In this video, Dr. Sinclair Ferguson explores how the means of grace encourage and strength Christians by communicating the very reality they signify.
Historically the church has believed that there’s a whole series of means of grace. Prayer is one of them; preaching is one of them; worship is one of them; but I think often in our world, baptism and the Lord’s Supper have also been thought of as means of grace. So maybe I could answer the question just by focusing on them and by saying that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are signs that are given to us, but they are actually different kinds of signs. They are signs that you might call demonstrative signs in the sense that they point to something that isn’t actually there where the sign is. So street signs are often like that. The sign is not the street. The sign tells you where to go to go to the street. But we also have signs in our common life that actually communicate the reality they signify.
So perhaps the three most common of these in human relationships are the handshake, the hug, and the kiss in ascending order. These are all signs that we use that actually we understand they communicate the reality that they signify. And they not only communicate that reality, but because they are physical means of communicating that reality, they have a kind of appeal to the whole person, so, it’s different.
I sometimes would say to my students, “If you don’t understand this, here’s the test. Those of you who are married students for the next six months, make sure with some regularity you tell your wife, you love her. Do not go near her. Do not touch her. Do not hug her. Do not kiss her. And I’m pretty sure that pretty soon she will say to you, ‘Do you really love me?’ And I want you to say to her, ‘Well, I’ve told you that I love you.’ And I think she will say: ‘But you’re not touching me. You’re not hugging me. You’re not kissing me.’” Well, isn’t my word enough? And the instinct that is expressed there is the instinct that even in our human life, we communicate the reality of our hearts to each other, not just by the words that we speak, but by the actions in which we engage that both parties understand.
And especially baptism and the Lord’s Supper are like that. That’s why I think often in the past, Christian writers would speak about the Lord’s Supper as the Lord’s kiss of His disciples. You don’t get a different Christ in the Lord’s Supper from the one you get in the preaching of the Word. But as one of my Scottish forefathers used to say, “You will get the same Christ better.”
So you don’t get a better husband because he speaks his love to you and shows his love to you, but you will get his love better. And it’s in that, that there is the confirmation that the Lord really loves us and wants to have communion with us. And that’s why those means of grace as well as other means of grace are tangible, physical, audible means by which God demonstrates His love to us in Christ.