4-2: Education

Good morning! I’m pastor Bill Connors, and I’m so glad to welcome you to Family Worship with Eastern Hills. If you’re a guest or visitor this morning, thank you for deciding to make Eastern Hills your church family for the day, and I pray that being with this body today is a blessing to you. Could just ask a quick favor of you if you are visiting? Whether you are visiting in the room today or online, could you please just text the word “WELCOME” to 505-339-2004? It will send you a quick link back so you can fill out our digital communication card so that we can more formally thank you for your visit today. If you’re in the room and would rather complete a physical card, you can grab one of those from the back of the pew in front of you. Just fill it out during service, and either drop it in the offering plates by the doors as you go out, or bring it down to me directly when service is over, so I can thank you personally for your visit this morning.

I have three quick announcements to make today before we get into our study:

Announcements

First, gentlemen: we will have our next monthly Men’s Breakfast at 8am on Saturday, January 21 in the Family Life Center (or gym). That’s two weeks from yesterday. We will have a special guest speaker, who will continue our conversation that we started in September about what it means to do life together with other men. Plan now to be here, and plan to invite guys to come as well. Have a son or sons? Bring him along. It’s going to be great food, great study, and great fellowship.

Second, we ordinarily have our bi-monthly business meetings on the third Sunday of the month, but since the 1st fell on Sunday this month, we need just a little bit more time to get everything together. So our January business meeting will be held on Sunday night, January 22, at 5:30 pm, here in the sanctuary. Please make plans to be here that evening as well.

Finally, I’d just like to remind everyone that we are still receiving our annual Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for International Missions through the end of this month. Our church goal is $35,000, and through last Sunday, we’ve received $22,415. Please continue to pray and seek God’s direction for giving to this offering to support our overseas missionaries.

Opening

This morning, we really start what is in my mind the home stretch of our look at our Statement of Belief. Beginning in Article 16 of our confessional statement, it turns to four articles that speak to how we should live because of our faith in Jesus and our identity as His people and His collected church, as we are are sojourners and aliens in this foreign land of the world. This place is not our home, but for now and until God sees fit to call us home, we must live here. So what does it mean for us to live in the world during “the last days?” Our Statement of Belief covers four topics in particular in this regard: Education, Cooperation, The Christian & The Social Order, and Religious Liberty. We will engage the first of these topics—education—this morning.

Our focal passage this morning comes from Psalm 19. Let’s stand together as we are able in honor of the Scriptures as we read verses 7-14:

Psalm 19:7–14 CSB

7 The instruction of the Lord is perfect, renewing one’s life; the testimony of the Lord is trustworthy, making the inexperienced wise. 8 The precepts of the Lord are right, making the heart glad; the command of the Lord is radiant, making the eyes light up. 9 The fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever; the ordinances of the Lord are reliable and altogether righteous. 10 They are more desirable than gold— than an abundance of pure gold; and sweeter than honey dripping from a honeycomb. 11 In addition, your servant is warned by them, and in keeping them there is an abundant reward. 12 Who perceives his unintentional sins? Cleanse me from my hidden faults. 13 Moreover, keep your servant from willful sins; do not let them rule me. Then I will be blameless and cleansed from blatant rebellion. 14 May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, Lord, my rock and my Redeemer.

PRAYER (Hoffmantown Church, Lamar Morin; search for pastor or director of children’s ministry, their evangelism emphasis this year)

I think that it’s kind of funny how God’s timing works. The irony of the fact that we’re talking about the concept of education on the Sunday following most kids’ return to the classroom isn’t lost on me. It’s a beautiful thing that God had designed us to be able to use our minds—to think—and to reason through our decisions and choices as a result. Our ability to think rationally is one of those things that I believe is a part of our bearing the image of God as human beings. And since that is the case, education plays an important part in making fully devoted disciples of Jesus. This is why our confessional statement, and the Baptist Faith & Message on which it is based, have statements dealing specifically and uniquely with the topic of education.

Article 16 of our Statement of Belief says:

Christianity is the faith of enlightenment and intelligence. In Jesus Christ abide all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. All sound learning is, therefore, a part of our Christian heritage. The new birth opens all human faculties and creates a thirst for knowledge. Moreover, the cause of education in the Kingdom of Christ is co-ordinate with the causes of missions and general benevolence … In Christian education, there should be a proper balance between academic freedom and academic responsibility. …The freedom of a teacher in a Christian school, college, or seminary is limited by the pre-eminence of Jesus Christ, by the authoritative nature of the Scriptures, and by the distinct purpose for which the school exists.

— EHBC Statement of Belief, Article 16: Education

Irrespective of what you may hear and to what those with a purely secular viewpoint may claim, as our confessional statement affirms, Christianity is the faith of enlightenment and intelligence. Somewhere along the way in the last century-and-a-half, humanity manufactured a false dichotomy between reason and faith: that the two don’t go together, that reason is rational and faith is irrational, that reason is objective and faith is subjective. But I assert that one does not have to check their brain at the door to become a Christian. Far from it.

This is because modern science started with Christians relying upon a Christian proposition: that God made the world and everything in it, that He made it consistently and predictably, and that as a result, we could learn more about God by studying the scientific disciplines. Much of our university and collegiate institutions in the West owe their existence to believers, many of them Baptists even, who founded these schools on the basis of educating people in the truths of the Christian faith and the examination of the world. It might shock you to know that many of our institutions of what culture refers to as “higher learning” actually started as institutions of truly higher learning: Brown University, Bucknell University, the University of Chicago, Colgate University, Rochester University, Temple University, Colby College, and Vassar, were all “Christian” colleges and universities when they began: seeking to teach people to reason well and to think rationally about both our existence and the world that God had created.

In Mark 12, in the passage commonly called the Great Commandment, we are called to love God with all that we are: with our hearts, souls, strength, and with our minds:

Mark 12:29–31 CSB

29 Jesus answered, “The most important is Listen, Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. 31 The second is, Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other command greater than these.”

So it is actually a form of worship when we think deeply about God and what He has done. It’s not unreasonable, not irrational, and not illogical to do so.

In contrast, much of what we call “reason” today is anything but reasonable, rational, and logical, because culturally we’ve declared that truth is a purely relative concept that in many ways is unhitched from the moors of reality: that how we feel about something is what determines whether it is true or real, that it is a terrible wrong to simply say (or in some cases to have ever said) something that someone else disagrees with, that history can be rewritten based upon our modern sensibilities, or that someone can merely decide whether they are male or female on a given day and force everyone else to go along with that decision. If you think about it, all of these things that I’ve just brought up are found not in the arena of what we might call “reason,” but instead they are of a particular brand of “faith:” that what we believe about a particular thing is what determines its reality. But this doesn’t make any sense: Faith doesn’t make something real. Something real makes faith.

So the problem with faith and reason today doesn’t have anything to do with the concept of faith. It has everything to do with the very real object of our particular Christian faith:

That according to the revelation of Scripture, there is one and only one perfect and eternal God, who created and presides over everything, and Who exists eternally in three Divine Persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, each fully and completely God in essence, and yet distinct in personality. This one and almighty God is Lord over all things, and He made humanity as bearers of His likeness and to glorify Him as we share in and enjoy His divine nature of love. We, however, have chosen to rebel against His love, and through sin have corrupted both our nature and our purpose, and have become objects of wrath. Because God is just, holy, and perfect, our sin demands eternal judgment and punishment, and because we are corrupted, we cannot ever regain our righteous state on our own. Because of God’s lovingkindness and grace, He Himself has taken the punishment due to us for our sin, by God the Son coming to earth as the man Jesus Christ, who lived perfectly in our place so that He could pay the debt that He doesn’t owe, but that we do. He took our sin and the wrath owed because of it on Himself on the cross, died, was buried, and was raised back to life by the Spirit, defeating death on our behalf. He ascended bodily to the right hand of God the Father, and He will return to judge the world in righteousness. God the Holy Spirit still works in the world to convict the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment. Those who surrender to God by faith in what Jesus has done will be declared righteous and receive both eternal life in heaven and the indwelling of God the Holy Spirit Himself, a deposit guaranteeing their eternal inheritance. Those who do not respond in faith are already condemned because of their sin, and will receive the punishment due to them because of their sin: eternal separation from the One who created them in a place of torment called hell.

This is not merely a faith claim. This is a claim about the nature of reality, and thus, it is a claim that calls out to our reason, our rational faculties, our ability to use logic. This is how I came to faith in Christ: I heard about this God that I didn’t believe existed. I examined the evidence logically and came to the conclusion that the universe was either intentionally created or everything within it was the result of a massive cosmic accident with impossible odds: that positively everything came from absolutely nothing. And so I realized that God was the only rational choice for the reason for the universe’s existence. I reasoned that if He made everything, then He also made me, and if He made me, then He must have both ownership of me and a purpose for me, and I also realized that according to the Bible, I had not lived up to that ownership or purpose. As a result, I was convicted that I was deserving of His judgment. But instead of judging me, Jesus was judged for me, even though He didn’t deserve it. I now also know that it was the blessed work of the Spirit of God, as He was at work in my conviction, calling me to faith in Christ as my one and only hope. My response to that revelation and calling was both a response of faith and of reason. I knew the Gospel was true, and I trusted my very real life and eternity to Jesus.

This is what I’m really going to be talking about this morning as we consider the topic of education. I’m just talking about education in the faith, and how it relates to the individual, the family, and the church.

Let's begin our study this morning by taking a look at the biblical mandate for education.

1: The biblical mandate for education

Contrary to the relative spirit of our age that disparages any claim on absolute truth aside from one’s feelings, the Bible begins not only by assuring us that absolute truth is knowable, but by telling us that God Himself is the very source of that truth.

Scripture tells us in Psalm 31:5 and in Isaiah 65:16 that God is the God of truth. Since He created all things, knows all things and is in absolute control of all things, all truth is God's truth. In fact, the beginning of wisdom, says Psalm 111:10, is the fear of the Lord and Psalm 119:160 tells us:

Psalm 119:160 CSB

160 The entirety of your word is truth, each of your righteous judgments endures forever.

So we don’t need to be afraid of subjects like math and history and science (if taught fairly). God created those subjects as well, and in fact, they are good for us to learn.

The New Testament informs us in John 14:6 that that Jesus Himself is the truth incarnate and Colossians 2:3 assures us that all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are to be found in Him. Thus, any worldview or educational system which is not rooted and grounded in the biblical truth about Jesus suffers from a fatal flaw. How can people really know the full truth about any part of creation without a sure and certain knowledge about the Creator? That is why any truth apart from the knowledge of Jesus is really only a partial truth, waiting to be made complete in light of the knowledge of Who He is, since He fills all things according to Ephesians 4:10.

God has given each of His children the Holy Spirit, who is called the Spirit of Truth. Jesus said in John 14:26 that He will teach us all things and cause us to remember the things Christ has taught us. According to 2 Peter 1:21, it was the Holy Spirit who inspired the Word of God and Hebrews 4:12 assures us that God's Word is the guideline for all truth. And 2 Timothy 3:14-17 tells us that God's Word is the instrument of measurement by which we are able to discern truth. God has always been concerned about truth and has always desired for His children to learn His truth.

Beginning in the Garden of Eden, in Genesis 1:28 when God told Adam to have dominion over the earth and to subdue it, God has always encouraged man, His crowning creation, to learn and to seek wisdom and knowledge. In Deuteronomy 6 God speaks through Moses, commanding the Israelites not only to learn but to continue to teach successive generations the truths which had been entrusted to them:

Deuteronomy 6:4–9 CSB

4 “Listen, Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 5 Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. 6 These words that I am giving you today are to be in your heart. 7 Repeat them to your children. Talk about them when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8 Bind them as a sign on your hand and let them be a symbol on your forehead. 9 Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your city gates.

As we saw in our focal passage at the beginning of this message, Psalm 19 speaks about the importance of hearing and learning the instruction of God:

Psalm 19:7 CSB

7 The instruction of the Lord is perfect, renewing one’s life; the testimony of the Lord is trustworthy, making the inexperienced wise.

And Proverbs 3:13-18 tells us that becoming wise and understanding is a pathway to blessing. 2 Timothy 2:15 calls us to understanding of the Word of truth, so that we can teach it well:

2 Timothy 2:15 CSB

15 Be diligent to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who doesn’t need to be ashamed, correctly teaching the word of truth.

God has always directed His children to learn, to seek knowledge, wisdom and understanding and the place to begin is by fearing the Lord and knowing His word.

A healthy Christian life is characterized by a hunger and a thirst for living out the truth. Jesus says in Matthew 5:6:

Matthew 5:6 CSB

6 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

God encourages His people to learn, and the learning has always been directly tied to actions. This is the biblical mandate for learning, it walks hand in hand with the biblical mandate for Christian living and service.

2: The method of education

The Scriptures outline for us how we are to go about the process Christian education.

A. Personal discipleship is the responsibility of every believer

God intends that each of us will become responsible for our own engagement in spiritual development. That's why Paul tells us in Philippians 2:12, to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” Each of us is responsible for the development of our Christian walk and testimony through faithful submission to the Spirit’s work and the intake of God’s Word.

Scripture tells us in Psalm 119:11 to the hide the word of God in our hearts, so that we might not sin against God. It tells us in 1 Thessalonians 5:17 to pray without ceasing, in Ephesians 5:18 we are commanded to continuously be filled with the Spirit, and in Philippians 4:8 we are told that:

Philippians 4:8 CSB

8 Finally brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable—if there is any moral excellence and if there is anything praiseworthy—dwell on these things.

As I said during the introduction, we are to love God with our minds by intentionally choosing to think about godly things. And Colossians 3:16 says

Colossians 3:16 CSB

16 Let the word of Christ dwell richly among you, in all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another through psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts.

I’m not saying that this is a checklist that we need to check off, like if we do these things, we’ll be holy. I’m saying that growing in our faith is going to include these things as we pursue knowing and loving God more:

Read the Bible

Pray

Be filled with the Spirit

Think on the right things

Teach and admonish one another with the right attitude

We are each responsible for our own engagement in our spiritual development, and we are responsible for helping others in their spiritual development. That responsibility begins with parents, at home.

B. A Christian education begins at home

Christian education is grounded in the home—There can be no question about it, according to Scripture, Christian education begins at home, with parents responsible for teaching their children how to become fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ. We saw the importance of this in Deuteronomy 6, but earlier, in Deuteronomy 4, we find this admonition:

Deuteronomy 4:9 CSB

9 “Only be on your guard and diligently watch yourselves, so that you don’t forget the things your eyes have seen and so that they don’t slip from your mind as long as you live. Teach them to your children and your grandchildren.

Proverbs 4:1-10 clearly teaches that children are to be instructed in the ways of God by their parents.

Contrary to popular belief, the church is not primarily responsible for teaching your children the things of God. The church is to complement and reinforce parental education, but the home is where children are first supposed to learn how to be followers of Jesus Christ.

Many parents, especially in this day and age, are not very comfortable being responsible for their children's spiritual development and want to hand off that responsibility to someone else. I've heard some people even blame the local church when their children rebel or fail to follow after Christ. It seems many people want someone else to accept the responsibility God has given them, but even looking at it from a merely practical perspective, there is no way the church can be anywhere nearly as effective in training up a child to follow God as their parents can be.

If your child came to Sunday School and church every week for an entire year and never missed a single Sunday, we would only have 156 hours each year to teach your child how to be a Christian. And that is working off of the presupposition that we can get teachers who are willing to give of themselves sufficiently to teach our children. Increasingly it is becoming more and more difficult to get people to teach our children. But again, supposing we could get all the teachers we needed and your child were to attend every week without fail, we would only have 156 hours a year, between worship service and Sunday School. If they really stretch and come to every opportunity available with the church body for them every week, it bumps up to somewhere between 250 and 300 hours per year.

According to a survey by Statista in March of 2022, the average tween (those 10-12 years old) spends over 32 hours per week in front of a television, computer screen, tablet, or smart phone, and teens (13-18) spend around 60 hours per week. That means in just three to six weeks, the YouTubers, TikTokkers, Instagrammers, Snapchatters, and television and movie producers have as much time as the church family has with your child in an entire year at best.

Now, this isn’t me saying that you need to get rid of the tv and cancel their phones, smash the tablets, and lose the high-speed internet. We have all of those things in my house as well. These things are a part of the fabric of life at this point, and they aren’t going anywhere. The point is that we need to be active in discipling our children at home, interacting with them about the things that they take in, discussing what the Bible has to say about the things that they see, and maybe even sitting through some of those things with them in order to open up those moments of dialogue and conversation.

Dads especially, you have been handed the spiritual authority in your house. You are the living representative of Christ to your wife, and the spiritual covering and authority over your children. Numbers 30 paints a picture of the level of authority that we have as fathers: that we can even cancel a vow our children make to God, and it will not be held against them. Ephesians 6:4 is clear about whose responsibility it is so ensure that Christian children are raised according to the Scriptures:

Ephesians 6:4 CSB

4 Fathers, don’t stir up anger in your children, but bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.

This is not a role that we can neglect, dads! Encourage your wife in her faith. Teach and train your children. Serve as an example in your walk yourself. It’s an incredibly high calling, and not something to be taken lightly.

One last thought on this: I don’t plan on bashing our modern educational system in the U.S. Admittedly, there are some serious issues in education in our country right now, and as a result, I applaud anyone whose children are serving as witnesses to our culture in public schools and I am thankful for public school teachers who are Christians and who choose to continue to be a light amidst the darkness. But I cannot blame any Christian mom or dad who feels led to take their children out of public schools to either home school them or put them in a private Christian setting. And you aren’t alone: stats show that about 11% of U.S. students were home schooled for 2021-2022, and another 6.5 % of U.S. students attended a religious private school like Eastern Hills Christian Academy.

The fact is that the culture largely drives the educational bus, and the same factors that I brought up earlier are taking place from kindergarten up through even the university level says that our national educational system is not the place that our children are going to learn the truth of God’s Word. Again, this simply goes to underscore the importance of parents teaching their children Christian truth at home. It is parents whom God has primarily tasked with teaching and training the next generation in godliness.

So there you have it. The biblical method of education is this, we are each responsible for our own spiritual maturation, we are to teach our children at home and we are to complement that teaching in the local church where we are to teach and admonish one another.

3: Christian education and the local church

The local church is God's ordained institution for the expansion of His kingdom. One of the things the local church is tasked with doing is that of discipleship. From the Old through the New Testament we find the public reading of the word of God to be a central act in the house of worship. Consider Deuteronomy 31:12-13:

Deuteronomy 31:12–13 CSB

12 Gather the people—men, women, dependents, and the resident aliens within your city gates—so that they may listen and learn to fear the Lord your God and be careful to follow all the words of this law. 13 Then their children who do not know the law will listen and learn to fear the Lord your God as long as you live in the land you are crossing the Jordan to possess.”

We just read this week in our Bible reading plan about how Josiah read the Word of the Law to the people in 2 Chronicles 34. Ezra read the word of God and as the people stood and repented in Nehemiah 8. Jesus Himself went to the Synagogue and read from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and Paul commands his readers to read his epistles in all the churches. The local church is the place where discipleship and teaching often take place.

This is done in several ways. One way is in the public proclamation of God's word through preaching. Paul tells Timothy in 2 Timothy 4:2 to preach the word, in season and out of season. Go through Scripture and do your research and you will find that the principle responsibility of a pastor/teacher is to preach the word, to rightly divide the word of truth so that God's people will be instructed in God's truth, so that they will be equipped to actually do the work of the ministry:

Ephesians 4:11–12 CSB

11 And he himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, 12 to equip the saints for the work of ministry, to build up the body of Christ,

Additionally this teaching ministry of the church extends to Bible study and discipleship classes. Both expository and topical studies are used by churches as they seek to take disciples deeper in their walk with God. All of this is in keeping with God's directive to learn, to seek knowledge, wisdom and understanding.

But the mandate to learn was never supposed to be an end unto itself. The biblical directive to seek knowledge and understanding is always geared toward making us better disciples and thus better servants of God. In other words, learning always has an end, that is, to help us become the people God wants us to be so He can use us as He wants to use us. Learning was designed to make us sharper instruments in God's hand, and instruments are made for service. God allows us to learn so that we can teach others. That's what's supposed to take place in the local church, people who have been taught are in turn supposed to teach others.

The philosophy behind Christian education is found in the Deuteronomy 6 passage we read a minute ago and is carried on in 2 Timothy 2:2 where Paul instructs Timothy by saying:

2 Timothy 2:2 CSB

2 What you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, commit to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.

The Biblical method of education is this: We are to learn so that we can teach others, who will in turn teach others, and perpetuate the process.

One of the problems with Christianity in our country is not a lack of access to knowledge or even a problem of knowing the truth—we have more translations of the Bible, more commentaries, and more educational opportunities than any other generation of Christians at any time in the history of the church. Ours is not a problem of the lack of knowledge, our problem is that somewhere along the line we have disassociated learning with service. Folks, God gave us knowledge, wisdom, understanding, truth and insight, not just to fill our heads, but to fill our hearts and thus to fill our hands with the work of furthering the kingdom of God.

In fact, Hebrews 5:12 warns us about the dangers of attaining knowledge but not putting it to use, a condition which reveals a certain level of spiritual immaturity. The writer of Hebrews says, “For though by this time you ought to be teachers..." You see, spiritual maturity necessitates taking what we have learned and passing it along to others. So committed to learning and education is our Lord that He intends all of us to be sharing what we have learned with others.

This is part and parcel of the great commission. Jesus tells us in Matthew 28 that as we go we are to make disciples, and what is it we are supposed to do as we make disciples? We are to teach them to observe all that He has commanded us. Learning and obedience, or observance is always connected. That means to those whom He has given more knowledge, the more accountable you will be. Jesus tells us in Luke 12:48 that whom much is given much will be required.

The degree to which God has poured learning and knowledge into our lives is the degree to which we will be held accountable.

Closing

So how do I put this truth about Christian education, about learning and discipleship into application? Allow me to suggest a few things to you this morning.

Get a plan for personal discipleship—There are dozens of daily reading Bible and personal discipleship programs which you can use that will help you as you seek to become a more fully devoted follower of Jesus Christ.

Get intentional about your children or grandchildren's spiritual formation—Don't leave to someone else that for which God will hold you accountable.

Get involved in passing on what you learn. Share the Gospel with people. Look into how you might be able to serve in the church body.

And this morning, I’ve shared with you the truth of the Gospel. It’s reasonable, rational, and logical to believe it, even though it’s supernatural. Will you surrender to Jesus as your Savior and Lord this morning?

Church membership.

Prayer needs.

Offering

PRAYER

Closing Remarks

Bible reading plan (Nahum 1 today, then Habakkuk, then Zephaniah this week)… calendar on the website.

Reminder: AOM tonight at 4:15 in the Parlor.

Pastor’s Study tonight at 5:30 in MH, looking at Ephesians 2:10

Prayer meeting this Wednesday at 5:45 pm

Parents, please make sure to pick up your kids from the Clubhouse upstairs. If you don’t know where that is: Down foyer, turn right, down the hall, up tan stairs, turn right, down 3 steps, on your left.

Instructions for guests

Benediction

Matthew 7:24–27 CSB

24 “Therefore, everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25 The rain fell, the rivers rose, and the winds blew and pounded that house. Yet it didn’t collapse, because its foundation was on the rock. 26 But everyone who hears these words of mine and doesn’t act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. 27 The rain fell, the rivers rose, the winds blew and pounded that house, and it collapsed. It collapsed with a great crash.”

God bless you all this afternoon. We’ll see you at AOM this afternoon at 4:15, and at Pastor’s Study tonight at 5:30.

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