Episode #26 – “Silly Christian, the Bible is for Kids!” – Why Preschool?

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On this episode we answer the question “Why Preschool?” that so many people ask. The Christian community looks around and sees all the problems in the world, but they fail to understand why wickedness and immorality are so rampant in our communities, and they fail to understand how it got this way. Hopefully, by the end of this episode not only will the question to how our communities and nation got into the situation they are in today, but will lay out a plan to turn the tides and influence the future for Christ. And, hopefully, put an end to the question, “Why Preschool?”

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Transcript of Episode:

Intro: The Reconstructionist Radio Podcast Network presents the Preschool Pioneers Podcast with Reverend Jeremy Walker, where you will hear practical and biblical advice from a unique perspective on the subject of Christian education.

Jeremy Walker: The Preschool Pioneers Podcast is brought to you by the GCS Apprenticeship Program. For more information, visit GCSApprenticeship.com.

Welcome back to another episode of the Preschool Pioneers Podcast. I’m your host today, Reverend Jeremy Walker. Today we’re going to be covering a topic entitled “Silly Christian! The Bible is for kids.” The reason for this title, it brings me back to when I was a kid, myself. Whenever you watch those cartoons and those commercials with the rabbit and Trix Cereal. All the time during the commercials, you would have the rabbit trying to get the cereal. The kids would come in, of course, and take the cereal away from the rabbit. They would say, “Silly rabbit! Trix are for kids.”

I took the title from that. “Silly Christian! The Bible is for kids.” Because a lot of times you get this question, and we have our podcast here, which is entitled Preschool Pioneers. I was talking with some people recently, and they heard the title Preschool Pioneers, and people glossed over the subject of the … they hear the word “preschool,” especially in the Christian community. Preschool is not seen as something that is prestigious. It’s not seen as something that’s overly important. Therefore, whenever they see the term “preschool,” especially if they’re men in particular, they gloss over that subject. They want to discuss something high and mighty. They want to discuss something with somebody who has a doctorate. They want to have college-level kids.

I remember when I was younger and I was about 18, and I met a younger man who was also in the ministry. He was faced with an opportunity to work with children as well as I was. I remember sitting with him. He sat with me and just says, “I just don’t think teaching kids is for me.” I said, “Well, why is that?” He said, “Well, I just think that I can do so much a better job expounding on the scriptures for adults.” Now, of course, that wasn’t the case. But the guy did leave and he did not work with children. He did end up going off and doing his own thing. In fact, he did get out of the ministry all together. I guess he found out he wasn’t very good at expounding on the scriptures as he thought he was. But, the general concept that children are not considered important is a very severe problem in the Christian community. Just that term, “Preschool Pioneers,” that concept alone just drives people off by itself in a large degree.

We actually got the title, Preschool Pioneers, this podcast title, this entire series we do here, from RJ Rushdoony and the Chalcedon Foundation. This was years ago. He called us “pioneers in education.” Of course, our focus is preschool. Whenever it came time to put a name to our podcast, to put a name of focus, of driving our listeners, what is it you’re going to hear, you’re going to hear mainly the focus on education. You’re going to mainly hear a focus on young children. That’s where your focus is going to be. For a lot of people, it just is … they gloss over it entirely, because it’s not something they feel is important.

This idea of “Silly Christian! The Bible is for kids” is hopefully to catch people and answer this question of, why preschool? We actually get that a lot, the concept of why preschool. It doesn’t matter how many people I talk to. I talk to a lot of people. Especially when they’re introduced to a ministry, like Grace Community School, that I’m involved in, and that of course is the ones who put on the Preschool Pioneers Podcast, they always ask that question. Why preschool? Why preschool? Why preschool? I have to answer the question. If I answered it once, I answered it 1,000 times.

In this podcast episode, I’m going to take that question, why preschool, and I’m going to answer that in depth-ly. Hopefully every time I get asked this question I’m going to put a link to this podcast, and hopefully it’ll answer that question very well for those people.

“Silly Christian! The Bible is for kids” is something I’ve done to hopefully jerk some people into reality, that children are important. Sadly, the Christian community does not view them as important. The general public for churches, they take children and actually remove them from the church community, from where you’re having the big people church, and they’ll have a Sunday school or they’ll have children’s church. They’ll have a separate area where kids go, away from the general teaching of the Bible, because kids really shouldn’t be part of that.

Even if you have those people that have integrated family-type churches where the children are there, even those churches, even though the kids are there, they still ask me this question. Why kids? Why preschool? Because even though they themselves see their own children as learning the Bible, being in there with the adults, being in there with the normal preaching, the normal teaching of the Bible, they still don’t understand the connection that evangelism has to children. They see it on a personal level. They would say, “Well, we need to have our kids with us. We need to have them learning the Bible with us.” They see that connection. That’s not something they miss. But when it comes to the concept of evangelism, when it comes to the concept of teaching and discipling the nations, gone. No idea whatsoever. It actually is baffling to them. Why preschool? They can’t grasp the concept of why it would even be important.

Let’s go ahead and start with a few things. I think the first place to start with the concept of why preschool, answering that question, starts with the great commission itself. The great commission is found in a couple places in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, I believe it is. One of them being Matthew 28, 18-20, where Jesus comes and says, “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you. Lo I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” Very basic great commission here. Of course, the rest of the New Testaments go through what the disciples were doing, and how they were doing it, and going to everybody and teaching everybody.

That concept there is distorted and misunderstood by the vast majority of Christians, because they view the great commission as going to people who have to make a decision. Going to people who are going to hear the gospel and then they’re going to be baptized and then they’re going to be starting the instruction that goes on at that point. After they have made this decision, now the instruction is going to come. They have to make a decision first. Even the people who claim to be Presbyterians, even the people claim to be not … what’s the term for it? I guess pray-the-prayer type people. Some people who might even be infant baptism or not infant baptism and all the rest that goes with it, they still have a distorted understanding of what this means.

Let’s break it down and let’s take two steps back. Instead of starting with the concept of why would you start with evangelism in preschool with children, why would you evangelize children and not be on the upper levels? Because that’s the normal question we get, that I get, that I have to answer a lot. Let’s start by just backing off 20 steps first and let’s start with the basic concept that we already understand that I just said. Parents understand that their children need to learn the word of God. They understand that concept, personally speaking-wise.

In other words, what it means is this. If I went to a person and I looked at them and I saw them teaching their children, or I saw them bringing them into church to sit in the congregation with the rest of the congregation, with the pastor, listening to the sermon, or if I heard that they did a Bible study at home where they’re teaching their children the word of God, memory of verses, catechisms, whatever it might be, and I said, “Hold on a minute. Why are you teaching your children? Why don’t you wait till they’re older?” If I asked that question to somebody, “Why are you teaching your children?” Why is it important to take your children to church? Why is it important to catechize your children? Why is it important to teach God’s law? God’s word? Why is it important to have Bible studies with your children? A person on a personal level would look at me like I was crazy, because they understand it’s their responsibility as a parent to train their child, to teach their child, because it’s important.

Let’s go through a few things here. Starting from that perspective right there, we both know and everybody understands parents have the responsibility to start with the youngest of ages to teach their children about the world, about who God is, about morality, what is right, what is wrong. It starts at the youngest of ages. I had somebody ask me that question one time was, “Well, when does this kind of instruction start?” I said, “Well, the first time you tell a child no, you’ve now set forth a moral standard. Something is right, something is wrong.” This starts at the youngest of ages, maybe even the ages of one.

Even when they start to start just beginning to learn these concepts, especially when you work in the field of education or preschool, like my wife and I do. We run our preschool. You have children who might try to scratch each other, bite each other, throw a fit, hurt themselves, hit people, hit their parents, hit their teachers. Of course, the child is going to be taught the word “no.” This of course is a moral training, moral teaching. This is where it all starts. In other words, we don’t have to really argue over the fact that parents have to teach their children or that young children have to be taught right from wrong. We’re not really arguing over that concept.

But let’s start from that perspective, from the parents’ side of things, and then we’ll move to the concept of evangelism as a larger spectrum, the nations, the community. We’ll try to get there. Let’s start here. This will be going over some basic Bible verses that I know most people who are potentially listening to this will know, hear, and absolutely agree with. Let’s start here.

Proverbs 22. The proverbs, of course, most of these will be read from Proverbs, just because Proverbs holds most of the wisdom, or at least a very condensed version of it, the Bible in general. Let’s just start there. Proverbs 22 verse six. One of my famous favorite ones of all time, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he would not depart from it.” Basic Bible verse. Very easily understood. Very simple concept. We understand as parents this is our responsibility. What it means is very simple. Just like it says, you have to start when they’re young. Instill in them God’s law, morality, right from wrong. As they grow older, it’s something that they will adhere to and hold to and believe.

This is something that parents understand is their responsibility to instill right from wrong in their child. They’re not supposed to wait, as I just gave the analogy, until they’re older. You don’t wait until the child’s 15, 16, and 17 years old before you start teaching them right from wrong. You start at the youngest of ages. Before they can even talk, they start learning morality. As they get older, of course, they might start understanding where the morality comes from, from God, from the Bible, and all the rest. But we understand we have to start at the youngest of ages and, of course, what we do when they’re young is going to impact their behavior later.

This is not something I don’t even think is up for debate with people. If you see a child that is absolutely wild, and we see it all the time, it is absolutely indicative of the fact that the parents have not done their job training their child, restraining their child, and teaching them morality. It doesn’t mean they’ll never throw a fit. But there is a difference between habitual types of behavior and just a outburst the child has. There is those differences there. But we all understand if you let the child or you don’t train the child properly, we call it “spoiling the child.” You might see them sometimes screaming because somebody didn’t give them a lollipop, or whatever. We all already understand you have to start when they’re young and it has a lasting effect on the child. This is something we understand.

Moving from here, let’s go to Proverbs 29:15. “The rod and reproof give wisdom, but a child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame.” The rod and reproof, of course, the rod means that is authority. The parent has authority. They have responsibility to teach the child. Reproof, of course, is that wisdom and that instruction that is going to guide and mold the child. That’s why the second part is if you leave them to themselves, if you just don’t teach them, you don’t restrain them, and you don’t try to teach them right from wrong, let them do whatever they want, some people just call it “spoiling.” But here it’s very clear. The Bible says, if you don’t teach a child properly, he’s going to cause shame to his parents.

This is something we all understand as parents. You can’t just let a child just live however they want. You have to start when they’re kids. You have to start when they’re young. If you’re going to mold that child as a parent, you have to start young. You can’t wait till they’re 14, 15, or 16 to say, “Okay. Now I’m going to put my foot down.” That doesn’t work. It never works. What we’re seeing here biblically, we’re just laying down some biblical principles here for parenting, basic parenting principles, we understand that it’s anti-biblical to try to attempt later on to now exert authority over the child which you’ve never done before. You’ve never exerted any authority, but now you’re going to start when they’re older. Or you’ve never had the rules set forth, and now you’re going to try to bind rules on the child that have never been on them before.

Of course, you know what’s going to happen. They’re going to buck against it. They’re going to fight against it, because it’s not something that’s been instilled into them when they were young. Therefore, it’s something that they’re absolutely going to war with versus accept. This is something that not only Christians, according to the Bible, should understand. This is something that non-Christians who follow the psychologists and all of the rest of the behavioral people, specialists, whatever you want to call them. They’ll understand this. You have to have “boundaries,” they’ll call them. You have to be the parent. You can’t be their friend. Even non-Christians understand this concept as being a parent. You have to start when they’re young if you’re going to make a long-lasting difference in the child’s overall behavior. You have to start young. You cannot wait till later to attempt to enforce these rules.

Let’s jump to Proverbs 29:17. “Correct thy son and he shall give the rest. Yay, he shall give delight unto thy soul.” We’ve all seen the parents who are absolutely frustrated, at the ends of their ropes, because they can’t get their kids to listen to them. Absolutely frustrated. I work in the childcare field, so I see this all the time. Because parents do not have a biblical foundation, they actually have a very humanistic foundation where they think that it’s best to just let the child do whatever they want and the kid will love them. They find out that doesn’t work. When they listen to the non-Christian advice, they find out it doesn’t actually work in practice. They get very frustrated. Very upset.

In fact, some people, you can just tell. They just wish they never had a kid in the first place because they’re so aggravated and so upset. They have no rest. This says here, if you correct them, if you start when they’re young, and as they get older, they will be a delight to you instead of a aggravating, unrestful experience as a parent. Once again, biblical advice. Start young with your kids. Start there. As they grow, instead of being something that gives you no rest at all, turmoil, aggravation, irritation, they will be a delight to you instead. You’ll love being a parent, because they will be a person you can be proud of, versus the crazy wild child that nobody wants to be around.

We’ve all seen them. You’re in the restaurant. They’re the ones walking around the tables, touching people’s other food, or yelling at people, or screaming at their parents, or kicking their parents. You’ve seen it. I’ve seen it. We’ve all seen it. That kind of parent has no rest, and it’s because they don’t take, in general, the biblical advice. Once again, as parents, we understand children do have outbursts. That’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about in general the overall guide of the child’s life, the overall attitude of the child.

Let’s go on. Proverbs 29:18. As you can tell, most of these are in Proverbs 29, apparently. But Proverbs 29:18, “Where there is no vision, the people perish. But he that keepeth the law happy is he.” This also is about parenting as well. They don’t have a vision for where they’re going, therefore they have no goal to get to. But if you teach the law to your children, it’s going to make you as a parent happy, and it’s also going to make your children happy too. Because, once again, nobody wants their children to be raised to be a criminal, to be a liar, to be disobedient, to be disrespectful to authority, to be somebody who’s a thief, a murderer, all the things that come with it. As the children grow up, if you want them to be happy, teach them the law. You want to be happy, teach them the law yourself.

But you have to start when they’re young. You can’t start later on trying to bind these things on somebody. You have to have that vision for the future. If you don’t have this vision, you’re going to fail as a parent. This is a very simple concept. It’s very easily understood.

Let’s jump again to another verse. Proverbs 19:18, “Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying.” To chasten means to bind, to discipline, to organize, to help. Once again, this is the positive and the negative. You can’t always go negative and you can’t only go positive. Working in the childcare field, we see it all the time. We see some people who try to lavish their children with reward, always promising this. “If you do this …” It’s bribery, is what it is. Bribery. It’s not even a goal to work towards. It’s just bribery. “If you do this, then I’ll get you that. If you get off the ground, I’ll get you a snack.” Whatever it might be, they try the positive. Of course, it works for two seconds, and they’re right back to it again, because you can’t constantly be giving the child something for terrible behavior.

Here what you have to do as a parent, basically, is set those goals, know what they are. To chasten them means to set the standards. Meaning, if you did something good, you’re rewarded for it. If you’re not, you withhold the reward, or there’s some form of disciplinary procedure that happens along with it. A positive and a negative.

Then, of course, the second part of this verse, not to spare for their crying, I cannot tell you how often I see this. All the time. Kid starts crying, give them what they want. No matter what it is. If you see that they have two children, I’ve seen this before, which I always cringe when I see it, one child will have a reward, maybe it’s for something they did good at school so they got a reward. Our school calls them badges. The secondary child that they have did not get one for that day. Maybe it wasn’t because they didn’t do something good, per se. But it just wasn’t that they got one for that day, maybe.

But what happens is the other child will start to scream. The other child will start to yell, be upset, cry. Then they will want to give them something just to stop them from crying. Or, once again, the child will do something wrong. I’m not sure if most people know this. But, having been in the childcare field as long as I have, and having 11 kids now, as my wife and I do, the person that cries the most when there’s a problem, if there’s two people involved in an altercation, one child is scratched, one child is bitten, whatever it might be, the one that’s crying the most is not the one that’s been injured. If a kid’s got a bite on their arm, they’re usually not crying for the most part. It’s the one who did the biting, did the scratching, did the stealing. Whatever it was. They’re crying because they don’t want to get in trouble for what it was.

This Bible verse right here about not sparing them for their crying is just telling you how human nature is, I’m going to attempt my best to be crying to make you feel bad about having some form of negative consequence for my actions. God says here, if you’re going to actually help your child, you have to make sure that you do not back off and you can’t reward bad behavior and you cannot punish good behavior. In fact, that’s one of the things that I had a parent one time ask me. They said, “What does it mean to be a bad parent?” I said, “Well, strictly speaking, it’s this. It’s rewarding bad behavior and punishing good. If you do those two things, and you are doing something that parents should not do, and I would not call them a good parent, because that is absolutely training your child for the wrong thing. As they grow up, the thief is not rewarded, and the hardworking is not punished. Therefore, you’re giving your child the wrong idea of the future.”

But, once again, it comes back to the concept of rearing the child. Starting when they’re young and building into them this concept that good things happen to people that are doing good, bad things happen to those who are doing bad. Very simply concept, but it’s something that they have to start with when they’re young. If they get the idea in their head that they can do bad things and still get rewarded for it, guess what they’re going to do when they’re 17, 18, 19, 20 years old? They’re going to think that it still operates like that, the world operates this way. Because, guess what? In my home life, or whatever it was, that’s the way I was treated. Therefore, I expect it to be that way in the future with everyone else was well. We understand this is the way to destroy a person, not to help them. But, as we see the common pattern here, it starts when they’re young and shows them how they view the world when they’re little. Let’s move on.

Proverbs 10:1. The Proverbs of Solomon. “A wise son maketh a glad father, but a foolish son is the heaviness of his mother.” Once again, the way the Bible describes a foolish or a wise son is one that either obeys the commandments or does not. Of course, once again, the father and mother, their jobs are to instill wisdom into their children. What things are good, what things are not good. A wise son will make a glad father. You want to be a happy parent? Teach your children correctly. If you don’t, as we saw later on, they won’t give you rest. They’ll be shame. They’ll be heaviness to you. It’ll be difficult. It will take all the joy out of being a parent because of how the child is acting.

There’s not one single parent, and I see it all the time, that looks at their child when they’re throwing a fit, causing a scene, throwing things, harming people, and say, “Atta boy. Good job.” No. They feel what’s here, the heaviness. The shame that they’re talking about. As the parent, you have to start when they’re young and do your best to train them up, as we were talking about earlier, in the way they should go. Let’s move on.

Proverbs 13:24. “He that spareth his rod hateth his son, but he that loveth him chastenith him the times.” Here’s a very simple concept here. Once again, the rod in the Bible is always representative of authority. If you spare your authority over your children, if you don’t establish that there is a authority figure that they have to listen to, then you have not done your job as a parent. It says here that you hate them. If you do not, as the parent … If you try to be their friend, if you’re just trying to be the friend of your child, you’re going to actually, instead of giving love to your child, which people think that they’re showering them with love because they don’t want to be the authority figure, wrong. The Bible here is very clear. If you do not exert your authority over your child, if you do not give them the impression there is someone they have to listen to, this authority figure in their lives starting with the parents, then you do not love your children. You actually hate them.

Because, once again, you’re training them. You are rearing them. You are cultivating them into a life that says, “I can do what I want, and there is no one that is an authority that I have to say I’m not going to do what I want. I have to listen to somebody else and do what they want.” Therefore, if the parent does not exert this type of authority over their children, they actually do not love them, because that’s what the second part here. He that loveth them chasteneth them. Or, he will guide them, direct them, reward the good, punish the bad. Restricting negative behavior, promoting the good behavior. This is what it means. But, once again, this is not a one-time thing. This is not something that you do when the child is 16 or 17 or 18 years old. This is something the parent starts with at the very beginning, exerting authority.

Working in the childcare field, this is something that’s very interesting to me. I hear it a lot. They say, “My child has entered the terrible twos.” The terrible twos. If you haven’t heard that term, it’s something that’s very common. Terrible twos. I remember telling somebody, because I’ve been having 11 kids and being in the childcare field now working with other people’s kids for 17 years, thousands of kids and thousands of families, I tell the parents that when they say that I say, “Well, it’s not really the terrible twos. It’s the terrible threes and fours and fives and 16s and 17s.” Then I go on to explain what I mean by that, because the idea is that the two-year-old is finally becoming self-aware that they want something.

My little two-year-old, Willow, she’s now two. She’s just entered that stage. You can clearly see it. The lights have come on. There were certain very specific things that she wants. We were at the dinner table just earlier this morning, and she had a bowl and she had some fruit in it, and she wanted some whipped cream in there. Somebody was not giving her whipped cream, and she got all upset because somebody was not giving her what she wanted, which was whipped cream in that bowl.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with having certain desires, like having whipped cream in a bowl. There’s nothing wrong with that. Of course, we try to recognize that she can’t talk yet. We’re like, “Oh. She just wants that.” We try to teach her, you don’t have to get upset. You just identify that you want something and we’ll help you get it. Then, as they get older, however, this type of will power will exert itself in lots of different ways, into theft, into harming other people, into throwing a fit. This concept of terrible twos is because the parent is now gone from where the child was an infant, like our number 11 now, Madeline, what, three weeks old now. They’re little. They’re tiny. They’re beautiful little babies. They have that little baby bug, as some people call it, where they’re always cute all the time.

Because I tell people, they don’t really move a whole lot, so they can’t run away from you, and they don’t talk, so they can’t really say no to you. That kind of stuff. But really, they just haven’t gotten the will power yet, like the two-year-olds have and the older kids have, yet to really exert that. But that is what we’re talking about here, is that authority. You can’t get what you want just because you want it. You have to learn to listen to somebody. That’s what this Bible verse here is talking about here, where it’s talking that you have to make sure you do not spare the rod. You have to chastise your children, which means you cannot give up your parental authority. You have to constantly exert your authority over the child so that when they get older they will understand there are people they have to listen to.

How does this play out later on in life? Real simple. Turn on your Internet any time you want to, tune in to Facebook. You will see people all the time shouting at police officers, yelling at police officers. People give the police a bad rap sometimes. Don’t get me wrong, there are police officers that do things they shouldn’t. But there are people in every field that do things that they shouldn’t. It doesn’t matter which field it is. Pinpointing some people who do things wrong here and there does not mean the entire profession has a problem. It means that certain people definitely have a problem.

But what it means is you turn on these people, the police officers can be asking something very simple, and people will just start getting very aggressive with them. They don’t feel like they have to be polite at all to a police officer, as if somehow they can just yell and shout at them, or they even do this to the parents. They do this to their boss. In other words, if the parents don’t exert this authority over their children, get them to listen to them, teach them that they have someone they have to listen to typically throughout their entire life, then they have not done their children a service. They have actually done a negative of child rearing. They’ve done a bad job of rearing their children. They’ve actually set their children up for failure in the future, because there’s always somebody they have to listen to.

Once again, this concept comes back to, if you want your children later on to be benefited, you have to start now. You don’t start at 16, 17, 18, 20 years old, 24 years old, 28 years old, to try to start doing these things. They will buck at it and will never do it because their entire lives they thought they could do whatever they want whenever they want to whomever they wanted, and I don’t have to listen to anybody. That’s not biblical and that’s not what parents are supposed to do. We understand you have to start when they’re young to start this concept. Anyways. Let’s go ahead and move on a little bit here. I think I hit that pretty good.

Proverbs 19:26. “He that wasteth his father and chaseth away his mother is a son that causes the shame and bringeth reproach.” Once again, the concept of a person who cannot listen to their parents. They will refuse to obey their parents whatsoever. If you want to get your child, you have to start young. We see this all the time, but it’s mostly because the parents when they’re young didn’t want to be the authority figure, just like we’re talking about here. The person that will run from the child … You’ll see this in the preschool setting or in the general setting. You’ll see it in the supermarket as well. Children will try to run away from their parents and whatnot.

Basically it’s just a concept of getting the authority away from me. I will not listen to you. I will not listen to you. I will do whatever I want. This causes shame and reproach upon the parents. But, rightfully so if it’s the parent who has not done the job they should in training them when they’re young, young, young, young, young, young. This is where this starts. Not when they’re older.

Here is another one. Here’s a good one. Proverbs 28:7. “Who so keepeth the law is a wise son. But, he that is a companion of riotous men shameth his father.” Once again, this comes back to, in this case, where a person is now getting older, and now they’re making friends, and now the friends and the company that they’re keeping are riotous men. These are lawless people. These are disobedient people. Basically, the incorrigible delinquents that we hear about all the time. This, once again, causes shame to the parent.

When is it that the parent starts to exert and guide their children about who to hang around? When is that? Real simple. Two, three, four, five years old. That’s where it starts. It doesn’t start at 17 years old or 16 years old or 13 years old. No, no, no, no. We already see it all the time. In fact, they make lots of movies about it all the time, where they have their friends and they just go off and do whatever they want with their friends. They’ll drive up in trucks and they’ll be having tattoos all over themselves and rock music is blaring and there’s beer cans in the back and they’re sneaking out of windows. This all brings shame to the parent.

But, once again, this doesn’t start when they’re older. If you start trying to teach your kids about what people to hang around, by the ages of 12 and 13 and 14, even 10, you’ve lost the battle. You have to start young. You have to start real young, starting to set the standard of who is somebody to be around. That’s why the beginning of the verse said, “Who so keepeth the law is a wise son.” People that are keeping the law won’t want to be around those that don’t. If they’ve been taught the law and that is the people you’re supposed to associate with, and later on they understand what the standard is. You can’t come back later trying to instill that concept into the child. We understand this as parents. You have to start, once again, young if you’re a parent.

This one for me also goes in here. I’m going to get back to it in a second, more explanation, because I think this is also a key verse to bridge the gap between the concept of parenting and between the concept of evangelism as a whole, as far as the gospel mandate goes out there to go out to preach the gospel to all nations and disciple them. It goes like this. Proverbs 29:21. “He that delicately bringeth up his servant from a child shall have him become his son at the length.” Let me read that again, because I think this is the bridge of the gap for me. I want people to hear this, because if anybody asks me this question again, why preschool, I want this to get instilled very much so in the back of their minds.

Proverbs 29:21. “He that delicately bringeth up his servant from a child shall have him become his son at length.” This is real simple. This is not somebody who is your flesh and blood, but it’s somebody that you raise, somebody that you, from the time that they were a child, the time that they were little, you bring them up, you raise them, you care for them, you nurture them, you teach them, you reward them, you discipline them, you give them your boundaries, they know where they’re at, and you teach them authority, teach them law. This will no longer just be some outsider, outside of your family. They’ll become your son or like one of your children, one of your own. You cared for them so much.

But did this happen when they were 17, 18, 19, 20 years old? Let’s read that again. “He that delicately bringeth up his servant from a child shall have him become his son at the length.” From a child. From very, very little. How is this person going to take this outsider and have them become part of his family? He starts young, very young, and slowly delicately brings them up and teaches them as a parent would.

What is the whole goal here, the whole thrust of the parent-child relationship? I think that’s covered here. One of my favorite verses of all time, at least the compilation of verses, found in Ecclesiastes 12:11. It goes like this. “The words of the wise are as goads, and as nails fastened by the masters of assemblies, which are given from one shepherd. And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.”

That is probably one of my favorite passages of all, because this is the culmination of the entire Bible. If you want to take every doctrine in the entire Bible and say, “What is it all about? What is a parent’s job? What is it I’m supposed to get across to my child?” Simple. They’re supposed to fear God, keep his commandments. That is their entire job. Why? Because God is going to judge them and every other person, and every secret thing, if it’s good or if it’s evil. Judgment day is coming eventually, and you better be aware and cautious about what you do here and now. You better think about it. That’s what the parent does. We’ve done a podcast, my wife and I, before about how parents do not save their children. They do guide their children, though. They point them this direction, and that is the goal right there.

Now, having said all that, let’s see if we can jump to a few things. I’m going to turn the tide a little bit here. What I want to do is, as we turn the corner, is let’s stop talking about what Christians are supposed to do. I know that sounds odd. But, a lot of times, and for me there’s this Bible verse where it goes into how the people who are non-Christians are actually wiser in their ways than the Christians are. That’s actually from a parable that Jesus did in Luke 16, which you can go there later and learn about it.

But it was a steward who was a bad steward. He’d actually wasted that which was his, the money that the owner gave to him, he wasted it away. As the owner was coming back, came and found out that the steward had wasted all the money and he was going to lose his job. He was the steward of this large household. He says, “I’m going to be out of a job soon, so I need to do something.” He goes back to all the people who were the creditors. One guy, he owed the owner a certain amount of money. Another guy owed another certain amount of money. He comes back to both the people and says, “How much do you owe the owner?” They said, this amount. We’ll just say $10. He says, “Okay. Well, let’s write a receipt for $5. Now you only owe $5.”

The steward at the time had the authority to do that because he was still the steward. Then he goes to the other guy. He says, “How much do you owe?” He goes, “$100.” He says, “Okay. Let’s make it $50.” In other words, he’s cutting the debts of these people that they owe the owner. This is a horrible, evil thing to do, because he’s actually further wasting the money of the owner. But what he’s doing is he’s going to be losing his job from the owner of the property, because he’s a bad steward. What he’s doing now is, when he gets fired, he wants to have all these people like him. He goes out there and he reduces their debts to the owner so that whenever he does get fired he’s going to have a place to go, people to help him out, because, “Hey, you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”

The owner comes back and says, “You were a wise steward.” Not necessarily a good steward, but he was wise in the fact that he was himself self-preserving himself. He understood that he had to do something for self-preservation. He went out of his way and he got himself of these people, in a bad way obviously. But these people were going to like him. After he gets fired, he’s going to end up having himself a place to go. This is an evil man that is doing something very shrewd, but it was very self-beneficial and helpful to himself and his cause, which was self-preservation. He did more evil things in order to self-preserve himself. He understood self-preservation very, very, very well.

That goes into what I’m about to talk about next, about how the people that are non-Christians actually understand self-preservation. They actually understand many, many subjects much better than Christians do. So many more. I’m going to give you a few examples here. I don’t want to just be off the wall, up in the air, theoretical type stuff. I actually want to give you some actual examples of what I mean, because whenever somebody comes to me and they say, “Why preschool? Why preschool? Why kids?” Let me give you some examples not from what I would say. Let me give you some examples of what actually is taking place in the world today.

I went through. I’m on social media, on Facebook, and I watch the news. Every now and then, as I’m flipping through and I see things in my feed, I’ll hit save the link, save this link, save that article, and all the rest. Later on, when something comes up like this podcast, I’ll run through those articles and links that are saved and I’ll find the articles that are relevant to the topic that I am discussing. I actually have some real-life, happening-now circumstances to share. Here’s one for you.

Children are a focus of people who are non-Christian. I’m going to give you an example of what I mean by they have an agenda. We all, as Christians, can say non-Christians have an agenda. We like to talk about it all the time. They want to talk about it in public school all the time. That is something that is for a whole different situation. But, let’s start with this. In general, in the public, ready, okay.

Here’s premise number one. People that are high up in government want to go for gun control. Gun control. You see this all the time. Recently you had the news when Obama was president, he came against guns all the time. It was always about guns. Every five seconds he was against guns. People were running out and buying bullets and buying guns because they were so afraid they were going to pass laws. Guess what? The people in power, people in politics, know they’re not going to come get people’s guns. That’s not the route they’re going to go. They know they’re not going to change your mind. These good old boys like where I grew up in country towns, you’re not going to change their minds. They like their guns. They’re going to keep them. They’re not going to change their minds about it whatsoever. Of course, I don’t think they should.

But the people who are anti-gun, they want to change the people’s minds because they want to get rid of guns because then, of course, they’re the only ones with guns. How do they do it? They start with children. They start teaching them about guns being bad. How do they do it? I remember I was watching, this is a while back, actually, a Spongebob episode, cartoon, Spongebob, if you haven’t heard about it. On the Spongebob episode, they were talking about how there was a superhero and they talk about weapons. Spongebob says, “Weapons? Only bad guys have weapons.” These are subtleties that they put in. This is just one example of how they do it in the cartoons and things like that to try to say, “Only bad people need guns.” When you go through all the different TV shows and programs, and you’ll hear it start to resonate again and again and again, how people don’t like guns, they don’t want guns.

Eventually, people start to become indoctrinated by this. Another one recently was in the news. The kid had a Pop Tart, had a Pop Tart, and he chewed it into the shape of a gun, in the shape of a gun. The kid got suspended because he had chewed his Pop Tart in the shape of a gun, and he got suspended for it.

Another one that I know of was a kid who was actually in my local town who had gone to school with a small figuring, like a GI Joe. People that are older, like myself, might know what GI Joes are. But they’re little tiny small figurines about two inches big. It looked like a machine gun, but it was two inches big. The child got suspended for bringing that to school. Suspended for bringing in this little thing to school.

Another person recently in the news, it was on Instagram. Some kid either posted something or liked the photo, and it was a photo of a gun. It was an Airsoft gun. It wasn’t even a real gun, it was actually a pellet gun. But he got suspended for it. These are ways that they indoctrinate kids. Going there to teach them that guns are bad, guns are bad, guns are bad. You don’t need guns. Stay away from guns. You’re going to get in trouble if you have guns. Later on, when they’re older, you think 13 years of that type of indoctrination, that’s going to resonate. They know it, therefore they start with them. That’s just one example.

Let’s start with another concept of gender fluidity, or there are more than one genders, not just male and female. Recently in the British museums they were starting exhibits. It actually happened in Britain. They were going to have these exhibits about pornography, exhibits on homosexuality, exhibits on transgenders, and exhibits on things like sex toys and other things like that. These workshops were geared towards, guess, wait. Wait for it. Children. Young children. Not high school. Not middle school. Elementary children and younger. We’re talking five years old and younger. They were wanting to have these workshops, bring them in, and then teach them about these concepts. Pornography, homosexuality, people who are cross-dressing, and of course, once again, sex toys and other perversions that are out there.

They’re teaching this to kids. Why? Because they are very intelligent. If they want people to accept certain things as normal, accept certain things as being equal, they start with the kids. Once again, they’re not going to be changing the minds of the adults who have already been raised a certain way with a certain viewpoint on certain things. They have to go back and say, “Well, we have to scrap the old. Start with the new. Let’s go with the kids.”

Here’s another one. There was recently in, let’s see, Brooklyn. Brooklyn. Here’s another one. A drag queen named Little Miss Hot Mess. A drag queen, Little Miss Hot Mess, showed up at a public library where they were doing readings. They were going to read. It was called the Drag Queen Story Hour at the public libraries. Of course, there were parents and children who were coming. The drag queen, Little Miss Hot Mess, which was a guy obviously dressed up in drag, was going to sit down and read storybooks about what it means to be a drag queen, about girls who can dress up like boys and boys who can dress up like girls, and how this is a good normal thing that children should accept as being good and normal.

How did they do it? They also did little songs. They did little songs. One of the songs was Little Miss Hot Mess stood up and, like The Wheels on the Bus, you know, “The wheels on the bus go round and round.” You know the song. Instead, they did a different one and they changed the words along the way of going, “The hips of the drag queen go swish, swish, swish,” or, “The hands of the drag queen go jazz, jazz, jazz.” I don’t have to make this stuff up. I’m just telling you what I saved from watching social media and things that were in the news and other things.

What are all these things geared towards? What are they geared towards? They’re not geared towards adults. In fact, with that little clip that they had from Brooklyn about the drag queen story hour they were doing at the public libraries, the drag queen, Little Miss Hot Mess, actually said that she knows, or, rather, he knows, rather, that people, adults, don’t agree with what he does, don’t agree with drag queens, don’t agree with cross-dressing, don’t agree with homosexuality. Of course, he said, “But that’s okay, because I can’t change their minds. But,” he said, “I’m going to go teach the kids, so that way maybe they can in the future learn that it is normal and okay in other lifestyles.”

They are very self-conscious about what they’re doing and that they’re going after children. They have a very clear understanding that they’re not even going to attempt to come after the adults. They don’t even try it. They know that they want kids. They know that’s what they want.

What does that mean then? It means that Christians aren’t paying attention but non-Christians are paying attention about what is going on. You won’t hear any of these people that I’ve just mentioned. They’re spending thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars to put on these programs. Come on. Drag queen story hour in public libraries. This is going to take money, public money, and public venues to do this type of stuff to pull it off. Museum exhibits of pornography and homosexuality and all the rest of this stuff, this costs thousands and thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars. They’re going to gear it towards children. They are really putting their pocketbook to work. They have a very specific focus. It’s children.

You won’t hear any of these people going, “Why would we want to do it for children?” You will not have that. In fact, you won’t hear the concept, why preschool? Why not? Working in the field, as we have, if you weren’t paying attention when Obama was in office, he wanted universal preschool. He wanted universal state-funded preschool, which of course meant universal humanistic education. But you didn’t have President Obama saying, “Why would we need to go to preschool age?” When he’s talking about universal preschool, what he really means is infancy through age four. That’s what they’re really talking about here. We’re talking about getting them as young as possible, getting federal funding to take them from infancy all the way up to kindergarten, and we already got them from kindergarten through high school. They want to go all the way to the bottom. You won’t hear them saying, “Why preschool?” In fact, they understand why preschool. Because they understand all the things I just mentioned that you have to start when they’re young.

Let’s go ahead, since we started ourselves at the parent level, right, we started at the parent level. Let’s go ahead now and go to the next level, which is the evangelical level. You have all the Christians sitting around complaining. You have the people who are trying to be anti-abortion, so they go to the abortion mills. They’re doing a great job of trying to teach people there outside the abortion mills at the very last second that this is a real child and you’re actually murdering your child. But, once again, as we were just talking about here, the people that are going out there are fighting against 14, 16, 18, 20, 25 years of non-Christian indoctrination, that I can do what I want. This isn’t really a baby. It’s just a fetus. Even if it is a baby, I still have the right to kill it if I want to. I’m not doing anything morally wrong.

Then, the person that’s stepping up at the abortion mill is trying to combat all of that in five seconds before a person walks in the door. That is what we’re up against here. That’s what we’re talking about here. That’s just one example. You’ll hear people talking about, “Oh, our world is in such a dire straits, where people are ill-educated and so immoral, and sexual immorality is rampant.” We need to stop complaining about the results of how the kids have been reared. Whenever the Christian community says, “Why preschool?” It tells me one simple thing. They don’t understand the simple concept and they can’t move it from the private realm of parents and children into the evangelical realm. Because all the people we’re talking about here trying to minister to who are all older, these people have been indoctrinated their entire lives. Now you’re stepping in there to try to upturn their entire worldview in five seconds when you talk to them. That’s what you’re trying to do.

This is why preschool. Because, going back to that verse, “He that delicately bringeth up his servant from a child shall have him become his son at the length.” Working in preschool, working with children, working with families, I can tell you this much right now, is that the children that we work with, my wife and my family work with, they feel like they’re part of my family. We live this verse that I just read to you, Proverbs 29:21. Because we work with them from the time that they’re young, we are actually part of their family. They certainly feel that way. They act like that. They know. In fact, we have them all the time will come in and visit us, all the time at the schools. They know that we care about them. They know that we try to teach them what they should learn. Once again, they feel like they’re part of the family.

That verse right there is what Christians are missing. They want to just step in at the ages of 15 or older, ask people to pray a prayer, and then wonder why the world is falling apart. As Rushdoony says all the time, and working on the Easy Chair tapes and the other things that I’ve been working with for Rushdoony stuff and various other projects that we’re working on, the concept that you always hear from Rushdoony is a Christian civilization. A Christian civilization is an interesting concept, because people don’t I don’t think understand what Christian civilization even really means.

The Christian civilization that we’re talking about here is one I like to call is sanctified, a sanctified society, where they are Christian-influenced. It doesn’t mean that everyone’s a Christian, but it does mean that they have Christian morality. It means that there’s less murders, less thefts, less adulteries, less fornications, less people leaving their children, making them orphans and widows and all the rest that goes with it, and a slow sanctification of society. But if Christianity is going to make a difference, then they’re going to have to take the principles that we discussed at quite some length and we have to get rid of this idea that children aren’t important.

The people who are non-Christian, as Jesus said, are wiser in their ways than the children of light. That is very, very true. You will not find these non-Christians involved, these politicians or people involved in education say, “We really don’t need to focus on the children.” They know that you have to focus on the children. Why? Because of all the Bible verses I just gave you on a personal level which you understand. If you train the child up in the way he should go, when he is old he will not depart from it. Why can’t we as Christians take that and attribute that to the concept of evangelism and say, if we want to impact society … hold on a minute. We need to actually start with children. We need to start impacting the children and the families’ lives.

Because whenever you go to a family, let’s say you’re in a preschool setting like myself, and you train that child to listen to their parents, you train the child to listen to their parents, what’s going to happen to that family? You’re going to start sanctifying the family slowly. Why? The child’s going to go home. They’re being taught they shouldn’t steal. They’re being taught they shouldn’t lie. They’re being taught they should honor authority. They’re being taught that they should do unto others as they would want others to do unto them, and all the rest that goes with it. Of course, as they get older, because this is one concept also I mentioned to somebody before as well.

They said to me, “Why preschool?” I said, “Real simple. Because these children become adults very soon.” I’ve been doing this for 17 years now working with children. I can tell you right now is that these children become adults when you blink. When you blink. It’s crazy. Right now, 17 years, and I already have people who are going off into the Military. They’re 20, 24 years old now, because I had them when they were younger. It’s absolutely insane. You blink and all of a sudden they’re adults.

You take these kids, you influence them. They then had this Christian rearing, this Christian upbringing, the influence of Christians. What happens next? They have this family that was always there, at least in the case of my family. My wife and I were always there for these kids when they came to the door. Their lives at their homes might be chaotic at times, but whenever they came into our schools they were safe. They knew we were always there for them. What happens?

When they get older and they start having kids, which happens all the time. Grace Community School has been around for 30 years, so we’re already seeing lots of our students having children. Guess what they’re doing? When it comes time for their children and they need a place to help them with, they bring them right back to Grace Community Schools. Now not only are we getting the first generation. Grace Community Schools is starting to see the second generation of children come in. Can you imagine three, four generations down the road, all with a Christian upbringing and a Christian rearing? Can you imagine what could happen to society with multiple generations reared to take the Bible seriously, to take God’s authority seriously, to take the 10 Commandments seriously? Can you imagine the impact it can have on our society?

That is why preschool. That is why. I hope that in the future if anybody asks me that question I can point them to this podcast. I hope I’ve done a good enough job. At least, I hope I have, at explaining to you why you work with children and why it is that I had to use the phrase of “Silly Christian! The Bible is for kids.” Because evangelism is for children. It’s not just for adults to get them to pray a prayer. Evangelism is for children. It’s for godly rearing. For the same reasons that you are going to be rearing your children when they are very young to start there, all the Bible verses I just read. Go back and listen to the podcast again to catch a full list of them. For the same reasons you have to train your children from when the time they were very young are the same reasons Christians need to look at other people in the community and start with their children as well.

Once again, it’s in the hopes of helping them, because we know that you are not blessed by breaking God’s commandments. You’re only blessed by keeping them. As you teach these people from the community and their children, you’re trying to bless them. You’re trying to help them. Your only goal is to absolutely 100% to help them and their children, and you help by pointing them towards God, by teaching those commandments and teaching the way of life. That’s what it’s all about.

I’m going to end with this verse. Once again, why preschool? Proverbs 29:21. “he that delicately bringeth up his servant from a child shall have him become his son at length.” If you start when children are young and you begin to instill into them the word of God, and you are always there, you’re a stable force in the lives of a child, they will become part of your family, part of your spiritual family. That’s going to take root in them. Hopefully it will take root in their children, and hopefully in their children. You start to see the impact Christians can really have if they actually took evangelism seriously.

Whenever a person asks me, why preschool, it’s because they don’t take evangelism seriously, and they obviously do not understand the biblical doctrine of what a parent is supposed to be doing. Because they don’t understand what the parent’s supposed to be doing, they don’t understand what the people who are trying to disciple the nations are doing as well. Discipling the nations does not mean going out and soul winning, asking people to ask Jesus Christ into their heart. What it means is consistent basis, every day, all the time, teaching people the word of God constantly all the time, just as if you’re rearing your own child. You don’t just teach your child a few things here and there once a week. It’s all the time, every day, consistently, again and again and again, over a period of time of years.

I’ll leave us with this. Hopefully you’ve gotten something from this. Hopefully I’ve answered that question, why preschool, sufficiently. I’ll leave it with this. We just had the end of our school year happen upon us. We had a number of children leaving us and their parents brought in flowers and cards and wonderful thank-yous for us, because we had been with them and their children for over 10 years. That is something that I can’t think of any other Christian ministry gets an opportunity to do, besides those in the field of Christian education, preschool in particular, like ourselves, like Grace Community School.

That is why preschool. Because, over the period of over 10 years, I’ve had the opportunity to assist and help these families, help train their children in the way of life, and in hopes that God would bless that and that that child would be benefited and they would grow up with their children and their children would be benefited from it as well. That is why preschool. Christians need to get the idea that children are important. That’s why I think the title is great. “Silly Christian! The Bible is for kids.”

Thank you for listening to another episode of the Preschool Pioneers Podcast. If you’d like to subscribe to the weekly Preschool Pioneers Podcast, you can visit our website at PreschoolPioneers.com. You can also find us on Facebook at Facebook.com/PreschoolPioneersPodcast. Of course, you can also find us on Twitter at Twitter.com/PioneersPodcast.

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