What AI Can't Teach Your Children | Pastor Kyle McMullen

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Awesome.

Well, uh, good morning.

My name's Kyle, one of the pastors here.

Uh very grateful and uh honored and blessed to get to open the Word of God with you all uh today.

And just in light of the reality that uh Garden City Academy and Vector are and Little Farmers are all off and running for another school year.

We are gonna talk about education today.

We're gonna look at God's Word and see uh what He has to say.

It is one of our distinctives, it is one of our values here.

We've started uh three institutions uh uh spanning from uh preschool, pre-K all the way through college uh in this endeavor of Christian education.

And so we ought to know uh what the Word of God says about these things.

Amen?

So here's my title The Thing AI Will Never Learn.

The Thing AI Will Never Learn.

If you follow AI news at all, uh you know that as of this past week, uh the human race has three years left before total extinction.

And uh, you know, everybody from Elon Musk to Bernie Sanders is talking about it.

Aren't those strange bedfellows, by the way?

It's like just just last month, Bernie Sanders, I'm pretty sure, thought Elon Musk was like the Antichrist for being so rich.

And now they're now they're both talking about how AI is gonna kill us all.

I I don't know.

Who knows?

All I know is that there is something AI cannot do, will never do, cannot learn, will never learn, cannot teach, will never be able to teach, and that is to love God.

To love God.

And that is the goal, that is the foundation, that is the definition of Christian education, of biblical education.

What is education according to the Bible?

It is this it is learning to love God with every human faculty in all of life.

Learning to love God with every human faculty in all of life.

Where do I get that?

I get that from Deuteronomy chapter six.

If you want to turn there, uh you can turn there with me.

We're gonna be all over the place uh in Scripture today, but if you want to turn there as just an anchor point, you can do so.

Deuteronomy chapter six, verses four through nine.

Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might.

And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart, and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and you 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.

You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.

You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

So as we continue to look at what the Word of God says about these things today, would you would you pray with me?

Father, we do pray that you would bless our time, that you would help us, that your Spirit would guide and direct.

Uh Lord, we thank you that your word is not silent about these things, but that you have much to say.

Uh, Lord, at the start of this new school year, we do pray for your blessing to be upon every family, upon every parent, upon every child.

Uh, Lord, is as and and upon our church family as a whole.

Lord, it is it is our sacred responsibility, and we take it very seriously, uh, the discipleship of the next generation.

And for all of us, Lord, we never stop learning how to love you more.

And so we pray that this would be a school year where every single person grows in the love of God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength.

We pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So, uh, what is it?

What is education according to the Bible?

It is it is learning to love God with every human faculty in all of life.

There's our anchor text.

Next question is this who then is responsible for the endeavor of education?

Who is responsible for the endeavor of education?

And it's right there in the text we read, but the the biblical answer is that parents are ultimately responsible for the education of their children.

Parents are ultimately responsible for the education of their children.

Look what it says.

It says that you shall teach these things.

You shall teach the words of God, the commandments of God, the most important one of which is to love God.

You shall teach this diligently to your children.

But this isn't just an Old Testament reality.

It gets reaffirmed in the New Testament, Ephesians chapter 6, verse 4.

Ephesians 6:4

Fathers do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

And so this is, and I know for many of us here, this is just baseline review here, but let's just say it again and let's just continue to say it repeatedly and loudly and confidently that the Word of God gives the responsibility of educating children to the parents.

That is the biblical framework for who is ultimately responsible for this endeavor.

Well, you might be wondering, why then should the church be involved with this at all?

Right?

If it's the family's jurisdiction, if it's the parents' responsibility, why would the church get involved with education?

And the answer is because it is essential to the mission of making disciples.

It's essential to the mission of making disciples.

And so, yes, we have Deuteronomy 6, teach your children diligently these things.

Yes, we have Ephesians 6, raise your children in the in the uh instruction and admonition and discipline of the Lord.

But we also have Matthew 28.

And Jesus came and he said to them, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me, therefore go make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.

And behold, I am with you to the end of the age.

And so Jesus codes education into the Great Commission.

And in that way, there's almost a broadening here of the jurisdictional responsibility for discipleship, for education, and that is yes, parents ultimately responsible for their children, but the church should be involved as well because it is education and teaching and instruction, these are actually essential things to making disciples, and that's the charter of the church.

That's the commission of the church.

And while we're on that note, if if biblical education is learning to love God with every human faculty in all of life, right?

Learning to love God with every human faculty in all of life.

Well, who are the students?

I don't have this in my slides, but who are the students?

And the answer is all of us.

All of us.

It's not just for kids.

It's this is the lifelong learning project of being a Christian.

That you're you're always in this school, the school of learning to love God with your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

And you never stop learning that lesson.

And you never stop growing in that.

And so, right here at the start of this new school year, you know, you know how the the calendar year obviously starts in January.

The school year starts in the fall.

And I don't know about you, but for me, I almost I almost get more self-reflective at the start of the school year sometimes than I do even at the new year.

You know, the new year you're coming off of uh uh you know eating a lot of food for for two weeks at Christmas, and you're kind of tired and you just bring in the new year, and it's like, all right, you know, sometimes it can take a while to get the engine revved up for the new year.

The fall, I man, I I I usually come into the fall just like raring to go.

It's like, all right, let's and so i in in terms of just resolves and goal setting and self-reflection, man, I I feel oftentimes more productive in the fall at the start of the school year than I do at the start of the calendar year.

And so there is no better time, friend, than right now, at this, at the start of this new school year, no matter no matter what age or stage of life you're in, no matter whether you have little kids at home uh or not, no matter who you are, now is a good time to resolve that you will enroll yourself in the school of learning to love God more this year.

Amen?

Amen.

So back to our foundational definition here.

Biblical education is learning to love God with every human faculty in all of life.

As I mentioned earlier, the tech overlords are saying this past week that we have about uh three years until the extinction of the human race because of AI.

And uh, I don't know, maybe they're right, uh, or maybe there's just suddenly more power and money to be grabbed through fear-mongering, i.e., Y2K, global warming, COVID, etc., but who knows?

Time will tell.

In the meantime, while this is going on, Garden City Academy and Vector just launched their school years yet again, in which students will be given physical copies of actual books and will be given grades based on literally reading them and learning something from them.

They will, while the world is developing an ulcer about a supposed oncoming global technological matrix.

We're over here having kids read Homer, Augustine, Jonathan Edwards, and Mark Twain.

We're having them do long division with a pencil and a piece of paper.

We're having them do push-ups with proper form.

We're timing them on how fast they can run a mile.

We're teaching them the parts of speech so that they can know the difference between an adjective and an adverb.

We're having them prepare to be ready to argue for either side of the federalist, antifederalist debate.

We're teaching them the difference between communicable and incommunicable attributes of God.

We're teaching them logical fallacies.

We're having them sing and act and compete and perform.

We're taking them on hikes to Alpine Lakes.

We're teaching them how to spend six hours alone with a Bible, a journal, and a pen.

What are we doing?

Are we crazy?

Are we the crazy ones?

After all, it is 2026.

And depending on the day, AI is either here to make us all unfathomably rich, or it's here to end the existence of money altogether, or it's here to take all of the jobs, or it's here to make us go extinct.

Why do we care about long division by hand, running cross country, how to read biblical narrative, and what Augustine wrote 17 centuries ago?

We're doing all of this because loving God is the purpose of life.

The sacred responsibility of all Christian parents is to teach their children to love God.

And while this is a simple thing to say, it is an all-consuming endeavor to actually do.

All-consuming.

When you walk by the way, when you sit at home, when you lie down, and when you rise, the love of God is the lesson that must pervade all of life.

Loving God requires every human faculty, heart, soul, strength.

And when Jesus quotes this passage as the greatest commandment in the gospels, he adds mind to the list.

And so it is a spiritual thing to love God, a physical thing to love God, an emotional thing to love God, and an intellectual thing to love God.

And this is the thing that AI cannot do and will never be able to do.

Love God.

But it is the thing that men and women made in the image of God must do and always be doing.

Love God.

We live in a time where education is viewed as what I'm going to call a neutral positive.

A neutral positive.

That's kind of a weird phrase.

What do I mean?

Doesn't the word neutral imply that it's neither positive nor negative?

So how can it be a neutral positive?

Isn't this a strange phrase?

Exactly.

That's the point.

Education is largely viewed today as a thing that is supposed to be neutral with regard to religion and worldview.

It's not supposed to have a belief system.

It's supposed to be neutral.

And yet it is also supposed to accomplish something good in society.

It's supposed to have a positive effect.

And so people don't want religious indoctrination, but they still want literacy, diplomas, degrees, and a certain standard for institutions that train brain surgeons.

And so education, culturally speaking, is kind of viewed as this neutral positive thing.

In a society where education is seen this way, Christian education has to be talked about as if it is its own unique endeavor.

Christian education cares about literacy, it cares about institutions that train brain surgeons having a standard, but it does not try to claim worldview neutrality.

It is, in fact, Christian education.

But there was a time not that long ago, and this is the whole point here.

There was a time not that long ago when education itself was universally recognized as a Christian endeavor from start to finish.

Meaning Christian education was not one flavor of education, like flavors of ice cream, chocolate, vanilla, pistachio, pick your flavor, it's all ice cream.

No, rather, the very foundation of there even being education to begin with was Christianity.

To put this into a concrete example, people take it for granted today that education will teach children how to read.

But historically, it would be more accurate to say that Christianity taught children how to read.

Because it was Christians who cared about people being able to access the written word of God for themselves.

Literacy is a goal of education today because it was first a goal of Christian discipleship.

Education as a distinctly Christian value has its roots all the way back in the Old Testament, thousands of years ago.

Deuteronomy 6, love the Lord your God and teach your children diligently these things.

Jesus, of course, quotes this as the greater commandment later.

In the original context, let us not forget that the greatest commandment is followed up with the commandment to teach this to your children.

Meaning it's an educational endeavor to teach it in such a way as to make it the governing normal reality of all of life.

Loving God is not a side project, it is the very reason for being alive.

And this must be taught.

Education for the people of God is the preserver of our understanding of our very purpose for existing.

And that is the love of God.

The Puritans are probably one of the greatest examples of what I'm talking about here in terms of education being a uniquely Christian endeavor.

They were the first, really, they were the first group of people who successfully established a culture of literacy for both boys and girls.

They cared about children being taught how to read because they wanted everybody in their society, in their culture, to have access to the word of God because they viewed the Bible as the foundation of their culture.

Like they it it all it all rises and falls on that for them.

They understood that our culture will not long survive if we forsake the word of God.

And so everybody needs to be equipped with the word of God.

And so there's kind of a fun little historical tidbit.

In 1647, 1647, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, there was a piece of legislation that was enacted that was called the Old Diluter Act.

Okay?

The Old Deluter Act.

And the old the deluter, right, deceiver, liar, they're literally referring to Satan.

Okay?

So the old liar, the old deceiver act, referring to Satan.

And the goal of this piece of legislation, like they literally wrote this out and stated it, that the goal was to defeat the lies of the devil.

So we're going to enact this legislation to defeat the lies of the devil.

And the legislation required that parents and towns together, once they reached a certain size, that parents and towns together would teach boys and girls how to read so that they could read the Bible and therefore not be vulnerable, not be susceptible to the lies of that old deluter, Satan.

Like that's that's why it was called the Old Deluter Act.

Isn't that awesome?

That's incredible.

So they they put right at the foundation, I mean, there's so much to unpack there.

They understood that this is a spiritual war.

They understood that heaven and hell are on the line here.

That these things are spiritual, uh, and that it and that literacy is not just uh not just gaining knowledge for knowledge's sake, it's so that they could defeat the lies of the devil, so that they could build a certain kind of culture.

It wasn't just about uh viewing boys and girls as empty buckets and we need to just fill them up with the right content, with the right information.

It was like, no, our culture will only persist, it will only be built, it will only survive, it will only grow, it will only thrive insofar as our children are the carriers of this culture.

And so it was an enculturation, not just an information, you know, data download.

An enculturation of this is the way of life that, you know, by you know, as you walk on the way, as you rise, as you, as you go to bed, as you sit at home, the love of God is the great theme.

And it's and it's a culture that is created by that.

And so the old deluter acts 1647, uh teaching children, boys and girls, to read the Bible so that their culture could be guarded against the deceptions of the devil.

Incredible.

What is what is at stake here?

What is at stake in education?

Everything is at stake.

Everything is at stake because learning to love God is the purpose of life and it's the definition of real success.

What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?

What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?

Everything is at stake.

What does it profit a man to get a degree?

What does it profit a man to get a certification, to have a nice career, to build material wealth, to have paid time off, or to do anything else that might be categorized as an immediate goal of an education or of training?

What does it profit a man if he does not learn to love God?

There is a massive disruption in the educational landscape of our culture right now.

There are many, many unknowns.

How is AI gonna change this?

How is it gonna change that?

Is college a scam?

The fact is, there will always be a culture war around education because ideologies need people to carry out their agendas, and people are the recipients of education.

And so that's why there's always going to be a war around this stuff.

There's always gonna be a culture war around education.

The thing that AI will never learn how to do, that you absolutely must never stop learning how to do, is to love God.

The thing that all the worldly success in all the world can never make up for a lack of is the thing that you must never be lacking in, and that is the love of God.

This is the great distinctive of Christianity.

Did you know that the word Islam means submission?

But in Christianity, the greatest commandment is to love God.

Our submission to Jesus follows our love for Jesus, and our love for Jesus follows his love for us, which is the origin of all of it.

I'm not anti-submission.

I preached a whole sermon on submission earlier this year.

But a loveless submission, a heartless submission, a heartless conformity, that is not Christianity, friend.

You can have a warped version of submission without love, but you cannot have real love for God and not end up submitting to Him.

And so our greatest commandment is love.

Love the Lord your God with all of your faculties, with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength in all of life.

This is the reason for living.

This is the reason for breathing.

This is the reason for existing.

Everything is at stake with lear with uh with whether or not we learn this lesson, with whether or not we teach this lesson to our children.

This is the definition of real success that a man or woman would love God with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength.

Amen?

So then what is the curriculum of biblical education?

What's our curriculum?

Biblical education studies.

God's Word and God's world.

We study both God's Word and God's world.

Look at Genesis 128.

God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, have dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

And so you'll notice here the pattern.

God starts with a word.

God said to them, and then that word is supposed to result in action in the world.

Right?

God said to them a word, and the word is, have dominion over the world that I've made.

So we have God's word, and we have God's world.

And we study both as revelation from Him.

This is our mandate.

Knowledge ultimately has to be revealed by an authoritative source, which means you have to start somewhere.

Right?

You have to start somewhere.

So the rationalist starts with reason as his version of divine revelation.

The postmodernist starts with subjective experience.

But as Christians, we start and we end with the Bible.

So we adhere to sola scriptura, which means scripture alone, that great reformation principle.

We adhere to sola scriptura, but not in the sense that we study the Bible exclusively, in the sense, rather, that we study it exhaustively.

And we engage all other pursuits and all other subjects from a biblical foundation.

So the Bible permeates the curriculum not just because we force it upon other subjects like a bumper sticker on a car, but because, speaking of cars, the very concept of a curriculum self-existing in a world without the Word of God makes about as much sense as a Ford existing without Henry Ford.

There is nothing in existence outside of God that is not sustained by the Word of God.

There is no subject, there is no discipline, there is no thread of knowledge that is not sovereignly ruled by the Word of God.

We will never untether curriculum from Scripture for the same reason that veins cannot disconnect from the heart.

It is a matter of life or death.

Scripture is our primary source text, because without it, there are no texts.

The leading astrophysicist and the leading string theorists today cannot ultimately explain what stuff is made of within the constraints of science alone.

They will verbally reduce matter down to particles and molecules and atoms and quarks, but they cannot finally explain the stuff of stuff without essentially just saying that stuff is made of other stuff.

Christianity doesn't start with stuff, it starts with the triune God, Father, Son, and Spirit, who speaks words that manifest into created things.

In the beginning, God spoke, and the heavens and the earth appeared.

Stuff is made of the words of God.

And our divine mandate is to take dominion of that stuff, of the stuff of creation, to be fruitful, to multiply, to fill the earth, and to subdue it.

And so theology and botany and geology and geography and math are all inextricably related because ultimately everything is theology.

When we study the scriptures, we are learning about God.

When we study plants and animals and everything else that God created, we are learning about the creator God.

To be given the very words of the living God and to give them nothing more than casual familiarity is inexcusable to us.

To live as characters in God's story in this world and to not have a relentless curiosity about history, philosophy, literature, creation, art, food, work, cultivation, architecture, poetry, leadership, and humanity is an atrocity to us.

While we live in an age where information has never been more available, the great irony is the average student today, produced by the information age, has hardly ever been more incompetent, less intelligent, or more bored with reality.

And so we refuse to squander what we have been given.

Christians should have the most insatiable appetites for truth, goodness, and beauty in every field and in every endeavor and in every discipline, and we will settle for nothing less.

So our curriculum is both the Word of God and the world that God has made.

So then what are the marks?

What are the marks of biblical education?

Well, biblical education includes spiritual vigor, intellectual rigor, and physical discipline.

Spiritual vigor, intellectual rigor, and physical discipline.

Look at Romans chapter 12, 1 through 2.

Romans 12 · chapter mention

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies, physical, as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, intellectual, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

And so we want an education that is spiritually vigorous, intellectually rigorous, and promotes and trains physical discipline.

The love of God must be taught, modeled, cultivated, and relentlessly pursued.

Starting with spiritual vigor teaches us that it is better to know a little and have a great love for Christ fanned into flame than to know a lot and have a heart of stone.

Meaning, it's all for nothing if you don't love God more at the end of the syllabus.

It's all meaningless and worthless if your heart is not burning with passion for God.

It is our conviction that true knowledge is not the enemy of spiritual affections, but rather a companion in the journey of loving God.

Indeed, it is the fear of the Lord which is first felt in the heart, is it not?

It is the fear of the Lord that is the beginning of knowledge.

Proverbs 1:7.

Proverbs 1:7

However, there is a worldly version of knowledge, a counterfeit kind that produces pride.

This is the type of knowledge that puffs up, 1 Corinthians 8.

This is the deadly poison that so many drink in the higher education sector.

Academia is a modern high place of grotesque idolatry where men and women sacrifice at the altar of arrogance.

The tragic but ironic result of pursuing knowledge pridefully is that it produces ignorance.

Romans 1 records this unavoidable devolution of man's sin nature.

The problem is not that people fundamentally lack knowledge, for all men can ascertain that God exists through the revelation of his creation.

The problem is that men know God is there and choose to worship false gods in defiance of him.

In other words, sin is not an ignorance problem to begin with, it is an arrogance problem, but it will eventually produce an ignorance problem.

Sin leads to ever-deepening levels of depravity that can only be embraced by suppressing the truth.

And again, it is a unique irony that the stupidest and most destructive ideas infecting culture today all existed in seed form in the universities long before they became mainstream.

And so here are the alleged institutions of intellect, the supposed colleges of academic achievement, pumping Marxism and feminism and transgenderism and all manner of mental derangement into society.

As the proverb says, real knowledge is born from fearing the Lord.

This is a condition of the heart, spiritual vigor.

Future leaders must first and foremost, and all disciples, must first and foremost be formed as men and women who have rightly ordered affections with the love of God as their chief aim, their chief reason for even living.

And so biblical education must be spiritually vigorous.

Intellectual rigor does matter because truth belongs to God.

Higher education has long claimed to be in pursuit of truth, but the college culture of our day exposes a severe lack of anything remotely resembling real intellectual rigor.

College is supposed to be hard.

It is supposed to grow a person's constitution.

There is no shortcut bypassing the ancient paths of deep thought, wide reading, precise writing, and persuasive arguing.

But college students today are enslaving themselves with financial debt in exchange for four years of debauched summer camp.

We need the old school kind of school, the kind that still believes in hard work and in genuine learning.

And so we do not spoon feed students and we do not hand out participation trophies.

We identify a high bar and we aim for that.

We operate with the fundamental conviction that the average student is capable, capable of true academic excellence, and that he will rise to the standard that compelling leaders call him to rise to.

The goal is not that every student earns straight A's.

The goal is that every student earns what they learn.

Not all graduates will graduate with distinction, and that's fine, but every individual journey to graduation should be marked by intense reflection on the most important questions.

It should be marked by experiencing primary texts.

It should be marked by moments of soul-level enjoyment that only come after a profound struggle.

It should be marked by the formation of one's worldview, which cannot happen without sustained effort.

It should be marked by becoming wildly curious and by becoming, therefore, an interesting person.

God created the universe with his words.

Words are expressed thoughts, and so we endeavor to graduate men and women of thoughtful substance who can intelligently wield words, who delight in discovery, and who exercise their God-given minds for building great things in the world that God made.

Consider 2 Corinthians 10, for the weapons of our warfare are not flesh, but are not of the flesh, but have divine power to destroy strongholds.

And so we destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and we take every thought captive to obey Christ.

But it's also a physical thing.

Education is also a physical thing, and it requires and it ought to cultivate physical discipline.

We are not anti-technology, at least not yet.

But we are absolutely anti-transhumanism.

Men and women are not machines.

Men and women are images of God.

And while this is more than the reality of having a physical body, it is not less than the reality of having a physical body.

The despising of physicality is as old as philosophy itself.

But we reject these age-old Gnostic leanings of rebellious thought in every form that they reincarnate themselves for modern times.

The body is a created good.

It enables us to see, touch, taste, smell, and hear.

Without their or with their bodies, men build churches, hospitals, homes, companies, and empires.

With their bodies, women grow, bring forth, and sustain new human life.

For the one who has been bought by the blood of Christ, the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.

But this is made possible only by the fact that Jesus Christ Himself took on a body, that he laid that body down in a sacrificial death and he raised that body back to life by the power of the same spirit who now inhabits those that he redeemed.

And so true education is not an escape from the body into some ethereal dimension of the mind.

The spiritual does not abolish the physical.

The spiritual establishes the physical and governs it.

Intellectualism with soft hands is self-defeating.

So our students discipline their bodies as an act of love to God, as an act of submission to Christ, so that the Apostle Paul, as the Apostle Paul said, they will not disqualify themselves after espousing the truth to others.

I do not run aimlessly, I do not box as one beating the air.

I discipline my body, I keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.

1 Corinthians 9.

And so, spiritual vigor, intellectual rigor, and physical discipline.

What then is the paradigm of biblical education?

What's the paradigm here?

And I'll draw you right back to Romans 12.

The biblical education, the paradigm here, trains disciples to think rightly, discern wisely, and live faithfully.

So think, discern, act.

Right?

As you've heard Pastor Josh teach many times, think, discern, act.

This is such a great paradigm.

Right back to Romans 12.

I'll just highlight some other phrases.

Look at this.

The renewal of your mind.

Think.

Thinking.

That by testing you may discern, discerning what is the will of God.

Once you discern the will of God, what's the next step?

Do it.

Act.

Think, discern, act.

Right there.

This is our paradigm.

And so biblical education trains disciples to think rightly, according to the truth of God's word, to discern wisely according to the real life circumstances, the physical and spiritual circumstances of real life.

This is real.

This is not a simulation.

We're playing for keeps.

And there's relationships to navigate and there's vocations to embark on, and there's things to build, and there's words to say, and there's stuff to write, there's families to raise, there's marriages to be formed, there's churches to get planted, there's good works to be done.

God has prepared these things in advance for us to walk in.

And so we need to discern the will of God in the real world, and then we need to do it.

We need to live faithfully.

We need to take action.

So we think rightly, we discern wisely.

We live faithfully.

What then is the result of all of this?

What's the result of biblical education?

The band can come out, and I will close with a story.

The result of biblical education is men and women who change the world.

Samuel Adams, who was the founding father that the other founding fathers recognized as the spark of the American Revolution, was a devout Christian of the fire-breathing Puritan brand.

You attach his name to a beer today.

But he was a devout Christian.

He was a Puritan.

And he was a true believer.

And the other founding fathers are quoted often recognizing Sam Adams as the real spark of the whole thing.

Samuel Adams was proficient in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew by the time he was a teenager.

He went off to Harvard, where he eventually delivered a master's thesis written that he wrote and that he delivered verbally in Latin.

His topic, is it ever morally right to disobey the government?

And as you probably have guessed, his answer was yes.

Now, that wasn't in 1776.

That was in 1743.

When he wrote that thesis and delivered it at the age of 22.

33 years before the Declaration of Independence, Sam Adams was thinking about the moral causes for exercising civil disobedience.

And he was thinking about it in Latin.

The point is this this is the point.

America did not nationalize in a random moment of violent frenzy, like a bolt of lightning out of the clear blue sky.

America became America because there was already in existence a certain kind of culture on these shores.

It was the kind of culture that produced men like Sam Adams.

It was the kind of culture that produced men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and all the rest.

This culture was a 150-year Herculean effort of a particular people.

Those people were of a certain kind of character.

It is with without the character of those individual men and women over the course of that 150 years leading up to the Declaration of Independence, without the character of those individual men and women who put the Word of God and the worship of God as the driving forces of all of life, who understood that to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength is the reason for living.

Without those individuals and without their convictions and without their resolves and without their lifestyles and without their actions, the culture that birthed the United States of America would never have been formed.

And so this is the point that when you attend to the formation of your personal character, when you attend to the formation of your children's personal character, when you enroll yourself in the school of learning to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, you aren't just working on you, and you aren't just working on your kids, you are changing the world.

That is what you are doing.

That is what we are doing as we learn together, as we teach together, as we disciple together.

Education, biblical education, the kind that is about men and women learning to love God with all of their faculties in all of life.

That is the kind of thing that creates a kind of culture that changes the world.

Fundamentally, we are forming men and we are forming women who have been made in the image of God, and we are forming them to be transformed into the image of Jesus Christ.

Ephesians 3, that according to the riches of his glory, he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

So, Father, we thank you for what you allow us to be a part of, and we thank you, Lord, for giving parents the sacred responsibility to teach their children.

And we thank you for equipping the saints of the local church to be involved in this great endeavor.

And we do pray at the start of this school year that every person in here would enroll himself or herself back into the school of learning to love you more with all our hearts, with all our souls, with all our minds, with all of our might, with all of our strength.

We want to love you more at the end of this school year than we do right now.

We pray that your Holy Spirit would guide and direct.

Lord, we pray for your great protection.

In all of this, we know, just as the Puritans knew 400 years ago, we know that Satan hates this.

That he hates the thought and the idea of children having access to your word, of children being formed into the character of Christ, of children growing in the love of God.

And so we pray for divine protection in Jesus' name from the attacks of the enemy and all and the opposition that we face.

Lord, for every parent, for every child, for every family.

Would you bless them in this endeavor this year?

We pray all of this in Jesus' strong name.

And everyone stay together.

Amen.

Thanks for listening.

If you want to learn more about Grace City, check out our website listed below and check out the Stronger Man Nature podcast with Pastor Josh McPherson for regular podcasts tackling issues on marriage, fatherhood, growing as a stronger man, and how to be a faithful Christian in a war from depravity.