Part 2 of this article explored a free-market approach to education from a Christian worldview perspective. Part 3 listed practical action items and ideas to help move Part 2 toward a reality. Below are a number of references that speak to the important role both parents and the church have in the education of children. Godly training for children and adults is a theme that spans the entire Bible. The verses below are from the New American Standard Bible (NASB) translation.

• Deuteronomy 6:4-7 – Hear, O Israel! The Lord is 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. These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your sons 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 up.

• Psalm 78:5–8 – For He established a testimony in Jacob and appointed a law in Israel, which He commanded our fathers that they should teach them to their children, that the generation to come might know, even the children yet to be born, that they may arise and tell them to their children, that they should put their confidence in God and not forget the works of God, But keep His commandments, and not be like their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation, a generation that did not prepare its heart and whose spirit was not faithful to God.

• Proverbs 4:1-2 – Hear, O sons, the instruction of a father, And give attention that you may gain understanding, For I give you sound teaching; Do not abandon my instruction.

• Matthew 18:6-7 – but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea. [Children whose thinking is developed from false ideas will stumble.]

• Matthew 19:13-14 – Then some children were brought to Him so that He might lay His hands on them and pray; and the disciples rebuked them. But Jesus said, “Let the children alone, and do not hinder them from coming to Me; for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these. [Sending children away to be trained in ungodly doctrines is hindering.]

• Matthew 28: 19-20 – Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” [Christians and the Church are called to make “Christian” disciples, not disciples of secular humanism.]

• Luke 6:40 – A pupil is not above his teacher; but everyone, after he has been fully trained, will be like his teacher. [Who do you want your child to model his or her life after? How about you!]

• Acts 1:8 – But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth. [Jesus was very intentional, so the order is likely intentional – start closest to home. Don’t forsake the children in the church for distant missions. Sending children to be discipled into a counter-Christian mindset is a sure way to kill the local church, and its missions.]

• 1 Corinthians 15:33 – Do not be deceived: “Evil company corrupts good habits.” [Parents, don’t send your children to a school where you have little to no control over peer influences.]

• 2 Corinthians 6:14 – Do not be bound together with unbelievers; for what partnership have righteousness and lawlessness, or what fellowship has light with darkness? [An education choice for a child is a binding that parents enter into.]

• Ephesians 4:11-16 – And He gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ; until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ. As a result, we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming; but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ, from whom the whole body, being fitted and held together by what every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love.

• Ephesians 6:4 – Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
  © Mark Shepard