What good are baptism and the Lord’s Supper to the life of the Christian? How can sprinkling, or even immersion in, some water or eating a morsel of bread and drinking a sip of wine bring us closer to God?
The contemporary American church sometimes overlooks or downplays the sacraments, focusing more on individualized and expressive spirituality than the traditional piety of the church. While evangelicals often embrace the gift of the Bible as the Word of God to guide us, they can neglect the other means of God’s grace, especially the sacraments.
However, to disregard the sacraments is to fail to receive all the blessings that God has given us. The “Westminster Confession of Faith” provides us with a more expansive vision for the sacraments. “Sacraments are holy signs and seals of the covenant of grace” (WCF 27.1). By the sacraments, God the Father in Jesus Christ through the Spirit blesses us with gifts and provision to live out our pilgrim life together.
Many people fail to see the connection between the Lord’s Supper and Baptism in the gospel itself. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are offering us the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ for our sins, but in a different way, through signs and seals, as the Heidelberg Catechism teaches in question 67:
Q. Are both the word and the sacraments then intended to focus our faith on the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross as the only ground of our salvation?
A. Yes! In the gospel, the Holy Spirit teaches us and by the holy sacraments confirms that our entire salvation rests on Christ’s one sacrifice for us on the cross.
The proper place of the sacraments in Reformed spirituality begins with understanding how they confirm the gospel of Christ by the Spirit to us. No competition exists between faith in Christ and reflections and meditation on the sacraments because Christ is the substance of the sacraments made present by the Holy Spirit. To be baptized in faith is the sign and seal of our union with Christ, and to feast on the bread and wine is to experience in faith the Bread of Life and the Fount of Living Water.
The sacraments are divine gifts to communicate the gospel of Jesus and its benefits. The Triune God, as the Creator, can and does work through physical realities to convey spiritual blessings. We must reconceive and teach about the sacraments not merely as points of ecclesiological distinction or theological nicety, but as relational realities sanctioned and used by the Triune God to bless his covenant people.
Pastors can help their people understand these realities by thoughtfully weaving the blessing of the sacraments into their preaching and discipleship. Because baptism and the Lord’s Supper are relational realities, they have an objective foundation and demand subjective participation. The objective element is grounded on the promises of God that in these tangible symbols God will meet his people.
Since the sacraments are objective gifts in the form of communication and means of communion, they require personal reception and reflection.
There is nothing magical or mechanical about them. The proper participant must receive the blessing offered therein by faith. As the “Westminster Shorter Catechism” reminds us, “The sacraments become effectual means of salvation, not from any virtue in them, or in him that doth administer them; but only by the blessing of Christ, and the working of his Spirit in them that by faith receive them” (WSC 91).
It is not the power in the elements or water, but it is the Triune God who ordained them for our good. The faith that receives the covenant promise in baptism and presence at the Lord’s Supper is that same trust that takes hold of Christ himself by the power of the Holy Spirit. The object of our faith, God in Christ by the Spirit, is the same one we encounter through the sacraments.
Baptism is the continual marking out of the Christian by the covenant sign and name of God. Each day we live out our baptism – setting aside the old life with its sin and death and living the new life in Jesus Christ by the Spirit – as those to whom the gospel is given. Baptism binds us to Christ and summons us day after day to live in him and with his body, the church.
The Westminster divines call us to live into our baptism “by drawing strength from the death and resurrection of Christ, into whom we are baptized, for the mortifying of sin, and quickening of grace” (WLC 167). Likewise, Communion is not only a call to remember the gospel, but is the new covenant in Christ’s blood (Luke 22:20), which establishes the gospel, and the participation in Christ’s blood (1 Corinthians 10:16), which seals the gospel to us. Through his promise and presence, Christ through his Spirit is with us at the table nourishing our faith and empowering the people that are his body.
Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are not add-ons to the gospel but are the gospel enacted. If we are to counteract American spirituality’s tendency to neglect the sacraments, we must intentionally and actively reintegrate the sacraments in Reformed piety and the teaching of the Church. They are gifts ordained by God for the blessing of his people until he returns. They are signs and seals of the gospel of grace that bless the Church until faith turns to sight.
The new life symbolized in baptism is fulfilled in resurrected glory, and bread and wine become the marriage feast of the Lamb.
K.J. Drake serves as academic dean and professor of historical theology at Indianapolis Theological Seminary.