You know this!
No matter where your child attends school, both the content and the context of that schooling is discipling your child. Parents who elect home-based, parent directed schooling are in greater control of both the content and the context - we have an easier time screening and selecting truth-filled curriculum, and we can scrutinize and hand-pick the teachers we enlist to help us on our journey. Christian parents who outsource their children to institutional schooling - whether that be government schooling, private schooling, or even Christian schooling - must be evermore vigilant in tearing down those things that set themselves up against the knowledge of God and evermore diligent to root their children in Truth. They have a harder job! A Christian-thinking education for our children is not optional - says God. We parents have been given a sacred stewardship of our children to raise them for His glory, and we only have a limited amount of time to do it and the deck of cultural and ecclesiastical decay is stacked against us.
Q1: What is the chief end of man?
Q2: The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
Here, the word glorify does not equate 'making much of', although that is our privilege and delight, but rather the word 'glory' here means to reflect or to mirror. Like the moon, having no light of it's own, it shines bright in the night sky by simply reflecting it's light source - our sun. We benefit from this reflecting of the sun's light by illuminating our night sky. Likewise, we glorify God by mirroring Him and reflecting Him to the world - His attributes, His nature, His will. John Piper puts it this way, "'Glorify' does not mean make glorious. It means [to] reflect or display as glorious." When we glorify Him rightly, we are a benefit to this world in our applying His Truths to every sphere of our living - we shine forth His majesty and rightful reign in the darkness.
Facts are, most professing Christians - profess Him with their mouth, but deny Him in their hearts and their minds and actions. What shapes your thinking, shapes your living! It's not sufficient to have a little "Jesus" sprinkled on a compromised lesson or to know even heaps of bible trivia. When we don't think God's thoughts after Him concerning our family life, church life, community life, politics, economics and finances, entertainment, vocation, education, history, the arts, conduct and ethics, etc - we obscure His nature and majesty and infinite worth to a world in desperate need of Him, and provide grounds for God-directed scorn and mockery. This issue is not about you. This issue is not about your child. This is a Great Commandment and Great Commission issue (Luke 10:26-28, Matthew 28:16-20). The issue is the glory of God!
“There are a several troubling patterns to take notice. First, although most Americans consider themselves to be Christian and say they know the content of the Bible, less than one out of ten Americans demonstrate such knowledge through their actions. Second, the generational pattern suggests that parents are not focused on guiding their children to have a biblical worldview. One of the challenges for parents, though, is that you cannot give what you do not have, and most parents do not possess such a perspective on life. That raises a third challenge, which relates to the job that Christian churches, schools and parachurch ministries are doing in Christian education. Finally, even though a central element of being a Christian is to embrace basic biblical principles and incorporate them into one’s worldview, there has been no change in the percentage of adults or even born again adults in the past 13 years regarding the possession of a biblical worldview.”
~ The Barna Group ~
(Click to read full report.)
"Secular Education is the most powerful ally of Humanism [Atheism], and every American public school is a school of Humanism. What can the Theistic Sunday Schools, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching?"
- Charles Francis Potter, Humanism: A New Religion, p. 128
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