The Directory for Private (Family) Worship #1

Recently we looked at the concern the Church of Scotland had that fathers conduct family worship. Today we continue in this vein by looking at the first article of the directory for private worship. Although the language is archaic, with a little careful reading, it should be comprehended.

I. And first, for secret worship, it is most necessary, that every one apart, and by themselves, be given to prayer and meditation, the unspeakable benefit whereof is best known to them who are most exercised therein; this being the mean whereby, in a special way, communion with God is entertained, and right preparation for all other duties obtained: and therefore it becometh not only pastors, within their several charges, to press persons of all sorts to perform this duty morning and evening, and at other occasions; but also it is incumbent to the head of every family to have a care, that both themselves, and all within their charge, be daily diligent herein.

From this we see a concern that every believer be privately marked by regular prayer and meditation. This is seen by the church leaders of the time as the right preparation for all our duties – be they as husband, wife or child. Pastors were seen as having a duty to encourage very strongly all those in their congregation to perform prayer and meditation on God’s Word at both ends of the day (and other times to). Additionally, the heads of families (in most cases this would be the father) are responsible not only for there own spiritual feeding in this manner, but all in their household. This was a challenge to me as a father. Although we read the Scriptures together and pray together morning and night, I do not regularly check to see my children are reading the Scriptures on their own. This has encouraged me to do this more regularly.

Reddit Parenting Advice #7

We continue on our Reddit parenting advice series with a slightly different type of query. In this post, we explore career vs family. How do we decide what weighting to give career vs children? As Christians, we must let God’s Word determine how we approach life. So let’s take a look at the question and then consider briefly what a Christian response might be.

Partner and I have two beautiful children, 2.5 and 8 months. We don’t “feel” done, but at the same time, we know that growing our family is not untenable, but not the smartest move, with our current careers. More specifically, I (33F) would have to modify the career path I’d envisioned in order for a bigger family, as my husband’s (35M) isn’t as flexible as mine.

I want to grow my family, but not at the expense of my education and a huge part of my identity. Or maybe I don’t know it yet, but a large part of my identity is having 3+ children! Parents who struggled with this dilemma, how did you decide where your priorities were?

First of all, when considering this question, we must consider the concept of career. In the past, our forefathers tended to think of their work as a vocation – a calling. It was a way of providing for themselves and their families, and it was a way of serving the community. When considering career, both as fathers and mothers, we need to remember that our identities should not be tied to this aspect of our lives. We don’t have careers for ourselves. We work to feed our family and to serve the world through the gifts God has given us, but climbing a corporate ladder for our identity without regard to the impact this has on our family is unwise.

Secondly, we need to consider what God tells us about masculine and feminine roles. Now even in Christian circles, this will seem old fashioned, but it seems to me that the Bible clearly teaches different roles for husbands and wives. A brief read of Genesis 1 and 2 will demonstrate that before the fall into sin, Adam, as the first husband was required to lead, provide food from the garden and protect the garden and implicitly his wife. A husband is directed outward to the world and the dominion mandate. Eve, as Adam’s wife was directed toward Adam as his helper. How does she help him in the dominion mandate? She bears children. Thus together they are able to fill the earth and subdue it. The apostle Paul teaches that wives ought to be focussed on their husbands and children and be busy in the home. Of course, a lot more could be said here, but the Bible teaches that men should provide for their families, and wives should be focussed on nurture and the domestic sphere. This does not mean that a wife is unable to work or do anything outside the home, as the Proverbs 31 woman demonstrates. It does mean that her priority is her children and husband. All this is a long way of saying that as a wife, your God-given mission is your husband and your children – so go to it! God did call us to be fruitful and multiply, so I’d say that if possible that means more than two! You’ll always find joy in fulfilling your God-given calling.

Finally, we should note that for most of us, we will never have careers of great importance. Not many of us will be CEOs of major corporations. Not many of us will be Prime Ministers. Few of us will be movie stars. Most of our work, while serving neighbour, is not particularly awe-inspiring. Few will remember us after we are gone. So as Christians, we should realise that our greatest impact for Christ’s kingdom will be through the investment we make in our families. Investing strongly by spending time on your children’s spiritual development you are helping raise a grounded and strong family. These children will then in turn have an impact on the lives of their families. Who knows how many millions will be in Christ’s kingdom as a result of your faithfulness as a wife in this area? Likely as not, raising a godly family will be the most important work you do for Christ’s kingdom.

Letter #1

I Won’t Believe Unless God Speaks to Me

Regarding your question about the friends who say they will not believe unless God speaks to them or reveals himself to them in a special way. First of all, I would ask them how do they know that he isn’t already doing so. This will probably surprise them. But this is the teaching of the Bible. Creation speaks of God every second of every hour, every day, throughout all ages. I’m sure you would have learned Psalm 19 as a child.

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard. Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.

Here David poetically describes the truth that all of creation is a message from God about him addressed to anyone who has eyes to see and ears to hear. This speech of God’s is able to cross any language barriers. It goes throughout all the earth. So God is doing amazing things and speaking amazing things every second. He is revealing himself every minute of the day through his creation. So the problem is not that God is not revealing himself…the problem lies somewhere else.

Think of it like this. Let’s say you visit someone who has a house right next to the motorway. Perhaps you have been living in the country all your life. When you visit this friend’s place, you will certainly notice the sounds of the cars whooshing past. You ask your friend how they manage to live with such noise. And what will their answer be? They don’t even notice it any more. In fact likely as not, they will find things extremely odd if they went to live in the country. Something would be missing, but they won’t be able to put their finger on it. It’s like this with God’s speech to us. The sun, the planets, the stars and the moon are all speaking to us. Actually speaking to us and telling us about God. But we have heard their voices our whole lives, and the background noise of their speech no longer signifies anything to us. Were they to stop (which is impossible, for all creation even the very stones must cry out testifying to God), we would suddenly realise that something has stopped. Something would be missing. So in one sense, our problem is that we are so used to God speaking that it has just become part of the background noise.  

But the problem is even deeper than this. For in our example, the person living next to the motorway can train herself to hear the sound of the cars passing if she concentrates. Our problem is our naturally rebellious hearts do not want to hear God. It’s a problem of our hardness of heart – our spiritual blindness and deafness. For example, Romans 1 teaches us that creation itself is sufficient to know God. Here is what Paul says in Romans 1:18-20.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.

In other words, according to Paul, the knowledge of God is plain. So plain that God holds each one of us without excuse. We should be able to see his power and his divinity through his creation. But the rebellious human heart suppresses the truth. We bury it deep within us and any time this knowledge attempts to come to our consciousness in our natural rebellious state we push it back down again. The human heart does not want any reminders of God and his claims on us. 

This rebellious suppression of the truth is so bad, that it will reject even the most miraculous evidence of all. Take a look at the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16. In this parable, the rich man ends up in torment, and he asks for the poor man Lazarus to be raised to life and tell his sinful brothers to repent so they can avoid his fate. In the parable, Jesus has Abraham tell the rich man that even if someone rises from the dead, they will not repent if they refuse to hear Moses and the Prophets. I think the point Jesus is making through this parable is that repentance comes not so much through seeing something miraculous and it changing you. Rather as Paul puts it, “faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.” (Romans 10:17). Jesus’ point is even further underlined by the response to his own resurrection from the dead. This is a resurrection that was testified to by hundreds of people, including the apostles, all of whom (except for John) died gruesome deaths testifying to the risen king. (They were in the position to know whether the resurrection was a lie, but they died claiming it was true.) Even so, many of the Pharisees and religious leaders of the day carried on suppressing the truth even though they knew he had risen. Although the knew Jesus’ claims about rising from the dead (Matthew 27:62-64), when it actually happened, they tried to cover it up by paying the guards who had seen things to lie. (Matthew 28:11-14).

So in summary, God is speaking through his creation. He has spoken in his word which is powerful to change hearts. And he has spoken fully and finally through the Word, Jesus Christ. In Jesus Christ, we have the final and full revelation of God to us. As John puts it, “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side; he has made him known.” (John 1:18). How can a God who has not a body like men reveal himself in the context of a world of suppressors of the truth? He becomes a man to make himself known. The incarnation is the great one-off miracle that reveals God to every human being.

Can miraculous events occur? Can God speak audibly? Can he come to us in visions? Of course. He’s God. Is this enough for a doubter to believe? No. God must change our hearts. Does God ordinarily work through visions and audible speech to draw people to himself? No. He usually uses ordinary means. It is his Word about Christ by his Spirit which breaks down our sinful rebellion and draws us to himself. 

Another question to ask these friends might be this one: Are you willing to bet your eternal soul that Jesus is not the king of the universe and requires you to repent and submit to him just because he doesn’t appear to you in the manner you want him to? Think about romantic relationships. Let’s say a guy wants to get to know a particular girl he is attracted to. He asks her out to watch drag racing with him. She’s not interested in drag racing and says no. Perhaps she suggests coffee instead. What would happen if the guy stubbornly says, “No, I want you to come to watch drag racing with me.” That’s just not going to happen. If he wants to get to know the girl, he must do it on her terms, not his own. God is there and he is not silent. He speaks, but we cannot demand that he reveals himself to us on our terms. He is God. He gets to dictate the terms of our relationship. If we refuse to accept this, we will never know him. 

Criticising Government

It is only by believing in God that we can criticize the Government. Once abolish God, and the Government becomes God. The truth is that irreligion is the opium of the people. Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world, they will worship the world. But, above all, they worship the strongest thing in the world.

G.K. Chesterton

A Father’s Duty in Family Worship

Recently I was reminded of the Directory for Private Worship which was put together by the 1647 Assembly at Edinburgh. The document gives directions for family worship. The General Assembly believed that family worship was so important to the purity of the Christian faith, that they appointed “ministers and ruling elders in each congregation to take special care that these Directions be observed and followed.” So seriously did they take family worship that where the elders found families not engaging in family worship as prescribed, the head of the family would first be privately admonished, but if he continued in his negligence, he would be debarred from the Lord’s supper.

While this may seem excessive to our modern sensibilities, we can hopefully see the propriety of the concern. Firstly, they were right to see the importance of the Christian faith being taught and practised in the home. It is not enough for our Lord to be mentioned once a week at church and then ignored the rest of the time. Deuteronomy 6 reminds parents that daily regular teaching of children is to be conducted. Secondly, the ASsembly was correct in holding fathers responsible for this duty. God has given fathers authority in the family unit, and he holds them responsible for the training of children as Ephesians 6:4 demonstrates.

This is not something for men to take lightly. While our church leaders may no longer bar us from the table, we should not hold lightly our duty in this area. God still holds us responsible and he will hold us to account. One thing our family has developed and grown in over the years is pairing meals with Scripture and prayer. We always eat together at the table for breakfast and dinner, so we almost always read Scripture together and pray as well.

In a series of posts we will look at the directions set out in the Directory for Private Worship.

The Tyranny of Moral Busybodies

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”

C.S. Lewis

Unteach Racism – Module 1

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A new website called Unteach Racism has been set up for teachers in New Zealand. Apparently, this is the result of a few years of collaboration between the Teaching Council and the Human Rights Commission. The stated aim of the website is to support teachers to ‘identify confront and dismantle racism in education.’ Who knew racism was such a problem in New Zealand education?

Who knew teachers were deliberately favouring some and targeting others for failure? Being a teacher myself I was shocked! Having always desired the best for all my students and delighted in the achievement of every single one regardless of ethnicity, I was shocked to be informed that racism is a systemic part of New Zealand education. I assumed my colleagues were more or less the same as me. Yet it seems thousands of my colleagues are racist rednecks who have slipped into the education system with the nefarious intention of secretly passing on their intolerant bigotry and deliberately targeting sections of our community for permanent illiteracy, innumeracy, shame and poverty.

Thankfully, despite being educated in such a patently racist system, our glorious Teaching Council has remained untouched by this racism and is committed to rooting out the bigotry of hate and oppression in order to usher in a glorious new dawn of racial harmony and educational equality. So the result is an app that is apparently designed to brainwash support teachers to think about what they know about racism so they can teach unteach it in the classroom. Thankfully this will without a doubt immediately shame all these evil racist bigots within the teaching profession and they will repent of their evil ways. No longer will they be able to blame weeknight party throwing, sexually immoral, unemployed, drug-dealing drunkard parents for the failure of their children. The blame will be back squarely where it belongs – with the racism of the system.

So in the next few weeks, we will work through the eight modules on the app. Today we will look at Module 1 which is entitled “Unteach Racism”. The stated aims of this module are to introduce the concept of systemic racism and identify its impacts in education and other sectors. We commence with a typically emotive and fluffy speech that one expects from a young girl who has not yet moved into the real adult world. She is a young Maori student who suggests that failing to pronounce a name or place correctly is feeding the ‘taniwha of racism’. So take that all you ignoramuses who pronounce Paris ‘Pa-riss’. You racist bigots.

We are then taken on a tour of examples of ways that racism has shaped our systems, structures and social outcomes. The module consists mainly of statistics of which some are noted below. A few of the statistics are linked back to government reports, but a couple are linked to articles from Stuff – that bastion of neutrality and objectivity.

  • June 2017 unemployment rate for Pakeha was 3.4% while Maori had an unemployment rate of 11.1%
  • In 2017 the mean hourly rate for Pākehā was $30.09, for Pacific Peoples it was $22.96
  • 52.9% of the prison population is Maori, but only 18.7% of our population is Maori
  • Maori home ownership rate is 31%, whereas Non-Maori home ownership is 57.9%
  • Pacific and Māori participation in Early Childhood Education is lower than Pakeha
  • Only 2.7% of students are enrolled in Maori medium education
  • Maori learners are twice as likely to be suspended

Once again, we have a list of disparities cited with no context to ‘prove’ racism. Despite the stated aims of the module being to introduce the concept of systemic racism and identify its impacts in education, it seems that the two ideas are conflated. For the designers of this brainwashing app, systemic racism seems to be defined as the existence of disparities between races. This ‘proves’ systemic racism. Actually, these statistics do no such thing. Even a quick read of some of the linked reports demonstrates there is complexity. For example regarding the unemployment rate, a Statistical Analysis of Ethnic Wage Gaps in New Zealand suggests that “Educational level and occupation are the two factors that have the largest impact on Māori-Pākehā and Pacific-Pākehā wage disparities, amongst all those considered.”

Assuming systemic racism is the cause of these disparities is simple and perhaps, therefore, appealing to the simple-minded, but what if the existence of disparities is not so simple? What if different cultures in their different values tend to choose things in accordance with those differing values? And what if those different choices lead to different outcomes? Even some of the quotes from learners illustrate this. One child in Kura Kaupapa Māori was asked about achievement. The learner said, “Achievement should be more than grades. Be able to support whānau and doing jobs well in life.” That’s not something I (an experienced teacher) have heard regularly (if at all!) from an Asian parent’s lips. Perhaps, just perhaps, the values a family has will make more of a difference to a child’s educational success and achievement than this mythic taniwha named ‘systemic racism’. If the problem is ‘white privilege’, what is it that enables other minorities such as Asians to succeed more than Pakeha New Zealanders?

Since feedback is an essential part of the teaching process, I have assigned a grade to the Teaching Council of New Zealand and given them my teacher’s comment on their work. Let’s hope for better in the future.

Grade: F–

Comment: Teaching Council of Aotearoa New Zealand. Thank you for finally handing in your group assignment entitled Unteach Racism. It’s a little overdue. I note you started this in 2018 with the Human Rights Commission. Frankly, I expect more from you given the exorbitant fees you forcibly charge me for the privilege of you hectoring me and badgering me all in the name of improving my teaching. Furthermore, given the extensive time frame you got with those extensions, I was hoping for a top-quality assignment. Unfortunately, I have to grade you an F double minus for biased presentation of statistics with no context, lack of critical thinking, an absence of diversity of thought and alternative viewpoints and a divisive approach to race relations in New Zealand. I also think you have inaccurately titled the assignment. I suggest “Teaching Racism” would be a more suitable title. Please do better next time. With a little more research and a more balanced approach, I hope, though sincerely doubt you are capable of more.

Are you serving your children up to cannibals?

There are only two things wrong with our schools: everything that our children don’t learn there and everything they do. The public schools, with their vast political and bureaucratic machinery, are beyond reform. That does not mean that persons of goodwill should not offer themselves up as missionaries of truth and goodness and beauty, to teach there, as in partibus furibundis. But we would be quite mad to send our children there, We send missionaries to cannibals. We do not serve the cannibals our boys and girls.

Anthony Esolen on schooling in Out of the Ashes

Language Lies

No doubt my readers have noticed the wonderful ability of some of our ‘thought leaders’ to brainwash the young, gullible and ill-educated by lying to them. They have become so brazen that they will now use a term to mean the exact opposite of what it truly means.

One example of this misuse of language is the term “diversity”. When our thought leaders use this word and claim they want diversity, they mean they don’t want me or other conservatives who have different opinions to them to speak or have a platform anywhere. Another example is the phrase marriage equality. Marriage was always equally open to any man or woman who could find someone who wanted to marry them. Marriage equality was about destroying the definition of marriage. A third example is the word ‘anti-racist’. To be anti-racist, you must support policies that actively discriminate based on race in order to lead to equal outcomes. So an anti-racist is a racist. Of course, let us not forget the chestnut “economic justice” which sounds so beautiful, but has nothing to do with justice, but is about stealing from some to give to another group, which when you think of it doesn’t sound very just at all.

A current example of deceitful speech of our thought leaders is the term conversion therapy. A friend of mine recently shared this thought experiment with me. Let’s imagine you went back to the time when your grandparents were young, and you asked them which of the following was conversion therapy, and which was gender affirmation therapy: 1) Telling a person that they need to live in accordance with their male or female sexed body. 2) Assisting a person live as the gender they consider themselves to be in their minds. This may involve removing parts of the body and injecting the body with hormones from. I think most of our forebears would imagine that gender affirmation therapy would be described by number 1, and conversion therapy would be number 2, which in actual fact is the opposite of how the elites define these things.

There’s a great video which I’ve posted before which brilliantly points out this stupidity. Watch it before our tolerant and inclusive elites decide it’s dangerous.

Now some readers might be saying to themselves, sex and gender aren’t the same. You, dear reader, have been brainwashed well. What is this idea of gender? It seems it is something you define yourself according to the whims of your feelings. How can you scientifically investigate a thing like that?

I leave you with a brilliant quote from Anthony Esolen’s book Defending Marriage: Twelve Arguments For Sanity. ‘I do not use the word gender, except to refer to the grammatical category. I’m quite aware of the non-sensical idea that sex is one thing, referring only to a minor bit of plumbing in the nether regions, and gender another, referring to everything else about men and women, all of it supposedly “socially constructed” and arbitrary. Yes, I’ve heard it all my academic life, and the more we actually learn about biological maleness and femaleness, the more absurd this line becomes. Every cell of my body is marked as masculine. My adrenal system is different from my wife’s – it is primed for sudden attack and just as sudden calm; an adrenal system for all-out fighting, followed or preceded by cold strategy. Hers is not that way. I doubt anyone caring for small children ought to be that way. My heart-lung capacity at age fifty is that of a woman at her peak, at age twenty. I will possess more brute strength (by far) than my daughter until I am very old, or in the last stages of a terminal disease. My wife sees things I do not see; she makes connections with people I would not make; she has the touch.