Education

 

Education and Communication

I spend a great deal of time in the summer planning for the coming school year. I love it! I shop my own shelves, making piles of books everywhere and writing down a plan for each child. I begin with determining the theme for the year. Sometimes I spend hours, days or weeks determining the time period to study: early world history, middle ages, colonial, twentieth century or American civics and government? I had been struggling with the theme for the upcoming year until my husband mentioned the new Ann Coulter book, Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America. This launched a discussion on our current culture and talk radio. I had an epiphany- we should study today’s culture! I have spend years teaching my children history and setting up a foundation, it’s time they dig deeper in what is going on in the world today. Talk radio and talk mom and dad is not enough. We need more meat to chew on and discuss.

With several teens quickly approaching college age, it is important to me that they are able to understand the culture in order to be missionaries in it.

“The God of the Bible is a sender by nature. He is a missionary God who has sent his people into the world since Abraham. In the Old Testament he sent prophets like Isaiah, Daniel, Jeremiah, and Jonah over cross-cultural boundaries. He sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to earth to live as a man, in a particular time and place, with a particular people as a missionary in a sinful culture. The Father also sends the Holy Spirit to Christians so that we, like Jesus, might also live as missionaries in culture. The gospel that portrays this most clearly is John, where Jesus says roughly forty times, “The Father has sent me,” and then says in John 20:21, “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” – Mark Driscoll

When my children were younger, I prayed for their salvation, that they wouldn’t fall and get hurt, catch a cold, wreck their bikes, but as they got older my prayer focus changed. One of the prayers I pray for them is from Ephesians:

“Let no foul or polluting language, nor evil word nor unwholesome or worthless talk [ever] come out of your mouth, but only such [speech] as is good and beneficial to the spiritual progress of others, as is fitting to the need and the occasion, that it may be a blessing and give grace (God’s favor) to those who hear it.

And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God [do not offend or vex or sadden Him], by Whom you were sealed (marked, branded as God’s own, secured) for the day of redemption (of final deliverance through Christ from evil and the consequences of sin).” Ephesian 4:29,30

Teens can be swayed by their peers in social situations to speak curses- to agree when they disagree- grieve the Holy Spirit and therefore lose their witness.

“Truth demands confrontation; loving confrontation, but confrontation nevertheless. If our reflex action is always accommodation, regardless of the centrality of the truth involved, there is something wrong. Just as what we may call holiness without love is not God’s kind of holiness, so also what we may call love without holiness, is not God’s kind of love…A false spirit of accommodation is sweeping the world as well as the Church, including those who claim the label of evangelical.”

Francis A. Schaeffer

8See to it that no one carries you off as spoil or makes you yourselves captive by his so-called philosophy and intellectualism and vain deceit (idle fancies and plain nonsense), following human tradition (men’s ideas of the material rather than the spiritual world), just crude notions following the rudimentary and elemental teachings of the universe and disregarding [the teachings of] Christ (the Messiah).
Col. 2:8