mattbraunlin
Member
You, Their Most Important Teacher
In one episode of South Park, the local parents insist that their kids get put into sex education. They think that their kids are at risk, and they need to be taught about sexuality. By the school.The boys' teacher is Mr. Mackey. He doesn't know the first thing about sex, and the boys end up hopelessly confused.
The girls, meanwhile, get an old lady with an extremely negative attitude toward sex (can't write her name here lol). She inundates them with the horrors of pregnancy and STD's, and by the end of their first lesson they are terrified of the boys.
The way the rest of the episode plays out is brilliant, but I'd like to stop here. Because this principle of talking to your kids frankly and lovingly about sex applies to faith, too.
And no one (well, not no one) can attest to this better than me. Because my parents were excellent examples of the consequences of not personally going the extra mile to make their children understand the nature of the Christian faith.
My parents were very devout Baptists. But they simply did not know how to convey to me what they knew about their Saviour. I have only one memory of them sitting me and down to try to have a talk about God, and they used some lame book that did the work for them. What little I can recall from that discussion was trite and awkward, and those talks lasted a very short time.
After that, they assumed that our church could do the job for them. They brought us to church every week, and thrust us headlong into all aspects of church-culture they could think of. In terms of our exposure to Christianity at work, my brothers and I had an A+ upbringing.
Unfortunately, when it came to exposure to the horrors of the encroaching tsunami of sin which gained momentum at the turn of the century, I also had an A+ upbringing. I went to school with kids who swore, who drank, who fooled around, who watched all the latest horrible shows out there (like South Park) and knew everything there was to know about being cool.
I grew up in the ultimate contradiction, the swirling vortex where conservative Christianity and postmodern godlessness met in terrible conflict.
And I liked postmodern godlessness better.
I resisted my parents' Christian inundation with all my strength. I wanted nothing to do with this thoroughly lame culture which said no to everything that every other aspect of my life defined as fun.
And all my parents could do was pound a fist.
When I resisted the Christian life, my parents did not know how to do anything but get angry. Whether it was my bad behaviour in Sunday school (which of course I now regret) to my deadpan reaction to Jesus Christ Superstar (which I do not regret), to my anger at God over my struggle with psoriasis, all I ever got in response to my resistance to church (not Jesus, church), was flak. Intense anger that I was not responding to God the way they thought it was obvious that I should.
I was a grandchild of God, not a child.
I don't know how much I should blame my parents. They were raising me at one of the pivotal points of the history of the western Church. Satan's great and terrible ambush had just been unleashed, and my parents (my mother at least) could have had no idea about it.
But the bottom line is, by the time I was fourteen, I had been immersed in church culture all my life, and my actual faith in Jesus Christ was as weak as a newborn kitten. It shattered like old glass, and it wasn't until seven years later that God led me to good, sturdy Christian voices who could do what my parents never did: just talk it out reasonably, and help Jesus make logical and emotional sense to me for the very first time.
To all Christian parents: the world your children in which are growing up make mine look like Israel during Solomon's reign. If you want them to have any hope at all of accepting Christ, you need to step it up. You need to know him (thoroughly, powerfully, intimately) yourself. You need to teach them what you know. You need to be able to answer their questions, counter their objections, and be chill.
I will be honest: writing this blurb has scared the hell out of me. It has reminded me what a powerful enemy we face. And yet even as I have written this paragraph, God has reminded me of that one blessed, shining trump-card:
HE IS IN CONTROL.
Did you know that you cannot have faith in that statement unless you have read the Bible? That you could repeat those four words a thousand times and come not one step closer to actually believing them unless you have seen them in action in the pages of God's word?
I have read God's word. I have seen societies crumble, chaos reign, the purest evils desecrate all that is good about being a human being. And I have seen God's people arise, time and time again, and overturn those evils when all hope seemed lost. And all they did was devote everything they were to the God who was worthy of their children.
May God bless you as you fight the evils of our time. May he strengthen you with love and wisdom as you fight, even at the cost of your life, for a good and Godly future for generations you will never see.
May you find the courage you need to be a witness to your children.
