I really hope this morning and throughout the whole week that you guys are excited and encouraged about the school year ahead. I hope you are. I really hope there's a spirit of excitement this year and particularly for you guys that are brand new starting and that it's not all anxiety and worry and what if. But I hope you're just really excited about all the cool things that are gonna be happening. Yeah, I know, I know. There's always going to be a mixture. But I hope it's more excitement than worry. So I'd like to start off this morning by talking to you about staying faithful in education. Staying faithful. Staying the course. And I'm glad we have new teachers on board this year. I'm glad that you guys are with us. I really am. And I'm thankful for you guys who have been with us for a few years and have been faithful thus far. And I really am excited about the trajectory that God is taking us on as a church and as a school. It's really exciting. And as I've been learning about Christian education over the past five years or so as a profession. I've come to the conclusion at various times that there are things that I have to unlearn, right? Have you ever been there? There are a lot of things I have to unlearn. As we repair the ruins, so to speak, part of repairing the ruins is tearing down Those old walls that aren't straight. I think of Nehemiah and having to tear down some of those walls in order to build new and straight ones so if you find out that You may find out that you have way more tearing down than you thought you did and if that's the case Don't be discouraged take heart The Lord is with us in our endeavor. Okay, so And I think it's important for us to be willing and ready to see the things in our lives that may not be straight, not just in education and what we do here, but in all of our, every aspect of our lives, you know, is how we live, does that truly align with the word of God in everything that we do, right? Because all of that's interconnected. And if that's the case, if things aren't lined up, we need to pray and ask God to help us to be willing to change and to be grateful that God showed these crooked walls to us. Amen? So I want to talk about faithfulness in education. And I'd like to set the stage for you by communicating exactly what the Christian walk is. What is the Christian walk? What is following Christ like? The Christian life and everything, of course, it's a Christian endeavor. So how are we to live as Christians? That can be expressed in, I think, a really good metaphor. And it's a good picture that we can construct out of the Christian walk. And that's the picture of faithfulness, being faithful. Faithfulness like a wife to her husband, that kind of faithfulness. Because as Christ's bride, we do have a husband, right? We have a covenantal head. And you being a part of the bride of Christ, you have certain covenantal responsibilities. And there are certain stipulations that God has given to us that we have to own up to being his bride, and that you have to obey and fulfill in order to be faithful to him. And education is simply one part of that. And so what I'd like to communicate to you is that faithfulness in education doesn't boil down to merely faithfulness in education. Does that make sense? Your life is integrated. Your life is connected. All the different aspects of home life, school life, life at the grocery store, life with your kids, life with your family, all of that stuff is connected to one another. And the same is true in education. But we have to break all of the knowledge that we've been given by God. When we teach integrated life to our kids, we have to break these things down in pieces. for our students to understand them, right? And how do we normally break it down? Well, into mathematics, into science, into writing, literature, and history, and all that. So when we get into the classroom, we spend most of our time teaching these things as separate units and then spend time trying to integrate those subjects. back together again under Christ, right? And so we want to be able to teach our history at the same time that we teach science, in a sense, so that they're integrated well, right? We want to integrate writing with that and have our students writing about the history and science that they've been studying. And of course we want theology to be the head over all of that. We want theology to run the show. We want all of these subjects to rotate around theology and be seen through the Word of God. We want it to be integrated. And your life is that way. Your life is just like that. And you can't be faithful in education if you're not faithful outside of education. You can't spend all of your life pursuing grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and trying to devote yourself to the Christian school, and devoting yourself to the study, and the discussion, and the pursuit of the calling in Christian education, and then at the same time neglect your children at home, or neglect your husband at home, or your wife at home. You can't do all of those things, neglect all of the other things that you have to do, and still be faithful in education. It doesn't work that way. And so I want to consider these things in that light, that faithfulness in education is integrated, and it all boils down to faithfulness to our husband, our federal husband, right? It's really easy. in a week like this, like as we sit back, we take these mornings to be instructed, to be fed, so to speak. It's really easy to be equipped in this sense and feel like we're getting ready to do our day-to-day callings here at school. And sometimes I know, at least the first couple of teacher training weeks, I know I was kind of an instructor, but You know, really, I was learning really one day ahead of y'all. I wasn't much farther ahead. And it was really easy for me to feel simultaneously blessed and overwhelmed all at the same time. And, you know, this week y'all probably have extra childcare set up. I'm sure y'all have extra childcare set up. They're not running around at home. like a bunch of crazy children. But you have child care set up. And this has given you time to really think about and put in the work of being a good teacher. Many of you have been preparing all summer to do this, at least through July, to do this. And you've made special arrangements to be able to set yourself up to set up your classroom, to really think about curriculum, to think about lesson planning. All in getting ready for that preparation for August 15th to get started, and we'll finally be doing it. We've been preparing for this long, now it's finally time to get started. And when it's time to actually start getting in the groove and getting to work, and August 15th comes and we get in our routines, The temptation that we're going to run into is thinking, man, I've got to keep thinking about education. I've got to keep reading. I've got to think about how I can become a better teacher and have all the stuff I want to do in the classroom. But I have all these meals to cook when I get home. I have a house to clean. I have dishes to do. I have diapers to change. And it's getting in the way of all the things that I'm called to do by God at Christ Church Academy. See, it's really tempting to get into a position where you're, in a sense, kicking against the other aspects of your calling that God's called you to do because you wish you could be more faithful in education and devote more time to it. You may be tempted to think, man, if there weren't so many dishes to wash and so many clothes to fold, I can actually fulfill this calling at school so much more effectively. So I wanna encourage y'all to stay away from that temptation. And I wanna call y'all to be faithful disciples in those other areas too. Because God has certainly called you to be faithful in education. but he's also called you to be faithful to your family and to be faithful to the things at home. If you're a father and you neglect your wife and you don't nurture and love your wife because you're too busy lesson planning and grading papers till 11 o'clock at night, if you're not spending time with your children and discipling them and loving them because you're too busy doing school-related work and being bombarded with the idea that there's still so much you don't know about Christian education and you're neglecting all the people that God has called you to be faithful to, well then you're in essence being unfaithful in education. You can be faithful to the things here at school and not be faithful in the things at home, but it voids all the stuff you've been faithful to God here out. It voids it out. You're unfaithful here too. And so, You know, if you wish you'd just have more time and less things to do at home, then in essence, you're wishing that God would give you something else that he hasn't given you, right? He hasn't given you those things. And God's answer to you if you want these things taken away from you is no. No. And because you wouldn't be more faithful if you had all the time in the world to pursue Christian education instead of doing the dishes. You wouldn't be more faithful. Matter of fact, you'd be less faithful. And so you've been given a charge. I've been given a charge. by God to do what he's called us to do. And that means faithfulness in the mundane, faithfulness into just tedious work or work that just didn't seem to have much meaning other than the dishes are dirty and once I clean them, I know they're gonna be dirty again in about 12 hours. You know, yeah, I know these shirts are clean and folded, but I know within the week they'll all be dirty and back in the dirty clothes again. And you know, I think of my wife that deals with this all the time. You know, we have five little kids at home and one on the way, and sometimes she feels like she doesn't do anything else but laundry and dishes and diapers. And intending to these mundane, vain, repetitious tasks all the time. But in these things, there is faithfulness in education. Look, when you change the diapers, you're changing the diapers of a little one who is going to change the world someday. It's difficult. It's easy to lose perspective of that, you know, in the middle of everything. But it's true. When you do the dishes, you are being faithful to your husband, Jesus Christ, and you're being faithful to your family and washing those plates, fully knowing that they're going to be dirty again in the morning. So don't become discontent in what you've been called to do. And in all of these things, yeah, read more books in education. Try to pay attention and not fall asleep when you read them. Try to remember as much as you can. Talk to other teachers and other folks about these things in education, of course. Read God's word, love God's word, love the truth, seek to become wise, do all of those things. But understand that a part of seeking to become wise is being thankful for what you have on your plate. and eating it, and eating it with a grateful heart, even though it's maybe a vegetable you don't like, right? So after saying all these things, I know we're all very familiar with Deuteronomy 6, but I'd like to go over it one more time and point a few things out in Deuteronomy 6. So if you want to turn in your Bibles and your phones to Deuteronomy 6, you're more than welcome to. I'm gonna start at verse 6. Deuteronomy 6, verse 6. So let me know when you're there. All right. All right. It says this, and these words which I command thee this day shall be in thine heart, and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children. and shalt talk of them when thou sittest down in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thy hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes, and thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates. Now many of us have this twisted understanding that there are some people who do these things that are mentioned here in verse six, and there are some people who don't do these things, right? But we have to understand that we are all doing these things all the time. Even the rank pagan non-believer, they're doing Deuteronomy 6.6, okay? We are all talking to our children when we're walking by the way. We all have something that's written on our hearts, something that's in the front of our minds. We're all teaching the children that God has given to us all the time. We may not always be communicating with words, but we communicate and teach them all the time by what we do and how we act. And some of us do these things faithfully, and some of us do these things unfaithfully. But this is the default position. Everyone who has children in this world, and this child lives in their home, they're doing this. They're doing Deuteronomy 6.6. But the difference is that some are doing this faithfully under God's law, and some are doing this unfaithfully according to some other law. Okay? There's no way around it. We are teaching our children the desires of our hearts, whether we know it or not. And if we And if you don't understand that your children are studying you carefully and watching you like a hawk and imitating you in everything that you say and do, then we don't know our children. We don't know them very well. And so, uh, you know, they're growing up to be just like us in every way. And every time you walk with them, and you're saying things to them on the way, you are teaching them. We're instructing them. And every time you sit at the table, regardless of what you say, you're teaching them something. And they're watching every little move that you make. And the same is true, probably to a lesser extent, here at school. Your students are watching everything you do. they're studying you, whether it seems like they are or not, and they're imitating your every move and your every word. So we need to think about what we're teaching them as we walk by the way. What are you teaching your children when you lie down and when you rise up. What are you teaching your students when you're just, we're going through the everyday routine tasks? You know, pretty soon all of the things that you do, as our veteran teachers know, will just be second nature. You don't even think about them anymore. You just seamlessly flow from one subject to another. It's time for this. It's time for this. It's time for this. Because the routine is the same every day. So it's easy for us to kind of disengage our minds and remember to know that they're watching everything we do. And so kind of our default position comes out. What's really in our hearts begin to come out. And so we just have to be careful. First of all, praying and asking God, Lord, let me have a pure heart. Let me have the right heart. And second, just remembering that I need to set a good example for these kids in what I say and what I do. And they're listening to the conversations you have with other teachers in the hallway. They listen to all those things. all of these conversations, I'm not saying they're not edifying, but it could be tempting sometimes, especially when you're talking about another student who might be misbehaving, to say things and frame things in such a way that could cause the other students to look unfavorably upon that particular student. So we just have to be careful of that. What is coming out of our hearts right now? Because Jesus said, abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. So we have to be careful. And we just have to remember that our students, they're sponges. They're soaking up everything that they're getting from us all the time. And the same is true at home with the kids God's given us. And there are areas in education specifically where we need to be renewing our minds. And as the bride of Christ, we have a choice. And there's a crying out, so to speak, of different educational authorities out there, which is crying out for our allegiance. There are other laws that are crying out for our allegiance that we can walk by the way with and teach to our children. There are other laws out there and authorities out there who want our affections. Does that make sense? Am I making sense? And there are some laws out there and ideologies out there in education that are asking and beckoning for our attention. And so we have to remember in the midst of that, that we are a bride, we are faithful. We are to be faithful to our husband, to our Lord. We are a wife, so to speak. And so we have this covenantal head, and if we listen to someone other than our husband when it comes to education, then we're being unfaithful. We're being an adulteress, essentially. We're being an adulterer. And so if you take your cues from educational psychology or humanistic psychology or from anyone other than the Lord Jesus Christ, if you take your cues and you gain your wisdom and your understanding of education from anywhere other than the Word of God, then you're being unfaithful to your covenant head. and will Deuteronomy 6-6, all the educational psychology that the world offers, and our kids will learn that and absorb that. We don't want to do that. We want to be faithful. So I believe, really, that there's different areas where we have really done this, where we've bought into the philosophies of the world, and it comes in through the different assumptions that we hold as educators and as teachers and parents. And I believe sometimes we are unfaithful, and we don't really even know it, because there are some built-in presuppositions that we've had our whole lives regarding education that we still need to unlearn. But sometimes we don't know we need to unlearn it yet. I'm still there. I still learn things. And my habits and decision making here at school sometimes is still ruled by a law that's not God's law and not his word. So I have to ask God to help me to see those things and expose them and know what God's word really has to say. So we need to listen to our husband. In other words, we need to listen to the word. You know, because we can listen to the word or we can listen to man, which is, that's the other law, the man law. And man comes in all sorts of different forms. You know, it could come from your personal experience with children, your own personal experience. You can make that Lord over what God's word has to say about education. You may have picked up these other laws from various mentors that you've had in the past who weren't necessarily Christians. You may pick these things up from books that you read on education. There's a plethora of books on education. that could fill up the Lafayette Library easily, but are they grounded in God's word? Would we be faithful if we read them and implemented them? You know, there's all these different avenues in which man's word can come to you. If you buy into this philosophy, then if you do that, then you're taking the advice and the counsel from someone other than your husband. Does that make sense? Am I making sense? Yeah. You know, of course, there's the temptation to try to synthesize the two. You know, God's word and man's law. Because, I mean, sometimes, you know, the educational psychology classes, I think they have a point. So, but there's a way that, you know, God's word kind of aligns with this, so we can go with that. You know, but is that, let's say you tried that if, you know, you're married and you tried that listening to your husband but also listening to another man at the same time. Is that faithfulness? No. What if you listen to the leadership of your husband and the leadership of some other guy? That's not faithfulness. So we can apply that here too. If we listen to part of the teachings of the Word of God and then try to synthesize those with the teachings of the world, and we end up with this sort of combination of the two, that's unfaithfulness. And if a woman's following her husband and then follows another man, that's infidelity. And so we should be those folks who desire to know what our husband, Jesus Christ, has to say. about education, about everything, but specifically right now about education. What does the word of God say about education? And then we must follow hard after that, really follow hard, no beg. And in all these things, I believe we should follow Banquo's advice. Anybody remember Banquo from Macbeth? Well, I'll remind you. We read that last year in Omnibus, so it's kind of been fresh on my mind. And if you're familiar with this, great. But if not, y'all remember the three weird sisters in Macbeth? They came to Banquo and Macbeth, and they promised Macbeth glory and fame and exaltation. Banquo wasn't really buying it, what they were selling. And Banquo gives Macbeth some advice. It's really interesting. He says this, I'll quote it. He says, "'Tis strange and oftentimes, to win us our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths. Win us with honest trifles, to betrays in deepest consequence." So what's that mean? So basically we can apply this in saying that if we listen to any other covenantal head than Christ, because in these other things you'll hear the truth in trifles. It'll sound appealing. There'll be appealing elements to it, but you'll be betrayed in matters, as what he said, of greatest consequence. It leads to the road, even though it looks sweet now, it leads to a road of destruction. And essentially you'll be unfaithful to your husband. And Banquo is trying to warn Macbeth of this. These weird sisters, they sound like they have a point by betraying and killing and making your way up the hierarchy here. And it sounds really sweet, but it leads to the deepest and gravest consequences. It was a warning. to be faithful to the truth, to be faithful ultimately to God. And I think we see this in a few different areas and assumptions. In Herbert Schlossberg's book, Idols for Destruction, he says this about the assumptions that we hold. He says this, assumptions in fact are more powerful than assertions because they bypass the critical faculty and thereby create prejudice. my mind tends to accept the assumption and bypasses it in order to engage the argument which in fact depends upon it. It sounds like circular reasoning. You're trying to argue from something in which you're You're basically using the thing you're trying to prove to prove the argument. Does that make sense? Yeah. So I believe many of us as educators have swallowed certain assumptions about the nature of students, the nature of children, the nature of teachers. And we've swallowed certain assumptions about the role of parents in education because of just the world and the age we live in. And I think we've bought into some of those things so much and we haven't really taken the time to examine them because there are assumptions and we reason from them already. We spend all of our time considering what's built upon the assumptions and what naturally follows based on these assumptions that we have, but we don't actually consider the assumptions themselves. Everybody understand what I'm saying? Yeah. So it's almost as if these assumptions that we have have come in through the back door, and we're not really looking at them, but at the same time, we're using these assumptions to make judgments in future decisions about our methodology in education. We look at what's following from them. So I want to consider three of these back door assumptions that I think are, they apply to what we do in education. And the first one is egalitarian education. Now I know whenever we all hear egalitarian education, that's bad. That's bad. We're certainly not that. But I think sometimes we have assumptions built into us just because of the age we live in. I think we have some hidden egalitarian assumptions that we don't know that we have. And we need to have them exposed and dealt with. Everybody understand what egalitarian education, what I mean by that? The desire to level everything out, to be the same. The desire to level education. The egalitarian assumption is that every student can perform as well as any other student, given the right conditions. That's the egalitarian assumption. This is true. This has an element of sweetness. This is a trifle that is sweet at the beginning, right? Because given the right conditions, yeah, every student can perform as well as any other student, right? But the problem with that is that the right conditions, they could disregard the blessings that God has given to the students in your classroom. You know, God has given blessings in different areas to the students that you have been tasked to teach. He gives different blessings to the different ones in your class. They've all been given differing numbers of talents. Some students are faithful and they use their talents well, and some students have a temptation to bury their talents. And some students haven't been given as much as other students in certain particular areas. But for us to desire that everyone perform exactly the same that we must have equality in performance and equality in outcome is egalitarian and that's unfaithful because it disregards God's differing gifts that he's given to each student. And we can see an example of this if, let's say hypothetically, our board, our elder board at Christchurch who is essentially our school board. Let's say they look at me and they tell me to task the junior high teacher with this. The junior high PE teacher, I have a responsibility given from the board to tell him, look, you've got the junior high boys every day for PE, every day of the week. And one of our goals that the school board has made as a standard, one of the standards for the junior high boys is for every boy at the end of the year to be able to dunk a basketball. That's the goal, okay? And if they can't dunk a basketball, then they fail the class. And by the way, we've mandated also that every student must pass junior high boys PE. In fact, it's your job, teacher, to ensure that there is a 100% success rate in the class that you're in charge of. Nobody should fail, OK? So what do you do with this? What's the teacher to do with this sort of directive? Well, he sits with these new directives from the principal. And you can just about imagine what's going through his mind. He's thinking through his students. Who do I have in this class? Well, one of these students, you got one who's 6' 3", and you have another one who's 5' 7". You have another one that's 5' 4". And you got one kid that's just barely 5 feet. And he's looking at this lineup of students in his class, and there's only one thing that's going to happen if we're going to meet all these objectives. What's he going to do? Drop that hoop. Drop that hoop, exactly. You've got to drop the hoop. When he looks at the hoop, it's 10 feet, and he looks at this five foot student, and he considers the charge that he's been given, the hoop's going to have to go down. And he's going to have to drop it to seven feet, to six feet, maybe even to five feet. And now he'll say that everybody qualifies. Done. I've completed my objectives. And everybody's going to pass the class because everybody's going to be able to dunk the basketball. So in this sort of situation, we can apply this in other ways. We see the bar dropped or the hoop dropped significantly in order to level the outcome. And now we have a 100% success rate. And I think there are at least two ways that we can do this in the classroom. One way that we can do that is to accomplish this egalitarian dream is to eliminate awards completely. Get rid of awards. I've heard of quite a few schools that have just done away with awards. No awards. I've seen it in those who are advocating for an elimination of grades. That's a relatively new thing, at least around here. We don't want to have letter grades in the classroom. We don't want to have quarterly report card grades. We don't want to have semester grades. We don't want to give out awards or give acknowledgment of academic performance in our school so that everybody can be leveled out. Everybody can hit the standard. Because if you start giving awards, not everybody is going to get an award. So anyway, yeah, so because if you start giving awards, then not everybody's going to get an award. Uh-oh. And if you do that, then that's, you know, if you give awards, that's not fair. We'll be showing favoritism then. But when you give an award to a student, what are you doing, though? When you actually give on awards night, what are we doing? Well, we're simply acknowledging God's kindness to that young man or that young woman. This is glorifying God, giving him or her the award. You know, if the student is bright and has been blessed with a sharp mind, then that is a gift from God, right? And if the student has average abilities but works really hard and earns that good grade and earns all of that, the fruit and the harvest of that hard work is a gift from God and it should be acknowledged. And if the student has a wonderful teacher who teaches extremely well, and the student is blessed academically, then that teacher is a gift from God. See, anytime that we ignore the gifts that God has given to our children, we're seeking to establish a culture, or seeking to establish a school that disregards the gifts of God to your young ones. And therefore, we're being unfaithful, being unfaithful. We're not giving God the glory. for the talents and the gifts that he's given to all of our students. And, you know, instead of teaching them to be thankful to God for what he's blessed the kids with in all of these areas, when we don't give awards, we're essentially teaching students to ignore what God has given them. And so they eliminate awards completely. You know, there is the no awards. Another way we can be unfaithful to God in education is to flood the market with awards. Everybody gets an award. You know, the excess of praise. Everybody gets an award. You get an award. You get an award. And we see this in grade inflation, at awards nights, awards assemblies. Not ours, but maybe other ones that you've seen in the past. where you're sitting there and it's like two hours have gone by in this award ceremony. We're two hours in and they're still giving awards and everyone is sitting there just about shot. We're done. And the teacher is shot and the parents just cannot believe how long this thing is going. And then you have an administrator or principal or someone up front who's saying, now for the fourth grade participation award for those who came to the speech meet and remembered half of their speech. And they come up. The standard's so low. And now for the award for those who came to the speech meet. Then we do that. And then pretty soon you look around and no one's left in the crowd. All the students are up on the platform. Everyone's up front. And we have this influx of awards, which does the same thing that no awards does. It levels everything out, because everybody has an award. And to me, everybody having an award is the same thing as no one having an award. There's nothing special about it. There's no distinction. Everything is leveled out. You can also have the same sort of leveling when you, When you get up and you're in the middle of this awards ceremony and the administrator, I've been in one like this, the principal is sort of looking all nervous. And before the awards portion of the ceremony, he kind of gives this apologizing speech to the students. And he's saying, oh, well, you know, the school board makes me do this. I know this is going to be hard for some of you, because I know you've worked so diligently. And some of y'all are going to get awards, and some of y'all aren't. So they're making me do this. So I'm sorry. Right. And so he's basically making the kids that are going to get awards feel bad that they're getting one, because there are some in the crowd who aren't going to get an award. And all the teachers probably are just like, oh, give me a break. Like, come on. Because you know your students. You know who really deserves the award. And those of us who go along with this and say, all right, I'll give the awards, but I don't like it. It's not fair. And we're apologizing and we're tripping over ourselves and all of this. What we're doing is we're refusing to acknowledge God's blessings to our students. We can't do that. You know, there should be no apologizing at awards night. You know, I think it's a really like every every year so far. There's at least one pre-Kerr that's crying because they didn't get an award. I didn't get an award. That was last year. I didn't get an award. But that's good for them. I think that's helpful for them. Because we shouldn't apologize for having to acknowledge someone who's worked really hard and acknowledging someone who's been really gifted in academics by God and in his kindness to us. You know, we should be happy to acknowledge that. And at the same time, we should be teaching students how to receive an award. How do we receive an award? When a student gets an award, whether it's a trophy or a certificate for history or Latin or whatever, they should receive that award and say, thank you. Most of them do when they come up and receive their award. And not just to me, but to God, to their father who has given them these gifts. That's who they should say thank you to. And if there's no award, if we don't do that sort of thing, you may have students who don't know what they can do well. They may not know what their gifts and abilities are because they haven't been challenged. The standard and the level's been set so low. And the funny thing is that after all 100 awards have been given out, and we have all of these pieces of paper out there, if everybody gets an award, and the whole thing is over, and everybody goes home, and you walk around where everybody was sitting, what do you normally see on the floor? The awards. They didn't even bother to take them home. They don't even bother. And some are in the trash can. They don't even bother because they are meaningless. If everybody gets an award, if you showed up and you have a pulse and you got an award, it doesn't mean anything. So it's the same thing as no award at all. And why not save some ink and paper and just do it that way, right? So the whole idea of everybody gets an award, all I had to do was show up and they gave me this award. The award ends up being worth nothing to you. And that's why you gave it to me. That's why you give it to just anybody. It's not worth anything. So in the trash, it goes. Or under the chair, it goes. And the kids, some of the students realize that. I worked hard. I know what my partner here did or didn't do. Absolutely. And he got one, too? Right. It's all that hard work for him. Right, right, exactly. And then the parent. You know Pastor Scott, the parent. Well, that's all those egalitarian assumptions. They're on board with the school, they're on board with the mission that God has given us, but they still haven't realized that that's an aspect of their assumptions about education that they have to unlearn. And that's, the egalitarian doctrine is so pervasive in our culture, it's everywhere. We all have it, some aspect of it, because it's just, it's the air we breathe, it's the water we swim in, we don't even realize it. But, see how like, naturally, the idea of everybody getting an award would flow into, would flow nicely into the idea that somebody who doesn't get an award as a victim and then that person needs to be medicated or compensated for their victimhood. And that flows directly into ADHD and dyslexia and all that stuff. And then the people who do get the award are penalized for it. They're made to feel guilty because apparently I've oppressed my brother by getting this award. But that goes even into their careers and stuff later on. Yeah, that doesn't stop at school Right exactly There are some award nights where only the parents whose child gets an award is invited to go. I don't want to do that. I'd like the whole school to celebrate others and maybe their kid if they got one. So that's why we changed the name. It wasn't for egalitarian reasons. Oh man, that would be awful. I just thought about that too. So yeah, so that was a misunderstanding is that they thought they were specially invited because their kid was going to get an award. But so we changed it to celebration. I think there are a lot of, like the awards night is a great opportunity to teach students to praise God and give glory to God for the gifts that they've been given and others have been given. I think, you know, although we're not very strong in this right now, sports does that too. Athletics does that. very well. Because how many of us have sat through a t-ball game or a little kid's soccer game where they don't take score? Have you ever sat through one of those? I've sat through a couple of those. The kids play, and they're having fun, and there are innings and quarters and all that, and there's halftime, but they don't take score. There's no winner. Huh? There's no winner. They're all winners. They're all winners, right. That's more egalitarianism, right. And so what we have here is a bunch of egalitarian parents who have established this league and set it up so that nobody can tell who's winning. But if you talk to anybody in the stands, or any of the kids outside the game, and you said, hey, what's the score? Oh, it's five to two. They're keeping scores. They know. They know. And so you have kind of this padded room situation where we don't want anybody to win, and we don't want anybody to lose. We want participation. And the goal is participation. The goal is good sportsmanship. But think about this. How does good sportsmanship exist if there isn't any winning or losing? Isn't that a part of good sportsmanship? Like how to win faithfully, how to lose faithfully, how to give God glory whether you win or lose. You know, how are they going to practice good sportsmanship if there's no winning or losing? Can't happen. And everybody, believe me, everybody's going to walk off the field knowing whether they won or lost. They know it. But you have this sort of superficial situation where the teaching of how to win and how to lose has been erased. Because in our eyes, there's no winners and no losers, or everyone's a winner, or whatever. Even the ones who lost, they're winners, and they know who they are. That's a shame, because I think we miss a lot of great teaching moments when a child wins and when a child loses. That's how they learn good sportsmanship. Life does not work this way. Not everyone is what you would call a winner in life. That sounds really bad, but it greats our egalitarian assumptions when we say those sorts of things. And I'm not saying every, you know, God doles out blessings to whom he wills, but you know, there are some winners and some losers. We're in a fallen world, it happens. And the sooner our kids learn this and understand this, the quicker they can know what their talents are, what they've been given by God as gifts and abilities, and they can get about being winners, but not for their own sake, but for God's kingdom. If they don't have that idea that there's success and there's failure, then they're not gonna know how to serve God, especially when persecution and trials come, they're not gonna know what to do with that, because they've been taught they've been winners their whole life, and they haven't been. Right? And so all of this, initially, seems very harmless. Right? You know, they're all winners. You know, big deal if we don't take score. But, you know, how many of us have heard that ideas have consequences? We've all heard that, right? I think ideas also have destinations. They have a pathway. They're going somewhere. They're on the road to somewhere. And you may hold to something that's true. And when you hold to that, certain things follow from it, right? Or you may hold to certain presuppositions and certain behavior follows from it. Or if you hold to certain ideas, there are other ideas that are downstream from it. Ideas are always on highways and they're always moving somewhere to some destination. And if you buy into egalitarianism, that seems harmless on the outset, but egalitarianism is on a highway moving somewhere. It's moving in a certain direction. And it's ultimately, in my mind, in my study, it moves towards essentially autonomy. That's the idea that's down the road from egalitarianism, autonomy. And when you try to look over the landscape and you try to pull down all the things that are high, all the mountains that are high, and you try to fill in all the valleys with dirt, and you try to level out the landscape to which everything is equal, and everything matches up with everything else, then you get to the point where you've And you've done that with mankind to make all your students equal in the way they perform athletically and academically. And that's going somewhere. That's leading them to autonomy. And we've seen this even with animals, when we try to put things in categories and level them out as well, right? You know, we have a human life here and we have a canine here. We have a dog and a human and they're both life and we want to elevate the two so that a respect for life at the end of the day means not pulling leaves off trees because we want to respect life. That's where that idea of egalitarianism leads to. Many people equate pulling leaves off trees to hurting a little baby. That's egalitarianism. Everything's the same. Life is life. There's no more valuable life or less valuable life. There's a leveling going on. We have to understand that the egalitarian mind looks across the horizon and sees mankind being leveled and animals and men being leveled, but there's a distinction that's left at the end of all that leveling. There's something left at the end of that. There's the creator-creation distinction. How many of you know life is not like that? There's a hierarchy in life. Man is in charge of the animals. We're to have dominion over the animals. It's hierarchical in every way, our lives. It's not egalitarianism. We all got a boss who tells us what to do. Right? That's a good thing. That's not bad. How many of us, when we hear that idea of me having a boss or you having a boss, it's like, initially, you're like, boss always tells me what to do. Many have heard that from people. Like, I hate my boss. And I guess they're a terrible person. I guess you can dislike them. But the idea of having a boss and someone over you It's not a bad thing. That's how God created the world. I mean, he's our ultimate boss, if you want to put it that way. But if you're a tried and true egalitarian and you've jumped in that egalitarian car and went down that highway, you don't like that. You don't like the fact that you have a boss. You don't like the fact that you're accountable or you have to be accountable to someone. It's not fair that someone is telling me what to do. It's not equal. And so if you keep going on that highway, the desire then will be to tear down authority and to exalt the individual, exalt yourselves, and you end up desiring autonomy, self-law. And we want individuals who can decide what they're going to do, but as soon as someone starts dictating to anyone else what they're supposed to do, they're offended by it. And this idea of rejecting authority and having autonomy is downstream from egalitarianism. And ideas have consequences, and ideas have destinations. All right? What time do we have? I'll give you all a little bit of a break. I have quite a bit to cover.