Watch ye therefore, and pray always, that ye may be accounted worthy
to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of
man. - Luke 21:36
Watch ye therefore, and pray always, that ye may be accounted worthy
to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of
man. - Luke 21:36
By Jeff and Elisabeth Barnes
Notes:
All the bold emphasis in quotations are mine.
Genders: The father is usually referred to in the first person. The child is, unless context implies otherwise, male to help distinguish him from his mother, for which I used a feminine gender. If gender-based roles in the traditional family offend you, proceed at your own risk.
My daughter, Sarah, a waitress at a local restaurant, told the story of a family she was serving. There was the father, mother and four or five children. Their ages ranged from about one to eleven. They were all happy, and she never heard the children whine, beg or quarrel, including the baby. They all sat still in their seats, being attentive to each other, telling stories and having fun. They were content with their meal. By the end of the dinner, Sarah noticed that the children had not had any spills or made the usual mess. As they were leaving the restaurant, she complimented the father on his pleasant children. Then the seven year old said, very matter-of-factly and without pride, "Oh he knows that, he hears it all the time." The father laughed and nodded in agreement that what his child said was true.
This father's counsel on raising children would be worth gold. Lots of it. If a childcare professional does not have happy, obedient children, the reason is simple: he does not know how to raise them. If you want to be a good parent, you must pick your counselors carefully.
A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behavior, given to hospitality, apt to teach; Not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre; but patient, not a brawler, not covetous;
One that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity; (For if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God?)
Not a novice, lest being lifted up with pride he fall into the condemnation of the devil. Moreover he must have a good report of them which are without; lest he fall into reproach and the snare of the devil. - 1 Timothy 3:2-7
When my wife and I were young, idealistic parents, we were told, "Just wait, your children will rebel against your belief system soon enough." The idea being that rebellion is a natural and necessary phase in growing up.
The premise of this paper is that the Scriptures give us what we need for life and godliness; this includes raising godly, happy, obedient children. It is when you take away the Biblical foundation that rebellion becomes the norm.
For the last twenty-five years, people have been shocked at our children's behavior. We are regularly asked, "Is that really your teenage daughter? How do you get her to talk that way?" By this, they mean pleasantly and respectfully. Is it possible that teenagers could still love their parents? In September of 2009, my wife and I attended a mission conference at the church my daughters regularly attend. As we were greeted, everyone commented on our wonderful daughters, and enough asked how we raised our children that I have now decided to write it down.
If you read this with an open heart, you may learn many secrets necessary to raising godly children. I will gladly share all, so you may also learn from our mistakes.
Children, and often adults, believe the first thing they hear. This is why it so important to control their early environment. It is far harder to remove the wrong thoughts from your child's mind than to prevent them from entering in the first place.
While this is not possible for everyone, one of the most important things you can do to raise godly children is home school; here are eight reasons for home schooling:
This is the reason we home schooled our children. Public educators forbid any reference to the Christian religion in their schools; at the same time, they push an atheistic worldview on our children, starting in kindergarten. This, and the peer pressure, will make it difficult for your children to confess Jesus in their public life. It is unreasonable to send a six-year old to fight spiritual battles against adults.
Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven. - Matthew 10:32
My high school gave us a promiscuous sex education. I remember the lady from Planned Parenthood who said something to the effect that your parent's morality is okay for them, but you must make your own decisions for your own life. Do whatever you want as long as it doesn't hurt anybody. I forget if the woman said this before or after she put a condom on her nose. What boy would ever admit to being a virgin in a public high school?
Our amoral drug awareness education was no better; it included most recreational drugs, what they looked like, and their street names. My best friend and I learned enough in class to feel comfortable at the first party where illegal drugs were passed around. Most of the boys in my high school smoked marijuana at least occasionally; I did not know anyone who had not tried it at least once.
Public schools will teach evolution as a fact and not theory. Since evolution cannot be questioned in the class, children are no longer taught to think critically. They are taught what to think, not how to think. Evolution is an important tool used to remove God from your child's life. Jesus said:
For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words? - John 5:46-47
And later, the Apostle Peter said:
For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished. - 2 Peter 3:5-6
Do not expect public schools to help you raise godly children when Thou shalt not bear false witness and Thou shalt not steal are banned from the classroom.
"Parents give up their rights when they drop the children off at public
school."
-Federal District Judge Melinda Harmon (Harmon)
The above quote is from a case where, without the parents' knowledge, Texas school officials strip-searched a child looking for signs of paddling. The Judge seems to be saying that strip-searching is acceptable behavior in public schools, and that a Biblical form of discipline is not.
He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that
loveth him chasteneth him quickly.
- Proverbs 13:24
In some counties, public school officials are openly hostile toward parents. You can find countless examples of abuse by school officials; you only need to search the web if you are interested.
As a young mother, my wife, Hannah, was concerned that she was not qualified to teach our children at home. After thinking about the bad influences that our children would receive in a public school, though, she was willing to try it. And it turns out that all a parent needs is commitment. Experience has shown us that anybody can give a child a better education at home than is offered in many public schools. In counseling young adults, we have learned some sad facts. For instance, it is common for someone to get a high school diploma and yet not be able to read it. One high school graduate did not even know that the body of water she lived next to her whole life is called the Pacific Ocean. Another high school graduate could not add without counting on her fingers. I myself came out of high school functionally illiterate.
In 2007, two of our children tested for the state and they both earned a 99 percentile in the national average. Even though our youngest daughter did not miss a single problem, they still only gave her a 99%. In 2009, the same children earned a 99 and 96 percentile. The one that tested at 96 took the tenth grade level even though she was in the eighth grade. The lowest score any of our children have ever received was, on one occasion, in the low eighties. While I may sound like I am obsessed with our children's GPA, I am not. It is just that a homeschooler can learn more in three hours than a public schooler will learn all day.
Just as a child cannot learn properly in a class that is going too fast for him, a bright child does not learn well in a slow class, because it is boring for him. For this reason, bright children are often labeled ADHD. I have heard that Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill and many other great men received poor grades in school. This should not surprise us.
When other children in the classroom misbehave, the teacher may end up spending more time babysitting than actually teaching. Homeschoolers do not sit for extended periods in a room full of distractions; parents teach their own children at a pace where the child has the best comprehension. Homeschoolers who need correction receive loving discipline; public schoolers receive Ritalin.
It costs from $8,000 to 25,000 per year, for a child in the USA to receive a public school education. A much better education at a private school costs far less. Look at our national debt and do the math; we are mortgaging our children's future.
If I told you how little we spent last year to home school our own children, we would have a social worker come to our door.
In the beginning it may seem easier to send your children off to school, yet one day the Lord will ask us if we have been faithful stewards. When he looks at us Americans, what will he think?
You do not need to be an expert to know that questionnaires not only gather information, they also teach. As a homeschooler, your child not only avoids being medicated, he also avoids being a victim of a teacher who is practicing psychology without a license. In a free country, it is not the role of the government to decide what thoughts and emotions are normal, especially in my children.
In a public school, teachers are no longer the focus of the children's attention. They are now facilitators who wander around the room, helping one child here, and chatting with another there. They are also using the most irrational teaching methods ever devised by so-called educators: whole-language, invented spelling, the new new-math, plus sensitivity training, values clarification, transcendental meditation, cooperative learning, death ed., sex ed., suicide ed., etc. Teachers are more interested in the child's feelings, his sexuality, his family, his thoughts about death, suicide, abortion, feminism, homophobia, the environment, global warming and world citizenship than they are in teaching your child to read. The Underground Grammarian by Richard Mitchell is a must read on this topic.
When our children were little, many warned us that our children would become socially dysfunctional, if we didn't send them to a public school. However, no one who has had a conversation with one of our adult children has ever made that accusation.
Unfortunately, most public schooled children have a difficult time socially interacting outside of their peer group. Do you want your children to be able to interact comfortably with people of different ages? Not only do children segregated by age suffer from the generation gap, the segregation makes public schooled children far more vulnerable to peer pressure. It is silly to think that segregating children by age for extended periods each day gives them any advantage socially.
Honor thy father and thy mother ... Exodus 20:12
When you notice bad grades, it is too late to remove your child from school. He has probably had bad companions for months. As a teenager, all of my bad influences came from other teenagers I met at school.
It is the year 2009, and I have seven children. Three are teenagers, four are in their twenties and all of them have always honored their father and mother. We have never had any teenager rebel. This is not an anomaly; other parents that we know, homeschoolers with the same worldview, have also missed the experience of teenage rebellion. Maybe one source of teenage rebellion is the public school system.
If you need help in starting to home school go to HSLDA, or email us.
Have a Bible study (quiet time) for the family's devotional time. My style is to go back and forth between the Old and New Testament. In time, we will have read and studied the whole Bible. Some books (the Gospels, Proverbs) are better for the younger children, it is better to wait until the children are older for the harder books (Revelation, Leviticus).
Until our children were five or six years old, my wife read Hurlbut's Story of the Bible. We recommend this storybook because of its faithfulness to biblical facts. Never use storybooks that make the Bible seem like a book of fables, for instance ones that make Noah's ark seem overloaded. Never teach your children to believe fables. If you teach them to believe in Santa Clause, do not be surprised if, after they stop believing in Santa, they also stop believing in Jesus.
During our quiet times, all the issues of life are discussed, including:
Before I knew the Lord, I was controlled by peer pressure. The Bible gives many warnings, and you can defuse the power of peer pressure, if you do so before a peer group controls your children.
When my oldest daughter was seventeen, some of her friends and their acquaintances came to visit. As an overprotective dad, I did not care for this, because I did not know these acquaintances. But there comes a time when you have to let your children make their own decisions, and hope that you have raised them right.
The kids had been sitting in the living room acting bored when my daughter suggested that they play a game called spoons. At this suggestion her ‘friends' laughed at her in such a way as to communicate that playing spoons must be the most un-cool thing a teenager could possible do.
In the other room, I was already thinking about damage control. I couldn't rush in, or they would humiliate her as a baby, but as soon as they left, I would need to do something. So I kept listening. The next thing I heard was my daughter laughing with them, and when the laughter started to die down, she began to explain the rules for playing spoons. Less than thirty minutes later they were all enjoying the game.
We all know the power of peer pressure to make our children conform. I hadn't prepared my daughter for this moment, yet it was in our quiet times that she had learned what she needed to counteract it. The peer pressure did not intimidate her, because it was God's opinion, not man's, which mattered.
I press toward the mark for the prize of the high
calling of God in Christ Jesus.
- Philippians 3:14
Children should learn to defend the Bible as their final authority in the Christian faith. Along with Bible studies, sharing our faith as a family outside the home has helped with this. When an atheist asks you a hard question, something that your child has never thought about or always just accepted as fact, and when you answer that question, your child will hear your answers. Then he will be able to believe, not simply because his parents said it was the truth, but because he has now heard the argument presented from both sides. Later, when your child has the same hard questions put to him by a university professor, he will not be intimidated, because he will already have addressed the issue.
We were never afraid of our children losing their faith because someone asked a hard question. Rather, interacting with unbelievers in this way made our job as parenting much easier. The objections that they brought up allowed us to address these issuse with our children rather than to have the skeptic address them on his own.
This is the science of interpreting the Bible. When we look at a verse that is commonly taken out of context or misinterpreted, I use it as an excuse to teach my children how to study the Scriptures. 21 Mistakes not to make while studying your Bible and Camas Valley Christian Fellowship's Inductive Bible Study may be helpful resources.
Verses that are commonly used by cults are explained during our quiet time. This helps inoculate the children to cults before they knock on your door.
We must teach our sons to respect girls. The Bible gives you a better format to teach this than a sex education class does. And, to be blunt, we must teach our daughters to recognize that when a guy is saying, "I love you" it often means that he is trying to manipulate her into giving him sex. She must understand that, if he really loves her, he will wait for marriage. These issues come up (i.e. 2Sa 13:1 about Tamar and Amnon), and are discussed, during our Bible studies.
Most of us understand why it is wrong to commit murder (I hope), yet children (and many adults) often do not know why it is wrong to covet their neighbors property. Many cannot explain why homosexual behavior is wrong, except that the Bible tells me so. But this will not be sufficient for your children when they attend a college or university.
Can you defend The Book of Genesis? If not, how will your children?
Do not think that I [Jesus] will accuse you to the
Father: there is one that accuseth you, even Moses, in whom ye trust.
For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of
me.
But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words?
- John 5:45-47
Just yesterday, my oldest daughter started the fall semester of college. On the first day, she got an assignment to write an essay on evolution for biology. In another class, the teacher is trying to help students to separate facts from myths (the Bible is the myth). Because of our quiet times, I do not worry that these classes will shake my daughter's faith.
The bottom line is to make sure your children can think critically. It is not enough to believe just because their religion, or their parents, says so. I was recently at a Focus on the Family2 apologetics conference for teenagers, called the Big Dig. It was an excellent conference, addressing some difficult issues, but I disagreed with one speaker who said, "Parents do not freak-out when your adult children start questioning their faith". He should have said, Parents do not wait for your children to become adults before they question their faith. Rather teach them from a young age how to test their faith. If what you are teaching them is true, it will withstand sincere inquiry.
Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world. - 1 John 4:1
While it's true that we should obey the Lord simply because He says so, it will be easier for your children to obey when they understand why.
Make sure that your quiet times cover every topic: sin nature and the solution, evolution, psychology and everything else that is essential for living a godly life. Also, while devotions should center around Bible studies, do not forget prayer and hymns for worship.
And that from a child thou hast known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.
All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works. - 2 Timothy 3:15-17
As parents, we did not have hobbies that did not include the kids. You can take a five year old camping much more easily than you can take him golfing.
Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. - 1 John 2:15
In fact, most of our hobbies were mission minded. We simply looked for ways to serve God as a family. We have known other mission minded families, and these children seem to stay in the faith after they grow up.
Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child; but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him. - Proverbs 22:15
He that walketh with wise men shall be wise: but
a companion of fools shall be destroyed.
- Proverbs 13:20
Put these two proverbs together, and they explain the problem perfectly.
We tried to pick our children's companions carefully, and even then, we did not allow our little children to play with other children unsupervised. One time we broke this rule when another Christian family invited us to come over for dinner. It turned out that I did not know this family as well as I though; they allowed their children to play with Ouija boards. While we parents were only talking of Spiritual things, our children were in the other room actually trying to call up spirits! Fortunately, my oldest daughter was there and able to stop the nonsense.
Unfortunately, many children are not fit to be my children's playmates because, through their parents' failures, they have been exposed to many evil influences on the internet and on TV, etc. It is harder to remove evil thoughts than to keep them out in the first place. For instance, when I was six years old my best friend's parents allowed him to look at Playboy magazines. I will never be able to remove the image of that first centerfold from my memory.
But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart. - Matthew 5:28
When our children were small, our favorite ‘holiday' was Family Night. It happened once a week, usually on Friday or Saturday. The children prepared special treats and games, and the evening ended with us all camping out on the living room floor.
Our next favorite holiday is Thanksgiving. Though we prepare the traditional feast, the day meant more. During the preceding week, we will all prepare an essay with a theme of "thanksgiving" to be read sometime during the day. We also did other things like making the neighbors cookies, treasure hunts and giving of gifts. Finally, we had a special thanksgiving jar; sort of like a piñata (since it was made of glass we opened it more carefully). All during the year, we filled the thanksgiving jar with little slips of paper, each one a memorial of an answered prayer and other things we were thankful for during the year. On Thanksgiving evening, we read, and thereby relived, the great events of the previous year. Later we put the slips of paper into an album. There were times that we had so much thankfulness our celebration lasted three days.
Our third favorite holiday is Independence Day. Here too, we teach our children to be thankful that we were born in the USA, and thankful that we can worship freely.
We do not celebrate Christmas or Easter. I could give many reasons, but the two most important are that Christmas is given over to covetous practices, and that teaching children to believe in Santa Clause will undermine their faith in Christ later on. If we cannot separate fact (the resurrection of Christ) from fiction (Santa visiting every house on Christmas), how can we expect our children to?
While we do not celebrate these holidays, we do not isolate ourselves from family during this time. We visit the relatives, and they can give our children gifts, if they wish. While we tried to explain to relatives which toys were offensive, sometimes they would ignore us. Occasionally, we would have to redeem an offensive toy. To redeem means that we would explain to our child, in private, why we could not keep the offending toy, and then we would go to the store and find an acceptable toy of similar value. We do not give offensive toys away; we throw them away.
We never celebrate Halloween; we do not redeem Halloween; we would not allow our children to go to Harvest festivals, if they were imitations of, or alternatives to, Halloween.
Neither give place to the devil. - Ephesians 4:27
The reason I mention holidays, is that they are a good way to bond with your children, when celebrated in a healthy way.
