What a blessed time for fellowship, food, and fun as we celebrated 50 years of Chalcedon’s ministry yesterday in Northern California. The day included inspiring talks along with videos of young people giving their rendition of essays from “A Word in Season” by R.J. Rushdoony.
I held a Family Feud Bible Quiz game for families. The kids got more right answers than their parents! See how you do. Continue reading
Recognizing the Kingdom of God and its justice system has everything to do with God’s law. If we do not become expert in the application of God’s commands to every area of life and thought, we can convince ourselves that we are pleasing God when in actuality we are pleasing ourselves. For example, justifying the choice of having our children educated in a humanistic school system so that we can better use our time and resources to “serve the Kingdom” pits one of God’s laws against another. By failing to live out a systematic theology, all our lamenting about “how bad things are getting” becomes just a smokescreen for irresponsible behavior.
Too many people place learning and applying God’s law on the back burner because they are too busy acquiring the necessities of life. For a growing Christian family this can include homeschooling the children, trying to make ends meet, and maintaining a busy social schedule of church, extracurricular activities, music lessons, and sports. By waiting until the time is more conducive to learn the law of God, they forfeit the very tools they need to maneuver through a sinful world. Ephesians doesn’t call the Word of God the sword of the Spirit for nothing! (Eph. 6;17) Continue reading
Easter was celebrated a couple of weeks ago, and in many circumstances the familiar greeting, “Happy Easter” was proclaimed. Easter is the celebration of Christ serving as the ultimate and final Passover lamb whose shed blood redeemed His people.
How sad that many professing Christians miss the significance of Christ as the Passover lamb because they don’t fully appreciate the initial Passover. God’s people were spared the death of their firstborn; and any household that did not have blood on the door suffered grievous loss. For those not passed over, this was not a happy occasion. The Passover stands as a perpetual memorial that those with stiff necks who do not bow the knee to God will share an eternal fate worse than Pharaoh and his people.
When we rejoice that Christians are saved, we must remember exactly what we are saved from. Our message to the world is all the more important because, without faith in Christ, those around us are eternally doomed. Our Great Commission work is to proclaim the good news that eternal punishment is not the only alternative.
As in the time of the Exodus, there were Egyptians who left with the Hebrews. Exodus 12 describes the people as a “mixed multitude.” No doubt, these non-Hebrews recognized that they should be on God’s side!
Family histories in the Bible are meant to remind us that, as part of God’s New Israel, we have forebears who valued their relationship with the Lord. In the process of carrying out His will, they had challenges to face, but there was a reward to follow—deliverance. Our children should know these accounts as well as they know their birthday, address, phone number, etc. Certainty, knowing that God delivers His people and crushes His enemies, makes for a truer, more genuine witness to others.
Many times women I speak with lament that they don’t have opportunities to share their faith. Those who stay at home with their children especially feel as though they have limited access to unbelievers. But the truth is quite different.
First, a woman’s family is a great mission field. Even those born into a believing family need to be taught the Christian faith and discipled into a life that lives out God’s law-word in practical ways. This should never be minimized as these sorts of interactions on a day-to-day basis will have a greater lasting value than occasional, infrequent exchanges with others. Continue reading
In a world of innovation, we are bombarded with marketing that promises to save us time, money, and/or effort. Some of us are more prone to be persuaded by one of these three depending on our circumstances in life. For those on a tight budget, saving money gets our attention quickly. For others, who feel as though they constantly run out of hours in the day, anything that promises to save time moves to the top of the list. Still others with some physical impairment or a lingering lazy streak find that saving effort is a top priority. So, which is better—saving time, money, or effort? Continue reading
“It is to God’s glory and by His supernatural grace that He has allowed us homeschooling moms to go beyond ourselves. Thanks to His call and strength, many of us are moving closer to the standards proclaimed in Proverbs 31 and we thus need to recognize that our merchandise is good! I know it’s difficult to view ourselves this way when the hair is getting gray and the figure reveals our age and the number of children we’ve had. I know that victory isn’t always evident and failure not always distant. However, a proper view of our overall effectiveness in performing the tasks that God has called us to can bolster our courage. The courage needed to recognize that the future of our civilization depends very much on what we do now and how we do it. May God grant us the vision to see the fruits of His victory.” (Lessons Learned from Years of Homeschooling)
One of the most important lessons to teach children is that they were created for a purpose. Unlike the ludicrous theory of evolution that posits random occurrences that result in people appearing in this world, the Bible teaches that we were personally known by our Creator before the foundation of the world. Of course, parents cannot teach this perspective if they don’t hold it themselves and mere assent to this doctrine is not sufficient. Beliefs should manifest themselves in our thoughts, words, and actions. Children should be able to witness that their father and mother live out their callings in a deliberate and purposeful manner.
This means that children need to be acquainted with the reasoning behind specific family practices. For example, why are we being educated at home, or why do we go to Christian school, or why do we attend public school? If parents cannot give a good apologetic from Scripture for decisions such as these, they will be teaching their children that certain matters are outside the jurisdiction of God’s Word. They should not be surprised when their children grow up to discount God’s law as binding on their lives. Continue reading
If you are like me, you have always assumed the phrase appearance of evil (1 Thess. 5:22) has to do with conduct that might be construed as outside the bounds of godly living. The problem with this is that it uses one definition of the word “appearance” which means an outward show. That is not the meaning in the Bible. A Biblical definition of appearance is the exhibition of a person and the character of that person before God.
Thus, in some circles, a man and a woman spending time together alone may be frowned on because other people might get the “wrong idea.” What this promotes is the paradigm of living our lives before men rather than before God. In this case, if the man and woman are pure in heart (love God and keep His commandments), being alone without any other person present is not in and of itself evil, or necessarily going to result in sin. Their conduct in that situation is to be judged in terms of God’s Word and not whether or not someone could construe their behavior as inappropriate (evil). Continue reading
Mankind has always been faced with a choice: either accept God’s terms (and His definitions of terms), or construct independent and self-serving ones. When a culture constructs new ways of referring to Biblical concepts, it is evidence that it is in active rebellion against God and its laws and conduct will reflect such rebellion. When the people of God succumb to altered definitions and modern adjustments to God’s Word, the results are detrimental and decidedly wicked. What’s more, issues that are clear-cut in the Bible and clearly defined in Scripture become muddied and unnecessarily complex.
In the law of God as given to Moses and fulfilled (put into force) by Christ, certain behaviors are deemed capital offenses. This means that God requires the death penalty to be imposed by the civil government on people who commit these crimes. In addition to the justice demanded by God for these crimes, the death penalty also purges evil from among the people. Yet in our day and age, due to antinomian compromise within the church and outright humanism in the secular world, we have replaced Biblical terms with euphemistic ones and compounded the problem by inserting the concept of “mitigating circumstances” to areas where the Scripture speaks plainly and clearly. Continue reading
When babies first come into the world, it is not beneficial to feed them an adult diet. Without a mature digestive system, teeth, and the ability to hold themselves up, they would not get the nutrition they need, and they would likely become ill from adult food. That is why in God’s design, an infant’s mother is uniquely prepared to nourish her child.
That said, if the diet never changes as the child grows, what was once beneficial becomes a poor substitute for the full complement of healthy proteins, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins, and minerals. One’s diet must mature as one matures.
It is the same when it comes to the Christian faith. At first, we are fed the basic doctrines of the Bible and we should absorb them as the infant absorbs his food. But, like a growing child, the time comes when we need to feed ourselves more than just the easily digestible food and move on to a heartier diet. The New Testament speaks of this issue more than once: Continue reading
The Kingdom-Driven Family 