Category Archives: Articles written by Craig

“Same-Sex Couples and the Law”

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“Same-Sex Couples and the Law”

Posted in Craigs Keystone articles

I spent the entire holiday break researching and writing a submission to the Ministry of Justice on their Discussion Document “Same-Sex Couples and the Law”. Very depressing. The biased nature of both the discussion document and the background paper was amazing: they took a “nonjudgmental” approach which automatically forced them to regard married couples, defactos and homosexual “pairs” as all being on an equal footing. Well, once you do that, the result is a foregone conclusion: there is no logical reason why homosexual or lesbian “couples” (terms which are nowhere defined) should not have the same rights and privileges as do married couples when it comes to formal recognition in law and society, claims on property and the adoption of children.

No country on earth has actually redefined “marriage” to include same-sex liaisons, in spite of what we may have heard in the media. What has happened is that a couple of governments have made provision for such pairs to register their relationship with the state, formalising it more than defactos do. The net result is the same, of course, for it means the state must listen to their every claim for inheritance, reproductive technology, and adoption rights. Such a thing would amount to a total radical and revolutionary redefinition of two foundational institutions in our society, in Western civilisation: marriage and the family. The tenor of these discussion documents puts traditional marriage on the defensive of having to justify its existence and place of privilege in law, by asking how different treatment of homosexual “couples” from marrieds can be justified. This issue WILL affect us all greatly. Please consider it.

The ministry of Justice would like feedback by 31 March 2000. Either do the questionnaire on their website; write your comments in response to their printed questionnaire attached to the Discussion Document, “Same-Sex Couples and the Law”; or simply write your comments to them. Request a copy of the discussion document mentioned above and also a “Backgrounding the Issues” document from:

Ministry of Justice

PO Box 180, Wellington

ph.: (04) 494-9700, fax: (04) 494-9701

email: reception@justice.govt.nz

Copies of these documents and the questionnaire for electronic completion are available on their website:

www.justice.govt.nz

Send your submissions to (only one copy needed):

Same-Sex Couples and the Law

Public Law Group, Ministry of Justice

PO Box 180, Wellington

fax: (04) 494-9859

email: reception@justice.govt.nz

From Keystone Magazine
January 2000 , Vol. VI No. 1
P O Box 9064
Palmerston North
Phone: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
email: craig@hef.org.nz

The True Millennium Is Well Hidden (Part 1)

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The True Millennium Is Well Hidden (Part 1)

Posted in Teaching Tips

(Researched from the internet)

PART 1

The passionate discussions in some papers as to when the new millennium really started is nothing new. “We have uniformly rejected all letters and declined all discussion upon the question of when the present century ends, as it is one of the most absurd that can engage the public attention, and we are astonished to find it has been the subject of so much dispute, since it appears plain. The present century will not terminate till January 1, 1801, unless it can be made out that 99 are 100… It is a silly, childish discussion, and only exposes the want of brains of those who maintain a contrary opinion to that we have stated — The Times, 26 December 1799.

The Birth of Christ and the Christian Epoch

A count of years from an initial epoch is the most successful way of maintaining a consistent chronology. But it must be tied to a sequence of recorded historical events.

The birth of Christ is the initial epoch of the Christian calendar. We count years from an assumed year of the birth of Christ as determined by Dionysius Exiguus (Denys the Little), a monk and astronomer from Scythia in what is now SW Russia. About AD 530 Dionysius was commissioned by Pope John I to calculate dates of Easter for future observances. Dionysius followed previous precedent by extending an existing table (by Cyrillus) covering the period “228-247” which was on a time scale reckoned from the beginning of the reign of Emperor Diocletian. However, Dionysius did not want his Easter table “to perpetuate the memory of an impious persecutor of the Church, but preferred to count and denote the years from the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ”. To accomplish this he designated the years of his table Anni Domini Nostri Jesu Christi 532-550. Thus, Dionysius’ Anno Domini 532 (AD 532 for short) is equivalent to Anno Diocletiani 248. A correspondence was thereby established between the new Christian Era and an existing system associated with historical records. (By the way, when AD is used it is always before the number. BC always follows the number. This year is AD 2000 not 2000 AD.)

What Dionysius did not do was establish an accurate date for the birth of Christ. In his scheme he believed that Christ was born on the 25th of December of the year preceding the start of the year AD 1. There is no year 0 preceding the year AD 1. Indeed, the concept of counting from zero, rather than one, does not exist in Latin and was introduced into Europe from the Middle East many centuries later. Therefore, Dionysius’ calendar places the birth of Jesus Christ at the end of the year 1 BC. The 2,000th anniversary of Christ’s birth would then be 25 December 2000. However, modern research indicates that Christ was probably born in 6 BC and certainly by 4 BC, when Herod died. So the real 2000th birthday of the Lord Jesus, the real new millennium, probably occurred during the years 1995 to 1997.

When Was the Very First Epoch?

James Ussher was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1581 and died in England in 1656. He lived through a time of tremendous political and religious upheaval in his native Ireland and in England. Though he was a Puritan in theology, he was a royalist in his steadfastness to the king and the principle of divine right of kings. Invited to participate in the Westminster Assembly, which eventually wrote the Westminster Confession and Catechism, Ussher refused because he thought the assembly itself was illegal.

In his day Ussher was an imminent scholar known to the foremost scholars and statesmen in England. At one time he had possibly the largest collection of books in Western Europe. He eventually donated the collection to Trinity College, Dublin, which his uncle James Ussher helped found. During his lifetime he was widely known as a defender of learning, of the value of books secular and sacred, and a proponent of maintaining an independent identity for Irish Protestant faith. He was appointed Archbishop of Armagh in 1625.

His collected works total seventeen volumes. The most famous of these is his Annals of the Old and New Testament, published in the 1650s, which is a detailed chronology and dating of Biblical history, wherein Ussher said God created the world on the morning of October 23, 4004 B.C. He arrived at this date, in part, by adding the ages of Adam and his descendants found in Genesis 5 and 11. (Refinements by others further pinpointed this to 9 a.m., London time, or midnight in the Garden of Eden.)

This would mean that the world’s 6000th birthday was on October 23, 1997. This is determined because there was no year “0”, but the counting went straight from 1BC to AD1. Thus 4004 + 1997 – 1 = 6000. It is very tempting to think of each set of 1000 years as a day, and the 7th would be our Sabbath day or millennium of rest. If Bishop Ussher’s chronology is correct, and if we can validly assume each 1000 years represents a day, then we entered upon our millennium of rest just over two years ago. This also corresponds with one of the possible “true” years of Jesus’ birth.

Types of Calendar

But keeping track of time and constructing calendars is a very tricky business. The principal astronomical cycles upon which we base time and calendars are:

1) the day (the rotation of the Earth on its axis),

2) the year (the revolution of the Earth around the Sun), and

3) the month (based on the revolution of the Moon around the Earth).

The complexity of calendars arises because these cycles of revolution do not correspond to a number of whole days, but include fractions of days and because astronomical cycles are neither constant nor perfectly commensurable with each other.

We need to identify two kinds of years. The “tropical year” is defined as the mean interval between vernal equinoxes; that is, it is a year that corresponds to the cycle of the seasons and is made up of a certain number of whole days plus a bit left over. This bit left over is not always the same. The other kind of year is a “calendar year”, the kind we are used to seeing on the wall and in diaries. It is made up of either 365 or 366 whole days. You can see that the two kinds of years do not match up exactly.

Three distinct types of calendars have resulted from this situation. (There are about 40 different calendars in use in the world today.)

1) A solar calendar, of which the Gregorian calendar we use today is an example, is designed to maintain synchrony with the tropical year. To do so, days are intercalated (forming leap years) to increase the average length of the calendar year.

2) A lunar calendar, such as the Islamic calendar, follows the lunar phase cycle without regard for the tropical year. Thus the months of the Islamic calendar systematically shift with respect to the months of the Gregorian calendar.

3) The lunisolar calendar has a sequence of months based on the lunar phase cycle; but every few years a whole month is intercalated to bring the calendar back into phase with the tropical year. The Hebrew and Chinese calendars are examples of this type.

The Julian Calendar

It wouldn’t be hard for Dionysius to have made a mistake in determining the date of the birth of Christ, even though both Christ and he lived in times that used the same Julian calendar.

The Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 BC, was a solar calendar with months of fixed lengths. Every fourth year an intercalary day was added to maintain synchrony between the “calendar year” and the “tropical year”. It served as a standard for European civilization until the Gregorian Reform of 1582.

Julian years are classified as normal years of 365 days and leap years of 366 days. The year is divided into twelve formalized months that were eventually adopted for the Gregorian calendar (the one we use today).

The year 46 BC has been called the “year of confusion”, because in that year Julius Caesar inserted 90 days to bring the months of the Roman calendar back to their traditional place with respect to the seasons. This was Caesar’s first step in replacing a calendar that had gone badly awry. Although the pre-Julian calendar was lunisolar in inspiration, its months no longer followed the lunar phases and its year had lost step with the cycle of seasons. Following the advice of Sosigenes, an Alexandrine astronomer, Caesar created a solar calendar with twelve months of fixed lengths and a provision for an intercalary day to be added every fourth year. As a result, the average length of the Julian calendar year was 365.25 days. This is consistent with the length of the tropical year as it was known at the time.

Following Caesar’s death, the Roman calendrical authorities misapplied the leap-year rule, with the result that every third, rather than every fourth, year was intercalary. Although detailed evidence is lacking, it is generally believed that Emperor Augustus corrected the situation by omitting intercalation (leap years) from the Julian years 9 BC through AD 4. After this the Julian calendar finally began to function as planned.

Through the Middle Ages the use of the Julian calendar evolved and acquired local peculiarities that continue to snare the unwary historian. There were variations in the initial epoch for counting years, the date for beginning the year, and the method of specifying the day of the month. Not only did these vary with time and place, but also with purpose. Different conventions were sometimes used for dating ecclesiastical records, fiscal transactions and personal correspondence.

Caesar designated January 1 as the beginning of the year. However, other conventions flourished at different times and places. The most popular alternatives were March 1, March 25, and December 25. This continues to cause problems for historians, since, for example, February 28, AD 998, as recorded in a city that began its year on March 1, would be the same day as February 28, AD 999, of a city that began the year on January 1.

Days within the month were originally counted from designated division points within the month: Kalends, Nones, and Ides. The Kalends is the first day of the month. The Ides is the thirteenth of the month, except in March, May, July and October, when it is the fifteenth day. The Nones is always eight days before the Ides.

By the eleventh century, consecutive counting of days from the beginning of the month came into use. Local variations continued, however, including counts of days from dates that commemorated local saints. The inauguration and spread of the Gregorian calendar resulted in the adoption of a uniform standard for recording dates.

Gregorian Calendar

The Gregorian calendar resulted from a need to reform the method of calculating dates of Easter. Under the Julian calendar the dating of Easter had become standardized, using March 21 as the date of the equinox. By the thirteenth century it was realized that the true equinox had regressed from March 21 (its supposed date at the time of the Council of Nicea, AD 325) to a date earlier in the month. As a result, Easter was drifting away from its springtime position and was losing its relation with the Jewish Passover. Over the next four centuries, scholars debated the “correct” time for celebrating Easter and the means of regulating this time calendrically. The Church made intermittent attempts to solve the Easter question without reaching a consensus.

By the sixteenth century the equinox had shifted by ten days, so something had to be done. At the behest of the Council of Trent, Pope Pius V introduced some adjustments. Pope Gregory XIII, who succeeded Pope Pius in 1572, soon convened a commission to consider reform of the calendar, since he considered his predecessor’s measures inadequate.

The Gregorian calendar, proposed by Aloysius Lilius, a physician from Naples, met the recommendations of Pope Gregory’s calendar commission and was instituted by the papal bull “Inter Gravissimus”, signed on February 24, 1582. Ten days were deleted from the calendar, so that October 4, 1582 was followed by October 15, 1582, thereby causing the vernal equinox of 1583 and subsequent years to occur about March 21.

This new calendar was promulgated through the Roman Catholic world but took a while considering the logistical problems of communication and governance of those times. Protestant states initially rejected the calendar but gradually accepted it over the coming centuries. (The Gregorian calendar was adopted in Britain 170 years later, in the year 1752, when September 2nd was followed by September 14th. This provides a pretty trap for unwary students of history trying to reconcile events in England with events on the Continent.) As international communications developed, the civil rules of the Gregorian calendar were gradually adopted around the world.

Leap Years

According to the Gregorian calendar, which is the civil calendar in use today, years evenly divisible by 4 are leap years, with the exception of centurial years that are not evenly divisible by 400. Therefore, the years 1700, 1800, 1900 and 2100 are not leap years, but 1600, 2000, and 2400 are leap years.

The Gregorian calendar year is intended to be of the same length as the cycle of the seasons. However, the cycle of the seasons, technically known as the tropical year, is approximately 365.2422 days. Since a calendar year consists of an integral number of whole days, a calendar year cannot exactly match the tropical year. If the calendar year always consisted of 365 days, it would be short of the tropical year by about 0.2422 days every year. Over a century, the calendar and the seasons would become out of sync by about 24 days, so that the beginning of spring in the northern hemisphere would shift from March 20 to April 13.

To synchronize the calendar and tropical years, leap days are periodically added to the calendar, forming leap years. If a leap day is added every fourth year, the average length of the calendar year is 365.25 days. This was the basis of the Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 B.C. In this case the calendar year is longer than the tropical year by about 0.0078 days. Over a century this difference accumulates to a little over three quarters of a day. From the time of Julius Caesar to the AD 1500s, the beginning of spring shifted from March 23 to March 11.

When Pope Gregory XIII instituted the Gregorian calendar in 1582, the calendar was shifted to make the beginning of spring fall on March 21 and a new system of leap days was introduced. Instead of intercalating a leap day every fourth year, 97 leap days would be introduced every 400 years, according to the rule given above. Thus, the average Gregorian calendar year is 365.2425 days in length. This agrees to within a half a minute of the length of the tropical year. It will take about 3300 years before the Gregorian calendar is as much as one day out of step with the seasons.

The Hebrew Calendar

As mentioned earlier, there are other calendars, most of three types: solar, such as our Gregorian; lunar, such as the Islamic; and lunisolar, such as the Hebrew calendar. It is based on calculation rather than observation. Each year consists of twelve or thirteen months, with months consisting of 29 or 30 days. An intercalary month is introduced in years 3, 6, 8, 11, 14, 17, and 19 in a nineteen-year cycle. Years are counted since the creation of the world, which is assumed to have taken place in 3761 BC. In that year, AM 1 started (AM = Anno Mundi = year of the world). Our 1 January 2000 is in A.M. 5760.

The Islamic Calendar

The Islamic calendar is a purely lunar calendar in which months correspond to the lunar phase cycle. As a result, the twelve lunar months rotate through the four seasons, coming back to where they used to be over a period of about 33 years. That is, their month of Safar sometimes occurs in winter, sometimes in summer.

Day 5 of their week, which is called Jum’a, is the day for congregational prayers. Unlike the Sabbath days of the Christians and Jews, Jum’a is not a day of rest. It begins at sunset on Thursday and ends at sunset on Friday.

Their initial epoch, A.H. 1 (Anno Higerae), is reckoned from the Era of the Hijra, commemorating the migration of the Prophet and his followers from Mecca to Medina. It is generally taken by astronomers to be Thursday, July 15, AD 622 (Julian calendar), while those favouring chronological tables generally use Friday, July 16, AD 622. Our 1 January 2000 is in A.H. 1420.

Keeping Time is a Messy Business

Sweden has a curious history. Sweden decided to make a gradual change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. By dropping every leap year from 1700 through 1740 the eleven superfluous days would be omitted and from 1 Mar 1740 they would be in sync with the Gregorian calendar. (But in the meantime they would be in sync with nobody!)

So 1700 (which should have been a leap year in the Julian calendar) was not a leap year in Sweden. However, by mistake 1704 and 1708 became leap years. This left Sweden out of synchronisation with both the Julian and the Gregorian world, so they decided to go “back” to the Julian calendar. In order to do this, they inserted an extra day in 1712, making that year a double leap year! So in 1712, February had 30 days in Sweden.

Later, in 1753, Sweden changed to the Gregorian calendar by dropping 11 days like everyone else.

From Keystone Magazine
January 2000 , Vol. VI No. 1
P O Box 9064
Palmerston North
Phone: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
email: craig@hef.org.nz

What Do You Do When the Ministry of Education Sends Your Exemption Application Back For More Information?

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What Do You Do When the Ministry of Education Sends Your Exemption Application Back For More Information?

Posted in Tough Questions

This is such a common occurrence, it is virtually standard procedure. It is nothing to worry about: they are not turning you down, they just want some more information here or there. Fine, just shovel a bit more in there and send it back.

They will often request more information under the following headings: Broad Curriculum Area; Study Area; and Timetable.

“Broad curriculum – are you using the New Zealand state school curriculum? If not, you will need to provide details of the seven core curriculum areas….”

When responding to a request for an application for exemption from enrolment, the MoE sends out its own definitions of the key words from Section 21 of the Education Act, which require home educators to teach “at least as regularly and well as in a registered school.”

Their definition of the word “well” stresses that the curriculum is your curriculum. Home Educators are not required to use the New Zealand state school curriculum nor are they required to cover the “seven core curriculum areas”. If the MoE sounds like they want you to do these things, you should only need to remind them of the absense of any legal requirement to do so, and then be able to fully state your own particular subject areas, however they might be covered (subject by subject, thematic, unschooling, etc.) It is not unreasonable to expect a prospective home education parent to be able to clearly explain the broad curriculum areas which they intend to use. Never be intimidated into organising your curriculum along lines the MoE sets…unless you like their system better than your own. Ask a couple of other families in your local support group how they did it….that’s what the support group is there for!

You may feel that having written certain things, you will be obliged to do those things. Not true. The Ministry expects you to change your educational approach and tactics as time goes by: your perception of the educational task will grow and mature, the needs of the children will change, certain resources you started out with will prove ineffective with your children’s learning styles and/or your teaching style, etc. In fact, the Ministry has told me that they would be worried if you didn’t change over time! The application form is mainly so that the Ministry can see that you are a competent person, you know what you are doing, you have a plan, you can work the plan, and that both you and your children are excited about it! These are the main things to communicate in whatever you write….your thorough confidence in your ability to succeed, enthusiasm, excitement, anticipation, total competence, that you are plugged into local and national support groups, that you are flexible and totally committed.

“Study area – this should be described.”

Fine. Describe it. Again, there are no requirements in the Act regarding “study area”, although there will be plenty of preconceived ideas in the mind of the MoE official reading the application. These officials either need reminding or instructing about what constitutes acceptable home education environments: the kitchen table, toaster, crumbs and all; the beat-up but comfortable old couch on the back porch; or like Mark Twain said was the best classroom of all: a log down by the river with a child sitting on one end and a parent sitting on the other. The questions in the exemption application are clearly coming from a very narrow “classroom” perspective, as if they expect you to set up a regular “school” in your own home. Actually, many of us start out that way, but home education can be infinitely more flexible and fun and effective than that.

Remember that classrooms are set up for the mass teaching of a large number of mixed-ability and mixed- background children by one state (read: politically) trained teacher. The logistics of a home education scenario, which is the far superior and near-ideal tutoring/mentoring system, bear virtually no resemblance to the logistics of the classroom, rendering the home a far more effective, fun and efficient learning and teaching situation. Just think about it: how long do you suppose it takes to get all 28 seven-year-olds in a classroom simply to get out their maths books and turn to page 12? Within the last six months we had a Massey University College of Education student reveal how they teach them at college that today’s teachers can only expect one minute (that is ONE MINUTE) of meaningful time per student per day in the typical school classroom. So how can we miss?

“Regularity/timetable – please provide a timetable to show approximately how much time will be spent on each curriculum area daily and weekly.”

We wrote back to them when they asked this same question and simply pointed out that we do not work to a timetable, so to write one up would be hypocritical. We also mentioned how the number of hours spent in instruction bear little or no relation to anything in the realm of learning. We carried on to describe how our time is taken up, a bit about the routine and probable disruptions. This seemed to be good enough, for we got the exemption. I still believe that if we are simply honest and are able to clearly articulate our personal policy/philosophy they are happy to (and probably obliged to) run with that.

Instruction in most home education situations is self-consciously a 24-hour-a-day occupation. For some it is helpful to perceive two realms of academic learning. The first is the basic skills that must be mastered: the three Rs. These can be further broken down into: 1) Inputs, such as reading, listening, comprehension, study and research skills, interpretation of the written word, voice inflections, body language, etc. 2) Outputs, such as writing, penmanship, grammar, spelling, composition, debate, oratory, voice modulation, body language, etc. 3) The four operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division plus a range of everyday skills such as measurements, estimation, ratios, percentages, volumes, areas, many of which one should be able to do mentally. The second realm of learning is everything else, virtually all of which one can learn for themselves once they have mastered the basic skills. You can organise this “everything else” realm anyway you like: subjects like history, science, geography, logic, technology, animal husbandry, woodwork, auto mechanics, languages, whatever.

There is no minimum or maximum number of subjects you must cover, there is no sequence prescribed that home educators must follow, there is no depth of knowledge one must obtain…..as the MoE says in its definition of “well”: it is your curriculum. According to the MoE’s 1996 Homeschooling Desk File, “Ministry officers will look for some evidence of planning and balance that we would expect would be a feature of curriculum organisation in any registered school.”

Sometimes the people reviewing our exemption applications infer that we need to be spending as much time on each subject as they do in schools. Again, this ignores the vast superiority in the effective use of time which is typical of a home education (tutoring) situation. They certainly cannot require any specific number of hours.

We home educators too often and too easily get intimidated by these MoE officials because the actual requirements of the Education Act, even when coupled with the MoE’s own definition of the key words from the Act “regularly” and “well”, are so minimal and vague we just get the feeling there must be something more here required of us. But no, there isn’t. So let us not acquiesce to them, for to do so would set a pattern which would be recognised by them eventually as a standard practice, which would one day find itself written into legislation as a legal requirement.

The officials will always have us on, pushing the conventional school model on us by assumption. We need to simply hold our ground and politely refuse to be pushed around. We also need to be informed. Buy a copy of the Act and become familiar with the relevant sections. There really isn’t much. Subscribe to TEACH Bulletin to keep up to date with legislative developments. And keep in close contact with your local support group, and network with others around the country to pick up invaluable teaching tips and ideas on where to locate and how they use various resource materials. Home educators are re-discovering a lot of very effective teaching methods which have become virtually lost to our culture because of 120 years of compulsory, secular mass state schooling in classrooms.

From Keystone Magazine
January 2000 , Vol. VI No. 1
P O Box 9064
Palmerston North
Phone: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
email: craig@hef.org.nz

Give Them A Biblical Self-Esteem

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Give Them A Biblical Self-Esteem

Posted in In line with Scripture

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it? — Jeremiah 17:9

This passage puts a very unpleasant and unpopular message before us. It is telling us something we have all heard before: that at the heart of the human problem is the problem of the human heart.

Now, we are not talking about the band-aid class of problems here. We are talking about a terminal, inoperable cancer type of problem. And it is a problem we all have. Yes, even born again Christians.

You see, we were created good by God in the Garden. But in Adam we all fell into sin. We tend to underestimate the problem of sin, mainly because we have been living in it since conception and are rather more comfortable with it than we would admit. But this sin is a deadly disease with a 100% kill rate. It affects every part of us, giving rise to the doctrinal term “total depravity” which means we humans have been depraved or corrupted in every area, that is, in our total being. (It does not mean every area is as totally depraved as it can possibly be, but until one is converted, one is certainly headed in that direction.) We Christians have been saved from the worst part of this disease, namely, everlasting death in hell, but we will not be free of this disease until we are resurrected to Glory. Meanwhile, the indwelling Holy Spirit gives us an increasing ability to overcome the power of sin in this life, a life-long process known as sanctification.

Implications: we humans are not in a state of normalcy, but are born sick, live with this illness all our days, and only gain deliverance at death. Those lovely people we know who have “hearts of gold” have no such thing. Their hearts are the worst part of them. The Scripture above says the heart is “desperately corrupt”, which is a lot worse than just plain old “corrupt”, which is pretty bad already. Also note: the heart is deceitful…..deceitful above all things, more deceitful than anything else you could mention. Which is why you still think those lovely people DO have hearts of gold, in spite of what the Scripture says. Praise God, not man, for the good deeds done. And praise God that He organises even unregenerate people to do many good deeds…..in spite of their heart conditions.

Our children are not little bundles of innocence….they too have the same deceitful hearts, desperately corrupt. Their cute little eyes and mannerisms will deceive us into thinking otherwise, but we must hold to what Scripture says, not what our deceitful hearts want to tell us. Our job is to give them a proper Biblical “self-esteem”,  one that acknowledges this problem. Not surprisingly the world’s idea of self-esteem is just the opposite: instead of realising you are so depraved that you need a Saviour, you will save yourself by affirming how truly great you are.

It said in the July 13, 1998 issue of Newsweek magazine: “If students work in classrooms where posters proclaim WE APPLAUD OURSELVES! and complete sentences like “I am special because….” they will be inoculated against drug use, teen pregnancy, bad  grades and just about everything else short of the common cold. Or so the story goes. Parents, like educators, have soaked up the message, trying to make their child feel good about himself no matter how many courses he fails or fly balls he drops.”

However God’s reality has a way of asserting itself as even this Newsweek article had to observe: “But now there is evidence that it might be dangerous…. ‘If kids develop unrealistic opinions of themselves and those views are rejected by others,’ warns psychologist Brad Bushman of Iowa State University, the kids are ‘potentially dangerous’….High self-esteem that is unjustified and unstable — Bushman’s definition of narcissism — also puts a kid at risk of turning violent.”

We parents must always remember that God has appointed us as parents and mentors of our children: we teach and role model, they learn and emulate. They learn to have a healthy scepticism toward their own hearts by our teaching and by our example. We don’t follow our feelings: we do our duty, which we find written in the pages of Scripture. We men have a particular duty to provide strong leadership here. Having done our duty, God in His grace may well give us the feelings of satisfaction once the job’s well done, or of pride in a child once he’s been disciplined to accomplish things on his own, or of affection toward your wife once you’ve loved her sacrificially, or of respect for your husband once you’ve honoured him sufficiently.

Again, the key to a proper self-esteem is to have a proper — that is, Biblical — self-portrait. We are created in the image of God. But we are fallen and so depraved in every area of our lives (physical, spiritual, emotional, intellectual) that we are unable to function as we ought without outside help. We get some help from our parents via discipline — as long as they are not deceived by their hearts to be slack in discipline — and via teaching and example. We also get the spiritual help we need from the Lord via the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit. This conversion so thoroughly changes us that we are henceforward enabled to do God’s will and even to desire to do His will over our own. But because sin is still an integral part of our human nature, especially our hearts, that until the day we die we must co-operate with the Holy Spirit in our sanctification, using the Scriptures as our infallible guide rather than the fickle fancies of our deceitful hearts.

From Keystone Magazine
January 2000 , Vol. VI No. 1
P O Box 9064
Palmerston North
Phone: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
email: craig@hef.org.nz

The Holy Spirit and Our Children

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The Holy Spirit and Our Children

Posted in In line with Scripture

But I tell you the truth, it is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counsellor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send Him to you. — John 14.7

Gordon Fee, a well respected Pentecostal New Testament commentator and scholar, writes in his conclusion to a major work on the Holy Spirit in the letters of Paul (God’s Empowering Presence, p. 900):

At the same time, the dynamic and experienced nature of life in the Spirit was generally lost. At least part of the reason for this was a matter the NT never addresses: how do children of believers become believers themselves? At some point in time, the majority of Christians became so as a result of being born into Christian homes rather than through adult conversion. … … All the Pauline epistles, it must be emphasised, were written to first generation believers, all of whom – at least those addressed in Paul’s letters – were adult converts, whose conversion had included an experienced coming of the Holy Spirit into their lives. … … But what happens to this experienced conversion, attended by the Spirit, for children born and raised in the homes of such converts? As much as anything, this probably accounts for the subsequent loss of the experienced nature of life in the Spirit and for the general marginalising of the Spirit in the later church. Again, this is not intended to be a judgmental picture, nor do I suggest that it is true at all times and in all places.

There is here a slight pessimism about the experience of the Holy Spirit in the lives of those who have grown up in Christian homes. It is almost as if he could be thinking in the back of his mind, “These second generation Christians are all soft. Give me a raw heathen, snatched from the very flames of hell itself, and I’ll show you a really evangelical believer!” Is he not hinting that Christians reared in Christian homes are in some way responsible for the marginalisation of the Holy Spirit in church history?

Well, we know what he means. We all know Christians who were marvellously converted from the depths of depravity and whose testimony is so fascinating to listen to. And they often seem to be the best evangelisers, too, somehow better able to identify with the unbelievers around them. I know unbelievers who have expressed the same sentiments: that artists, playwrights and other creative people who have suffered greatly are better able to really put feeling into their creative works. And so a Christian who has really experienced the depths of a sinful life prior to his or her conversion is so much more on fire for the Lord for he KNOWS exactly what he has been saved FROM and is therefore the more urgent and sincere in proclaiming the saving message of the Gospel.

Now we Christian parents, especially those of us who were NOT brought up in Christian homes, do sometimes wonder and worry about how keen for the Lord our children are going to be. This is one of the reasons why we home educate, so that the world will not unduly tempt them away from the faith.

And we are conscious of the “Preacher’s kid” or “Missionary’s kid” syndrome, where the parents were so busy ministering to the needs of others, they neglected their own children to the point where the children go off the rails and deny the faith.

In addition we have all seen how the stifling effects of a dead formalism or traditionalism can creep into a church. Where you used to see people hungry for the faithful preaching of the Word, for personal application and spiritual growth, and for evangelising the lost, you now see people more concerned about someone else taking their parking place or sitting in their pew-position or the little ones making noise during the service. And so we form home-churches or radically rev up the existing church’s services.

That our children would not have such vivid conversion experiences as some (but by no means all) of us have had is to be expected. They have grown up hearing from infancy the Blessed Name of Christ our Saviour spoken in tones of awe and reverence rather than as one of a selection of swear words. They are used to prayer and Bible reading and the singing of psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Yes, they still need to be born again, yet it would be rare parents who would send their child out into the world to be tempted by and even experience so much of what those same parents know to be sinful so that the child could have the benefit of a really dramatic turnaround in his life. No, we would rather see our children’s conversion be more of a growing personalised eagerness, an acceleration into the Christian life; not changing direction, but continuing on the course along which we parents have been steering them from birth.

Many parents will testify of themselves and of their children that a conversion experience has indeed taken place, but they cannot pin-point the event in time. For some it was more of a process, for others a dawning realisation, for others a reality they never in their lives seriously doubted. Now as a person who has experienced a clear, dramatic, one-moment-in-time conversion, I struggle to understand these other salvation testimonies, for they are outside of my personal experience.

But it is not a conversion experience that makes a Christian.

It is the work of the Holy Spirit IN our children’s lives, a consistent change over time, little by little, in this area then in that area, but always toward a closer resemblance to the image of Christ a la II Corinthians 3:18 that reveals a true Christian. It is the presence of the Holy Spirit Himself in our children’s lives that will clearly demonstrate whether they are branches as described in John 15:5, vitally abiding in the vine. For they will produce, slowly perhaps but inevitably, the blessed fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23).

Sure, it would have been great for those Apostles and early disciples to have had the continuing experience of Christ Himself among them. Wouldn’t we all love such an experience ourselves? But as He said, He needed to depart for our good, that He might then send the Holy Spirit Who would dwell not just with us but IN us, causing us to grow and mature. The promise, “I will send Him to you” is for all Christians. Those born into Christian homes, and raised in Christian families CAN have as vital, fresh and powerful a work of the Holy Spirit in their lives as those converted from out of the world.

Reading through the book of Judges is most instructive, for here is a repeating cycle of a first generation whose hearts are turned to God, a second generation who seem to have lost the vision, and a third generation who have gone over to pagan practises so abominable the Lord has to punish the people and raise up a judge to bring them back and start with a new generation.

We trust that we are keen first-generation Christians, and in our home education we do not want to see our children turning out as second-generation Christians who are losing the vision. If anything we want to see them even more consistently Biblical than we are. We want our children to be themselves first-generation Christians. And so it should be, for God adopts us as His children. We are born again into His family as children, not as grandchildren.

Unlike the people in Judges, we present-day first-generation home schooling parents have the Holy Spirit in our hearts and the completed Scriptures in our hands and all the benefits the 20th century Church has to offer…and without hindrance we are free to constantly and consistently utilise these in the upbringing of our children!

So let’s go for it! Let us appreciate afresh the privilege that is ours through the Holy Spirit’s coming: being true branches vitally abiding in Jesus Christ, the vine, and producing the fruit of the Spirit for all, especially our children, to see. They will then have the pattern, the living role-model, and will see the vital Christian  lives of their parents — struggling yet persistent, burdened yet rejoicing, tested yet overall victorious — in action. For in the Lord our labour is not in vain.

 

 

From Keystone Magazine
September 1999 , Vol. V No. V
P O Box 9064
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