As incoherent as it really is

Discipleship, we need to get this.

Vision and discipleship, it pertains to all walks of life, family is where you learn about, and first practice it, which then prepares you to press out in dominion to disciple the Nations.

On the way back from a mountain trip last week the family listened to the Disney discussion cd’s from vision forum. I have mentioned these before. This time while hearing Botkin talk about Walt Disneys Victorian understanding of morality, which was apart from real biblical moorings. (Wholesome goodness will always get punked, by the shifting sand of humanism that’s its resting on) The big lesson is on how Walt had no understanding of discipleship. After his death his successors made off with his creation.

I have been reading about Westminster, the college that Machen built in the 1930’s when the liberals hijacked, what had remained of the Old Guard Christian thinking. I have talked of Machen before here.

Machen built up this college, New Westminster and had Cornelious Van Til on staff. Lead by Van Til, Westminster was an island in a sea American Relativism. Van Til tore up humanism on a presuppositional level. Machen died shortly after starting the college and could not disciple, mentor an succensor .

The college came to actively oppose the very biblical vision that started it! I can now see and am aghast at how this happened over and over and over the last couple of hundred yrs as the church took the great commission, to make disciples of every nation, and put it on a slim fast diet that became, getting people saved. As an institution the church finds itself pushing back against Christian dominion and discipling nations, its seen as interfering, with the real work of the gospel. Who’d thunk it?

As a part of modernity, the concern is about “who“ is best equipped to grow, this, or that institution, rather than who has the correct understanding of what was the primary vision.

Countless foundations, universities and institutions are now adrift,or worse, deliberatly used in manners contrary to their design, as no one at the top discipled or set in place the importance of this understanding. Proposition: We miss it at the institutional level because we missed it at the family level.

As a father, your primary calling is the discipling of your children. Not maybe, not kind of. This needs to be a burning mission, your back ground music as it were, in harmony with glorifying God. Done right, this will pass on a vision that goes beyond the family and even leaves your children’s children with an understanding of how they are a part of something that is Galatic and eternal in scope. Increasing the kingdom of God for His own glory. (Doug Phillips had a great teaching on how God makes clear, that for many key men he used, He knew, they would pass on to their children his truth, and it was a factor in their being used by him. Abraham, Noah.)

We must throw away, discard, the Amercana lie about how “they” must decide. Our kids had no choice over being born, or when, or to what mom, or dad, or what their moms and dads strengths and weakness’s would be, or the historical family heritage it is a part of , or what continent, what nation, what state, what city or neighborhood, or house. They do not decide how tall they will be, hair color, facial features, big boned, male or female, basic gifting and talents, all are divinely chosen by God as creator. He does not work from our preference sheet, when he knits us together in our mother’s womb (Isaiah 44:24 )

Along with every other created thing in the universe they didn’t get to sign off about being a part of glorifying God. When thought of in this manner, the idea that they would be shot out as arrows to move in terms of Gods word is totally normal in the context of a Biblical Christian family. It’s such a crock, the idea, that “they should decide” and must be seen as incoherent as it really is. There is no neutral ground here, either you aim them, or the culture/state will do it, all the while saying, “they are making their own decisions.”

We must direct them, aim them out as arrows, as commanded by scripture, filled with purpose that is in harmony with who God has made them. No beards for our daughters, not equipped to cut their husbands off at the knees to control them, but womanly enough to pick up a rifle/handgun and help defend the family if need be.

We men cannot be tyrants as fathers but we must develop enough back bone to stand up and say no! to those ideas and worldviews that are contrary to Gods word.

We don’t let our kids make up their own minds about gravity. We instruct them on its reality as best we can. My kids are not allowed to decide for themselves if two and two is four. And so it should be with every truth we know of in life. Hopefully that’s a deep well of biblical understanding we dish out and continue to ladle out until there is no more breath in us. Be wise,surround yourself with men and families who get this!

Broadly speaking this was integral to the message of Deuteronomy, and played out in proverbs and a part of the worship of the Psalms to be pressed into our childrens understanding. The Bible is full of verses like this.

3 Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, The fruit of the womb is a reward. 4 Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, So are the children of one's youth. Psalms 127:3-4 (NKJV)

28 The children of Your servants will continue, And their descendants will be established before You." Psalms 102:28 (NKJV)

4 We will not hide them from their children, Telling to the generation to come the praises of the Lord, And His strength and His wonderful works that He has done. 5 For He established a testimony in Jacob, And appointed a law in Israel, Which He commanded our fathers, That they should make them known to their children; 6 That the generation to come might know them, The children who would be born, That they may arise and declare them to their children, 7 That they may set their hope in God, And not forget the works of God, But keep His commandments; Psalms 78:4-7 (NKJV)

They are given to you as arrows first, for His own glory, and the aspect that they are little Americans, should be way down the list.