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Loving the Lord does not simply happen for our children. It must be modelled, yes, and nothing is more important. But the Lord Himself also teaches us, as a gentle Father, how parents (and particularly fathers) must teach love for Him.

Deuteronomy 6:5–7

"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.”

Love for the Lord must not only be taught, but taught diligently! Teaching the love of the Lord must be a persistent habit of life. But, in so doing, fathers in particular are instructed, “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” (Eph 6:4, emphasis added) For this reason, I will unashamedly direct my own instruction here to fathers, but you will see below how it naturally extends to any Christian stewarding the soul of a child. 

It would be wrong, though, to think this responsibility ends at the boundaries of what we call “Sunday School”, and does not extend to what we think of as Monday-through-Friday school. For God goes on to give one purpose for all this instruction in Deuteronomy 6:20-25: that a son will ask a father why all these rules exist. The way the Lord commands fathers to answer that question is to teach them about their history! After the Law is given and the land is breached, God asks for a man from each tribe to set up a monument. God meant this specifically so children will ask what the monument means in time to come, and fathers can tell children the history of the Lord’s faithfulness to them.

In I Chronicles 16, Great David commissions Asaph to be Israel’s lyrical historian, and when Asaph writes Psalm 78 (likely from his Bible study in Deuteronomy 6), he styles it this way:

Things that we have heard and known,

that our fathers have told us.

We will not hide them from their children,

but tell to the coming generation

the glorious deeds of the LORD, and his might,

and the wonders that he has done.

He established a testimony in Jacob

and appointed a law in Israel,

which he commanded our fathers

to teach to their children,

that the next generation might know them,

the children yet unborn,

and arise and tell them to their children,

so that they should set their hope in God

and not forget the works of God,

but keep his commandments;

and that they should not be like their fathers,

a stubborn and rebellious generation,

a generation whose heart was not steadfast,

whose spirit was not faithful to God. (Ps 78:3-8)

Asaph then proceeds to recite the history of Israel, not in some morally neutral way, but emphasizing the Lord’s faithfulness to His people and their unfaithfulness to Him. After all, when God repeatedly calls His people back to faithfulness to Him, He does so by relying on their knowledge of their history from their fathers. And when Yahweh charges the false gods to present their case in Isaiah 41, He challenges them not just to tell the future, but to accurately tell and interpret the past. Any false god is good enough for a false history, but only the One True God can enlighten His people with true history!

Now that we have been told by Jesus (Luke 17:32 and many others) and His apostles (Rom 15:4 and many others) to mind our history, how much more should we do so! Not only that, we have been told that without the historical facts of the Gospel, our belief is in vain (I Cor 15:1-28). Finally, the New Covenant Scriptures give us the Christian view of history in nine (English) words: “In Christ God was reconciling the world to Himself” in II Corinthians 5:19.

But II Corinthians 5:19 goes on to say that He “gave us the ministry of reconciliation”. In other words, this history did not stop when the Bible ceased being written. The history of God’s faithfulness to His people continues for as long as history continues and God is faithful. Fathers, your natural tendency to get obsessed with history is a God-given impulse to disciple your children!

The demonstration of God’s sovereign authority over the discipleship of our children in every subject would be its own dissertation. Suffice it to say that teaching biology cannot be morally neutral for at least two reasons. First, as one example, it will look like special pleading to demand faith in the Scriptures, when Romans 5:14 says “death reigned from Adam to Moses”, if a child has been taught in biology for 13 years that death reigned longer than humans have ever existed,  and that “Adam” is a fictional character of a fictional author, “Moses”, created to cope with the idea of death. Second, and more positively, a Christian way of nurturing and admonishing children would point to the intricacies of creation as a way of exposing and exulting in the wisdom of the Creator.

And every poorly taught subject has both of these aspects: a threat to the coherence of the Christian worldview and a missed opportunity to disciple our children in worship of the living God. Mathematics, no less than biology, displays the magnificent order in the unsearchable wisdom of the Lord. Language Arts presents not only the possibility of literature hostile to your values but also the risk of a child losing the opportunity to enjoy reading and take responsibility for their own instruction in the Lord’s precepts. Both subjects, in University departments of Education, suffer from an anti-Christian anthropology (view of human nature) that sees children as blank slates, and thus completely misunderstands how they learn. So, the command to disciple our children—to raise them in the Lord’s nurture and admonition—cannot be separated from their formal education. Education is itself discipleship.

The work can be delegated, but the responsibility cannot be.

The work of educating children can be delegated. No one would suggest a Christian father is negligent if his wife teaches his children about some great work of the Lord, even though the Bible is clear that the duty is his. Nor could anyone object if he had a pastor do the same, or a neighbour. There is no clear way to draw any Biblical line, then, that makes delegating the work of education to a teacher or a school of teachers immoral.

The responsibility of educating children, however, cannot be delegated. No father may stand before the judgment seat of Christ and say the precious soul God gave him to cultivate withered in someone else’s care, and thereby absolve himself of responsibility. No teacher and no school can stand before Christ for you, so no teacher or school can bear the responsibility for discipling your children in Christ. Not even the claim of sending children to church and a Christian school will absolve a negligent father before the face of Christ. How much less, then, can you expect that Premier Danielle Smith, or Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides, or your local school board trustee (whether or not you know her name) can stand before Christ to answer for the soul He entrusted to you!

Thus, I offer a few pieces of practical advice for the father trying to take the discipleship of his child seriously in Alberta. First, I understand the weight of all of a father’s responsibilities, but it is just as important for Dad to be there for school meetings, parent-teacher conferences, assemblies, chapels, field trips and the like, as it is for Mom. Again, there is no sin in delegating the work, nor is there sin in delegating the overseeing of the work, but taking the specific commands to fathers above seriously means it’s not automatically a “Mom thing”. In particular, God has given Dad the responsibility to confront damnable error as it encroaches on his little flock, and it is a natural, God-given tendency for Dad to be more alert for such things than Mom. But Dad won’t see things if he isn’t there, and he won’t be taken seriously if a confrontation is the first time anyone at the school has seen him.

Second, no matter what type of school your child is in, discipline is probably a significant issue. Unfortunately, even in Christian schools, the discipline that used to be a matter of course in any school has become so rare that when present, it is grounds for profound thankfulness to God for a great school. The lack of discipline along with other issues may be societal problems, but the best way to reform society is to present it with a single reformed unit—yourself. In this context, that means making clear to your child’s teachers and school that you intend to be more than a full partner in the discipline of your own child—you intend to take the leading role. The old adage that if a child is in trouble at school, they’re in worlds more trouble at home still works. Insist on knowing when your child does anything wrong at school, and insist on making it right. This also makes you more believable to the teachers and the school when you say you take your child’s education seriously and insist on being included.

Third, if your child is in a Christian school, ask about how they incorporate God’s truth into every subject. Definitely ask what the Gospel is and how it will be taught. But, as we’ve covered above, ask how they will teach history in light of the faithfulness of the Lord. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge, so, if this is ignored, the worst outcome is that your child comes to believe that the fear of God and knowledge can be separated. Ask how they teach Christ as Lord of every subject. Ask how they will teach in line with the Bible’s claims about Creation, but ask gently with the understanding that they are required to teach the content of basic evolutionary biology by the Alberta curriculum, and don’t interpret unease with any tension there as a lack of conviction (recognition of the tension is a good sign).

If your child is in a non-Christian school, the conversation will be more about how you can partner with the school to make sure your child receives a good education, but without hostility towards your values. In the abundance of God’s common grace, there are still many schools that will teach history, for instance, in a manner compatible with a Christian view of history. This is not to say this is preferable to a Christian education, but it is certainly preferable to an education hostile to Christianity, many of which also exist. The most assigned text in Canadian and American teacher training is Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which frames the teaching profession itself as a social justice movement to empower the oppressed and Christianity as a frequent oppressor. Thus, it is not uncommon for history to be taught as if Christians were always and everywhere oppressors, instead of ministers of reconciliation of the world through Christ to God.

Obviously, that is an anti-Christ catechism that you must know about and confront with Biblical truth, but this does not absolve parents with children in Christian schools from looking out for the same insidious message. Christian teachers, even at Christian schools, were also taught in the same teacher training programs, and may have imbibed the same anti-Christ catechism. At any rate, we live in a culture saturated with anti-Christ catechisms in entertainment products, political appeals, and interactions on the street.

Fourth, you have probably been told that “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it” (Pro 22:6) is a “proverb, not a promise”. But too often, that platitude comes too close to denying the proverbial truth of the Proverb. It is true, and here’s how it works: when you train a child to love the Lord, to have his loves shaped by what God loves, to have her hatreds shaped by what God hates, to love His law and meditate on it day and night, then the emotional manipulations of the anti-Christ catechisms are not attractive. That’s it. That’s the ballgame. Just as hockey is a game of putting more pucks in your opponent’s net than you allow in yours (though it gets vastly more complicated than that), so child-rearing is a game of giving your child every advantage to love Christ and not an anti-Christ manipulation (though it gets vastly more complicated than that, and the Spirit is ultimately sovereign over your child’s affections, not you).

Fifth, in any school, make sure reading and math are being taught as foundational competencies to unlock all other competencies. As mentioned above, an anti-Christian anthropology haunts even these subjects, spreading false accounts of how children learn. An exceedingly popular one, in wave after wave of teaching fads, is that children don’t need to be taught to give attention to the letters in words to learn to read, but can better figure out words from their contexts (including pictures). This is one of the reasons “graphic novels” reach deeper into the higher grades every year. One simple question to expose whether a teacher labours under this anti-Christian anthropology is: will there be spelling quizzes, and if not, why not? If they spew some nonsense about kids not needing to know how to spell yet, it’s almost certainly motivated by this error.

A similar pattern exists in math around things like timed quizzes and multiplication tables (both align with the way God made kids to learn math). One final element to look for in history (which, as you may have discerned, I believe normal dads are best equipped to sniff out issues in) is whether it is taught sequentially, as much as is allowed by the Alberta curriculum. The anti-Christian anthropology teaches that kids learn best when taught about history closest to their own experiences first, but God does not recite His own history that way, and He has made kids with a natural curiosity for history most foreign to their own experience—like ancient and medieval civilizations.

Finally, an encouragement and a caution, as the case may be: institutions are more powerful in shaping your children than individuals. Because the Word of God does not return void, even a secret unbeliever can effectively help parents disciple children, in an institution that ensures the Word of God and the Gospel of Christ are clearly taught. By the same token, though, a solid Christian labouring in a hostile institution often labours in vain, even if bad company fails to corrupt their good morals. One last rule of thumb for estimating overall institutional health is to tally for yourself whether African Christians are over-represented or under-represented in the institution, as compared to your local faith community. It means nothing if a rural area with no African Christian population features a similarly melanin-bereft school, of course, but it almost certainly is a red flag if a supposedly Christian school in Northeast Calgary has no African brothers actively involved. My general observation is that African Christians will fight for their institutions, but they are remarkably less likely than other Christians to keep fighting in an institution long past its expiry date at the expense of their children.

Some may say that you must fight like Hell for your children. But that couldn’t be more wrong. You must fight under the fear of the Lord, with His kingdom and His righteousness as your goal. You must fight with the confidence that you will win because He wins. In other words, you must fight like Heaven for your children.