As Christians, we are called to deliberately impact the culture in a positive way, for the Lord Jesus Christ. This is seen in the dominion mandate in Genesis, and again in our Great Commission to teach, or disciple the nations. But too often we look like a dim shadow of the world around us. The pagans are creating the culture and discipling the nations and we just sit back and follow suite. This is especially true in the area of education. Most of us Christians are perfectly content to hand our children over to the priests of baal… er ahhh… I mean evolution. And by the way, Darwinism is a religion. If you don’t believe that, why don’t you try to blaspheme against it in public? You will probably be ridiculed, scorned, maybe you’ll even get your face and name in the paper as a loony that belongs on the funny farm.
But the area of education is not the only problem! On Sundays, the one day when the family might get to be together, we are content to send the kids of to Sunday School and Children’s Church while we go to the “Big People’s Church and Sunday School.” Let somebody else deal with the children, never mind that they have to miss out on any good teaching that goes on while they watch over and shepherd and train our children.
And as if that weren’t enough, we have many Christians whose wife works to help win the bread for the family. And if the children are too young to go to school, we must send them to day care. Unless of course you work at the day care… then you take care of all of the other mom’s children so that they can work as well.
The problem is, we are trying to bring the world into the church… and what do we get? We get the world in the church. Big surprise there!!! We are worldly. And what is worldliness? Worldliness to a Christian is that which the world does that is contrary to the scriptures either in practice or in notion. Now I know that someone will take this to an extreme and say, “If the world does it, we can’t do it.” This is entirely wrong headed. However, we must know why we do what we do. Worldly people sleep and so do Christians. Just because they sleep does not mean that we cannot. That is not the point I am trying to make here. Rather, we must know that everything we do is Godly and effective in building the kingdom of God, and at the very least that we are not tearing down the kingdom of God. We must seek to impact our culture for Christ and His kingdom. This means that when the Bible says that we should train up our children in the way they should go that we don’t send them off to the priests of Darwinism. This means that we don’t send our kids off to the little peoples church while we go eat meat and place the spiritual well being of our kids in someone else’s hands. This means that the husband is responsible for making the ends meet in the family.
But let me address any concerns or misunderstandings that someone may have. For us to provide for the education of our children does not imply that we can never allow someone besides mom or dad to train the children. It means the parents are responsible for the training. It means that you cannot send you child to the priests of Darwin without being held responsible. And when I talk of send the kids to children’s church, I am not saying that it is always wrong to have separate activities for the young people. The problem is that we place the responsibility of our Children’s well being upon other members of the body of Christ who aren’t responsible for their well-being. And when I talk of women working outside of the home, I am not saying that a women must never do any work outside of the home. But the women is not the primary bread winner. That is the man’s responsibility.
It seems to me that the pendulum swings too far in either direction and I very rarely see it fall where is should. This makes it very hard for Christians to have the impact on the culture that they are supposed to.
