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On January 3, 2014 By In Books, Culture, Family and Children

Free Copy of Pastor Uri Brito’s “The Trinitarian Father”

Hello dear Kuyperians. You might have noticed some recent excitement here at your favorite Kuyper-inspired website over the publication of Uri Brito’s booklet The Trinitarian Father. As Steve Wilkins said, “Pastor Brito helps us to see what God’s nature implies for us and requires of us as fathers. His essay is an excellent beginning to getting us into Trinitarian shape.”

You can buy the book here, for a mere $8, and it is well worth the purchase, dear friends.

Even more exciting than that, however, is the prospect of getting a free copy. Which you can now do by making sure you’ve joined our current book giveaway. There are now two prizes, the first drawing being for Bread & Wine and Watch For The Light, and the second drawing being for The Trinitarian Father.

Even if you’ve already entered, share the contest. The more people join through your link, the more entries you have. Contest ends on Sunday the 5th.

As the Huguenots probably never say, bonne chance!

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On January 3, 2014 By In Family and Children

Covenantal Union

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On December 3, 2013 By In Culture, Family and Children

Raising Life-long Learners and Leaders

In his book Beauty for Truth’s Sake, Stratford Caldecott states that it is,

“no wonder students come to a college education expecting nothing more than a set of paper qualifications that will enable them to earn a decent salary.  The idea that they might be there to grow as human beings, to be inducted into an ancient culture, to become somehow more than they are already, is alien to them.  They expect instant answers, but they have no deep questions.  The great questions have not yet been woken in them.  The process of education requires us to become open, receptive, curious, and humble in the face of what we do not know.  The world is a fabric woven of mysteries, and a mystery is a provocation to our humanity that cannot be dissolved by googling a few more bits of information.”

Mr. Caldecott has aptly described a generation who has been taught that they are nothing more than highly-developed mammals, and how highly-developed is still up for grabs. We have 90% less fur and 99% less purpose than our monkey’s uncle. As long as a young man makes enough to pay for his Playstation and Netflix, he’s good to go. This postmodern generation is enslaved to their evolutionary apathy. This apathy reminded Francis Schaeffer of Ancient Rome. In his book How Should We Then Live he said,

“As the Roman economy slumped lower and lower, burdened with aggravated inflation and a costly government, authoritarianism increased to counter the apathy… …because of the general apathy and its results, and because of oppressive control, few thought the civilization worth saving.  Rome did not fall because of external forces such as the invasion of the barbarians.  Rome had no sufficient inward base; the barbarians only completed the breakdown—and Rome gradually became a ruin.”

America is reaping what Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Dewey and Horace Mann have sown. America is reaping what America has sown. We cannot turn back the clock; so we must decide how we are going to respond, and where we can go from here. The opposite of apathy is passion. The opposite of slavery is freedom, and the opposite of modern, socialist education is classical, Christian education.

With the classical tools of learning, constructed upon the solid foundation of God’s Word, students will not only excel at whatever their hand finds to do, but they will be able to become leaders in their particular field of interest. So, we are not just raising life-long learners, but we are also raising life-long leaders. Are we training our children to be the next generation of leaders in Christendom, or are we assuming that someone else will take care of that?  If Christians aren’t doing it, then who is? Is the apathy in our culture limited to the twenty-somethings in their Star Wars pajamas, living with their moms, playing Wii all day, or does it extend further than that?

Are we passionate for the Kingdom? Are we avoiding government schools because we have a vision for our children’s future in Christ’s Kingdom or merely to avoid drug use, school violence, and free condoms?  Our vision for child-rearing must extend beyond the things we’re trying to avoid and manifest itself in all the things that we are working to accomplish, namely the coming of Christ’s Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. The classical model is not the only way to raise up your little olive shoots in the fear and admonition of the Lord, but it is a premiere tool to accomplish the rearing of passionate, Christian, life-long learners and leaders.

(This was short, I know. Here are some resources to flesh out the bald assertions I’ve just made.)

Click here or on the book cover to link to this title on Amazon.

Case for CCE

Click here to link to an outstanding lecture by George Grant on Classical Christian Education. It’s available free of charge at wordmp3.com

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On November 26, 2013 By In Culture, Family and Children

When Are You Ever Going To Grow Up?

by Marc Hays

“When I became a man, I put away childish things…”

Norman-Rockwell-Taller_thumb2For decades, American culture has been pushing the threshold between childhood and adulthood further and further from birth. This is being done in the name of science, which supposedly is just analyzing the data and then reporting the facts. A myriad of professions, from psychiatrists to psychologists to neurologists to anthropologists, are making the claim that the period of “adolescence” continues to lengthen. As many of these professions are built on evolutionary assumptions, the data is often treated as though this is simply the way things are. Perhaps it is simply the next stage of human evolution; the next stage of progress being a state in which the human being no longer wants to progress.

In September of this year, the BBC reported, “New guidance for psychologists will acknowledge that adolescence now effectively runs up until the age of 25 for the purposes of treating young people.” This shift in the direction for the psychiatric care of young people is being pushed by neurologists that are claiming that the prefrontal cortex of the brain is still developing until around age 25. Therefore, information is being processed differently than in the brains of adults, which leads to all of the stereotypical woes of the teenage years.

This distinction between “children” and “adults” is a real one, and not just some arbitrary legal age. This distinction goes far beyond the ability to reproduce their species; far beyond their overall physical shape and/or muscle tone; far beyond the final state of their prefrontal cortex. Those characteristics are certainly an objective reality, but the Apostle Paul doesn’t say, “When I became a man, I got stronger, taller, and had to shave my whiskers.”  He said that he “put away childish things”, or in the ESV, “I gave up childish ways.” He’s implying that a child behaves like a child, and an adult behaves like an adult. The problem in our culture is not that people are staying small and beardless. It is that they grow up physically but refuse to take the responsibility that is supposed to accompany that growth.

The term “adolescence” comes from the Latin word “adolescere” which means “to grow up.” In most cultures that recognize this stage of human development, it begins with the onset of puberty and the physical changes that reshape little people into bigger people. When adolescence ends is somewhat arbitrary, and this “commencement” is often attended by culturally relative rites and rituals. America’s famous age has long stood at 18-years-old. This makes sense as this age is attended by high school graduation and the legal right to enter into a contract, signifying the end of the legal guardianship of parents. Seems simple enough, right? Child…17. Adult…18.

If so, then why are leading psychiatric associations publishing that adolescence should be extended to age 25? Why? Perhaps it’s because they know that a sustained “identity crisis,” which supposedly comes with adolescence, is good for their industry. After all, they’re all about fixing crises, right? Why extend the age of adolescence? Maybe it’s because longer childhood provides more of something else besides sin on which to blame America’s interminable immaturity.

As Christians, when we finish critiquing the psychiatric community’s self-fulfilling prophecies, are we prepared to do anything about it? What about our kids? Are we raising them to grow up? Do we have a plan to help them put away childish things and move from godly children to godly adults? Paul’s list includes speaking like a child, thinking like a child, and reasoning like a child. We must teach them and, more importantly, show them what it means to speak, think, and reason as an adult.

A wise man once instructed me that our goal as parents should not be to raise godly children, but to raise godly adults. (I won’t tell you his name, but his initials are RCJR.) This epigram casts our eyes toward the horizon, lest we become too easily satisfied in present successes or too easily discouraged by the failures. The litmus test for adulthood cannot be a magical age when the prefrontal cortex stops growing, and we should not be surprised when, a few years from now, new scientific data attempts to explain why adolescence is being extended to 40-years-old. The standard for judging godliness, in both children and adults, has been, and always will be, the Word of God—fully revealed in the Son of Man, Jesus Christ.<>online gameпопулярность а проверить

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On November 14, 2013 By In Culture, Family and Children

Thankful to Be Cooking on Thanksgiving

by Joffre Swait

Thanksgiving, like many holidays, can be as stressful for some as it can be joyful for others. On Thanksgiving, the cook(s) classically labors, frets, worries, hangs hopes on the success of the souffle, and forgets to not make that stuffing recipe that father-in-law complains about every year.

We tell ourselves to be at peace, to pray, to be full of joy during the holidays. We tell ourselves to be grateful. But when we seem to be the ones doing all the work and all the giving, thankfulness can be hard. Nonetheless, it is necessary. Here we are in God’s wonderful world, in olive groves we did not plant, surrounded by curse and blessing of epic proportions. We must be thankful, even if we were the ones who bore the brunt of the sun and watched as the newcomers got the same wage.

What’s more, once the grand feast is plated up, your work isn’t done. And these newcomers have already finished all the cranberry sauce.

Since it is often difficult for the makers to avoid falling into this tearful way on Thanksgiving, I thought it appropriate to offer some reasons to be grateful for being the cook.

If you cook with any regularity, you already know these things. But the change from quotidian to festal eating highlights them to all parties. Suddenly every dish is made special and fraught with meaning and the weight of history, every decision to serve this instead of that worthy of praise and condemnation.

Thanksgiving is supposed to be a time of gratitude for God’s gifts. You, dear cook, in all your service, are elevated to a role of highest honor. You manifest God’s kind provisions to his beloved in tangible and visceral ways. You conceive, you create, you lay your talents and provender before your welcome guests. And whether they are grateful or not, you are sanctified. Your people may seem ever ungrateful, but you don’t provide for them to receive thanks. You do it because you love them.

At Thanksgiving the cook presides over a liturgy that not only connects us to our Father in Heaven, but to our brothers in times past. This, by the way, is the only acceptable reason for making a sweet potato casserole covered in brown sugar and marshmallows: because your grandmother made it that way and your great-uncles loved it. We live in a society that, on the one hand, abounds in varieties and origins of food that would have boggled the minds of previous generations, and on the other, moves toward a sloth in the preparation of food so great that we don’t even remember our own mother’s recipes. At Thanksgiving we remember at least some of the old ways. And you are the one presiding over this great feast of mourning over the dead and joy for the living.

You are also coquus semper reformando, the always reforming cook. You honor tradition, but you are able to take the lead in establishing new family traditions.

The cranberry sauce we use on Thanksgiving is my dad’s. It has been in our family for only twenty years. But who knows how much farther into time it will travel, being cut off in some streams of our family after perhaps only a generation, while proceeding down other streams for many ages of men? On Thanksgiving every dish holds its weight in glory.

Not only has time become your playground, but so has all the earth. Three hundred short years ago, would you have had much black pepper in your house? Marshmallows in a variety of size and color? Oranges from over there? Pineapple from who knows where? And yet all these, thanks be to our God, are before you now, waiting for you to fulfill their destinies, which their fathers labored in darkness over for so long. To past generations of northern Christians, getting hold of an orange in winter was enough of a feat that the orange would be featured in the Christmas stocking; we still cling, without thinking, to such traditions. Will you, who live in Wisconsin, fail to be grateful for the bags and bushels of oranges available to you? You will not. You will give glory to men, and oranges, and cranberries, and God who made them, by putting orange zest and orange bits in your cranberry sauce.

Take therefore your place of honor with gratitude. Sweat over the stove, weary your arms with the stirring of sauces. Be thankful for the honor bestowed upon you by holy God, who has chosen you to preside over a symphony of trials past and glories to come, of lands lost and lands conquered, of ships at the last barren of ale and ships on the nonce laden with fruit, of mighty men dead and children given new life, of long hard winters and help unlooked for.

You, good lady, kind sir, may hold your wooden spoon up as a scepter.

FirstThanksgivingPic Edited

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On November 13, 2013 By In Books, Family and Children

Feast With Us! Win a Copy of Supper of the Lamb

It would give us great joy to share the joy of these seasons with you. Our God is the God of winter, and the God of feasting! Laissez les bons temps of Thanksgiving and Christmas rouler!

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On October 25, 2013 By In Culture, Family and Children

As Temperatures Drop, We’re Getting Warmer

by Marc Hays

Fireplace by Clay Chapman

Fireplace by Clay Chapman

Three years ago, while building our house, we installed both a chimney and an electric heat pump.  The heat pump was for present use.  The chimney was for the future, standing cold and dormant while the heat pump did its work. For all the benefits that it does have, there is something missing from the heat pump experience; something crucial, like heat.  Although a heat pump keeps the pipes from freezing, one cannot stand over the grate and actually get warm.  Instead, there’s a draft– a mildly lukewarm breeze that actually sends chills down my spine just thinking about it.

Last winter, due to rising energy prices coupled with the desire to complete one of my several unfinished projects, I built a brick hearth and installed a Buck stove. My wife was very happy to see the electric bill drop, as expected.  I was happy to check one thing off my chore list, as expected.  The wood was happy to burn and the smoke happy to rise, but then something unexpected happened.  The living room got warm.  I mean, I knew it would get warm.  Fire tends to do that sort of thing, but the room actually became a place where you wanted to be.  The room became cozy.

Like moths to a flame, the children began to congregate around the wood stove.  Puzzles, board games, books, Legos and baby dolls made their way out of the nether regions of the house and assembled in the living room.  Since there’s no TV in that room, the children did things with one another, and unlike the lukewarm air that used to be forced into the rooms, the children were not.  They gathered and played quite naturally.

Fireplace by Clay Chapman

Fireplace by Clay Chapman

Now on Saturdays we drive the crew cab into the woods, fell the trees, and cut them into pint-size pieces.  My pint-size people load them into the truck and then unload them behind the house.  As a family, we are together more, and more importantly, we are working together more.

As idyllic as all this sounds, however, we are not the perfect family.  We bring our sin into the living room with us, and quarrels are kindled more often than the fire.  We have miles and miles left to go before we reach our destination, but by the grace of God through an old Buck stove, we’re getting warmer.

Check out more of Clay Chapman’s work at periodarchitecture.com

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On October 11, 2013 By In Culture, Family and Children

Charles Hodge on True Education

Hodge 1

Marc Hays posted earlier the opinion of three different contemporary writers on Christian education, specifically public school.  Here is a quote from an older Christian, Charles Hodge. This comes from his commentary on Ephesians 6:4.

“This whole process of education is to be religious, and not only religious, but Christian. It is the nurture and admonition of the Lord which is the appointed and the only effectual means of attaining the end of education. Where this means is neglected or any other substituted in its place, the result must be disastrous failure. The moral and religious element of our nature is just as essential and as universal as the intellectual. Religion, therefore, is as necessary to the development of the mind as knowledge. And as Christianity is the only true religion, and God in Christ the only true God, the only possible means of profitable education is the nurture and admonition of the Lord. That is, the whole process of instruction and discipline must be that which he prescribes and which he administers, so that his authority should be brought in constant and immediate contact with mind, heart and conscience of the child.  It will not do for the parent to present himself as the ultimate end, the source of knowledge and possessor of authority to determine truth and duty. This would be to give his child a mere human development. Nor will it do for him to urge and communicate every thing on the abstract ground of reason; for that would be to merge his child in nature. It is only by making God, God in Christ, the teacher and ruler, on whose authority every thing it so be believed, and in obedience to whose will every thing is to be done, that the ends of education can possibly be attained. It is infinite folly in men to assume to be wiser than God, or to attempt to accomplish an end by other means than those which he has appointed.”

 Hodge makes some excellent points in this paragraph, which I would like to draw to your attention.

First, education must include the will and the moral character if it is to be called education at all.  I would add that education will always be religious and moral in nature. The only question is will the religion be explicit or hidden. Public schools train our children to worship and form their moral character all the while claiming that they are morally neutral. 

Second, God, since he is the only God, is the only right source of education. To try to gain a proper moral formation, that is true education, apart from God is like doing heart surgery with a butter knife. 

 Third, notice how Hodge says that the child’s heart, mind, and conscience must be brought into constant and immediate contact with God’s authority. This is a paraphrase of Deuteronomy 6:7.  Here is why an education that excludes the Lord is a lie and is no education at all. God really does rule the world through His Son Jesus Christ and we really are to trust in Him and obey him and his Word really is the foundation for everything. To eliminate God’s authority from education is to eliminate the primary lesson that is to be learned.

Fourth, God is to set the curriculum. That curriculum is to make our children like their Savior Jesus. That does not eliminate math or science or literature. But it does eliminate math or science or literature without Jesus.  This also means that returning some vague, amorphous “god” to public education is insufficient.  It must be “God in Christ.” 

Fifth, any attempt to educate our children any other way is infinite folly and guaranteed disaster. We cannot eliminate the Creator and the Savior from our education and not also ultimately eliminate wisdom, joy, beauty, truth, and righteousness. 

Sixth, many Christians have adopted the mindset that education is primarily about earning a living wage. We get a good education so we can get a good job and earn money. This is insufficient as the end of education. Education’s end is the glory of God through making disciples of his Son Jesus Christ who apply his Word to all of life.

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On September 24, 2013 By In Family and Children, Theology

The New Testament Openly Commands the Baptism of Children

PENTECOST

Acts 2 at Pentecost provides key verses for interpreting baptism.

 

THE BAPTISM FIGHT OVER ACTS 2

When credobaptists and paedobaptists contend over the meaning of Acts 2.37-39, the baptists (credobaptists) usually have the easier time in front of the audience because most of us are ready to hear through baptistic ears – doesn’t it say “repent”? And so they posit that a baby cannot turn from idols. The paedobaptist thinks the baby is turned in heart toward God, and that the direction of heart requirement is taken care of. Hasn’t God always been “God to you and to your children”? Isn’t that enough?

The other major argument which works well as a crowd-pleaser in favor of the credobaptist view is the word, “and” connected to the apparent qualifier, “all those who are far off, as many as the Lord our God shall call to himself.” That is, “the promise,” they say, is not for every last one of you-plural, but for as many of you-plural whom the Lord calls. It is not for your children, but for as many of your children as the Lord calls; and it is not for all those far off, but for as many foreigners as the Lord calls.

Isn’t this an obvious and simple use of the distributive property of multiplication?

(A + B + C)(X) = AX + BX + CX

We might ask: if no group is being specified, then why is a listing of groups given at all? (more…)

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On September 14, 2013 By In Family and Children

Proverbs for Dummies

Proverbs. Kids needum. And they’re ready-built for kid ears. 

Here are a few ways that the wisdom of Yhwh appeals to the young and malleable. When the proverbial father says, “Listen my son,” he then proceeds to focus on what is…

Dunce Cap Large

STUPID
Kid’s like to call things stupid. Heck… I like to call things stupid too. Especially when I am calling evil “stupid” in front of my kids: Guess who is stupid? Those who hate wisdom and instruction. I mean… idiots, really. (Don’t be offended, friend – This doesn’t have to be you.)

HEROIC
The Lion of Judah wrote words that lionize the spiritually fruitful. Because the wise (those who have the fruit of the Spirit blossoming from their tongues and hands and feet) they are heroes! Everybody wants to be righteous, you know? Everyone who’s anyone wants to respect his father and mother. No one is cooler than a wise man. That guy who saves his money and works hard…awesome!

UNFORGETTABLE IN PICTURES
Prostitutes are ugly and scary…their gaping mouths are graves.

Stolen bread will make your gut a bag of rocks. Then it isn’t so fun to eat anymore.

Fools go eat dinner with zombies sitting in a grave in hell. Oops. Don’t go there.

RLStevenson Treasure Island Map

Robert Louis Stevenson, from Treasure Island

Lustful men light matches on their zippers and then set the flame down on their privy parts. Good idea, eh?

Girls who are beautiful, but not wise, are like jewelry covered in pig-snot. Go fix that.

Lazy people are so afraid to act… because, you know, the monsters out there might get me if I go outside.

CHALLENGING
Do your kids like a treasure hunt? Tell them to find wisdom under every rock. If they hunt it down, they will have rooms full of fine treasures. Tell them nothing is more worthwhile than the treasure hunt. Tell them that when they find it, they should cling to it. Oh, and tell them that the treasure map starts in chapter 1 of Proverbs, where they meet a guardian sphinx. They can answer this dark riddle to pass: Do you fear Yhwh?

But Oooooh to get your hands on a hunk of that TREASURE inside!!!

Teach your treasure hunters to pass the gate, storm the store room, and find some jewel encrusted, shining, golden plate. Show them how to do this, and then ask them to hold it up in the sun so they can recognize the reflection of their own face in it.

Cause that’s what kids like. And since their proverbial father Yhwh, when he made kids and when he made the book of proverbs, knew who he was writing to.

—-

Luke Welch has a master’s degree from Covenant Seminary and preaches regularly in a conservative Anglican church in Maryland. He blogs about Bible structure at SUBTEXT. Follow him on Twitter: @lukeawelch<>_gamesmmo online para mobilespr кампании по продвижению бренда в интернете

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