That would work. All right. This one's called, Children are to learn that all truth is God's truth. Before I read the text, which I will need a Bible for, I do have one, but it's just over there. I think it's in there. Aha. Thank you. Before we get into Deuteronomy 6, let me just open up in prayer. Father, thank you so much for your glorious gospel that comes through those words of those hymns. I feel preached to much better than anything I have to say here. But Lord, we trust that your word, even in law, as everything that you communicate to us in Christ, is blessing. All of your promises find their yes in Him. And Lord, as we approach this great and glorious calling that you have, regardless of how diverse it's carried out in our lives, we can rest in Jesus' performance for us. And so we are free to see your law as a window to an adventure in which we cannot fail, because we are upheld, as you say in Romans 14, by that Master who laid down His life for us. So thank you, and we pray that you would anoint your word and that you would guide the rest of my words as we draw inferences about this great subject of education. We thank you for these things in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, so turn to Deuteronomy chapter 6. Be reminded that this is God's Word, and as a little bit of backdrop, you might be interested to know that Deuteronomy, when the name was given in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, Deuteronomy simply means Deuteros, second in a series, and Namas, law. So, not a second law, then the one on Mount Sinai, but a second reading. And not even really just a repeating, but an unpacking of the law of Moses before the children of Israel were to go into the land. So, in Deuteronomy chapter 6, Now, this is the commandment, the statutes and the rules that the Lord your God commanded me to teach you, that you may do them in the land to which you are going over, to possess it, that you may fear the Lord your God, you and your son, and your son's son, by keeping all his statutes and his commandments, which I command you, all the days of your life, and all the days of your life. and that your days may be long. Hear, therefore, O Israel, and be careful to do them, that it may go well with you, and that you may multiply greatly, as the Lord, the God of your fathers, has promised you in a land flowing with milk and honey. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children and 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. 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 doorposts of your house and on your gates." So, all truth is God's truth. That's what Moses was getting at to the children of Israel. But what Bible-believing Christian doesn't believe this? There is such a thing as contradicting with your life's choices what you claim with your lips. And our lives are always speaking, everything about our lives. We're going to look at three things about this mandate that God gives to parents to teach their children, and you notice the emphasis, and your children's children. How do you do that? They're not there yet. So you obviously are teaching in a way that's geared toward your children's children and for the purpose of multiplying in the land and taking it over. Well, three things that we're going to talk about tonight, and this is just an introduction into this subject. Hopefully we'll get a chance to speak about this a lot more and unpack it more. But we're going to look at the imperative of Christian schooling that's laid down in a couple of Bible verses. Then we're going to imply from Scripture two other things, just to make it practical, the form of Christian schooling and then the content of Christian schooling. The big idea is this, which I don't have up there. That was a boneheaded move. I don't have a separate slide for the big idea, and it's kind of long, but you'll see it in the form of these three things. Here's the big idea, is that if the form and content of our children's education does not teach that all truth is God's truth, then we contradict with our parenting what we say at church. One more time. It's the form and the content of our children's education does not teach that all truth is God's truth. then we contradict with our parenting what we say in church. Notice I didn't say that in everything we'll contradict it. That doesn't mean that you won't get some things right in terms of truth. It just means that in this act, you say, oh good, just that act. Just that act? The education of your kids? Like that's like a, you know, a gumball at the store or something like that? No, just that one thing. Just that one meal, just that one event. It's huge. It's central to our lives, and I don't have to tell you that if you have kids. So here's a big idea. If the form and the content, which we'll lay out in detail, if the form of our children's education and the content of our children's education does not teach that all truth is God's truth, then we contradict with our parenting what we say at church. So first let's look at the imperative of Christian schooling. First things first, we need to establish the fact that such a mandate is in the Bible. Well, first of all, notice that there's a biblical mandate from God to parents in this passage and to the church, as we'll see in the New Testament in just a little bit, to educate those under their care. To educate those under their care. This mandate is given to the home in general, back in Deuteronomy 6. And this is part of God's law, and it's given a rationale here that goes beyond the particular circumstances of Old Testament Israel. After God had made all the commandments, as we see in the first couple verses, the subject matter of the people's observance, He makes it clear that one of the chief ends would be the very survival of the people. It says in verse 1 and 2, that you may do them in the land to which you are going over to possess it. So that's the first design of this education. That you may do this in this land that you're going to possess. And, verse 2, and that your days may be long. So notice the context of the whole law from God to his people. If you know anything about the fifth commandment, and Paul repeats it in Ephesians 6, children obey your parents and the Lord, so this is right. And then he says it's the first commandment with a promise. So notice that the whole context of God's law to his people has the same flavor as that, the same form as the specific commandment through earthly parents to children. Do this that you may live. If you do it, you're going to live. If you don't do it, you're going to get smoked. You and your children's children. So it's establishing a cause and effect relationship between truth in the mind and effective motion in the world. There's a couple of things I'm not saying here. Not an autonomous guarantee. So if I train up a child the way he should go, then he won't have any problem. He'll never stray from the faith. No, it's not a guarantee. Not a means of salvation. Not what we're talking about either. but nevertheless a real cause-and-effect relationship between Christian motive and making a dent in history to the glory of God. So with that God-glorifying dent in mind, the Lord says to the fathers of his people in particular, verse 6 and 7, and these words that I command you today shall be on your heart, which he's already described as all the commandments. You shall teach them diligently to your children, not slothfully to your children, not half-heartedly, not in a delegated way, and you get the leftovers. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and 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. Certainly doesn't sound like a compartmentalized religious education that comes to mean one hour on Sunday. Now Jesus expands this mandate to the church's mission to evangelize all people groups. Notice in the famous Great Commission passage, Jesus says, Matthew 28, 19, and 20, go therefore and make disciples of all nations. People say, there's no mandate to educate. Okay, maybe you don't understand the meaning of the word disciple. It means student. A disciple was specifically one who would follow a teacher, a rabbi. It was called the peripatetic method of teaching, where you'd follow him around and he would teach you. Socrates is one. And they had rabbis that did the same in Israel. That's what a disciple means. It means teaching before anything else. But not just teaching. Listen to the rest of the words. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations. Notice the conquest language. Teaching them to observe some of what I've commanded you. This is just the stuff on Sunday morning. No, he says, all that I have commanded you. Now, we're going to leave aside the relationship between baptism and discipleship here. That's relevant. But no matter where one lands on that debate, one thing we cannot do to the Great Commission is to divorce this evangelical discipleship, the going out and evangelism of making disciples. You can't separate that from education because that is the very meaning of discipleship. Notice that Jesus categorically commands his church to teach these disciples all that I have commanded you. So just as with the Deuteronomy mandate, this is not the kind of teaching that can be done on the side. It's holistic. It encompasses all of the subjects, all of God's truth. Now, several objections can be imagined to our claim that this is a biblical imperative. Objection 1. Now, I treat these respectfully because, in my opinion, these two are the most understandable objections, theologically. So, objection number one, God's grace and my child's sinful nature, and your child's sinful nature, are the two dominant factors. And I kind of caricatured it up there. God's grace and the child's nature are the real factors. But to state more respectably, God's grace and the sinful nature are the two dominant factors in the development and destiny of a child, not education. That's a false dilemma. That's a red herring in logic. It's true that grace and nature are more determinative, but it is not true, so big theology here, two mistakes that that reasoning is making. It is not true that the ultimate causes, sovereignty, sinful nature, that the ultimate causes annihilate the efficiency of secondary causes. Nor is it true that we judge the worth of secondary causes, like brushing your teeth. My kids have never had a problem brushing my teeth because I wondered whether or not it was cramping out God's sovereignty. Never occurred to me. You know, Matt, you're worried about your teeth, but God's going to do what God's going to do. Typically, they don't stumble over that. It's only things that hurt a little bit more. We don't judge the worth of secondary causes by what they can contribute to ultimate causes, but rather whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. 1 Corinthians 10 31. But beyond that, the objection is hypocritical. The person who makes the objection and takes a different educational track will be applying a secondary cause. Why shouldn't grace and nature annihilate the worth of their methods and means? Why is it only doing things with excellence that cramps out God's style? Why is it only those views that claim to be right and important that intrude on God's sovereignty? Why don't the other ones? So that objection is both theological and hypocritical. It's understandable, but when you peel back the surface, it is both irrational and hypocritical. Objection 2. The Bible may give a generic mandate to education, a generic one, but it never mandates a particular form. Now, I didn't have this in my notes, but you're assuming form means building with a flag over here versus over there in this size classroom, stuff like that. That's not the primary meaning of form of education as we're going to see. But this error makes the same mistake as those who complain that the word Trinity is not in the Bible. A thing is taught in Scripture when the truth of it may be irrefutably concluded from clear premises that are explicitly taught in Scripture. The premise is derived from Deuteronomy 6 and Matthew 28.20 alone, and I can give other ones. But if you just start with those two, Deuteronomy 6 and Matthew 28.20 alone, they are sufficient to at least create a crisis of education for parents. How can you take those seriously? How can such a thing be done if education is compartmentalized between religion and real academics? Which, by the way, is an unbelieving assumption. You'll learn the same thing in Biology 101, Day 1. You'll see a little blurb in Chapter 1 of the science textbook that says, don't worry all you cute religionists, scientists are moral people too. Science is just talking about facts. Religion's talking about values. They're both very valuable and deal with two very valuable parts of human reality. Science just deals with fact, in other words, reality, whereas what you're talking about deals with, in parentheses, pink unicorns. That's what they mean. But if you don't think critically, and is your first grader ready to ferret through that? I think not. If the whole form of education says that, that's a problem. How can such a thing be done if education is compartmentalized between religion and real academics? How can it be done time-wise? How can it be done worldview-wise? And how can it be done time-wise and worldview-wise if you're depending on your five-year-old to do it for you? There's also many basic truths of the Bible that a hands-off approach to education neglects. First of all, your child is a sinner and an exceedingly ignorant sinner at that. Nothing wrong with that, except that they're a sinner and they're exceedingly ignorant, just like we are. They're just more so. That's not saying anything against them, that's just a fact that you know already. They can no more navigate through the centuries of philosophical assumptions behind each proposition that they're going to receive in school than a puppy can hold the dog food manufacturer accountable for the nutritional content in his bowl. The Bible says, train up a child in the way he should go, not in the way he would go. but in the way he ought to. Many elements of form and content are secondary and therefore diverse in terms of our choice of them, but the imperative, from God to parents, that it is precisely the parents who must choose and actively coordinate the curriculum, that is not any more unclear than it is unimportant. Let's go a little bit deeper and see why this is, when we look at the real meat of this, the form of Christian schooling and the content. First of all, the form of Christian schooling. So here's where you're going to see I don't mean building, flag over here versus over there, class size, this diploma versus that. It's not what we mean by form. That's an outward shell of form. By form of education, we're referring first and foremost to the definition of education and the method of its communication, or what is called pedagogy. And of course, that method follows, just like preaching, you don't have the method of preaching you have unless you have a particular idea of scripture. Same thing here. In the first place, The whole meaning of the concept of education implies a specific form and a specific content. The word education comes from the Latin verb meaning to lead, ducare. So if you know baseball, you know el duque on the Yankees. Maybe they didn't call him that, but the leader. Okay? I didn't want to bring up Benito Mussolini because it's a shame to my people, but what he was called el duque, unfortunately, and that just means the leader. Don't smirk over there, you anti-Italian ite. To lead is what it means. So, eddicare means to lead out of, which is always closely associated with the words liberal arts, the word liberal. And as much as that's been destroyed by people in the modern world, it originally referred to the violent liberation of the will from conformity to nature. Education was viewed in the classical world as the primary factor in distinguishing between the free citizens and those who would become slaves. And the Christian culture for 20 centuries expanded upon this idea for even greater theological reasons. Think of John 8.32 and Romans 12.2. In John 8.32, Jesus said, you will know the truth and the truth will make you free. Something about the truth reverses the tendency of nature by grace. Likewise, in Romans 12, 2, you see that Paul commands us to not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. So, you see that fundamental tension, this way or that way, and it is precisely the stuff of education that grace uses as its instrument. So these two motions of the mind, transformation from mere nature or conformity to mere nature, are these theologically neutral? So the idea of education immediately begs all sorts of questions. What ideas enslave us to nature? Which liberate from mere nature? Where do the objects of each of the academic disciplines stand in relation to this ultimate contest? Do they? Or are they neutral? And is the idea that they're neutral an unchristian idea? So why are we tackling form before tackling content, if these are ultimately objects, content that education is leading us to or away from? Well, if you're asking that, that's good. You're a step ahead on the lights going on in your mind. But for the vast majority of Christians who first start to take the relationship between worldview and parenting seriously, the issue of form is the one that presses us first. It's the one we first concentrate on. And one of the reasons that happens is because we frankly leave it all up to our wife and pressure them. And they want to put meat on it because they need structure. And we know that. Those of us who've had homeschooling or that age kids already, that's the big immediate concern. And so the simple reason is that the issue is so unsettling to us. Or maybe it's so exciting to us that we rush ahead to make the right decisions. Because decision about things like that implies a form. We're acting out in the world. Our choices require structure. We want to put flesh on it fast, and of course we have to sell our ethical choices to those nearest to us in order to get the ball rolling. So the trouble with this is that we immediately confuse the substance of education with the outward shell. But the problem with that is that the substance of education is fundamentally invisible. In other words, the first thing we do in Christian education, oftentimes, is to mistake the form for the thing itself. And so begins the nasty war between public school, private school, and homeschool. But a quick perusal of those titles will show that none of the above is necessarily Christian schooling. So I have on there neglected rule number one. Oops, no, let me just go back to that first. Form is not content. That's one mistake. But form is not irrelevant to content. So let me liberate some of you right away. If we were to raise an army overnight that got this, and we had a vibrant school with plenty of teachers, and we had a thousand people left over who had education degrees, would we not want them to penetrate into the public school system? Of course we would. So don't look at this as an either-or thing, like you don't have the freedom of conscience, or it's unintelligible to glorify God in that venue. That's not what we're saying at all. But as far as your children, people often say, I want my kids in there for two reasons. I want them to be tougher, either intellectually or culturally, and I want them to be a missionary. Have you trained them to be a missionary before you made that statement? I'm not going to wait too long to hear all the crickets chirp when I ask you that question, because 99% of the time that is not the case. Instead, we're trying to live vicariously through our kids to do the things that we don't have the guts to do. And they're not capable of making those decisions and navigating through those waters. And so we throw them out to the wolves. But, in general, and in specific cases, for adults, or for people at 15, 16, if you really have built them up to that point, and that's a big if, then it can be very God-glorifying. So, none of those titles, and what you normally think of when you think of form, is what we mean by Christian schooling. each can fail to arrange the objects presented to the child's mind in the way that God has revealed. Now, of course, if Jonathan Edwards is your father, homeschooling is probably going to be the most Christian form. Why? Because the content arranging the form of Edward's mind was set to the theological solar system of Christian truth to such a comprehensive degree that he could have raised up 13 evangelical Aristotles if he could have cloned himself, or if he would have neglected his sermons, and thank God he didn't. But I hope this makes the right point. The point is not that one's form will not be more conducive to Christian content at a particular time and place. It will. But that conduciveness, here's a crucial point to understanding what the essence of education is, and I'll define it in a second. The conduciveness of that depends infinitely more on the form of the mind that's ordering the curriculum than it is the comparatively superficial forms of room, class size, or even proximity to one's own parents. the overwhelming decisive factor, really the only primary factor, that should be considered is worldview. And why is that? It's because education is worldview communication. So I think I have another slide on this one. So my fundamental definition of what education is, and therefore, by the way, discipleship, because if discipleship means the same thing, so notice the same thing that ought to be going on materially in the church should be going on with our kids. Education is worldview communication. It is nothing else. Everything else must consolidate every portion of every other mind under the fullest fountainhead of the right worldview. Or else the whole concept of education has been grossly misunderstood and the mandate will have gone unheeded. Homeschooling has a tremendous value, especially when the children are at the youngest ages and there are several in each household. It's difficult to pull off an organized school when mom has to juggle her humans. So homeschooling is a powerful tool. It may be the best formal tool around, but it's not education itself. To treat its superiority over most Christian schools or over public schools as the substance of what education is can turn into superstition and miss the mark of education altogether. So notice that people in the public school that are making that excuse, and people that are homeschooling, and people that go to Christian school, can all be making the same mistake. That's not what we mean first and foremost by the form of education. Because of that, the recent revival in classical education has to be taken with a grain of salt. The classical form is the correct form only insofar as the core of classical content. That's the main idea for the rest of the way. Content, content, content. Why? Because we believe that truth is what's true. Truth is facts about the real world. The real world is what we mean by truth. Objective theology has to be functioning as the blazing, all-informing center. lighting up all the other subjects, or the teachers haven't understood what those subjects are. Because the Bible does speak to that issue very clearly and repeatedly. Consequently, the correct form, in terms of methodology, is the classical framework of the trivia. And you see that here going from bottom to top, foundation upward. Grammar, logic, rhetoric. Grammar is the stage that exists roughly from kindergarten until roughly 10, 11 or so. It can vary, but that's the sponge stage. That's where they're taking in truth. Now, people today say, that's just rote memorization. What, being an imperialist of the mind? I know, because the first premise of education is that I know what I'm talking about and you need to hear it. That's the first law of teaching according to John Milton Gregory's book, The Seven Laws of Teaching, written in the 1880s. And he's right. There's no reason to do education if the teacher believes he has nothing good to say. Okay, so that's the first thing. Grammar corresponds to content. You start with content, with facts. Have you noticed, by the way, that kids prove this out. Kids will believe anything you say. And they're good at remembering it. And they remember stuff you have no idea. How do you remember that? How do you remember those Latin things you don't even know what they are? And they don't know what they are. They don't. But they remember. And that makes the point. God wired the soul this way, and therefore education is to be structured this way, and always was for 2,500 years. Logic, the second state, roughly from age 10 to 14 or 15, they synthesize it. They say, well if this is true, and this is true, formally I just memorize those as facts, then this is true too. If all bears are brown and Winnie is a bear, then Winnie's brown. Now, I don't know if that's true, but it sure is valid if it is true. Okay, they start to synthesize information. Finally, the rhetoric stage, which by the way, if you do rhetoric well, without doing logic and grammar, you will have very, very effective Hitlers. I hear Hitler was a good public speaker. He was very good at rhetoric. Now what happens in K-12 following John Dewey's methodology starting in the 1930s? You have people drawing out of the child their creative energy, a child-centered education, and then eventually that evolves into rhetoric where you're just expressing yourself. Just like Hitler. Hitler expressed himself very well. If you teach a sinner to be an awfully good communicator and manipulator of other people, he will be very, very affected at it. I mean, he may not be one of those, but he will do that in his own sphere of society. Okay, so content also corresponds to character education, by the way. So the grammar in the classical mode, if it's worth anything, is objective theology. Grammar without objective theology at the center is a contradiction in terms and will rot at the foundation level in due time, which is why classical education models that do not explicitly have theology zooming from the center to light up every other subject will not last as a Christian entity for more than 10 years. So the grammar stage involves the absorption of content, or the memorization of the way the world is, in the form of concise blips of data into various subjects that we call facts, or more logically speaking, truths. These truths may be memorized in the form of propositions, or else in the form of vocabulary words that are infused with meaning. But either way, each act of memorization suggests to the mind a truth claim, a picture of the way the real world is, as it must. So do you now see, last point on form, do you now see that the priority of which facts, two things that must be there, the priority of which facts predominate at the grammar stage, and which order they are placed in at the logic stage, entirely determines absolutely everything in the world view of this developing eternal soul. Not only which facts come first, But the order that those facts are arranged in is a fact. It's a big fact. How those facts go together is a fact. And if the education system does not communicate this, it lies about everything, because everything's in that biggest fact. And that brings us to the blazing center of the last point, the content of Christian schooling. What is the content of education? Now those two bubbles there represent two particular facts soaked in at the grammar stage. What is the content of education? The answers, if you give these answers, truth or reality, are both right, since they both come to mean the same thing. So let's put some flesh on this invisible reality by describing these two truths right here. Water boils at 212 Fahrenheit. So they pick that up in one particular class and then way down the hall, if it was a different school, if they even had theology, perhaps, they would read in the scriptures that God separated the waters above from the water beneath. They're both truths. But then so is the truth that the waters that God separated are the same waters that boil at 212. So maybe go to that next slide there. And that's what's happening at the logic stage, is you're rightly ordering those facts. Now, that's a crass way to suggest that, but at any rate, there's a unity of other subjects that order all the other smaller subjects, which, by the way, those larger subjects which order, for example, the scientific method. One example. Every physical science has something in common. They have several things in common, but the main thing they have in common in terms of their methodology is a method that no particular physical science studies. If you don't learn that through logic, which is a theological assumption, if you have a naturalistic worldview, you're not going to admit that. You're going to insist that the scientific method, and the principle of falsifiability that guides it, is entirely inferred from things you observe, because the means of observing is the highest court of rational appeal. If your school does not communicate that outer circle, it is communicating naturalism, in a way that the child, nor the parents, can possibly detect in a million years if you don't learn this. Now, is it true that there is not a right ordering of these three truths? It is not true. The circle that organizes these inductive circles, the two diverse truths, was the deductive circle implied by the third circle. This is a demonstration of higher formal thinking and happens in the logic stage. By the way, you not only had to learn this back 100 years ago, but to get out of the 8th grade, 40 years later, you still had to learn it to graduate the Ivy League, until finally tests on the same subjects were given to Ivy League professors in the 1980s and 90s and none of them could pass. We have a problem. Only the right theology. can bring this unity to the diversity of our children's growing minds. Most college-educated adults cannot think through even these three simple circles. There is a reason for it. The classical thinkers were convinced that we will be slaves if we don't see it. That liberating seeing, that sight, is education, and nothing else is. So we should notice that it is not enough to include theology in our children's studies, nor even to concentrate a certain amount of the day in it. What is needed is to reclaim all of the other subjects back within theology where they always went. As we've labored to show in all of our worldview classes, none of the other subjects make any objective sense apart from their theological first principles. A non-theologian is not competent as a total educator to organize all of the subjects, because education is theology demonstrated and displayed in the various humanities and sciences, and it can never be made something else because the intellectually backward secular state says so. And shame on us for allowing them to tell us what education and truth is. Application. And I want to put one up there, although I'm going to mention two. Just two things to put some flesh on this, tell you what we're thinking. This is basically what it would look like. In two points, and only two points, we're just getting into the subject. Putting content to the form in a Christian school, what would that look like? Well, the following format is fully conscious of the grammar, logic, and rhetoric order. You see that again there. And now, next to that progression that goes upward, you're going to see a first cycle, a second cycle, and a third cycle. Within each cycle, which you'll notice corresponds to 1st through 4th grade, 5th through 8th, and 9th through 12th, you'll notice four different eras in world history. that humanities vastly outnumber the sciences and can be tailored to these four different periods of time. And so beginning in the first grade, a series of the four-year cycles structured the various subjects around these four historic periods. In grades one through four, using a text, I don't have it on me, but Susan Wise Bower wrote a series of books called The Story of the World, four volumes in those different eras of world history. And it does it like a story. very readable and enjoyable for first through fourth graders. So in that, the student is going to move from ancient to medieval. to modern to postmodern worldviews by entering their whole world, history, social studies, language, literature, and philosophy. So that the same year we read Homer and Virgil in literature, we learn Latin in the younger grades or Greek in the upper grades. We learn ancient history and geography, economics and government from Greece and Rome while we're at it. And this is also the time as we move into the logic stage that the student reads Plato and then Aristotle. And so on with the other three historic eras. And this is because in grades five through eight, the cycle repeats itself and goes deeper. It's just appropriate for the logic stage now. Now, if you're wondering where American history fits in all this, it fits both into the modern and postmodern era, so it's hit in half of the years, and likewise with nine through 12. So there's three four-year cycles, each existing with an eye toward the three stages of the trivium. Trivium, by the way, is just Latin for way of three. English grammar and composition, mathematics, and the physical sciences remain just as they are, but notice there's less of them, and so they're easier to fit within the structure. Now, there's two crucial values to this format. Pay attention to this. This is really cool. This is really subjective and arbitrary. Cool, Matt, but subjective and arbitrary is what you mean by cool. So, I'll give you two objective reasons to do this. Number one, First and foremost, this format places the sciences within the larger context of the humanities, which says something about the relationship of God to man and man to nature. When humanities order the sciences, rather than the other way around, the assumption is that the soul is above matter, that man is above the world, that God is above creation, that truth is above cultural shaping of truth. it makes a statement about absolutely everything. Secondly, on a pragmatic level, the majority of symmetry can be found by this method, as the subjects in the humanities that harmonize with each other in a simple way outnumber the other subjects which don't. So more symmetry, easier for the memory of the students. So if you have ten, eleven subjects, and seven of them are humanities, and those are the ones that correspond to each other, their memory, their sponge is going to soak that up easier than if you try to do it either randomly or the other way around. You'd be memorizing things that don't make as much sense together. Lastly, what about real-world practicalities, Matt? Teachers, logistics, all the stuff people that think about these things don't know anything about because their head's in the clouds. Good question, but the first answer has to be C, rule number one. or listen to this again until you realize that education is what it is and that isn't going to change because it's going to be a challenge. So my second answer is, whatever it takes. If you're not willing to do whatever it takes, and you still haven't heard anything I just said, and if just a handful of members of the church body are willing to do what it takes, then by God's grace and with much praying, we will have exactly what's required, whatever that looks like. So what does it look like? A dozen committed mothers once all their children reach school age, and a pastoral staff that is committed to the heights of learning like we're committed to nothing else. What do you think we do with the rest of the adults? While we're on that question, it should be clear that this really strikes at the heart of why churches don't see the mandate for education. Either the church has bought the heresy of anti-intellectualism to begin with, or else we may be under the impression that our children are not to be treated like full-on disciples. as if it's a fundamentally different thing to minister truth into the soul of little people than it is to minister truth into the soul of big people. Well, doctrinal newsflash to Christians, your children are persons with souls and minds. And not only are they to be discipled, children are in one sense more of a disciple than most adults. They're a captive audience. They are sinners. But they don't have the freedom to act out in sin against the communication of knowledge that adults have. They will have excuses, but not the power to excuse themselves. It is the mother of all wasted opportunities to not teach our children that all truth is God's truth. You can be sure that on Judgment Day, or at least in your old age, that the one thing that will cause the deepest regret will be that you and I did the least for the one thing that can count the most. Maximum freedom to pour the maximum truth into the people we say we love the most. But do our decisions and do our plans match up to that? Not if we don't teach our children with everything that we've got that all truth is God's truth. So let me pray and then we will discuss. Father, thank you that all truth is your truth. and that all minds and souls that you have made work according to your design, whether we choose to acknowledge that or not. We pray that if there are questions, that questions would be asked and not hid behind. We pray that if there is offense now or in the future, because we recognize that this is, the doing of this is not the gospel. But the doing of this has been purchased by your Son. So Lord, we don't want to count our children as just one more arena that doesn't matter because of what your Son did. May we never cheapen the Gospel by hiding behind that excuse. Forgive us, Lord, of excuses. Forgive us of our lack of will. Forgive us of our lack of charity as we attempt to explain this with excitement and oftentimes are insensitive to how we do it. So protect our hearts and protect our minds as there are many ways to misunderstand this as there are anything else. So Lord, I pray that Your Spirit would not only be here tonight, but that You would bless every time we talk about this from now into the future, that we would be seen and that we would see ourselves as servants of something exciting and not as lords over what others can't do or can't see or anything else. Make this be something that builds up our children, not something that we boast in. Fill us with your Spirit now, and we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.