get together a retreat kind of to give a breath of fresh air back to the mothers as they get ready to start their homeschooling year. Do you mind if I spend some time doing that? I said, no, that's fine. Well, then she came and said, well, who would be a good speaker? Who are some people that we can get? And what are some good things that we can do to get this refreshing and get this mother refreshed and encouraged about homeschooling? Well, I said, well, that's simple. You want to encourage mothers their homeschooling venture, you get the fathers involved in the homeschooling, and that will encourage the mothers. So that's why I said, we're going to have this, let's do it, let's get the fathers involved as well, and let's encourage them. And what you'll see is, as the fathers get involved in the homeschooling, it will be encouraging to the mothers as well. So that's what we want to talk about this morning, is homeschooling and what has a father to do with it. We're going to start off by talking about two men. to what we would call real men or a manly man, masculine. And our country's founding, since the founding, is full of these kind of men. The first one I want to talk about was President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt. At a young age, young Teddy, his father instilled values in him. His father was a man that was into charities. He started many charities. one of the founding people in the YMCA, and he instilled these values into Teddy. Teddy would go on to get a love for animals and conservation. He would go on many hunts throughout the world, on safaris. And we all know that the animals, if you go to the Smithsonian or a lot of these museums, there's still the animals that Teddy brought back. He would go out to the Dakotas. We would start a cattle ranch. And not only would he round up and herd cattle, but he would go out and round up and herd cattle thieves with some of the locals. Then he would come back to be the president of the Police Commissioners Union in New York City, which at the time was the most corrupt police department in the world, or in the country, one of them in the world. But he would, not only would he run that, but he would reform it with what they called an iron-willed honesty. Teddy would not only tell his people what to do, he would go out and show them by going out on the beat in the middle of the night and making sure that his men were where they were supposed to be and doing what they were supposed to be doing. Then he would go on to form what most people know him for, and that is the Rough Riders. Him and several other guys would get together and they formed the first volunteer cavalry of the U.S. Army. And they would go, and we know when they went to Kettle Hill, in Cuba for the Spanish-American War, and Teddy wound up with the only horse that made it over on the voyage. And he would ride back and forth, checking from bunker to bunker, making sure that his men were okay under heavy fire. And then when he made the charge, his horse would eventually grow tired, and Teddy would dismount the horse and charge the rest of the way on foot. When he became president, he found out that McKinley was shot and that he was now president. And when he found that out, it was while he was climbing the summit of Mount Marcy. And this is my favorite. When Teddy was given a campaign speech on the campaign trail, a saloon keeper stood up and shot him. And the bullet went right through his glass case and lodged in his chest cavity. They came around, and they were like, Teddy, you've got to go get medical attention. Teddy just brushed him off. He looked at him, and he said, I could just see that voice. It's not vital. It's a mere flesh wound, for if I was in danger, I would be coughing up blood." And he gave a 90-minute speech. Now, I don't know about you, but if I get shot, if I take a bullet, whether it's a large caliber, small caliber, the chest cavity, the arm, the foot, the toe, if I take a bullet, I'm done speaking. Now, don't get any ideas, by the way, but if I take a bullet, I'm done. Not Teddy. Teddy took a bullet to the chest, and gave a 90-minute speech. That's a man. The other one I want to talk about is Douglas MacArthur, one of the most popular and famous generals in the U.S. Army. MacArthur was born in army barracks. And I was kidding with somebody the other day. I said, you know, if you want to be a good general in the army, a good place to be born is probably the army barracks. So he went on, he grew up on the plains of the Old West where he learned to ride and shoot before he could read and write. His father instilled in him, there's two things a man must be before he is anything else. A man must first be a gentleman. Second, he must be a scholar and everything else will fall into place. Douglas MacArthur went on to be first in his class in West Point. Then he would go on to be the youngest Brigadier General in the U.S. Army's history. He would lead campaigns in World War I where he would get the Medal of Honor and many other medals. He would retire and he would oversee the Philippines until he had to come out of retirement for World War II where he would again lead campaigns, win more medals, more Medals of Honor. MacArthur was on the deck of the USS Missouri and was there signing the Surrender Treaty himself with the Japanese Imperial Army. You look through the life of Douglas MacArthur and you see a man with masculine traits. Yes, both of these men, we could have picked out many more, but these are the two that I wanted to look at this morning. And both of them, they had several things in common, but the two things they had was one, they were masculine and they weren't afraid of their masculinity. They weren't afraid to be a man. They weren't afraid. They didn't hide it and try to apologize for it. They embraced their masculinity. And number two, both of these men were homeschooled. And you say, well, a lot of people were homeschooled back then. Well, people of their stature, they weren't homeschooled. They were sent off to school, to boarding schools and such. So it wasn't that common. But something happened. between the hundred years, between the time they were educated and the next hundred years or so. And the idea that you could be educated in your home went out the window. Then about in the, I guess, the 1970s, you had families, mainly led by the father, who realized something. They saw something. That something was Proverbs 22 5. It says thorns and snares are in the way of the crooked. Whoever guards his soul will keep far from them. They realized that the path was full of snares and thorns and that we were supposed to keep far from them. And then they realized what some of these thorns and snares were with their children. They realized it was some of the things that were being taught in the government schools and that was Some of the thorns of evolution, the thorns of humanism, the thorns of feminism, the thorns and the traps of constantly berating Christianity. And they said, I'm going to bring my children out of that. And so they did. They started the journey to homeschool their children. Now, these men, these families, it wasn't easy. Sometimes we catch some grief or complaints or we hear these snide comments. Well, these men heard a lot of it. They were mocked, they were ridiculed by not the teachers unions and the government as much as they were their friends, their family, and their church. But they stood true to what they were called to do. And that is because of what they had centered their education around. They realized that the Bible was totally sufficient telling you how to train your children. They realized that you could go to the Bible and you did not need anything else and it shows you the model for training and raising your children. And they stuck to that and that was what the center of it was. Now that they do academics, yes, you go back to some of these early homeschoolers and when you talk to them you realize they were learning stuff like logic, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, math, sciences. They were learning all of this. But it wasn't centered on that. It was focused on raising up godly men and godly women for the next generation. Then in the 80s, it got a little easier. The homeschooling movement started to grow just a little bit. I think in the early 80s, they estimate there was about 13,000 homeschoolers. That sounds like a lot, but when you look at nowadays, we're measured in the millions. So we've grown a lot. In the 90s, it really started picking up steam because several things took place. One, a lot of court battles were won. It made it a lot easier. Companies were seeing the trend and they started creating companies that were in lines that were entirely geared for the homeschool curriculums and the homeschool crowd. And also, these homeschoolers that were homeschooled in the 70s and the 80s were starting to get out of school. raise families of their own. And they started homeschooling their children. And thus we have the second-generation homeschoolers coming onto the scene. But the problem was, by the late 90s, early 2000s, we'd kind of changed our goal a little bit, or what we were doing. Well, what started focusing on all around the Bible And these people were saying, well, these kids are graduating and they're very smart. So they realized that it was academically possible to teach your children at home. So a lot of people who were apprehensive were now homeschooling their children because they saw that you could academically prepare your child. And unfortunately, academics became what it was all about. And that was what the homeschooling became. It was all about academics. with a little bit of Bible sprinkled over the top of the subjects. We basically took what was being taught in the secular schools, in the Christian schools, and we brought it into our homes and we threw a little Bible into it. We pulled out a few pieces here and stuck a little bit of Bible in its place. And we created these wholesome little rooms all across the country. Whether you're in the suburb, whether you're urban, rural, apartment complex, whatever, All across the country, we have these little rooms where we've made little safe havens for our children to learn. And we're like, well, we've blocked off all these evils. I've blocked off the evils of evolution. I've blocked off the evils of feminism and humanism from my house. There's no dangers that can get to me and get to my children as long as I am homeschooling them. Again, we've started off from the... This is what we started off. Then we go to education. We start doing the math and we start getting on that. Put this up here. And we get all these nice little, I said, these wholesome little classrooms. But are there dangers? Are there dangers in the homeschool movement? Yeah. And I am, let me tell you, what is children? I ask my kids, what is our family motto? That's right, always be prepared. Pattersons are prepared. Prepared to pull out a band-aid and alcohol wipe out of your pocketbook or your pocket and help a sibling that fell down. Prepared to welcome your brother or sister into the world unexpectedly in the family room. Prepared for it all. When I go out into the woods, and I do a lot, I get prepared. One thing I do is I say, okay, here's where I'm going. What are the largest animals that I can encounter that might want to eat me? And I carry a big enough gun to stop that animal. Pattersons are prepared, but Pattersons are not food. I'm not going to be eaten. So I make sure of that. If I'm going hiking and I say, you know what, I'm going to be back by 4 o'clock after dark. It's going to go below freezing. I'm going to prepare for the below freezing temperatures. Even though I'm not planning on being out there when the temperature drops, I don't know. What if I get lost? What if I fall down? What if? You know, it's not a danger that I've encountered yet, but it's a danger that I know is possible. And that is what being prepared is. If we wait for the danger before we start doing something, that is not preparation, that is reaction. So I like to be prepared. And as I was preparing, I started looking at the homeschooling. We started about seven years ago. We're going into our seventh year of homeschooling. And when I started, it was kind of just a viable option. And then all of a sudden, I realized when we started what it truly was. And I said, wow, this is something that not only I want to do, and I don't only want my children to do it, I want my children's children's children to be able to educate their children at home. I said, what are some of the dangers that's going to prevent that? And I got to looking and trying to find out these dangers. Some of them were the ones I thought I was going to find out. won court battles. Well, I figured that the court system would be somewhere that could cause some issues. And let me tell you, if you're not aware, you need to keep up to date on what's going on in the court system and the legal systems with the homeschool movement. A lot of times we take it for granted because we've won so many battles. But there are people, whether you believe it or not, that are in our government, in our education system, just people that don't like homeschooling. that are doing all that they can to get your children back into the public school system. They do not like the fact that we can educate our children and we can teach them values that goes against what they want to teach in the government schools. It is very behind the scenes constantly trying to take these legal battles. Many of you already may be a member of the Home School Legal Defense Association. I would encourage you, if you're not, look at that. And they'll send you an email so you can stay up to date on that kind of stuff. Because if we don't, we may wake up one morning and be like, wow, it's still legal to homeschool in America, like Sweden, Germany, and so many other countries that we like to follow after. Another danger was the peer pressure. We like to think, when we get out of school, that the peer pressure went away. Peer pressure never goes away. The peer pressure of family constantly telling you, why are you homeschooling your children? Why are your children not in school? Why are your children this? Why are your children that? Friends, they're constantly asking you. It's easy to fall victim to that. You know, I warn people, and I've seen it a ton of times, where a family that's been homeschooling for sometimes 10 years, and all of a sudden they stop. I'm like, what happened? And when you look, what usually happens is they stop associating with other homeschool families and solely associate with families that don't homeschool. When you do that, what happens is you start seeing what they're doing and you start wanting to be like them. Your children will start wanting to go and hang out with their friends in their school and do those kind of things. You've got to be careful. about solely hanging out with people who don't homeschool. The peer pressure will rub off. If it doesn't cause you to stop, it will cause you to grow bitter about homeschooling. It will be a burden and you will grow tired of it. Now, at the same time, I don't want to say only associate with homeschool families because if we went over here and just hunkered down in the corner, We're not doing anything. Yeah, we're safe. We're not getting all these other stuff in there, but that's not what Christ has called us to do. He's called us to go out. We're to have a fellowship of friends and family that are meshed, not just homeschoolers, not just public schoolers, not just of this walk. We're to have people that are of all walks so that we can relate with them. But just as it's so dangerous, we like to talk about that, not being in our little cliques. It's also so dangerous. not to go over here all the way, to have a good mix. Because the peer pressure is very real. But then I got to see another danger. And I wasn't expecting this one. And this one just started, it just come up and whoa. And I realized this is kind of crept in. Kind of went right under the radar. But it's very dangerous. And if we don't do something about it, By the time our children and their children start, it could be very well the end of the homeschool movement. And that danger is that the homeschool movement in general has become a woman's movement, a mother's movement. You say, well, what do you mean a mother's movement? Look around. When you go to homeschool conferences in general, who's usually at the homeschool conferences? Mothers. Who's writing all the books about homeschooling? Mothers. Who are the experts we look to? Mothers. Who? We go up to the blogosphere. Who's writing all the blogs about homeschooling? The mothers. And you say, well, what happened? How did feminism come in? I don't think these people who are at home, these mothers, it's not a feminist mindset. It wasn't intentional. It's simple. The father goes to work. The mother does what the Bible says and says, I'm going to be a keeper of home. And she's at home. The father's at work. The children are with the mother. Makes perfect sense for the mother to educate and homeschool the children. The problem is we've lost our goal. We've lost our goal of why we homeschool. What started with families and fathers saying, we want to raise our children So they are godly sons and daughters. They become godly men and women, godly husbands and wives, and godly fathers and mothers. That is the premise of our educating our children. But somewhere along the line, we lost that goal and it became, the goal was the college degree. That's what we homeschool for now, is the college degree. And don't get me wrong, I'm not against the college degree. I'm not against going to college. But that is not the sole purpose of raising our children, is to get that college degree. And it's not even the college degree. When you really go down and start picking it apart, the reason is materialism. We want our children to be able to have a nice house for their family, have two nice cars, have nice vacations, and nice stuff for the children, nice toys, nice landscaping, Typical American dream is what we want for our children But in order to do that in today's society you have to have a college degree for most part So we've made that degree Our goal and so that is our goal is And the mothers are teaching the academics at the house. And there's nothing wrong with that. Wives, mothers can teach your children academics just as well as the father. My wife can teach English. Well, actually, she can teach English better than I can. But she can teach English, math, you know, logic, Latin, all these things. She's just as capable of teaching that as I am. There's nothing in the scripture that says the father has to teach all that stuff. And since our goal is college and she's teaching that, and the father's at work, thus the father all of a sudden has become almost irrelevant in the home education of the child, apart from funding of the homeschool. So the father goes out, and the father raises funds, and the homeschool continues. It appears all is well. But years ago, there was a movement with mothers. Years ago, mothers realized the doctrines of feminism and the dangers of it. And they said, you know what? Feminism was telling them you had to go to work if you wanted to have fulfillment in your life. You wanted to go out and be your own person. Mothers started flocking away from their careers, leaving stuff from the admin assistant to doctors and lawyers. They started turning their hearts from the career and back towards their family, back towards their children, back towards their husbands, towards their home. And these mothers started coming home out of the career. And that was a wonderful thing. Fathers, it's time we have the same kind of revelation. If we start turning our hearts away from the bass boats and the golf games and the business meetings and all of our gadgets and toys and the internet and all that stuff and start turning our hearts back to our family, turning our hearts back to our wives, our homes, our children. I'm not talking about coming home from work, but I'm talking about turning your heart towards home. You can sit in a cube at the office with your heart towards home. If college, again, if college and career is our goal, all is well. But if our goal is something like Proverbs 22.1, where it says a good name is to be chosen rather than great riches, it is better than silver or gold. If that is our goal, if our goal is to raise up a generation, whether they're college educated or not, but they are on fire for Jesus Christ. They have a passion for learning His Word and living His Word. And that is far more valuable than the large house on the hill. If that is our goal, if you look at the homeschool movement, all is not well. You see, my concern is not, again, the career of my children. Now, if they go to college, that's great. Some jobs require a college degree. That's understandable. But if they choose to not go, that's okay too. As long as they are serving the Lord and raising a family up for Jesus Christ. I don't know where we bought into we've got to have nice vacations and huge houses. Those things are nice and if you got them and you can afford them, great. But that's not what it's all about. It's about raising godly children for the next generation. In order to do this, we need several things. Yeah, we got some. I'm going to throw out a couple of these here. Some of these may look a little familiar to some of us. All right. Usually do this on a hardwood surface so the carpet doesn't do too much justice here, but we'll try it. All right. Well, some of the things that's got to happen is boys need their fathers. Boys need their fathers at home with them and to walk with them, not just the mothers. Now, mothers, you can try to train your boys, and a lot of mothers are trying that. A lot of mothers try to raise their boys. They realize their boys need to be masculine, and they try to get them out there and Be masculine, be boys. That's why things like Vision Forum, you look, and I can tell people who have the Vision Forum catalog, when you pull up to their house, because there's things like zip lines going across the backyard, catapults in the backyards, you know, if you're into that, you know what I'm talking about. And the reason is, a lot of moms are saying, go be boys, go out here and play with this, build stuff, find stuff. Because boys need to be masculine. And they're trying to use these toys. Which, by the way, I love those toys. I become a kid when I get around those things. But those toys aren't going to make your children become men. Your children don't need toys. They need the father to show them what it is about being a man. Again, mothers, you can teach. Men are supposed to do this, do that. But it's kind of like taking your car to a mechanic that's never driven a car. He may know how to fix it. He may know the ins and outs of your car. But he doesn't have that experience of actually driving a vehicle. So he totally doesn't understand when you give him what's going wrong with it. Mother, Jesus told us that the teacher will not be greater than the disciple. There are only certain things that you can teach a boy about being a man. Other than that, he needs a man. He needs his father. to come in beside Him. And I want to make a big distinction. Throughout this today, I'm saying man. I'm using the word man. I want to make a distinction between male and man. There's a big difference there between those two. So, you're born being a male. Being a man has to be taught. And it's by taking your children with you. Let your boys walk beside you, fathers. and what you do. The Bible tells us, Deuteronomy 6, 7 says, 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, when you lie down and when you rise. We quote that verse a lot. Do you realize though that Moses was talking to fathers there too? As we walk by the way, as we go through life, our boys will be beside us. walking with us. One thing we do, my daughter, we set up a hope chest so when she gets married she has all her stuff with her. We started getting a tool chest for our boys so that when we buy new tools every year for them and for gifts, that's what we give. So that one day when they get married and have their own house, they have their own tools and they're equipped both physically and spiritually. And in doing so, I need to teach them how to use them. So they go beside me and they help out when I'm building stuff, when I'm fixing something. And let me warn you, if you're going to do that, be prepared. It's going to take you longer to fix things. What once took three hours now takes three days. You're hammering, pulling out a nail, putting it back in, pulling out their nail, putting it back in. Sometimes you're like, oh, just go over here. But then when you see them hammering, it does right. And that smile on their face, you realize they're getting it, and it's worth it. It's not just about using your hands and teaching them that nature. It's letting them see the bad and the good. It's letting them see that when you mess up, that daddy does mess up sometimes. He may lose his temper. The other night, I lost my cool with my children. I yelled out. You know what I had to do? I had to go back to them and say, Daddy shouldn't have done that. Not just, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to yell at you, but what Daddy did was sinful. Yes, you disobeyed me, but that was no cause for me to act like that and to raise my voice in the way I raised it. And I had to look him in the eye and say, will you forgive me? Fathers, your children need to see you do that. When was the last time you looked at your child and said, I was wrong? Please forgive me." We tend to think, ah, I don't need to do that. No, you do. They need to see Daddy ask for forgiveness when you've been wrong. When they're beside you all the time, they also get to see your integrity. See how Daddy handles stuff when things happen. When you get out of the car, in the parking lot, and your kids, they open the car door, and bam! Right into a brand new Mercedes or BMW. What they need to see is not daddy saying, Kev, get back in the car, go, go, go, go, go, and take it off. What they need to see is daddy saying, you know what, I got to find out who owns this car. I have damaged their property and I need to go find them or leave them a note and tell them who I am and what I have done so that I can pay for it. They need to see that kind of integrity in their father and realize whether people are looking or not, daddy's going to usually do the right thing. And when he doesn't, I've seen us for ask for forgiveness for not doing the right thing. They need to see that. And then you look at you say, well, what about the single mom or the widow mom? Well, remember what we said, the Bible was sufficient in raising your children. What does the Bible tell us in James? Pure religion, undefiled, is going to the widow and the fatherless in a time of need. It's sufficient in that place too. As a church, men, we are to go to these boys. We are to, when we take our boys fishing, bring them alongside of us. Hey, come over here. When you see them walking, don't just go over here and ignore them. Oh, that's a young teenager. I don't want to talk to him. No. How are they going to be men if men don't go talk to them? If all they associate with are boys, and that's where you throw them at, then who's teaching them manhood? Go to those boys. Pour yourself into them as well. Don't just neglect them and say, well, they're not mine. You're in the church. You're called to do that. I would caution you to beware at the same point. Not to neglect your family in order to go over here and help everybody else's. You know, I was guilty of that. And I've got several friends that are in the pastoral ministry, youth pastor ministry, Sunday school, whatever, in the ministry. And they are over here pouring their self into all these boys or all these families over here. And their kids are over here being neglected. How many of us have ever heard the term PK kid? What that usually represents is somebody, a preacher's kid who is wild. The Bible tells us that we are to go over here. I mean, we're to keep our house in order. Oh, Jesus Christ said that as long as we're doing it in the ministry, that if we're to go out and serve him, we've got to be willing to hate our children, hate our parents. Jesus Christ said that, but that's not what Jesus Christ meant. He meant that there may be times in our life when we make us take a stand for Jesus Christ and our children, our parents don't like that stand. We've got to be willing to stand for Jesus, even through those times. and not falter. That's what Jesus Christ was talking about. Not going over here and neglecting your family in order to serve somebody else's family. He tells us in Timothy and Titus that to be elders and pastors and deacons, men, your house has to be in order, your children have to be under control. If your children are not under control, you don't need to be trying to minister to somebody else's. I don't know who's in this crowd, I don't know if there's pastors or not, but if you're a pastor or a leader in your church and your children are not under control, You have no business teaching or standing behind the pulpit. I know that may be kind of bold, but that's the truth. If your children are not under your control, if your children are the typical preacher's kid, you ought not be teaching somebody else. Go home and get your children under control. That doesn't mean they mess up and they misbehave. And let's say general, if it's a general pattern, is what he's talking about. So the reason I'm saying that is we've got to be careful that we don't fall into that, that we make a balance. Helping them, but at the same time being over here to tend to your family as well. So again, just to balance. So boys need their fathers. But if boys need their fathers, so do daughters. They need you, Daddy. They need you. They need you to show them that they are worth something. That they have value. To tell them how wonderful they are. How great a helper they are. how much you love them. You know, time and time again, we see where some girl, young girl that is in the church, she's doing well, pretty much a typically good kid. Then all of a sudden, out of the blue, she's hanging on the arm of some tattooed, pierced up boy, and you're wondering, what happened? Where did she go? What did go wrong? She wants somebody that's gonna tell her she loves, they love her. Somebody that will tell her she means something. Whether these boys mean that or not, probably not, but they're willing to say that and they flock to them. You show me a girl who's done that, who has been brought up in the church and is usually a good kid and all of a sudden she's over here hanging around the wrong boys. 99 times out of 100, I will show you a home where the father is not involved. They need you as daughters to show them how you interact with your wife, how you father your children, how you handle your business affairs. Everything. Also to train them up. Wives are supposed to be the help meat of their husbands. Daughters, did you realize that until you're married, You're under the headship of your father. You are to be a helper at home to your father, to your siblings, to your mother. Father, you've got to allow your daughter to do that. To be able to be the helpmate. To be helping you. To go in and say, Daddy, can I get you this? Can I do this for you, Daddy? Allow them to do that. And they also see that you don't take advantage. At times, she may come in, Daddy, can I get you this? Well, no, princess, you can go over here and do this. You've been doing so much. Why don't you go over here and read that book you want to read? Or go do this. They see that Daddy doesn't take advantage, that a man is not supposed to take advantage of his wife in that nature. But we think, oh, well, girls are supposed to go out and have all their friends and go out here and do everything they want to do. And then one day, they'll get married and become a wife without being trained on the principles of being submissive, being a helpmate. They can have friends and go out, but they also need to know that. You see, what happens is we get married and you spend the first five or six years of the marriage trying to figure out what a husband and wife are really supposed to do. And if you make it, good, but so many times we don't make it because we don't know what we're supposed to do. We've been trained to be single. We've been taught to be single. And then we get married, it's all of a sudden a crash course. Well, oh, they'll learn it, they'll get it. Well, no, they're not supposed to learn it and get it at the altar. My goal is that by the time my children are 16, they are able and ready to be married. That doesn't mean my children are going to be married at 16. My 16-year-old daughter, I would woe be the guy that comes to the door wanting to marry my 16-year-old daughter. But the point is, by 16, she needs to be ready. My boys need to be ready at that age. Now they're still going to be learning some things. I'm still learning some things. But for the most part, they need to have that understanding of what a man and what a biblical wife or biblical husband are supposed to be. And we do that by pouring ourselves into our sons and our daughters. And we train them up. The Bible tells us that we are to train up our children. Has anybody ever heard a verse in the Bible that says, talks about training up your child? There's a famous one in there, isn't it? Proverbs 22, verse 6, says, Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it. You know how we interpret that verse nowadays? We interpret it to mean, when your children are really small, put them in a really good program in church, get them. And then as they grow, get them in more stuff, and more stuff, and more stuff. Get them in the right ministries, in the right Bible studies, send them to the right camps. And when they are old, if we've done our diligent job of having them in church enough, they are going to go over here, they're going to stray, but have no fear, they'll come back one day. That's the way we interpret this verse right now in today's church. That is not the way that verse is supposed to mean. It means we're to train up our child in biblical principles. Folks, if you train your children, I don't care how many hours you have them in church, if they are trained in the ways of the world, when they are old, they will not depart the ways of the world. If you train your children on PlayStation, Xbox, Spongebob, Facebook, and all those sorts, when they are old, they will not depart PlayStation, Xbox, and Spongebob, and you name it. There's a reason that men at a staggering rate are divorcing and leaving their families and living back at home in the basement with mom and dad playing video games all day. It's because that's what they were trained on. They were trained up on that. You know, it used to be that when I was growing up, I would beg my mom and dad, can I please play the video game now? Can I please play Nintendo? Please. And sometimes they would let me. Nowadays, the kids are still doing that. I said, it's not because mom and dad are busy and they don't want to hook it up. It's because daddy won't get off the video game and let them play it. It's because we were trained on that. If you really want to know what train up a child means, go to the verse before that, 22.5. We've already looked at it once. It says, thorns and snares are in the way of the crooked. Whoever guards his soul will keep far from them. Train up a child in the way he should go. Even when he is old, he will not depart from it. Thorns and snares. Are we supposed to throw our kids into it? No. It says, where are these thorns and snares? They are in the way. How are we supposed to train up a child to go? By the way. The path. The path, if you want to look at this verse and say, well, what path are we supposed to train up our child on? We go back a verse and we say, well, here's the path, the way, and when there's thorns and snares on it, we're to stay far away from these thorns and snares. And some people say, oh, well, how are they going to learn if you don't let them go through it, if you don't let them experience it? How are they going to learn? We all homeschooled here, I think, so most of us have probably heard that before. If you don't let your children get involved in this, they'll never be able to experience it, and they're going to be ruined for the rest of their life. That's ludicrous to think that we have to let them experience it. I think Kent Hovind, if you ever listen to him, he makes the... I don't have to stick my head under a Mack truck and let it run over it to realize I don't like that. And that's the point we're here. We don't have to let our kids experience it. Fathers, we can walk by and say, you know what? We're walking down the path with our children. You see those thorns over there? They're bad. And this is why. And explain it to your children. Don't just say, smoking, bad. Drinking, bad. Don't look at these things and just say, bad, good, bad, good. Say, bad. But this is why. This is what will happen if you get involved with those. Oh, that's okay. They need to experience the alcohol. They go out there and experience it one night. They need to know that. No, they don't. You know why? They might just like it. I did. And I spent 10 years as an alcoholic because of that. Stay away from the thorns. Again, we think that we have to take our kids, and we get them trained up enough, we get enough Sunday school and enough Bible teaching and classes in them, and then we throw them through the thorn bushes, and when they come out on the other side, they're stronger. And if we didn't do our job right, they might not make it through it. That's the way we take parenting today. Friends, that is not biblical parenting. That is the doctrines of evolution. That is the doctrines of humanism. That is the doctrine that says the survival of the fittest. And it's not from God. It's straight from the pits of hell. We're to keep our kids away from the thorns as much as possible. Now, sometimes a thorn will grow across the path and you stumble over it. And it happens. That's when you help the kid back up and say, oh, here it is. But we are not to intentionally put our children in the thorns and hope they can get through it. There's a good chance they won't make it through it. So children need their fathers. And if children need their fathers, guess who else needs you? Your wife. She needs her husband. We mentioned it earlier that wives start to be the helpmate. Not your servant, not your slave. There's burdens that belong on the father's shoulder that we have shifted to the mother's shoulder, to the wife's shoulder. We've got to take those burdens off of her shoulder. Did you realize that picking the homeschool curriculum is not your wife's burden? It is yours, fathers. Deciding how your children or what the academics are they're going to be taught, did you realize, fathers, that goes to you too? These are burdens that aren't yours. Raising, or they aren't hers, they're yours. Raising your children. aspects. Fathers, that is your responsibility. It is not a responsibility that you can just hand off. Now, can you delegate that? Yes, but it's still your responsibility. We like to think, well, I'll just send them over here and when they don't turn out right, I'll just blame them. No. God has given you that responsibility and you're going to be held accountable for how your children turn out, no matter who it is. that teaches them. Now, when you're choosing the curriculum, does that mean that fathers are supposed to say, here's all the curriculum, this is what we're going to do, and just be a drill sergeant about it? No. Because one thing that, if you're like me, what would be is, okay, well, I'll get the curriculum, and then we go out, and we would search, and we would, you know, look on the internet and find the right curriculum for what we want to do, get it all packaged up in a nice little box, Walk in, hand it to our wives, and say, here you go, honey, look how much I've helped you. Now go see to our children. And walk off. That's what we would like to do. But we've got to go and say, look, I found this out. This is curriculum that I think would be great for our children, honey. What do you think? And let your wife give you some input. Because you know what? If she's going to be at home teaching the academics to your children, I think we owe it to her to be able to have a big input into what she's teaching our children. If your wife looks at you and says, you know what, I'm not comfortable teaching that, or I don't think our children are ready for that, don't look at her and say, ah, big boy, you don't know what you're talking about. No. She's probably got a good reason, and you need to listen to it. And unless you have a very, very, very compelling reason why to push the issue, then I would say, OK, well, let's go back and look at something else. And again, you're training up your children. They're seeing that daddy is not just pounding his fist, that he's compassionate, that his wife is helping him, but he's realizing she's not just the helper that walks behind him, she's his helper that walks beside him. So, husband, your wife needs you. She needs you to be there, to go to her and say, hey honey, how can I help you? How can I assist you? Is there an area that the children need me to come in and help on. Is there a disciplinary issue in the house that I need to deal with? What is it that you're struggling? Do you need guidance in a certain situation? They need us to come in and help. I'll be honest, your wife, she doesn't need more of your funding for the homeschool. She doesn't need you to be a cheerleader standing here on the sidelines cheering her on as she raises and teaches your children. She needs you to be involved with the homeschooling of your children, and she needs you to be a leader and lead the education of your family. That's what she needs. And Father, we've dropped the ball here. We have dropped that ball, and we have handed that burden off to our wives, and we've walked away. How many times has somebody ever asked you, where do your children go to school? Oh, my wife homeschools. Father, don't you dare ever tell somebody my wife homeschools. The answer ought to be, we homeschool our children. Yes, the wife is the one doing most of the teaching because she's at home with them. But ours should be to the point where our lives and we're pouring ourselves into our children. That when we go home, it's not just cutting grass or doing this. It's teaching our children throughout the night. Notice, when we look back, Deuteronomy does not tell us to educate our children from 830 to 230. It says when we sit, when we lie, constantly teaching our children. So fathers, you've got to be involved. And usually when I talk about that, there's a wife or something elbowing the husband, listen up, listen up, I've got to get you involved. Wives, it's easy to do that. But if your husband is going to pick up the mantel and run with it, if he's going to grab that baton and carry it, like he's supposed to, you're going to have to lay it down. And that's not an easy area. Some of you homeschooled for 10, 12 years, maybe, a long time. You're used to having that power. You're used to being able to control what goes on in the homeschool and the education of your children without the interference of your husband. Now you're going to have to lay that down. and hand it to them. And husbands and wives, if you do that, I can promise you your first year is probably going to be a little bumpy. Because there's going to be times when you're going to get a good idea, and you're going to go home and tell your wife this wonderful idea about the education of your children, and she's going to say, oh, I've already taken care of that. Well, honey, I thought we were going to do this and work together on this. Yeah, but because I've been doing this for so many years, I just knew right what to do, so I went ahead and did it. Husbands, don't get mad at her. It's your fault for putting that burden on her shoulder for all those years. Wives, don't get mad when your husband, when you're needing his guidance, and all of a sudden he doesn't give it to you right away. He's not used to doing that. It's going to take some time to get that right again. But the reason sometimes homeschooling can be such a burden is because there's a burden on your shoulder, mothers, that's not supposed to be there. So, fathers, your children need you. Husbands, your wife needs you. You may be saying, well, I thought this was a homeschooling conference. So far we've heard a lot about being a father. Well, yeah. The education of our children, guess what? It's not about academics. It's about the raising up of godly children to the next generation. It's about having children that 250 years from now My great, great, great, great, great grandchildren will believe what they believe and know why they believe it by what I put into my children today. Looking generations down the road, not just getting my children into college and through, but looking at generations to come. That's what home educating your children is about. I've used the term homeschooling a lot today, and I usually don't use that term. It's usually about home education, about home discipleship, And the academics go right along with that. But it's about training our children up in the academics, their integrity, their ethics, how they work, how they handle other people. We can't separate it and say, here's that part, this part, and this part. It all goes to one. And that is what educating our children is all about. Remember what I said earlier that we Started the homeschool movement focused on the Bible As we look we there's some good books, you know that I Really like a lot of them. Most of them came from my my library But as we look you see I'm taking all these good books in these curriculums And now do you notice something? What have we done to the Bible we build a wall around it where you can no longer see it. We've gotten off of the scripture and we've got all on man's philosophies. Like I said, these are good books. I love them. They've changed my life. But it's not the Bible. Fathers, what we've got to do is we've got to start taking these books one by one and tearing them down, tear the walls down that we've built And so all we have standing in the center of our home is the Word of God. And we can say, you know what? This right here is sufficient. and telling me how I am to raise my children. I don't need Dr. Phil. I don't need Dr. whoever to tell me how to raise my child. Everything that I want to know about raising a child and raising my daughter to be a godly wife and a godly mother, to raise my son to be a godly father and a godly husband can be found right here in this book. That's what it's about when we train our children up. That should be the goal. We started out today talking about Teddy Roosevelt and Douglas MacArthur. Teddy Roosevelt, as I said, as he was homeschooled, his father had a vision for his family. He really had a family. He loved the family ties. He taught them about scripture. And Teddy would go on to raise his family. Now, I don't agree with all of Roosevelt's policies, but I do agree with the way he poured himself into his children. And he taught them the value and integrity and honor to love the family, to love the siblings. There's one story that just, I love it. And that's Teddy Roosevelt. He got mad one day, and he grabbed his son and was shaking him on the shoulder. And he looked over. They said his four-year-old daughter, Edith, was sitting there with tears streaming down her eyes, crying, saying, Daddy, Please shake me daddy, not him. Such a love for family and sibling that she did not want to see her brother punished. Teddy Roosevelt's family went on for generations to take what he had taught them and pass it on to their children after children. Their children went on to do the same things their father did and were great servicemen, great leaders. Remember Douglas MacArthur, remember his first two things, he said, a man must be a gentleman and a scholar. We're down south in the heart of the south, so let me just tell you, being a gentleman is not godly. It's not unbiblical or ungodly, but we take it to be almost Christ-like to be a gentleman down in the south. Now, I'm raising my children to be a gentleman. I think it's a wonderful trait, but it does not equate to being biblical father or a biblical man. The other thing was scholarship. He stressed being a scholar above all things. When Douglas MacArthur died, his only son, Arthur MacArthur, changed his name and went into hiding. He ran away from his father's legacy. He ran away from what his father had instilled in him. Here we have one of the greatest generals to ever serve in the U.S. Army, and even his grandchildren will never know of the accomplishments of their grandfather. They will never know the values of his grandfather. The heritage was stopped right there. Fathers, what are we putting the emphasis on in our house? Is it getting that degree? Being a scholar? Or is it about training up godly sons and daughters to be godly husbands and wives, and then godly fathers and mothers? And notice it is in that order. Before they can be a godly husband and wife, we need to have them be godly sons and daughters, then husbands and wives, then fathers and mothers. What will your legacy be? Roosevelt, will your children still be passing on your convictions? Or will they run from what mommy and daddy taught them? So that your children, so their children and your children's children, never even know who you were. I pray that is not the case. That 250 years from now, because of the children that we have just in this room, that thousands upon thousands upon thousands of children will be raising up their families in the admonition of the Lord to go out and serve the world for Jesus Christ because of what us as fathers and mothers instill in their hearts as we raise them now. Let's close in prayer. Father, I pray that you would be with us this morning. Lord, touch our hearts. Let us realize that it's not about Academics, Lord. Lord, time and time again, we see you have shamed the wise. Father, touch my heart as a father. Pour myself into my children. Through discipline. But also through love. Father, may you touch our lives here. May you let us look deeper into the scripture. to find out how we are to raise our children. May we make the Bible, Lord, your holy word, a guidance, our true light into our path. Father, we ask these things in Jesus' holy and precious name. Amen.