
Episode #4 – The Blessings of the Law & Agents of Destruction
Description:
Rev. Jeremy Walker, Rev. Aaron Slack, & Pastor Ellsworth McIntyre
On this episode of the Easy Chair in Practice we discuss two of the original Easy Chair tapes recorded by R.J. Rushdoony. The first was recorded on May 25, 1995, and the second was recorded on September 24, 1995. Both episodes were episodes where R.J. Rushdoony was interviewing Pastor Ellsworth McIntyre, founder of Grace Community School in SW Florida.
Join us as we revisit this interview with Pastor McIntyre and discuss how the blessing of God are tied to obedience to His law, and how those that reject God and His law became agents of destruction that destroy those around them, and become self-destructive and suicidal.
Listen to Episode:
Here are the two Easy Chair tapes referenced
in this episode of the Easy Chair in Practice.
The Easy Chair with R. J. Rushdoony
Episode #340
Originally Recorded – May 25, 1995
The Easy Chair with R.J. Rushdoony
Episode #347
Originally Recorded – Sep. 24, 1995
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Transcript of Episode:
Radio Announcer: The Reconstructionist Radio Podcast Network presents the Easy Chair in Practice. Join us as revisit sermons, lectures and discussions by RJ Rushdoony and give examples of how the doctrine and teaching of Rushdoony are to be put into practice and how Christian reconstruction is to be implemented today and in the future.
Speaker 2: The Easy Chair in Practice Podcast is brought to you by the GCS apprenticeship program. For more information, visit gcsapprenticeship.com.
Jeremy Walker: Welcome back to another episode of the Easy Chair in Practice, and this if for June 2017, and on this episode, this is episode number four, we’re going to be covering the topics of blessings of the law and agents of destruction. Now, on this podcast, The Easy Chair in Practice, we like to assign ourselves different things coming from RJ Rushdoony. If it’s a sermon or if it’s a video he did, if it’s an easy chair tape he did or a book or an article that he’d written and we like to discuss those as we go throughout this podcast and kind of center our stuff around something he has written or produce.
This week, or this month, we’re going to be having two different things we were looking at, and we will have these available on our website. The website that we have is gcsapprenticeship.com. From there you can select at the top, podcast, and The Easy Chair in Practice is one of those selections, or from the homepage, about halfway down, we also have a selector for The Easy Chair in Practice, and you can find it there as well. You’ll be able to find episode number four, which this is episode number four. We will be providing links for these two easy chair tapes that we’re going to be covering.
The first one was Easy Chair tape that Rushdoony had done in September 24, 1995. The second Easy Chair tape we’re going to be covering is also from May 25, also of 1995 as well. We chose two of them because both of these Easy Chair tapes had an interview of the same person we also have the exact same person here with us today. That is Dr Ellsworth McIntyre.
Let’s go ahead and get started. We’ll go first and introduce everybody. Reverend Jeremy Walker is who I am, and with me also is Pastor Ellsworth McIntyre and Reverend Aaron Slack. We’re going to go ahead and get ourselves started talking about the schools a little bit and then our topic of discussion as well here, about the blessings of the law and agents of destruction.
We’ll go ahead and get started first by touching on the importance of Christian education in the realm of preschool, because RJ Rushdoony had interviewed Pastor McIntyre on both of these podcasts specifically concerning the preschools that he had started here. In 1995, there were six schools, and since then, and we are now in the year 2017, there are now nine Grace Community School locations and ten buildings. There are actually ten schools, and nine locations.
We’re going to go ahead and get started here, briefly touch on with Pastor McIntyre about Christian preschool and its importance. Pastor McIntyre, if you can go ahead and get us started talking about the importance of Christian preschool specifically in the field of education.
Pastor McIntyre: Thank you Reverend Walker. The preschool, as covered in the two webcasts that RJ Rushdoony did with me in 1995, was he had visited our school. I believe it was the year before and was very much enamored with our approach to education of the preschoolers versus home schoolers and versus other preschools that he was aware of.
The thing that impressed him particularly about our schools were that they were highly structured. Of course if we were going to read RJ Rushdoony’s Biblical Law, you understand that he wrote his book because he was concerned that the law had been taken out of the evangelical schools. They had been teaching that the law had been done away with, and they were teaching a plan of salvation that was just asking the Lord to save them, the sinner’s prayer, but then because they believed the law had been done away with, there was any structures beyond that.
Historically, we can look back and we can see the Sunday School Movement in England was concerned with the same thing. The children were not being taught God’s law and as a result, why the Sunday School Movement catechized them. The same thing was true with Martin Luther in Germany. The priests at Martin Luther’s time didn’t even know the Ten Commandments. Didn’t even know where they were in the bible. He wrote his longer catechism and his shorter mostly for the priests. Not for a preschool movement as we are doing it, but the fact that the priests needed educated in the importance of structure and law being taught to the very young.
Now Grace Community Schools, as Reverend Walker has pointed out, we now have nine schools, which at the highest element would be about 2000 students, but even during the summer, we end up with nearly 2000. Sometimes as low as 1500, but this approach that we use it to teach a catechism. For example, the children come into our schools, they have to learn the 23rd Psalm, the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments and repeat those twice daily, in addition to the other bible stories that they’re covering.
It’s important to point out to the youngsters that life has to have a structure to it. There has to be certain things that if you do, good things happen, and if you don’t, bad things happen. It is with God in his word. The word of God promises very emphatically that without obeying the Lord and obeying his law, your life is going to be without meaning. It’s going to be without purpose. You’ll end up with a lawless person.
A lot of the problem carries over also to the homeschool movement. The homeschool movement very often is taught by a member of our current generation and the mothers who are teaching the homeschool don’t know the law either, just as the priests didn’t know the law in Germany. As a consequence, they’re rearing their children against the public schools who have no law and quite unconsciously are also teaching them no law. As a result, the need for preschool like Grace Community Schools is very, very strong.
It has to be done. The idea of evangelizing a nation by teaching God’s law was done in Germany under Luther. It was done in England under the Sunday School Movement, and was done also by Reverend Lancaster. This one went worldwide. What he was doing was students teaching students. Older students being used as tutors to drill, drill, drill in God’s law. They had to memorize God’s law, and then the application of God’s law was made by the instructors.
I could take you to schools and could point out to you that the teachers themselves are not making application of God’s law. Very often, their teachers are graduates of evangelical schools who don’t know the law either. They’ve been taught a love of God is all that’s necessary, but they must understand that God also has bad things that happen, punishments that happens, so that the fear of God has to be taught to the youngsters first, and then afterwards, or co-mingled with it, they also learn that following God’s law has rewards.
Without the fear of God and the rewards being taught simultaneously to the youngster, the youngster winds up thinking that he doesn’t necessarily have to obey his mother and father because mother very often being his teacher in a homeschool situation or in a pseudo-Christian school, like most evangelical schools are, he doesn’t think that he has to obey in order for good things to happen. Mother is always very forgiving in a homeschool environment, and the weak Christian school and the Christian school movement sort of grades on the curve as well. It isn’t quite necessary that you do things all the time exactly as you’re told.
Then after they get out into the workplace and they have an employer which is setting down rules to run his business, and they get the idea somehow they can criticize the man who owns the business, they can obey only half-heartedly the man who owns the business, and they find that they’re not getting promoted. They’re not making progress and even if they go out and start a business on their own, they don’t understand the importance of discipline and structure in their business.
This leads very often to a very high suicide rate among graduates of many, many Christian schools, but worse with the public schools. The Christian schools are not much better because how to live under authority, how to be a person under authority … For example the Lord Jesus Christ complimented the centurion soldier whenever the centurion solder said, “Come and heal my servant.” He says, “Well follow me and I’ll go there.” The centurion says, “That’s not necessary. I’m a man under authority. I say to my soldiers do this and they do it. I say come and they come. Go and they go.” He said, “Just say the word and it will be done.”
The Lord was very moved about it and said, “I have not seen such faith, no not in Israel.” Israel of course is the church today. We have to have a product that comes out of our Christian school that obeys authority, that doesn’t need to be punished because they’ve learned long ago that God hears, God understands, God sees everything. Everything is going to be rewarded, or everything’s going to be cursed, depending upon his law.
It’s necessary that youngsters learn the Lord’s Prayer, which teach the youngsters very emphatically that he’s God’s child and that the Lord is with him, if he’s obedient. He has to learn that reward is at the judgment seat of God, if he’s obedient. It’s believing in the Lord Jesus Christ and the proof that you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ is if you obey him. You follow his instructions.
Likewise when they get into the business world, they’re going to get promoted if they do what their boss wants them to do, and they’ve not going to get promoted if he doesn’t. Therefore they end up with a life that doesn’t have any success to it, because success in this world only comes on the basis of obedience to God’s law, unless you’re going to be a criminal of some sort, and that’s not going to be much of a life. That’s going to end up ultimately in failure as well.
The saying crime does not pay is very true. Obedience does pay, and obedience is the thing that needs to be taught to our youngsters, and that’s what the Sunday School Movement taught the children of Great Britain. That’s what the Germans learned under Luther in his catechism. That’s what most of the world learned under Reverend Lancaster and his movement.
We today are the modern Luther’s. We are the modern Sunday School Movement. We are the modern Lancaster movement, because we’re getting youngsters very young and teaching them that good things happen when you obey and bad things happen when you don’t. It’s just not enough to give lip service, to say, “I believe in Jesus. Please come into my heart. I want to go heaven.” It’s also necessary to back that up because we’re all going to be before the judgment seat of God before very long, and we’re going to be judged on the basis of how we live. We make it to the judgment seat by faith in Christ, but our reward comes on the basis of how well we obeyed our God. Obedience is so necessary, but so not taught in the modern day Christian school.
Jeremy Walker: Well whenever we were reading and listening to these Easy Chair tapes, I know that some things came across to me because Rushdoony was complimenting the schools we have here, and its involvement in Christian reconstruction in particular because of course we’re moving forward with reconstructing education and teaching children from very young. Now Reverend Aaron, maybe you can help us out some more with fleshing out the importance. We’re talking about here the blessings of the law, so maybe you can flesh out for us a little bit more as well. Obviously we’ve been in the schools for a long time, and anybody that’s listening to this podcast or maybe has read your book, seen your testimony, knows how long you’ve been in this. You’re family’s in this as well. Maybe you can share some more of your thoughts on the importance of teaching children very young God’s law and how it is the way of blessing.
Aaron Slack: Well, I was just going through the transcripts and the videos that we did of our apprenticeship event earlier this year, the conference that we put on here in Naples, Florida. One of the topics that came up was the history of Christian reconstruction as a movement and RJ Rushdoony more or less creating and popularizing the term Christian reconstruction.
I think Reverend Jeremy brought up the fact that while the term Christian reconstruction really originated mid-20th century, this is something that’s been going on over and over and over, as Pastor McIntyre pointed out all the previous revivals, the Wesley revival, the Sunday School Movement, Joseph Lancaster. This is something that keeps happening over and over. It’s a never-ending task.
Pastor McIntyre, one of the quotes that I got from the apprenticeship event, he pointed out that Christian reconstruction is something that is basically a never-ending task. It keeps needing to occur over and over and over. That Christian reconstruction is never something that could be accomplished in one or even two generations, and even if it did, it would then need to be repeated over and over and over. It’s a never-ending task, and in particular, the task that we’re engaged in here at Grace Community School is with young children.
You have to set down the fundamentals that they’re going to need to live their lives and obviously the most important of those fundamentals, even more important than learning to read and learning math and learning a trade, is basic instruction in God’s law. Is developing the character, character shaped by God’s law that they might enjoy a happy life, that they might enjoy a blessed life. When you get down to it, these fundamentals, you can never do too much in regards to them, in regards to teaching them.
We just went through, here at Grace Community School, we finished up the story of Ruth in the bible. I pointed out to the children this week, a lot of the bible stories that we do, they have major conflicts. There’s a lot of fighting, attacking the Philistines and the Israelites having to go to war against this people or that people, to defend their country, but the story of Ruth is a much more simpler tale.
It’s basically the story of a woman who came from a non-Christian society, from Midian, and she had to learn, and God had to sanctify her, to change her heart, help her to become one of God’s people, meaning she became saved. She learned the commandments, the rules that governed the people of Israel, and in the story, she receives the same things that we tell the kids everyday. Good things happen when you keep the commandments. The story of Ruth, more or less, is basically the story of a woman who became saved, became sanctified, learned to keep the commandments, kept the commandments well and was extraordinarily blessed because of this.
This is the same thing that we tell the children each and every day. They have to keep the commandments in order that good things will happen, in order that God will bless them. More than any of the other things that we teach the children here at Grace Community School and in our families, that most important fundamental is God has a law and we are required to keep it, and if we do keep it, God will bless us.
Jeremy Walker: One of the things that really touched on for me, and all those aspects of the importance of teaching education to these really young people, and we get to do it on a daily basis, so I think we kind of take it for granted sometimes when you’re getting up, and every single day you’re going in there and teaching these kids, and you’re getting to see the impact in their lives. One of the things we noticed that Pastor McIntyre mentioned a minute ago was that most Christians in particular, and when I was growing up, this was always stressed, was salvation all the time. Salvation, salvation, pray the prayer.
Nobody was teaching the children specifically how to live. It was only if you’ve prayed the prayer, then you’re headed on your way to heaven. Pastor McIntyre, in these two interviews, he was asked by Rushdoony about deferred gratification and one of the topics they were talking about was a child, if they were going to get in trouble. They couldn’t say, “Well you’re going to get in trouble in a week from now.” Children need something to happen immediately. Children need to have very limited goals whenever you’re teaching them that good things are going to happen when you obey your mom right now.
Negative things, or punishments are going to happen right now if you’re not going to do a good job. For young children … As they get older of course, they can handle longer term things, and yes, the concept of hell is more of an ultimate goal, but for children they don’t really understand it so much. Whenever we’re discussing these subjects and talking to kids in particular at schools, we teach them the law. We teach them what they’re supposed to do. One thing I’ve seen at our schools in particular is we don’t look for a profession of faith.
Pastor McIntyre was mentioning this in the two podcasts that we listened to originally with Rushdoony. What we look for is we teach the children to look for a changed life. Are they growing in the power to keep the commandments? Now you can’t teach this to children, you can’t teach this to people unless they know what the commandments are. I remember talking to somebody recently and they were asking me, what the tenants of Christianity and faith were. There are a lot of catechisms out there about Jesus and who he is and all the rest, but one of the things that the catechisms universally miss is something that 1 John and James really cover and that is the necessity for necessary works to follow. In other words, how a person lives.
Think 1 John, John mentions that if a person says he is a Christian or believes in Jesus but walks in darkness, he is a liar. And James kind of puts it, “Faith without works is dead.” But what are these works? What does it mean to walk in the light? This is what we’re talking about. The standard is God’s law, teaching this to children. This is how they can have assurance of faith. When somebody says, “Well I asked Jesus into my heart,” you would say well okay you did that, but what is your assurance of salvation?
I think this is one of the important aspects of the blessings of the law, is that not only does it bring you to Christ because you learned as a child or as an adult that no, I don’t keep those. I need a savior. But then once a person has accomplished or believes that they have been saved or asks for forgiveness of their sins, how are they supposed to live now? Of course as Pastor McIntyre just mentioned a minute ago, is that you will have a blessed life if you’re walking in the commandments.
I think the story of Ruth is a great one. We pointed this out also during bible time at our school as well, is that this was a woman who Boaz came to. She was a stranger to him. She had come from Moab, where the people had come from. She had left her country. She had come back with Naomi and now she was taking care of Naomi. She had given up everything. She had told Naomi, “Your home will be my home. Your God will be my God.” She gave up everything and came to Israel where she had converted. Now here she was gleaning, here she was hardworking, here she was caring for this widow and Boaz acknowledged this and had high respect for her, but he had high respect not for something she said but what she did.
These blessings continued to follow her throughout her life. I think this is important for people to stress, which they kind of miss, is that if you want to be blessed, then you’re going to have to be a law-abiding person and that without the law you can’t know it. I think that we can kind of move forward into this, into another aspect that Rushdoony was talking about. I love the concept of the wild man. He had mentioned this about being on the Indian reservation and never heard an Indian child cry because they got instant gratification. Maybe Pastor McIntyre we can kind of flow this into this concept that people without the law, people that aren’t taught the law are then, we’re creating wild men. I’d like to develop this subject a little bit more and discuss it. What were your thoughts on that? You were part of the original conversation, but I’d like to flesh it out again, about the concept of what is a wild man?
Pastor McIntyre: Well, a wild man is a man that can’t control his emotions. A wild man is a man who can’t defer immediate gratification for a greater reward in the future. I can illustrate that from one of the teachers that I hired years ago who was a returned missionary. She was elderly, and she loved little children, and she came to us and asked for a position, which we gave to her, but what I discovered was, we explained as Reverend Walker just did that rewards have to be immediate. In other words, you can’t say to a child, “You’re going to have a grade six weeks from now.” Six weeks from now to a three, four year old child is an eternity away. So is the threat of going to hell. The child feels like he’s going to live forever, which is one of the reasons that young men make good soldiers. They don’t think death is going to happen to them immediately if they don’t follow directions.
But, this missionary that we hired, we gave her a bag of marshmallows. Marshmallows was going to be the immediate thing that she gave to a child which quoted the commandments correctly or did anything correctly, immediately on the spot. Said the commandments without error, did the Lord’s prayer without error, and on and on it goes. What I discovered was, and this is, should not be hard to believe for those people out there listening. She took the bag of marshmallows, even after I explained to her how to do it. Well, she went around and gave a marshmallow to every child, even after it had failed to do anything. To her, equality was law, which is a socialist idea, but not a Christian idea.
Christian ideas are reward goes to the obedient one. Loss of reward even to the one who’s disobedient. But after a lifetime on the missionary field, that concept had never come through to this missionary. There are some people listening to this podcast who are homeschoolers or teachers in a Christian school and you think more of equality than you do of the inequality of reward on the basis that good things happen if you obey and a curse happens if you don’t.
If you’re not teaching that, you’re not teaching the covenant. Go back to Deuteronomy, when the covenant was produced in Deuteronomy 28. The Lord is very, very clear that you’re going to have abundance if you obey me and you’re going to be cursed if you don’t. This is not taught in Christian schools somehow or other because they have gone overboard with this God is love idea. Therefore God is love idea has to be expressed in equality, regardless of how you live. Well the bible emphatically doesn’t teach that kind of nonsense.
The rewards go to those who obey and curses go to those who do not. We’re going to stand all of us very soon, sooner than you think, at the judgment seat of God and the one who’s earned 10 times more than the one who took his one talent and buried it in the ground. The person who a vague well, that the Lord says, “Take this from this coward over here who buried his talent in the ground and give it to him that has 10.” Now that’s very unequal and that thing is emphatically taught over and over again in the bible.
I’ve heard sermons, even in the Presbyterian church of my youth, be sure your sin will find you out. There’s a famous painting which shows wolves going to devour somebody and the idea is that your sin is going to find you out. The congruent thing that goes with it is your obedience will find you out also. Your good deeds will find you out also and good is defined by a deed which is done according to the law and a bad is a deed that’s done against the law.
I would point out to you my missionary, by giving out the same reward equally to everybody was not a good biblical idea. As a result, she was teaching the youngsters to be future socialists, not to be successful capitalists, who would run their business to make a greater reward than the competitors. So it is that this unequal gospel is the gospel and this idea of equality is socialist and not biblical.
Our society is so saturated with this and we evangelical Christians have jumped onboard helping the socialists because we have told them the law’s been done away with. Well it has as far as asking the Lord for salvation. The Lord is going to grant salvation on the basis of faith without works, but after you have been saved, you’re going to be rewarded on the basis of works. You’re going to be judged by works at the judgment seat of God. You are not going to be based on saved or not saved. You’re already saved or you wouldn’t be at the judgment seat of God.
The Lord there is going to hand out rewards unequally. It’s very important that we teach these youngsters as young as possible how to be successful at the judgment seat of God and how to be successful right now. Therefore, we told the missionary that when the youngster does what he is told, and does it perfectly, like reciting the Lord’s prayer or reciting the Ten Commandments, you give him a marshmallow. You give him a reward. You give him a prize. You give him recognition, and you do it immediately. That is so that the youngster is not in this idea that off in eternity somewhere something’s in jeopardy.
Things are in jeopardy right now. You go to work for your employer and if you do the work that the employer wants you do correctly, you do it without being told over and over again how to do it. You apply yourself, that you’ll one day end up owning a business. You’ll one day end up giving employment to other people. This makes one country superior to all others. The United States of America was founded by Puritans who emphatically taught not equality but inequality on the basis of God’s law.
What Reverend Slack said is very, very important. What Reverend Walker said is very, very important, but the youngsters have to be taught this, and it has to be taught in the name of love. It’s not love to teach children that they’re going to be rewarded no matter what they do. No matter what they do, all is going to be forgiven. No matter what they do with the rewards, rewards are always going to be equal. That’s not love. That’s hate. That is what is wrong with the public school and that’s what’s wrong with most evangelical schools as well. Thank you very much Walker. I appreciate that.
Jeremy Walker: Well we see these things all the time in our school because we work with children and we’re working with children prior to the age of adolescence and all the rest, so we’re seeing human nature at the very beginning. People, you can turn into your TV, you can turn on the news, and you see how people are reacting, rioting in the streets, all the different things you see nowadays, but you can trace that back to and see it in children as well.
We’re talking about this concept of the wild men. Somebody asked me one time, they asked me if they were a good parent. One of the parents did. I told them, I said, “Well, if someone is going to, if I was going to define what it meant to be a good parent or a bad parent,” I said, “Really the only reason you have to worry about being a bad parent is if you do one of two things, or maybe both.” I said, “One of the things that you have to avoid doing as a parent, that would create, make you a bad parent was if you were going to reward bad behavior. If you reward bad behavior, you’re going to create a wild man.”
Then of course, going along with that, was if you punish good behavior. Now that sounds a little strange that someone would punish good behavior, but here’s a good example of what I’m talking about. Working in the schools, we like to put these things into practice, illustrations for people, and I think I’ll ask Reverend Slack to give us one, some examples of maybe what he has seen in the schools as well.
A couple examples of what I’m talking about for here, as far as what wild men look like, I’ll give you a couple illustrations. One was a child who, at bible time, we passed out a bible leader badge so one child in the classroom receives a badge for doing the best job, at the end of bible. Only one child. It’s a very special badge, very special reward, but there’s this one child in particular. He comes to mind because every time we have bible, and we’re getting ready to pass out the badge. We’re getting all the badges out, getting ready to pass them out.
What will happen next is that the child will put his hands up and begin to scream at me, yelling at me, that he wants the badge, wants the badge. Starts crying, very incessantly, super loud because he wants the badge and he wants me to give it to him. Because why? He’s screaming. I can only assume that at some point in time, somebody gave him the impression that by screaming, by yelling, by throwing a fit, he’s going to get what he wants. Of course, I had to stop what I was doing because of course other children were seeing the same thing, plus it is a opportunity to teach the child something.
I stopped what I was doing. The child was about two and a half years old, and I stopped and looked at him. I said, “Do you want a badge?” The child kind of nods at me. They understood me completely. I said, “Well okay, what you have to do is you can’t get something by yelling at me, by screaming at me, by demanding it. You actually have to have good behavior. You have to sit there. You have to listen.” I said do that and then we can try to get you a badge.
The child immediately stopped what they were doing, stopped screaming at me, stopped yelling at me, sat down, folded their hands, did the things I was asking them to do, but if I had given them a reward for this … Most likely their parents had then this is how you create a wild man. Giving in to these types of demands.
Pastor McIntyre: Amen. Excellent. Excellent.
Jeremy Walker: We talked about the other subject is the fact of punishing somebody. Punishing somebody for good behavior. Using once again the same analogy, because we use bible badges, rewards for bible time, and it’s very special. The child that gets this badge, feels very special when they get it. No one else got it. Only they got it. I remember one person had two children in our school. They were twins. The one child had gotten this bible leader badge, and the other child had not.
Well this parent, on the way out of the school, the other child, seeing that their sibling had this reward, I believe it was a lollipop at the time, they began to throw a fit for the parent. Screaming at the parent. Upset, all the rest. What happened was, to calm the other child down, they took the badge from the child who had earned it and gave it to the child who was screaming, throwing themselves on the floor and upset.
Immediately this parent is doing the two things which I’m just describing here, that you should not do in order to not create a wild man. She was punishing the one who had done good deeds to get the reward, this lollipop and was rewarding the bad behavior by throwing a fit because the parent just wanted it to stop. Then of course you can guess what happened. The child who had done a good job became indignant, of course.
Pastor McIntyre: I think that would be called taxing the rich.
Jeremy Walker: Yes it would, to put it in political, very realistic terms. This is exactly the problem we have, not just in the preschool field, but like you said, in the world in general. Punishing the good and rewarding the bad. This is why the world has so many problems. We are a lawless people. I’m curious Reverend Slack. Maybe you can share a story that you have, maybe in the back of your mind of something along these lines because we like to kind of give illustrations for these types of subjects, not just to give the theological concepts.
Aaron Slack: Sure. In our offices at our locations, we typically sell snacks or drinks for the parents to purchase on the way home. It’s very common for parents to buy their children snacks on the way home, or occasionally to reward good behavior if they had a good day at school, this kind of thing. Many of our families of course have more than one children. It’s not uncommon for parents to come in and ask me or my wife Amy if the children had a good day, so that they might reward them by purchasing the snack.
I remember one time where it was a boy and a girl, brother and sister and the sister had had a very good day. The parents asked us how the children’s behavior was for the day, and this one girl had had no problems, no trips to the office, no times out, no reports that had to be sent home about behavior. However the brother had had a couple trips to the office. There was a behavior report for the mom to sign. She signed the report. We explained what the behavior issue was for the day.
Then when they both came up to the office to go home, the mom decided for whatever reason to reward both of them by purchasing a snack for each children, even though one had had a very good day, had kept the commandments, and the other had not. When you do this kind of thing, much like Jeremy just mentioned, it’s essentially punishing the child who had kept the commandments, who had had good behavior. You’re teaching the children that behavior doesn’t really matter. Keeping the commandments doesn’t really matter. This equality thing that, there’s no incentive for good behavior if everyone is going to be treated equally, everyone is going to be rewarded regardless of behavior.
This again will create this wild man, this person who doesn’t think that rewards, either here and now or in the future are tied to the keeping of the commandments. There’s no reason, no incentive that they can see to keep the commandments, to have good behavior, if they’re all going to get a reward, regardless of that behavior. You have again, essentially you’re punishing the child for the good behavior because their sibling did not have a good day and still got rewarded for it.
Jeremy Walker: Well this is what we would consider to be humanism 101, right here, is where there is no law, and this concept of socialism and everybody’s equal, despite their behavior.
Pastor McIntyre: Excellent Reverend Walker. That’s exactly what it is.
Jeremy Walker: Well see this conversation that Rushdoony had on these Easy Chair tapes continued on from the wild man and what I like, one of my favorite sayings Rushdoony had which I think was in Institutes of Biblical Law, he said that, “The disciplined mind works the best.” When we talk about children at school and if you listen to the Easy Chair tapes, you’ll learn a little bit more how we run schools. We’re a very structured school where the children are, they’re taught to self-control basically.
These children that are these wild men, these ones that are not taught to restrain themselves, to bind their desires, or their actions by considering if they’re lawful or unlawful, creates a very undisciplined child, this wild man we’re talking about, where they are completely self-centered. They can’t focus on anybody else and in fact they’re self-destructive, which we’re going to move this into now, in just a second.
We’re going to take a break and we’re going to catch back up with the agents of destruction which is where this all leads. Whenever you fail to teach the law, whenever you fail to teach rewards and punishments and whenever children then, or adults are these ego-centric wild men, they become self-destructive of themselves and suicidal. We’re going to take a break and we’ll be right back and we’ll continue this discussion of the agents of destruction, so we’ll be right back.
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Jeremy Walker: Now we’re going to continue our discussion here on this fourth episode of Easy Chair in Practice. We have been discussing the blessings of the law a little bit. I think we’ve touched on that pretty good and the importance of it. We’re also going to now discuss in this second segment here agents of destruction and what happens to people, what do they do whenever they are not taught the law and they become this undisciplined wild man we were discussing.
One thing I’d like to point out before we move on is the implications that this concept has not rewarding the disobedience or the lawless people. That would be for those who are having children and they are thinking on the future for inheritance and this concept we were discussing here about rewarding everyone equally. It has been a very normal concept, a humanistic concept that everyone should get an equal share in someone’s inheritance.
Rushdoony did a wonderful job, I believe it was in Institutes of Biblical Law and if the listener is interested they can look that up in his book, but he touched on this subject of inheritance very well. If I’m not mistaken paraphrasing, he said that we are not to capitalize the future of the future humanists, those that will be against God’s law. In other words, you are going to help people break God’s law. It’s very important for those people that have the, maybe they’re thinking about how should they disseminate their inheritance, should they have one and they have children. This is an important concept also to think about.
I would definitely encourage somebody to go back and read on that and it’s a very important subject. We are only supposed to capitalize those who are going to be obedient to the commandments and promote the commandments and God’s law.
Moving on here, to the agents of destruction, I’d like to delve into this a little bit more because whenever a person is a wild man, as Rushdoony mentioned in these Easy Chair tapes. They’re undisciplined. They can’t think of anyone but themselves. Everything is about me and they’re uncaring about the world around them and other people. They become self-destructive, suicidal.
When people think of suicide, they think of hanging themselves, putting a gun to their head. There have been many times where we’ve actually had a parent in our school actually. She was cleaner. She worked for a cleaning company, but she wasn’t cleaning windows. She was a crime scene cleaner actually. She had told me stories of her job. Two times she told me stories, one of them, we’re talking about suicide. One of the situations was a situation where it was a boyfriend/girlfriend, they weren’t married. Had a child. They had a fight. They were angry and the man was very angry at her, so he was going to end his life.
It wasn’t enough just to end his life. He climbed into the bath tub. He had taken a knife, slit his throat. Sorry. Not his throat. He slit his wrists in the bathtub, and before he died, he took his index finger and wrote on the walls, “It’s your fault.” Now was in the home that the two shared. Of course the girlfriend was the one who came and found him in the tub. His suicide wasn’t even about just ending his own life. His last, his last action on the earth was to try to punish this woman, to try to say this was her fault for killing him. Somehow she did it.
Another situation was where a father who was a very overly controlling man, was angry when his adult daughter was going off to go shopping in Miami. She had taken her kids with her. He didn’t want her to go. He was a very abusive man. What he did was he went to her home, and while she was gone, he sat in her chair and he took pills to overdose himself in the chair while she was gone, knowing that when she came home, and when the children came home, the first thing that they would find was his dead body in the living room, in the chair and he left himself there for them to find.
His last act of course was suicide, self-destructive suicide, but also to inflict harm upon others. This is the type of thing we’re talking about here, not just the suicide in general or somebody actually takes their life, but even these people, their purpose behind what they’re doing is to harm others in one way or another.
I think, Pastor McIntyre, if we can go into this, let’s go into the subject of self-destructiveness and how this plays out, not just in the taking of one’s life, but how it plays out in, as a person lives and becomes self-destructive to themselves and others.
Pastor McIntyre: Well the leading cause of death of young people, that is up to the age of 25 is suicide. Talk to any policeman, and he’ll tell you that many, many times the suicidal teenager will run into a bridge abutment or do something in which the conclusion you can come to is it was suicide but it will not be counted as suicide out of compassion. They’ll say it was an accident, but if you take all of these accidents and you add them together to the purposeful suicides that you’re talking about, the leading cause of death of people under the age of 25 is suicide.
It’s a natural consequence of never teaching the child the law, never teaching the child that God is going to reward those who obey and curse those who do not. These young people have destroyed themselves and somehow or other it is a strike not only at their loved ones but it’s also a strike at God. Somehow that God is responsible because God hasn’t rewarded them as they were taught they should be rewarded by people who give equally to everybody regardless of their actions and somehow think that’s a good deed. It’s not a good deed. It’s a hateful thing to do.
You’re going to teach the child that God is a monster who has to reward everybody equally. Well God does not have to do anything. God has to reward people on the basis of his sovereign will, not on the basis of our wishes. He rewards people on the basis of his covenant. He rewards them unequally. As the parable of talents at the judgment seat of God teaches, one had 10+ and other had little. Now we’re not talking about people that are lost here. They’re not at the judgment seat of God if they weren’t saved already.
Getting to the judgment seat of God and getting an unequal reward, that is something because that verse, it ends up there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Now gentlemen, as Christian teachers, we don’t want to have people foaming at the mouth and gnashing their teeth because you didn’t teach me that this was a consequence. We want our students, we want our children to end up at the judgment seat of God and find that they are rewarded for what they did well and they’re going to suffer for what they did not do well. But there’s not going to be the hate spilled out against a loved one, like the one who’s in the bathtub that you talked about. It’s your fault, or it’s going to be, on and on it goes.
Actually I suppose the missionary who I spoke about who gave marshmallows on an equal basis for no deeds at all, he probably won’t be foaming his mouth out at her, but he should. Because in a way what she did was more hateful, far more hateful than someone coming along and abusing them as such. We have a lot of nonsense about child abuse in our school system and our humanistic school system. State inspectors and child protective agencies and so forth feel that any discipline is an act of hate.
I could take you into Christian schools in which the teacher would agree. Any kind of correction in their dictionary of what world they’re doing, and it’s not the bible they’re following, is abuse of the child. That is how to raise a wild man as you say Reverend Walker. That indeed is how you raise a person who expects life to treat them very generously, just because they said they believe in Jesus without any works to back it up.
Well the back up of the works has to be that if you have asked Jesus into your heart, and it’s genuine, Jesus’s going to change your heart. Jesus is going to clean your heart and you’re going to want to obey God’s law. But if you do not want to obey God’s law or you have perverted somehow or your teachers have, into thinking that that’s not necessary, you’re going to end up weeping and gnashing your teeth at the judgment seat of God, where it’s horrible to contemplate but many, many times those who think they’re Christian teachers with the best of motives, are going to raise wild people.
Again, the way to raise a wild person, as Rushdoony pointed out, the way the Indians were raised wild, was that you never heard an Indian child cry. Well I had the same experience in Korea as a soldier. I can remember the women would come up to the fence of the compound and we would hand through the fence our clothing, because we found that for a couple cartons of cigarettes, they would wash all of our clothes for a month. We of course, got a deal that’s too hard to pass up. But they would come up to the fence and the Korean mothers don’t have carriages to wheel their kids around and so forth. They carry them on their back, and they wrap their cloaks around them and so forth and the child is on their back.
I have seen many times that the child would urinate down their back, and there would be absolutely no, nothing said. Matter of fact a little teeter or laughter and so forth. There was no punishment involved. The older kids would come up, and I’ve actually seen the older kids kick your mother when they got angry. Again, no discipline was put forth at all. The idea again being if you want to raise a child that’s going to grow up to be a wild person, no discipline, no direction, no anger. Everything absolutely equal.
I’m sure that there’s some people listening to this would somehow agree, that you shouldn’t lose your temper ever, ever with your child. You shouldn’t give that child direction, ever, ever. That’s being a good mother. Well they’re going to find out at the judgment seat of God they are not a good mother. They have taught that child to be a wild person who believes that anything is supposed to come without any standards of conduct whatsoever. God’s law, God’s law sets forth emphatically the standard of conduct.
Even John 3:16 which is quoted so often by these love bugs, “For God so loved the world, he gave his only begotten son that those should have everlasting life.” Now it doesn’t say all of them are going to have everlasting life. It’s going to say those who believe. The attribute of a person who believes is he obeys God. The one who obeys God is going to have everlasting life. Now your child was born with temporal life, but everlasting life is only to be given to those who believe in Christ. Therefore they have to be taught what it is to believe in Christ is to obey him, emphatically so.
Even at John 3:16, there’s unequal reward. Those who believe are going to be rewarded. Those who are not going to be believers are not rewarded. As survival goes on and on, the third epistle of John says, “For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments and his commandments are not grievous.” Now that’s very emphatic definition, almost like a math calculation. This is love of God, that we keep his commandments and his commandments are not grievous. You can’t even break from God’s law. You have to effect God’s law and love it because that is what he has for you.
The bible teaches in all things give thanks for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you. Things that even seem terrible in this life when they happen to us, we’re supposed to give thanks in everything because these are directions from God for our good. He loves us, so therefore, a punishment came, a loss came, something terrible on the surface but the thing was given to us because God was correcting us. The correction is something that you should thank God for.
It’s thank God for all things, good things, bad things, everything that happens, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you. It’s individual treatment, individual treatment from God so that you can have a greater reward at the judgment seat and a greater goodness comes to you in this life and at the judgment seat if you give thanks for God in all things. God, the Holy Spirit is teaching us, we are given by God the Father to God the Son for salvation, to be taught by the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is teaching us in everything that happens to us in our life, and it’s preserving us as you’ve so efficiently and brilliantly pointed out, Reverend Walker.
You don’t want to raise a wild man. You want to raise a Christian. A Christian is an obedient person who sees that God controls everything, everything in our lives for our good, for all things work together for good, to those who are called according to his purpose. That has to be taught, but to just emphasize the sinner’s prayer and none of the directions from the Lord is to hamper the Holy Spirit to where he cannot teach them because they’re blind to God’s law.
Jeremy Walker: And rightly so. Rightly so. Go ahead.
Aaron Slack: Well the world, the real world, operates according to God’s law so whenever you do not reinforce good behavior with rewards and bad behavior with negative consequences, you’re creating a wild man, but you’re also preparing a child for life in a world which does not exist. You’re preparing them for to live in a fantasy world. It’s a very unnatural environment. Just as soon as they step out of the home and into a world where God’s law is in effect and bad things happen when you break the commandments, there are penalties for bad behavior, again they react with this sort of anger, this self-destructiveness towards others because their entire lives they’ve been prepared to live in a fantasy world and not the real world.
Jeremy Walker: Exactly. When we’re talking here about the wild man, I like to use illustrations because it takes it out of the ether and the concept of wild man and puts it right down where you can see it. Children in particular see this very well and for me, the self-destructive nature we’re talking about, destroying everything around them, one aspect of the wild man you can see these especially when you’re talking with young children. We see preschool students and these children come in and because they have no self-control themselves, they can’t control themselves. They’re just kind of creatures of desire. Whatever they want to do, they do it immediately. Instant gratification.
That also goes into destruction, where in the preschool setting you’ll see them, instead of looking at the books, they’ll rip the books up and stomp on them and destroy them. They’ll go over and take a crayon. Instead of coloring on the table, they’ll sit there and color all over the table and the floor and they’ll throw the crayon at their friends. You see all these types of things. One story in particular that I think is apropos to here, which we cover under the fifth commandment to honor your father and mother, to listen to people in charge of you.
This is actually one of my children. They had gotten in trouble at school and they had a time out. They came into the office where mom and dad were at. We were there in the office, and they were sitting in a chair next to us, and he kept trying to, as children do, take their shirt and put their feet in their shirt and their arms inside their shirt. We kept telling them stop doing that. Keep your legs out of your shirt, put your arms out of your sleeves. You’re going to fall. You’re going to fall out of your chair.
We told it to him twice, and he kept doing it, and the third time we were talking to parents in the office, and he was sitting in the chair right next to us, and didn’t listen. He decided to put his legs into his shirt and his arms inside of his shirt and you can guess what happened next. He lost his balance, but he had no legs to catch himself because they were stuck in his shirt. He had no arms to steady himself because they were stuck inside of the shirt. Next thing we here is the thunk. He had fallen flat onto the floor and bumped his head on the floor of course.
Now we had, obviously checked to make sure he was okay. He was perfectly fine, not even a mark on his head, but the point was that he hadn’t listened. He hadn’t self-controlled himself to obey the commandments, and of course we reiterated that at the time, telling him that you should listen to your parents. You’re going to hurt yourself if you don’t. This is part of the self-destructive nature that we’re talking about. I like to … Go ahead.
Pastor McIntyre: One thing I’d like to add to make this subject that we’re talking about as of today. Zuckerberg, the founder of …
Jeremy Walker: Facebook.
Pastor McIntyre: The Facebook. Zuckerberg came into a vast fortune. He’s one of the richest men in the world on the basis of Facebook. He recently went back, I think it was to Harvard or to some structure where he graduated from, and he projected that what the best thing we could do in America was give everybody a guaranteed minimum income. They have an economist who’s come up with the idea that somehow that we would guarantee everybody $13,000 a year as a base income.
Now of course they can earn more than that, but with $13,000 income, you could not be poor. In other words, we’re going to wipe out poverty. In other words we’re going to wipe out the consequences of being poor, which is nonsense. But nonsense, it’s only thought to be good by some academic guy who wants to make a name for himself or Zuckerberg whose wealth was all handed to him, with nothing but, well you might as well say it was just flat luck, as such. He probably believes in luck.
As a consequence, he is a man with no character. He’s going to produce a country in which everybody will be without character if we start giving them all rewards for just being as such. We cannot reward people on the base of citizenship, and we cannot reward people on the basis of blood. There’s giving an equal inheritance to all of your children just because they’re all of your blood is to teach them it doesn’t matter how you live, particularly if you’re a rich man, and he knows that all of them are going to have millions of dollars as an inheritance when they die, why work? Why develop any character? Why develop anything because everything is going to come to you and be given to you on an equal basis. This will destroy our country.
If Zuckerberg and these stupid academics have a way about it, they would think that they would do away with the poor, but the Lord assured us, the poor ye have always with you. The idea somehow that we’re going to be able to take all the money that’s made by the rich people and give it to the poor people and wipe out poverty, has never, every worked. Zuckerberg in his stupidity, which I think you can only earn at Harvard, would come up with a stupid idea like that.
It was presented on a business channel that I was listening too as though somehow this was something worthy of consideration, which just goes along with what we’re talking about gentlemen, that God’s law has to be taught because anybody that knows God’s law know the bible would recognize instantly that that’s a bad, bad idea which has been bad ever since the beginning of time. Sorry for interrupting. I just wanted to make an illustration.
Jeremy Walker: I thought it was a great point. I think it rolls us right into what we’re talking about, agents of destruction. I’d like to read just a couple passages here from Psalms. People love the psalms. People like to sing the psalms, but I really wonder if they actually read the psalms and understand them, because along with this concept of agents of destruction, Psalms 1.
In fact, it’s probably the most common one. I think I had to learn, memorized it later on when I was a young boy in school, but Psalms 1, “Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the Lord and in his law doth he meditate day and night. And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water that bringeth forth his fruit in his season. His leaf also shall not wither and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.”
Now I think this is a wonderful tie in to what we’re talking about because here God says the man that does not follow ungodly advice, this is talking about humanism, socialism, equality, all the things we’re talking about here. The one that does not follow God’s law instead, he delights in it. It’s not grievous as Pastor McIntyre means to him. It’s something he wants to do and not only that, it’s something he meditates on, something he focuses on daily. This is something he wants to do on a daily basis and also to teach.
Those people that are parents, those people that are school teachers, those people that are pastors or otherwise, this is something that they’re called to do, is not only to delight in the law, but to teach it. What’s going to be the outcome of a person who lives a godly life? Everything that they do prospers. The opposite as Pastor McIntyre was also mentioning earlier is also true. Those that do not delight in the law, those that despise it, those that take the ungodly advice and those that do not remotely consider God’s law or obey it, instead of prospering, they’re going to be a destroyer of themselves. Everything they touch will not prosper. Everything they touch will be destroyed. It will wither.
In other words, poverty will come to those people who despise the law. I think this can’t be overstated enough. This is why, for us, when we’re talking Christian reconstruction, and I love the fact that Rushdoony in these tapes praised the ministry we have so much to these young children, and I’d like to just end our episode here on Easy Chair in Practice discussing that, just in brief about what we do here because I get a kick out of it. I’m not sure if any of you guys notice this, but in one of the episodes that we listen to, Pastor McIntyre, you’re talking about the set up, the organization, how the family runs the business and how the children participate in that.
You’re mentioning your daughter, Abigail, which is my wife. You were talking about how when she was, I think nine years old, only in third grade, she had started in the family business, helping out and she had an aptitude for accounting. You praised her for accounting abilities and at the time of the recordings, she was only 19. I would have only been 15 at the time. That’s why I get a kick out of it.
You mention the fact that hoping that one day, whenever she married a young man, she would run a school as well with her husband, and here we are. I’m listening to this tape and I’m getting quite a kick out of it because I’m that person you were talking about. It’s really quite interesting to me, but I’d like to discuss, Aaron wrote his book, Full Reward, and Dr. McIntyre wrote his book also about schools, and so what I would like to touch on real quick as we end, have both of you, because you have both written ostensibly on our subject here, just in brief, give us the benefits of what we do to yourself, to your children and of course to the community as a whole and how that might tie into Christian reconstruction. Let’s tie up this episode with finishing up with this. Reverend Slack, go ahead and give us your thoughts on this subject.
Aaron Slack: Well you have to start with the basics in any subject. There’s no topic as far as education and as far as living your life in general than God’s law. It’s what rules everything. If you can give children, and the younger the better, as we’ve discussed in previous episodes about the benefits of teaching children at the young age, the younger that you can teach them God’s law, the more benefits that they’re going to accrue in their lives and at the judgment seat. To earn a full reward, you can’t do that unless you keep God’s law.
That’s a parent’s most fundamental job, is to teach your children God’s law, the rules that the universe operates according to, how they’re going to live a happy, successful life, what they have to do to avoid punishment, avoid judgment, breaking God’s covenant and as surrogate parents in the Christian schools that we operate, that is also our primary task as caregivers, as teachers, as educators, is to teach children God’s law so that they might live a life, earn as much reward as possible, avoid judgment as much as possible.
If you’re going to reform society, if you’re going to build strong families, if you’re going to make changes in our world, you have to start there. You have to start with God’s law, and that means teaching the commandments. The commandments with illustrations like we do twice a day. Everyday at bible time in Grace Community school, and then with our families, and then living those commandments out before the children. There’s nothing that you can do that makes a bigger impact than that.
Jeremy Walker: Pastor McIntyre, why don’t you give us, as you’re closing up here, maybe some, the benefits of what you think is important about the ministries you’ve started and are continuing to operate?
Pastor McIntyre: I began Christian education after I graduated in 1971 with an education degree. My first assignment was a church institution. I found that the church institution was not really a Christian school as such. It was a public school reproduced in a so-called Christian setting under a Christian church in which the only thing taught was easy believism, salvation by saying the Sinner’s Prayer, and there was no application to God’s law. There was no application to what went on.
I found because I had a system of theology in my mind that was reformed, that was like RJ Rushdoony’s Christian reconstruction, that they wouldn’t let me teach bible because they wanted me to teach God is love. Of course I, believe that with all my heart, but I also wanted to teach, beware, your sin will find you out. But they did not want me to teach the fear of God. It was simply the love of God with no fear.
Now fear at one time was the chief thing of the Puritan faith. You can even call a God-fearing man. A God-fearing man is a man who’s afraid to break God’s law. Because his joy, if he matures in the faith, is keeping that law. As I quoted before in the 3 John chapter 1, “For this is the love of God, that you keep his commandments and his commandments are not grievous.”
What I found was that the principal of the school and the pastor said, “No, I’m afraid you’re so far adrift of what we’re teaching that you’re going to have to not teach that. Why don’t you just teach history instead?” They had great respect for my scholarship and great respect for my teaching ability. So I said, “Sure. I’ll be glad to teach you history.” However when I started teaching about Martin Luther, and the catechism and on and on it goes, why they decided I couldn’t teach history either.
I lasted three years at that place. However, it’s interesting to point out that when I left that school, they lost 144 out of 600 students, not because of something that I said or did. I was very loyal up to the end of it, but what had happened is that what I had taught had so penetrated the families, with their children bringing home the doctrine and so forth, that they quit that Christian school.
Sad to say because the Christian school even teaching nothing but salvation is superior to a public school. No question about it, but this they brought about on themselves. I went to the next Christian school. I won’t mention … I did three Christian schools before I founded this one, but I went to this Christian school and here they, I told them what had happened previously in the previous school I went, that they wouldn’t put up with teaching the fear of God, and they said, “Oh, no, no. You can teach that here. We’re fundamentalists.” And on and on it went, so good.
I went ahead to teach it. I happened to be reading this week a great book, The Book that Made Your World by Vishal Mangalwadi and in it he talked about Wesley. He talked about Whitfield, and he talked about them, and they began their open air preaching. They said it was met with great opposition. He said, why they actually burned down some of the houses of the people that were ordained and so forth and sent out by Whitfield and Wesley. Wesley for example was so hurled missiles out, where he would bleed at the head and he would have to wipe the blood off his head to continue to preach.
Wild bulls were turned loose to stomp through the audiences in the open door to stop them from hearing. Now the description of Whitfield in particular, what he taught in America was he assured his hearers that they were of no more value than a worm, if they just didn’t follow God’s law. They were nothing better than an animal. This, I’m quoting Benjamin Franklin almost word for word.
The thing is if you’re a sinner and you’re not following God’s word, you’re living at the level of an animal. You are not living at the level of a child of God. Well, I know what some of the listeners of this are thinking. Well they don’t burn down your house do they? I say, yes they tried to. High school students from that school actually went outside of my house and lit a bonfire to burn down the house. As they were running away, one of them had a change of heart, and called the fire department, and the fire department came banging on my door, to say my house was in danger of being burned down.
Now that’s incredible. No it’s not incredible. Human nature hasn’t changed a bit from the days of Wesley and Whitfield. Yes if you go out and teach what we’ve been talking about, you will end up being hated, and you will end up being hated by people who call themselves Christians in particular. We should not expect that what we’re talking about is something that doesn’t apply to you personally. It applies to you personally. It applies to your church. It applies to everybody out there that’s going around thinking that there isn’t any way, anything to do other than to make a profession of faith and then go on with your sinful life as it was previously.
Without a changed life, you are not really a Christian and if you make it to the judgment seat, you’re not going to have a full reward. You may have what little you earned given to a person that’s far, far richer than you. That’s exactly what the bible teaches. Sometimes I wonder if people read their bible at all. But thank you Reverend Walker. I appreciate what you had to say.
Jeremy Walker: So if you have interest in what we’re discussing, specifically about getting into Christian education, we have a apprenticeship program which is involved in that. If you would like more information on that, you can go to the website. It is gcsapprenticeship.com. Lots of information on there. You can find about what we are hoping to do, hoping to inspire other people to get involved in reforming education and specifically in teaching God’s law to mold the next generation of people.
If you want more episodes of the Easy Chair in Practice, or would like to find this one, you can go to gcsapprenticeship.com/theeasychairinpractice. You can find every episode on our website there. You can also find us on Facebook. Go on Facebook and look us up, GCS Apprenticeship Program. Just put that in the search bar. You should be able to find us there. Also you can find The Easy Chair in Practice on Facebook as well, where we post these episodes and more. You can find us on there if you go to the search bar in Facebook. Just type in The Easy Chair in Practice. It should bring us up as well.
I’m hoping that the listeners have been edified by what we have said here today, giving you something to think about and in particular the importance of Christian education and the importance of Christian reconstruction in this area. Thank you for listening and we look forward to talking to you more next month. God bless.
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