Right, it's Ephesians chapter 6, and as you know from your bulletins, we're going to look at these, well, it's going to be verse 4,
we're going to look at the first few verses. So Ephesians 6 from the beginning from verse 1 again,
just want to see those first four verse again where it says this.
Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.
Honour thy father and mother, which is the first commandment with promise, that it may be well with thee, that thou and thou mayest live long on the earth.
And ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath, but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
And the title this morning of my sermon is The Importance of Home Education.
The Importance of Home Education.
I'd like to pray before we get down with the message.
Father, thank you for your word. Thank you, Lord, for the children, Lord, for, you know, the blessing of children.
Lord, help us all here that have children, those maybe that go on to have children in the future.
And just to appreciate, you know, that they're in heritage of yours, Lord, and that we want to do the best we can by them.
And Lord, help us to just appreciate that, to want to hear with open ears and an open heart today,
to the message that I've been thinking about now for a little while with recent events going on as well.
Lord, help me to preach this message clearly, accurately and boldly in front of your spirit.
In Jesus' name, pray. Amen.
So the importance of home education.
Now, if you're unaware, there is an attack by our government, our current government,
especially on the right to educate your own child.
So I don't know if everyone's aware of this.
I'm sure most of the parents are probably at least at least part aware of this.
So the following is from the Education Hub blog on GOV UK, the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill,
which is being passed through Parliament right now.
It says this, if you already home educate your child or are thinking about it,
there will be some important changes in the bill.
Parents know their children best, and it is right that...
And I'm going to highlight some of these things, because when you read this stuff,
you could easily skim read it, but it's always hidden in plain sight in this stuff, okay?
So let me just highlight things like this.
It is right that they have a say, talking about parents, okay?
So apparently, parents know their children best, it is right that they have a say.
Only a say, right? Yeah?
That they have a say in the best education for their child, including home education.
But whilst many home educators do a good job, this is not the case for all.
It is vital all home education is suitable and safe, according to who?
According to the all-wise government, it seems, and that no child falls through the cracks.
That's according to the state.
That's why we are introducing compulsory children not in schools,
registers in every local authority in England.
So local authorities can identify all children not in school in their area,
and ensure that all children are receiving a suitable education.
Translation, we want to force children to be educated how we deem is suitable,
whether a parent agrees or not.
Next paragraph.
Parents will no longer have an automatic right to home educate.
If their child is subject to a child protection investigation.
Not they being shown that they're unable.
No, just the investigation.
You investigate a child, they no longer have the right to home educate.
They go straight to school.
Just the investigation started, okay?
If they're subject to a child protection investigation or under a child protection plan,
for all children, if a local authority deem, okay,
deem they decide the education and or home environment unsuitable,
yeah, not dangerous, not just unsuitable,
local authorities will now have the power to intervene and require school attendance.
So all they need to do, according to that,
is start an investigation and a child is no longer allowed to be home educated.
If the local authority deem or consider the education unsuitable,
they have the power to force your child into school.
There are many reasons, it says, why parents choose to home educate,
including whether their child has special educational needs.
As long as they are providing a good, according to who,
safe, according to who, education, they can continue to do so.
The measures will ensure that the most vulnerable children cannot be withdrawn from school
until it is confirmed that this would be in their best interest.
So now you can't take them out of school when you decide
and until it's confirmed it's in their best interest
and that the education to be provided outside of school is suitable.
So you can't take your child out of school, regardless of the reasons,
trauma from bullying, etc, until the state agrees with what the parent wants to teach.
That's what they're proposing, that's what this bill is being passed through Parliament right now.
This is a classic case of hidden in plain sight.
And if maybe you're sitting here thinking, well, what's the big deal?
Maybe you are, maybe you've never looked at this subject,
maybe you've got no idea, maybe you haven't, maybe you've got views like that.
Most kids are taught in school.
Maybe you've built into the whole, it's only to protect them in extreme cases, rhetoric.
Maybe you've built into that.
Today I'd like to appeal to you from both the biblical standpoint,
but also just a common sense position too.
Okay, so I want to show you biblically and I want to show you with that
just the common sense stance on home education as opposed to the state school system.
And I would agree, by the way, I would add to that the private school system,
which ultimately is state regulated to a degree anyway.
At least they've got the private regulators and everything else,
but it's all pretty similar, okay.
And with that, I want to help everyone to understand the importance of home education.
Okay, I really want to help you understand that.
Now, just last point before I go into that.
There are some people, there'll be people in here and there'll be people in the future
and there'll be people maybe watching, you know, that aren't here
who cannot, for reasons, for circumstance in their life, home educate.
And I'm not preaching at you today, okay.
And I do believe that, you know, if you have the ability and you have the wherewithal
and it is an option that obviously you're going to see by the end of the sermon,
I think you'd be mad not to take it.
But for those that don't, I think, you know, God can still bless what you do do, right.
Okay, but if you choose to just be like, yeah, I don't care about any of this,
it's easier for me to shove them off in school, isn't that what everyone does,
then I don't think maybe God will look so favourably on you.
But let's continue and you'll hopefully see that as we go through this sermon.
Now, so we're in Ephesians 6, okay, so Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit,
he's giving the Ephesian church some specific commands.
He says this in verse 1, Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.
Now, another way we might say this is children, obey your parents
unless it contradicts clear commands of the Lord.
If your parent tells you to sin, you know, your parent says you need to lie, for example,
to do something that's clearly opposite to what God tells you to do, then you don't obey.
Okay, that's what I believe there.
Verse 2, he then says, Honour thy father and mother, which is the first commandment with promise.
So honour is to respect, to hold in high esteem.
He said that it may be well with thee, and now mayest live long on the earth.
So the results of honouring your parents is a happier, longer life.
And aside from God's, you might say, supernatural influence on that,
there are simple practical ways that this would apply too.
The vast majority of parents will, okay, the vast, like,
take your head out of, like, the fear-mongering and propaganda and everything else.
The vast, vast majority of parents will, to some degree, okay, look out for their kids' welfare.
It's a natural instinct, isn't it?
Now, how much they do that is, you know, that's going to vary, but most will.
On a completely different level to that of, say, a teacher with their pupils.
So it doesn't matter how many movies you have where there's evil parents being protected by
the kindergarten teacher, by, you know, in the old days it was, like, Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know,
beating up these horrible parents, you know, and things like that.
The reality of it is, is that most parents will have that natural instinct that a teacher
doesn't have for their child, who's doing a job, okay?
But honouring them, okay, respecting what they say, should help to keep you from many dangers in life,
shouldn't it? You know, because parents are looking out for you,
parents are going to give you a lot of instruction and things which should help to keep you safe,
because that's their instinct, that's what they're ultimately trying to do, is keep you safe,
keep you alive, raise you to have a good life, okay?
But also, as well as that, think of the life affecting stress that's a result of domestic rifts,
of the parent issues that so many hold on to.
So many of you have, like, mummy and daddy issues and stuff, and a lot of it,
and I'm not saying that there's not justification for a lot of it, but sometimes just honouring your parents.
If you just said, whatever, I'm still going to honour my parents, it would actually solve a lot of that, okay?
And then added to that is the financial side of honouring your parents in their later years,
because that's part of it as well, right? And that's something that there is a biblical command,
it's something that we should do, and Jesus Christ addresses that with the Pharisees,
which may stop you from taking the poison chalice of early retirement,
which does seem to be a poison chalice for so many, so many after early retirement often,
they don't live many years after that, and instead keeps you busy and active into your old age,
which is an important thing as we get older as well, when people just shut down and stop doing anything often,
they don't last very long. But after these specific commands to children, okay,
God through Paul said this to fathers, to the head of the family, that's who he's talking to,
he said, and you fathers, provoke not your children to wrath, but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
Now, obviously, Paul is speaking to the general majority here, the father of the nuclear family, okay?
But does anyone here think that he doesn't want the single mum bringing up their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord?
Anyone think that? You're like, oh, no, that's only for dads, you don't need to bring them up like that.
No, of course, okay? He's talking to the head of the family, but that goes without saying, doesn't it, to parents, right?
And as we get into this sermon, like I said, different circumstances are going to affect people, you know,
that we all have imperfect lives, different starts in life, those who have come to try to live for God later in life,
you know, are going to have things which can't just be solved with the click of the finger.
And it will limit how we raise our children, but we should all want to do our best, shouldn't we?
We'll try to do our best where possible.
Now, he's talking to the father here as the head of the family.
Like I said, on the back of chapter five, spelling out of the husband and wife's roles, okay?
You know, because some people like chapter division is almost like for them, whole new book and everything else.
No, he's just explained, okay?
Just in the previous chapter about the husbands and wives' roles, wives submitting unto their husbands as unto the Lord.
So it's not that he's telling men here to put on the pinny, okay?
Send their wife in, give their wife their work boots and send them off to work, right?
To provide, to submit someone else's husband in the workplace.
Of course, the working father though, okay?
But on the flip side, of course, the working father should take an active role as a parent,
but he should also take an active role leading the family decisions, shouldn't he?
Okay? Because he is the man of the house, with a big part of that being parenting decisions.
Okay, that's a massive...
I mean, they're some of the biggest decisions you're going to make in your household, parenting decisions.
And let me tell you a big parenting decision, whether or not to send your kids to school.
That is a big parenting decision, isn't it, to make? Huge parenting decision to make.
Well, this is what dads are commanded by God in Ephesians chapter 6 and verse 4 with all of that in mind.
And ye fathers, he said, provoke not your children to wrath, but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
The title is the importance of home education and point number one today is the importance of home education,
number one in provoking not your children to wrath, in provoking not your children to wrath.
So there are various ways that we can provoke our children to wrath, to violent anger, you might say, to indignation.
And we're told to avoid them. It's something we should be avoiding as parents, okay?
We should be trying to find ways to avoid that.
Look, obviously it's not like, right, they're now threatening me with a tantrum, I'll do whatever they say.
That's not what he's talking about, right?
But we're trying to find ways to avoid that wrath in our children, aren't we?
Okay? And one way, okay, one such way is by causing abandonment issues.
That's one way you can cause wrath in your children.
And something that I've seen and clearly seen, in fact, and heard through family, through experiences, through people,
anecdotal evidence of, amongst family, friends, and the rest, yeah, is also something that is evidenced in studies too.
This abandonment issues, these problems that come from basically shoving your kids off with other people, especially early in life.
Turn to Colossians chapter 3.
Turn to Colossians chapter 3, whilst I read from the Institute for Family Studies.
I'm going to give you some highlights, but they are kind of some long highlights, okay, from a really long piece that I was looking at recently.
It's called Measuring the Long-Term Effects of Early Extensive Daycare.
So this is post the 1997 rollout of full day year-round childcare for all children under five in Quebec, Canada.
So back in 97, they rolled this out and just provided it, you know, for next to nothing.
It was very cheap, it was subsidised, just early years childcare for kids across Quebec, right?
Within 10 years, social development among children, as indicated by both emotional and behavioural measures,
had significantly deteriorated in Quebec, relative to the rest of Canada, 10% of a standard deviation lower.
Comparisons between children ages two to four who had been exposed to the programme, with older children and siblings who had not, okay?
So that's what they're comparing here, so the children that were exposed to this programme, to these older kids at Addon,
revealed significant increases in anxiety, hyperactivity, and aggression in those exposed to the programme.
Like I said, the programme was a rolling out of basically early years childcare from young, you know, under school age across the board in Quebec, okay?
Research 20 years later as well, so that was 10 years later.
20 years later confirmed that the negative effects did continue, and in some cases became stronger across development.
Among five to nine year olds, negative social emotional outcomes not only persisted, but in some cases increased.
As indicated by 24% of a standard deviation increase in anxiety, a 19% increase in aggression, and a 13% in hyperactivity.
So this continued, it didn't just say, oh yeah, those kids were a bit affected by it, but they got through it.
No, it just continued. It just continued to be a problem for the rest of their childhood, and you would say onwards.
The impact on boys and children with the most elevated behavioural problems was stronger, especially in measures of hyperactivity and aggression.
So boys it was worse. For youth and young adults ages 12 to 20, analyses of self-reported general health and life satisfaction indicated that negative social emotional outcomes associated with exposure to the daycare programme persisted into young adulthood.
The most striking finding was a sharp and contemporaneous increase in criminal behaviour for those exposed to the universal daycare programme compared to their peers in other provinces.
Though crime rates in Quebec are lower than the rest of Canada, there was a significant increase in crime accusation and conviction rates for those cohorts exposed to the Quebec childcare programme.
There was an increase of 19% in the average rate of criminal accusations, and an increase of 22% in the average rate of criminal convictions.
As with the five to nine year olds measures, the impact on criminal behaviour was greater for boys and for those who had already had elevated behavioural problems.
Importantly, the findings from the Quebec programme are largely consistent with the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's comprehensive evaluation of daycare in the United States.
That study, which followed the same 1,364 children every year from birth, found that extensive hours in daycare early in life predicted negative behavioural outcomes throughout development, including in the final assessments done when the children were 15 years old.
So early childcare is just destroying these kids, basically.
By age four and a half, extensive hours in daycare predicted negative social outcomes in every area, including social competence, externalising problems and adult-child conflict, generally at a rate three times higher than other children.
That's a lot, isn't it? That's not just, oh, a little, I don't know, there may be some issues there. That's big.
In caregiver reports of behavioural problems, only 2% of children who averaged less than 10 hours per week of daycare during the first four years of life had at-risk scores. Only 2%.
While as much as 18% of children who averaged more than 30 hours per week did.
By third grade, children who had experienced more hours of non-maternal care, by the way, 30 hours is like 6 hours a day, that's school, that's basically young school sort of hours, right?
By third grade, children who had experienced more hours of non-maternal care were rated by teachers of having fewer social skills.
Yeah, by the way, that nonsense, they need to socialise from young. Oh, I just need to get them socialising. It's a load of nonsense.
It destroys them, OK? So they had fewer social skills, poorer work habits, more time in daycare centres specifically predicted more externalising behaviours and teacher conflict too.
Hours spent in daycare centres specifically continued to predict problem behaviours into sixth grade, but by age 15, extensive hours before age four and a half in any type of non-relative care predicted problem behaviours,
including risk-taking behaviours such as alcohol, tobacco and drug use, stealing or harming property, as well as impulsivity in participating in unsafe activities.
Even after controlling for daycare quality, socio-economic background and parenting quality.
So you take out those, you take that influence on the numbers, take that out, take those away and it's still a problem.
Here we are, but yeah, that's just the bad kids, that's just the bad families. No, it's still an issue.
And much like the findings for the Quebec child care programme, the statistical effects linking daycare hours with problem behaviours at age four and a half were nearly the same as the statistical effects at age 15.
It continues to mess them up for life.
But let me explain something to you, OK? Because, OK, they obviously didn't approve we see as years went by and you might say, well, that's early years, just keep them at home until school, right?
That must be the problem. Does anyone think four and a half is a magic age? Anyone think four and a half is a magic age?
No, it just all gets solved at four and a half. That was the problem. It's pre-four and a half. No, it's just that's the age that they then go to school.
That's the only difference. The stats end there. There's no more statistics because they go to school at four and a half. It's already, that's the age they go.
But you start, obviously, even earlier, you're going to mess them up even more.
It's not, it's not as bad, OK, obviously, the older they get.
But you get a child that has avoided childcare until four and a half and try dropping them off with strangers for the day.
Every day. And many of us have experienced that, many of us have seen that.
You go past a school gate with four and a half year olds at that age, especially in September at the beginning time,
and you're going to probably see a lot of tears, a lot of tantrums, a lot of screaming, a lot of crying,
a lot of scared, worried, anxious faces going off to spend six hours plus without their parents.
They have to wean them in, they try and wean them in so, oh, we'll start for the first week with a half a day or something.
But it's still half a day and it's quickly within a short amount of time, six hours a day without their parents.
Plus, six hours is sort of the minimum, right? You do it every day and what are you going to get?
Psychological problems. It's pretty simple stuff, really, isn't it? Pretty obvious, right?
The study didn't say that these things are non-existent in non-early daycare children, by the way,
just that they're more prevalent in those who had more hours of it, OK?
And it sounds like a sliding scale that you'd just be wise to steer well clear of, wouldn't you?
That's a sliding scale that I don't want to put, oh, four and a half, magic age, fine, off you go.
At least we avoid it for four and a half years. And by the way, just on that as well,
when people choose that life, especially if they're having more than one child,
because of work commitments and because of, you know, you get used to what you're earning,
what you're spending a lot of time, mums will then go to work because they haven't got really much to do in a day
by comparison a lot of the time, right?
The reality of it is that they're going to need the early childcare stuff.
Otherwise, they're probably going to have to lose their jobs because they haven't suddenly got four and a half years career off or something else.
So then they kind of go hand in hand a lot anyway.
And that, by the way, we're not even going into all the after-school, pre-school, off-stead regulated stuff,
all the same sort of stuff, all state childcare, before school, after school, holiday clubs, all that stuff,
to make up, to help the fact that you're trying to go to work, right?
So remember, OK, that we heard of significant increases in anxiety, hyperactivity and aggression,
and the command in Ephesians 6, 4 was,
And you fathers, provoke not your children to wrath.
Well, here in Colossians 3, we see some similar commands.
You turned to Colossians 3, didn't you?
Verse 20 says, Children, obey your parents in all things, for this is well pleasing unto the Lord.
Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged.
Let me tell you some anecdotal experiences of angry older children now.
So we've looked at some young children.
And in this nation, it's four-ish, whatever it is, after that fourth birthday,
that September comes, they need to go to school, it seems, OK?
But let me tell you about some angry older children.
Those getting picked on, bullied, tormented sometimes at school.
In fact, I mean, this is a big part of school life, sadly, for a lot of kids.
And do you know what, it often comes to, not entirely true,
but it often comes to this, for a lot of school kids at school,
they either get tormented and bullied, or they become a bully.
They become part of the gang at least,
they're at least friends with the people that are bullying,
or a lot of the time they're getting picked and bullied.
As much as you'd love the idea, I'm going to raise a strong child
who's going to be like the police force in the classroom,
and they're going to look after the bullied ones,
and they're going to, you know, they're going to tell off those bullies.
And the reality of it is, there aren't many like that.
Because peer pressure, because anxieties, worries, concerns,
because of all the things that go through kids, teens, as they grow up,
it's hard to be like that.
There are masses of children that are often so discouraged from these things
that they don't even want to live life anymore.
They're discouraged to the point of not wanting to live anymore,
and you know, sadly, what often happens with kids as well, teens at school.
So I thought I'd see what the so-called experts have
as the reasons for children's anger.
So this is according to Aspiris Children's Services,
and it was all very similar stuff.
This was just an easy quick list that I found,
which seemed to correlate with others.
They said, children can become angry when they are frightened,
anxious and do not understand what is happening in their lives.
There are a number of reasons that can cause a child to become angry,
which include friendship problems, bullying,
struggling with school and exams,
feeling stressed, anxious or fearful about something,
coping with hormone changes during puberty,
seeing family members being angry or arguing with one another.
The first three, four really on that list are much more likely with school.
You've suddenly just increased the chances of them being angry
due to friendship problems,
and there's a lot of friendship problems that go on in school,
basically because so much of it is unmonitored.
There isn't a parent, there isn't somebody,
he hasn't got foolishness behind the heart,
trying to prevent the bullying, trying to prevent the full-outs,
trying to encourage them to be good friends,
trying to encourage them not to do this, not to behave like that.
They don't have that.
Friendship problems, bullying.
Bullying is a big problem in school.
Struggling with school, and you know why?
Because just carnal people are mean.
You see it amongst adults.
Sadly, you even see it sometimes amongst adults in churches.
You'll see bullying, bullying of people,
whether it's in group chats, bullying of people,
whether it's in the church house, whatever, let alone with kids.
Struggling with schools and exams.
Again, home school, you're not doing exams every whatever,
because you know how they're doing,
because you're there to monitor and assess how they're doing.
Feeling stressed, anxious or fearful about something.
There's a lot of things to feel stressed, anxious or fearful about
when it comes to school life.
And then the other two were hormone changes.
And again, by the way, you've got some issues with hormones.
I'll tell you what's the recipe for disaster.
Put them with hundreds, if not thousands of other kids
who have issues with hormones.
Seeing family members being angry or arguing with one another
is one that you could say, but again,
if you can create a nice environment at home,
then you can solve that, right?
So, verse 21 said,
fathers, provoke not your children to anger,
lest they be discouraged.
So you send them off to school,
you're indirectly at least provoking them to anger.
The result?
Discouragement and ultimately from the Christian life.
Discouragement from life itself, from the Christian life.
And that's a whole new subject we'll get onto as well.
Discouragement from actually doing things for God
in an environment full of people
that don't at least believe in God,
that haven't trusted God for salvation,
that don't want to live by the word of God.
Back in Ephesians chapter six and verse four,
it said this,
and ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath,
but bring them up.
He said, but bring them up
in the nurture and ammunition of the Lord.
The title is the importance of home education.
Point number one in provoking not your children to wrath,
and point number two in you bringing them up.
The importance of home education in you bringing them up.
He didn't say, but have them brought up.
He didn't say, but pray for them to be brought up.
No, he commanded fathers to bring them up.
It was a command, wasn't it?
Bring them up.
Turn to Proverbs 22,
whilst I do some pretty simple maths with you, okay?
You've got 24 hours in a day.
Let's take out 12 for sleep
for the youngest school-aged children.
Okay, so the youngest school-aged children
are going to be sleeping about 12 hours of the day, okay?
That gives you 12 waking hours left out of 24,
with the average school day at that age
being over six hours.
Usually drop them off before nine,
usually pick them up,
usually it's more like 3.30 or something like that.
So for five days per week,
not including preschool and afterschool clubs,
external sports clubs, et cetera,
half-term clubs and all the rest of it,
not including any of that,
not including the time spent playing
once they get home on their own,
or sadly often glued to a TV or iPad for so many.
During term time, over 50%,
over 50% of their waking hours
are spent with you absent from Monday to Friday.
Over 50%.
Who's really bringing that child up?
Are you really bringing them up?
Is it you or the state-trained, state-regulated,
state-funded, state-designed school system?
Who is it?
It's not you.
And this is how messed up it is, okay?
The majority of people in this nation
actually think that that is going to be better for a child.
Honestly, that is going to be the general consensus.
If you spoke to people out on the street now,
if we went, right, survey time, guys,
let's get out there and start asking people,
what do you think?
Home, educate or school,
still the majority will be like,
well, it's much better for them to be at school.
They need to be around other children
or they'll come out with like the cliche stuff.
You know what they need?
A trained teacher.
Are you a trained teacher?
You home educate?
You're not trained by the state?
Are you state-trained to teach your own child?
This is the stuff that people,
this is just the natural responses, isn't it?
The conditioning results in that.
They honestly think that.
They think that education decisions, education practices,
education laws decided by the same politicians
that pushed what was it?
Was it five COVID jabs?
Anyone remember?
Six?
10?
Is it 10?
Are they still going?
There's still more boosters?
I thought one was meant to solve it.
That's what they told everyone.
One would solve it.
Then it was, no, you need a booster.
You need another one.
It just kept going.
It was like the never-ending injection.
You wouldn't have done better to have just sat there
and let them just keep going.
At least you didn't have to keep booking it in.
But no, no, they want what's best for you though.
They want what's best for your children, don't they?
Don't they?
The same politicians which are proven time and time again
to be self-serving mammon-serving liars,
breaking promise after promise after promise
after every single election.
Every time.
Promise after promise, broken, broken.
Asked in parliament, what about this?
What's usually the answer?
Change of subject.
I saw one the other day, yeah, just briefly.
I was like, whoever it was,
Starmer gets grilled in parliament, yeah?
Someone says, right, so why is it
that you're about to basically give away this territory
with billions and billions of pounds and everything else
but you're saying that you can't afford
to pay for pensioners' fuel?
The answer.
When you look at the previous Conservative government,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, sit down.
It's a complete waste of time.
It's vain jangling.
That whole thing is just a charade.
Like, oh yeah, they're really getting put through it.
They're really getting grilled.
That's a lie.
No one's getting grilled.
They're just finding amusing ways
to just clearly not answer questions.
That's what they do.
That's basically parliament, yeah?
Let's find ways of not answering questions
and just change the subject.
And it's not even subtle.
The same people that end up being
all sorts of weird perverts,
I think the statistical probability,
I remember looking at it,
it was like a thing on the Labour government,
it's politicians across the board,
of them actually being arrested for some sort of deviancy
is, again, just through the roof
when compared to the normal population.
In cahoots with other perverts like Savile,
other establishment perverts,
covering up Muslim rape gangs.
Oh no, but those people,
they want what's best for your children, don't they?
They know what's best for your children.
They know what's best for our children, yeah?
Do people honestly believe this?
People do honestly believe this.
At a completely unrelated incident,
completely unrelated to home education,
of some poor little girl murdered by her Muslim father,
having taken her out of school,
but she was on registers,
they knew exactly what was going on
and everything that she had been taken out of school.
So was it someone just,
oh no, someone hasn't registered to home,
they knew!
And apparently that's now justification
for taking away the rights of parents in this nation.
The disgrace, by the way,
one of the biggest disgrace of all of that,
being that they use incidents like this
as just a callous way of persecuting
just law-abiding citizens.
How wicked is that, right?
How wicked is that?
Do you really want these people
and their brainwashed socialist armies of teachers
educating, teaching, bringing up your children?
Anybody want that?
Especially when we're commanded by God to bring them up.
We're commanded to bring them up.
With Proverbs 22.6 showing the importance
of what a child is taught.
Proverbs 22.6 says,
"'Train up a child in the way he should go,
"'and when he is old, he will not depart from it.'"
Do most parents even know half
of what is being taught in school?
Really?
Especially as their children get older.
Especially when half of what they're getting taught
is by their peers in the playground
or at the back of the classroom
or in the many, many times of downtime
in between trying to get them to actually shut up
so they can be taught something.
I mean, there's so much wasted time in a school, isn't there?
Does anyone really believe that these politicians
are willing or capable of training up a child
in a way he should go?
Because that's basically what it comes back to
is what the politicians have decided
that the state school should be teaching.
And aside from the home education stuff,
that's what this latest bill is also trying to push
is even less autonomy of schools
to decide what suits their area, their type of children,
their type of teachers, their part of the nation, et cetera.
Whether it's some inner city school,
whether it's a city in the middle of, you know,
the quaint little village somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
No, they all gotta do it the way
the government tell them to do it.
Whether they can employ people
that haven't had the formal brainwash, sorry, training
at teacher training school,
the university degree in teaching,
now they're no longer able to do that.
That's what they're trying to push.
So that everything is basically even more centralized,
you know, and it's more just dictated to us,
to the schools by the government.
And the whole premise itself
is ridiculous in the first place, okay?
For anyone, again, that's never even just thought about this.
Turn to 1 Peter chapter two, 1 Peter two.
This should just be way out
of a national government's jurisdiction.
Okay, really.
This, schooling children's got nothing
to do with the government.
How far down the socialism slope
have we slipped in this nation
to believe that the national government
should have any reach into our homes?
Like, people, honestly, there are Christians,
people who claim to believe their Bibles,
who would be like, oh yeah, well, yeah,
well, you know, we need to have the government trading.
Oh yeah, we need some laws to make sure
that kids go to school and stuff.
Yeah.
Like, what on earth?
Get your head out of socialism.
Get your head out of the brainwashing
and actually get your head into the Bible.
How we raise our children,
how we educate our children and our children.
In 1 Peter two, he pretty much spells out
the function of government.
He says this in verse 13.
1 Peter two, 13.
Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man
for the Lord's sake, whether it be to the king,
or supreme, or unto governors,
as unto them that are sent by him
for the punishment of evildoers,
and for the praise of them that do well.
National government there is ultimately for law and order.
That's what it's there for.
That's really the point in government.
Law and order, which would include, of course,
protecting its citizens from outside invasion,
outside un-law, non-law, non-order, disorder.
That's the point of government.
Of course, there's a need for the building
and maintaining of some national infrastructure, of course.
But state-controlled schooling
isn't a job for the government.
In fact, it's a very, very new concept
relative to mankind's history, relative to 6,000 years.
It's, I mean, this is so recent, okay?
It wasn't until the end of the 19th century,
the very, the closing 1800s,
that primary education became compulsory
in this nation with state schools
having been rolled out over a period before that
amongst the poor.
Because, look, there were people with wealth
that were sending them to things,
there were church schools, things like that sometimes.
But for it to be something that the government provided
and the government gave was only in the last
100, 130 years, 140 years in this nation.
I mean, that is minuscule.
That's never been the case.
Oh, well, it's much better, it's much better now.
Is it really?
What did people do before then?
I'll tell you what they did before then.
They brought up their own children.
Oh, but all the opportunities they've missed out on.
Yeah, about that.
What do you mean?
The opportunities to be drug addicts.
The opportunities to be taught by the world
with all the different ways that the conditioning,
the opportunity to have their faith shaken
or if they're not saved to maybe never have,
to have it just squashed so much
that they never will get saved.
The opportunity to just be bullied, tormented.
The opportunity to be preyed upon by deviants.
Proverbs 1.8 says,
my son, hear the instruction of thy father,
of Satan, not the law of thy mother.
That's how God wants people taught,
by their father and by their mother,
those who care about them, those that know them best.
And just on a side note as well,
a lot of people used to just take on the trades
and the skills and the things that their parents used to do.
And you know why?
Because they've probably got the best teacher for that.
He's able to do that and teach them.
That's why a lot of companies are in sons, you know?
And you know what?
They've probably got the genetics that suit that as well,
because they're learning and they're seeing
and they're experiencing and they're being around someone
that's done that before.
And they look, oh, the poor thing,
they ended up doing that.
Well, what job of all these, you know what?
I'm seeing a load of kids coming out of school
and going into no jobs.
I'm seeing a load of kids coming out of university
and going into no jobs just with more debt
and not jobs that they were just so suited to
and the world was their oyster.
It's a lie.
Back in Ephesians six and verse four,
said, and you fathers provoke not your children to wrath,
but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
The title is the importance of home education.
Number one, in provoking not your children to wrath.
Number two, in you bringing them up.
And number three, in the nurture of the Lord.
In the nurture of the Lord.
It wasn't the nurture of the political elites, was it?
The nurture of lefty socialist teachers.
The nurture of the child abusers that infiltrate schools.
No, he said, bring them up in the nurture
and admonition of the Lord.
Turn to Psalm 127.
How are we to bring, Psalm 127,
how are we to bring them up in the nurture of the Lord
if we're sending them off to be taught
by those that reject the Lord?
How are we bringing them up in the nurture of the Lord?
I mean, this is a no brainer.
It's a simple concept, for Christians at least.
But as you go through this stuff, you know,
that's, by the way, the vast majority
of people being homeschooled in this nation
are not Bible-believing Christians, still, to this day.
I think still, there's still so many
that just because they're like,
school is an absolute mess,
because they've just still got some,
their moral compass hasn't been completely skewed yet.
They're like, I don't want my kids
being taught that sort of filth.
I don't want my kids being around that sort of filth.
In fact, of course I could teach my kids
better than some lefty teacher somewhere.
Oh, they just know everything.
No, they've just got the answer book.
Honestly.
I mean, you don't remember everything,
they haven't given them the answer
to all problems in university.
No, they've just trained them in,
they brainwashed them in leftism
and all of that stuff and associated things
when it comes to teacher training.
Yeah, there's some teaching skills and things
of which a lot of them will change, by the way,
and they'll get, all right, we've got a new idea now,
we've got a new one, so when were they actually trained?
But they're taught the bureaucracy
because a lot of it is filling out forms
and filling out this and completing that and everything else.
And then after all of that, they're not now,
they don't now have the answer to every question in life
that the child of whatever age they teach might ask them.
No, they just have the answer book.
Oh no, how are you going to teach them otherwise?
By being a parent and knowing what they need
and actually knowing them
and not trying to know them amongst 30-something children.
For that hour, let alone the other,
however many hundreds of kids in a secondary school
that you're teaching per day as well.
Anyway, Psalm 127 in verse one,
it's the Song of Degrees for Solomon.
"'Except the Lord build the house,
they labour in vain to build it.
Except the Lord keep the city,
the watchman waketh but in vain.'
So he said, "'Unless you do it with the Lord,
you'll labour in vain.
Unless you do it God's way,
you won't be able to keep your people safe.
It is vain for you to rise up early to sit up late
to eat the bread of sorrows,
for so he giveth his beloved sleep.'"
So you can be up early to get those extra few minutes
with your kids in before you drop them off with the Marxist.
You can sit up late worrying and problem solving
about the bad influences, the bullying,
the weirdo teacher, but it just won't help.
"'Lo, children are in heritage of the Lord,
and the fruit of the womb is his reward.'
He's saying that they're his heritage,
or inheritance, we might say.
They belong to him, they're his reward.
They're not yours, they're God's.
So we better do our best to return them in good shape, right?
I mean, it's serious, even more serious
than the fact that it's your precious child
that they're actually God's.
How do we do that?
Ephesians 6, 4 said,
"'To bring them up in the nurture
and admonition of the Lord.'"
Now, nurture is what nourishes,
it's what is needed for growth.
But it gives a sense of a caring provision too, doesn't it?
When you think about nurturing,
you're not just thinking,
oh yeah, shove a meal in front of them and walk off, okay?
It's giving them what they need, it's providing for them.
It's a caring provision, a giving.
Turn to John 17, John chapter 17.
Let's say, I was thinking about this analogy, okay?
Let's say you had a favorite pet, okay?
Let's say it was a fluffy little baby rabbit.
A real lovely little fluffy rabbit.
Maybe you even called it fluffy,
because it's just so sweet and cute.
It's just lovely, right?
And you gave it to me to nurture.
You said, Pastor Taverner, I need you to nurture fluffy.
Could you take fluffy and nurture her?
We're gonna go her as well, okay?
She's a cute little baby little rabbit girl thing.
Baby, whatever.
What do they call, what are baby rabbits called?
Anyone know?
Ella, huh?
Okay, I don't know, okay?
So you got this baby little rabbit, okay?
You've told me to nurture it.
And I've said, okay, okay, I'm gonna nurture.
I'm gonna do as you tell me, right?
Okay, you've told me to nurture
your little baby fluffy rabbit.
I'm gonna nurture it.
How would you feel if I took fluffy down
to the local Greyhound track
and dropped her off for several hours a day?
I don't think she'd last seen her.
How would you feel about that?
Would you think I was nurturing her?
You'd be like, oh, he's such a nurturing guy.
He took fluffy down to the track,
dropped her off and left her in the track
with all those greyhounds baying for blood.
You wouldn't, would you?
You'd go, that's not nurture.
You're not nurturing.
You might have given fluffy a carrot on the way down,
but you're not nurturing fluffy.
How about I drop two off daily?
How about I just drop two off daily
with my friend, my buddy,
who states openly, who clearly hates rabbits?
Would you consider that nurturing?
Oh, he was so nurturing to little fluffy,
he dropped fluffy off with someone who hates rabbits.
I wouldn't be nurturing fluffy, would I?
That's not nurture.
But we're expected to leave our precious,
hopefully saved children to be brought up by the world.
I mean, it's just ridiculous, isn't it?
In John 17, the Lord Jesus Christ prayed to the Father
about his disciples, okay?
He said this in verse 14.
I have given them my word and the world has hated them.
What did he say?
He said the world has hated them, right?
Talking to his disciples.
Because they are not of the world
even as I am not of the world.
They might get away without having the dogs
physically rip them to shreds,
but spiritually, that's exactly what happens in schools.
Spiritually, they're going to get ripped to shreds
by the dogs.
That's just the way it is.
He said in verse 15,
I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world,
but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil.
So sadly, all of us have to be in the world
because we have a job to do.
But how not to keep your children from the evil?
Send them into the midst of it.
That's how you don't keep your precious children
from the evil.
You send them right into the middle of the evil.
And believe me, there's a lot of evil
that goes on in schools.
When I was coaching the stories,
in fact, there was a kid that got saved, okay?
He was a teenager at school,
and he had his head on his shoulders.
He had good discipline when he trained and stuff.
He was a good kid,
kept away from a lot of the nonsense and stuff.
He used to tell me about some of the filth
going on in his schools.
And this is a school which had a rainbow flag above it,
and it was local to where I lived and were at all.
And he used to tell me about some of the stuff going on.
You don't even want to hear some of the stories he'd tell me
about some of the kids, some of the teachers,
all sorts of filth, disgusting stuff,
like dangerous stuff.
Just horrible.
It's horrible.
That's not a place for the children of God, is it?
And those of us who,
you know, and especially whoever here, right?
I would say that the younger people
who have been in school more recently,
probably this should resonate with even more,
because standards have gone down.
They have gone down.
There's no doubt about that.
The less they're able to punish,
the less they're able to kick out in schools,
the less they're able to do a lot,
the more just liberal conditioning, liberal brainwash,
the worse they've got.
And do you really want to send your kids to that?
To where you were?
They are not of the world, he said in verse 16,
even as I'm not of the world.
They're not of the world.
What do you want to send your kids there for, to the world?
Back in Ephesians 6, he said in verse 4,
is that the nurture of the Lord?
Is that nurturing your children?
No, it's not.
Back in Ephesians 6, he said,
and you fathers, provoke not your children to wrath,
but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
The title is the importance of home education.
Number one, in provoking not your children to wrath.
Number two, in you bringing them up.
Number three, in the nurture of the Lord.
Number four, in the admonition of the Lord.
Yep, the admonition of the Lord,
as opposed to the non-admonition
of the ridiculously liberal teacher,
as opposed to the upside-down and inside-out admonition
of the latest product of wokeism teacher.
You know, that's not what he told you to bring them up in, did he?
As opposed to the admonition of the 30-something similar-aged children
that your child spends the majority of time learning from.
And that's just the ones in his actual classroom at the time.
Because that's really generally where the admonition comes from in a school.
That's where the majority of admonition comes from.
Turn to Psalm 1, the first Psalm.
Admonition is reproof, instruction in duties, caution, direction.
And in most schools around here,
the majority of what is going to come of that
is going to come from your peers, isn't it?
The instruction, the correction, how you talk.
You're going to get jumped on pretty early doors of that in a school.
How you dress.
How you walk, even.
How you jog.
How you do anything.
He's just jumped on by other kids, isn't it?
Isn't that what goes on in the school environment?
Or was it just in my school?
Yeah?
Pretty much everything.
How your hair's cut.
How it isn't cut.
What you... just...
I mean, I remember being criticised for how I chewed food.
Apparently I looked like a camel.
HE LAUGHS
So I'd better start opening my mouth more.
HE LAUGHS
Problem is, the admonition's not always good.
I was taught to keep my mouth shut.
Suddenly I'm getting criticised for it by one of the kids at school.
The next thing you know, I'm like,
I'd better keep my mouth open more.
And then, you know, I grow up to maybe not always have the best table manners.
It's not always the right thing,
because being cool for school is often stuff
which is going to wreck you for the rest of your life.
From all of those unbelieving kids
raised on the whole contrary to how God wants his heritage raised.
That's where the admonition comes from.
But Psalm 1 says in verse 1,
blessed is a man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly,
nor standeth in a way of sinners,
nor sitteth in the seat of the schoolful.
And whether it's from the teacher at the front of the classroom,
or the 30-something kids in the classroom,
or the hundreds in the playground, right?
The pressure in school is immense.
It's immense.
The pressure on kids in school,
when they're growing, while they're learning,
with all that anxiety, all that other stuff,
it is immense.
The influence is immense.
It's massive. That's why you go past the school,
you see a load of kids coming out,
dressed very similarly,
acting, talking, walking, behaving very similarly,
watching the same stuff in the evenings on the TV,
or on whatever it is now,
on the same computer games.
There's thousands of computer games out there.
You go to a school and you'll find it's the same ones,
whatever in a group setting,
and everything else, whatever it is.
That's what people do.
The result, a child that isn't blessed,
a child that is unhappy, unfulfilled, and on a bad path.
The blessed man avoids all of that,
which ultimately comes from avoiding those people in general,
really, as much as possible.
Yeah, we have to be in the world.
Yeah, we have to reach the world, right?
However, you don't want to be hanging around
with those sorts of people all day every day, do you?
Proverbs 13.20, we've seen it a few times now in the last week,
he that walketh with wise men shall be wise,
but a companion of fools shall be destroyed.
So you can send your kid off to not be a companion,
to go and be that kid on their own there,
and you're still provoking them to wrath,
and they've still got to deal with the teacher,
they've still got to deal with all the other stuff,
or they're going to be a companion of those fools,
and it's going to destroy them.
Instead, verse 2,
but his delight, this is a blessed man,
is in the law of the Lord,
and in his law doth he meditate day and night.
That's where the admonition of the law comes from,
it's from his word, from the word of God.
And you're not finding that
in all the schools across the station.
You go to a church school,
you're not finding the law of the Lord in there,
you're finding some perverted Bible version,
they might do a couple of extra little prayers or something,
and maybe one service a week or something else,
by a false prophet, some ecumenical,
whilst also ticking all the boxes
that Ofsted wants them to tick in every other area.
Oh, it's so restrictive,
those poor kids that aren't being sent off
to be destroyed in the school system.
Honestly, people think,
this is how people think out there,
those poor kids being home educated.
Only they could go to get flushed down the toilet at school.
Literally.
If only they could go to get shaken up
outside the school gates for their money each week,
or if only they could go for you to have to train them up
and teach them up and get them to be pretty hard, yeah?
And I'm not talking about hard like in a good way,
I mean, they're gonna have to get pretty hardened
to be able to deal with that.
Oh yeah, that's just what we want, isn't it?
I want my kids to just not even care
when they see blood and people getting battered
and everything else,
because that's the only way they're gonna get through it,
is getting hard.
Oh yeah, that's what I wanna do with my 10, 11 year old.
I mean, even primary schools, primary schools are rough.
That's why an eight year old, seven year old
needs to teach them to smash kids in the face early, right?
I mean, honestly, how are you gonna get them through it?
Or they just need to be a victim for the rest of their life.
And it's not just the bullying, it's like everything,
the whole lot, but that is a big problem in schools.
You might go, oh, it's hyperbole, it's not.
It's not, this is real, that's real.
We all know, because we all went to school.
And it's so better with the girls as well.
In fact, the girls, you probably have to teach them
to get rough as well.
More so.
He said in verse three, I don't think it's too bad.
And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water
that bringeth forth his fruit and his season.
His leaf also shall not wither
and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.
Doesn't sound so bad to me, right?
It's better, definitely better than the admonition
that comes from the world.
And by the way, also, not just for your kid,
for a child's parents too.
Proverbs 29, 17 says, correct thy son,
he shall give thee rest, yea,
he shall give delight unto thy soul.
Is that what we want?
Delight, you know why?
Because if you do it right, if you do it God's way,
you can achieve that, you can achieve that.
How can you correct him if for the majority of the day
you don't know what he is and isn't doing?
How can you correct him?
Do you know how much, like,
if you just watch your kids for a day,
in general you're like, okay, no, maybe don't do that,
maybe don't talk to him like that.
You know, especially when you're like siblings interacting,
you're like, okay, that was a bit mean there, wasn't it?
Maybe you could have said that a different way.
Sometimes you're just like, oh, you little bratty,
you know, whatever else, right?
I noticed I was trying to show the liberal side first.
Oh yeah, come here.
Now, what could you have done differently?
Not smashed him over the head with the hammer.
Exactly, now go back and do it another way, you know?
Don't ever give those kids wooden hammer-like
whack-a-mole things.
Your siblings don't fare too well with that stuff.
But, you know, I'm joking, okay,
that's not the best way necessarily of dealing with it.
But the point being that how can you even know,
because you do need to just be regularly, don't you?
You're regularly helping and regularly correcting them,
regularly showing them, regularly giving them,
you know, helping them to behave well
and, you know, regularly chastising them as well,
often, especially at a young age.
It all, you're not doing that when it's gone.
Do you know what?
No one else is.
Oh, well, you know, they might have to,
I mean, do they even have detentions anymore?
Is that against their human rights or something?
I mean, what do they even do now?
I mean, what if they, do you know what happened
when I started getting older?
Kids started learning that when they got a detention,
which if anyone's wondering, if they have phasos out,
I don't know, right?
That was basically where you had to stay behind an hour
after school and sit in a classroom or you had to stay,
I mean, they had something in my school
where it was called headmaster's detention.
This was serious business.
We had to come in on a Saturday morning
and do like sweeping of leaves or whatever else, right?
Okay, and that was with the headmaster there
and that was when you're really bad, right?
But the rest of it would be a detention
which was after school.
But then as kids got older,
they realised that this ain't gonna turn up to detention.
What are they gonna do?
So they tried for a bit while it's being doubled,
but then they just wouldn't turn up and wouldn't do anything.
And then it got to the point,
as I was coming to my later years,
where it's actually getting harder and harder
to just kick a kid out of school
and even getting suspended from school
for the naughty kids are like, great,
I don't wanna be here anyway.
I can go and sit at home and do whatever I want
and then come back a week later.
Oh, well, you might even get expelled.
Yeah, sure, because that was so hard.
Now it seems borderline impossible to do that.
And so they just don't really do anything.
So nothing really happens.
But you know what?
Kids need correcting a lot, don't they?
Of course, you don't wanna just jump on everything
and anything they say,
but kids do need a lot of correction, don't they?
And he said here, back in Proverbs 29, 17,
correct thy son and he shall give thee rest.
We should be correcting them.
Yea, he shall give delight unto thy soul.
That's what our goal is.
And that's why a child left to himself
is to bring his mother to shame.
And whether that's in school,
which isn't necessarily by their self
because they're usually getting influenced,
or you just leave your kids to it,
you're not gonna get a chance to correct that stuff,
are you?
And you're gonna have problems in the future.
And back in Ephesians 6 and verse 4,
he said, and you fathers provoke not your children to wrath,
but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
But the reality of it is that it's not easy.
Did you know that?
It's not easy.
It's easier to send them off.
It's easier to send your kids to school.
It really is.
You know, it's easier to shove them off.
It's easier to conform to this world, isn't it?
That's the easy thing to do in life.
And you know what will often happen as well?
The beginning of home educating or homeschooling,
whatever you want to call it,
often it will be hard at the beginning
because that's kind of the challenge.
That's the test.
And you'll have some hard times with it.
And that'll maybe continue as well,
but there could be some challenges
because the challenge, the choice for you is,
do I give up?
And guess who would love you to give up?
The devil.
He would love you to give up.
Send him back to him.
Send her back to him.
Send him into the school system
where he can have his way with your kids in various ways.
But is the world school system,
thinking about being conformed to this world,
really that good and acceptable and perfect will of God?
Does anyone really think that?
Hello, yeah.
Some home educators, some homeschoolers,
some Christian homeschoolers,
some Christian homeschoolers probably here in this church
or in similar like-minded churches,
know they won't be doing everything
in God's good and perfect will, but you know what?
They should at least be trying to.
Yeah, we're not always going to get it right,
but we should at least be trying to.
And this, by the way,
this sermon is without going into all the other benefits.
The self-discipline that kids can get from home education,
from especially as you're training them
to be able to get on with their work
more and more themselves, that's a great benefit of it.
The fact that you can tailor it to a child
rather than a one-size-fits-all across the whole nation.
Instead, there are kids that maybe need a bit more time
with this subject to less time with this one.
Maybe have more of an interest in this.
Maybe they're never going to do anything with this subject.
They're just teaching the basics and more with that.
There's so much of that, isn't there?
The level they go at, the speed they go at as well,
rather than it just being the average across the board,
with the clever kids being frustrated,
the stupid kids just finding it really hard
because they can't keep up.
Better grades, I mean, that's pretty standard.
Home-educated kids do better.
They get better grades.
They achieve better in exams at the end of it all.
Why?
Because they're getting one-on-one tuition,
because they're not getting all that corruption,
all that wasted time, all the other stuff
that comes from school.
So just results alone have clearly been shown to be better.
I've looked at this over many years.
Long before I even got saved,
I was interested in home education
and it was just clearly the better way,
before I even knew that God wanted me to do that.
Social skills, having improved social skills.
You talk to a lot of, you, me,
and the more, you know,
we've been home-educated many years now.
You come across home-educated kids,
obviously you come across them in the church and stuff.
They're usually able to hold a conversation with an adult
and other children and people of various ages.
Okay, and yeah, there'll be phases,
there'll be times when they'll go through
maybe shyer phases and things like that,
but I've been around school kids
and I've taught school kids and trained them as they,
you know, done kids classes, things like that.
It's a different game.
And they're actually socially better off
because it's not a normal social,
that's not a normal social setting.
Where else in life are you with 30 in a room
of people your exact age within a year?
Doing exactly the same thing, it doesn't happen.
It's not normal.
You need to be able to interact with others, don't you?
You need to be able to socialise with different people,
with adults, with children, different ages.
Home-educated kids don't come out, you know,
scared to even look someone in the eye
and talking to their armpit when they talk to kids,
to adults or kids.
Safety.
That's a big part of it, isn't it?
Because there's a lot of kids that,
sadly there's kids that aren't here anymore from schools.
I mean, there are stabbings going on every week,
it seems, aren't there, around this nation in schools.
Not just the stabbings, the safety from the influencer,
the safety from the perversion,
the safety from the sexual abuse and stuff.
So much of it doesn't go reported.
All of that different stuff,
I mean, we haven't even gone into all the getting
basically pushed, at least to a degree,
into fornication, things like that,
which is massive in school as well.
And the flexibility as well.
You do get, you do have a flexibility
when you home-educate.
A flexibility to fit around different schedules,
a flexibility, flexibility to even go away
when, if you're able to,
when you're not getting absolutely ripped off
because it's the school holidays or something.
To be able to say, right,
we're going to take a couple of days off for this reason.
To be able to say, right,
we're going to go and do this today.
No, we're going to go on a school trip.
So you get, you have flexibility
that can suit you and your family.
But then with all of that in mind, okay,
and I'm not going to go into all of that,
but just with those four points,
from a Christian point of view,
and you could say from a non-Christian point of view as well,
even if you don't say the nurture of the Lord,
do you really want to raise your kids
in the nurture of the socialists
and the nurture of other children?
Do you really want to raise your kids
in the admonition of the other kids and everything else?
So even for a non-Christian,
I think those points would still apply.
But perhaps whilst we still have the liberty
of home-educating here,
and I don't know how long that's going to last
because how long will it be until they're coming,
and there might be some things that affect this,
but how long will it be until they're saying
what we're teaching is not suitable?
What we're doing is not suitable.
It's they don't deem it acceptable.
I don't think we're a long way off, are we?
If things carry on the way they're going.
So while we have that liberty,
surely we need to make sure we do it
to the best of our abilities, don't we?
We need to make sure,
not just for the socialists that's going to come round
and try and find any fault in what we do,
but maybe to be answerable to God as well.
Maybe God will bless us.
Maybe God can, and of course he can,
but maybe he will have some input
into the law changes and everything else here
that we're able to if we actually take advantage of it.
Whereas if God's children are home-educating their children
and maybe doing it lazily or maybe doing it badly
or maybe doing it so we're not a shining light,
maybe not doing it the way God wants us to,
maybe we won't have that liberty for much longer.
Maybe we have a responsibility with that as well.
In Genesis 18, 19, you'd have to turn there.
God said of Abraham,
"'For I know him that he will command his children
in his household after him,
and they shall keep the way of the Lord
to do justice and judgment
that the Lord may bring upon Abraham
that which he has spoken of him.'"
Don't you want God to be able to say that
about each and every one of us here, right?
That we will do our best,
we will bring them up the way God wants us to,
we will do it the best way,
and maybe he'll make a way for that
to keep being possible, right?
And last point, kids, if you're home-educated,
appreciate it, yeah?
Appreciate it, because it's not easy.
Like, a lot of mums out there,
it'd be much easier to just go off into a workplace
where the productivity is probably
a couple of hours of work a day in most workplaces,
maybe three at a push for a whole day's work.
In a lot of workplaces,
it'd be much easier to just go and forget about it,
to have that headspace,
to not feel like they're working 24 hours a day.
And it'd be much easier for many dads out there
to have their wives at work and take the pressure off them
to have more things financially, et cetera.
And ultimately, who benefits from it?
It's you, you know?
So maybe appreciate it, kids,
if you are home-educated,
because maybe there might be a time in the future,
sadly, in this nation, maybe in the near future,
where it's no longer possible.
And if you're ending up getting sent back to school,
believe me, the grass is not green.
Excuse me.
I even spat when I said that,
because I was so disgusted at the thought of it.
It definitely isn't, okay?
So that was the importance of home education.
Number one in provoking Not Your Children to Wrath.
Number two in you bringing them up.
Number three in the nurture of the Lord.
Number four in the admonition of the Lord.
On that, we're gonna finish in a word of prayer.
Heavenly Father, thank you, Lord, for the kids here.
Thank you for the blessing of children.
Help us to bring them up, Lord,
in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord,
and to not provoke them to wrath, Lord.
Help us to get this right, all of us here.
You know, we're all gonna fail.
We're all gonna get things wrong.
We're all gonna make mistakes, Lord,
but help us to just,
to constantly just respond to those things,
to respond to how you want us to bring them up,
to take it seriously as they are your heritage, Lord.
Help us to just take our job seriously as parents.
Help us to raise the next generation of believers,
of soul winners, of kids that are gonna carry on
standing on the word of God and preaching the gospel, Lord.
Help us do the best we can with that.
Help us to all get out this afternoon and get people saved,
and reach kids if possible as well, Lord,
and, you know, show them the gift of eternal life, Lord.
Help us to get back to the evening service,
and just so proud of this.
Amen.