he says that Adam was not deceived, but rather Eve was, that is not to acquit Adam, but most likely to indict him! Eve was deceived because Adam failed to guard the garden and his own wife as he ought.

Adam’s failure was, in a word, leadership. He didn’t do what God had placed him in the garden to do. He was insufficiently masculine, and his failure led to the upending of God’s creation design. Rather than Adam obeying God’s command and guarding Eve as they exercised dominion over lesser creatures, the lesser creature, the serpent, taught Eve heresy while Adam passively stood by, disobeying God. God had intended authority to flow from himself to Adam, from Adam to Eve, from Adam and Eve to lesser creatures, but Satan attacked by turning God’s order upside down.

Humankind has been lost ever since, manifesting the characteristic sins of men and women described in Genesis 3:16–19, and distorting God’s creation design and structure of authority. As Gilbert explains, “The woman will seek to dominate and master man, and man will twist his authority into an abusive domination of women” (32). That’s in the world, though. It’s not to be so in the church and Christian households.

The redemptive vision to which Paul calls the church means restoring God’s original design, not assimilating to the sinful distortion. And this vision is especially featured within the church’s leadership — with “manly men” serving in the office of elder.

Really Call It Manly?

Far from arbitrary, the office of elder is reserved for mature men for good reason. Manly men are best fit for the office because the work of building and defending, of instructing and rebuking, is quintessentially masculine.

To instruct, to build, to feed requires initiative, assertiveness, and steadfastness characteristic of masculinity. The equally important task of rebuking, of defending, of leading is just the same, often requiring sacrificial watchfulness and an unemotional assessment of values. The work is Adam-like and Levitical. It’s manly.

Therefore, for “women elders” to actually function, it must mean that either one has altered the biblical office to accommodate a feminine essence, or women are acting like men.

We don’t have the authority to do the former, and the latter is out of step with God’s design. Some women might seem able to do manly work, and in some painful situations they must, but it does not make for long-term health and thriving. God’s design calls us to something more beautiful — manly men and womanly women doing manly and womanly things, respectively. With the elders being manly men.

For some, a single sentence has changed the trajectory of their ministry. For me, it was a paragraph from Richard Baxter’s classic book The Reformed Pastor.

Our whole work must be carried on under a deep sense of our own insufficiency, and of our entire dependence on Christ. We must go for light, and life, and strength to him who sends us on the work. And when we feel our own faith weak, and our hearts dull, and unsuitable to so great a work as we have to do, we must have recourse to him, and say, “Lord, wilt thou send me with such an unbelieving heart to persuade others to believe? Must I daily plead with sinners about everlasting life and everlasting death, and have no more belief or feeling of these weighty things myself? O, send me not naked and unprovided to the work; but as thou commandest me to do it, furnish me with a spirit suitable thereto.” Prayer must carry on our work as well as preaching; he preacheth not heartily to his people, that prayeth not earnestly for them. If we prevail not with God to give them faith and repentance we shall never prevail with them to believe and repent. (The Reformed Pastor, 105)

Richard Baxter has taught me at least three lessons that clarify the pastoral vocation and bring more of God’s power into the task of preaching. They’re summed up in the above passage, but I present them to pastors as a cascade, each point flowing from the one before it, starting with the fact that pastors are primarily teachers.

Pastors Are Primarily Teachers

Baxter (1615–1691), as the late J.I. Packer has described him, “usually called himself his people’s teacher, and teaching was to his mind the minister’s main task.” Baxter wrote his most famous book, The Reformed Pastor, to make this case, because he was convinced that unless pastors themselves understood their calling, there was little chance parishioners would. During Baxter’s day, and in ours, the question comes down to this: What are pastors for?

The New Testament makes it clear that pastors — the office of elder (presbyteros) or overseer (episkopos) — serve the church with official authority through teaching the apostolic gospel as handed down to us and preserved in the Bible. This is our chief task — a task that was widely understood in the early church and recovered during the Reformation, but that too often gets downplayed in our modern thinking.

To be sure, this downplaying is seen not so much in the church’s activity, but in the pastor’s own vocational clarity. When it comes to the church’s activity, most evangelical churches still feature the preaching moment as the high point of its weekly gatherings. Teaching has certainly not been abandoned, but I still doubt we appreciate its central place in how we conceive of our calling. I’m referring to the level of our basic self-understanding.

For example, imagine, pastor, that you meet a new neighbor and they ask you what you do for a living. You respond by saying, “I’m a pastor.” Now, doubtless, your neighbor has a category for that. They hear you say “pastor,” and they immediately picture something. At the bare minimum, especially if they’re secular, they hear you saying that you’re religious. Now what they think hardly matters, but what does matter, and what I’m most concerned about, is what you and I picture in our minds.

“We should think of ourselves primarily as teachers of our flock for the purpose of their salvation.”

What are we thinking when we hear ourselves say, “I’m a pastor”? Do we think, as the New Testament would lead us, that we’re teachers? We should think that. Baxter would certainly say so. The pastoral vocation, Baxter argued forcefully, is about explaining the gospel for the salvation of souls — in public and private, from the pulpit to the gathered church and sitting across the table from individual church members. We should think of ourselves primarily as teachers of our flock for the purpose of their salvation.

Having learned this from Baxter, I commend it to you, brother-pastor. Regardless of how much you still need to grow in teaching, as a pastor you are primarily a teacher, and you should think that way about yourself. Our calling starts here.

Pastors Teach for the Salvation of Souls

It’s vital, at this point, to remember that we’re not simply teachers, but teachers with a purpose — and that purpose is the salvation of souls.

In the paragraph that changed how I view ministry, Baxter references work five times:

“our whole work”
“a work as we have to do”
“the work” (2x)
“our work”

This is a loaded word for Baxter. He uses it several times throughout this section, and interchangeably with the word oversight. It goes back to his introduction, where he tells his reader that he aims to expound Paul’s exhortation in Acts 20:28: “Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock” (KJV).

A pastor’s taking heed of his flock, or overseeing them, consists mainly of his teaching them for their salvation. We cannot teach apart from this intent. “Our work,” according to Baxter, is to teach our flock, publicly and privately, for the sake of this supernatural goal. That’s what he has in mind by the simple phrase our work. And it’s also what puts our work in a completely different category from other kinds of teaching.

Under Baxter’s influence, I’ve tried to make remembering my aim a repeated exercise throughout the sermon-writing process. Before I start to write (where I turn my exegesis and reflection into the words I plan to speak), and in my last review (where I think deliberately about tone and potential real-time dynamics), Baxter asks me, What do you want God to do in the hearts of your flock?

“We want the saved to experience full salvation, and we want the lost to be saved.”

At one level, the most immediate answer is that we always want our hearers to faithfully understand God’s word and what it means for us right now. That’s the point of preaching. But within the larger understanding of our work, as Baxter explains it, we want their salvation. We want all those who are in Christ to be “mature in Christ” (Colossians 1:28), to be transformed more into Christ’s image (2 Corinthians 3:18), and to be assured of Christ’s love (Ephesians 3:16–19). We want the saved to experience full salvation, and we want the lost to be saved. We preach the sermon in our hands, as we do all of our other teaching, for that.

Pastors Can’t Produce the Harvest

Now it’s not hard to see why Baxter says, “Our whole work must be carried on under a deep sense of our own insufficiency, and of our entire dependence on Christ.” This is because in our work, in our teaching, we intend something we ourselves cannot accomplish. We desire something we cannot create. We want our people to be saved, but we can’t save them.

We can’t heal their marriages. We can’t make them stop ruining their lives. We can’t make them care, or care less, or embrace, or disavow. We can’t make them more gracious and less judgmental, or more joyful and less cynical. We want these, and a hundred other things, for these souls in front of us, and we can’t produce any of it. Why did we become pastors, again? What other vocation feels so feeble? Indeed, we are fools for Christ’s sake (1 Corinthians 4:10).

And what does one do in such a predicament? What do you do when you want something you can’t reach? You ask for help. You pray.

This is the most basic explanation for why anyone prays petitionary prayers. It’s because God’s grace in us leads us to desire things we can’t do, so we ask him to do it. When pastors understand they are primarily teachers, and the goal of their teaching is the salvation of souls, then pastors will pray. There is really no other way to fulfill our calling. This is what leads Baxter to say that “he preacheth not heartily to his people, that prayeth not earnestly for them.”

What if we come to preaching with the goal of our preaching in mind? Or better, what if we reconsider our entire vocation in terms of primarily being a teacher whose goal is supernatural? What if we prayed earnestly that God would accomplish this supernatural goal through our teaching, and then we actually taught “standing” upon such prayers?

With a deep sense of our own insufficiency, entirely dependent upon Jesus, having prayed that he do through our teaching ministry what only he can do, our preaching then becomes a kind of enactment of our own wrestling with God for our flock. We stand before our congregation and preach for what we’ve already prayed for, carried by the same Spirit who has guided us in the praying. This inevitably means more of the Spirit’s power in our preaching, and certainly less of our own.

Put altogether, it’s simple: pastors are primarily teachers, and the goal of our teaching is the salvation of souls — a supernatural goal we can’t produce. This understanding leads us, naturally, to prayer. We ask God to do what only he can do, and this accompanies the task of preaching (and the whole of our work) with a heartfelt dependence on Jesus. And that’s where the power’s at.

It’s been said that the content of a prayer shapes the one who prays it, because we tend to pray what we love, and what we love makes us who we are. And this is not only true of individuals, but of churches too. Like when the early church once prayed,

Now, Lord, look upon their threats and grant to your servants to continue to speak your word with all boldness, while you stretch out your hand to heal, and signs and wonders are performed through the name of your holy servant Jesus. (Acts 4:29–30)

Of all the things they might have prayed — and of all things churches should pray at various times — the fledging church in the early pages of Acts wanted God to give them boldness: “Grant to your servants to continue to speak your word with all boldness.”

We as twenty-first-century pastors and churches can learn from this first-century prayer, but to do so, we need to first go back one chapter.

Words Filled with Jesus

The apostles Peter and John were walking to the temple one afternoon when they encountered a lame man. He had been lame from birth. The man was doing what he was always doing: asking for money from people passing by. But on this particular day, something unexpected happened. The man passing by responded, “I have no silver and gold, but what I do have I give to you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk!” (Acts 3:6).

In an instant, the man was healed. He leapt up and began to walk. He entered the temple “walking, leaping, and praising God” (Acts 3:8). The scene drew a crowd, so Peter did what Peter was always doing. He preached. His sermon was full of crystal-clear witness to the person and purpose of Jesus. He is the Holy and Righteous One (verse 14), the Author of Life and the one whom God has raised from the dead (verse 15). Jesus is the reason, the only reason, why the lame man was healed (verse 17).

Then Peter proceeds to show that the Hebrew Scriptures had long foretold Jesus, from Moses in Deuteronomy and God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis, to all the prophets “from Samuel and those who came after him” (Acts 3:24). It has always been about Jesus, and people’s response, now, must unequivocally be to repent (Acts 3:19, 26).

New World Breaking In

These Jewish leaders were “greatly annoyed because [Peter and John] were teaching the people and proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection from the dead” (Acts 4:2).

The problem wasn’t only that Peter and John were witnessing to Jesus’s own resurrection, but that they were saying Jesus’s resurrection has led to the inbreaking of the resurrection age. As Alan Thompson writes, “In the context of Acts 3–4, Jesus’s resurrection anticipates the general resurrection at the end of the age and makes available now, for all those who place their faith in him, the blessings of the ‘last days’” (The Acts of the Risen Lord Jesus, 79). That, in fact, was what the healing of the lame man was declaring. The new creation had invaded the old.

“Jesus is the climax of all of God’s saving purposes, and we cannot ignore this without eternal consequences.”

In the resurrection of Jesus, everything has changed. He is the climax of all of God’s saving purposes, and we cannot ignore this without eternal consequences. This message ruffled the feathers of the Jewish leaders, and so they arrested Peter and John and put them on trial for all that happened that day.

“By what power or by what name did you do this?” they demanded (Acts 4:7). Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, and again with a crystal-clear witness, says the lame man was healed because of Jesus. Jesus is the Messiah who was crucified and raised, and who was foretold in the Hebrew Scriptures. Specifically, Peter says that Jesus is the stone mentioned in Psalm 118:22, the stone that would be rejected by the builders but then become the cornerstone. The stakes could not be higher. Only in Jesus could one be saved (Acts 4:12).

Outdone by Fishermen

The Jewish leaders were astonished. They could not reconcile Peter and John’s boldness with the fact that they were “uneducated, common men” (Acts 4:13). These were neither teachers nor even pupils, but fishermen. Fishermen. That agitated the Jewish leaders all the more. These unskilled regular Joes, as it were, had been teaching the people! And now they ventured to interpret the Hebrew Scriptures before these skilled Jewish interpreters, telling them who Jesus was, according to the Scriptures, and who they were, according to the Scriptures.

These Jewish leaders saw their “boldness” (Acts 4:13), but this wasn’t merely a reference to their emotional tone. Peter and John’s boldness wasn’t mainly about their zeal or behavior — it was about what they had to say. This kind of boldness is repeatedly connected to speech in Acts, so much so that another way to render “boldness” in many passages would be “to speak freely or openly.” That’s what Peter and John had done. They had spoken clearly, freely, openly, boldly about Jesus from the Hebrew Scriptures — and they had done so under intense intimidation.

As they watched this unfold, even the Jewish leaders began to connect some dots. “They recognized that they had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13). So how did these untrained fishermen learn to interpret the Scriptures like that? How could they speak so confidently about the meaning of Scripture when they had never been taught? Well, because they had been taught — by Jesus himself. They had been with Jesus, and so they were unusually bold. They spoke of Jesus clearly, both of his person and work, on the grounds of what the Scriptures say, even when it might have cost them their lives.

Voices Lifted Together

This is the boldness the church pleads for in Acts 4:29–30.

The Jewish leaders had warned and threatened Peter and John to stop talking about Jesus, but eventually they had to release the men from custody. Peter and John went straight to their friends to report what happened. These friends of Peter and John, the nascent church in Jerusalem, “lifted their voices together to God” (Acts 4:24). Their corporate prayer was as rich with the Old Testament’s witness to Jesus as Peter’s sermon was. They knew the person of Jesus. They knew why he had come. And they knew how unpopular this message would be.

And what did they pray?

They did not pray for articulate positions on the current cultural issues, nor for increased dialogue with those of other faiths, nor for the ability to refute this or that ism, nor for the development of a particularly Christian philosophy or culture (all things we might pray for at certain times in the church). None of these are part of the church’s prayer in Acts 4. Rather, they prayed for boldness to speak the word of God. They asked God to give them the kind of speech Peter and John had modeled — to testify clearly about who Jesus is from the word of God, no matter the cost, as the new creation continues to invade the old.

Do our churches ever pray like this today?

Do we lack a similar heart? A similar perspective? Or both?

And yet our cities need our boldness every bit as much as Jerusalem did in Peter and John’s day. They need the crystal-clear witness of who Jesus is and what he has come to do.

Praying for Revival

What if the church of Jesus Christ, in all her local manifestations, was marked by a singular passion to know Jesus and make him known? This is the true priority of the church in every age and culture.

“The best, most important thing we ever have to say is what we have to say about Jesus.”

We are all about Jesus, and the best, most important thing we ever have to say is what we have to say about him. Our failures to live up to this calling are reminders of our need for revival — of our need to plead with God for boldness. Like the early church, may our heart continually beat to testify to Jesus’s glory and to what he demands of the world. Church, this is who we are. Recover it, as needed, and live it out — even though it’s the last thing our society wants to hear from us.

Our society wants the church to be “helpful” on society’s terms — what J.I. Packer called the “new gospel,” a substitute for the biblical gospel, in his introduction to Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ. Whereas the chief aim of the biblical gospel is to teach people to worship God, Packer explains, the concern of the substitute only wants to make people feel better. The subject of the biblical gospel is God and his ways; the subject of the substitute is man and the help God offers him. The market demands the substitute, and those who refuse to cater to it are at the risk of being considered irrelevant or worse. Against that mounting pressure, we should pray that we would speak clearly, freely, openly, boldly about Jesus from the Bible, no matter the cost.

Would this not be the sign of revival? Would God not answer our prayers like he did for that first church?

When they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness. (Acts 4:31)