Making the Most of the Time

Posted in Craigs Keystone articles

In a vine-covered shack in the mountains

Bravely fighting the battle of time

Is a dear one who’s weathered my sorrows.

‘Tis that silver-haired Daddy of mine.

I know it’s too late dear old Daddy

To repay for those sorrows and cares

Though dear Mother is waiting in heaven

Just to comfort and solace you there.

If I could recall all the heart aches ,

Dear old Daddy, I’ve caused you to bear

If I could erase

Those lines from your face

And bring back the gold to your hair,

If God would but grant me the power

Just to turn back tbe pages of time

I’d give all I own

If I could but atone

To that silver-haired Daddy of mine.

When I heard those lines sung by the Everly Brothers a few weeks ago, I burst into tears. As a father I now know about the unspeakable nightmares I must have put my parents through. I would love to apologise to my Dad, to talk over all the trials I forced on him. But I never even had a chance to say ‘good-bye” to my Dad. He died of sudden heart failure when I was 13. He was 44, same age as I am now. He was one of those dads who worked 10 hours a day, six days a week. Even though I can count on one hand the times he did something with just me out of the five of us kids, I loved him dearly …he was my Dad.

As a door to door salesman I once met a man who said he wasn’t interested in my products and really couldn’t spare the time to have a look since he was nursing his terminally ill wife who had been sent home from the hospital to die. What do you say? I asked him what advice he would give me if I were to find myself in his position. Without hesitation he replied, “Start talking to one another.” Even though they’d been together for years, now that they saw the end was near, they couldn’t find enough time to talk to each other. I wish my Dad had taken the time to talk to me. As a matter of fact I remember how twice just the month before he did, he called into my room just on bedtime to see how my brother and I were doing. He had never done that before. It was neat. Then he was gone.

Time is short, men. Do those things for your family you have been thinking about doing, but keep putting off. Go get ten minutes, OK, make it only five minutes, with one of your children just as they are going to bed. Lying there in the darkness is a good time to re-cap the day, catch up with each other, and you never know what burning questions they may be encouraged to ask. Make it a regular time at least once a week.

Read to them as often as you can. Use times around the dinner table as the opportunity to fulfill your role as prophet, priest and king. When I pray after reading the Scriptures at meal times , I now confess our collective sins, as did Job for his children, and ask the Lord’s forgiveness. As we read though the Scriptures, there is hardly a topic of interest to modern families which is not mentioned. I am tempted to skip parts like the rape of Tamar or the incest of Lot’s daughters, but there it is in the Bible giving me the perfect opportunity to talk about these things with my children. If I have read some outrageous statement or story in the papers I will read it to the children and invite their comments on it. We have some really good discussions that way, and it is especially educational in allowing me to point out the humanistic, pagan thinking in many of these stories and how that differs from Christ-centred thinking. In fact I just read an article which stated that “several studies have found the frequency of family meals together to be a strong predictor of student test scores. “

Time is short, men. Keep short accounts with people. Don’t let the sun go down if you are angry at someone or pushed out of shape because of some kind of problem with another person. Go get it sorted out as soon as you recognise that there is a problem. You may not get another opportunity.

Let me be more specific. Husbands, fathers, it is our responsibility to keep our homes and families running smoothly. It is up to us before God to sort out the problems that arise in family situations, or, see that they get sorted out. The Lord will hold us fathers responsible. We will have to give an account of how we handle the role of head of the household He has delivered unto us.

We have all heard it said that the best thing we could possibly do for our children is to love our wives. You have heard that, I trust. Well, I would like to vouch for it, from our own experience. Not that we are experts in this area or have a whole lot to shout about. But there have been periods of time when I have not had the best of attitudes toward my wife. Not just once but several periods of time. During those times I noticed the children became sulky, unusually disobedient in both frequency and type, less communicative. What is worse, one of the children seemed to be developing his own negative attitude toward my wife, the child’s own mother, simply because he was mirroring my lousy attitude. When my attitude improved and I began to show a lot more respect and consideration toward my wife, the children all improved. “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for it” (Ephesians 5: 25 ). The benefits of obeying this Scripture extend to our children and their entire home educarion and training.

From Keystone Magazine
November 1995 , Vol. 1 No. 5
P O Box 9064
Palmerston North
Phone: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
email: craig@hef.org.nz

Think Biblically But Speak Secularly to Unbelievers?

Posted in Tough Questions

When conversing with unbelievers, be it sharing the Gospel or explaining why we home school, shouldn’t  we endeavour to think Biblically but to speak secularly?

There is a strong current of thought among Christians that we need to modify the way we present the Gospel (or any other Biblically based principle by which we live) to the unbelieving and mostly unchurched people around us. If the public is to comprehend what we are saying as Christians we need to use language free from Christian jargon. We all probably agree with this sentiment.

But this is not the issue in the “think Biblically/speak secularly” debate. We told that our presentation of Biblical truths must not be too overtly Christian or else 1) we will get branded as Bible bashers and fundamentalists, 2) our unbelieving friends and family will switch off when we try to share with them, and 3) we will lose credibility and influence. Instead we must present Biblical principles in a way that does not immediately give away where we are coming from , is simple and appeals to the typical non-Christian NZer’s sense of righteousness, justice, fair-play, reasonableness and innate conservative sense of traditional family values. This is the way to win friends and influence people.

There are, however, many things terribly wrong with this mode of thinking. It denies the Lordship of Christ. It actually offers nothing at all distinctively Christian. It fails to grasp the work involved in thinking Biblically. The motivation behind this approach is to gain popularity, influence and mana in the eyes of men rather than to bring glory and increased faithfulness to God. It assumes that unbelievers have virtues which they do not possess. It causes us to abandon our Biblical stance and to argue from the unbeliever’s point of view. It also works against one of the main reasons many of us have for home schooling in the first place: surrounding our children with consistent standards.

First let us ask, ”Who’s in charge here, anyway?” Is it the risen glorified awesome and majestic Lord Jesus Christ to Whom has been granted all authority in heaven and on earth, or is it the intimidation of our friends and family that controls the way we think, speak and act in their presence? Is Jesus Lord of all or only Lord of some? What is it we Christians are called to do while here on earth? If it is simply to add an inoffensive Christian flavour to society so that some people will think, “Well, that’s so nice I’d like to join them,” then I think we have missed the point.

We are to be the lamp set on a lamp stand, not to be seen by others so much as TO DISPEL THE DARKNESS.

NZ is crying out for ANSWERS, not possibilities or good ideas. As Christians so often we know we have the answers in the Bible, but we take it so much for granted. Unless we are prepared to offer Christ, that is the Word of God, as the only hope for this nation, our friends and families and their families, then we really have nothing more than any of the secular counselling agencies or Social Welfare Officers of the state are offering.

Our children listen to the way we converse with our non-Christian friends and neighbours. They listen to what we say. Now granted we must use diplomacy, tact and sensitivity in sharing the Gospel, and there is truth in the idea that we must first earn the right to share the Gospel with our friends and workmates. But too often we think of sharing anything Christian with non-Christians as “witnessing”, and therefore as a separate activity. THIS IS A FALSE VIEW OF LIFE, and a view we DO NOT want to impart to our children. The Gospel and various aspects of it can and should be on our hearts and minds all the time, as they determine whether our speech and actions are distinctively Christian or basically the same as the pagan next door. Actually the truths of Scripture should not just be on our hearts and minds: they should be the frame of reference through which all incoming data and all outgoing messages are filtered. Only in this way can we think God’s thoughts after Him, acting and reacting in ways pleasing to Him. .And we want to be building this consistently Biblical frame of reference into our children’s hearts and minds as an integral part of our homeschooling programme. It is pretty tough to do when we do not have this consistently Biblical frame of reference in ourselves as yet. Many Christians, calling us to think Biblically yet speak secularly, themselves only know how to think secularly.

OK, so how do we go about building a consistently Biblical frame of reference? Work at it. We are talking about our minds here, our intellect, and the Lord Himself said that the greatest commandment was to love the Lord our God with ALL our heart, soul, MIND and strength. So use our minds to study the Scriptures on a continuing and regular basis. This is not the same as listening to sermons or tapes or someone else’s prepared mid-week study when you may or may not have actually read the chapter under study. This means pursuing a topic through the Scriptures and other study helps as if you were doing the sermon. I personally enjoy studying up an issue I may find , say, in the letters to the editor column. To focus my study I make it my aim to write a reply letter as a result of what I have learned , and most of the time they are published. And sometimes it starts a real debate through the papers, giving me even more issues to study up (and incidentall y , more opportunities to share the Word of God with the population at large). Listening to tapes is of course an excellent way to imbibe spiritual truths, as long as you use plenty of discretion in who you listen to.

One thing the saints have done all through the ages, something which is a lot of work but which repays in vast dividends, is to memorize Scripture. Do not just think in terms of a verse here and a verse there. Go for whole chapters, and memorize entire books. The wisdom gained, the experiences of God bringing a verse to mind for just the right occasion, the insights while reviewing and meditating on passages memorized to keep them sharp, the time with the children as they listen to see that you memorized it correctly and when you listen to see that they memorized it correctly, the blessing to others by bringing a quote rather than a paraphrase to bear on an issue at hand are all well worth the work. And as home schoolers, we can as a family memorize a verse around the breakfast table and review it together at the lunch break and review it again at tea time. We took a whole year to memorize James chapter one, and found that our 5-year-old had memorized it along with us even though we left her out of the process thinking she was too young! And again, those precious times around the mea1 table or while studying together are great for discussing the meaning of a verse or the blessings of a recent time in study or meditation over a passage of God’s Word … these things all build in a Biblical frame of reference into our children.

In addition, these methods of loving the Lord with our minds will cause us to think Biblically. Then we may act and speak Biblically as well. This idea of thinking Biblically yet speaking secularly seems a bit inconsistent, and we do not want to introduce these inconsistencies into our children’s education. To be consistent, let us first ensure that we think Biblically so that we are then ABLE to properly speak Biblically. OK, we may need to watch our vocabulary and stay away from certain Christian jargon, but we must use ideas and concepts that come straight from the only source of pure truth we have : the Bible. As the Lord says in Jeremiah 23:28-29, “And he who has My word, let him speak My word faithfully. ‘What is the chaff to the wheat?’ says the LORD. ‘Is not My word like a fire?’ says the LORD, ‘And like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?’ “

From Keystone Magazine
November 1995 , Vol. 1 No. 5
P O Box 9064
Palmerston North
Phone: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
email: craig@hef.org.nz