Okay, well, we're continuing a series in Christian worldview, and we're looking at different topics, Christian view of the specific topics. And so today, what we want to look at, we just finished talking about government. And so today, what we want to talk about is education. Now, you may wonder, okay, all right, I'm through with my education, so what do I need to know about education? But I think the truth is, as we're going to talk about, your education never ends. And the way we should probably, maybe the first thing we should say about education is that education should be lifelong, and you should be thinking about it that way. Because we never stop learning. God never stops teaching us. Now, when we talk about education, I'm going to begin with a definition that I learned through RUF. And actually, later I learned that RUF got it from Norman Harper. when I went to seminary. Norman Harper was the man who founded the first Christian education program at Reformed Theological Seminary, and this was his definition that he came up with of the learning process. But I think it serves well as a definition of education in general. and every part of it is really important. And so I want to just recite it for you and then we'll look at it. I'm not going to write it down, but I will write down every part as we look at every part of it. Okay, so Norman Harper said that the learning process, or as I'm saying, education, is a divinely ordained process whereby a person comes to understand and commit him or herself to the truth of God in a unique and personal way. Okay, let me say that again. It's a divinely ordained process. whereby a person comes to understand and commit him or herself to the truth of God in a unique and personal way. Alright, so let's look at each part of that. So, education is a divinely ordained process. There are two parts of that. I could have separated them, but we're going to deal with them together. Education is divinely ordained. Education is something that is God's program. And so God didn't make us fully formed knowing everything. He made us with development in mind and development cognitively. Development in terms of our relationship to truth. And we're going to talk about that a little bit later. But we're to develop in terms of that understanding. And that was true, that's not true not only because we're born into the world as infants and we develop, our brains develop and our experience develops and our understanding of everything develops, but Adam and Eve were created, even though they were created as adults, they looked like adults, they were created to develop. And one of the ways we know that is because of the whole situation surrounding the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and how they were to learn. You know some skeptics look at and non-Christians look at the story of the garden and the fall and they look at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and they say, well you see God wanted them to be naive and it's not naivete that God was after because we read in the New Testament that the mature person, the person that God wants us to be is a person who can discern good and evil. And so, in various places, Hebrews 6 is a good place, talking about the writer of the Hebrews is rebuking them for their lack of maturity. I have to give you milk, not solid food. And then he describes the mature person, he says, I wish you were mature. And then he describes the mature person as a person who is acquainted, or an immature person is a person who is acquainted, unacquainted with the word of righteousness. Okay, but solid food is for the mature, he says, who by constant use, constant use in what? The word of righteousness, have trained themselves to discern good and evil. And that's a really, I think that's a neglected passage. I don't think we talk about that passage enough. I think that's a very important passage in the New Testament. It says, one thing it says is that God wanted Adam and Eve and God wants people, God wants us to be able to discern good and evil. It's not that God was preventing them from that by forbidding them to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but interestingly enough to command them not to eat of that tree meant that if they ate of the tree, it would give them a knowledge of good and evil experientially. In other words, they would experiment themselves and they would strike out on the basis of their own trying to discover what was good and evil and figure out for themselves what was good and evil. And that's the spirit of the age today. Good and evil is what we kind of figure out and determine as a society it is. But God's will is this, that we know good and evil. We learn to discern it, but we discern it on the basis of what His Word tells us. In other words, through revelation. not through experimentation, not through our own meditation or our own thinking and trying to figure it out, or through experience with evil. It's through revelation. God wants us to know His Word and God reveals to us what is good and what is evil because He's the one that defines it. We don't define it. He defines it. And so, this is something that God has ordained. He wants us to depend upon Him and His revelation and He reveals truth to us. This is how we become educated. If you want to use the term educated. We think of education in different terms. If we're thinking about it Christianly, this is how we ought to think about it. And this is divinely ordained. But the other part of this is that it's a process. Okay? So it doesn't happen all at once. And we don't come out of the womb fully formed knowing everything and understanding everything. And so it takes time. And this is gradual. There's a progression. Okay? Which means that in accord with something later in the definition, we should take into account where a person is in the process. in terms of both what we're teaching them and how we're teaching them. In other words, there are developmental considerations that have to enter into education. Okay? We don't educate everyone the same, and we take into account where they are in the process in how we educate them and what we educate them in. Okay? So, divinely ordained process. whereby a person comes to understand. Okay, now let's go ahead and jump ahead first. Let's not start there. Understand and commit himself to, or herself to, what? The truth. And the truth of God. Truth of God. Okay? Now, a couple of things we have to say in light of the spirit of the age and where we are now and the challenges to this as a Christian view of what we're doing. First, there is objective truth. In other words, when we think of education, a lot of the modern idea in this has been propagated by many well respected or almost icons now in the education field. And if you take education or you get an education degree in a university, you're going to learn a lot about John Dewey. and his philosophy of education, and you're going to be really pretty much indoctrinated in John Dewey's philosophy of education, which came from a philosophy known as pragmatism. John Dewey, one of the main advocates of this philosophy. And part of this philosophy is that there is no such thing as objective truth. that reality is always changing. And this is part and parcel really, it's very logical, it's part and parcel of a chaotic, of a world where there is no God. An atheistic concept of the world and of reality. So if there is no God, you can't really rely on anything being stable. And if nothing's stable, then reality's constantly changing, reality's chaotic, then we can't say there's an objective content, there's an objective body of truth with which we want people to become familiar. Because the moment you educate people in that, you look up and everything's changed. So what's the goal of education? The goal of education according to Dewey is not to educate people in objective truth. It is to teach them how to solve problems. It is to teach them how practically to deal with an ever-changing reality in their experience. So you learn a method of problem solving. And I won't go into all the ways, but I think if you're familiar with education, particularly in the public schools today, you will see how drastically this philosophy has affected education. It's issued in extreme forms of it. the approach to math that says we're not trying to teach you math facts, you know, we don't want you to know 2 plus 2 equals 4 necessarily. If you say 2 plus 2 equals 5, we'll pat you on the back and say that's close, that's good enough. That whole philosophy comes right out of Dewey, okay? And objective truth, what we say is that, no, reality is fixed. and it's ordained by God. And so because there is a God, there is objective truth. And it's really important for us to understand this. It's important for us to understand that these philosophies come out of either acknowledging God or ignoring that there is a God or pretending that there isn't a God. So that's really the difference. If there is a God, there's objective truth. And objective truth is what He has established. If there is no God, well, no, there isn't any objective. As a matter of fact, if there is no God, then the universe in which we live, just think about it, is just a mass of random, accidental particles. And even your thinking, and even your thinking there's some meaning to it is an illusion. There is no meaning to it. You just happen to be this collection of atoms that came together. And there's no such thing as right and wrong even. All of that, all of those things that we think about as meaning or purpose in the universe is just something that we've imposed on it arbitrarily out of our minds. And the best we can do is try to be comfortable while we have our time here before we ease off into nothingness. And it's really depressing. Very few people, very few atheists or advocates of such a philosophy really very often go into the implications of what they believe with that much frankness. But that's what it amounts to. And so you can see that it issues in some very definite methodology when we think about education. And you either base it, you know, either there is a God or there isn't. And what's astounding to me is that we still have over 90% of people, I think upwards of 95% of people who still will say they believe in some kind of higher power or God, that some kind of God exists. And yet, they don't think through the implications of that for what they're learning. If there is a God, then There is an objective truth. Polls today say that even Christians, this is one reason why we're teaching this class, Christians are included in this. I think it's like 70% now, or maybe more than 70%. If you ask people, is there such a thing as objective truth, they'll say no. 70%. And the percentage among Christians is almost the same as that among non-Christians. That's not only startling, it's scary to think that. But that's where we are. So it's vitally important that we understand that if we're approaching education, education means that we're educating people in something. There's objective content that we are seeking to convey. We're not just trying to teach people how to get by in life. We are teaching them truth. There's objective content that we're trying to convey to them. But it's also really important that we recognize that it's the truth of God. That truth is not something that we can perceive independently from God. Now that doesn't mean that people who don't acknowledge God can't understand that 2 plus 2 is 4. They can't understand that they shouldn't walk out in the rain and things like this. But I'm talking about really ultimately understanding the context of truth. Because if we don't understand the context of truth and understand it in reference to God, we really don't truly understand it. And we don't have the total picture. So, you know, one of my favorite illustrations is the fishbowl illustration. You know, if you're a fish and you're in a fishbowl, there are certain things you can understand about your situation. You may try to jump above the surface of the water, and you can't stay there. And you may be aware of other fish in the fishbowl, and you may be aware that there's a barrier beyond which you can't swim. I can go only so far in this direction, and then I have to turn around and go back in this direction. There's certain things you can understand, but you really don't understand why, do you? You really can't understand what your situation is unless you could get outside the fishbowl and look at the fishbowl and look at all the other fish. Then you could understand the situation as it really is. You'd understand why. You'd understand the totality of where you are. But that requires a transcendent perspective, doesn't it? And you see, we're in the same predicament. We are creatures. who live in a context. We've grown up in a context. Our context is not comprehensive. None of us has experienced everything there is to experience. None of us has seen every fact in the universe. No one has experienced everything. We haven't been everywhere. In fact, the percentage of all these things of which we're aware is very minuscule compared to the totality of everything there is to experience and know. And yet, our understanding of every individual fact, if we understand it truly, needs to be conditioned by everything else that's true. And the only way we can have that kind of a knowledge of any individual fact is to have a transcendent perspective. Have someone who is aware of the totality of everything to reveal how I should understand this individual fact or this individual situation. And only God can give that kind of a perspective. Only God has that kind of perspective. That's why if I'm to understand truth truly, if I'm to understand any fact as it really is in terms of its context and adequately, I have to refer it to God's revelation. I have to understand it in terms of God's revealed truth in the Bible. That's where he's revealed his truth, in the scriptures. So, any real education from a Christian perspective has to be education in the truth, but not just secularly thought of truth, secularly derived truth, even truth that we believe comes from the scientific method. from science, we think, okay, well that's really the source of truth. That's really where it comes from. It comes from science. Well, I want to refute that, spend some time just talking about that, because what we seldom consider is that science, true science, science that really works is based on assumptions that borrow from a Christian and theistic understanding of things. And this is true with respect to all kinds of things. With respect to the orderly universe, You realize that science, and we've talked about this before, but science arose, science began to flourish when the Roman Empire fell, and as Christianity and its worldview began to be ascendant. Why? Because prior to Christianity and Christians' worldview becoming dominant, you had people, you had Greeks investigating things, but At large, the notion that you have all these gods and goddesses who are warring against each other and human beings get caught up in their sort of fads and whims and it's a chaotic kind of universe and nothing's really reliable. When people began to really investigate the world and try to determine the principles on which it's built, that only really began in earnest and on any kind of large scale with the ascendancy of the Christian worldview which said there is a stable universe. Why? Because there is a God who has made it and he has not only made it but it is a work according to his principles But He is consistent, and He is sustaining the world, and He's governing the world according to reliable, consistent, unchanging principles, because He doesn't change. And it's that conviction that created the confidence for scientists to say, we can investigate this world then. We can investigate how God operates. We can investigate how the world operates because it's not going to change. It's going to be reliable and stable. And we know, we talked about it here, that part of that is because of the Noahic covenant and God's promises that everything's going to be regular until the final judgment. There's not going to be a cataclysm that destroys everything like the flood again until the final judgment. But God has established regularity in his universe. And this conviction is what provided the basis for scientific exploration. And although modern scientists may deny God, they're still building everything they do on assumptions that are only valid in terms of his existence. So they have to borrow from a Christian worldview in order for what they do to be valid. What does that mean? It means the truth they're discovering is the truth of God, whether they know it or not, or whether they acknowledge it or not. So education has to be, and this is another way to put it, education cannot be at its root secular. It really can't be if it's true education. It has to refer to God. And it has to, to the degree that it recognizes that it's God that's the source of our awareness of that truth, to that degree it will be effective and profitable and truly insightful. Okay, so education. Divinely ordained process by which a person comes to the truth of God. Okay, we talked about truth of God. Now here's another component. by which a person comes to understand. All right? So what is education? It involves understanding. Now, understanding is, it involves obviously, okay, I'm going to state the obvious here, an awareness of the facts. Okay, that's where you start. Understanding means that there are facts, there's truth, and I become aware of them. There's things of which I previously wasn't aware, okay? So we learn new things, we become acquainted with new aspects of reality with which we were not familiar before, okay? Or we weren't aware of them. But understanding is more than that, okay? It's not just an awareness of the facts. Because you and I both know that a person can be aware of things, can assent to certain things without really, really understanding them. Okay, right? So what is that really understanding them? What does it mean really to understand something and not just be aware of it? You know, you can talk about, I mean there are a million different illustrations of this, but when you are, when you were an elementary school child, before you went through puberty, You read stories about, you know, the prince and the princess getting together and falling in love and marrying and living happily ever after, right? And, you know, there are certain facts about love, what love is. But I would submit that you can understand now that you really didn't understand love like between a husband, a wife, a man, and a woman like you would now. You understand it more. There were certain facts. of which you were aware when you were a child, but now there's more understanding. There's a depth of understanding. Part of understanding means understanding not just the facts, but their implications. Things that aren't explicitly stated, but things that go along with this. If this is true, then this is also true. If this is true, then there's a whole host of things that go along with that being true. Understanding means understanding more of those implications. And what you're really doing when you're doing that is you're understanding any given fact's relationship to everything else that's true, okay? So you're relating it to what some people call a cognitive framework. A lot of people don't understand this about truth, that truth is seamless. God's reality is seamless. That is, everything is related to everything else. Whether you realize it or not, every time you learn something new, there is a ripple effect through everything else that you know. It should affect everything else that you know. And this is where understanding comes in, because at first it might not. You might not understand that, hey, if this is true, then what I've always understood over here needs to be adjusted. But you might not see that. You might not see that connection right away. Part of understanding is when you make that connection, you adjust this, and your framework of knowledge becomes more consistent. It becomes more coherent. Some of those contradictions between this and this are resolved. What do we call that? We call that greater understanding. I've come to a greater understanding of this fact because I've related it to this or this fact because I've related it to this. I see the whole like God does all at once. And really part of understanding involves eliminating, increasing understanding means eliminating some of the contradictions in my thought. Because all of us hold different things to be true that can't be true at the same time because they're contradictions. What that really means is we don't understand those things that we think we understand as well as we think we do. God's truth is non-contradictory. So the more my thinking, the more my awareness of truth becomes consistent with God's truth, the more contradictions are going to be resolved. But that requires refinement of my understanding of this or that thing. Okay? So, does that make sense? Anybody have a question about that? Am I explaining that clearly enough? Beg your pardon? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And this is another part of understanding because, and I was going to deal with it in the next point, but that's a great segue. You know, truth is not just something that we understand. It's not just something that we think or we perceive in our minds. It's also something we do. Right? So, John, in 1 John, can talk about, all through the book, he's talking about doing the truth. The first time I read that I thought, what do you mean doing the truth? I mean the truth just is. Yeah, but I can either live in the light of that truth or I can live in a way that's inconsistent with that truth. And that leads us to the fourth point, which is, That education is a divinely ordained process whereby I come not only to understand, a person comes to understand, but to commit him or herself to. Okay? Commitment. And we understand this, don't we, in terms of the gospel, in terms of conversion, right? Because if a person is converted, what is saving faith? That's a great question. Because there is such a thing as believing that doesn't save a person. And we know that, we see this. We see it, for instance, in John 6. Many people believed in Jesus, and then Jesus starts talking about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, and most of the people say, this is a hard saying, who can accept it? And they leave. They fall away. Even though it says they believed, well how did they believe? Well they believed in terms of ascending to certain truths about Jesus. And saving faith isn't just saying, yeah, I believe the fact that there was a person named Jesus who lived and he was God who became a man. Even that he died on the cross. Even that he died on the cross for my sins. You can assent to those facts without committing yourself to them. It's a million different, you know, I've told illustrations about this all the time, but I'll give you a couple. My favorite one has to do with Connor and washing his hair. when he was when he was just a young child. We go in there. Those of you who have children, you know the drill, right? You're you have to wash your your child's hair and you go in and you put him in the bathtub and you know, you turn the water on and take his head and he wet the hair so far so good. And his hair, his head's leaning back, the water's going that way. Even if he gets his eyes, it's not going to hurt anything. You know, just water goes out. But then the rub comes, and the time comes to put the shampoo in the hair. And contrary to popular belief, there is no such thing as no-tears shampoo. And you know that if you've ever been a parent. So you put the shampoo in the hair, and I would be doing this with Connor, and I'd say, We've been through this before. I'm saying, look, I'm putting this in your hair, and you know, you got soap in your hair, and if it gets in your eyes, it's gonna sting, and you're not gonna like it, but listen, listen, here's what you do. This water's running, all you have to do is let me hold your head, don't fight me, just let me hold your head, and lean your head back, and just keep it back there. When the water hits your head, Just keep your head back there. Just trust me, just keep it. And if you keep your head where I've put it, the water will go that way and nothing will get in your eyes. I promise. And say, okay, dad. You know, I believe, right? And then I put his head back there, and the water touches his head, and you know, you can guess what happened. He goes, he starts to do this, and when he does that, I'm thinking, Connor, stop, just trust me, hold your head back there, but no, he does this, and the water goes down into his eyes, and he starts crying, and he's going crazy, because it's stinging his eyes, and I'm saying, Just in frustration. Connor, just trust me. And he's crying. He's saying, I do trust you, Daddy. But he didn't. Really. Until he came to the point where he learned, hey, this isn't working. And he said, I'm going to try this. And he says, OK, I'm going to trust him. And even though every instinct in my body, when that water hits my head, tells me to do this, I'm not going to do it. I'm going to keep my head back, just like my dad said. And the first time he did it, no water got in his eyes. And he said, hey, what do you know? This is right. It was true. What he said was true. But he didn't really commit himself. He said, I believe it. He understood it. He understood it in his head. He understood the principle. He was old enough to understand. There's gravity. Is it going to go down in my eyes if I do that? He understood it. He acknowledged it. He assented to it. But he didn't commit himself to that truth until he said, I'm going to hold my head back. And the goal of education. And it's really important that we understand this. From a Christian perspective, the goal of education is not simply knowledge of facts. It's not just assent to facts. It is committing oneself to the truth of God. We are not really educated until that happens, from a Christian perspective. until I'm committed to the truth. And when I'm committed to the truth, then I begin to live it out. And see, this is part of the covenantal structure of God's world and our relationship to God. We're blessed as we trust God and we act in the obedience of faith. What is God calling us to in Romans? Beginning of Romans, end of Romans. He says this. Paul says this. God chose me to bring people from among the Gentiles to what? What's Paul trying to bring them to? To the obedience of faith. That's what he said, the obedience of faith. Does that mean we're justified by works? No, we're justified through faith. by grace through faith. But that faith, what's the meaning of that faith? It means to commit oneself to the truth. Not just understand it, not just assent to it, to commit oneself to the truth. And what does that do? It leads to obedience. And how do we get blessing under the covenant? Through obedience. Blessings for obedience, cursing for disobedience. But the heart of that, the heart of the covenant commitment is faith. We trust God. We trust God. But trusting Him means we obey Him, precisely because of this, you see. That's what the Christian life is. That's why if all we talk about is grace and faith, and we never talk about obedience, we have given people a distorted view of the Christian life. Just like if all we talk about is obedience and we never talk about that it springs from faith, And we never talk about how Christ makes up for what we lack, because our faith is never perfect, at least until glory. It's never perfect. We always have guilt that needs to be atoned for, and Christ does that. Only Christ does that. Our works never do that. Our works can't atone for our sin. So you see, there's a balance. There's a total picture in what our relationship to God really involves. And education, we think about education, it's vital that we understand these basic components. This is what education really is. Okay, so we said, a divinely ordained process whereby a person comes to understand and commit himself to the truth of God. Now here's a big one, okay? The last one is, in a unique and personal way. That's a biggie. Because the way that we understand education, often is is as this in this as this monolithic process. And it's the same for everybody. Everybody learns the same way. Everybody's basically the same. Everybody's mind's basically the same. That's not true. Some people are visual learners. Some people are oral learners. Some people are abstract thinkers. Some people are concrete thinkers. And the way that a person, that each individual person comes to go through this process and develop is unique and personal. Now we can categorize people into rough categories, but even people within those categories are going to differ in other ways among themselves. And so God's made a lot of people that are His people, and we have certain things in common that unite us. But we're also individuals and we're distinct in all kinds of ways. And just, you know, I've been thinking a lot about this lately because it has to do with my study. But we ought to relate this. We ought to think about this all the time. This relates to who God is, relates to the Trinity. This is the way we should expect. We should expect it to be because God is both one and many. He is one God, but He is multiple persons who are eternally distinct from one another. Not the same. And they're not interchangeable either. You think about it. The Father has always been the Father And the Son has always been the Son in terms of their relationship to each other. They've never reversed the roles. The Father is eternally the Father, the Son is eternally the Son, which means that they are not the same. They're both fully God. Everything that is God is true of both of them fully and independently of each other. But they're one. But they're distinct. They're not the same. And they have interchange between each other. And what that means is that unity and diversity are both equally ultimate. They're both equally important. They're both equally true. And so we can't ignore diversity in the name of unity. And we can't ignore unity in the name of diversity. We have to, in our methodology respecting everything, appreciate both equally. Which means that when we approach education, we say, yes, all of this is true. We're always doing these things. We're always trying to educate people in the truth. We're not trying to educate one person in the truth of God and another in the truth of Buddha, or whatever. There's one truth, one God, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, as Paul says in Ephesians 4. But we have a lot of individuals and God has ordained people as different individuals, which means that the way that we educate people needs to vary. And we need to have a variety of methods that we're employing in education. We can't just funnel everybody through one system, one method. Now, that's why I think teachers, if you have a big class, and you're teaching a class, you need to be able to explain what you're doing in different ways. You need to have not just one way of explaining. They have various ways of explaining it. You need to have illustrations prepared for people who are less abstract. I'm a very abstract thinker, but I really self-consciously, when I'm preaching or teaching, I try to come up with illustrations. and not just give you the abstract truth, because some people really can't, a lot of people really can't hang with just the abstract stuff. And they need something concrete that they can hold on to that helps them get their mind around the abstract, you know? But I don't just tell stories. You know, I do give the abstract, because there's some people who just give me the principle, okay? People who think like that. You know, some people respond better to lecture, particularly people who are very motivated to learn what you're trying to teach them. like you guys. But then others respond better to more of a Socratic method where you're asking questions and people are being led to think on their own and to come to conclusions on their own. And I think we need to employ both methods. You know, some people learn better in a group. Some people learn better by themselves. That's why, in most subject matter, I think it's good to have some of both. Now, I hate, I absolutely despised learning in a group because I wanted to go off by myself and do my own work and, you know, I just, I didn't want to be bothered by other people. You know, some people, they've got to have that, you know, they need the other people, they need other people's understanding. And so, in the church, we've got to, we need to employ different methods. Our small, in our small group, we like to do more We've done both. We've done things in this CE class where it's nothing but questions. When we were going through Christian growth, that's pretty much what we did. We looked at Bible passages and I just asked questions. And we got had really, really good profitable interaction, because it was what you were coming up with. Right now, we're doing more lecture. But different people learn in different ways. And let me just give one last application of that. And we'll stop there and then I want to open it up for questions if y'all have any questions. We'll continue this next week because what I want to do is I want to build on this and then talk about how we ought to look at education in society, particularly public education, private education, those things. But I will say as a segue into that with this application, You know, there's such controversy about education. Should you send your kids to public schools, or is it ever okay to send your kids to public schools? And what about Christian schools, and what about homeschooling? And my kids never went to public schools, I have to admit that. But we did some homeschooling, and we did Christian schooling. And what I want to say is that what we found, at least for our kids, each one was different coming out of the womb. They were not ever the same. Their differences were not the product of socialization, and that was very true. We saw that very early. They were individuals. And what we saw was that not only was homeschooling better and Christian schooling better for some, depending on who they were, but at various points in their development, one or the other was more appropriate. And we had to ask the question, okay, what does this individual need right now? And that really is just an application of this. Everybody's not the same. And so what that says for us, I guess, as a church body is that certainly, you know, what people develop is convictions because of their experience. And there's a tendency to say, this is the way it's done. This is the way it ought to be done. This is the way you ought to be doing it. And I think what we need to realize is that because everybody's different, we need to temper that a little bit. temporary confidence that we've, you know, our way is the only way. And it's really not. Now, I'm going to talk about why. And I don't want to step on anybody's toes. But I'm gonna, and I didn't used to say this, this confidently, but next week, I'm going to say I don't think I would not personally, I wouldn't send any any of my children to a public school right now in the United States. And I will tell you why in light of kind of the foundation that we've established today. I just wouldn't do it. I don't, I must stop short of saying you're sinning if you do. I don't think you're sinning. But I think it's very unwise for anybody to do that. And I'll tell you why next week. Because the answer is longer than we have right now, but I've got more ammo than I can shoot right now on that one. Okay, so I'm going to stop, and anybody have any questions on anything we've talked about? This is a foundation. Next week we'll talk about some of the application of it practically. producing enlightenment. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the last word. Yeah, right. No, I didn't see that, but I'm not surprised. Other comments or questions? Yeah, Gail. Yeah, we're going to link them. I'm going to give you a preliminary answer right now, and it's really essentially the answer. I think that Christians ought to be involved in leavening the public school system, definitely, just like every other area of life. But I don't want to use my young, impressionable children to do it. And the best illustration I've ever heard of this, to answer that, is my children are like tender, young shoots who need to be in the greenhouse until they get strong enough to be out there in the weather. And so I keep them in the greenhouse and nurture them until they're strong enough. And so I certainly wouldn't send my children to public schools when they don't have the discernment to sift what they're getting. And, you know, I think every parent has to decide when that is. But for us, it's been the line has been typically at college. By the time they go to college, I want them to be able to sift. And it's good for them then to be in an environment, I think, really, where they're getting some things that are bad perspectives, so that they get practice in doing that. Because that's what they're going to have to do in the world. Where you do that, where you turn them loose to do that, may be different for different children. But as a rule, that's where it's been for us. For some people, it's, I'm gonna send my kids to public high school. They think they're able to do it. I think, personally, I think very few high school students are able to do that yet. But, and just developmentally. But, you know, it's a judgment call. It's a wisdom call. Okay, we're through.