The following was originally preached on Trinity Sunday, June 15 2025 as part of a series of sermons titled "Building a Christian Culture." It was Father's Day to boot.
Christ Church Leavenworth
Ephesians 6:1-4
June 15, 2025
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OT READING: Deuteronomy 6:1-9
NT READING: Matthew 28:18-20
"Christian Education is the End of the World"
READING OF THE TEXT
Our text this morning is Ephesians 6:1-4, these are the words of God:
Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father and mother” (this is the first commandment with a promise), “that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land.” Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
The grass withers, the flowers fade, but the Word of our God stands forever.
PRAYER
Our Father and our God, we come before You this morning through Jesus Christ, our Lord, and in the Holy Spirit. Teach us how to obey Your commands that we might teach others to do the same. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.
INTRODUCTION
Ideas have consequences. Christian ideas will have Christian consequences and secular ideas will have secular consequences. This is why education is so important and why it is often so hotly contested. Education is not neutral. The ideas that sown will have to be reaped and if those ideas are bad seeds they will produce bad fruit.
R.L. Dabney, that great southern gentleman, once put it this way, "The training which does not base duty on Christianity is, for us, practically immoral." In other words, no matter how good the education is, it is bad if it does not begin and end with the Lord, Jesus Christ. If a curriculum assumes that Jesus can be set aside for an hour or two each day, the biggest lesson, regardless of the subject being taught, is that Christ can be set aside sometimes. And that is unregenerate nonsense. Your virtue needs a vacation like your heart needs a break from beating. You cannot take a moral holiday and remain moral. And teaching that it can is immoral.
So, education has consequences. And this is why it has been such a battleground. Education is warfare. But didn’t Dr. Bray just say last week that worship was warfare? Does everything have to be a fight with you guys? Yes. Yes, it does. Welcome to CCL. Education really is a battle. This is not hyperbole. Education is boot camp for the brain. It trains the mind to defend certain ideas and to attack others. It introduces you to and trains you with certain weapons and tactics. It inspires loyalty to a particular flag and assigns you a particular uniform. It runs drills and prepares you for live fire. State schools, therefore, are a sort of secular boot camp. The good news, however, is that Christian education always has the home field advantage. This is our Father’s world, not satans’. “No weapon that is fashioned against us shall succeed and we shall refute every tongue that rises up against us. This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord.” That’s Isaiah 54:17. “God has given us divine power to destroy every secular stronghold, to dismantle every antiChristian argument, and to strike down every high-minded opinion that might raise itself up against the knowledge of God.” That’s 2 Corinthians 10:4-5. Christian education will take every thought captive. But more on that later.
All things either hold together in Christ or they don’t. You cannot split the difference. Jesus is either Lord of all or He is not Lord at all. If He only rules over some standards, He is not the ruler or rulers. If He is not the authority on certain subjects, He is not the Headmaster. If He is not destroying all of His enemies, He is being defeated by some of them. It is Christ or chaos? Few things bring this reality into sharper focus than that of education.
That brings us to today’s text. Turn with me to Ephesians 6:1-4
SUMMARY OF THE TEXT
Children, the Bible is talking to you this morning. Listen: you must obey your parents. You must not listen to every adult in the world, but you must listen to the adults you call “Mom” and “Dad.” Do this “in the Lord.” When your parents say, “because I said so,” you should do it because God says so. Honoring your father and mother is one of God’s favorite things for you to do. Top Ten, easy. This is the first commandment with a promise. So, kids, obey God by honoring your parents and you will have a good, long life, and you will live in the land of your fathers. Worship your father’s God and you will inherit your father’s world. Now, let me speak to your parents.
Fathers and mothers, the Bible is speaking to you this morning. Christendom is more than just your sons and daughters turning back to you, it is also you turning back to them. The weight of this falls first and foremost on you, dads.. So fathers, pay attention. You are the federal head of your family unit. As such, God has singled you out. You have a particular responsibility for and duty to your children. Your children are to follow you; you are to lead. Your children are to listen; you are to teach. Your children are to respect you; you are to be respectable.
So, children, you must respect your dad. You owe him that. And fathers, you must be respectable. You owe your children that. When a father fails in this, it often provokes his children to anger. Dads, do not make it harder for your children to honor you than it already is. As hard as it is to honor others, it is even harder to honor them if they are hypocrites.
Scripture gives the command first negatively and then restates it positively. Do NOT provoke your children to anger. DO provide for them. Do NOT give them frustration. DO give them a Christian education. You cannot expect them to behave like Christians if you’re not giving them Christian instruction. And that begins with you obeying. Do you want your kids to honor you? Show them how. Honor God. Do you want them to obey you? Show them how. Obey God.
Fathers, another way you can provoke your children to anger is by allowing your house to be divided. God has commanded your child to honor his father and mother. Do not force them to ask, “Which one?” When mom and dad give different orders, it makes it impossible for the child to obey both.
So, fathers, you are going to have to lead your wives; and mothers, you are going to have to get on the same page as your husband. If you can’t or you won’t, your children will be angry and it will be your fault. You must teach your children that you and your spouse are on the same team. Children, this means if mom says, “No” the answer is no. Do not go ask dad. If dad says “No” the answer is no, Do not go looking for mom. If you play your parents against each other, it is a sin. Let no man separate what God has joined together. Especially you.
Fathers, the words “bring them up” in verse 4 of our passage is a translation of a Greek word that can also be translated as “nourish.” One of those places is back in 5:29 where it says, “no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it.” So, bring up, or nourish your children and take good care of them. What constitutes “good care” in this case is not left up to you to decide for yourself. Paul goes on to define it as “the discipline and instruction of the Lord”. House rules may determine what methods work best for your home, but your mission must be the same as every other Christian father. The method may change from household to household or even from kid to kid within the same household, but the mission must not: our children must be given the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
“Discipline” comes from the Greek word paideia (pie-day-uh). This is a word that is pregnant with meaning. And not just early pregnant, but BIG pregnant. Paideia is the kind of word you can write a book about. It is not just learning multiplication tables or music or manners, it’s all of it. It’s learning your culture. That includes things like knowing which side of the plate the fork goes on, which side of the equation you solve for x, which side of the parenthesis the period goes on, and which side of the road you drive on, but it’s more than that: it is what you believe and why you believe it.
The word “instruction” comes from the Greek word nouthesia (new-thes-ee-uh). It can also be translated as “admonition.” It means “to call attention to” and has the weight of a mild rebuke. It is the hard work of giving the lesson before the test. It is easier to let experience do the teaching, but experience is a harsh instructor.
It gives the test first and then the lesson, if you’re lucky. Instruction is the hard work of preparing for life’s tests in order to pass them on the first try. A good dad doesn’t withhold tests from his kids, he helps them study and hopes they pass.
So, all things taken together, “the discipline and instruction of the Lord” requires a Christian dad to give his children a Christian world. That will include a life full of Christian history and culture and, of course, all that Christ commanded. Lest you be discouraged by the weight of such a task, consider that the men who first read this letter had nothing to work with. They were commanded to give their children a Christian culture that did not exist. All they had was the book of Ephesians and their orders. They were like Adam. He had a garden to study, a word from God to go out, and a whole world to tame. The early church rose to the challenge and got to work. As a result, you now have nearly 2,000 years of Christian creativity at your disposal in addition to that same letter from Paul that they preserved for us. That is a lot of homework.
SO, HOW SHOULD WE THEN STUDY?
With so much to know, shouldn’t we spend every free minute studying? No. No one is going to Heaven because he earned a degree in righteousness. You do not have to be “smart” to be a Christian per se. Obedience is better than sacrifice. Even if that sacrifice is a giant head crammed full of knowledge. That said, there really are good and glorious things you should know and many others that you could benefit from knowing. The scope of this sermon series is building a Christian culture and we will not be able to do that if we are stupid. I use the word “stupid” here not just to get the kids attention, but to make a point. Stupidity is not ignorance. It is disobedience. A stupid person is not the one who did not know, but the one who knew better. Forrest Gump’s mom had it wrong. “Stupid is as stupid doesn’t.” Consider Proverbs 12:1 “Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge, but whoever hates correction is stupid.” It is better to be corrected and feel stupid than it is to feel correct and be stupid. The more intelligent you are, the more accountable you are. So, if you don’t want to be a dummy, you don’t necessarily need to read another book as much as you need to do the things you’ve already learned about. Jesus said, “Now that you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.” (John 13:17)
That said, we know quite a bit. We stand on the shoulders of 6,000 years of dominion and discovery. There is so much you could know. Too much, in fact, for any one of us. We are going to have to miss out on some things. We are finite in a world of infinite interest.
Acknowledging this is not anti-intellectual, it is creational. We are creatures. We are not omniscient. So, we love knowledge, but we do not worship it. Knowledge is a fellow creature. We worship God. That is why we have no interest in competing with the world according to their standards of intelligence. Their degrees do not mean what they say they do. No one is a “master of science” whatever the paper on their wall says. Again, I repeat, this is not a call to put the “dumb” in Christendom. Far from it. God has called us to be wise enough to outmaneuver serpents… all without surrendering our innocence.
If we are going to build Christendom, we are going to have to be teachable and we are going to have to teach. Education is generational. It is something you learn and something you pass along. You cannot build a culture in a single generation. One generation’s trends do not a culture make. Thanks be to God! I mean, can you imagine a world where the 80’s weren’t merely a decade of bad hair days, but a way of life? One generation can produce a trend, but it cannot produce a culture unless it can convince its kids to keep the bandwagon running. A trend is like a trinket that can be bought at the mall; a culture is like an heirloom that must be inherited and then passed down. Rome was not built in a day, but neither was Moscow, Idaho.
Cultures are built by honoring its ancestors and teaching its descendants to do the same. You cannot teach your kids to honor you by throwing their grandparents under the bus. Their grandparents may have made mistakes, but you will not fix those by adding your own to them. So, honor your fathers. If you cannot or will not do this, you will not have a culture. You may think that you are passing down wisdom and discernment, but what you are actually passing down disobedience. You are teaching them how to turn on you someday. T.B. Macaulay said it this way, “People who take no pride in the noble achievements of their remote ancestors will never achieve anything worthy to be remembered with pride by their remote descendants.” When this happens, each generation is left on its own to indulge in its own blind spots and to complain about the blind spots of the others. In short, you’ll only have pop culture, which, strictly speaking, is not a culture at all. Pop culture is to culture what bubble gum is to food. It is meant to be discarded when you are done with it. It is not the kind of thing you leave in your last will and testament. None of your great grandchildren will want your used bubble gum… or your old Spice Girls cds.
Pop culture isn’t meant to nourish, it is meant to entertain and amuse. It is meant to distract you. Amusement, after all, is literally “the state of not thinking.” Muse means “to think,” ment means “the state of,” and the a at the beginning is a negation. A-muse-ment then is the state of not thinking. That is why pop culture is often equated with bubble gum, as in “bubble gum pop.” It is something you can do without thinking much about it and toss aside when you’re done without regret. Gum doesn’t build up the person who puts it in his mouth, it merely keeps his teeth busy for a while. Real, solid, Christian culture is not like that, it is more like a thick, juicy slow-cooked steak seasoned and grilled to perfection by your father. It is rich and fat and full of protein. It sticks to your bones, builds up your muscle, and nourishes your body. You cannot get that kind of thing in a drive thru. There is no microwavable version of that. “You cannot just order Rivendell from IKEA.” (Douglas Wilson) No, you can only get that kind of thing by going back home. So, like the prodigal in the pig sty, we too need to go back home to where the fattened calves are kept. And that means a return to Christian education.
SO, WHAT MAKES A CHRISTIAN EDUCATION “CHRISTIAN”?
Is it simply “school” plus Jesus? If the state schools put prayer back into the classroom, would that make it Christian education? What if they replaced the Black Lives Matter posters with the Ten Commandments? Or what if they went so far as to put the Bible back into the curriculum? Would that make it a Christian Education? While all of these would be welcomed signs of societal pressure coming from the right direction, it would not be a reason to leave that lump in charge of our littlest leavens. Voddie Baucham put it this way, “The government school system is a foe to be defeated, not a friend to be reformed.” In other words, Christian education is not about getting the government schools to do what we should be doing. God did not tell the state to educate our kids, He told the dads to do it. Education belongs to the family, not to the feds.
A Christian Education is nurturing your children in the culture and the commands of Christ. This includes knowing shapes, colors, letters, and numbers; how to read, how to count, how to tell time, and more, but those are tools for understanding the story you’re in, not the story itself. This is not a story about numbers, but it is a story with lots of numbers in it. This is not a story about words, but it is a story with a lot of words in it.
So, our mission in educating our children is not merely to give them a bunch of information, but to give them the world. And that means seeking Christ’s Kingdom and His righteousness before we get to anything else. We do get to everything else, or at least as much of it as we can, but we must not begin it. Forgive me for being overly simplistic, but a Christian education must begin with Christ. The worldly approach is a photo negative of this approach. It begins with the information and then, maybe, maybe, considers speculating about the nature and existence of God. For centuries people searched for the one thing that made sense of everything. The first universities were created for this very purpose. Their purpose was to discuss the one thing that held everything else together: that is why they were called “uni-versities.” They were created to discover the unity of the diversity. Other cultures acknowledged the four elements: earth, air, fire, and water, but they longed for a fifth element that would bind the others together - that is to say, something quintessential. And though they searched, many died never knowing if it even existed, let alone much, if anything, about it.
What they worshiped as unknown, I proclaim to you. “The God who made the world and everything in it, being the Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything else. He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined the allotted periods and boundaries of their respective dwelling places. Why? That they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us. Those times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. Because He has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising that Man from the dead.” That is the sermon Paul preached to the philosophy department of Athens in Acts 17. Christ or confusion. Christian, you know something Socrates only sought. And not only do you know it, you know His Name.
Colossians 1:15-17, “Jesus Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
Jesus is the university. He is the one thing that ties all other things together. As Dr. Bray pointed out last week, the Trinity is the unity of diversity. Christ is also the quintessential. He is not one of the elements, He is the Creator and Sustainer of them. That being the case, “See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily. (Colossians 2:8)
Our goal in educating our kids then is not just to cram as much info into their heads as possible, but to give them as large of a glimpse of the glory of God as we possibly can. A Christian education is not less than academia, but it is certainly more than that. Understanding a few things and how they connect to Christ is better than understanding all the things and not knowing who God is. “If you understand all mysteries and all knowledge, but have not love, you are nothing.” (1 Corinthians 13:2).
So, knowing how things connect to Christ is more important than the number of things you know, but better yet is understanding as much as you can and how that all connects to Christ. It would be better to know nothing but Christ than to know everything but Christ, but best of all is knowing Christ and growing in knowledge. So, let us learn a lot, yes, and amen, but always “in the Lord.” That is what makes a Christian Education “Christian.”
BUT WHAT MAKES A CHRISTIAN EDUCATION AN “EDUCATION”?
We get the English word “education” from the Latin “educere.” (eh-DOO-kay-ray) The etymology of this word is the Latin prefix “e” meaning “of” or “from,” and the word “ducere” meaning “to lead” or “to draw out.” So putting it all together, education is leading or drawing someone out of something. An education, therefore, always presupposes a start and a finish or to frame it in more theological terms, an origin and an eschatology. An education assumes certain things about where we came from as well as about where we should be going. So, where does a Christian education begin?
Take a look at our OT reading: turn with me to Deuteronomy 6:1-9
EDUCATION AS AN ORIGIN STORY (DEUTERONOMY 6:1-9)
God commanded Moses to teach the commands of God to the people of God. Included in these was the duty of each father to teach his own sons. People need instruction because left to their own devices, they live according to their vices. People are not blank slate. In the land to which they were going over, they would need to establish a culture and possess it, but not before they possessed themselves. A culture is you, your son, and your son’s sons all worshipping the same God the same way for centuries. That kind of continuity creates a good and godly land in which you ong to live as long as you can. So, be careful and keep God’s word and you will be fruitful in God’s world. Goodness and mercy follow the faithful wherever they go and make them fruitful where they grow. This is the promise of God: the leaven will spread through the rest of the lump and the meek shall inherit the earth. Christendom is the land of milk and honey surrounded by the sweetness of God.
Note that these promises from Deuteronomy 6 are the same ones Paul referred to back in Ephesians 6. Here, in Deut, they are being applied to a particular people and a particular plot of land, but Paul applies them to all peoples and all places, including children and gentiles like the ones living in Ephesus.
Back to Deuteronomy 6, picking up in vs. 7, we see that a godly education is not confined to a classroom. It takes place all day long and everywhere. It takes place on the road, in the kitchen, on the phone, in the garage, at church, at the store, in the morning, at night, around the table, over cigars, under the sink, on the computer, in your bed, on the couch, and anytime or anywhere in between. All of Christ for all of life. Memories are the only way to take time with you.
So, go and make some good ones, but know that a good memory cannot be scheduled for a Tuesday night. Quality time is the product of quantity time. If you want to bank some good times, you’re going to have to spend a lot of time together. You cannot schedule a “you-just-had-to-be-there.”, but you can make it more likely simply by being there. A child brought up in that kind of consistency will grow up well watered in the covenant. He will grow in that same garden, plant himself not far from your tree, and someday plant seeds of his own. And when that happens, the entire landscape begins to change. The garden begins to take over the world. So, keep the covenant, keep your kids, and keep the world.
You cannot, like God, build something out of nothing. You cannot build a Christian culture out of thin air. This is why we must give our children a Christian education. That is why we must look to what God has done and to what He has promised to do. Christ has called us to conquer the world and we cannot fulfill this great commission if we do not make disciples of our own children.
That brings us to Matthew 28:18-20, which was our NT reading .
EDUCATION AS AN ESCHATOLOGY (MATTHEW 28:18-20)
Jesus taught the disciples that all authority in Heaven and on earth was His and that it was their job to get the word out. The message was simple: “Christ is King, so come along quietly.” The disciples were not charged to ask the world what it wanted, but to tell it what Christ had commanded. Making disciples meant a Trinitarian baptism in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit for every nation and a Christian education oriented around the commandments of Christ for every person. Lastly, Jesus promised His disciples that He would be with them when they did this. He was not sending them out on a suicide mission, He was letting them walk along on His victory lap.
Many Christians in their zeal to participate in this Great Commission have set their sights on unreached peoples in foreign lands. So far, so good. May their tribe increase as they reach every last tribe. One group, however, routinely overlooked in all the excitement is Christian children. Let us call it the Great Omission. Below the four foot level, there is a people group that literally flies under most people’s radars. And sometimes that isn’t by accident. In many churches this morning, Christian children are segregated to “kids’s church” so that the adults and visitors can worship God without distraction. Many mission-minded and seeker-sensitive Christian ventures have inadvertently done the exact opposite of what Christ commanded: they have left the 1 in order to seek out the 99. They have flipped the script and provided for other people’s children without looking to their own. They have funded Christian schools overseas in order to reach lost kids and then lost their own by sending them to secular schools down the street. They have sent shepherds out to seek and save the goats and sent their lambs off to be shepherded by wolves.
When we omit our children from our mission, we leave them vulnerable to the missions of others. Someone will want our children, even if we don't. Especially, if we don’t. Someone will set their sights on our kids. Someone will take an interest in them. Why not us? What does it profit a man if should reach the nations, but lose his own son? We cannot send our kids to the enemies’ boot camps and expect them to come back and fight in our battles. Might I submit that Christian kids in pagan classrooms is not the highwater mark of Christendom, whatever David French might say. If that is the fruit of Christendom, it is rotten fruit and rhymes with the kind that killed our first parents.
While many Christians have failed to realize the importance of education, our enemies have not. Ben Merkle stated it this way: “You may not be paedobaptist or postmill, but the left is and that's why they're winning.” He said this back in 2021 during the height of COVID times. All of those crazy people doing crazy things back then went to school somewhere. Education is warfare and the progressives are focusing all of their energy on recruitment. They believe that your kids and our future belong to them. You may not baptize your kids and invite them into the covenant, but the secular state is ready to welcome them into its daycares as soon as you’re willing to part with them. They have preschools, elementary schools, after school programs, high schools, and universities ready to convert your kids. You may not hold to a postmillennial eschatology and a never ending increase of your God’s governance, but the Left does. They hold an optimistic view that someday everything will be under their control. We have the promises of God. They have the communist manifesto. Why are they so bold? Why are we so timid?
Children are the missionaries of the future. They are sent out to rule and subdue the world of tomorrow. Because the Left wants to populate the future with their ideas, they are working hard to disciple your children. They don't have kids of their own to raise, so they must groom yours. They don’t make disciples at home, so they must poach them from yours. The Left does not act like a defeated people. No, they are aggressively optimistic in their eschatology. And all that on spec. We have the Word of God. Why are we so pessimistic? Someone will lay claim to the kids and to the future. Christ made His claim on BOTH over 2,000 years ago on a mountainside near Galilee. His disciples faithfully got that Word out, but many modern evangelicals, who should know better, have flat out ignored it. The Left wants your kids and the world to come. Why don’t we?. Their eschatology comes out their fingertips. Why doesn’t ours?
CHRISTIAN EDUCATION IS, AFTER ALL, THE END OF THE WORLD
Steve Wilkins said it this way, “Whoever trains the children controls the future.” Education does not merely make graduates, it makes disciples. If that education is Christian, the disciples will be Christian. If that education is secular, the disciples will be godless. You cannot build a Christian culture out of a people who aren’t Christian. If our kids don’t know who they are, what they believe, or why they believe it, the culture that results will not be a Christian one. Rest assured, somebody’s kids will someday see it, for all of God’s promises in Christ are “Yes” and “Amen,” but ours won’t, not unless we bring them up in the culture and commands of Christ. Christian education is not simply filling a child’s head with facts, it is filling his heart with the belief that Christ fills everything. Christian education is the end of the world. By that I mean it is both the reason the world exists and the conclusion of all history when the knowledge of the Lord finally covers the earth as the waters cover the sea.
Consider these words from C.S. Lewis, “If you have not chosen the Kingdom of God, it will make in the end no difference what you have chosen instead. Those are hard words to take. Will it really make no difference whether it was women or patriotism, cocaine or art, whisky or a seat in the Cabinet, money or science? Well, surely no difference that matters. We shall have missed the end for which we are formed and rejected the only thing that satisfies.”
Good grades do not matter if Christ is not the curriculum. There are people with doctorates who do not know God and there are people who did not graduate from high school who are going to Heaven. Do not miss the main thing. Education is important, but only because knowing God is important. And being a Christian is a better education than graduating summa cum laude from sodom state university. Listen to Lewis one more time: “Anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened: one of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself.”
An unbeliever can be smarter than a Christian, but there is no unbeliever, no matter how smart he currently is, who would not be made smarter by becoming a Christian. In a few minutes, Christian, you will confess something that Nietzsche never knew. C.R. Wiley said it this way, “Worship is the highest form of liberal arts.” So, whether you eat or drink, or read or write or add or subtract, whatever you do, do it all, in the Lord.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
PRAYER
Heavenly Father, as we reflect on these things, may the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight through Jesus Christ, our Lord, who taught us to pray…
