To celebrate Easter to good folk at Songs for Saplings are making their whole collection of Christian songs completely free. That includes downloadable albums, sheet music, lyrics – the lot.
We have really loved how their Questions with Answers CDs have helped us to worship God together as a family and we’ll be downloading the material we don’t yet have this week.
I’d highly recommend you do the same by clicking here.
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
For anyone interested in an extremely helpful and in depth review of two of the most popular “children’s story Bibles,” David Shaw has done a great job here. It’s a long read but well worth it as it provides a helpful way to think through the important issues in reading God’s Word with your children.
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:
A helpful post for parents from Justin Taylor summarising Anthony Esolen’s book, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child. It’s available from Amazon as a hardback, but you’d be far better off buying it in the Kindle version.
1. Begin by rearing children almost exclusively indoors
2. Never allow children to organize their own worlds of exploration of that which is interesting or challenging
3. Don’t risk allowing children to explore machines or encounter those who know and use them
4. Replace fairy tales with cliches and fads
5. Denigrate or discard the heroic and patriotic
6. Cut down all heroes to size
7. Reduce all talk of love to narcissism and sex
8. Level all distinctions between man and woman
9. Distract the child with the shallow or unreal
10. Deny the transcendent
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!
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.
We’ve recently picked up a new children’s Bible, The Gospel Story Bible – Discovering Jesus in the Old and New Testament, by Marty Machowski, which you can find out more about here. So far I really like what I see and it looks like it will be a useful resource to use with our children. Released a couple of years ago, Justin Taylor has some good things to day about it (and some other good children’s Bibles) here.
Among the benefits of this particular children’s Bible is that it has an accompanying Daily Devotionals to Draw Your Family To God – a series of 156, 10 minute family devotionals that can be purchased for an additional amount.
Whilst on the subject of children’s Bibles, I discovered today that The Beginner’s Bible, which we have amongst the Bibles we’ve used with our young kids over the last few years, has an accompanying website with a number of useful resources to download from it.
The newspapers have been full of comment this week on how there has been nothing to support families in the government mid-term review, something that the Christian Institute highlight here.
However the majority of UK Christians have not woke up to the fact that our secular establishment are actively seeking to ensure they do anything but support the family unit, as it’s a huge threat to their own agenda.
The latest move to decrease or remove child-benefits while at the same time increasing the childcare tax allowances to support working mothers by providing for nursery care, is a prime example of this in action.
The government has no interest in seeing parents raise their own children – they may end up becoming free-thinking enough to oppose the very worldview the secular government is frantically preaching.
Far better to reward parents for indoctrinating their children from infancy with the message that the state is their god who provides for their every need, than allow godly parents to nurture young plants that will in time, become the Lord’s oak trees.
WHATEVER IS COMMENDABLE 