How to Raise Kids with a Biblical Worldview that Sticks

Okay, guys, I think we will go ahead and get started today. How's everyone doing? I see lots of smiling, earnest mom faces out here, and maybe some high schooler and college faces too.

This is great. So let's go ahead and open up in a word of prayer. Heavenly Father, thank you for this day.

Thank you for this community learning environment, Lord. Thank you for Bayside Church for hosting events like this to help us grow strong in our faith and be rooted in these interesting times,

Lord. I pray that you would use me as a vessel today and cause me to say the right things that would bless and edify this group.

In Jesus' name, amen. But first, just a little bit about our ministry. So we've been around for,

I think, about eight years. Actually, the ministry started in this room here when I came and heard a guy named Dave Bisbee give a talk about dinosaurs, and it so rocked my world.

I took 90 days and learned everything I could about dinosaurs. I went to Montana, I went to Canada.

I spent thousands of dollars' worth of DVDs and books and learned about dinosaurs and Noah's Flood. I'm a behavioral scientist by training, so I love research.

I spent about 20 years testifying as an expert in state and federal court cases dealing with research.

So I took that one topic, dinosaurs and Noah's Flood, and drilled into it for about three months, and about halfway through became overwhelmingly convinced of the historicity of Genesis.

And that kind of gave birth to our ministry and led to what we do here today. So we have several different movies that are coming out that have already come out, some that are gonna be coming out,

The Ark in the Darkness, we'll talk about that one. We do a lot of presence on social media because we wanna meet youth today on where they're at, which is about six hours a day on their phone.

So we have a mobile app that goes after youth. We have about 119 ,000 subscribers on YouTube, about 11 million views now on our different videos.

We speak a lot in different Christian schools. We're at Jessup, Capital Christian, Providence, Victory, Summit.

These are probably familiar to some people here. In fact, Dave Bisbee in our ministry, that's all he does pretty much full -time in his retirement is to go around.

He's like a traveling speaker in the greater Sacramento area. And we give a lot of local church talks like this.

Then we have an annual conference. You can go to g1conference .com. Last year, we had it at Jessup, and we got

COVIDed out of that one. So we're reevaluating what to do this year, but hopefully should do another good one.

We have all of our resources downstairs in the main church foyer, and they're all free today.

This is my home church, so we're pushing everything out for free. There's no charges at all. If you have a fifth to 10th grader, please grab our

Debunking Evolution book. This takes the top 10 pillars about evolution that are taught in life science and biology classes and addresses them from a biblical worldview.

Then we have our Seven Myths program, which is for seniors in high school before they go to college. Gets them ready for a lot of the teaching they're gonna experience in college.

And then we have our Answers book. As I mentioned, our biggest presence is on social media, and we get thousands and thousands of questions that come through our

Facebook channel and YouTube and emails. And we took the top 50 of those questions that we were getting for years and developed really sound

FAQs for them and videos for maybe 10 of the 50 questions and put them all into one book.

So if you wanna give a single resource to someone, please grab our Answers book before they go out. We brought, I think, 300 today, and they'll probably go out pretty soon.

And then, of course, our mobile app. We have about 120 ,000 downloads on that, so you can get it on your phone for free, and it plums into all of our leading

YouTube videos. So if you wanna learn about creation or dinosaurs or Noah's Flood, whatever it is, just download that free app and it goes into all of our videos.

Here's our movie that's gonna be coming out in 2023, probably July. I'm kinda wrestling with the director on how soon we can get this out, but it looks like probably

July 2023. Fathom's already accepted it, so it's gonna be in about 1 ,000 theaters around the

US. And did anyone see the movie, Is Genesis History? That was a really good movie.

How about Genesis Paradise Lost? Has anyone heard of that one? Okay, great. So the director of the

Genesis Paradise Lost movie is gonna be doing this one for us, so we're real excited about it. It's gonna have, historically speaking, probably the most photorealistic reenactment of Noah's Flood ever done in history.

So we're paying thousands of dollars to have a lot of this animation stuff done, animating the water and the physics and the hydraulics and all that stuff.

And we interviewed the top 11 experts around the world on Noah's Flood and how it happened and when it happened, so you guys can go check that out.

Just go to noahsflood .com and you can get all the updates you want about that. And then we have a couple other movies you can get free downstairs as well.

This is one I would highly recommend for the talk today. It's just called Foundations. You can grab the

DVD or you can go to foundationsmovie .com and watch this for free. It's a 30 -minute video that shows the impact of what we believe about the

Bible, how we regard it as authoritative or not, plays out in a person's life. It's a really good movie, really professionally done, and it's also free.

So I like it when someone starts a presentation with a conclusion up front.

And so I'm gonna give you my main conclusion, and this is just something we've come up with over the years because you can imagine we've trained probably tens of thousands of students about creation evolution.

So we hear all kinds of stories from students and parents alike. And I've come to the realization that for a

Christian to have a strong faith and eternal effectiveness will only be maximized if they fully believe in the history of the

Bible and are empowered by the Holy Spirit. I know people have different perspectives about the spiritual gifts.

Are they for today? Are they not for today? But I'm gonna stand here and say that unless you're a teenager, unless you're a student, or if you're a high school student, unless you have those two pillars stand up, you're likely gonna have some pressures that could cause some aspects of your faith to buckle.

So I would say it's real important to believe in the history and the credibility of God's Word and get into the

Holy Spirit, whatever that looks like for you. It could be worship, it could be prayer, it could be a church like Bayside that's very open to the spiritual gifts.

But please make sure you infuse those two things into your family. And let's see, so our plan today, we're gonna talk a little bit about worldviews.

We're gonna talk about how worldviews lead to beliefs which believe to outcomes that are gonna challenge challenging today's youth.

Then we'll talk about what are the life results of living from a biblical worldview and how to strengthen your student's biblical worldview.

So let's first start about, well, what is a worldview? A worldview is something like a part of the brain that you don't know that's there, but it really is there, and it impacts how we perceive the world, how we see things.

So from a graphical standpoint, you can put worldview here in the middle and from this worldview radiates out our beliefs and our values and then ultimately our behaviors.

And if we wanna raise students that are gonna be God -fearing, Christ -seeking students, this is all gonna emanate from the middle, right there, their worldview.

So from a simpler way of looking at it, you've got your worldview as a foundation and from that worldview are gonna come your beliefs and then from your beliefs, of course, your thoughts and your feelings and then come actions.

So this is a real important thing as we talk about how to raise kids and how to make sure that you have a sticky worldview.

So the Bible doesn't mention worldview directly, but it has a really powerful scripture verse that I think hits home on what a worldview is from a

Christian perspective. So this is out of Colossians and it says, so then, just as you received

Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught and overflowing with thankfulness.

And then it says, see to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ.

That would be a great Bible study to just dwell on that for probably a half an hour. There's so much there.

But notice that it says two things. It says what to do, which is being rooted and built up in Christ.

And we know that Christ is the words. The way that you get Christ in you is by soaking yourself in God's word.

But then it also says that see to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ.

So it's the things to do and things not to do. So worldview is really gonna be assembled in your kids, your students' mind and in your mind by a whole collection of different things.

Your school, friends, TV, parents, state parks, Christian experiences, music, movies.

All of these things are gonna be surrounding your students in trying to lobby for space in the real estate of their mind for what's gonna make up their worldview, how they're gonna see the world.

And someone recently, actually goes to church here, says that one way to tell where your worldview is gonna go with your student is look at the top three people they follow on Instagram or Facebook.

Because a lot of that stuff's gonna bleed through at a real subconscious level and it's gonna start framing a lot of their worldview.

From a more technical standpoint, where does a worldview come from really? Well, I would say that it's not just what a person believes about the world and about the

Bible. It's the belief system that they have that's actually been confirmed. So it's not just theoretical things, it's what beliefs that they have that have been confirmed.

That leads to their experiences, which leads to their worldview and that's gonna bleed through to their choices, attitudes, behaviors and outcomes.

Okay, so we really wanna make sure that we consider both the mind and the heart because the worldview really involves both of these.

So the worldview asks three different questions. This is from a great website we refer to people a lot called gotquestions .org.

We're up there in the upper right corner, really great website. So three questions. First of all, where did we come from and why are we here?

That's the biggest question that a worldview wants to answer. What's wrong with the world is the other question and then how do we fix it?

This is a really oversimplified way to look at a worldview, but anyone's worldview from any culture or any secular background or Christian background or homeschool or secular school is really gonna be after these three questions.

Where did we come from and why are we here? What's wrong with the world and how can we fix it? So what we're gonna do now is take a somewhat boring journey for about 10 minutes into some academic stuff, but I have to take everyone through this pain to bring us to the solution.

So I think you'll see what I mean as we go on. So we're gonna go through the bad news first before we present the good news.

So the bad news is that a lot of people in Christianity are in trouble right now because the biblical worldview is getting less and less every year as we go through and look at statistics and do research.

But I believe that in most situations, we really have to understand what the problem is before we prescribe a cure.

I've run a business for, actually several businesses for about 20 years here and I always tell people, hey, don't come in my office with just a problem unless you also have the solution.

So I'd like to say today that I'm bringing the problem, we're gonna talk about the problem for maybe 10 minutes, then

I'm gonna also present what I think is a great solution for us. So we have to first define the problem, that's gonna be the bad news and then

I promise you today, if you can get through it with me for the 10 minutes of drudgery and research, I'm gonna have hopefully some really good takeaway practical things that you guys can do that should be very gripping on how you can help shape your family's worldview.

All right, so here is what came out in Christian Daily, March 8th, so 2022, very, very fresh news.

It says only 6 % of Americans believe a biblical worldview according to a recent Barna survey.

So they had a survey that came out with 37 questions, gave it to a thousand people, found that only 6 % of Americans are holding onto or believing in a biblical worldview.

And then they said, well, while 51 % of the respondents polled believe that they have a biblical worldview, it's actually only 6%.

So there's a huge gap between people that say, oh yeah, I'm a Christian, I believe in the Bible compared to the people who really knows what the

Bible says about different topics on origin and culture and the sinful nature we have and things like that.

So there's a big disconnect there. And I love this quote from the Family Research Council president. He says, every

Christian can and should obtain a biblical worldview, which is achieved when a person believes that the

Bible is true, authoritative, and then taught how it's applicable to every area of life, which enables them to live out those beliefs.

Very, very good quote here. We'll go through a couple more quotes. A growing skepticism about the

Bible, especially among people, is a leading cause of the precipitous decline of biblical worldview in America.

And then they say, a stunning new results of this American Worldview Inventory, which is a survey that they used, found that the number of Americans who believe that the

Bible is true is down by 21 % since 2000. So over the last 20 years, the number of percentage of Americans that believe that the

Bible is a true word of God has dipped down by 20%. And I love seeing so many moms and students in here today wanting to hopefully change that and redirect the curve.

All right, we'll move on from that one. So what this survey did is it identified, based upon someone's response, into kind of worldly or cultural

Christians all the way down to what they called an integrated disciple. An integrated disciple is the 6 % who really believes that the

Bible's the authoritative word of God having a biblical worldview. But how they got to identify people like that is they correlated their behaviors with their beliefs.

And that's who they called an integrated Christian, is one who's actually their beliefs match what their behaviors are doing.

So we can say that 70 or 69 % of people say, yeah, I'm a Christian, but when you start going down, what do you mean by that?

You know, it goes all the way down to just 6 % who would hold the biblical worldview. So those are the two important numbers there.

So what are some examples of some things that were on the survey? Well, here's one that I think is most telling because 71 % of the cultural

Christians said that they agreed with this, and only 4 % of the remnant over here, the integrated disciples, affirm this.

So the question says, your most trusted primary source of moral guidance is your feelings, experiences, or advice from friends and family.

Wouldn't that make sense today when you look around the landscape that people are saying, yeah, just go with what you feel like, what your experiences lead you to do, and 71 % of people who identify as Christians are saying, yeah, that's a pretty good way to live life, but only 4 % of the integrated

Christians or the disciples are saying, no, that's not a bad idea because they're placing God's word over their life's choices and behaviors.

So very, very telling survey here. Here's another quote. We just have a few more to get through. So this survey also shows that people's beliefs about the

Bible directly correlate with whether they develop a biblical worldview. Unsurprisingly, those who believe the

Bible is the true word of God are much more likely to have a biblical worldview, and conversely, those who are more skeptical in the

Bible, which is a rapidly increasing number of American adults, is less likely to have a biblical worldview.

And just a couple more here. I thought this was really interesting. Born -again Christians constitute about 1 3rd of the population, but less than one of five of those holds a biblical worldview.

So think about this. One of three of Americans say, I'm a born -again Christian, but only one out of five of those people have a biblical worldview, who are seeing the lens through what the

Bible has about origins and where we come from and why we're here and things like that. And then

Barna himself says, remember, people do what they believe. This is the most important sentence we're gonna go over today, and that's from Barna himself.

It says, this is why worldview is so important. They do what they believe. This research underscores the fact that growing numbers of people are moving away from believing that the

Bible is true, relevant, and valuable for their lives. Then he goes on and says, Christian churches cannot keep doing what we've been doing in ministry for the past 30 years and assuming that things will get better.

So it really does say the solution is to map back to a biblical worldview. And that's, of course, why

I thank God for Bayside's Bible Conference. Was anyone at the Bible Conference? It was amazing, you guys.

I think it put this whole church into the red line. The volunteers were working like crazy.

It was five straight days of basically Francis Chan and Bible speakers and breakout groups.

It was amazing, but I love seeing a church this big get people into God's word like that.

It was a tremendous time. A couple more quotes, and then we'll go into some solutions here. As Barna again says, that one of the big things that we discovered was that literally a majority of Americans believe that they have a biblical worldview, so they think that they have one.

But I mentioned before that only 6 % actually have one, and 51 % of American adults think that they have a biblical worldview.

So there's a big disconnect there between, I'll say I'm a Christian versus what does the Bible really say about certain topics and then seeing life through that.

Because if we see life through what the biblical lens is, we're gonna live out our behaviors and our choices accordingly.

But we have to believe the word of God is true first because our worldview is gonna be a decision -making filter in our life.

I can't tell you how many times I have conversations with people to say, well, you know, you really shouldn't be living with your girlfriend and drinking every weekend because God wants to bless you with a wife and a marriage and kids and a whole future and a legacy.

And they say, well, I'm just not convicted about that right now. Well, why aren't you convicted about that?

Because they're not submitting to the authority of scripture. Are you concerned about what scripture says about that? But if they don't have a biblical worldview, they're not gonna submit to what it says, and then their whole future is gonna take a journey without the

Lord's guidance. And I see that happen so many times with people, and it's really sad to see family members do that.

So what can we do then to reinforce a biblical worldview? Well, I'm gonna focus today on just this one, which is where do we come from and why are we here?

That's what our ministry really focuses on is where do we come from and why are we here? And that's because we have a whole lot of teenagers that put the

Bible under a truth test. You know, they're sitting there very skeptically saying, well, if the Bible doesn't get it right on the first couple pages, and I can't believe the first couple pages, why should

I believe the rest of what it says? So if the very first paragraph of Genesis isn't true history that we can confirm and believe in with good science and good evidence, why should

I believe what it says about drinking or premarital sex or any of these other things?

So truth begins with the beginning. And Christ himself said that you should love the

Lord, your God, with all of your heart and with all of your soul and your strength and your mind.

We've all seen this in the Bible. And here's how we see this play out a lot with teenagers in particular.

So they want their heart and their soul and their mind and their strength to belong to Christ.

That's what the Bible says we're supposed to be doing. So, but when it comes to their Christian experience and their dedication, they say, yeah, my heart is saved.

I love the Lord. I'm totally on his team. And they say, yep, my soul, my experience,

I can feel the Lord and worship. This is great stuff. I love going through his word. And then their mind stops a little bit short because they're getting filled with ideas about evolution and ideas about cultural issues and things that are against a biblical worldview.

And then they're thinking, well, why doesn't the Bible line up with science? Because if they go through public school, we're not here to say anything against public school, but this is just the reality of it.

They have about 250 pages of evolution teaching they're gonna get before they graduate high school. And to most

Christians, and I can say this with some authority because we train a lot of different students. I would say to the vast majority of students, it's taking them from a biblical worldview and turning them into theistic evolutionists before they graduate high school, just believing that God somehow had a hand in creation, but evolution is why we're here.

So a lot of people, it parks their mind a little bit behind their heart experience. And then they're like, well, why should

I serve Christ? If my mind's parked over here with all these doubts, I'm not gonna bring my whole package to the faith community.

And when they can understand that the Bible really is true, going all the way back to Genesis, it's gonna bring their heart, their mind, their soul and their body, the whole package to the table and bring them to be a participant in the faith community.

So that's what we want is we want fully committed Christians because we don't want Christians who are dragging behind doubt, unbelief, and having what we call dissonance or cognitive dissonance.

Like, how can this truth be true and this truth be true at the same time? But unfortunately, we see a lot of students that are stuck in that idea.

And in part, it's because starting in sixth grade all the way to seventh grade and 10th grade, they're getting all kinds of evolution teaching.

And if people believe, if they're taught that they evolved from ape -like creatures millions of years ago, rather than God creating us out of dust on the sixth day of creation, well, they think, gosh, well, if I'm evolved from an ape, why can't

I live like an ape? Why can't I live for fun? If sex is good, why not do it?

Why not have a partner, a different partner every weekend? Or why not do this? So we can really see how the idea of evolution does come into play on a worldview and how people live out their lives on a daily basis.

Then we can go visit the movies. In fact, I was on a plane once and I had three people around me and they were all watching different movies that had a ton of evolution propaganda in it.

But why do we have movies like Dawn of the Planet of the Apes? When you really watch this movie from an analytical perspective, it really does push the idea of evolution.

We even have a movie here called The Missing Link, same thing there. And then The Croods is the idea of a person going from a chromagnum -like caveman over to a homo sapien.

So kids these days are really getting saturated, their worldview is getting saturated with this idea that we evolved from ape -like creatures.

So does that have an impact? Well, it certainly does because if kids believe that random chance mutations over millions of years led to evolution, which led to apes, which led to mankind, then that impacts their views about God.

Then their views about God impacts the role in their world, their purpose, and their choices, and of course, their whole life outcomes.

So it does, those seeds will begin to sprout and will begin to have a huge impact in their life.

What we would prefer them to understand is that an almighty, loving God created man on the sixth day of creation.

He creates Adam, and then he creates Eve with intention. They're supposed to take dominion over the earth, be fruitful and multiply, just like the

Bible says, which is gonna impact their views about God, their role in the world, their purpose, my choices, and of course, their life.

So do you see more how the worldview works with respect to at least this piece on evolution?

There's all kinds of other influencers, but at least on the creation evolution piece, we're getting some insights here.

So when your kids go to college, or if you're in college now, worldview's also gonna be a huge play there.

They're gonna learn different ideas about origins, where the race groups come from, what's their purpose, where they're gonna draw their strength from, accountability, lifestyle, and it really is gonna be the same different topics that they're gonna experience, but there's two different ways of looking at those topics.

So when they go to college to graduate, they're gonna have to learn about geology, astronomy, natural sciences, biology, anthropology, earth science, fossils, and dinosaurs.

And what you realize when you go through Genesis 1 to 11 and treat it like a real history book is that there's two very different ways at looking at these different topics.

So we all have the same data. We have things like fossils and biology and things like that, but we can either look through it through a biblical lens, because when you find a dinosaur fossil, it doesn't have anything like a date on it, or a genus, or a species, or an order.

All we know about that creature is that it died and that it got buried. That's all we know for sure. The rest is being imputed onto the data as an inference.

So when we discover things through this earth, we can have a biblical worldview lens to look at it, or we can have a secular history worldview lens.

And a lot of it does come down to assumptions. So we can either have a supernatural worldview or a naturalist worldview.

Okay, so that's enough about the bad news. Let's talk about what the solution is. God's word has it, and I would actually say it's in one single passage of scripture.

One day I was trying to figure out, okay, I've got these four kids. I'm gonna raise them with a biblical worldview.

How am I gonna do it? I know, I'll make a list of all the different Bible topics I want them to know growing up.

And then I thought, oh my gosh, that's gonna be impossible. It's got four different kids, different timing. It's not gonna work.

Then I ran into this single passage in Deuteronomy 6 that says this, and these words which

I command you today, which is talking about the Bible, shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children.

You shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, when you rise up.

You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorpost of your house and on your gates.

You guys, I would argue that probably 60 % of what my kids grew to know about God's word and about the

Bible having a biblical worldview happened in the back of our van when they were asking questions of my wife when they were driving around.

I kid you not. It's these kids that are just driving around. Hey mom, tell me about this person. Why does he look different than I do?

Well, that's a theological moment right there. And so my wife was pouring theology into my kids as they're just driving around in a van getting all these questions answered.

So that's what this passage is talking about. When you're sitting, when you're walking, when you're praying, when you're putting them to bed at night, speak from a biblical worldview and it will seep through into these kids and impact and change their lives.

Here's a couple more verses in Proverbs. Now therefore listen to me, my children, for blessed are those who keep my ways.

There are some conditional blessings in scripture. It's a really controversial topic because you don't want to get into speaking about blab it and grab it type of prosperity gospel stuff.

But there's all kinds of sections in scripture that talk about, look, if you ignore the guidance and rules of scripture, bad stuff can happen to your life that you brought on yourself.

Has nothing to do with your external circumstances. But if you honor God and live your life under his scripture, you can put your life on a blessable momentum, on a blessable trajectory.

And it's the same for your kids also. Proverbs 14, in the fear of the Lord, there is strong confidence and his children will have a place in refuge.

And another one, train up a child in the way he should go. And when he is old, he will not depart from it.

Controversial verse because it appears to promise that well, if you raise your kid according to godly ways, they should turn out great, right?

I talk with all kinds of moms that that's not the situation. They did everything right. They raised your kids with the biblical worldview, went to Sunday school class, had them in private

Christian school, and by age 14, they're gone. You know, they're finding their own path. What usually happens, the more common story, is they raise them well, they're 18 years old, they go off to Chico State or some other secular college.

And nothing against Chico State, it's probably just a little bit on the liberal side. And they come back and it's usually the first semester.

It's not halfway through, it's not the second semester. It's usually they come back from Christmas after taking a philosophy class.

It's usually a philosophy class. And they're like, oh, I don't believe in that fairytale Christian Santa Claus stuff anymore.

I hear that story so, so much. So it's not a promise, but it's a general guide that you should be raising your kids under scripture and that it should work out great.

This is actually one of my life verses. I love that Christ brings this up. Hopefully you guys are familiar with this.

This is Matthew 7. Jesus says about this, about building our lives, he says, whoever hears these sayings of mine, and that's a pretty broad statement because Jesus as the word, you can say, pretty much encapsulates all of scripture.

So who's hearing scripture and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock.

The rains came down, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house and it did not fall for it was founded on the rock.

But everyone who hears these sayings of mine or listens to scripture and does not do what scripture says will be like the foolish man who built his house in the sand and the rain descended and the floods came and the winds blew and beat against that house and it fell and great was its fall.

There's so much theology in here, but just consider one insight I wanna share with you guys. Do you notice that the same adverse life events happened to both people?

Both people, it says the foolish man built his house in the sand and the rain descended and the floods came, the winds blew and beat against that house and it was a great fall, but the same thing happened to the guy that built his house on the rock.

So tribulation's going to come, but those who are building their lives after scripture have a promise, an eternal promise from God's word that their house will not fall, that it will stand.

Great, great promise there from Christ himself. So let's talk about practical solutions.

I was talking with some moms that I know that have really done a great job raising family and they said a couple of things

I wanna share with you guys that I think are some great advice. Number one, they said, and I heard this from a lot of moms, if you wanna raise godly kids who have a biblical worldview that sticks, they say this, don't be a hypocrite.

Practice what you preach in your home. Let your kids see you cry, let your kids see you pray, let your kids see you feel, when you feel

God's let you down or when you struggle through things or read the Bible. That's the number one thing

I kept hearing from these really successful moms saying you gotta practice what you preach. I think that's some great advice.

The second thing is, of course, we're gonna go through a whole list here, is I really believe in intercessory prayer.

Does anyone pray a lot sometimes? Do we have some good praying people over here? Okay, you guys,

I have to say here, as a scientist who spent years testifying in state and federal court cases about things that aren't supposed to be in the spirit realm,

I have seen prayer work in supernatural ways before. Things that shouldn't be that turn out being a different way.

I believe you can move and shift things through prayer. So if you've got a kid that's gone astray or is thinking about going astray, get in that prayer closet, lock the door, and steep yourself in some prayer.

That's probably the best advice I can give you today. And the other one is, of course, practice what you preach. Teach them the fear of the

Lord. Well, what does that look like? Teach them the fear of the Lord. The scripture's got a lot to say about fearing

God and it will turn out well for you in life and things like that. But I would say having fear of the

Lord would be understanding at a very root level that God is real from both experience and beliefs and it comes down with your choices and your consequences and develop from the head to the heart.

Here's another great tip for you guys. I modeled and raised four kids after this and I would really like to say this technique works.

It's a philosophy of raising kids that says you should go through four different stages with your kids as they grow.

The first one is to just be a caregiver. They come out first couple years, all you're doing is providing for basic, basic care.

Then you shift over to being a cop. Don't eat the rotten banana. Stop beating up your sister.

Don't lock yourself in the refrigerator, all that kind of stuff. So you transition into being a cop.

Then you turn into coach. And remember, coaches are not supposed to get on the field.

They can call in things from the sideline but they're not supposed to get on the field. And we have to learn from some other cultures.

If you go back to other ancient communities and look at what the Jewish practices are for the bat mitzvah and the bar mitzvah, do you know that when a kid turns of age like 12 or 13 years old, they have different ceremonies for boys and different ceremonies for girls, that they regard their child as a young adult in the house at that age.

After 13, for girls going through the bat mitzvah program, they basically, or ceremony, they basically say, hey, now you're a young lady in our house.

You get to make more decisions, more leeway, and we're only gonna pull you in if it gets really, really bad, if you're making some really heavy, serious decisions.

But they regard people in their house as adults after age 12 or 13. And then after that, you have to turn into a consultant.

And what does a consultant do? A consultant only gives advice after they're asked. So when

I went to J .H. Rantz and learned about this, I heard the most important sentence I ever heard about parenting,

I think, ever. And here it is. He said, and I think he's right, he says that most kids who go into rebellion are ones that shift these or don't go from a coach to a consultant.

They stay as a coach, or even worse, as a cop when their kid is 17 or 18, and that evokes rebelliousness in your kid more than you can ever imagine.

But when my 17 -year -old comes up to me and says, hey, Dad, what do you think about X, Y, and Z? And I think, I turn it back on her and say, well, what do you think about that?

What's the best decision for you to make in this situation? As opposed to, well, you gotta be home by 11 o 'clock and I don't like that girl you're hanging out with, that's a bad idea, strict, strict, strict, strict, strict.

Well, that's gonna evoke rebellion. Well, I'm just gonna go find a way to get around what my dad says and do what I wanna do anyhow.

So make sure you roll out your parenting in these four stages. The first couple are easy, but you have to transition from a cop to a coach, and then from a coach to a consultant.

It really does have some great parenting DNA to it. Okay, so I'm gonna click through some of these pretty quickly.

Is your focus gonna be on outward rules or in the inward beliefs? Sometimes you really have to drill down and find what's going on with the kid.

They need to develop their own true belief system. That's why for all four of my kids, we've saved up college money for them.

We have 529 plans for them. But we say to all four of our kids, if you wanna have access to your college money, you have to go to Bible school first.

And we're not controlling them. We just say, hey, we've got money and it's set aside. We've been saving since you were a one -year -old.

But if you wanna use that money to go to college with, you have to go to a torchbearer program. There are 25 of these things around the world.

And it's an opportunity, it's called a gap year program. And they have them in Australia, New Zealand, and England, and Sweden.

So they just go over there for six months and they just get New Testament and Old Testament scripture and do a bunch of amazing things to live out their faith outside of their own family.

To figure out, is this faith something for me? Am I gonna personalize my faith? Because God has no grandchildren.

He only has children. He has to take the faith, they have to personalize it. And I can tell you, every one of my kids that have done that program, it's been amazing.

Also consider things like going to Mexico or the Thrive program here. Tremendous programs.

You want your kids to personalize their faith outside of your parental umbrella.

And that sometimes happens slow. So go to Mexico, send your kids to Mexico, great opportunity, go to Thrive School, or go to one of the torchbearers.

I think it's just torchbearers .com. They usually try to keep it at a pretty good budget.

It's usually seven to $8 ,000, but it's for like six months. It includes room, board, food, the whole bit.

And your kid just goes over there and figures out, is this faith for me or not? Because they're kind of in an external environment.

They're away from their family. They have to figure out their travel budget and currency conversion stuff. They're having to live like adults, but they're getting taught a lot of Bible at the same time.

Okay, I'm gonna skip through this one and go on to just a couple more here. I just don't wanna lose out of time.

This one encourages you guys to make sure that when your kids ask you hard questions that may sound like they could be walking away from their faith, don't overreact when that happens.

Your kids are developing their own world view. They're understanding things for their own selves for the first time, so don't get scared or shocked when they come up with some crazy questions sometimes.

But youth today, they wanna know, how many pages do I have to flip in the Bible before I run into truth?

We happen to this a lot. So they're going through it saying, if truth doesn't start on the first page, just tell me when it does start.

So we like assuring people that truth begins on the first page of the Bible. So has everyone heard about the parable of the sower before?

Quick raise of hands, all right, stay with me. We got like 15 minutes left. We're doing great. More solution stuff.

So what the parable of the sower does, it's actually in two of the gospels. It talks about the seeds, which is the word of God or the kingdom of God.

And it talks about the seed falling and it's getting in some cases eaten by the birds by the wayside or it falls on stony soil or thorns or fertile soil.

So let's take a quick look at this. One part of the parable says, well, the devil that comes and takes away the word or takes away the seed, or some seeds have no root who believe only for a while.

Some seeds are choked with cares, riches, and pleasures. And some seeds fall along good ground and then produce a crop of righteousness and a crop of Christian fruit.

Well, the first one, when the devil comes and takes the word away from them, it deals with disbelief.

And this is where we see the creation evolution thing come into play. The seeds that have no root really has to do with doubt.

And then the seeds that are choked with cares and riches deals with distraction. And then what we want over here is roots that are deepening into their belief.

But the enemy in the world is really going hard after trying to sow disbelief, doubt, and distraction into your kids as you're raising them in this world.

So some seeds, because they have no root, they fall away. Here's what Matthew says. The seeds fell along stony places where they did not have much earth.

And immediately they sprang up because they had no depth of earth, or they had no root and then they later withered away.

And then some seeds that have no root in themselves, they endure for a while, but when tribulation or persecution arises because of the word, immediately they stumble.

So there's a lot of Christians that become enthusiastic Christians, but when they barge into the world, all of a sudden they get tribulation that happens or persecution that happens.

And the word tribulation here means oppressing or oppressing together, pressure, oppression, affliction, tribulation, distress, and strains, or persecution is to put up a fighter to drive away.

So this parable is really applicable today. If you go through your kid's newsfeed on Facebook or Instagram, you'll see all kinds of persecution against Christians and ideas that are not about that.

If you plunge into the world and look in the movies, for example, here's all kinds of examples where that fit this

Bible verse perfectly, yet he has no root in himself, he endures for a while, but when tribulation or persecution arises because of the word, that's the key, because they're new fledgling beliefs, immediately they stumble.

And when we live in a world that's, we're getting an onslaught from a different worldview on cultural aspects and on origins aspects, we really see this play out with our students today.

So we want them being like the ones that are fruitful, that actually can have a root that's gonna go down and produce good, righteous things there, all kinds of stuff.

So we believe that the roots have to go all the way back down to Genesis. If you want your student to have good fruit, it's all about having good roots.

A lot of students that we see that are professing Christians, they don't have a lot of Christian fruit. And in many cases, it's because their roots structures have been hampered, they hit all these obstacles to faith, and then they stop growing.

But if you see a thriving fruit tree, it's thriving only for one reason, it's because its root structure is strong.

Fruit doesn't grow from the twigs and the limbs over here. Fruits that are gonna grow healthy and vibrant are gonna all be drawn from the root system.

And I think from a biblical worldview, this of course starts with Genesis, answering that origins questions.

I had to develop stilt roots. So I became a Christian when I was 11, fell away until I was about 17, but really didn't know what

I believed about origins until about eight years ago. And so I kind of had a metaphorically, I had roots that were going up here, roots underneath the soil, but I had to shore up my faith just eight years ago when

I came to understand that Genesis 1 to 11 is a real history book. And what that did for me, it has allowed my head to join my heart.

And now I have a shored up faith in a way that's more visible, but I didn't have roots that were starting out underneath deep.

I had to grow my roots later in life. And thank God that I did.

We see a lot of Christians today that have a shallow root system. They get hit by wind and turbulation of earth and overgoes their trees.

You really need to have a tap root that's gonna go all the way down deep, all the way into the fabric of God's word.

That's what a tap root looks like. And that's how some trees are able to withstand a whole lot of wind and change because they've got a tap root that goes deep.

So Psalms 1 promises us that blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the path of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful, but his delight is in the law of the

Lord. And the Hebrew for that is the Torah. And of course, Genesis is the first book in the Torah, but he's saying, whoever's gonna have strong roots is gonna delight in the law of the

Lord and meditate in the law of the Lord day and night. He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water that brings forth its fruit in season, whose leaf also shall not wither and whatever he does shall prosper.

You guys, that's a great promise and it all starts with having roots and believing that God's word is true and credible.

I think what's happening a lot with kids today when kids are doing a lot of tattoos and things like that, not to give a comment or even a perspective on tattoos, but a lot of kids are doing things like that because they're seeking affirmation.

They want a rite of passage. They want mom and dad to put their hands on their head and say, I love you,

I affirm you. I've seen kids melt in front of me when I've been able to do that as a dad or as an uncle, just say,

I affirm you, I bless you. There's a lot about the family blessing that goes through scripture, but kids need to understand that they have a pedigree in history.

They're not just some random mutation that happened millions of years ago through natural selection.

They wanna know that they're part of God's plan and you can take the history of God's word and go all the way back to the beginning and say you're part of this plan and how comforting is it to know nowadays with all these potentially end time signs coming around us in society and around the world today to know if we can trust the beginning of what

God did, we can trust the end. So we have to go all the way through this, and I've seen a lot of students be very affirmed to say no, you have a place in history, you've got papers, you've got a pedigree.

Okay, a couple quick stories and then we'll end up and take some pictures. So I was at a museum once with my daughter at the

Royal Terrell Museum, a big, huge, the largest dinosaur museum in the world, and my daughter and I were standing off to the side and there was a mom and a son over here, and the son was looking at a museum exhibit that displayed some goo down here, like some primordial soup that led to zoo creatures that led to me and you.

So the goo to the zoo to me and you over millions of years, and this kid's looking at it, and you can just see the gears turning in his 10 -year -old mind.

He's just like looking at this going, my gosh, I'm evolved pond scum. That's really what

I am. I evolved from this goo, and then I turned into a mammal or a reptile, whatever it was, and the fish crawled up out of the water and it eventually led to humans.

This is incredible, and you could see the kid wrestling with this, and I just sensed it, and I looked over at this kid and the mom, and then he asked the question.

He looks up to his mom and says, mom, is this true? Is this really true, have

I evolved from pond scum, like this frog -looking creature, is this really true? And there was a long pregnant pause there for the mom.

She didn't say anything for maybe five or 10 seconds, and she looked at the exhibit, and she says, you know, I guess it is.

It was a terrifying experience, because then my daughter and I left that experience and we're walking down the way, and I look over at Michaela, and she's just bawling, my daughter.

She's like, I really sensed, because that mom will never get that moment back. At that minute, that kid, his little synapses in his brain fired and made a connection that I'm evolved pond scum.

That could take a long time to undo something like that, so that's why a lot of this stuff is super important.

Just a few things, I'm gonna go on to my little tree analogy here, and then we'll wrap up. When it comes to apologetics, and creation, and origins, and things like that, we're talking about this aspect of the worldview,

I wanna draw out another metaphor here, and it deals with a tree. So a lot of philosophical or cultural apologetics are gonna sway in the wind, and what

I mean by cultural apologetics is some cracked, kind of a crafty answer to an often question posed about Christianity that doesn't deal with origins.

If people learn rehearsed answers to some of those tough questions about Christianity, but they don't have a root system, and they don't understand that the

Bible's true history as it's written, they're gonna sway in the wind, and their tree could actually even fall down.

So these questions are gonna change with every generation, but Genesis 1 to 11 is gonna have a solid and lasting history over time.

The Jews have been believing it for a long time, we've been believing it for a long time. It's gonna withstand the changing wind of culture, because these questions are gonna change differently for every culture.

It's gonna be multi -generational, and timeless, and foundational. So if you have students that are trying to get fancy answers to fancy questions to try to come after their professors, or whatever their kids are answering, just know it might even be more effective to give them the evidence that Genesis really is a true history book, because if those answers can emanate from a place of believing the historicity of God's word, then they'll be able to deal with the tougher questions.

Does that make sense? Okay, good. Okay, so a couple more things. So of course, if your faith starts at the top of the tree and stays there, because you know a couple answers to a couple good questions, it's not gonna last long.

But if your faith starts at the bottom and grows up, you're gonna have a much more solid infrastructure there.

Okay, a couple more things here, and then we'll wrap up and take a couple questions. So without knowing that the

Bible is historically true and scientifically credible, one will be more inclined to sway to the philosophies of this world.

And if you really understand that you have a concrete faith, your root system's gonna take care of a lot of that stuff.

Okay, so we kind of rushed through some of it at the end. I wanted to make sure I got through everything today. But all the resources

I talked about today, the Debunking Evolution program and the 7 Myths, all that stuff is downloadable free on our website.

Just go to genesisapologetics .com or go downstairs in the foyer and grab all the free books while we've got them.