SERMON: The Canon of Education

Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherds Church podcast. This is our Lord's Day sermon. We pray that as we declare the word of God that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith, and you would catch a greater vision of who

Christ is. And may you be blessed in the hearing of God's word, and may the Lord be with you.

Over the last two weeks, we've been in a series on education from the book of Proverbs.

We've been trying to understand what does the book of Proverbs teach about education?

And the focus of the book of Proverbs is primarily not on our individual self -improvement as far as education goes, but how do we pass on education?

How do we take as men and women, as parents, as friend to a friend, husband to a wife, how do we impart knowledge?

That's what the thrust of the book is about. Solomon wrote it as a father, as a training manual to his son.

And what we've learned over the last two weeks has laid the foundation for what we're gonna be talking about today.

Two weeks ago, we discovered that the entire architecture of knowledge, the foundation upon which every fact in the known universe rests, is the non -negotiable commitment to the fear of God.

Whether it's the math that our children do at the kitchen table, the music your daughter plucks away on the grand piano, or the history your son reads upon the lamp at his bed stand, every act of learning sits under the glorious scaffolding of the fear of God.

And what we saw is that this fear and this reverence is not merely the paint that goes on the wall, it is the wall.

In the same way that the fear of God is not sprinkled upon your education, it is your education.

It is the foundation of it all. Every coat of knowledge that you will ever learn, every skill, every data point, every fact, every piece and scintilla of knowledge is layered upon the fear of God.

That's what we learned in week one. Week two then, we began to build on top of that foundation.

And if the fear of the Lord is the foundation, then who is the authority behind all education?

Who is the one who has the right to dictate what education is? And what we learned is that that's the son of God.

So the foundation of knowledge is the fear of God. The authority underneath all knowledge is the son of God.

And we said that the son of God will allow no rival wisdom to stand against him.

And that every single sub -teacher, because every teacher is a sub -teacher under the one who has the greatest authority, which is

Christ, whether it's a homeschool mother, whether it's a Latin tutor in a co -op, a pastor in a pulpit, or a math teacher in a

Christian academy, all of them hold their authority on rent from the divine

Logos himself. But with that foundation and the very first framing boards that have been laid in this structure called education, we have a long way to go before we have a completed building.

And so this morning, the next structure, the next stone, the next substructure board that we're gonna be laying is the question of who teaches and what must be taught?

That's the question of today's content. What is the curriculum of education? What is the canon of education?

And what we're gonna see today is that this canon is more than just what omnibus you should use, more than just classical education versus some other kind of education.

What today we're gonna see is what is undergirding all of your children's education? What is the canon that dictates it?

So the question we must answer today is the question of canon. And by canon, I don't mean morales. And by canon,

I also don't mean things that shoot great bombs. Today, I'm talking about the canon or the corpus of literature.

And what is the canon by which you will educate your children? Is it the 66 books of the

Bible or is it some other canon, some other corpus? And that way

I mean canon being used in the original Greek term of canon, which meant measuring rod or a ruler or a tool that a craftsman would use like a plumb line or a measure that would figure out whether something was square.

A canon is a blueprint or a yardstick by which you measure, judge, and evaluate a body of literature.

It's the paradigm for which you say this is a part of the accepted text, this is not.

That's what canon is. Canonization is the way by which you determine what is approved text and what is not.

It's not just a list of books. But every single educational theory, every single educational system, every single model for education in all of human history has had a sacred canon.

And today, we need to understand what that canon is for true knowledge.

What is true? What is false? What is worth knowing? What is worth ignoring? What is the real and what is the fiction?

What are the lenses by which we understand that? That is what canon is.

And again, every single culture had it. The Greeks had an approved and sacred canon.

It was Homer and the Tragedians. The Romans had a canon and it was Cicero, Virgil, and the

Aeneid. The medieval Christians had a canon and it was the quadribium and the tribium with the

Holy Bible at the head of every table. The Enlightenment has also had a canon. It was John Locke and Hume and Voltaire.

The Marxists have a canon, which was Karl Marx and Engels and Lenin and Mao.

The progressives even have a canon, which is the canon that of today's acceptable literature, tomorrow's will be different.

It's an ever -changing canon, but it's still one nonetheless. And the one from yesterday, more than likely will end up being racist.

But what this tells us is that every single system of knowledge, every competing theory of epistemology is even if it's pluralistic, even if it's not committed to the sacred truth is a sacred canon, is a holy corpus, is a religious body of literature to disciple people to a worldview.

And the question every parent, every Christian parent must answer with your time, your checkbook, your calendar, your kitchen table is which canon will your children sit under?

Because as we've already seen in this series, there is no neutrality in education. There is no

Switzerland when it comes to education. You know, the country that's neutral and never gets involved in anything.

There's no Canada, eh, when it comes to education. And the canon that you choose for your child will in the end be the thing that shapes your child.

It is that important. So with that, today we're gonna look at five things when it comes to canon. We're gonna look at the canon of God is the word of God and it is primary.

The second thing we're gonna look at is that God's canon is closed and total and complete.

The third thing that we're gonna look at is this canon is different because it's not written on the brain, it's written on the heart.

And then the fourth thing that we're gonna see is that this canon must be given by us parents to our children because fifthly, this canon will lead to life and flourishing.

So if you will, allow me to read several passages from the book of Proverbs that talk about these things.

We will pray, then we will jump in to this study. So from Proverbs.

I'll start in Proverbs 30, verses five through six. Every word of God proves true.

He is a shield to those who take refuge in him. Do not add to his words lest he rebuke you and you be found a liar.

Proverbs 29, 18, where there is no vision, the people cast off restraint, but blessed is he who keeps the law.

Proverbs 3, one through three, my son, do not forget my teaching, but let your heart keep my commandments. Bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart.

Proverbs 22, 17 through 19, incline your ear and hear the words of the wise and apply your heart to my knowledge that your trust may be in the

Lord. Proverbs 4, 18 through 19, the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day.

The weight of the wicked is like deep darkness. They do not know over what they stumble.

Proverbs 13, 13, whoever despises the word brings destruction on himself, but he who reveres the commandments will be rewarded.

And then Proverbs 24, 13 through 14, my son, eat honey for it is good and know that wisdom is such to your soul.

Those are our verses today, let us pray. Lord, I pray that as we've understood now the foundation of education is the fear of God, and we've understood that the authority of education is the son of God, that now

Lord, we would understand the curriculum of education is the word of God, at least in its primacy.

So Lord, I pray that we would understand that today, that we would submit our lives up underneath that today, that every parent would find their place in that today, every person would find ways in which that they can come up under this today so that whoever of us intends upon communicating knowledge, which is all of us, that we would do so with the word of God having a primacy and an ultimacy in all that we say.

And it's in Jesus' name we pray, amen. Of all the competing canons of literature, of all the competing visions for reality, there is only one canon of literature that has primacy over all of life, and that is the word of God.

The most basic question that we can ask of any textbook is whether it's true, and that which it covers between the front cover and the back cover, is it actually communicating reality to us or falsehood to us?

Or are we just paying $60 for the credentialed opinion of yesteryear's graduate seminars?

God, through the lips of Agur in Proverbs 30, answers this question with a single

Hebrew phrase that should grab the attention of every person in this room. He writes in Proverbs 30, verse five, every word of God proves true.

He is a shield to those who take refuge in him. The Hebrew here is rich and beautiful, and it deserves a closer look because the word in this passage, the key word in this passage is tazerephah, which is the

English translation of the word prove. That's what's underneath our English word prove. And that word is taken not from the courtroom, it's actually taken from the metal workers and the silversmiths of the ancient world.

It describes something that has been purified in the fire, melted down and tested, cleansed of all of its impurities and proven to be genuine.

And the picture that it's communicating is actually quite powerful because God's word is not the raw ore pulled from the dirt of human understanding.

It is not the musings and the pebbles of ancient people. The word of God is the refined silver that has been tested in the forge.

It has been proven over intense scrutiny, over great lengths of time, and it has been proven to be pure, trustworthy, flawless, and without corruption.

The word of God proves itself true in the same way that silver forged in the fire, purified of impurities, shows the face of the one who smelted it in its reflection.

And because God's word is perfect, his people can trust that everything that it says is true so that when

God says that he is our shield, we can believe him. And that means that God's word, his holy canon, his collection or body of literature is utterly refined.

It is totally tested. It has been smelted, ran through the fires of his own holiness so that no speck of dross remains.

It is that this word is the very word that David picks up in Psalm 12 when he writes about the

Bible. The words of the Lord are pure words like silver refined in a furnace on the ground, purified seven times.

I want you to picture the silversmith at his bench taking a lump of ore from the mine that is not yet pure silver.

And that lump is silver mixed with copper, mixed with lead, mixed with rock, mixed with slag, mixed with dirt, mixed with other things.

And then the silversmith places that lump in his own crucible. And he heats the furnace up until the bellows steam.

And then the metal turns to liquid in the cup. And then the impurities rise to the top of it like gray scum across the pond of the silver puddle.

And he takes the ladle and he skims the dross away. And then he heats it again.

And he skims it again. Then he heats it again and he skims it again. And then he heats it again and he skims it again.

Seven times, which is the biblical way of saying totally, completely, perfectly.

Seven times the psalmist says that God has purified his own word. Not because God's words were impure, but because he is showing us that like infinitely perfected silver,

God's words are infinitely pure without question, without error, without dross.

Every utterance of the Almighty is like silver from its seventh heating.

Every commandment of God has been through the furnace of his holiness. Every promise has been refined and clarified and tested and proven over his hot, white, hot, holy character.

And it has been proven true across every single century of man. And in that way, the world has had innumerable chances to oppose the word of God.

And it was the world, not the word, that has been completely found lacking.

Now, I want to set the side of this glorious canon of scripture. This inerrant, infallible, sufficient, pure canon of scripture, the canon of the modern academy.

The modern academy hands textbooks to our children and three years later issues their revision.

Three years after that, another revision. And three years after that, a third revision because what passed for a fact just a few years ago has been overruled by it several years later by another credentialed committee, by another equally confident, peer -reviewed board of pagans.

And I only need to give you several examples to show this. Psychology. You consider the textbooks of psychology over the last 50 years.

The next generation of our children, everything has to do with their trauma. Well, nope, that's not true.

The next generation says that it has to do with their gender or their social construct or the way that they can manifest whether they're male or female in the moment.

Psychology every single year, it seems, is changing its theory of what it is so that how can we actually trust them as the ultimate authority of anything.

Nutrition is another great example. Eggs are evil. Oh, wait, no, eggs are good.

Oh, wait, no, eggs are bad. Oh, wait, no, eggs are good. Fat will kill you. Fat is great.

Sugar will kill you, but in moderation. Carbs will kill you. No, actually, you should be eating good. It's ridiculous.

The food pyramid's blown up every couple years by the very same people who formed it the last time.

Cosmology has been no different over the last 50 years. The universe is a steady state. Nope, the universe is a multiverse.

Nope, the universe is an expanding universe. Nope, the universe is a collapsing universe. Nope, the universe is accelerating indefinitely.

Nope, the universe is mostly matter. Nope, the universe is dark matter, which you cannot see.

Nope, the universe is undetectable dark energy that is indetectable. Every chapter in the recent history of cosmology is a confession of the stupidity of the knowledge of man.

Every new idea posited with the same level of unshakable confidence, we've now discovered it, is just as fallacious as the last one.

These are not the utterly purified and refined words of Holy Scripture.

They are the unrefined musings of man who are bumbling in the darkness, attempting to understand general revelation, but general revelation is not special revelation at all.

Special revelation given from God is pure and undefiled. Our limited and finite ability to understand the world is not pure and not refined and often prone to error.

Case in point, eggs are really good for you. Oh, wait, no, they're not. The word of God, however, is unquestionable.

Think about this. I want you to think about this. In your lifetime, you've had probably seven different views on what the universe is.

In your lifetime, you've had seven different views of what's at the bottom of the ocean. In your lifetime, things have changed rapidly on everything.

In your lifetime, most of you in this room, we lived in a very strange world where men were men and where women were women.

Wow, what Neanderthals we were. And yet the word of God, look at the longevity of the word of God.

Moses wrote 2 ,500 years before Christ and the words of Moses are not retracted by David when he picks up his harp to play for King Saul.

The words of God written and sung on the lips of David are not retracted and amended when

Isaiah cries out in the temple. The word of God proclaimed on the lips of Isaiah in the days of Uzziah are not overturned and discarded by Paul when he wrote from a

Roman prison cell. 3 ,000 years of men writing who did not know each other, who did not live at the same time period, who often didn't live in the same proximity, all writing the exact same message with no contradiction amendment or remission or revision.

Not one promise from the word of God was recalled. Not one commandment had been overturned by any committee, any nation, any reason, any morning in any century.

And then it doesn't just include biblical history. Think about outside of biblical history and church history.

Origen examined the word of God. Augustine examined the word of God.

Anselm and Aquinas examined the word of God. Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and Bucer examined the word of God.

Edward Spurgeon and Whitefield examined the word of God. Bavinck and Burckhoff examined the word of God.

Van Til and Bonson examined the word of God. Some of the most towering intellects that have ever existed in the history of humanity have examined the scripture and what they have found lacking is themselves, not the word.

Every single one of them tested the silver word from its seventh heating and reported back the same finding.

It is pure, it is true, it will not corrode, and I am not.

So when you sit down with your child and you open up the word of God and you put your finger on a verse that was written three and a half thousand years ago, you are not handing them something that is from the musings of man.

You are not handing them something that is small and trifle. You are handing them the God -breathed word, something that has no expiration sticker, the grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of the

Lord remains forever. You're handing them a book that you and I will have in eternity.

Imagine that. When we get to heaven, we will see the Bible there on full display in its beauty and it will not at that point be, oh, that's the book that got us by.

If we viewed the Bible the way that Christ viewed the word of God, how much would it change our life, friends?

You are placing within the hand of your child the most refined, the most tested, the most proven, the most pure, the most holy, the most perfect content in the universe in written literature.

It is, I can't even come up with adjectives to fully enumerate what you are doing.

It is that important. Every other curriculum on your child's desk at best is silver mixed with copper, mixed with rock, and mixed with dirt.

And that doesn't mean that your children should only study the Bible and not study anything else. That's not what I'm saying.

But what I am saying is that when you choose a curriculum for your children, the word of God must be primary in their education.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't learn secondary things. I'm saying that primary things must be primary.

Only one curriculum on your child's desk is that pure, and that's the word of God, which is why we cannot add it to, sprinkle it on top of, make it a mere devotion in the midst of an ocean of educational options.

The scriptures are not supplemental in our children's education. The scriptures are primary.

God's special revelation has primacy over their ability to know, understand, and interpret anything.

And this way, mathematics must be interpreted through the one who breathed logic into the universe.

Science must submit to them. History must be read through them. Literature must bow to them.

Philosophy must be judged by them. Politics must answer to them. Art must be discipled by them.

The Bible is not merely a book resting on your shelf. It is the shelf.

And the wise parents puts that curriculum, not just at the top of the list, infuses it into everything on the list and reads everything on the list through that holy word.

That's the first thing I would say, is that the word of God is primary. It is the primary education that you must give your children.

If you give your children all of the learning of Aristotle and all of the philosophy of Hume and all of the other various classics of the

Western canon, you give them not the word of God, you have failed. You have failed.

You've hit three foul balls that went into the upper deck and then swung and missed on your final strike.

Great for you, you hit a long ball, it was foul. That's the first thing, the canon of God is primary.

The second thing I would argue is that the canon of God is closed. And the book of Proverbs will argue this as well.

Right on the heels of the primacy of the canon of God, Agur again says this, do not add to his words, lest he rebuke you and you be found a liar.

So here's the simple point. If you add to the word of God, you're a liar. And if you add by subtracting from the word of God, you are a liar.

This word here for liar is kazav, which means not only to lie, but it's the language out of a courtroom where you have been cross -examined and found fallacious.

You're the one who have committed perjury on reality. Agur is telling us that the man who adds to the canon has not enriched the canon, but has perjured himself in the courtroom of Almighty God.

So when the prosecuting attorney, the Holy Spirit using his word of God examines that man, his entire case falls to pieces.

Now I want you to hear what Agur is doing here. He's not just saying, do not contradict the word.

He's saying, do not even augment the word. Do not even supplement the word.

Do not even try to improve upon the word in the slightest. The man with a clever chisel who tries to add another truth on top of the truth that has already been revealed, trying to smooth out the jagged pieces of God's granite revelation has not made the word richer.

He has defaced what no man is allowed to touch and he will be held within the crosshairs of judgment.

And brothers and sisters, this matters enormously for the question of curriculum because every false education system in all of human history has committed the sin that Agur forbids.

And this is true in the way that they add to the canon. This is true in the way they subtract from the canon.

This is true in the way that they replace the canon. For instance, let me give you a couple examples in the church.

In the medieval church, they added the traditions of men to the scriptures and as a result of that, they gained venerations, indulgences, purgatory, and a little man in a funny hat who thinks that his words are on par with scripture.

The liberal Protestants in Germany, the higher critics, those willy -willy smart people who know better than God, they subtracted the miracles from the scriptures and they made a

Jesus that belongs in a wax museum instead of the Lord of glory, a kind and moral teacher that Lewis says cannot be.

He's either a liar, he's a lunatic, or he is Lord, he cannot be just a good man.

They created a kind of Jesus that can no more rise from the dead than your goldfish live outside its fishbowl.

And in doing so, they neutered the scripture and then they fell into ruin as we will see soon.

The cults do this as well. Joseph Smith added the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, the

Doctrine of the Covenants. Mary Baker Eddy added Scientism and Health.

The Watchtower Organization added its New World Translation because hey, if you can't prove it from scripture, just rewrite it.

Thomas Jefferson took a black marker and redacted most of the New Testament and Old Testament because if you don't like it, erase it.

Ellen G. White added her visions to scripture so that her visions were now normative and revelatory for the church as well as scripture.

So if her visions disagreed with scripture, oh well, Ellen's a prophet.

And in every single case, what looked like from a distance an enrichment of the canon was in the language of agar, a perjury before the courtroom of God.

And this is not merely the sin of heretics either or the sin of sex. This is the sin of the modern academy.

Every progressive curriculum and every public school in America begins in a world that has been designed by the breath of God, begins in a world that has been ordered by the logic of God, begins in a world where every fact bows the knee to God.

So they are interpreting a world around them in light of the word of God while rejecting the word of God.

Paul says that it is evident to them, that's why they're condemned. They're not condemned because they have pure ignorance.

They are condemned because the knowledge of God is known to them and yet they have suppressed the knowledge of God in their heart and hated the knowledge of God.

For instance, the world adds the gospel of self -actualization and takes away the gospel of denial of self.

It adds the canon of intersectionality. It adds the catechisms of gender ideology.

It adds the liturgy of feminism and weak masculinism. It subtracts the doctrine of creation.

It subtracts the doctrine of original sin, the doctrine of objective moral truth of male and female marriage, meaning and reality itself.

And by the time that the average modern curriculum has hacked up truth and reality by either adding, subtracting or replacing what

God has said is true, all they end up giving people is a sweet tasting poison.

If you leave antifreeze in your basement in the dog's bowl, it will eat it because it's sweet and it will kill it because it's poison.

That is what the modern world has done. It has sweetened poison and caused people to drink it to its death.

And the consequences of choosing such a canon built upon the knowledge of man, the dunghill as Agger described it, of man, the consequences are not abstract, they're concrete.

Solomon names them in chapter 29, verse 18, where there is no vision, the people cast off restraint, but blessed is he who keeps the law.

The Hebrew here is very interesting because it is not the word vision in English that's the best translation.

When we think of vision, we think about a CEO coming up and talking about what's our vision for the next quarter?

What's our mission vision statement? What's our tenure plan for how we're gonna take this company to the next level?

How are we gonna go from being a graphics processor to being one of the key people in the

AI space? How are we gonna have vision to do something like that? That's not what this is talking about. This is not a corporate plan.

This is not a whiteboard corporate consultant session. This is a different kind of vision.

The word charon is not vision as in a plan or an idea.

The word charon is divine vision, divine revelation.

The word is actually equal sign synonymous with scripture. Where the people have no scripture, they perish.

Where the people have no divine revelation, they perish. Not where the people don't have a tenure plan, they perish.

This is one of those verses that drive me nuts. In the same way

I can do all things with a verse taken out of context is this one. Pastors gather their elders together and say, where the people have no vision, their plans fail.

So we need a vision for this church. You know what the vision for the church is? The word of God. And giving people the divine revelation of God.

That's the vision. Anything apart from that is fodder meant to be set in the flames of fire.

The verb here for vision is divine revelation. The verb here for perish is even more striking than perish.

Perish is the idea of dying and then it being over. The word here in Hebrew means to unbind, to unsew, to rip apart, to let loose, and to allow something to be thrown into utter chaos and unrestraint.

In fact, you will be surprised to know this, that this word actually appears in a very famous chapter of the

Bible. This word perish. It appears in Exodus 32 when Aaron made the golden calf and the people broke loose.

The people devolved into chaos. The people let themselves go as they were dancing naked before the idol.

Solomon is telling the people that without divine revelation, you will become exposed.

Without divine revelation, you will be plunged back into the chaos that the Lord himself tames.

Without divine revelation, you will not become more enlightened. You will become more bestial.

Without divine revelation, you will not experience progress. You will unravel at the seams.

And all you have to do to look at the truthfulness of this statement is just look at our culture and then tell me whether or not this verse is wrong.

Without divine revelation, the people unravel. That's the story of New England.

I've said this before. When you preach almost every week, you run out of stories.

So deal with it. When I went, I was so excited in seminary.

I was in Jonathan Edwards' class. He wasn't teaching, I was learning about him. I'm not that old.

And I was learning about Edwards, I was learning about his life. I was reading Marsden's biography of Edwards.

So if you want to read a good biography of Jonathan Edwards, you should read his biography. It's actually really good. It's riveting, it's not boring, it's lively.

And you'll get to know this man who preached 50 miles from here, who was one of the great reasons that the

Lord caused the revivals to happen in New England. And my heart was I really wanted to go to see his church.

So when I took my son to homeschool co -op that was somewhat near the area, I decided instead of going to Starbucks and doing my actual job,

I'm gonna go to Jonathan Edwards' old church. I walked up to it, I was so excited.

It was like a kid in a candy store. I walk up to the door, I knock, and the lesbian secretary answered the door.

And I said, or she said, hi, how can I help you? And I said, oh, I was just wondering if you guys had any information on Jonathan Edwards, because it's his church.

Like, wouldn't they have some sort of library, some sort of plaque, some sort of something? And she said,

I don't know who he is, but we have a Yellow Pages in there if you wanna look him up. I literally went to my car and I cried that the home of the thunderous,

God -glorifying preaching of Edwards was now inhabited by fools. A nation that once put the

King James Bible in every classroom from the forest of New Hampshire to the coast of California now parades men in dresses in front of four -year -olds and calls that progress.

A nation whose founders literally quoted Deuteronomy 17 in their founding documents now teaches 12 -year -olds that the documents themselves are racist and the founders are villains and our great salvation is to repent of our own nation and to express our hatred of our own nation so that we can penance ourself for our great sins.

A nation that once produced the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and produced them as an institution for the propagation of the gospel of Jesus Christ is now a culture that produces women's studies that by the end of the semester, you can't even define what a woman is.

There is no Chazan in our society anymore. There is no vision.

There is no divine revelation that is undergirding us and because of that, we're unraveling.

We are corroding. We are rotting. We are decaying as a country and apart from the sheer grace of God, we will eventually ravel into the point of collapse.

We will rot into the point of ruin. We will fall apart to where there is no making us back up again and what's interesting to me is that the disintegration of a people does not happen quickly if you study history.

It happens very, very slowly and then instantly. It happens over time and then all of a sudden, it happens quickly.

There's a long downgrade that occurs until we fall off the cliff.

Decade after decade, we've compromised truth to where we can no longer interpret reality and the church has been absolutely passive and cowardly in the process so that now, we don't know a child from a fetus.

We don't know a parent from a stranger. We don't know a sacrament from a sandwich. This is the wages, my friends, of opening up the canon of God and disregarding the sufficiency of the reality to which it expresses itself.

This is what happens when every generation believes that it has the authority to edit the fabric of reality but as we've seen, the canon is closed and all who try to endeavor to change it will be ruined.

The canon is perfect. The canon is sufficient. The canon is complete.

You can't subtract from it or add to it lest as Revelation says, God would add unto you the plagues that are described in this book.

The Christian does not approach scripture as one authority among many. It approaches it as the authority over all.

That's the second thing that I want us to see is the canon is closed. The third thing I want us to see is the canon of scripture does something different in education than other textbooks.

Instead of trying to tickle the synapses of the brain, it is actually trying to engrave the law of God on hearts.

The goal of teaching such a canon is that our children would have the word of God written inside of them.

Solomon answers one of the most beautiful educational images in all of scripture by saying this in Proverbs 3, one through three, my son, do not forget my teaching, but let your heart keep my commandments.

I love that. Not let your mind remember my commandments, let your heart keep my commandments.

Not let your brains cognitively comprehend my commandments, but let your heart love and have affection that translate into action for my commandments.

And then bind them on your neck and write them on the tablet of your heart. The Hebrew here is again astounding.

The muach was a stone tablet, the kind on which kings engraved their orders so that everyone had to obey them.

A king did not write down an edict for someone to come up with a pocket protector and say, well, now let's dissect the grammar of what the king is saying.

It must be a third optative in the present active continuous.

King's edict was meant to be obeyed. It was meant to grip your heart with fear and produce obedience with your body.

The same word is used in the stone tablets of Mount Sinai. The muach, written by the finger of God, placed into the

Ark of the Covenant. The goal of the high priest was not to come in and inspect the spelling of the 10 commandments to make sure that the

Almighty used proper grammar. The meaning of them sitting in there was that they are an authority structure that grips the heart of man that produces the obedience.

And that is the true goal of Christian education. Not merely the informing of the mind, but the shaping of the heart.

Not merely the transference of information, but the formation of affections and instincts and loves and desires and reflexes and convictions and trust.

That's why Jesus says, that's why Jesus does not say, go into all the world and teach them doctrine.

He doesn't say go into all the world and have them read Berkhoff. He doesn't say go into all the world to make sure that they understand

Calvin. As good as that is. He says, go into all the world and teach them how to obey everything

I've commanded. He doesn't even teach them how to understand it. He teaches them how to obey it.

I remember when I was in the army, one of my chief problems that I had as an early soldier in the army is this three little word that got me thousands of pounds of sweat extracted from my body through my drill sergeants enacting torture on me.

Why? Drill sergeant, why are we doing that? Lankford, down.

One hour later, you done? God's not telling us why in everything.

God doesn't always tell us the why. He says obey. He's given us the command. He's our general.

He's told us to do it. It's supposed to grip our hearts because of him to obey him, not to sit there like private

Lankford. Why are we doing that? Here's what my drill sergeants told me.

Don't think, shut up and do it. Honestly, if I would treat my Christian life like that, don't think, shut up and do it,

I actually probably would make more progress. The modern world thinks that education is about stuffing facts into our brains.

The modern world thinks that education is about self -actualization. How do I feel about it? What does this mean to me?

What is my truth? What an utterly ridiculous thing to say. My truth.

And then your truth is different from my truth. But somehow they're both truth. Two plus two is four to me.

Oh no, that's racist. Two plus two is five. Every curriculum is trying to shape a person according to some image.

And every classroom that is not founded upon the word of God is trying to shape your children or shape you into the image of man instead of the image of God.

Every teacher is aiming at the heart whether they would admit it or not. This is why a

Christian view of education, a biblical view of education, must not stop at what does my child know, but who is my child becoming?

That's the goal of Christian education. Because a child can know mathematics and be heartless. A child can master grammar and still hate the things of God.

A child can memorize Pythagoreans formula, pass exams, secure their credentials, and remain spiritually hollow at the center.

Which is why God's word is after something deeper. He doesn't want truth that tickles our hypothalamuses.

He wants truth engraved on our heart. He wants truth that cuts so deep into the soul of our children that wherever they go, that inscription goes with them.

Whatever they see, that vision is the glasses and the lens by which they see it. That's why

Solomon says in Proverbs 22, 17 through 19, incline your ear and hear the words of the wise and apply your heart to knowledge that your trust may be in the

Lord. Did you see the goal? Hearing is not supposed to stay locked in your head.

You go up to the drink machine. I know now they don't take quarters. It's like $5 for a drink now.

When I was a kid, you put a quarter in or two quarters in when it was a really big drink, like a 32 ounce.

And you put the quarter in. Have you ever had that moment, any of you who are my age and older, where the coin got stuck and you don't get the thing?

And then what you do is in that moment, you respectably tap the side of the machine.

And then after respectably tapping the side of the machine, you unrespectfully tap the side of the machine.

And then the little lady who's walking past you thinks you're crazy, but you get the drink.

The point is, is that it's not supposed to stay bumbling around at the top. It's supposed to trickle down into the bottom so that it can produce the thing and give the thing, which is the thing,

God glorifying obedience. That's the aim of Christian education.

The single line is not intellectual competence, but whole life dependence. The goal is not merely producing clever children, but producing children who say,

Christ is Lord over all of my life. A child whose heart is full of information, but whose heart has never been shaped by the transforming power of the gospel will lean on himself and his circumstances instead of God.

He will lean on his peers. He will lean on his motions. He will lean on his appetites.

He will lean on his ambitions. He will lean on his politics. He will lean on his entertainment, and he will lean on every other thing that he's been taught to understand if you, my friends, do not teach him the one primary thing, which is the knowledge of God through the word of God.

If a child has that foundation, the word of God, if you persistently, aggravatingly pester the word of God into the soul of your children, when they are old, they will not depart from it.

When they are old, when suffering comes, and when temptation comes, and when confusion comes, and when grief and trial and heartache and pain come, when life kicks them in the gut, even when death itself occurs, if you write that, if you put that, if you deposit that, they will lean on God, and they will trust him in all their ways, and he will guide their paths.

It must be deliberately handed down. It can't be unintentionally handed down. It doesn't come through osmosis or diffusion, because diffusion is like osmosis without water.

I don't like that analogy. It must be taught at home.

It must be spoken at the table. It must be modeled in your character. It must be defended in your conversations.

It must be delivered at your bedsides. It must be given in such a saturated and totalizing way that the next generation grows up breathing the air of Scripture, feasting upon Scripture in their churches, grabbing hold of it as their own, and being

Scripture people when they leave and they go out into the world. It was said of John Bunyan that if you were to poke him, he would bleed the

Bible. That is your vision for your children, that if you poke them, they would bleed Scripture.

And in that way, that leads us to our fourth point, that the canon of God must be transferred to the children of God.

The canon of knowledge your child receives does not stay trapped in pages. It sinks into the imagination.

It shapes their conscience. It forms their loves. It eventually steers the entire counsel of their life.

And we must recognize that all of us are giving our children something. All of us are giving our children something.

We are transferring some canon, some corpus, some body of knowledge that is catechizing our children to a vision of reality.

Whether it be through our active participation or our inactivity, we are giving our children some view of the world that they will grow up in.

Every story we read, every conversation we have, every fight that they witness, every moment that they get to behold our character or the lack thereof is teaching them what we think is truly good and beautiful.

What is evil? What is worth loving? What is worth worshiping? What is worth rejecting? And since every parent in this room is already handing down some canon of knowledge to your children, the real question that we have to ask is what canon is it?

Solomon says in Proverbs 4, hear my son, I have taught you the way of wisdom and I have led you in the paths of uprightness.

Solomon has said that I have chosen the canon and it's the word of God. I have taught you,

I have led you. He's chosen active participation in the life of his children to teach them the things of God, not passivity, which by the way, my brothers, speaking directly to my brothers, we are downstream of our father

Adam. Our father Adam watched as his wife fell. Our father

Adam was a coward when his wife fell. Our father Adam stood by and did nothing when his wife fell and that same

Adam lives in you and that same Adam must be slayed by a thousand swords to the throat of those thousand dragons.

We are not to be passive, detached. We are supposed to actively imprint the wisdom of God upon our children in such a way that it deliberately transfers to the next generation so that the legacy of your family is one day a

Christian nation. And this is where we need to be honest, especially in a family,

I'm gonna make it narrow now, especially in a church where many of us, convictionally so, have taken our children and brought them home away from the perversions of the secular world.

And this is where we need to be honest because I'm sure every single person in this room, whether you're homeschool or public school, has a similar vision of what the world is and how corrupt the world is.

When I say that the world hates God, we shake our heads. When I say that the world hates masculinity, we all shake our heads.

When I say that the world hates women in the way that God intended women to be made and loved and cherished, we shake our heads.

But homeschooling, I will say this, is not the victory.

Buying the right curriculum is not the victory. Abandoning public school is actually not the victory.

You can remove your child from Caesar's palace and still feed him Caesar's portion. I want you to think about the entertainment that you let into your home after your holy

Christian curriculum. Or, parents, I want you to think about the moments of laziness where you don't model godly character because you're tired and you give yourself justification to model ungodliness.

Or, the distraction where our children see that we have busy schedules and busy lives, but not knees that have been worn from prayer.

Or, early mornings when they can't sleep, they wake up finding us reading the word instead of scrolling

ESPN. The lack of protection for our children's screens.

The vanity that seeps into our life where we love us more than the things of God.

The softness that we have towards obedience because if you were married to her, you would act this way too.

If you listened the way that he treated me, you would do this too. Aren't we soft? Don't we make excuses for ourselves so much?

Because I've been sinned against, I will sin, and watch what's happening. The congregation, your children, are watching what you value.

And it's not God. It's something else. Yeah, they're homeschooled. Yeah, they've got

Bob Jones or Classical Conversations or Mogos Academy. And yet, at the same time, you're living like you don't believe any of those things are true right in front of them.

Which curriculum are you teaching them? Some Christian homes give out the greatest triviums and the greatest canon of Western civilization, the greatest biblical studies that family worship, and yet Netflix has discipled the imagination.

YouTube has discipled the attention span. Sports has discipled the schedule. Phones has discipled the desires of our children more than we.

I know what it means to be exhausted. I know what it means to have an overfilled schedule. I know what it means to let our children watch me be ragged and haggard and joyless.

And then when they look at me, their father, and they say to themselves, whether it's actual or whether it's subconscious, what does the

Lord produce in my dad? He's tired, he's joyless, he's frustrated, he's on edge, he's unavailable.

He says, leave me alone for a second, I need space. What is my life teaching my children about who

God is? And what is your life teaching your children about who God is?

It's not enough to just reject Hegel and Marx. It's not enough to say that the secular academy is evil.

Of course, but what curriculum is our life sharing with our children? Does the reality of who

God is actually affect us? Or are we teaching them that it's just a

Sunday morning thing? Christ is part of our life, He is not our life. Christ belongs in a category, but He's not the whole.

This is why precisely Solomon speaks with such urgency when he says, do not enter the path of the wicked, avoid it and turn away from it and pass on from it.

This is why Deuteronomy 6, 6 -8 says, these words which I've commanded you today shall be on your heart and you shall teach them diligently to your sons and you shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up and when you bind them as a sign on your hand, they shall be as frontals on your forehead and you shall write them on the doorpost of your house and on your gates.

If we want the word of God to be written on the heart of our children, shouldn't it first be written on our heart?

Shouldn't it first inform everything that we do? It says, it says, let the word of God be written on your heart so that when you lie down or rise up.

Can I ask, is there like any other time period other than when you lie down and rise up?

Like, isn't that describing like all time? If I lie down or if I rise up. If I'm laying down or if I'm not laying down.

That's like 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. That's all time. So what he's saying is, is whether you sleep or awake, whether you eat or whether you drink, whether you lie down or whether you stand up, whether you walk or whether you sit, in everything that the word of God be written on your heart because if it's not, you have nothing to give.

How many of us feel like we're empty? How many of us feel like we don't have anything left to pour out?

How many of us feel like that we've been pouring out so much that we're empty and not been poured into?

The reason that we feel that way is because very subtly, we've allowed the enemy to take us out from underneath the fount of living waters and to stand somewhere

Christianly, acceptably adjacent to it, to where we pour it out. But we've hit the bottom and now we have dust and ashes left in the picture when all we would need to do is reorient back to Christ and his word so that we may be poured into so that we'd actually have something to pour out.

I think at the bottom of all of this, we could say that not doing this would lead to ruin in our children's life and ruin in our life.

The fifth thing that I wanna show us is that it actually does lead to life. After all of Solomon's warnings and contrasts and pleadings and teaching us that we must prioritize love and affection for God if we're ever gonna have our children, prioritize love and affection for God, he gives us concrete, wonderful little examples of why this is true in Proverbs 24.

He says, my son, eat honey for it is good and the drippings of the honeycomb are sweet to the taste.

Then he says, know that wisdom is like that for your soul. He's saying that the word of God is not merely true, that it's good, that the word of God is not merely right, it's sweet, it's delightful, it's beautiful, it's glorious, it's tasty as it goes in.

It's life to the soul. What Solomon is saying is very, very simple, astonishingly simple.

He's saying to his son, son, I'm not trying to deprive you. I'm trying to feed you.

Son, imagine, I don't know, imagine your child has in front of them stale potato chips.

I'm making this up. Stale potato chips. The bag was left open for four weeks and that's what they're eating when you have the greatest, most beautiful, loaded baked potato made by Shannon Linkford on a plate and your child gets mad at you.

I want the chips then. And you're like, look at what I'm trying to give you. I'm not taking from you,

I'm blessing you. That's what Solomon is saying the word of God is. The word of God is not taking from your schedule.

The word of God's not taking from your business that you need to get done. The word of God's not taking from your morning.

The word of God's not taking from your beautiful autonomy. The word of God is giving you blessing upon blessing upon blessing because God works through means and the means by which

God intends to bless you is not a thunderclap from heaven, but actually opening up the word of God and seeing what has

God said. The world is gonna catechize our children into confusion, instability, vanity, lust, outrage, anxiety, pharmaceutical dependency, drugs, noise, emptiness, everything else.

The word of God is gonna produce clarity in them where they have stability in the chaos, where they have courage in an age of cowardice, where they have purity in an age of perversion, where they have joy in an age of lifelessness, where they have wisdom in an age of foolishness and where they have life in an age of death.

This is why we must not stop treating the scriptures as if it is the very medicine our children need, the very honey our children need to taste.

And we must not give it as a bitter duty. If you came over to my house and you said today,

Don Smith was cooking me a tomahawk ribeye, I would not come to that plate with a frown on my face, my friends.

I would come to that plate with two forks, a knife, maybe a spoon if I felt really fun, but I would come eager.

You would see steak on my face because I would take that bone and gnaw it. If I can do that over a dead cow, why can't

I do that over the word of God that's sweeter than anything, better than anything, tastier and more savory than anything?

Why don't I come to the word of God with that level of anticipation, that level of joy, that level of eagerness in the morning to plunder the word of God, to find the treasures that have been deposited therein?

So parents, when your children are afraid, give them the word.

When your daughter is confused, give her the word. When your family is suffering, give them the word.

When the world is loud and noisy, give them the word. When cultures shift, when governments rage, when definitions of marriage and gender change, when economies tremble, when civilizations seem like they're on the brink of war, give your children the only thing that is never cracked, the only thing that is never corroded, the only thing that has never failed, the only thing that has never lied, the only thing that has been purified seven times in the furnace of the holiness of God, give them the word.

And for all of us who are failures, which is all of us, every father in this room has been inconsistent.

Every mother in this room has had moments, many moments of hypocrisy.

Every person in this room has been distracted when we should have been attentive. Every person in this room has been passive when we should have been active.

Every person in this room has prioritized comfort over the word of God.

We've prioritized schedules over family worship. We've prioritized watching television over singing.

We've prioritized all of these things. We've been prayerless.

We've been faithless. We've done everything in the exact opposite of what

Solomon would have told us to do. And if our children were to inherit our patterns of life, may

God help them, which means that our only hope in parenting can't rest in our performance.

Our only hope in our parenting can't rest in our homeschooling. I know, I know it's really easy to become so excited about your thing.

We're the homeschooling group. We're the wives at home with chickens group. We're the ones who are gonna do the Christian Academy group.

We're the ones that wear this thing and wear that thing. And we're the ones that have head coverings and we're the ones that do this.

And we're the ones who have this new kind of orthodoxy that is making us righteous of our own merit.

No, our hope is not in those things.

Not in our homeschooling, not in our classical education, not in our Christian Academy, not even in our family worship, not in the structure of our home.

Our hope is in Christ. Because it is Christ alone who died for sinners.

And it's Christ alone by his spirit alone that shapes us into his image. So at both the same time, we can repent for how we fall short and also rejoice in who

God is changing us to be. People who love his word so that increasingly we can teach our children how to love his word so that when we're dead and gone, there will be 10 ,000s of people who stand in your lineage who love and praise

God. Until all have heard, until the glory of God covers the earth as the water covers the sea.

Amen. Lord Jesus, help us to have a joy for the word of God, a pleasure and a delight in the word of God so that that will be what we transfer to our children.

Let our legacy not be Nintendos and sports and everything else.

Those are good things. But let the thing our families are known for is that our families are known for bleeding and breathing and loving and submitting and bowing and rejoicing and hands raised to the truths of who you are revealed in your word.

Let that be the curriculum under every curriculum. Let all of us with different vocations, whether it's pastors or engineers, whether it's accountants or pilots, let those things be what's secondary of us and let what is primary be the truths that you've revealed in your divine revelation.

Lord, let it be so and not dry and dustily so. Let it be true joyfully so, delightfully so, passionately so.