Choosing a School for your Child: Will Their School Define Them?

    Let me start by saying that I have two young children. Neither of them are in school yet. We are just starting to explore school options.

     We recently went to an open house at a private, classical, christian school. We will probably send our children there, because their values (i.e. worldview) match our family values. Making education choices for your child are complex. There are many options: public, private, secular, Christian, charter school, home school, etc... There is no simple answer. Often you will think about: your child's future, the quality of the education they will receive, the peers they will socialize with, the cost of tuition (if any), the values or worldview they will learn, etc, etc....

    This brings me to some of my core values / goals for my family:

-To raise children that become the spiritual giants of the next generation. 
-To raise children that follow God with their whole heart.
-To raise children that follow the Bible's clear teachings on all matters no matter how loudly our culture tells them to do the opposite.

I firmly believe that parents are the most significant influence in a child's life. This means that if you have similar goals for your family, that ultimately the responsibility to meet those goals falls on you and God.  Let me say this again a different way.

The amount of spiritual effort parents pour into their children, is most often directly proportional to the achieved result.

This means that children do not turn into Godly adults (Christ followers) by accident. It also means churches, schools, pastors, youth camps, books, movies, etc... do not produce Christ followers. Those things are tools that parents can utilize to help them achieve their goals, but by themselves these things often fail to produce Christ followers. The statistics will back me up on this.

So, in regards to education options for your child; a great Christian school can be a great tool, but it does not determine the fate of your child. Each family creates their own destiny. I believe the families that follow God, produce the best results.


So, if you have the means and the opportunity to send your child to an amazing Christian school, should you? Absolutely.  It can be a great tool in your family's journey to producing Christ followers. However, not everyone has both the means and the opportunity. Often one or both of those items can be elusive in your family's life adventure. Do not panic!  You still have many tools available to produce wonderful godly children.  The most important tool for producing a Christ follower, is the one you cannot buy:  the unyielding determination of the parent(s) to produce godly children.

If your family decides that a public (non-christian) school is the institution that will educate your children, that is fine. Just make sure to understand what that means and to adjust your battle plan as needed. You will need to fortify and continually replenish certain areas of your family's worldview.  Maybe your family will have bible devotions after school or after dinner. Maybe your family will use a biblical based school curriculum to supplement public school. Maybe the parents will be sure to monitor what information their child is consuming from school diligently asking questions: what did you learn about today? Did you hear anything that conflicts with the Bible today? Did you hear anything that conflicts with our family's values today?

Even if you do send your child to a great Christian school, don't forget that the school is not raising your child. You are!  Your child will not be at school 24 hours a day. Confrontations between children brought up with a biblical worldview and our culture are inevitable. All families need a battle plan for combating our culture; the families with children attending a Christian school may just draw their plan differently.

Homeschooling can also be a good tool for raising your child with the worldview you want them to have. This is a good option if you have a lot of time, but not a lot of money and you do not want to spend a lot of effort battling conflicting ideas your children might learn from public school.

Neutral?
Make no mistake that you must battle the ideas that public school produces if you want to give your child a biblical worldview. Public school does not teach a neutral viewpoint. By leaving out God and religion public schools are teaching a defacto standard of: humanism,  materialism, and to some extent atheism. When you do not teach about God, it is easy to believe there is no God.

Don't forget to include God in your family's goals and the choices that help shape your child's future.  I often pray that I will successfully deliver on these goals. I suggest that any parent reading this article spend time in prayer before making a decision.

A tale of Intolerance and Ex-CEO of Mozilla

So a long story short: the CEO of Mozilla (the company that makes the internet browser Firefox) donated money to Prop. 8 in California (supporting traditional marriage) BEFORE he was the CEO of Mozilla. When the public found out, a bunch of pro-homosexual marriage supporters called for him to resign.



I like what Glen Beck had to say about what the proper response to this should be:

Beck said Mozilla should have released a statement that said: “We support the constitutional rights of all of our employees to express themselves politically without the fear of retribution. This is America and the first principle of this nation is the right of expression. While we disagree with Mr. Eich’s stand, we support his right to be true to the dictates of his conscience, and we support the rights of everyone in the homosexual community to vehemently disagree with Mr. Eich … We will not, however, cave in to the un-American attempt to squash free political thought, expression and political viewpoints, no matter who’s behind the effort.”

Source:
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/04/04/an-american-nightmare-the-story-that-made-beck-say-we-are-becoming-a-thugocracy/


Clearly this is another example of the intolerance of the "tolerant" left. Very sad.

The greatest battle of your life will NOT be on a battlefield

      The greatest battle of your life will not be on a battlefield, at least not a battlefield like most of us normally thing about. The world spends so much time and resources on conflicts and wars, but so little time dealing with the battle that really matters. So what kind of battle is more important than the wars fought between powerful nations?

       The most important battle ever, is the battle for your mind.  Don't ignore this concept, because this is a real battle.  In this battle their our captors and captives, just like a war fought with guns and bombs.  The most likely captive is your mind, unless you actively defend it!  You mind is the greatest prize the enemy can capture and they use the most dangerous weapon of all....Lies.

   Planting your thoughts and actions firmly in Truth is the best, and only, defense against lies. Bullet proof vests do not protect your mind from being captured. Therefore, don't let truth die on the battlefield of your culture, because if you do, your mind will be the next casualty of the Truth war.

     The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince the world he didn't exist. Ignoring Jesus Christ has much more serious consequences than simply having your body die for your country over some land dispute or some insult.

To My Children: Do Not Be Deceived, Truth Matters!

To my Children,
    You are young now, but each day you are growing. As you grow each day, the amount of information you consume (i.e. hear, read, see, etc..) will grow exponentially (grow very quickly). It appears to me that each day the world: rejects God more, shouts the lies louder, and spreads the lies more often. We must not let this take us by surprise. We must be prepared.
     We will have many choices in life and choices matter! However, one choice is not made in an instant, but is determined by the many choices we make each day. This choice is woven throughout our life and is the most important of all. This choice: To reject or accept the Truth.


There are Three options:
- Rejecting the lies and accepting the Truth.
- Being deceived (accepting the lies as "truth")
- Being overwhelmed by so much conflicting information, that you decide truth doesn't matter or doesn't exist at all.


      I hope and pray that you choose option 1, the Truth. I hope that reading this will help you to choose option 1.    However, do NOT make the mistake that since you are reading this that selecting option 1 will be easy. In fact, option 1 is the most difficult of all the options! DO NOT let that discourage you; for the rewards associated with accepting the Truth and acting on it are too great for words to describe.
       I encourage you to learn the skill of keeping a mental shield around your mind and your heart. We have little control over how often or how many lies will bombard us, but we don't have to let them into our mind and poison our thoughts! Keeping this shield strong and using discernment to decide what to let in requires effort. It does not come automatically. I believe the more Truth you let into your mind to fortify your position, the easier it will be to keep your shields strong and your discernment calibrated.

      If the Truth is required to build our shields and tune our discernment that how can we do this until we have first determined Truth? We must seek the source of Truth. There is no other way.

Truth: A Single Source
Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." John 14:6

A very important idea to understand from this Bible verse is that Jesus did NOT say, "I am a way, and a truth, and a life...."

Jesus did not say "a truth", because he was clearly informing us that there is no other truth outside of him. This is an amazing claim of cosmic proportions that not nearly enough people understand.


    Truth must have a single source. Logic dictates this. If someone claims multiple sources of truth and the sources conflict, then they are poorly defining truth or their claim of multiple truth sources is wrong. 

If Jesus' claim of being, "The Truth" is true, and I believe it is, then this claim serves to be a beacon that broadcasts loudly over the non-stop noise created by lies. It gives us something to fix our sight on. We can still be distracted, by lies, but at least we always have something to turn back to.

Truth is Absolute
    Throughout this letter in various places I have said, "Truth" with a capital "T", because not only is there only a single source for Truth, but Truth is also absolute. absolute!? Yes, absolute. This means that each of us cannot read a Truth and then decide for ourselves what it means. It has one meaning and we must seek that Truth to fully understand it.
     Some may say truth is relative. Saying that truth is relative is really a shallow answer used by way too many people. Two people may have different stories about what took place at a crime scene, but clearly only one set of events actually took place. This is because reality dictates truth and God's view of reality is the ultimate Truth. We must seek to see the world the way God does in order to fully understand absolute Truth.

The Bible
     I've made reference to the Bible to support my position. Some may see this as poor logic. Everyone must have a foundational concept in which to build the fortress of their mind. The Bible is the best place to start. The Bible is a book like no other. The word of God. To describe it fully and to the level it deserves would be impossible. Even if someone rejects the bible, they cannot claim with any veracity that this book is not unique among all other books through out all of history!

How many books make claims about:
- The history of the world from its beginning.
- Accurate prophesies spoken centuries in advance.
- Numerous claims about the attributes and character of God.
- a sinless savior satisfying God's wrath against sin.
- a person walking this earth that claims to be God eternal and with the miracles to back up that claim.
- Predicting Jesus' return and the end of human history.
- All of this tied together in a consistent theme.

   If you have any doubts about the Bible's authenticity, do NOT hesitate to ask. Together we can research the word of God directly or we can explore other resources solidly based on the bible like:

http://www.creation.com
http://www.gotquestions.org
http://carm.org/
and many more.....

There are answers for all the questions and objections.

Conclusion
         When building the fortress of your mind; do not be blinded or deceived. Any lie that you accept as truth becomes a threat scheming on how best to push out the Truth and replace it with more lies. I am hoping you will grasp this concept early and prevent any deadly lies from invading the fortress of your mind. I also hope that we all (myself included) will read this letter regularly so that we can evaluate whether or not any lies have slipped past our defenses. If we can remove a lie quickly it will do less damage.


Sincerely from the bottom of my heart,
Your Dad

P.S. I fear I did not convey this concept with the clarity it deserves, but I had to try. The Truth is priceless and worth every hour we spend pursuing it.

Is the Bible reliable as a historical record?

    Here is a great article that responds to someone who think the Bible is not historically accurate. Obviously this topic could be covered in more depth, but most people don't care to actually see if the Bible is historically accurate. It is just easier to believe it is not or to accept someone else's  opinion who ways it should not be trusted.

The Bible can prove itself if people test it.


Is the Bible reliable as a historical record?
http://creation.com/bible-historical-reliable

for those who want more depth in this topic, there are more resources to be found. Creation.com has more than just this one article. also:

CARM - Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry
http://carm.org/

Blogos.org - A Christian blog network focusing on understanding God's Word and connecting with Jesus Christ
http://www.blogos.org/

two lies are culture has bought about controversial lifestyles

“Our culture has accepted two huge lies. The first is that if you disagree with someone’s lifestyle, you must fear or hate them. The second is that to love someone means you agree with everything they believe or do. Both are nonsense. You don’t have to compromise convictions to be compassionate.”

― Rick Warren

Does Popular Science Rest Upon Unproven Assumptions?

         Many people use science as their authority in determining truth, facts, right, wrong, etc....  They see science as self correcting and infallible (at least in the long term). However, science is not perfect, often not objective (although it tries to appear that way), requires assumptions, and is not always a good foundation for decision making.

Science can draw the opposite conclusions from previous research, when new research is processed.

Can a person or a society really build its life on the foundation of science, when it is constantly changing?


Assumptions in science
http://creation.com/assumptions-in-science