Discipleship

Posted in Theologically Speaking

The inescapable conclusion we draw from the gospels is that Jesus’ call to discipleship is a call to a total rethink. Everything is affected: relationships, values, attitudes, motivations, priorities, goals, activities, decisions –you name it. The disciple’s entire life — past, present and future, is to be given over to Jesus Christ!

Following Jesus is not an “add-on”, it is a total remake. It is not only a call to personal change, but a call to be a change-agent, for Jesus said, “Go and make disciples of all nations.” (Matthew 28:l9)  Because of this the call to discipleship presents both a wonderful opportunity and a daunting challenge. On the one hand it offers a new life, a new beginning — “I have come that (you) might have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:l0). On the other it demands death — “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies it remains alone” (John 12:24-25). At one mornent Jesus says, “Come to Me all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28), and at another He says, “If anyone will come after Me let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow Me (Luke 9:23). It will be tough. There will be times of real discomfort. We will find some in the world around us reacting strongly to us. Jesus says. “If they persecuted Me they will persecute you also” (John l5:20). To some we will be the smell of death”, to others, “the fragrance of life” (II Corinthians 2: 16).  Being a true disciple of Jesus is to be ready for this.

(Lynton Brocklehurst, exerpts from “True Discipleship”, People to People– the Navigator Vision in Focus, Spring 1996, Vo1 4, No 3. The Navigators, PO Box 1951, Christchurch.)

My wife Barbara & I were discipled in Christchurch by the Navigators just after we became Christians. There were a good number of single people: students, nurses,businessmen. We were, for all intents and purposes, fanatics. We had a good 1/2 hour or more quiet time every morning, constantly memorized new passages of Scripture, attended Christian conferences all the time, spent hours in preparation time for our weekly Bible study meetings, wrote out and practised our conversion testimonies so that we could dump it on some unsuspecting unbeliever in three minutes flat, learned to share the gospel from several angles using several sets of salvation verses (all memorized), spent our spare time in thinking up ways to initiate conversations on spiritual topics or engineer conversations so they would go that way, and regularly patrolled Hagley Park or Cathedral Square or New Brighton beach for lonely looking souls to whom we would “witness”. We flatted together in order to discipline one another more effectively and keep the skills sharp. By the way, I do not mean mixed-flatting. Such a thing was only for sinners in those days. (I’m talking mid-1970s. These days the Navigator reps in university towns get phone calls from mums wanting them to organise mixed flats for their student daughters since that would be a more safe situation than an all-girl flat which would be far too easy a target. Have times changed or what? Maybe only standards have changed.)

Anyway, I digress. Fired with the vision of II Timothy 2:2, we became faithful disciples of Christ and looked for other faithful people into whom we could pour our lives as instructed in Isaiah 58:l0-12 (this passage is well worth a read and some good meditation time). The Navigators told us and we constantly reminded each other that if we trained up faithful disciples of Christ and then all went out, with these new disciples, and did the same next year, and all the same again next year, and so on, the entire population of the world, nearly six billion people, would be Christian disciples in a mere 35 years …. we’d all see the day with our own earthly eyes!!! Now, come on all you raving evangelicals out there, doesn’t that kind of vision just make you drool? Of course it does ….. me too. But the Navigators have been around for well over 35 years already …. more like 50. So how come they haven’t already discipled the whole world yet?

Faithfulness. It is a rare commodity. The II Timothy 2:2 principle requires faithful men and faithful women. Otherwise you cannot make disciples, for disciples have to be disciplined people, and disciplined people have to be faithful in practising the disciplines or else the “disciplines” are simply interesting Christian things they do now and again.

Take Queen Elizabeth II. She is a really good monarch. She personally NEVER puts a foot or a word out of place. She is incredibly faithful to her calling. She was groomed for that calling. No public schooling for her, no sir. She was tutored by the best with the constant objective before her of one day becoming Queen of the entire British Empire. None of her children were so tutored, but were all schooled …. in the best schools around, too. Look what it has done for them.

We Christian home schoolers have an unequalled opportunity to totally groom our children to be Ambassadors for Christ, official representatives on earth of the One and Only Almighty Sovereign of the entire Universe, the Lawmaker and Judge to Whom each and every one shall one day give account. With this objective in mind, I think we can afford to be one-eyed about things: in fact, woe to us if we are not. The vision and the disciplines need first of all to be in US, brothers and sisters. For if not, they will never, apart from God’s intervention, be found in our children.

From Keystone Magazine
March 1997 , Vol. III No.2
P O Box 9064
Palmerston North
Phone: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
email: craig@hef.org.nz

Money or Liberty?

Posted in Statist and Professional Trends

The Dominion of 9 September 1996 declared. “Forty-two percent of schools in Mangere and Otara, NZ, are performing very poorly and need extra help, an Education Review Office report says. The report recommends substantial incentives to help principals and boards attract and retain highly qualified and experienced teachers.” It is always interesting to notice how they treat problems among themselves and then with us. For problems they admit they have, the solution is to throw more money at it. If they reckon we have a problem, they do not suggest the same solution, but instead that we place our children in their institutions.

Primary and Secondary education in NZ will receive $2.35 billion in ’96-97 for the 680,000 students of that age. That is $3,455 each. And what good will it be doing for them? The illiteracy rates, crime rates, bullying, drug use, gang recruitment, condom instruction, and sexual experimentation among school children does not go down as they pour in more money …. it all goes up! These seem to be the inevitable effects of state funded compulsory education here in the west.

Please, please, never flag when it comes to defending our responsibility before God to home educate our own children in the way our consciences see fit. Let me quote the founder of Westminster Theological Seminary, Professor J. Gresham Machen:

If liberty is not maintained with regard to education, there is no use trying to maintain it in any other sphere. If you give the bureaucrats the children you might just as well give them everything else.

From Keystone Magazine
March 1997 , Vol. III No.2
P O Box 9064
Palmerston North
Phone: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
email: craig@hef.org.nz

“The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.'”

Posted in In line with Scripture

The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” – Psalm 14: 1

I just started at Massey University as a full-time student (taking three papers this semester). The main motivation was to receive the mature student’s allowance, which along with family support is our main income. Let me tell you, doing the reading required for my classes as well as editing KEYSTONE and TEACH is a bit more than I had anticipated.

However, the first day in our Philosophy of Education class, the professor, Dr John Clark, wanting to let us know where he is coming from stated: “I am a materialist. I have no time for gods or souls or metaphysics.” I appreciated him doing that. However, I now am concerned that I am not going to get any value for the fees I paid to attend that course. Why? Because, where the Bible says the FOOL says in his HEART “There is no God,” this professor said it out loud!

But after three weeks of it, I have found that all my other lecturers and the theorists whose writings I have to read, are all of the same ilk. Bronfenbrenner and Vygotsky are busy constructing theories of human development. Because they believe we are really only animals that walk on two legs and possess sophisticated language skills, we develop according to our biology, our environment and the socio-historical contexts in which we live. The God of the universe does not get a look in! Hirst, Lloyd, Langford et a1 may try to divide knowledge into subjects or integrate them into fields, but first they have to overcome the hurdles of “Why do this anyway?”, “What is the purpose of education?”, “What constitutes an educated person?”, “What, in fact, constitutes a person ?”….and they do not get over these hurdles because they do not have a comprehensive integrated philosophy of life. Once again, God, the Author of life, the Omniscient One Who has revealed to us mortals pure truth in the Bible, is totally ignored or assumed to be irrelevant! In other words, they offer their pickings, what they have concluded as a result of many years of thinking about it. It is like letting someone else fill your plate at a smorgasbord: some of the stuff looks good, some looks terrible, and altogether it is rather unappealing.

This is especially so for us Christians, on whom our God, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has had mercy. He has revealed to us the comprehensive truth about this whole universe, from the reasons for evil and death, to the meaning of pain, to the purpose of it all:

He has revealed these things to us in the Bible. We know who we are. We know why we are here. We know where we are going. Yet none of my professors can answer any of these questions!

As a further Scripture says. “Knowledge puffs up …” (I Corinthians 8:l). It is so easy to gain so much book knowledge as to put to shame many of your peers. It really isn’t that difficult, in fact. We can instruct our children so as to appear to be geniuses. Just get them to learn to count to ten in four languages, memorize four or five salvation verses with references, learn the first line of the periodic table, and all the bones of the body, and be able to name and place all the capitals of all the countries of Europe on a blank map. That would take maybe two weeks to learn if you had no other projects going. People would be amazed! But what do they really know? What wisdom has been imparted as a result of this learning?

We home schoolers must beware of imparting facts as if they were separate from the Creator of all facts. We must beware of our children gaining knowledge apart from the Biblical framework which tells us all knowledge is for the specific reasons of:

1) Bringing glory to God by revealing the wonders of His creation (I Corinthians 10:31);

2 ) Extending His sovereignty over every square inch of His creation through our stewardship in Christian dominion over it (Genesis 1:28):

3) Bringing the lost rebels of His creation, our fellow human beings, created in His image, back into fellowship with Him through the message and the ministry of reconciliation through the Cross of Christ (II Corinthians 5:17-20).

God has given us at least these three reasons for learning, for becoming educated, for engaging in home schooling. This is something you can sink your teeth into; this encompasses all subjects of the curriculum and every other field of endeavour as well; this will keep you going all your life; this makes the state’s reasons for educating, “To produce good citizens who can get worthwhile and fulfilling jobs and help make the world a better place to live”, look like a bad joke.

Because me know God, and that He is totally Sovereign over every atom in the universe, and because we know what He is going to do in the future, we Christian home schoolers take the education of our children very seriously … it is educating both for time and for eternity. My professors at Massey CANNOT take education as seriously as we do, for they do not have the eternal aspect in their thinking. I delight in the knowledge that virtually all of us Christian home schoolers can say along with the Psalmist:

“I have more understanding than all my teachers (at Massey), for Your testimonies are my meditation. “ –Psalm 119:99

From Keystone Magazine
March 1997 , Vol. III No.2
P O Box 9064
Palmerston North
Phone: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
email: craig@hef.org.nz