24 August 2023
What is it that we should be teaching children that church schools miss? They should be taught a timeless, otherworldly viewpoint of mysticism and faith. The greatest gift you can give anyone is to set them free from worldly concerns, and that includes children.
Children are perfectly suited to this. Everyone recognizes how readily children believe fairytales. What if we taught them the truth about the spiritual realm? What if we taught them to see with their hearts? Children can learn a covenant lifestyle.
The best place to learn that is in the home. Given that not every parent is equipped to teach their children, this reminds us why we need churches that act like small tribes. Your covenant community will always include someone apt to teach; that's God's promise. If your church is built right, on the Covenant foundation, it will have people ready to teach the children.
I'll grant that not everyone born into your household will necessarily be Elect. I've had at least one sibling who never seemed to exhibit anything that would indicate it. But if we had all been raised under the family assumptions of a Covenant with God, it would have changed the outcomes in some ways. That sibling, 15 years younger than me, has been dead for several years, having destroyed his own health in a search for something that didn't exist. His private church school education did him little good. It did not equip him with the basic assumption that there was a spiritual realm.
Instead, it taught him materialism and legalism. That's the nature of most church education. In this case, it was a solid libertarian politically oriented American idolatry. Such were the assumptions he absorbed, and they resurfaced strongly in adulthood. Not that he was patriotic, but that he was materialistic and rational.
I spent some time working in the American secular education system. It was relentlessly materialistic and rational, at best. Now it has become pagan and mythological. If you destroy the spiritual awareness for which humans are designed, then there will be a reaction demanding some kind of imaginary magical nonsense to fill the spiritual void.
How many times have you read or heard church leadership condemning mysticism and contemplative faith? They insist as a religious doctrine that everything must be rational, that faith must be reasonable. It closes to door on church folks getting to know the realm God calls "home".
The spookified spirituality of western cultural Christianity is precisely what the Pharisees believed during Jesus' time. The impact of Hellenism on Postexilic Hebrew culture was not the loss of belief in the eternal realm, but the loss of connection to it. Hellenism killed the heart-bound awareness, forcing the consciousness back down into the intellect. So, while Jews still believed as a matter of doctrine that there were angels and such, they completely lost their native connection to that unseen realm.
To walk in the Covenant is a naked advocacy of mysticism. Not just any mysticism, but that of the Bible. The Scripture is an Ancient Near Eastern mystical document promoting a mystical religion. But it happens to be the only true source of knowing God and understanding His Creation.
If you don't have a mystical orientation, you aren't following Christ.
Comments
DarkMirror
Sometimes it feels I'm the only one in my household, both current and former households, who are with the program.
Catacomb Resident
Just having my wife onboard makes a massive difference. I can't count how many times I've tasted the sorrow of others at being so very alone. This is a major element in how we think and talk about following Christ.
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