The Good Book Company have made their Easter Unscrambled family devotional material available for free online, with the aim of providing 5-10min Bible times to help families celebrate the crucified, risen King, during the week running up to Easter Sunday.
To make use of the material all you need to do is register here
A helpful post from Jason Helopoulos alerting us to some signs that show that what’s good – our family, has become our god.
The audio for the Biblical Counselling: Changing Hearts 2014 conference is now up over at the BCUK website. There are four talks in total from David Powlison, Winston Smith and Steve Midgley. All of the talks are worth listening to, but I found Steve’s talk, The foundations for relating well, especially relevant to our situation in the UK.
Man can name what God has done, but man cannot get God to name what man has done, or is trying to do, in his own name. Legislatures or courts can decree that men can now start marrying men, and those institutions can also, while they are at it, decree that water will start to flow up hill.
(D. Wilson, For a Glory and a Covering, p.32)
With strong calls by Christians to uphold traditional “family values” Peter Leithart encourages us to examine which family values we are seeking to uphold here.
If I set the sun beside the moon,
And if I set the land beside the sea,
And if I set the town beside the country,
And if I set the man bedside the woman,
I suppose some fool would talk about one being better.
G.K. Chesterton
(Wilson, Future Men, 18)
Following on from the previous post, Kevin DeYoung lists 10 items originally by John Witherspoon on raising children and parental authority here.
Of particular note are the following three comments on a parent’s authority or lack of it:
Here’s Peter Hitchens column from Last Sunday’s Mail newspaper on what the government really thinks of motherhood.
The more fuss we make about mothers, what with all those soppy cards and special Mothering Sunday lunches in restaurants, the less we seem to want them to bring up their own children.
You can read the whole article here, and it’s hard to deny that our secular liberal ruling classes want to encourage parents to have as little to do with the upbringing of their children as possible, in the light of the most recent announcement of a £1,200 bribe to parents to ‘warehouse‘ their children in state regulated child care.
It’s clearly not as innocent a move as giving parent’s a choice on how they wish to raise their children, if the state incentivises one means of child-care, while to all intents and purposes it penalises (cutting child benefits) the other option. There’s something more sinister going on.
To illustrate this, below is an exert from a piece in today’s Telegraph quoting an education minister’s response to the accusation that stay-at-home mums are being discriminated against
“We have helped stay-at-home mothers with increasing the free early education from 12.5 hours to 15,” she said. “We all know that childcare is so expensive that parents simply don’t have the choice to go out to work because they can’t afford the childcare. What we’re doing is helping parents make that choice.”
Did you spot that? We’re helping mother’s engage in the high calling of motherhood, enabling them to be the most influential voices in their child’s upbringing, by paying someone else to look after their children for a large proportion of the week. Some choice!
Douglas Wilson, pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, ID, and Andrew Sullivan, British author, editor, political commentator and blogger, debate the question: “Is Civil Marriage for Gay Couples Good for Society?” Peter Hitchens will moderate the debate. Full video of the event will be over at CanonWired.
This article by Joe Carter, on whether Christian parents have a fundamental right to homeschool their children, should be read with concern by Christians in the UK. Whether we chose to homeschool our children or not, it is fairly evident that Western secular government believes it has the right to determine what our children are told.
WHATEVER IS COMMENDABLE 