Happy Meal sacraments?

When our children were young, we would occasionally give in to pressure and take them to McDonald’s for a Happy Meal. If you’ve never experienced this delight, it’s a portion of highly processed child-pleasing food, in a cheerful-looking box, which includes a freebie plastic toy.

The burgers, of course, are gone in minutes; and in my experience, the toys last very little longer. Not just because they’re rubbish, but because the children know that they’re rubbish. I don’t remember any of my children ever caring about a Happy Meal toy longer than the duration of the car ride home. If something is given away for free, everyone – even a child – knows that it’s worthless.

Recently I saw a church minister post online that he was planning to baptise a child being brought up by a practicing gay couple, and asking for advice from other ministers on how to make the best of the opportunity. When a number of other ministers (myself included) suggested he should not be baptising a child where the adoptive parents were openly unrepentant, his response was, this is a great opportunity to reach the couple and their friends and family with the gospel. Why not baptise, if it would get them into church?

In other words, the sacraments, the physical signs commanded by the Lord Jesus to accompany the preaching of the gospel, simply don’t matter very much. They’re just a kind of freebie given out along with the gospel to make us feel better about it, like the plastic tat in a Happy Meal. Or worse, as with a Happy Meal, a mild incentive to get people to buy the “food” which is the real product on offer.

This “Happy Meal” approach to the sacraments is not limited to churches who offer baptism to children of unbelievers. It can be found in churches which would never baptise a child, but will give the Lord’s Supper to toddlers with not the first idea of what it means; or where people living in open, unrepentant sin are invited to the Lord’s Table without a hint of a call to self-examination.

Now Evangelicals of all stripes have rightly resisted sacramentalism. Sacramentalism is the belief that the sacraments are more important than the preaching of the word; so that as long as you are baptised and come to communion then whether you know or believe the gospel doesn’t matter. Of course we must not think that. It is the word of the gospel which brings life.

But that doesn’t mean that we should think that the sacraments are nothing. Our Lord commanded us to be baptised, and to eat bread and drink wine; that alone should be enough for us to take them seriously. But more than that, He didn’t command them for no reason. They are a vital part of how He forms faith in our hearts and enables us to receive His grace from Him.

Which means they are immensely precious. A Christian’s baptism should always be of huge value to him; a standing sign to him of God’s once-for-all act of grace in bringing him into the body of Jesus Christ, of washing away his sins, of putting the old self to death, of pouring the Holy Spirit into his heart. A Christian’s privilege of eating at the table of the Lord is to be treasured, as every time he is challenged to ask himself: “Will I today receive Christ? Will I today trust Him, crucified and risen, to share His resurrection life with me?” And every time he does so, a Christian is assured of the promise that Christ is in him and he is in Christ, with the certainty of salvation that brings.

Knowing that we are physical as well as spiritual creatures, Christ has put these things into solid (and liquid) physical form, a means of grace by which He clarifies and increases our faith, that we may lay hold of Him in our hearts more firmly, believing His promises more definitely.

And so we must not treat them like freebies! To use baptism of children as ‘bait’ for non-Christian families, or to give the bread and wine to those who openly deny the faith in their words and/or lives, is to render them worthless. It severs the connection between these signs and what they mean; it sucks out of them any possible spiritual meaning; and worst of all, it offers the assurance of the gospel (one of the sweetest blessings which God uses the sacraments to give, when received with faith) to those who have no grounds for it. For baptism to carry its meaning effectively, it must be administered to those in the household of faith. Otherwise it speaks of forgiveness to those who are not forgiven, of new life to those still spiritually dead, and of the Spirit’s outpouring to those who know nothing of His regenerating work. For the Lord’s Supper to carry its meaning effectively, it must be accompanied by warnings against unbelief and calls to self-examination and faith. At times, the elders of a church must refuse to administer the sacraments, when they know by a person’s life or words that real faith is absent or sin is not repented of.

Sometimes ministers fear that withholding the sacraments in these circumstances will put people off from the gospel. I can only say that the opposite is the case. Yes, sometimes it will make people angry or upset; but given that the whole point of the sacraments is to confirm faith, this is part of God’s intention to make people realise that the blessings of the gospel are not yet theirs. To form real faith, false confidence must be destroyed. In my experience it has been explaining that a person cannot yet be baptised, or cannot yet come to the Lord’s Table, which has often led to real repentance and faith in Christ for the first time. This is what the Lord meant by telling us that He has given His church the keys of the kingdom. To unlock the door and dish out the signs of Christ’s grace to those who deny the faith is a terrible dereliction of our duty. It fails to confront people with the need to believe the gospel in the way that the sacraments are designed by our Lord to do.

This has nothing to do with which historic understanding of baptism you follow. I am a paedobaptist in the covenantal tradition, but the same applies to Baptists or Anglicans. Ministers should follow their own theology of baptism and the Lord’s Supper on these things; but what they should not do is act as if they are meaningless trinkets. The gospel is not a Happy Meal, and our Lord’s precious gifts of baptism and the Lord’s Supper are not worthless and disposable freebies.