Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it. Proverbs 22:6

Our dictionary says, to train means to prepare for a contest, to instruct by exercise, to discipline for use. In our culture it is mandatory that we train and develop our children in very specific areas.

Mark 12:28–34 After the Shema (the words Jesus quotes, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart” and so forth), then Deuteronomy 6:6. “These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts.” That is, your minds, your personalities, your whole being. Impress them on your children. You try to make the next generation understand, to see the historical framework, and the revelation of God Himself. As a parent or grandparent, you want them to see how it’s tied to righteousness and truth and integrity.

We Must Teach Them to Discern Liberalism in Religion

Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that you should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints. Jude 3-4

Today, one of the greatest problems our children will face is they will go to a church… If they continue to go to church, and that church no longer believes the Scripture is God’s specific revelation to us, there is a great, dangerous vulnerability. Simply put, what used to be spoken as sin by the church is no longer spoken as sin. So the awareness is absent.

We must teach the objective and historical reality of God’s progressive and purposeful revelation. Through this revelation, God speaks a transcendent message to people in every age. He shapes their minds, hearts and lives so that
they can know and serve Him, and speak His truth to others.

We Have to Teach Our Children to Discern Humanism in Education

Humanism is a camouflaged way of saying atheism. People today don’t say humanism is atheism, although it is also spoken of today in a more favorable way than ever before. But they can say humanism; and humanism sounds good, better than atheism, because it sounds so much like humanitarianism.

The Humanist Manifesto II contains these basic tenets: We believe that traditional dogmatic or authoritarian religions that place revelation, God, ritual, or creed above human needs and experience do a disservice to the human species. The Humanist magazine, January/February 1983, page 26, article “A Religion for a New Age” said: “The battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith. The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new—the rotting corpse of Christianity, and the new faith of humanism.”

They (humanists—not all teachers, and not those in this room)are after our children and one specific way is through the classroom, whether in the public school or the university. College students today are bombarded with this mindset.

We Must Teach Our Children the Driving Force of Paganism in Society

By and large, our society today promotes paganism.

Moses looked ahead and saw a time when the Israelite nation would choose a king (Deuteronomy 17:14–20). He could not know that centuries later, when the Israelites would first ask for a king, they would do so for all the wrong motives—primarily so that they could be like the pagan nations around them. The result was King Saul; what a catastrophe.

The immature Christians at Corinth were affected by a number of social pressures. However, he Corinthians’ problem was not a relapse into paganism. Their Christian faith, however sincere, had not yet transformed the worldview they had inherited from the surrounding culture.

What was taking place in the first Christian century in the battle of Christianity and paganism is what we’re returning to now in the Western world. We have more of a pagan outlook where there are many, many ways. You choose your own way, and everyone has to be tolerant of everyone else. We’ll destroy anyone who is not tolerant, (unless they are intolerant toward Christians), or who believes something other than that ‘any way will do.’ That becomes a kind of neopagan frame of reference and it’s one in which we live and move and have our being today. In fact, it has merely returned to what Christians faced in the first century, when Rome supported paganism.

We Must Train Our Children to Beware of the god of Materialism

1 Timothy 6:10 For the love of money is a root of all evil: and some whose hearts were fixed on it have been turned away from the faith, and been wounded with unnumbered sorrows.

Jesus teaches in the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew 6, to store up treasure in heaven, because our hearts will inevitably pursue our treasure. What we ultimately value will tug at our “hearts”—our personalities, our dreams, our time, our imaginations, our inmost beings—and we will pursue it. Without question, that thing becomes our God.

Matthew 6:33 But seek you first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added to you.

If what we value is merely material, our god is materialism. But if all we cherish most belongs to the eternal realm, then our whole being will pursue what is not just material, but lasting