TLP S00-E12: Prepare Your Kids. Don't Protect Them. | fighting the urge to shelter your kids

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But here's where the mistake comes in. We're not supposed to keep our children away from the presence of all sin, whatever.

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And that's a good thing, too, because it's impossible. Welcome to Truth, Love, Parent, where we use

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God's Word to become intentional premeditated parents. Here's your host,

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AM Brewster. Thank you for joining me again today. I pray this episode can be part of your journey to becoming an intentional, premeditated,

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God -glorifying parent. You know, one of the factors that precipitated my move from Chicago to the

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Northwoods of Wisconsin was that I wanted to work in a ministry that afforded me the freedom to educate my children at home.

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Now, that might not be you, and that's okay. That was what it was for me. There are many facets of my love for homeschooling, but one in particular bears significant weight in light of today's discussion.

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I remember using a similar illustration with my former administrator. I said, imagine a universe where every 18 -year -old is required to fight a professional soldier as a rite of passage and be afforded all the privileges of adulthood.

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Children who fail to overcome the soldier would not be able to get a job, own a home, or start their own family. What are you going to do with your own daughter?

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Will you schedule her match as soon as she can stand? Will you teach her to knit instead of training her in martial endeavors?

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Will you wait until she's 17 to sign her up for a self -defense class? Of course not. If you want to be truly successful in that world, you'll start training her as soon as possible.

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You'll make sure that when it comes time for her to face off against that professional fighter, she's as equipped as a girl her age can possibly be.

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You're going to do your best to prepare her. There are some things in this world we must protect our children from.

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That's true. There are things we should protect ourselves from, but there are also inevitable battles that are going to be fought by your children.

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They don't need to be protected from those onslaughts. They need to be prepared to meet them head on.

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That's one reason I chose to homeschool my children. I believe God wanted me taking a more active role in preparing my children for the realities of spiritual warfare.

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I believed God would have me and my wife be full -time, intentional, premeditated, disciple -making parents.

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Now, I'm going to read to you a short article written by Doug Wilson. Mr. Doug Wilson, I really enjoy him.

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He is a prolific author and speaker, and his insights on this particular subject are profoundly accurate.

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If you read him, be ready for something you've never encountered before because I love his writing style and he's very passionate about what he believes, but particularly in regard to this subject of preparing versus protecting.

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He wrote an article called, Skanky Movie 3. Don't turn off the podcast, keep listening.

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You're going to appreciate this. You'll understand it in a minute. Here we go. I'm going to read this article from Mr. Wilson.

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One trap that parents fall into is a trap of not wanting sin around their kids, but I suppose this requires some explanation.

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The mistake arises because there are a bunch of sins that parents should keep away from their kids. Kidnappers, for starters, and cocaine dealers, and pornographers, and seducers, and Cartesian dualists.

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One of the accusations leveled against private Christian education is that conservative parents are sheltering their kids.

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What next? Parents sheltering children while we feed them, too. But here's where the mistake comes in.

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There's a question of degree here. We're not supposed to keep our children away from the presence of all sin whatever.

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And that's a good thing, too, because it's impossible. There is a type of sin common to the human condition that your children will encounter on a daily basis on the playground of the finest

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Christian school imaginable. If you don't send your kids to that school because of all the sin there, they will encounter even more of it at church, in their relationships with their siblings, in their bedroom all alone, and in the midst of all their dirty thoughts between their ears.

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The task of parents in this is not to avoid this kind of sin, but rather to teach their children how to battle it.

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You cannot learn to battle something if you are constantly endeavoring to stay away from it. In short, with this kind of sin, there are two errors, equally bad.

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One is to accommodate yourself to the presence of this kind of room -temperature sin in such a way as to assume room temperature yourself.

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That is the way of spiritual death. The other is to pretend to yourself that the choices you have made have somehow successfully distanced you from all that icky stuff.

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But it is as close to you now as it ever was, but is now invisible because you've dabbed your eyes with a special Pharisee salve.

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This is another way of spiritual death. The mere presence of sin discredits nothing and no one.

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A school is not a poor school because junior high girls are catty at lunch, because one of the boys in the fourth grade makes earthy observations about certain bodily functions, or because some blonde named

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Kimberly gets great grades and the word among the kids in the back row who don't like to study is that she might be the teacher's pet.

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Welcome to earth, everybody. This is not the kind of sin parents are required to keep their kids away from.

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They are, in fact, required not to try. This is the kind of sin that parents need to teach their kids to handle, and avoidance is not a biblical strategy.

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Because it will be necessarily unsuccessful, avoidance is simply a pretense of avoidance, with the downside, because you are too busy kidding yourself, of having children who are not learning how to respond and resist.

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Suppose your child is in the classroom of a fine Christian school, one with a great reputation. You know the teachers and administrators, and they really love the

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Lord. But you know for a fact that two -thirds of the kids in your son's class are all hot about the latest skanky movie.

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Just last night, after the youth group get -together, they all went to see Skanky Movie 3, one that has set records for both kinds of box office gross.

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What will your temptation be? Your temptation will be to think that however well -intentioned the folks running the school might be, the quote -unquote tone of the school is not nearly quote -unquote high enough, and that all these families clearly have poor standards.

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You regret having to do this, but you are considering pulling your son, wrapping him up in cotton batting for two final semesters of mom school.

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You think the problem is low entertainment standards, when the actual problem is that no Christian parents, including you, are teaching their kids what moral leadership looks like.

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About a third of the kids who went to that movie really didn't want to and wouldn't have gone if someone in the class, I'm thinking of your son in particular, had done more than simply studied his shoelaces when the subject came up.

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You are tempted to think that the others have low entertainment standards, when the real lesson is that your son is not a moral leader.

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The response ought not to be to do something that will make him even less of one. As I said before,

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I really appreciate Doug Wilson's style and I appreciate his passion and I appreciate in this particular article how right he is.

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I would encourage you to listen to episode 7 called Stop Being the Leader for more advice and how to prepare your children to be the kind of leader that Mr.

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Wilson is referring to. This is a huge deal. This is what our kids are encountering every single day, and to be honest,

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I mean, if you're listening carefully, this may even sound a little bit hypocritical due to what I said at the beginning of the show.

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I told you that I believe that God wanted me to keep my kids at home in order to prepare them for what they're going to find out in the world, and here

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Mr. Wilson in his article is talking about the fact that, you know, I just want to pull my kid out for two semesters of mom's school because, you know, oh, these terrible people are running this program.

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But the key difference here is the fact that I am not trying to protect my children, I'm trying to prepare them.

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And it is true that you can prepare your children within the context of them being homeschooled, going to a private school, or going to a public school.

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It's going to look very different and I hope to tackle this discussion about education and your family in the future, but right now the discussion has been about preparing them, not protecting them.

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How are you preparing your kids? In what ways are you introducing them to the person who is their only hope for survival on this planet and for eternity?

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You know, I used the illustration before of a fighter. I tend to do that because I'm a martial artist. I have been doing the martial arts now for nearly 25 years and this is a big deal to me.

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Everyone in my family studies the martial arts, but let's use a metaphor that maybe resonates better with you.

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How about basketball? What if we protected our kids from the heartbreak that comes with losing a scrimmage?

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The sweat and exertion that you have during a scrimmage? The ruining and wearing out your new shoes during a scrimmage?

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What if we just took all of that out and just got rid of scrimmages? How prepared would your child be for the game?

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You see, you're not supposed to protect him from that. He's supposed to go in there. He's supposed to wear himself out. He's supposed to realize that, oh wow,

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I went left when I should have gone right. I didn't pass. I didn't shoot correctly. He needs to see where he's failing. He needs to see what the standard is.

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He needs to practice and practice and practice, but with our kids, we so often throw them into the game without ever once teaching them, preparing them the way they should.

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Don't protect your kids. Prepare them for the world that's out there. Prepare them for the fact that Satan wants to destroy them.

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Now, if you'd like some more specifics on how to specifically prepare your kids within the context of your family,

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I'd love to help. You can email us at counselor at evermindministries .com. You can also call us at Victory Academy.

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Victory Academy has been around for over 30 years, helping families who are dealing with teens in crisis, and we're here to help, but we also like to help families who aren't quite to that crisis point yet.

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We'd love to help you not have to send your kids to a place like ours, and you can call us at 715 -759 -5976.

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As always, I encourage you to go to our website evermindministries .com and check us out on social media.

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I'd love to see you there, and I hope your family has a wonderful week, not being protected from the bumps and bruises that come with learning to glorify

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God more, but with you preparing them, helping them to understand who God is, who they are, and what that means for their lives today.

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Truth. Love. Parents. Is part of the Evermind Ministries family, and is dedicated to helping you become an intentional, premeditated parent.

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Join us next time as we search God's Word for the truth your family needs today.