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What God Says About Educating Your Kids - Kevin Swanson · Passing On The Faith

0:00
SPEAKER_01: The Paidea is the everything.
0:01
SPEAKER_01: The academic, the intellectual, the emotional, the social, the spiritual, all aspects of your child's life.
0:08
SPEAKER_01: And so that's what really education is.
0:10
SPEAKER_01: We don't separate out the spiritual or the emotional from the math course.
0:14
SPEAKER_01: It's all integrated.
0:15
SPEAKER_01: This is the first mistake everybody makes.
0:17
SPEAKER_01: Is oh right now we're just focused on the intellectual.
0:19
SPEAKER_01: We're not gonna focus on spiritual.
0:21
SPEAKER_01: We're not gonna focus on the emotional.
0:23
SPEAKER_01: You ever tried to teach math?
0:24
SPEAKER_01: It's not emotional with you?
0:26
SPEAKER_01: It's been that way in our house.
0:28
SPEAKER_01: It's our most emotional subject.
0:29
SPEAKER_01: Turns out to be our most spiritual subject, too, towards the end of the class.
0:34
SPEAKER_01: Because there's mom and there's the daughter weeping and gnashing of teeth, and then they're on their floor crying out to God.
0:41
SPEAKER_01: What's this?
0:41
SPEAKER_01: We're supposed to be teaching math here.
0:43
SPEAKER_01: What's going on?
0:46
SPEAKER_01: Turns out you can't disintegrate, right?
0:49
SPEAKER_01: It's the whole child, it's a holistic word.
0:52
SPEAKER_01: We're we're bringing our child up in the paide of the Lord Jesus Christ.
0:57
SPEAKER_01: Very simply, what we say is, do whatever Jesus did.
1:01
SPEAKER_01: The paide of Jesus, do whatever Jesus did.
1:05
SPEAKER_00: You're listening to Passing on the Faith, a podcast from generations.
1:10
SPEAKER_00: Every week, we bring you a powerful moment from one of our sermons, audiobooks, webinars, or conference talks.
1:16
SPEAKER_00: Hand picks to help you build a strong biblical foundation for your family.
1:21
SPEAKER_00: This week's episode is a sermon from an equipping series by the Reformation Church of Elizabeth, entitled What God Says About Educating Your Children by Kevin Swanson.
1:33
SPEAKER_01: Now turn in your Bibles, please, to Deuteronomy chapter 6.
1:37
SPEAKER_01: This morning I'd like to begin by reading the first nine verses of Deuteronomy chapter 6.
1:44
SPEAKER_01: So let's stand together and hear the word of God.
1:51
SPEAKER_01: Now, this is the commandment, and these are the statutes and judgments which the Lord your God has commanded to teach you, that you may observe them in the land which you are crossing over to possess, that you may fear the Lord your God to keep all his statutes and his commandments, which I command you, you and your son and your grandson, all the days of your life, and that your days may be prolonged.
2:17
SPEAKER_01: Therefore, hear, O Israel, and be careful to observe it, that it may be well with you, and that you may multiply greatly as the Lord God of your fathers has promised you, a land flowing with milk and honey.
2:29
SPEAKER_01: Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.
2:33
SPEAKER_01: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.
2:41
SPEAKER_01: And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart.
2:45
SPEAKER_01: You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up.
2:54
SPEAKER_01: You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.
3:00
SPEAKER_01: You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
3:06
SPEAKER_01: This is the very word of God.
3:09
SPEAKER_01: Our Father God, we pray we would be struck by your word this day, that we would see the truth, that we would know you better, that we would know your will for our lives, for our families, and for our children.
3:27
SPEAKER_01: In Jesus' name we pray.
3:29
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
3:30
SPEAKER_01: Please be seated.
3:34
SPEAKER_01: In Acts chapter 20, the Apostle Paul said that he was pure of the blood of all men.
3:40
SPEAKER_01: He was ready to die.
3:43
SPEAKER_01: Because he had given the church an emphasis the whole counsel of God.
3:52
SPEAKER_01: And before I die, I want to be sure that I have been faithful.
3:58
SPEAKER_01: That I have given you the counsel of God.
4:02
SPEAKER_01: I've given you the critical messages that need to be shared.
4:06
SPEAKER_01: And that we as the elders and pastors of this church have adequately equipped the saints for every good work.
4:12
SPEAKER_01: We're supposed to do that.
4:13
SPEAKER_01: That's 2 Timothy 3.17.
4:17
SPEAKER_01: And also that one of our responsibilities in the church is to disciple such that we have taught the people we're discipling to observe all that Jesus has commanded.
4:29
SPEAKER_01: That's Matthew 28.
4:31
SPEAKER_01: And so if we neglect any of this, we haven't done our duty.
4:34
SPEAKER_01: So what we want to do is we want to put together some essential equipping for the saints, for the various aspects, for every aspect of life.
4:45
SPEAKER_01: The Word of God is there to equip the man and woman of God for every good work.
4:48
SPEAKER_01: And there are a number of different kinds of good works that we're engaged in in the Christian life.
4:54
SPEAKER_01: This is a key moment in the history of the Christian church, as I see it, especially in the Western world.
5:02
SPEAKER_01: It is the year that five men died: John MacArthur, James Dobson, Charlie Kirk, Vody Baucom, and the Duck Commander.
5:14
SPEAKER_01: And they were all witnesses to the truths of God's word in a very difficult age, one of the worst possible times in all of human history, Western history, certainly.
5:28
SPEAKER_01: It was the secular age in which we were very much losing.
5:33
SPEAKER_01: The Christian world in life view has lost a tremendous amount of ground.
5:38
SPEAKER_01: And so there we were on our own two-yard line, and we had some strong voices, some prophetic voices, as it were, in an extremely evil age.
5:48
SPEAKER_01: This certainly is a time in which we need to save ourselves and our families from this evil age.
5:54
SPEAKER_01: Therefore, it's important that we have strong voices, and we had at least five men, but they're dead now, and God's providence they are gone.
6:04
SPEAKER_01: And this is it.
6:06
SPEAKER_01: I think this is it.
6:07
SPEAKER_01: I don't believe there's going to be much more warning for the church.
6:10
SPEAKER_01: Judgment is going to really kick in in the Church of Jesus Christ in our age.
6:17
SPEAKER_01: Therefore, you've heard the warnings.
6:20
SPEAKER_01: Every one of these men who died, these five men, they spoke strongly about one thing.
6:27
SPEAKER_01: One thing they synchronized on, and that was to get your children out of the public schools, the government-funded schools of this country.
6:38
SPEAKER_01: It's interesting this was not the only time in which this was said.
6:42
SPEAKER_01: But these were national figures.
6:44
SPEAKER_01: That's what made them so unusual.
6:46
SPEAKER_01: They reached out to 10, 15, 20 million people through their radio broadcasts and other outreaches, of which, you know, we only scratched the surface.
6:55
SPEAKER_01: We have a local church, and yet there are so few pastors that were willing to take the stand on issues like this and just say it in a public forum.
7:06
SPEAKER_01: But that was the message.
7:07
SPEAKER_01: Get your children out of the public schools.
7:11
SPEAKER_01: And as I said, this is not the first time it happened.
7:14
SPEAKER_01: The onslaught of secularism began ultimately in the 19th century.
7:17
SPEAKER_01: So for about 150 years, God sent a prophetic voice to the churches, and yet they were largely ignored in an apostate age.
7:31
SPEAKER_01: We live in a very difficult age, an age in which secularism has made its way.
7:37
SPEAKER_01: That is, a man-centered materialistic worldview has made its way into every one of our institutions.
7:42
SPEAKER_01: It's worked its way into our minds and our hearts such that God is calling us out of this.
7:50
SPEAKER_01: And he sent these voices to us.
7:53
SPEAKER_01: There were sharp voices, strong voices.
7:56
SPEAKER_01: And they were some of the most important conservative Christian voices that God gifted his church with here in this country.
8:06
SPEAKER_01: And I would include England as well in this list.
8:08
SPEAKER_01: I have these quotes before you because I do believe that the wisdom of the men who've gone before us is important.
8:14
SPEAKER_01: We ignore it to our own damnation.
8:19
SPEAKER_01: We must receive these warnings.
8:23
SPEAKER_01: And the churches in this valley should receive these voices.
8:29
SPEAKER_01: It's time now to say these things and to say it louder and clearer than ever before.
8:38
SPEAKER_01: As much as we have a voice, as much as we have friends, family members, church members, as much as we have a group of people we minister to on the internet, or whatever it is, let's make sure we get this message out loud and clear.
8:58
SPEAKER_01: As much as the Apostle Peter said, now is the time.
9:01
SPEAKER_01: Save yourself and your families from this perverse generation.
9:09
SPEAKER_01: Save your families.
9:11
SPEAKER_01: Save them.
9:15
SPEAKER_01: We need a desperate and urgent call now.
9:19
SPEAKER_01: God is calling us to this, all of us.
9:23
SPEAKER_01: Not just those who have children they're raising, but also the young people, the youth, those going to college, and those that have grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
9:34
SPEAKER_01: We need to be saying these things.
9:36
SPEAKER_01: Let's go all the way back to the 1870s.
9:38
SPEAKER_01: This is R.
9:38
SPEAKER_01: L.
9:39
SPEAKER_01: Dabney.
9:40
SPEAKER_01: He said, I assert without the fear of successful contradiction that the education of children is a work which God has assigned to parents and which they cannot delegate without sin.
9:52
SPEAKER_01: The duty is personal and it is parental, and God has nowhere given them the right to turn it over to the state.
9:58
SPEAKER_01: When parents commit the training of their children to the secular schools, they commit a trust given to them by God into the hands that cannot fulfill it, and thus they sinfully shirk the responsibility which God has laid upon them.
10:13
SPEAKER_01: And that was written a hundred and fifty years ago.
10:19
SPEAKER_01: A.A.
10:20
SPEAKER_01: Hodge, writing in the 1880s, said this.
10:23
SPEAKER_01: And this he was a Presbyterian who led Princeton University in the 1880s.
10:27
SPEAKER_01: He said, I am as sure as I am of Christ's reign that a comprehensive and centralized system of national education separated from religion, that is the Christian faith, as is now commonly proposed, will prove the most appalling engineery for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief and of antisocial, nihilistic ethics, individual, social, and political, which this sin-rent world has ever seen.
10:51
SPEAKER_01: Strong words, wouldn't you say?
10:53
SPEAKER_01: Extremely strong words.
10:56
SPEAKER_01: Jay Gresham Machin, the father of the modern Reformed Presbyterian movement, was writing in the 1920s, again, largely ignored today, largely ignored.
11:06
SPEAKER_01: He said, place the lives of children in their formative years, despite the conviction of their parents, under the intimate control of experts appointed by the state, where the mind is filled with the materialism of the day.
11:17
SPEAKER_01: And it is difficult to see how even the remnants of liberty can subsist.
11:21
SPEAKER_01: Such a tyranny, supported as it is by a perverse technique, used as the instrument in destroying human souls, is certainly far more dangerous than the crude tyrannies of the past.
11:34
SPEAKER_01: Gordon Clark, writing in the 1930s, in public schools, children receive pagan education.
11:39
SPEAKER_01: Any Christian should have sense enough to see the subjection to pagan influences work an injustice to the child.
11:46
SPEAKER_01: Just because a young man survives pagan institutions is no reason for subjecting him to it.
11:51
SPEAKER_01: Only if they reject the godless view of the world, will our Christian families be prepared to face the ensuing dark ages.
12:00
SPEAKER_01: And then Martin Lloyd Jones as well, writing the 60s, children are being taught perverse things in the schools.
12:05
SPEAKER_01: They hear them on the wireless, they see them on television.
12:08
SPEAKER_01: The whole emphasis is anti-God, anti-Bible, and anti-supernatural.
12:14
SPEAKER_01: Who is going to counter these trends?
12:17
SPEAKER_01: That's precisely the business of parents.
12:22
SPEAKER_01: John Murray, writing in the 1970s, we're talking about somebody writing about 50 or 60 years ago, said education must be Christian.
12:31
SPEAKER_01: Unless the school fosters the fear of the Lord as the beginning of knowledge, the influence of the Christian home and church is negated.
12:39
SPEAKER_01: To withhold from pupils the elements of the Christian faith is to damn them to godlessness.
14:13
SPEAKER_01: Now I can't think of more respected men of God of the last 150 years than the men I've been talking about here.
14:19
SPEAKER_01: But let me say this things are a hundred times worse than they were a hundred years ago, and probably ten times worse than they were 20 or 30 years ago today.
14:27
SPEAKER_01: And if these guys were taking the gloves off, we have a hundred times more reason in the church.
14:33
SPEAKER_01: Any pastor worth his salt anywhere in this country should be taking the gloves off and be uh be addressing these issues with language, I would say, 10 to 100 times stronger than the language used by these men of God in previous generations.
14:50
SPEAKER_01: Why?
14:50
SPEAKER_01: Because they didn't have transgendered bathrooms.
14:54
SPEAKER_01: They didn't have the godlessness of evolution either, taught in the American public schools until the 1940s and 1950s, post-scope trial.
15:04
SPEAKER_01: Things are a hundred times worse than they were back then.
15:07
SPEAKER_01: And yet there's hardly a prophetic voice in the churches today on these issues.
15:14
SPEAKER_01: There's something very wrong with us.
15:17
SPEAKER_01: Something very wrong with our nation.
15:19
SPEAKER_01: Something wrong with the churches.
15:22
SPEAKER_01: I hope we can see these things.
15:24
SPEAKER_01: I hope something's sinking into us today.
15:26
SPEAKER_01: If we can just get the frogs out of the slowly boiling water, we're up to 211 degrees, and we just have to ask ourselves, what have we turned into?
15:36
SPEAKER_01: What have we become?
15:41
SPEAKER_01: I want to draw out a very simple proposition, and that is that God cares about our children.
15:51
SPEAKER_01: And God has something to say about the education of our children.
15:58
SPEAKER_01: And we could go directly to Proverbs 1.7.
16:00
SPEAKER_01: The entire book of Proverbs is dedicated to giving knowledge, wisdom, and understanding to a young man or young woman, which means that God has an entire book of the Bible that's dedicated to the topic.
16:11
SPEAKER_01: You know, there's something there.
16:14
SPEAKER_01: We don't have to go to John Dewey, we don't have to go to Horace Mann.
16:17
SPEAKER_01: We don't have to go to any kind of human methodology.
16:21
SPEAKER_01: We can go straight to God's word and you know ask, God, what do you have to say about this?
16:29
SPEAKER_01: And what we find in Proverbs 1:7, there's six verses there that introduce this is a book for anybody who wants to educate a child and what knowledge, wisdom, understanding.
16:38
SPEAKER_01: If there's anybody out there who's interested in what God has to say about the education of a child, giving a child knowledge, this is the book about it.
16:47
SPEAKER_01: And then we get to the very first and fundamental lesson in the book of Proverbs, and that is what the beginning of knowledge is the fear of God.
16:57
SPEAKER_01: And so here's the proposition is that to refuse to teach the fear of God as ultimately foundational in knowledge is to lie to children.
17:11
SPEAKER_01: It's to communicate a lie to children, it's to raise your children in a fundamental deception, to willfully deceive a child in the most fundamental way possible.
17:25
SPEAKER_01: It's a lie.
17:30
SPEAKER_01: And this becomes the most fundamental, indispensable principle of all of learning that needs to actually work its way into every aspect of Christian schools and homeschool conferences and all the rest.
17:44
SPEAKER_01: The fear of God, is the fear of God in our consciousness as homeschool parents, as teachers in Christian schools, or whatever it is, is this the fundamental and most indispensable principle that works its way into every minute, every hour, every page of the curriculum that we give our children?
18:04
SPEAKER_01: I guess that that's the question here.
18:06
SPEAKER_01: And then now, based on Engel and Abington School District, Supreme Court decisions occurred in the 1960s, government-paid teachers in American public schools are forbidden by the state to treat God's word, the Bible, or to treat God devotionally.
18:25
SPEAKER_01: The word is devotionally.
18:27
SPEAKER_01: Now, what does that mean?
18:29
SPEAKER_01: That means that no teacher by law in American public schools can be devoted or express their own devotion to God, and the word devotion means to love God, to fear God, to reverence God, or to worship God.
18:46
SPEAKER_01: That is against the law in American public schools, and has been since 1964, which was the year that I was born.
18:56
SPEAKER_01: For that the last 60 plus years, this has been against the law.
19:03
SPEAKER_01: They took God out, they took prayer out, they took reverence, fear of God out of the school, they took Jesus out of the schools, and it's for us to bring him back in.
19:22
SPEAKER_01: To bring God back in.
19:32
SPEAKER_01: To do everything you possibly can do to counter the Supreme Court of the United States on this issue.
19:41
SPEAKER_01: You oppose with every ounce of your body, you oppose the Supreme Court of the United States, and you bring God back in in all his gloriousness and all his worshipful awesomeness into the curriculum, into the schools, into every aspect of your homeschool life.
20:08
SPEAKER_01: So what happened was this is that teaching the fear of God or the awesomeness of God in public schools and to express it as a teacher is against the law.
20:18
SPEAKER_01: Therefore, there are 1.4 million kids, evangelical kids being homeschooled in the country today, about 600,000 evangelical kids in Christian schools.
20:30
SPEAKER_01: That leaves 16 million evangelical kids are left to humanistic education in the public schools.
20:38
SPEAKER_01: Roughly 88% of evangelical families are in sin.
20:43
SPEAKER_01: 88% of evangelical families in America are living in sin.
20:49
SPEAKER_01: So only 3.5% of the children in this country are receiving an education that may or may not have the fear of God as the beginning of wisdom and knowledge.
21:01
SPEAKER_01: I'm concerned myself that there's so little fear of God.
21:05
SPEAKER_01: The whole concept of the fear of God is so foreign.
21:08
SPEAKER_01: It's hardly ever preferred among Christian schools or homeschools, even homeschool conferences and such.
23:27
SPEAKER_01: It's just so foreign of a concept because we're like four, five, seven generations away from where that was something constituted the fiber of real Christianity in America or anywhere in the world.
23:41
SPEAKER_01: The fear of God, the beginning of wisdom and knowledge.
23:45
SPEAKER_01: If you were to ask every primary school in this county, in this state, in America, what do you teach as the foundation of knowledge in this school?
23:57
SPEAKER_01: I tell you, not one principal is going to say we teach the fear of God as the beginning of wisdom and knowledge.
24:04
SPEAKER_01: I've never heard an exception.
24:06
SPEAKER_01: Now I know there are people who say, yeah, but my schools, our schools are different, our teachers are better.
24:14
SPEAKER_01: But not in this.
24:16
SPEAKER_01: Not on this.
24:18
SPEAKER_01: Sadly, Christians contribute, Christian principles, Christian teachers contribute to the secularism of the day.
24:25
SPEAKER_01: They're out there supporting this.
24:28
SPEAKER_01: Day in and day out, week in and week out.
24:32
SPEAKER_01: They're upholding the system that refuses the very most basic principle that God has given us that should dictate the education of a child.
24:42
SPEAKER_01: They won't do it.
24:44
SPEAKER_01: They won't teach it.
24:45
SPEAKER_01: They'll flee fire it if they do, they know it.
24:54
SPEAKER_01: Some will say, Yeah, but this education, we're giving our kids in the public school a substandard, but you know what?
25:04
SPEAKER_01: We just need a double income in the house.
25:06
SPEAKER_01: Besides, it's not that big of a deal.
25:07
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a sin, okay.
25:08
SPEAKER_01: Maybe it's not the best thing.
25:11
SPEAKER_01: But there is a heinousness of it, and I hope you caught it from the language I gave you, from the from prophets and teachers and pastors in the churches that lived way beyond.
25:22
SPEAKER_01: They were they weren't the frogs in the boiling water.
25:24
SPEAKER_01: They were seeing the heat coming, and and they had a conscience left.
25:29
SPEAKER_01: They had a sense of what was happening, they they realized the danger and the horrific nature of the world.
25:35
SPEAKER_01: Of the American government schools in the 1930s and 40s.
25:39
SPEAKER_01: They saw the horror of it.
25:40
SPEAKER_01: They came face to face with it.
25:42
SPEAKER_01: And they knew it.
25:44
SPEAKER_01: And they warned us of it.
25:46
SPEAKER_01: But not when you've been in the water a long time.
25:51
SPEAKER_01: We see them as strange.
25:53
SPEAKER_01: We say, it's not that big of a deal.
25:56
SPEAKER_01: But I think they were affected by Matthew 18.
25:59
SPEAKER_01: Jesus, in one of the most severe statements has ever made in any of his teachings throughout Scripture, I can't think of anything more horrific in terms of God's warning of judgment to anybody.
26:12
SPEAKER_01: And all of the Word of God is what we find in Matthew 18 in verse 6.
26:16
SPEAKER_01: What does he say?
26:18
SPEAKER_01: He said, You stumble one of these little ones that believes in me.
26:21
SPEAKER_01: It would be better for you that a millstone be hanged around your neck, you be drowned at the bottom of the sea.
26:28
SPEAKER_01: This is an egregious sin.
26:31
SPEAKER_01: And Jesus warns us of it.
26:39
SPEAKER_01: It's calling us to a deep repentance.
26:43
SPEAKER_01: All of us.
26:45
SPEAKER_01: I do believe that we, you know what, we can't say it's all them.
26:51
SPEAKER_01: It's all the fault of the institution, etc.
26:54
SPEAKER_01: As much as the Word of God is going to speak to us as well as them, we need to receive that.
27:02
SPEAKER_01: We ourselves need to repent on this.
27:05
SPEAKER_01: This, I believe, is the sin of the day.
27:09
SPEAKER_01: This is it.
27:11
SPEAKER_01: Cannibalistic tribes in New Guinea, they kill each other, they eat each other.
27:15
SPEAKER_01: That's their sin.
27:17
SPEAKER_01: This is our sin.
27:19
SPEAKER_01: This is the sin of our nation.
27:22
SPEAKER_01: And we need to repent of this.
27:26
SPEAKER_01: And this applies directly to parents.
27:28
SPEAKER_01: Every parent has responsibility to raise their children, the nurture, and the admonition of the Lord Jesus Christ, not to stumble the child.
27:34
SPEAKER_01: And these verses refer to the paid or the paidon.
27:38
SPEAKER_01: The paidon is the child who is between five and seventeen years of age, over which a parent is responsible for their instruction, for their training in knowledge, wisdom, understanding.
27:50
SPEAKER_01: The parent is responsible for this.
27:52
SPEAKER_01: And they're responsible from roughly five years of age till 17, 18, 19 years of age, somewhere in that range.
27:59
SPEAKER_01: Now, there's a different message for young people attending college and so forth.
28:03
SPEAKER_01: They make their own decisions.
28:05
SPEAKER_01: But this is directly related to parents.
28:09
SPEAKER_01: And the church, I believe, needs to address this.
28:14
SPEAKER_01: Otherwise, I believe that this is tier one.
28:18
SPEAKER_01: I believe this is if your church is not Trinitarian and does not believe in justification by faith alone, you've got a problem.
28:27
SPEAKER_01: And if your church has no problem with public schools or refuse to teach the beginning of wisdom and knowledge of the fear of God, then you need to get out of that church.
28:37
SPEAKER_01: You need to leave that church.
28:39
SPEAKER_01: This is tier one.
28:42
SPEAKER_01: This is as important, as crucial as the doctrine of the Trinity.
28:48
SPEAKER_01: Especially when we look at the level of language that Jesus uses in Matthew 18 in relation to it.
29:00
SPEAKER_01: So, brothers and sisters, there's a point at which we just need to be desperate, we need to be urgent, we need to say we are facing a worst-case scenario right now.
29:11
SPEAKER_01: In this country, and with our churches, with ourselves, we're dealing with an issue that I think is as evil or worse than abortion.
29:21
SPEAKER_01: Because in abortion, you take a child's life.
29:24
SPEAKER_01: When it comes to what's going on in the training institutions of this country, we're stealing the child's mind and soul.
29:34
SPEAKER_01: And and as this prophet from the 1970s said, we're damning them to godlessness.
29:43
SPEAKER_01: That's as serious as abortion.
29:48
SPEAKER_01: And as parents are awake to this, as we have come awake, as we're concerned for it.
29:56
SPEAKER_01: We need to be asking the simple question.
29:59
SPEAKER_01: What did God say?
30:02
SPEAKER_01: What did God say?
30:08
SPEAKER_01: We need to reach for the Word of God.
30:10
SPEAKER_01: There just is a point at which you just have to be desperate enough.
30:16
SPEAKER_01: No, not what did Horace Mann say?
30:19
SPEAKER_01: What does the gentle teaching movement say?
30:23
SPEAKER_01: What did the university say?
30:25
SPEAKER_01: What did the Greeks say?
30:28
SPEAKER_01: You need to get desperate enough that you say, What did God say?
30:35
SPEAKER_01: And you reach for this Bible.
30:38
SPEAKER_01: And I trust the the moms and dads here are desperate enough for the souls of their children.
30:46
SPEAKER_01: Desperate enough for the truth of God.
30:49
SPEAKER_01: Desperate enough to realize God is calling us to repentance on this issue.
30:55
SPEAKER_01: That we will actually go to God's word and say, What did God say about the education of our children?
31:01
SPEAKER_01: I think we just have to be that way.
31:04
SPEAKER_01: As in the case of Josiah, who tore his clothes, and his heart was tender before the word of God, because somehow they didn't have access to it for a number of years, and they blew the dust off of that Bible, and he began to read it, and the Bible says he tore his clothes.
31:20
SPEAKER_01: And perhaps there should be some tearing of clothes from time to time.
31:26
SPEAKER_01: On occasion, and perhaps even a rending of hearts.
31:30
SPEAKER_01: That's even better.
31:32
SPEAKER_01: But he tore his clothes, and he commanded Helkiah the priest, No Hakim the son of Shaphan, go inquire of the Lord for me, for the people, for all Judah, concerning the words of this book that has been found.
31:43
SPEAKER_01: For great is the wrath of the Lord that is aroused against us, because our fathers have not obeyed the works of this book to do according to all that is written concerning us.
31:53
SPEAKER_01: So the heart of Josiah.
31:55
SPEAKER_01: Brothers and sisters, that's what we need to be every day.
31:58
SPEAKER_01: Before the word of God, your heart hardened this morning.
32:02
SPEAKER_01: Don't want to receive it yet?
32:06
SPEAKER_01: Need a little more meat tenderizer going on in your heart today to just say, God, teach me.
32:13
SPEAKER_01: Speak, oh Lord, your servant hears now.
32:17
SPEAKER_01: It starts with a softness of heart.
32:21
SPEAKER_01: Especially when it comes to the most important and practical thing that you're gonna do in your whole life.
32:27
SPEAKER_01: What are you gonna do about these precious children that God has given to you?
32:32
SPEAKER_01: And what did the obvious men of the last 150 years say about it?
32:36
SPEAKER_01: Is that a concern for you?
32:40
SPEAKER_01: Are your children a concern for you?
32:44
SPEAKER_01: Do you want to damn them to godlessness?
32:48
SPEAKER_01: I don't think any one of you would.
32:49
SPEAKER_01: We love our children.
32:50
SPEAKER_01: We want the best for them.
32:52
SPEAKER_01: So if you want the best for your children, would you go to God's word?
32:57
SPEAKER_01: Would you ask God, what do you say?
33:00
SPEAKER_01: What do you want?
33:02
SPEAKER_01: Please teach me God.
33:04
SPEAKER_01: What does God say?
33:07
SPEAKER_01: Before we get to the trivium, before we get to great books, whatever it is.
33:11
SPEAKER_01: What are the priorities?
33:13
SPEAKER_01: What are the non-negotiables that God gives to us?
33:16
SPEAKER_01: And are you gonna trust God on this?
33:20
SPEAKER_01: Ephesians 6, 4, you know, we're not gonna hit that verse today, but I'll just read it for you.
33:25
SPEAKER_01: Fathers provoke not your children to wrath, but bring them up in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord Jesus Christ.
33:31
SPEAKER_01: It's to bring them up in the paide or the word paidea, the training, is the nurture of the child in the full orb sense.
33:40
SPEAKER_01: The paidea is the everything: the academic, the intellectual, the emotional, the social, the spiritual, all aspects of your child's life.
33:48
SPEAKER_01: And so that's what really education is.
33:50
SPEAKER_01: We don't separate out the spiritual or the emotional from the math course.
33:54
SPEAKER_01: It's all integrated.
33:55
SPEAKER_01: This is the first mistake everybody makes.
33:57
SPEAKER_01: Is oh, right now we're just focused on the intellectual.
34:00
SPEAKER_01: We're not going to focus on the spiritual.
34:01
SPEAKER_01: We're not going to focus on the emotional.
34:03
SPEAKER_01: You ever tried to teach math?
34:05
SPEAKER_01: It's not emotional with you?
34:06
SPEAKER_01: It's been that way in our house.
34:08
SPEAKER_01: It's our most emotional subject.
34:10
SPEAKER_01: Turns out to be our most spiritual subject, too, towards the end of the class.
34:14
SPEAKER_01: Because there's mom and there's the daughter weeping and gnashing of teeth, and then they're on their floor crying out to God.
34:21
SPEAKER_01: What's this?
34:22
SPEAKER_01: We're supposed to be teaching math here.
34:24
SPEAKER_01: What's going on?
34:26
SPEAKER_01: Turns out you can't disintegrate, right?
34:30
SPEAKER_01: It's the whole child, it's a holistic word.
34:33
SPEAKER_01: We're bringing our child up and the paidea of the Lord Jesus Christ.
34:38
SPEAKER_01: Very simply, what we say is, do whatever Jesus did.
34:41
SPEAKER_01: The paidea of Jesus, do whatever Jesus did.
34:44
SPEAKER_01: It's one of the simplest things we can say.
34:46
SPEAKER_01: Jesus didn't have a classroom, for example.
34:49
SPEAKER_01: Jesus took them out into the boat.
34:51
SPEAKER_01: Jesus was teaching them faith in a real life scenario, etc.
34:54
SPEAKER_01: It's easy.
34:55
SPEAKER_01: It's absolutely easy.
34:56
SPEAKER_01: It's so different than the Greek form.
34:59
SPEAKER_01: Just give them the paidea of Jesus.
35:03
SPEAKER_01: Bring them up the way Jesus taught his disciples.
35:07
SPEAKER_01: It's a very simple concept.
35:10
SPEAKER_01: Then we move to Deuteronomy 6, 4 to 7.
35:13
SPEAKER_01: Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.
35:16
SPEAKER_01: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength.
35:20
SPEAKER_01: And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart.
35:22
SPEAKER_01: You shall teach them diligently to your children.
35:24
SPEAKER_01: You shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, when you rise up, you shall bind them as a sign on your hand.
35:31
SPEAKER_01: They shall be as frontlets between your eyes.
35:34
SPEAKER_01: You shall write them on the doorpost of your house and on your gates.
35:39
SPEAKER_01: So what is it?
35:40
SPEAKER_01: An admonition to the parents, speaking to the heart of the parent, first with a motive.
35:45
SPEAKER_01: The motive is first we approach it with a heart that loves our God, with heart, soul, mind, and strength.
35:53
SPEAKER_01: And again, we're not talking about some bare methodology, some recipe, some list of external rules that somehow will guarantee a predetermined outcome, etc.
36:02
SPEAKER_01: That's not the way this thing starts.
36:04
SPEAKER_01: It starts with a heart motive.
36:06
SPEAKER_01: That's where it begins for all of us.
36:08
SPEAKER_01: That we have a heart that loves God.
36:11
SPEAKER_01: Remember attending a meeting with George Barnett, the Christian pollster one time, and somebody asked him, Does anybody do family worship in America today?
36:17
SPEAKER_01: He says, Well, born-again parents, we've asked the question, only one in 20 has ever tried it.
36:22
SPEAKER_01: Only 5% of born-again parents in America.
36:26
SPEAKER_01: What is that?
36:27
SPEAKER_01: Barely 1% of American families have ever tried family worship.
36:31
SPEAKER_01: But why won't they teach God's word as they sit in the house?
36:33
SPEAKER_01: Why not?
36:34
SPEAKER_01: Because they don't love God.
36:38
SPEAKER_01: That's why it begins with a love for God, a love for his word, a love for his children, to speak of the God they love to the children they love, but they gotta love God first.
36:49
SPEAKER_01: And they've got to know the love of God for them first.
36:51
SPEAKER_01: Somehow they miss the gospel.
36:53
SPEAKER_01: And I get that.
36:55
SPEAKER_01: Happens all the time.
36:56
SPEAKER_01: Somehow people miss the gospel.
36:58
SPEAKER_01: Somehow they don't really internalize or understand God's love for them.
37:02
SPEAKER_01: They won't love God either.
37:04
SPEAKER_01: And they won't teach children about the God that they don't love.
37:12
SPEAKER_01: The most important lesson I want my children to receive is that you know what?
37:17
SPEAKER_01: My dad loved God.
37:20
SPEAKER_01: My mom, she loved God.
37:22
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they had a lot of problems.
37:24
SPEAKER_01: But one thing for sure, my dad loved God.
37:28
SPEAKER_01: He loved God's word.
37:30
SPEAKER_01: He loved God's people.
37:31
SPEAKER_01: He loved God's church.
37:33
SPEAKER_01: He loved God's works and history.
37:35
SPEAKER_01: He just loved everything about God.
37:37
SPEAKER_01: He was a Godphile.
37:40
SPEAKER_01: That's what we want.
37:43
SPEAKER_01: To love the things that God loves, to hate the things he hates.
37:48
SPEAKER_01: He hates abortion.
37:49
SPEAKER_01: He hates divorce.
37:51
SPEAKER_01: He hates the shedding of innocent blood and the self-centeredness that drives all of that.
37:56
SPEAKER_01: The Godfile's passionate about the things that God loves, his kingdom, his church, his word.
38:02
SPEAKER_01: Every time that man comes into the church, his heart is warmed because he's coming into contact with God's people and God's word.
38:10
SPEAKER_01: And that love just roots itself in that man and manifests itself in the times of crisis and trial.
38:17
SPEAKER_01: And that's the way it works, right?
38:18
SPEAKER_01: The death of a loved one, the loss of a job, whatever it is, that man responds in love for God, still loves God.
38:25
SPEAKER_01: God's taken away some things in his life, his money, his comforts, whatever it is, his health.
38:30
SPEAKER_01: But that man still gleams with a love for God.
38:33
SPEAKER_01: Loves Jesus still.
38:37
SPEAKER_01: He says, he falls on his face and cries out, The Lord has given, the Lord's taken away, but I still love God.
38:42
SPEAKER_01: Blessed be the name of the Lord.
38:44
SPEAKER_01: That demonstrates that man's love for God.
38:47
SPEAKER_01: No matter what happens, no matter what kind of trials that man goes through, he comes through believing in God, trusting in God, loving God, following Jesus through it all.
38:58
SPEAKER_01: That's the first thing.
39:00
SPEAKER_01: It's not a crusty conservative dad who is a real good hater, you know, hates communists, hates homosexuality and abortion, but he doesn't really love God.
39:12
SPEAKER_01: Not just the crusty conservative dad.
39:14
SPEAKER_01: No.
39:14
SPEAKER_01: He's a good dad who loves God.
39:15
SPEAKER_01: And then verse 6, let's move on.
39:18
SPEAKER_01: The word of God then abides in the heart.
39:20
SPEAKER_01: It's right there in your heart.
39:21
SPEAKER_01: So as a dad, as a mom, the word is there in your heart.
39:24
SPEAKER_01: It's abiding in your heart, in your heart.
39:26
SPEAKER_01: It's right there with you.
39:28
SPEAKER_01: Jesus said the same thing in John 15.
39:29
SPEAKER_01: If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, you will ask what you desire.
39:35
SPEAKER_01: It shall be done for you.
39:36
SPEAKER_01: So it's the same thing.
39:37
SPEAKER_01: It's that the word of God is there.
39:39
SPEAKER_01: It's abiding.
39:40
SPEAKER_01: It's strong, it's dominating.
39:43
SPEAKER_01: We come back to it, we gravitate towards it.
39:45
SPEAKER_01: Here's what it is for me.
39:48
SPEAKER_01: On my bedside table, there's a Bible, and there's a history book, and there's a couple other things.
39:54
SPEAKER_01: I tend to gravitate towards the Bible.
39:55
SPEAKER_01: Okay, before I go to sleep, I just need a little more of the Word of God.
39:58
SPEAKER_01: You have a choice.
39:59
SPEAKER_01: That's what I'm saying.
40:00
SPEAKER_01: You have a choice.
40:02
SPEAKER_01: Are you drawn to the Word?
40:04
SPEAKER_01: Does the Word of God abide with you?
40:06
SPEAKER_01: Or is it always distractions and diversions getting in your way?
40:10
SPEAKER_01: And there are 10,000 worldly systems of entertainment, thought, priorities, etc., that can get in the way.
40:19
SPEAKER_01: But let's move on.
40:19
SPEAKER_01: Move on to verses 7 and 9.
40:21
SPEAKER_01: What does God say?
40:22
SPEAKER_01: What was it God said?
40:23
SPEAKER_01: That's what we're getting to.
40:24
SPEAKER_01: What is it?
40:25
SPEAKER_01: Let's go back to what God said about education this morning.
40:28
SPEAKER_01: What is it?
40:28
SPEAKER_01: This is the Locus Classicus.
40:30
SPEAKER_01: It's the classic passage about education for Jews and Christians through the ages.
40:35
SPEAKER_01: And it began right here.
40:36
SPEAKER_01: But here we have five things to say.
40:39
SPEAKER_01: Five things in this passage to say about how we educate children.
40:44
SPEAKER_01: Number one, it's parent integrated.
40:47
SPEAKER_01: Number two, it's God's word integrated.
40:51
SPEAKER_01: And number three, it's life integrated.
40:53
SPEAKER_01: I'll hit those first three things first.
40:56
SPEAKER_01: It's parent integrated.
40:57
SPEAKER_01: You shall teach them diligently to your children and shall talk of them as you sit in your house.
41:02
SPEAKER_01: Again, we're not trusting Jean-Jacques Rousseau here.
41:04
SPEAKER_01: We're not touching trusting anybody else.
41:06
SPEAKER_01: We're just saying, God, we're wandering into the word and we're saying, God, what did you have to say?
41:10
SPEAKER_01: He says, You shall teach your children as you sit in your house.
41:15
SPEAKER_01: I was at one of the largest Christian schools in the Denver metro area a couple of years ago, walk into the administration building, right there above the welcome desk, is you shall teach your children God's word as you sit in your house.
41:27
SPEAKER_01: And I looked around and thought, this doesn't look like my house.
41:31
SPEAKER_01: That's not my chair.
41:33
SPEAKER_01: That's not my couch over there.
41:36
SPEAKER_01: So again, what is it that God's word says?
41:39
SPEAKER_01: We can trust God's word here?
41:41
SPEAKER_01: Are we desperate enough?
41:42
SPEAKER_01: Is it urgent enough yet?
41:44
SPEAKER_01: Do we see there'd be a problem yet?
41:46
SPEAKER_01: Do we see that the secular systems that have been imposed upon us for generations may have some mistake about them?
41:54
SPEAKER_01: Is there even an inkling about it among any of us?
41:56
SPEAKER_01: If there is, then go to God's word.
41:59
SPEAKER_01: What does it say?
42:00
SPEAKER_01: You shall teach your children as you sit in your house.
42:07
SPEAKER_01: It's primarily parent integrated.
42:13
SPEAKER_01: We find this throughout Scripture.
42:15
SPEAKER_01: Deuteronomy 6, Ephesians 6, 4, the entire book of Proverbs, chapter 1 through 31.
42:21
SPEAKER_01: Mom shows up in chapter 31, but dad is there for the first 30 chapters.
42:25
SPEAKER_01: This is the predominant approach that God in his infinite wisdom gives you.
42:30
SPEAKER_01: Do you trust him?
42:34
SPEAKER_01: Do you think he's wise enough?
42:36
SPEAKER_01: You are are you doubting him now on this?
42:42
SPEAKER_01: And as you know, it was John Jock Rousseau that pretty much blasted the family out of the field of education.
42:48
SPEAKER_01: Well, he abandoned five of his children on the steps of an orphanage the day they were born.
42:53
SPEAKER_01: They didn't have names, they didn't even know what the genders were, just abandoned, ripped the child out of the arms of the mother, and he abandoned five children on the steps of an orphanage.
43:03
SPEAKER_01: And then he went and wrote a book on how to educate a child for the modern age, in which he said, his favorite book on education was Plato's Republic, where Plato suggested a form of human society in which a woman and a man come together temporarily liaison.
43:17
SPEAKER_01: She has a baby, the baby comes out of the womb into the arms of professionals who take over from there, the philosopher kings, and then after that, Plato said, No son shall ever know his father, and no father shall ever know his son.
43:30
SPEAKER_01: This is precisely the kind of non-relational father-son, father-daughter breakup that we see in the modern age.
43:38
SPEAKER_01: This was the vision of the humanist ideal that has finally come to pass in a mechanistic modern age in which Rousseau said, we'll turn it over the state, we'll increase taxation big time, and put a compulsory attendance law in place, and the rest is history as we've seen it.
43:57
SPEAKER_01: Now, do you trust Jean-Jacques Rousseau or God on this one?
44:05
SPEAKER_01: Let's trust God.
44:07
SPEAKER_01: Let's go to God on this.
44:11
SPEAKER_01: Secondly, says parent integrated, it's also word integrated.
44:15
SPEAKER_01: Now, why is this message going to be rejected and laughed at by most of the Christian church in America today?
44:23
SPEAKER_01: Well, it's because of this.
44:25
SPEAKER_01: When I was in South Africa this year, I wound up in a church where a reformed pastor quizzed me before I gave my presentation.
44:36
SPEAKER_01: And I said, I'm going to bring up Proverbs 1.7.
44:38
SPEAKER_01: He said, Well, that doesn't apply to Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
44:44
SPEAKER_01: That only applies on Sunday.
44:47
SPEAKER_01: Now, this whole community was very classical, very much embraced Aquinas to the point where during the QA it was always Aquinas.
44:57
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so this is the way, this is the direction the Reformed Church has gone, sadly, over the last 50 years.
45:03
SPEAKER_01: Largely the reason why they've rejected this message almost wholesale.
45:07
SPEAKER_01: Because of Aquinas.
45:09
SPEAKER_01: Now, the Word of God does not present two knowledges.
45:16
SPEAKER_01: See, Aquinas suggested two knowledges, sacred knowledge built up on the Bible, sacred doctrine, and human knowledge built up on human reason.
45:28
SPEAKER_01: And he said, they are different in kind.
45:30
SPEAKER_01: It's the first section of the Summa.
45:33
SPEAKER_01: This is why it was all straw.
45:35
SPEAKER_01: His whole work was straw, admitted to be so by himself on his deathbed.
45:40
SPEAKER_01: But it's the most horrific thing.
45:43
SPEAKER_01: It is the reason for the Catholic apostasy of the 1400s and the evangelical Protestant apostasy of the 1900s and 2000s.
45:56
SPEAKER_01: Aquinas is the reason for the apostasy.
45:59
SPEAKER_01: And the reason that he takes this position is because he does not realize that the Word of God presents two revelations concerning one knowledge.
46:13
SPEAKER_01: The revelation's natural, the heavens declare the glory of God, and the revelation that comes by special revelation through God's communicated word to us.
46:23
SPEAKER_01: But there is this massive sacred secular divide in which we're supposed to divide out the Word of God to only Sunday.
46:32
SPEAKER_01: And then a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, our children live a secular life.
46:37
SPEAKER_01: And it creates a sacred secular divide and raises children in at least a single generation that are hypocrites.
46:45
SPEAKER_01: It's a massive hypocrisy.
46:48
SPEAKER_01: It is the way in which you will guarantee an apostasy to this generation, and your grandchildren and great-grandchildren will not be attending church at all.
46:58
SPEAKER_01: This is the process of what happened with the universities.
47:02
SPEAKER_01: You see, the universities were at one time seminaries, and they talked about sacred doctrine, and they split out the philosophy department, and then in the early 1700s, the philosophy department closed down the Trinitarian seminary of Harvard, Yale, and then eventually Princeton.
47:17
SPEAKER_01: Because inevitably, the philosophy built up on human reason does not consider God's word to be sufficient to define our metaphysic or ethics, our worldview.
47:28
SPEAKER_01: And it turns out to be the secular worldview that destroys the sacred and destroys the faith in your.
47:35
SPEAKER_01: Up in America, and it's happening again to the reformed movement in America today.
47:45
SPEAKER_01: Now, the key word here is frontlet.
47:48
SPEAKER_01: The word of God is a frontlet before our eyes.
47:51
SPEAKER_01: And it's the means by which we look out into the world around us.
47:56
SPEAKER_01: John Calvin got it right when he called them the eyeglasses.
47:59
SPEAKER_01: Eyeglasses were not developed in 1600 BC.
48:02
SPEAKER_01: They were developed in roughly 1300 in a monastery somewhere in Europe.
48:07
SPEAKER_01: And so by the time you get to John Calvin, he says, well, effectively the Word of God is his eyeglasses.
48:14
SPEAKER_01: We look through eyeglasses to interpret the reality of natural revelation.
48:19
SPEAKER_01: We cannot separate any of these.
48:21
SPEAKER_01: Adam was never allowed to live without some special revelation.
48:24
SPEAKER_01: God immediately gave him special revelation through which he would understand his position in the world.
48:30
SPEAKER_01: After the fall, we have even more reason for bringing God's word into the philosophy classrooms or into history or science or anything else.
48:39
SPEAKER_01: Even more reason.
48:40
SPEAKER_01: Otherwise, we will guarantee the apostasy of successive generations in our place and our time in history as well.
48:48
SPEAKER_01: So the word of God, as we look at science, natural creation around us, we study this, we study it through the eyeglasses, the interpretive device of the word of God itself.
48:58
SPEAKER_01: Hundreds of Bible verses throughout the curriculum, by which we can interpret, by which we understand, a constant frontlet.
49:06
SPEAKER_01: The Bible doesn't want your children to go for an hour, five hours, the geography class, the history class, without some access to the word of God.
49:17
SPEAKER_01: That's why it is a frontlet.
49:19
SPEAKER_01: That's why it's right on the walls and the gates.
49:22
SPEAKER_01: That's why it's at every bodily position that they find themselves in.
49:27
SPEAKER_01: Brothers and sisters, we have to utterly reject the sacred secular divide, this dualism that has so destroyed the faith generation after generation.
49:40
SPEAKER_01: We look at history, examining what is history?
49:44
SPEAKER_01: What is history?
49:45
SPEAKER_01: History is the works of men.
49:48
SPEAKER_01: Or is it the work of God?
49:51
SPEAKER_01: Which is it?
49:52
SPEAKER_01: Is history the providential work of God or the works of men?
49:56
SPEAKER_01: Which is it?
49:58
SPEAKER_01: Well, yes, it's both.
50:00
SPEAKER_01: You see, but we're using God's word.
50:03
SPEAKER_01: God's sovereign control over all of the cause and effect relationships in the universe.
50:08
SPEAKER_01: We're using God's word as a filter by which we prioritize and look at the 60 trillion historical events that happen in history, and we we we sort through them, prioritize them, not as the heathen do, with all their wars and all the rest of it, but through a biblical sense of what's important, what isn't.
50:27
SPEAKER_01: And through a biblical concept of whether it's the works of men or the works of God.
50:30
SPEAKER_01: Always filtering, always filtering hundreds of Bible verses throughout the curriculum to properly filter the ethics, the prioritization, the significance of an event as it's related to Jesus and his kingdom, et cetera, et cetera.
50:45
SPEAKER_01: We absolutely must have the Word of God as the filter by which to interpret history as well as literature.
50:51
SPEAKER_01: What is literature?
50:52
SPEAKER_01: Literature delves into the very, very most intense and deepest psychological and emotional events that are occurring in the souls of men.
51:05
SPEAKER_01: So how do we how do we look at literature?
51:07
SPEAKER_01: Again, we interpret it through a biblical anthropology.
51:11
SPEAKER_01: A biblical psychology.
51:13
SPEAKER_01: We don't separate out the literature book, as though reading the pagan literature, even more reason, for hundreds of Bible verses by which we filter and understand the ethics of it, the psychology of it, the anthropology of it.
51:26
SPEAKER_01: We must use the word of God if we're going to salvage the faith.
51:31
SPEAKER_01: Otherwise, we will continue to contribute to the apostasy and the destruction of the Christian faith in the West and all over the world.
51:40
SPEAKER_01: Thirdly, we said that it's parent integrated, word integrated.
51:45
SPEAKER_01: Now it's life integrated as well.
51:47
SPEAKER_01: We don't have time for that this morning.
51:49
SPEAKER_01: But the teaching has got to be life integrated.
51:52
SPEAKER_01: Can't just know the word, but also do the word.
51:54
SPEAKER_01: And uh we'll talk about that another time.
51:57
SPEAKER_01: But I want to move down to verses 20 to 23 because these are really key.
52:01
SPEAKER_01: Just want to wrap it up here for a moment.
52:03
SPEAKER_01: But uh let's give it a moment.
52:05
SPEAKER_01: Verse 20 to 23.
52:06
SPEAKER_01: Now, when your son asks you in time to come, saying, What is the meaning of the testimonies, the statutes, the judgments which the Lord our God has commanded you, then you shall say to your son, We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand.
52:20
SPEAKER_01: And the Lord showed signs and wonders before our eyes, great and severe, against Egypt, Pharaoh, and all his household.
52:26
SPEAKER_01: And then he brought us out from there that he might bring us in to give us the land of which he swore to our fathers.
52:34
SPEAKER_01: Because as we're teaching the law and the standards, faith and character and such in our household, what what are what are our children going to wonder?
52:43
SPEAKER_01: Well, why are we teaching all of this?
52:45
SPEAKER_01: Well, the answer is that God has come.
52:48
SPEAKER_01: God has saved us by his son, the Lord Jesus Christ.
52:52
SPEAKER_01: He saved the Old Testament saints there at the Red Sea, but now, child, he saves us too.
52:58
SPEAKER_01: He saved us by Jesus Christ, our powerful Savior, who overcame sin and death for us at the cross, so that now we can keep his commandments.
53:08
SPEAKER_01: So there's a gospel-centered view.
53:11
SPEAKER_01: The content itself has got to include, yes, the law that forms the character of our children, but never separated from the gospel message.
53:22
SPEAKER_01: And then finally, the goal.
53:24
SPEAKER_01: The goal and the objective.
53:26
SPEAKER_01: What is it?
53:27
SPEAKER_01: Well, verse 24.
53:28
SPEAKER_01: The Lord commanded us to observe all these statutes, to fear the Lord our God for our good always, that he might preserve us alive as it is this day.
53:39
SPEAKER_01: The goal is that our children will fear God.
53:42
SPEAKER_01: They worship God, they realize the awesomeness of God in the classrooms.
53:48
SPEAKER_01: That they would see the amazing power and wisdom and goodness of God in the human cell, in the galaxies, in the great natural world around us that sustains all of the hundreds of quadrillions of bugs and animals throughout the entire globe.
54:06
SPEAKER_01: As our children view the science class, they they see the gloriousness of God, the goodness of God, and God's amazing power in the sun and the stars and the galaxies all around us, the quasars and all the rest.
54:23
SPEAKER_01: And that at the end of the class, they stand up, raise their arms, and just seeing how great thou art.
54:29
SPEAKER_01: There has to be, we have to break through this thing.
54:32
SPEAKER_01: And I've used this illustration many times all over the world that we need university professors in the chemistry classroom standing on their desks and just raising their hands in worship, falling on their faces and crying out, God, how great you art.
54:49
SPEAKER_01: And yet that doesn't happen.
54:51
SPEAKER_01: But why?
54:52
SPEAKER_01: Because we live in Aquinas' world.
54:55
SPEAKER_01: Because that doesn't belong in the chemistry classroom.
54:58
SPEAKER_01: It belongs in church on Sunday.
55:02
SPEAKER_01: Because we are to live the dualist life.
55:05
SPEAKER_01: We kind of believe something on Sunday, but we sure don't believe it on Monday through Saturday.
55:12
SPEAKER_01: And this is destructive to the faith.
55:17
SPEAKER_01: The goal is to worship.
55:20
SPEAKER_01: We study the just desolations that God brings into all the earth.
55:26
SPEAKER_01: Studying the history of Japan to add a little bit more to one of our courses.
55:32
SPEAKER_01: It's nothing but wars and desolations and utter devastation to human life.
55:38
SPEAKER_01: Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people slaughtered wholesale all over the place.
55:43
SPEAKER_01: The world's been doing this for years.
55:45
SPEAKER_01: But why?
55:47
SPEAKER_01: Because of the judgment of Almighty God.
55:53
SPEAKER_01: That's why.
55:54
SPEAKER_01: A third of Europe, wiped out by the bubonic plague, to thankfully prepare the world for the reformation, softened things up a bit in Europe.
56:03
SPEAKER_01: But as you present that to the class, you look up to the class and you say, fear God.
56:11
SPEAKER_01: God did that.
56:16
SPEAKER_01: It's for us to reverence the judgments and the mercies of God, certainly.
56:21
SPEAKER_01: We always go back to the cross and see how the Son of God took the brunt at the cross for us.
56:30
SPEAKER_01: And all the death and the devastation, all of this we see in the world, as it were, centered it on Jesus Christ to receive the pain, the agony for our sins at the cross, that we would not suffer an eternity of hellfire, destruction upon ourselves.
56:51
SPEAKER_01: At some point, somebody's got to be trembling in this room.
56:56
SPEAKER_01: At some point, we need to start believing this and focusing our minds in upon it such that we would just have like maybe just a desire to fall down.
57:11
SPEAKER_01: Just a little bit of an instinct, like I won't do it because everybody's watching me.
57:15
SPEAKER_01: I get it.
57:16
SPEAKER_01: But to fall down and to worship God.
57:23
SPEAKER_01: I just I want to do it now.
57:25
SPEAKER_01: I just want to worship God.
57:27
SPEAKER_01: I want to go prostrate like right now.
57:33
SPEAKER_01: That's the objective.
57:36
SPEAKER_01: Prostrate before the cross of Jesus Christ.
57:40
SPEAKER_01: For yes, the judgment of God, the wrath of God, but really for the mercy and the grace and love of Jesus, the pity of Christ for this poor sinner.
57:50
SPEAKER_01: Prostrate now.
57:52
SPEAKER_01: But not just on Sunday.
57:55
SPEAKER_01: But on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
57:59
SPEAKER_01: Amen and amen.
58:01
SPEAKER_01: Father God, oh God, I pray.
58:04
SPEAKER_01: Oh God, I pray you'd open our eyes.
58:08
SPEAKER_01: That we would repent.
58:10
SPEAKER_01: That our minds would be renewed.
58:13
SPEAKER_01: God, we have a whole new perspective of the Christian life.
58:19
SPEAKER_01: To love you.
58:21
SPEAKER_01: To talk of you.
58:23
SPEAKER_01: To integrate it into our children's life.
58:25
SPEAKER_01: Not because some expert told us we're supposed to do this.
58:30
SPEAKER_01: But God, because you're good and you're praiseworthy.
58:34
SPEAKER_01: And you're worth talking about and praising and fearing and reverencing and considering to be awesome by all of our children, ourselves as well.
58:43
SPEAKER_01: To worship you, God, today and every day.
58:47
SPEAKER_01: Oh, God, we pray you'd restore this to the Christian family in this church and churches everywhere.
58:52
SPEAKER_01: Oh, God, we pray you'd bring a repentance to the churches.
58:57
SPEAKER_01: Oh, God, we pray you'd salvage the churches, the precious body for which Jesus gave his life.
59:05
SPEAKER_01: Please, we pray for repentance in the churches of Christ.
59:10
SPEAKER_01: On this, amen and amen.
59:16
SPEAKER_01: This has been a production of the Generations Media Network.
59:19
SPEAKER_01: For more information, go to generations.org slash media.