Kuyperian Education

Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.

Kipurian education training into cultural advancement is my Title for my talk tonight, and I feel like I’ve been lobbed a softball, and I could just close my eyes and swing This is something that I Love to talk about so if tonight’s talk is disjointed It’s just because, well I hope it’s just because there are a thousand thoughts going around in my head as I do. Think about this very matter. It is, yeah it’s not because I didn’t try to make them concise and helpful, but I would just ask you to hear it charitably and just enjoy.

enjoy. Take back, sit back in here as we try to work through what God’s aim for education would be because education is fundamentally teleological and that means it has an ultimate aim. A telos is an ultimate aim and there is a telos to education. Whether you call it brainwashing or enculturation or something else there is a point, there’s always a point. For faithful Christians the telos involves training and character, teaching about God’s creation and about the God of creation. For the world or secular schools it may be more or less intentional than that but it’s still teleological. When we undertake the education of our young ones we have an aim in view and you can be pretty sure that if you don’t have a goal for your kids education somebody else does. But So make mistake, there’s always a tell-us, always a goal.

And I am always thinking about these things. So as I’ll mention in just a few moments, I get to be the headmaster of Evangel Classical School. And ours is a small school and we are actually driven by these principles all of the time, all the way down and imperfectly.

So for me, this goes beyond just a theoretical, hypothetical, pie in the sky, head in the clouds, sort of conceptual thoughts about education. And it has implication on the ground for me literally every day. So that’s part of why I get excited about this. So as I said, tonight we’re talking about Kuyperian education and training unto cultural advancement and I’ll be talking about what amounts to my own personal philosophy. And it is the philosophy that drives Evangel Classical School and it’s also the philosophy that drives Comfort College. And as we’ve been learning in these Sunday evening talks, faithful Christian living in the various spheres of influence, faithful Christian living in the various spheres of influence is a formula for human flourishing and for cultural flourishing and also for God’s glory.

And what I’m calling, Kuyperian education should have as its telos, the training of faithful Christians for living in these different spheres. So we’ve talked about politics and art and some things like that, and how Kyperian living would involve faithful Christian living in all of these spheres. Well, Kyperian education is undertaking to equip people to go out into those spheres in a school context. The church is charged to do the same thing. The church’s job is to train up Christians to go out and live in those spheres. And likewise, when we’re training children, we’re talking about the same sort of thing, but in an educational context.

My talk tonight then will deal with different aspects of this sort of education. We’re gonna kinda orient our thoughts very generally under three big headings though, and it’s basically a what, a who, and a why. So we’re going to consider together what is Kuyperian education, for whom is Kuyperian education, and why do it? Why do Kuyperian education? So we’re going to go ahead and get started then with the first of them, namely, What is Kipurian education?

And these are not inspired definitions, these are working definitions for our terms. I would submit that Kipurian education is education that gives students a reason to influence culture for Christ as well as the tools to do so. A reason to influence the culture for Christ as well as the tools to do so.

And that reason then is Jesus is Lord. Jesus is the sovereign overall. Christians live our lives in submission to his lordship and we take seriously our responsibility to represent him across all the different spheres of society. The tools are, I would submit, a robust and a substantive Christian worldview, a conviction that Jesus is Lord and God is sovereign, and an optimistic confidence that we are on the right side of redemptive history, and beyond all this, a big work capacity, namely that the students would be able to handle a lot of responsibility.

Kuyperian Education gets its name from Abraham Kuyper, and he was a guy who enfleshed this, although I think he would probably say he hadn’t received a very Kuyperian education himself. Among other things, Kuyper was an educator. He started, as you may be aware, the free University of Amsterdam, demonstrating his own commitment to, He saw the need to equip students to live in light of the lordship of Jesus Christ. And it was at the dedication of the free University of Amsterdam that Kuyper famously thundered, there’s not a square inch in the whole domain of human existence over which Jesus Christ, who is sovereign overall, does not say mine.

And Kuyper believed this. It was because of this conviction about Christ’s pervasive lordship that he started. All sorts of things, and all sorts of spheres. Recognizing the need for Christian representation in politics, he started a political party. He was the prime minister of the Netherlands for one term. Recognizing the need for Christian news media, he started a newspaper. He was also a pastor, a writer, the founder of the free university as we’ve already mentioned. And though Kuyper was but a man, because he definitely had his flaws just like you and I do, He understood well that if Jesus’ lordship is in fact pervasive, then we have work to do as his representatives and as far as that lordship extends.

And if we together with Kipher affirm this declaration that there’s not one square inch, not one thumbs width in the whole domain of human existence over which Jesus Christ, whose sovereign overall does not say mine, if we affirm that together with him, then that has implications in how we live as Christ representatives in this world. And Kuyperian education is intended to put feet to this idea, to train up people for that process. So as I mentioned before, I get to serve as headmaster of a small classical and Christian school that is committed to a Kuyperian view of cultural involvement. We are trying to do all that I just mentioned.

We’re actually trying to do that. We believe that God is sovereign, that Jesus is Lord, that Christ’s lordship is everywhere, pervasive, and the duty of Christians is to be his faithful agents and representatives in every space, in every sphere of influence, including political, the religious, the commercial, the scientific, the artistic, and more. When they are trained, we want for our students to engage the culture, and we are working to equip them with the tools and the interest in doing so. So while this is not intended to be an infomercial for ECS, I can’t help but use some examples from our school and our own experience to show you what this philosophy looks like in a K-12 context.

So then let’s consider for whom is Kuyperian education? And I would say that Kuyperian education is for Christians. Any questions? It’s not complicated, but if our operating assumption, aside from Jesus’ Lord, is that Christians should want to see Christian influence expanded, well this model of education trains to that end.

So there are educational models out there that train students well for life, for work, for critical thinking and more. But if and when they are taught apart from a Christian worldview, they lack potency and they lack staying power, they lack something in which to cohere. This model includes and combines practical tools and transcendent principles that color and energize how we live.

Beyond this, students who are well trained in these things but do not love Christ but well-trained adversaries. So can an unbeliever attend such a school? Sure, but his education will be kind of soul-less. So again, make no mistake. So, Kyperian education is Christian. Not all Christian education is Kyperian. Christians can receive a Kyperian, in fact, unbelievers can receive a Kyperian education, but it is going to be hollow. It will be soul-less. This is a great time then to talk some about parental responsibility as we consider who this education is for. Whether they like it or not, parents are responsible for their children’s education.

It is the duty of parents to ensure that their children’s educators have the same aims that they do. And of course, the easiest way to ensure that parents and educators are on the same page is for parents to be the educators of their children. Homeschooling done well requires the sort of investment and sacrifice and the commitment that God expects in Deuteronomy 6, verses 4 through 9. 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.

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

Many parents are able to do this well. I shouldn’t say that. Some parents are able to do this well. Not many. Our school actually is a data point is, the population of former homeschool families is incredibly high, very high. So they loved it, they loved the idea of homeschooling, and they bumped up against what they were able to do well. Because this is the challenge. And when we look at the bigger undertaking of equipping them for the different spheres of culture and society, then it gets even more overwhelming. So many parents then are not able to do this well. And as such, they solicit the help of others, usually in the form of a day school.

but this does not remove responsibility from the families. And any families who are enlisting the help of a school or of another teacher are still responsible for what their children are learning. And so they should choose a day school very, very carefully. And so we have these conversations in my office when I’m talking with prospective families, and I sometimes joke that I’m trying to scare them off. And if, for all of my efforts to try to scare them off, they keep saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s what we want, then they’re probably our people. But if I tell them, listen, this isn’t a decision you should make flippantly because you’re going to be responsible for everything that I say to your kid.

And I’m responsible too. But think about this. I work for you, I represent you during the day as one with delegated authority. So you wanna make sure that when you’re enlisting help from other people, you’re not abdicating that authority. Does that mean that I’m absolving myself for responsibility? No, of course not. But at the end of the day, God is, and at the end of our lives, God is going to ask parents for how they stewarded their children, not me for how they stewarded, for how I stewarded their children. He will ask me that about mine, and so I choose to have the teachers of Evangel Classical School speaking into my kids’ lives because I trust them implicitly and I’m ready to be accountable for what they say.

So, but that accountability doesn’t go away no matter how much enlisting of help of others that you try to do. Long before I had ever heard of Abraham Kuyper, or I was an educator at a local private school, and I noticed a disturbing trend that is epidemic in our culture, and I had seen this from the time I was a student teaching and onward. And it actually transcends educational models, even right down to homeschooling. And the biggest problem in education today, I think, is parental dereliction.

As a trend, when parents are involved in responsible children do well. And when parents are disinterested or they offload the responsibility for education of their children to somebody else, their children suffer for it. So when we’re considering, for whom is this education? It’s four Christians. This is a Christian education. And on the matter of choosing a school, I have in my notes triage versus telos.

Many parents believe that education is neutral. Many parents believe that by extension, education is neutral. So it doesn’t actually matter who tells their children that two and two are four. They’re more concerned that their children be sheltered and safe. Two and two are four all the time, right? Well, there actually is a worldview that assumes and posits that it’s two and two or four because Jesus is Lord and he holds together the universe by the word of his power. And there are fixed laws of the universe that are knowable and they’re actually assumed by moderns even if they cast off those restraints. Many well-intentioned parents, though, will send their kids to private or Christian schools to protect them as they respond to or as they anticipate dangers in public schools.

They don’t want their children being bullied in the locker rooms or sharing a locker room with someone of the opposite sex. So they enlist the help of a private school. This is a good idea, sure. I mean, it’s a good idea to protect your kids, absolutely, who would argue otherwise. But that by itself does very little in the way of training for life or training in character. Our children should be sheltered, but they should be sheltered in a context where they’re being trained to not be sheltered anymore. Where they are being trained to move beyond the shelter when the time comes. I’m very fond, and if you’ve heard me talk before about this, you’ve heard me use this illustration, of the juxtaposition of day camp or summer camp and boot camp.

A child who goes to a Christian summer camp may have a fantastic spiritual experience. He’s sheltered from the ungodly influences of the world for two weeks and he’s able to just focus on the Lord and his relationships with others in something of a Christian bubble. These are often referred to as mountain top experiences and quite fittingly because when you’re on top of a mountain there’s only one direction you can go. Contrast this with boot camp. Or is, so if you’re a marine it’s basic training, if I have it right. Boot camp army, basic training, okay. One’s a little longer than the other I’m told. Okay, so boot camp or basic training for a soldier.

A soldier who attends boot camp is being trained for life outside the wire. And boot camp, they use live rounds. They physically beat their bodies and discipline themselves, but the enemy is on the outside. This training is hard because battle and war time and protecting a country are hard.

They’re trying to build soldiers who are mentally tough and physically strong. Likewise, Kyperian education is rigorous because shaping culture is hard. So we have something of an academic boot camp where we will in a context where the instructor and the classmates are actually all on the same side discuss some of the ideas that are most hostile to Christianity. And I mean, I’ll ask my students from time to time, a few times a year, what are your biggest hang ups or concerns or fears about the Christian religion?

I mean, let’s have it out. Let’s have it out now so you don’t go off to university where there’s some guy talking about Nietzsche like he’s actually God, God’s not dead, God is Nietzsche. And, or he has an axe to grind and it wants to try to stamp out your faith. Let’s talk about that now. Let’s actually go ahead and read Karl Marx and the Communist Manifesto so that you can understand on its face its problems. Rather than somebody who’s a proclaimed, self-proclaimed Marxist who doesn’t know what Marx said.

But it’s supposed to be hard and not hard for hard sake necessarily, but hard because what we’re trying to do is hard and what we’re trying to produce is hard. Nobody ever wants to call 911 and have a poorly trained police officer show up. Nobody wants to turn on the cable news network ever. And nobody wants to tune into Fox News and find out that Iran has become, has ratcheted up hostilities toward the United States. And then take a deep breath and go, well, at least our troops got a soft basic training. No, none of that. So likewise, if what we’re trying to undertake with our young people is nothing less than cultural transformation, well then they should go ahead and do their reading drills and try to get through that list in less than two minutes.

And when they fail, to try it again tomorrow and go ahead and laugh along the way. And yes, that cursive B is not readily identifiable just yet. We can’t quite tell that it’s a B, but keep working on it. We’re a forming character, and we are, little by little, working to transform culture. All of this requires toughness, it requires intelligence, and it actually requires a huge work capacity, all of which can be cultivated with academic rigor and love.

A well-trained soldier can go into battle flanked by his buddies who are also well-trained and he trusts them, And he can be confident that the battle is the Lord’s to decide, the outcome is. He’s been trained, he’s physically capable. Likewise, a student of Kyperian education develops two things, the capacity to enjoy the work and the confidence to rest in the sovereignty of God. We want students who understand that the point of life is not rest and leisure, but rather being spent for others. spent for others. Being used up is completely normal. Just ask Paul in 2 Corinthians 4, having multiple plates spinning and mental windows open and thoughts competing is completely normal.

For culture shapers and for Christ’s ambassadors in the various spheres, the work is never finished, at least while we’re alive. So, and this is key, what if they can learn to enjoy the work? If we can equip our children to enjoy their work, which they’re always going to have, then they will win and they can transform the world.

At ECS, I’m sorry, I’m sure you’re getting tired of hearing these examples by now, at ECS, we try to cultivate this through laughter and song. Singing and laughing while working hard are excellent strategies for learning to enjoy the work. If you’ve ever been part of a clean-up party, you know, at the Boer’s house in their kitchen, or at ECS after an event, it seems like they’re always singing Disney songs and Psalms. I’m not, I mean, I don’t pick the songs. But doing that with your buddies while like up your elbows and dish suds is kind of fun.

Yeah, well there’s a principle there that actually applies to the rest of life. What if your grueling monotonous job is something you can actually find enjoyment in? So singing and laughing while working hard, as I said, are excellent strategies for enjoying the work and the laughing singers are really, actually they’re a little bit scary when you encounter them. So you have to wonder if the laughing singers can be beaten, and not typically, but it depends on what context we’re able to laugh and sing. We want them to have the capacity to enjoy their work, but also the confidence and, well, the sovereignty of God needs to be our bedrock, and so that needs to be our point of greatest confidence.

If it’s our starting point and it energizes our work. If our success depends on our faithfulness, then we may as well quit now and pursue a life of ease. It is precisely because God is at work in and through us and because he is sovereign that we go ahead and get up in the morning, that we go to work, that we converse and study and worship and play and eat and sing and sleep and do it all again tomorrow. God has created good works for us to walk in now and we do it. It may go without saying then, but it’s still merits mentioning under this heading of for whom is, Kuyperian education. This educational model is overkill if you’re running from something.

So do you get that? None of what I’ve said is about a retreat. So if you’re just disgruntled where you are, then why would you go to boot camp? I mean, if you’re really lacking direction, I’ve seen young men who have no idea what to do with their lives going to the military. And then all of a sudden they have direction. Somebody’s directing them.

And that’s and that and that’s that’s in many cases a good move If you can’t direct yourself, and you’re not motivated then then do that But but otherwise if you’re if you’re a lazy nincompoop with with yes, I just said nincompoop With with no direction or motivation and you to go off to boot camp, and you think you can stay the same You’re very soon gonna find out that you you’re getting more than you signed up for so likewise for for this model of education, it is actually really bad if you’re just disgruntled and running from something, but if you’re running towards something, like I want my child to be used by God in whatever sphere God places him as a culture shaper and one who can help to spread influence, then this is fantastic.

If you’re looking to train your children to love Christ in the various cultural spheres, then this is something that you should seriously consider. As I mentioned, for culture shapers and for Christ’s ambassadors and the various spheres, the work is never finished, so the key then is to enjoy it. And so then now we come to the question, why do this? Why do this at all? Why do Kyperian education? And so our working definition here, or at least our working answer to this question is, Kiparian education equips culture shapers unto the advancement and flourishing of a culture.

It equips culture shapers unto the advancing and the flourishing of a culture. For those who love God and who love people, strategically placing Christians, faithful Christians in all the spheres makes a lot of sense. It’s a formula for cultural takeover. It’s fun to imagine what it would look like if the medical and the political fields were dominated by faithful Christians. What if higher education were, once again, overwhelmingly Christian? The last time that that happened, we actually changed culture in a big way, and we’re the recipients of that. It has drifted a long, long way since then. What if all the businesses on State Avenue were run by Christians who utilized ethical business practices and who loved their employees and customers well because they loved Christ?

Like do you think that that could have a transformational impact on Marysville and Marysville Commerce? Kiparian education trains those future physicians, politicians and business owners, that Jesus cares about all those things. It trains those future politicians and physicians and business owners that Jesus cares about those things and that Jesus cares about people as well and so we should care about them too. But you may be asking, doesn’t modern education already do that? And actually it doesn’t. So I’m gonna talk for just a moment about the distinction between modern education and what I’m calling Kuyperian education.

And I’m distinguishing it in these terms. Transfer of information versus transfer of culture. What is the difference between traditional education and Kuyperian education? I would argue that it’s the same as the difference between modern education and classical education. It’s a matter of the transfer of information versus the transfer of culture. Transferring certain information from teacher to pupil for sake of academic performance unto college placement, job placement, big house, lots of money, is sometimes fine, but just as often, it’s actually small and even selfish and very not fulfilling, unfulfilling. And it’s rampant in modern education.

But by the way, remember that this is still teleological. There is still an end to modern education. And today we are using this model to still produce certain kinds of people, but they’re people who are dependent. They’re not independent, and we’re doing so as a culture by greatly restricting what we teach them. We actually have, well, we have excise, significant parts of what ought to be being taught. I’ll come back to that in just a little bit. Against this model, we have what our ancestors did. Classical education has been the means of training Western culture shapers for the better part of two millennia. It has equipped Renaissance men, critical thinkers, principled decision makers, and more.

In this sense, it is profoundly Kyperian, although it predates Kuyper, just like Calvinism predates John Calvin. Historically, education has been about the transfer of culture. We used to be concerned with what the next generation needed to know in order to be culture carriers and surpass us. Do you get that? That used to be our preoccupation. What do my kids need to know to not go backward culturally, but instead to take what my great-grandfather, grandfather and dad did and have learned and earned and built and established and then improve on it. Whether it was a student in the classroom or an apprentice in the blacksmith’s forge, the training was about the transfer of culture, learning from those who have gone before us so that the following generation can improve culture.

What does that look like? And so I’m gonna talk for just a moment about the value of studying history. What happens when we remove history from a school’s curriculum? When we remove history or even parts of history from a school’s curriculum, we lose the opportunity to learn from history.

For some, that is the point. A generation that has studied the bloody trail of Marxism is going to be a bit put off by neo-Marxism or by critical race theory or the Black Lives Matter movement. So some in our culture intentionally deprive them of the education that would keep them from making the mistakes of our fathers.

But we wish to honor our fathers. We wish to honor our fathers, and we honor our fathers when we surpass them by building on their foundation rather than simply moving on from them. There’s a strong temptation in our culture today to assume that what is old is not as good. It is outdated, it is obsolete, it is primitive. And as lovers of history and lovers of God and His Word, we have to reject that, and we happily do. So when, like what I would call good Hyperians, we get those faithful Christians leavening the culture across the spheres, they need to know what to do when they get there. So it’s one thing to get, let’s say in this room, We have one generation from now, a fantastic representation across the political, scientific, artistic, educational spheres.

What are they gonna do when they get there? Are they going to know how to tread water, go backwards, go forward, do what they’re told? A Kyperian politician will be historically oriented to make his father proud. He’ll understand what his fathers fought for and established what they guarded against, what they wanted to ensure, what they loved, what they feared. He’ll understand the principles that drove them, and he’ll learn from their victories and from their failures.

What we see today is precisely the opposite of this. History is replaced with social studies. The most influential writers and thinkers in history of our culture are not now out of vogue, often because they’re white males. And they are actually regarded as part of our systemic problems. Nevermind that without them we’d have no society at all for our problems to exist in. Their works are largely being replaced, not supplemented, replaced with works by marginal groups because they’re marginal in spite of their influence. Whether they’ve been influential or not. And this upsetting of the establishment is largely celebrated.

And I left political correctness about five or six steps ago, which is unfortunate. But if we deprive our children of the valuable lessons learned from studying the works of prior generations in our historical stream, we ensure that they will not surpass us or improve our culture. Rather, they will be well equipped to repeat the errors of generations past and create a new culture in their own image. And we see it happening little by little, even now.

I would be remiss if at this point I didn’t talk about eschatology. And some of you are wondering, that was a bit of a transition. If I didn’t talk a moment about Kyperian education in light of our eschatology. In 2014, a number of us, even several in this room I think, went to Together for the Gospel. How many of you were there when Mark Deverer asked a series of questions about how people got saved? Yeah, there you go. So they can fill in any gaps or tell you if I’m lying. And in the opening session, Mark Deverer asked a series of get to know you questions of the 12,000 plus people in attendance, most of them men.

He asked lead pastors to stand. He honored the longest tenured pastor in the arena and so on. One of the things he asked us though is how we came to Christ and so he would have everyone stand up and said things like remain standing if you responded to an evangelistic gospel presentation. And everybody sat down except for maybe 100 people in the arena. It’s like wow, look at that. people came to Christ by cold call evangelism. Or remain standing if you came to Christ by some conversion experience by yourself as you were reading your Bible. Everybody sits down in the arena except for maybe a dozen people or so.

He must have had two or three other options and every time you’d have everyone stand up and then remain standing if they identified with his potential scenario. Last of all, he said, please remain standing if you are raised in a Christian home. And lo and behold, about 20% of the people sat down and about 80% remained standing. That was very striking to me. The overwhelming majority of Christians in that arena that day had come to Christ by their immersion in a Christian culture. Far more than had responded to any formal gospel presentation.

It’s impossible to tell if that group was representative of Christianity on the whole, or Christian culture elsewhere. But it sure told me one thing, and that is namely this, culture matters. Does that mean that those hundred people who had trusted Christ as a response to cold call evangelistic efforts are worthless? No, I’m not saying that at all, of course not. But, I’m a dispensationalist. I affirm that there’s a future for Israel, that Christ’s return to earth will be premillennial, that he could come and take the church out of the world at any time, and without any additional events or warnings, the rapture then as I believe what they call immanent.

And that’s what it means when there’s nothing else that has to happen beforehand. And because of the imminency of the rapture and because of our love of people, we should be very concerned with getting as many people saved as we can right now. In a lot of dispensational context, they take that and then go down to Home Depot and get a sandwich board. And Jesus saves, ask me how. And if a Christian is really concerned about getting people saved, because Jesus could remove the church from the world at any moment, that Christian also should be concerned about the best way to get a bunch of people saved. The way that will actually bring God then greatest glory.

And what is the most effective, and what if, let me at least propose it as a hypothetical, what if the most effective method of evangelism is actually the establishment of Christian culture. Just like the cultures that produced that arena full of Christians in 2014.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying evangelism is not necessary and good. But, and so are apologetics and all those well crafted explanations as to the hope that we have, that Peter tells us to have ready for us, when people ask. But I believe that too many Christians today overlook the evangelistic potency of culture building.

Provoking the world to jealousy of our inheritance, not what we’ve earned, what we have been given. Our inheritance is a potent evangelistic strategy. Doing that by your own joyful and robust living is a potent strategy. We must live in such a way as to show our love for God and our love of people. We must live in such a way as to make them want what we have because there’s plenty of God’s grace to go around. Not because we are great, but because God is, and we boast in our inheritance and in the giver of our inheritance. And in fact, Paul goes a step further and says, we boast in our weakness. Like, the best that I could do was earn myself destruction.

And I am so far from meriting God’s favor meriting God’s favor, that it’s actually something I will glory in, because in my glorying in my own weakness, I exalt Christ. So I would have to roll that out there, that there is an eschatological agenda to all this as well. That is, we want to provoke the right kind of jealousy among the world unto their salvation by our culture building and robust living, and evangelistic efforts through spoken gospel presentations as well. I want to conclude with a word on the qualifications of teachers. So this educational model all coheres in Christ. There’s a reason and a place for academics, for training and character, for the teachers to be repentant and so on. But as such, it’s just a model. It’s not an inspired formula. It has to be carried out, has to to be lived out and unleashed by teachers.

So I’ll say that again. It coheres in Christ. There is a necessary human component to it. It’s been said in some circles like education doesn’t just come in a package you can get from, you know, delivered to your doorstep via UPS. It’s not like that. Just about any homeschooling mom could tell you as much after she’s tried it for more than two minutes. And since I’m all about the transition tonight, a kettlebell snatch is an awesome movement. Have any of you ever seen a kettlebell snatch? So it’s a cousin to the barbell snatch, but you know, just from here to overhead, it doesn’t look like much, but when you’re swinging around a weight that’s pretty heavy, it actually is very taxing on the lungs and on the heart and requires a lot of body parts.

Really fantastic movement. I love kettlebells and in kettlebell circles, It’s referred to as the czar of kettlebell movements. So people just pay homage to the snatch because it’s like it conquers me. So in those kettlebell circles, you know what they say? You can’t out snatch a donut. I’m sorry that the donut is consuming the text up there.

And what is the point there? Like it really is a good movement and you should go ahead and do lots of them but you’re negating all of that if you chase, If your post workout meal is a couple of donuts, because like two donuts will put into your body twice what a very rigorous kettlebell snatch workout will take out.

So if you actually want to be healthy, then the diet is a necessary part of it as well. So if you’re gonna take away anything tonight, Guys, you can’t out snatch a donut. All right, there you go. Likewise, you can’t out, that’s right. You can’t out teach a donut. No, you, no.

What got cut off there was the word sin. So you can’t out snatch a donut and you can’t out teach sin. Donut sin, we’ll have arrived as, that’s right, we’ll have arrived as a church, yeah. So any teacher or parent or anybody else who thinks that personal repentance is rendered unnecessary by an amazing educational model is deceiving himself and harming his students or his children. Is God gracious throughout this whole process? Yes, He is. But He’s more inclined to be gracious to the faithful than to the presumptuous. And for us to assume, hey, we’ve got our model dialed in, Therefore that will cover all of our personal sins.

We pray that you would help us to be humble and to sit appropriately at the feet of those who have gone before us, and then to honor them by building on what they have established and surpass them. I know that as a father, I really desperately want for my children to surpass me, and I want to give them as much to work with along the way as I possibly can. May they not surpass me by doing everything opposite of what I did and be better for it. But that means that I have some work to do here and now. All of us do. But we are grateful for the direction that you’ve given your word, and we are grateful that we get this time to examine this tonight. Help us to depend on you rightly and be glorified in the outcome. And we pray this in Christ’s name, amen.

We pray that you would help us to be humble and to sit appropriately at the feet of those who have gone before us, and then to honor them by building on what they have established and surpass them. I know that as a father, I really desperately want for my children to surpass me, and I want to give them as much to work with along the way as I possibly can. May they not surpass me by doing everything opposite of what I did and be better for it. But that means that I have some work to do here and now. All of us do. But we are grateful for the direction that you’ve given your word, and we are grateful that we get this time to examine this tonight.