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Belt of Truth Ministries

Scott Ritsema

Schooled: Undoctrinated

Father in heaven, we thank you so much for this opportunity to consider your will for our children as it relates to their education.

And as we think about that topic of education, we know that this is much wider and deeper and broader than we've commonly thought.

So please give us an open mind, a bigger picture, a more spiritual perspective on the training of our children for heaven and for the mission work that you've entrusted to us.

Well, you know from Deuteronomy 6, which we read in a previous session, that God tells parents to hide the words, the commandments of God in our hearts and to teach them to our children whilst we rise up and lie down and walk by the way and all of these things.

We've seen this a couple of times, but have you ever thought about it in terms of their educational training?

Now the topic of education is 1 that is of huge importance.

Listen to this statement and before I share this statement, this whole discussion is being pulled from these 2, schooled and undoctrinated.

Schooled is the deliberate agenda to destroy individuality, reduce intelligence, and re-engineer society.

That's kind of a mouthful, you'll see what that's all about in just a little bit.

And undoctrinated, how home education and schools of the prophets will produce the last generation.

Now this 1 particularly is coming from a certain denominational perspective as the historical development has taken place in the development of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

We've been given specific counsels, as I speak to you in a Seventh-day Adventist Church today, specific direction from the Lord in the documents and books and periodicals and statements from the pioneers of our church who've directed us in a unique path on true education.

So you might say education, that's just something that the teachers and the principals and the administrators and the school officials take seriously and we don't really have to worry that much about it.

It says, 1 who has long been our instructor was speaking to the people.

He said, the subject of education should interest the whole Seventh-day Adventist body.

The decisions regarding the character of our schoolwork should not be left wholly to principals and teachers." Now isn't that a wake-up call?

So you might not even be a parent, you might not even have children, but the whole church community says, we take seriously the training and education of our children.

There's some wake up call quotations like this 1.

There is no work more important than the education of our youth.

The church is asleep and does not realize the magnitude of this matter of educating the children and youth.

God requires that the church arouse from her lethargy and see what is the manner of service demanded of her at this time of peril.

The Lord of heaven is looking on to see who is doing the work he would have done for the children and youth.

As a church, As individuals, if we would stand clear in the judgment, we must make more liberal efforts for the training of our young people.

Now those are some strong statements, aren't they?

I mean, they're saying this is a serious matter.

The training of our young people, we're asleep to this.

If we want to stand clear in the judgment, it should matter to the whole church body, especially to parents, most of whom are gathered here for the seminar on parenting and on understanding the true education of our children, which really is 1 and the same thing.

Usually when we say the word education, we think about just the academic aspects, but look at this statement.

In the highest sense, the work of education and the work of redemption are 1.

So education is synonymous with redemption.

You're educating your child because you're leading them to Jesus.

You're helping them to experience what it means to be a Christian, to be human, to become fully the character, manifesting the character of Christ in their lives, becoming missionaries, becoming all the things that we are called to be.

Redemption, becoming the way God originally designed us to be, to be restored to God's original plan.

That's the process of education takes us there.

So this is not just a discussion about school and how you do math and these kinds of things.

Academic matters do count for parents as they think about their children, but the most important aspect is the well-rounded, complete, total redemption process.

This whole session is going to be a really, really comprehensive and involved story going way back to the Garden of Eden, taking us all the way through the Bible times, in the post Bible times, in the 2000 years after the time of Jesus, straight through the Dark Ages, and the time of the Reformation, and then the formation of the Advent Movement, and the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the 19th Century in our education system.

Also the worldly schooling methods that were coming in at that same time.

You are going to see these histories parallel each other.

False education and true education going at the same time, hand in hand, competing with 1 another.

There's a great controversy going on, right?

You've got Christ's methods, Satan's methods to raise and train our children, either for the world or for the Lord.

And then straight on into the last days, we'll see where this is all going at the end of the session.

I wanna take you all the way back now to the Garden of Eden.

You know what kind of education was formed there?

The system of education established in Eden centered in the family.

It says Adam was the son of God, not in the sense of Jesus, but a child.

And it was from their father that the children of the highest received instruction.

Theirs in the truest sense was a family school.

In the divine plan of education adapted to man's condition after the Fall, so here we are fast forwarding just a bit, Christ ordained that men and women should be His representatives and the family was the school and the parents were the teachers.

The original form of education in the Garden of Eden was Adam and Eve learning directly from God.

Then after the fall, you've got the parents are the teachers and the family is the school.

That was God's plan for after the fall, for the best way for the training and education and the raising of children.

And it says by the way, in Child Guidance, page 294, that this was God's plan for all after time also.

Now we are going to see some other elements come in and we'll see what God has done in the midst of this great controversy.

In early ages, This would be the patriarchal times, the times of Noah and Enoch and Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

In early ages, with the people who were under God's direction, life was simple.

Their children shared in the labor of the parents, and studied the beauties and mysteries of nature's treasure house.

And in the quiet of field and wood they pondered those mighty truths, handed down as a sacred trust from generation to generation.

Such training produced strong men." So did it work?

As history progressed here in the Old Testament prior to the time of Israel, you had the patriarchs in early ages.

The system God established was producing strong men.

They studied the nature's treasure house and labored with the parents.

That's a beautiful picture of how to do life as a family, isn't it?

It says, in ordinary life the family was both a church and a school.

In God's plan for Israel, so now we're taking 1 more step forward here into the time of Israel.

God's plan for Israel was the same thing.

Every family would have a home on the land with sufficient ground for tilling.

Thus were provided both the means and incentive for a useful, industrious, self-supporting life.

And no devising of men has ever improved upon that plan." Are you getting the idea this is God's preferred method, right?

I mean having a family in the country, in the land, and you're growing food, and you're working together, and you're studying in nature, and you're experiencing life together in this natural beauty setting.

That's no devising of man has ever improved upon that.

He said, we're going to continue it here.

In the place of stranger lips the loving hearts of the father and mother were to give instruction to their children.

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Schooled: Undoctrinated

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