7 Lies Your Kids Will Believe Unless You Do Something - with Elizabeth Urbanowicz

all right we're going to talk today about lies that your kids are probably going to believe even though nobody's directly telling them these lies these are things that we absorb from culture because nowadays unlike in the past like if he was in a farm culture back in like rural wherever 200 years ago your kids are exposed to this much of the world's culture but now it's in the cell phones and it's in the music and it's in the youtubers that they follow and it's in the tv shows that they watch and we're consuming so much that i've started calling this world culture because it's like sort of like planetary you know internet supplied culture and to talk to you about the lies that your kids will believe the things that they will swallow we're going to we're going to talk to elizabeth urbanowicz who's going to be going through these specific lies she has a lot of experience dealing with these types of things she'll tell more about her experience later but i thought first just say welcome elizabeth this is the bible thinker crowd and bible thinker crowd this is elizabeth thanks for joining us thanks so much for having me on today pastor mike yeah absolutely and i'm looking forward to this let's just jump straight into it then we'll talk more about you and the program you've got all that other stuff um what is the first lie that you've experienced with kids that you've dealt with yes so lie number one and what i would say is most foundational that we have to deal with with our kids is the lie that if i feel it it must be true or just this lie that truth is subjective and as i started working with kids and really helping them start to think critically and start to think biblically i was shocked to discover how deeply ingrained this lie is and the more i have worked with parents and pastors and christian educators the more i've seen how shocked they are in not even understanding that our kids have just absorbed this lie from culture when i first started creating resources for others i started getting monthly and now weekly emails from others saying oh my goodness like i had no idea that here i am teaching my kids the truth we talk about truth all the time and they think that the truth isn't true for everyone because one of the activities that i give people to do is just whether it's with the kids at home or at church or in christian school is just to ask them the question is the truth true for everyone is the truth true for everyone and then give the kids a sticky note and have them write down either yes or no and then a justification for why is it true for everyone or is it not and why do you think that and parents and pastors and teachers are always shocked that usually more than half the kids in their cares they know the truth isn't true for everyone it depends on who you are and so just to pause you for a second and tell people a couple things real quick like do this if you can do this with your kids no pressure you just ask them and have them write down their answer walk them through this um the these are the kinds of things you don't know they're believing because they're not expressed outward but then they really affect world view and so we're walking them through this and elizabeth has got a lot of experience this is why for you guys i wanted her to come and talk to you about this she's dealt with hundreds and hundreds of kids and she's actually developed a program for teaching world view to kids which by the way is not easy okay i do all kinds of thinking biblically stuff but the idea of teaching it to like kids under like ten under seven like this starts to get a lot more difficult and you have a special skill set that's why we brought you on here so please uh please continue yes and so usually the older the child is when we start to work with them on this just the more deeply ingrained it is and the more reformative work that we have to do where if we can begin with three four five six seven year olds about thinking about the concept of truth we can be much more formational rather than reformational in our work and a lot of times as christians it's tricky to cover this concept of truth because truth isn't necessarily outlined directly in scripture it's just everywhere assumed just because up you know 150 years ago no matter what world view you adhered to you thought that truth was true for everyone that truth was objective that there were absolute truths out there where now our culture just believes something so completely different so a lot of times all we do is we have our kids memorize john 14 6. you know jesus is the way the truth and the life we're like oh hey there we did it we covered truth with kids we're you know when we look at that passage jesus is talking about him being a true representation of who god is because he is god you know he's showing his disciples who the father is but then when we stop and think about it and think like okay well what is truth how do i actually get my kids to understand that truth is objective that what we need to do is we need to help them discern the difference between objective truths and subjective preferences and you know those of you who are into the world of theology and apologetics and philosophy you probably know the correspondence theory of truth backwards and forwards or this might be a new thing for you that truth is that which corresponds with reality and you know you say that to a five-year-old and like you might as well have been speaking in a foreign language to them good luck but if we can break it down in really simple terms and just say truth is what is real truth is what is real you know that's what it means for something to line up with reality and with little kids if you can get their bodies involved that's a great thing and just have them you know like lift up their arms and shout truth you know every time you say a sentence that's true for a little bit older kids it's great just to do a practical activity that can help them see that truth is what is real usually what i'll do with kids is if i'm working with younger kids i'll send them out on a treasure hunt and i'll give them directions usually hide like candy or chocolate somewhere around and say okay i have a couple different sets of directions your set of directions might be true directions or your set of directions might not be true directions let's see what happens and then you know all the kids go out and only one or one group of them finds the treasure or the prize because only one set of directions was true and then debrief and talk about why didn't everybody find this well let's look at your directions oh my goodness your direction sent you to the completely wrong place like why is that and so then they didn't show me what was real they didn't show me the truth so that kids get the importance of it if you're working with older kids you can have them work on a recipe just give them a recipe give one person the correct recipe other people a recipe that's like completely off that's going to end up disgusting and just so that they can see that truth is lines up with reality truth is what is real so that's just an easy thing for us as adults to be able to do with kids but then we want to dive in even deeper and we want to look at okay so is truth objective or is it subjective and so these terms can be confusing but i just like to say think of grammar okay the object of a sentence if i say tim kicked the ball the ball is the object it's outside of tim where tim is the subject so a subjective claim is anything that can be changed by my preference or my emotions where an object of claim is anything that it doesn't matter what i think feel or believe about it it can't be changed so like an easy activity i say bake cookies with kids or you know anything that they'll enjoy and then talk about what are some things about these cookies that are preferences like i'll always give kids the example i'm super weird i don't like chocolate like if it's a choice between chocolate and broccoli like i'm gonna choose the broccoli every time which is very disappointing i know i'm so sorry my mom's like i don't know how you're my daughter um but i'll tell kids like these chocolate chip cookies like i would say ew gross like that's my subjective preference about it or you might say yum or you might say they're too small they're too big and just come up with a list of things what are things about these cookies that are preferences they're going to change from person to person and then write a list of what are things that are objective that are not going to change like my mom is severely allergic to gluten and no matter how much she might think feel or believe that certain cookies don't have gluten in them her preference her feelings her beliefs don't change the fact either the cookies have gluten or they don't like she can't internally change that um that's just a great way to get kids to start thinking okay what is something that's objective what's something that's subjective and then we can just begin in our everyday conversations oh you know like we're talking about this movie you know like this decision that the character made or you know like this claim the scientific claim or you know like what you're learning in math is that something that's objective like it's either true or it's false or is it subjective like your beliefs can change and this is so foundational and so important so help us help us grab how important this is because um maybe give us some examples of if a kid falls for this if i feel that it must be true how does that affect their views of things like god religion other things that you know when the rubber meets the road what are the symptoms of the wrong thinking here yeah that's a great question because this is a lot of times why we don't even realize it because sometimes the symptoms are very subtle and they might not rise to the surface until we actually have an intentional question and so one one thing that's just that will just automatically arise out of this is just the belief that the bible is true for some people and not for others or christianity is true for some people and not others and not really understanding the objective nature of the claims about christianity like christianity i don't follow it because it makes me feel good like if it's false like we need to be out of here you know if christianity is of no value at all if it's false and then when we think about things like morality or we think about things like gender and sexuality or concepts like justice if our kids just believe you know like that all truth is subjective or that truth changes from person to person they are not going to believe that there is some kind of objective moral code that we are all required to follow or you know that there is there are certain things that we as humans need to do and so this is just going to permeate every area of life if we don't actually take the time to directly address it yeah you know i heard it in a poll that was done not too long ago amongst um was it gen z or it was it the j or was it the generation before them the millennials anyway it was the the poll was basically asking them um if you know are you a christian and for those who said yes i mean i'm an evangelical christian they asked them do you think it's right to proselytize to tell other people about your faith to try to convert them to make them become christian and the majority of them said no wow and i think that is a subtle symptom of line number one that there's this idea of like well yes it's true for me but i'm gonna let you live in your own sort of constructed reality and this has always really bothered me but i've seen it forever like my whole life i've seen it where people deal with math in a very objective way they deal with things like business and school and everything's objective until it comes to religious values and now it's all like make-believe and right and that seems to be like up until the point of death we act like our decisions matter and then and then after death when we stand before god or whatever happens depending on your beliefs you know you may think something different happens we suddenly go into la la land where we act like whatever you believe that's what happens but we've never thought this anywhere else in life like i've never thought with the gluten example that that somebody who's who has a gluten problem could just eat gluten as long as they believe it's not gluten then that's fine for them and and so yeah this is something that's multi-generational it's not just today but it's but it's affecting christian youth so much more because they're being raised up with more exposure to this that sort of thinking yeah right and that's i mean that's something we'll get into a little bit more later but if we can help just set this framework of the difference between objective claims and subjective claims that's one way that we can really help them see suddenly you know that in this religious or spiritual realm it's not everything is subjective because when we look at christianity i mean christianity makes a whole bunch of objective claims you know and it's not just like oh well maybe that's true for you it's like no this is either true or false and if it's true i need to stake my life on it and if it's false i need to find another world view so as you said you know so important yeah yeah big big big stuff so do you find that when you're working with kids on this and you bring these questions in these examples does it does it turn the lights on does it does it cause them to say wow i get it and then when they start asking questions about you know tense culturally tense religious topics are they able to transfer the you know the principles about objective truth over to those issues i found that that yes across the board it does work that they are able to translate them over the younger that you start the easier that it is simply because they've had less time to absorb this false lie from culture like a lot of parents that use my curriculum especially if they don't start until their kids are older will write in and be like okay i think we're going to have to go through that whole truth unit again because my kid still doesn't get it or you know parents that start when they're four years old the kids get it right away there's really no confusion between objective and subjective and that's something i saw when i use this in my own classroom that all of a sudden my students were able to translate this into every area of life like they would bring a book up to me and be like hey like this character just said this talking about like their decisions didn't really matter we could if it was different than someone else because you know everything's different for everybody but oh my goodness like that's not the way that truth works and it was so exciting for me to see like okay they're taking this concept you know this foundational concept we've learned and now they're applying it to every area of life right right yeah there's kind of a i don't know if you deal with this specifically there's kind of this thing that at least that seems to be the case to me which is that people feel like belief has like reality-making properties that the fact that i believe something can make it true and this is in some of the more word of faith churches this is kind of a preaching point that i think is you know they talk about your faith creating things and all this and i'm like oh don't don't please don't do that because it feeds into the same problem and then you when you encounter people of other faiths you feel like their strong faith creates the reality of that faith for them and it's just this whole um you know contrary wise biblically what you're saying is so true right it if if you're believing it it better be true not if you're believing it it is true right suddenly becomes true yeah yeah first corinthians 15 he's like if it's not factually true the faith part doesn't matter anymore yeah and so that's a pretty big deal how about okay let's talk about line number two uh this one is um follow your heart explain like what is it what is the thing that the kids are believing and then how does this affect them and then how do you work them out of that yes well i mean most media that they're going to be consuming you know like whether it's here on youtube or whether it's actually on a show that's being streamed somewhere like everything is going to tell them you know follow your heart be the true you be the authentic you you know just like the phrase we hear all the time like you do you you know you do you so our kids are constantly going to hear this lie that their heart is the most reliable guide for truth you know meaning again that morality is subjective you know like you will find the answer within i was just last week i was at disney world with my whole family and you know with my little nephews and niece and like everywhere there's like i love it there like there's this magical music but then all these lies are just coming it's like like if you have a dream you know like just chase after with all you have you know like or you have the power within you and our kids just hear this all the time you know even if they don't say those things out loud they're absorbing this but the reason i wanted to address this lie second you know as opposed to first is if we actually first cover the difference between objective truths or objective claims that are either true or false and then subjective preferences then our kids will be able to see through this lie because they're going to hear it everywhere you know just you do you you follow your heart but i saw this really quickly with my students that i was teaching third grade at the time and i had taught them the difference between objective claims and subjective claims and then we started looking at okay let's look at some different ways that people view the world let's look at different beliefs that people have about morality and we looked at this idea of you know like follow your heart and this one kid in in my class he raises his hand right away and he's like um excuse me mr brandon's i'm like super confused and i was like what are you confused about josh and he was like okay so let's say my heart tells me that i need this new video game and then my dad his heart tells him i don't need that new video game and i was like oh so are you saying that your heart is going to sometimes tell you something different than somebody else's heart he's like yeah that's like a subjective thing and i was like oh that's interesting so then what's gonna happen and so we just had a great discussion you know about how our hearts you know like are gonna constantly be in conflict that you know you can't practically nobody really lives this way um i mean they might be following their own hearts but not everybody else right um so i just found that we need to help our kids see that our hearts are continually steering us in the wrong direction that we have these subjective whims and one great way to do this is just to directly address this just directly address it and ask our kids you know should we follow our hearts like should you just do you what do you think about it and have this discussion and ask them just so that we can first gauge you know like where are they how you know have they absorbed this live from culture how deeply ingrained is it and then to really just give start giving some hypothetical situations or it could even be personal examples like i mean i don't know about you but if i followed all of the whims of my heart this week i probably wouldn't be doing this live stream because i'd probably be in jail right now like you know like there's so many things that like i in the moment like when i get frustrated or angry that i want to do that would you know like are just clearly not the right thing to do and kids are able to see this so quickly like a lot of times i'll just ask a kid like okay what are some of the things your heart has told you to do today or you know like when you've been playing with your siblings what sometimes what does your heart want to do push him kick him you know like call him a mean name um so they can just see the logical outworking of this that our hearts are not reliable guides to truth you know like we know in jeremiah 17 that you know god directly tells us this that our hearts are desperately wicked you know and and right before that pat that verse you know like god has outlined you know like that when we trust in ourselves when we trust in man you know we're you know like we're like a dried up tree you know as opposed to following him who is the who is the creator of objective reality um so this is another really important one yeah yeah there's like i think of the it's the reversal of proverbs 3 where it says trust in the lord with all your heart this is this is trusting in your heart and then you're sort of trusting um the lord with your heart like as if my heart is gonna even tell me what god wants and who god is it's all gonna come from my heart like all my my purpose and commitments and decisions are going to flow from my heart which is my desires but the biblical bad news it's good news when you realize it's true it's like oh good i'm glad i was warned is yeah the heart is like a landmine of dangerous you know places and things and some of the desires are good and some of the desires are bad and it's yeah and i i'm amazed elizabeth i'm sure you are too i'm sure anybody who's honest with himself is amazed at how quickly and and easily we can justify wicked behavior because we want to do it it's like my imagination goes into overdrive to make it okay to i remember when i was a kid this lame story but my mom says be home by the time the street lights come on right that was the rule for uh for this season of life i was 23 so i had to be home i was just a little kid but um when i was playing i noticed the street lights coming on and i was trying to weigh in my head how much i wanted to not get in trouble versus how much i wanted to keep playing and i noticed the street light directly in front of my house was not on now i knew that was just broken right but i was like technically the street light in closest proximity to my own home is not on and she said the street light's coming so i'm going to keep playing right and i got home so late and then when i and this was that this was the real bad thing right was i told my mom this i was like yeah well the street in front of our house didn't turn on and she was like okay and she just accepted [Laughter] i got away with a lot but um but yeah the danger is like i'm so good at lying to myself like every divorce i've ever seen is a result of someone following their heart every time someone has abandoned some really noble and good task they were doing they're following their heart like it's our hearts are just really dangerous things so um follow your heart when you deal with kids before we move on tell people a little bit about your experience like you you have a program that that i i think people should seriously consider if you have kids that fit what are the ages for the program from the bottom to talk because i know you're adding more yeah yep right now we have materials for ages four through fourteen four through fourteen and if so if you guys have kids four through fourteen please consider it go on their website foundationworldview.com i'm i'm not making a penny from this like i'm not getting kickbacks for each person who signs up like i just purely want you guys to be able to teach your kids it's not easy it's not easy as parents even to know how to walk them through this and elizabeth tell us a little about your story like how you got started because this this whole thing kind of happened organically right yeah very much so i did not see my life heading in this direction like seven years ago um so i was teaching fourth grade and then third grade in a christian school and the students that were in the school they came from these great christian homes um you know i'm passionate about god's word i'm passionate about discipleship so i knew that they were getting a biblically based education all day long for me most of them were fairly involved in the churches that they were attending and several years into my teaching experience i just noticed my students rapidly absorbing ideas from the culture without any question just like one humorous story is one day i was teaching was using a projector the projector went on the fritz i was trying to fiddle around with the wires and i was like okay guys do this gave them an assignment fiddling around with the wires and one of the students goes man this is like really stressful guys we should totally meditate to stay calm you know like kind of funny so i like stop fiddling with the wires and i turn around and like halfway class is on the floor with their legs crossed and their arms out and they're going like and i was like whoa like time out like okay everybody back in their seats we need to talk about this like when we talk about the word meditation like what you were just doing is not what scripture describes like you were trying to empty your minds this comes from like you know eastern religions and like just like blank stares on their faces and i saw so many different examples like this where i was like okay what like what am i doing wrong what you know how can i get my kids to think so i started studying i started taking a few online classes doing a lot of reading at the time i had no idea what apologetics was but i started diving into apologetics and world view and i was like okay this is what my students are missing they can't critically think through everything they're being encountered they're encountering so they need these skills so it's like okay i'm going to teach an after-school class on this so i got permission to teach an after-school class and i went and i looked for materials and i couldn't find anything like at the third fourth and fifth grade level and i was like surely somebody has to be doing something out there and there was like a few things but none of them were designed in a way that was actually going to transform the way that kids thought they weren't actually designed from a way that aligned with the way god designed the human mind to learn was sound educational philosophy so i was like well i guess i can start creating some stuff so i started creating things ran it by like a friend of mine who had a degree in philosophy and theology just to make sure i was like translating it faithfully and the students were like completely transformed like moms were calling me and were like um excuse me my son wants to pause family movie night and evaluate the character's world view and this is great but i don't know how to do it so can you help me um and then other teachers were coming down to my classroom and they're like okay your students are thinking like more deeply about literature and science and mathematics and history than i ever have like what are you doing and i was like i kind of don't know like i'm just giving them these skills and they're like we're not talking about like science or math or history in this class and so that was you know it was just so exciting to see the students at my school transformed and that's when people started hearing what was going on they were noticing the change in these students they're like oh great how can we get our hands on this i was like i'm not a publishing house i'm a third grade teacher like sorry um but eventually after getting several years of those requests i started praying through this and i went back to school got a master's degree in christian apologetics from biola and then eventually stepped outside of the classroom to create resources so that others can just take these resources and implement them with the kids in their life because i know you know most people don't have time to go back to school and you know get a master's and apologetics so i love being able to do this and i just love the journey i think it's so valuable i'm glad you're doing it the reason why i wanted to tell your stories because i want people to know like this happened organically there's a okay this is the same as my own youtube content right like this is just me saying i think there's a need and i think that i can try to help fill that need and then just watching what god does through it you know and and what i want to do is not just tell people what to think here's the christian theology you should believe in but how to think right like walking people through how to think biblically so that no matter what you encounter you can you can assess it and consider it and then process it through a biblical worldview and you're doing this for for kids respect for young people but also for their parents and that's what i love about this curriculum that's why i want to recommend people do it can we tell them about the the coupon code you mentioned earlier yeah yep no that's great so if you're interested in purchasing one of our curriculums to use in your home if you just use the coupon code bible thinker uh we'd be love to give you ten percent off any license that you purchase there you go just just use the coupon code right [Laughter] all right um and again i'm not making anything off nothing there's no payment or exchange of anything which is which is fine god's totally taking care of me so i'm i'm good but um i just want you guys to know there's no motive there except to help you minister to your kids so how about we talk about lie number three which which is that uh love is affirming everything i feel and this sometimes when you write these out they sound ridiculous right but that's because they are ridiculous but nobody ever says it that way the lie is absorbed the lie is you get the packaging of the lie you never open it to think about what the thing is you're really believing and that's what you're doing you're saying hey let's open this and look at it so what is this love is affirming everything i feel what is that yes and you're right it's it's never stated that way it's just assumed you know we hear these things in culture like love is love you know like if you loved me you would do x or if you loved me you wouldn't do x and this is really deceptive because we as christians are called to be loving we are called to love because god himself is love and so our kids are receiving this message just like we are that if we are loving we will never make someone feel uncomfortable you know we'll never make someone feel like they are not enough and so this is just this is really dangerous because the word love is is being completely redefined being completely redefined like so many different words in our culture just we might be talking with someone using the same vocabulary but be talking about two completely different concepts because if we think of you know biblically what love is you know we know in in greek you know there's multiple words used to describe what we just use in english you know one word love but if we think about that highest form of love like the love that god has you know among the members of the trinity the love that god has for us it's this self-sacrificing this thinking of another's best interest and putting that above your own where our culture has really shifted that you know to say that love is a feeling you know love is how i feel when everything is okay and so if our kids aren't if we're not careful with training our kids to actually think through what a word means then they're going to so easily buy into this because the narrative in our culture is that if you tell anyone that what they're doing is wrong or if you don't celebrate what they're doing that might actually go against reality you know as the way god is has a lot has designed it then you know what you are not loving um so what's really important for us to do here is to really get our kids to ask good questions and to pay attention to how words are used that this is something we're going to need to do some direct training of we need to directly ask them you know like what is the definition of love let's actually look at this and then look at okay how are some people defining love nowadays this is in some of the materials i've created we take two whole days just to talk through words with kids because it's really beneficial to look at definitions and then also look at examples and look at okay when somebody's yeah this one's huge this is such a big deal the whole love question because it's it's again this is not something just kids are dealing with and oh parents you're all immune to it i'm like you're probably many of you are going ma i think i've swallowed that one too like you know what are what are some of the the spheres where this will impact us when we when we come to a decision and we make a wrong choice because we think love is affirming everything i feel could you give maybe a couple examples of like real life scenarios yeah so when um i mean just with everything that's going on with gender and sexuality so many parents that i talk to even unfortunately now in the elementary grades they're having their child is going to school with someone who last year was a boy and is now identifying as a girl or last year was a girl and is now identifying as a boy and they're expected you know just without any question to really celebrate that and you know to call that student by his or her preferred pronouns and so you know the narrative then is well if you actually don't believe that he's a boy or if you don't actually believe that she's a girl then you're not loving him or her and so this is when with our kids we can go to the definitions of words but then also anchor this back to the first thing that we talked about the difference between objective truths and subjective preferences and to talk through okay like objectively you know what who is this child you know that they were born a boy they are a boy is it the most loving thing for us to do to tell a lie and to to affirm his subjective feelings or her subjective feelings now this is gonna this can get wildly complicated you know and sometimes it involves actually looking at you know is is the school this classroom the best place for our child to be because they might be too young you know to on a daily basis walk through this but just practically you know knowing that our kids are going to encounter this whether it's at school whether it's in our own families our own extended families but to actually think through like is this loving does is this actually what love is and i love you know in the example in mark 10 where the rich young ruler comes to jesus you know and he tells him you know that he's followed all the commandments and it says that you know jesus looked at him and loved him and told him this one thing you lack and he knew that it was the one thing that that rich young ruler needed but also the one thing that richard young ruler was not going to decide to do and it says jesus loved him you know that is how jesus loved him and that's that's a really powerful example to give to our kids um especially with this with this lie that we're facing in culture yeah yeah and i i think that i almost want to empower people even kids by saying if someone says you're not loving them that doesn't mean you're not loving them exactly parents need to hear this too when their kids tell them like you hate me and and that's the you know that's like the trump card because you won't let me do the thing i want to do you you hate me therefore and the wise parent the secure parent the one understands their world view can look and say no you're just upset because you're not getting what you want and there's there's an element of that that we need to look at all of our culture and say yeah the the um the affirming everything thing is is silly and strange and irrational it doesn't make sense of objective truth and it's also one-sided because we're really not affirming everything you feel we're only affirming things you feel that are in a certain accepted cultural category right so right i feel that male and female are real you know that that apply to almost everybody is male or female those are real like objective physical things and people are going to say well we're not going to affirm what mike feels right there forget that we're not affirming him at all so you find that it's a super inconsistent that's why it's never presented as a clear doctrine believed by people instead it's just can it you know it's more presented as like a standard of behavior approval if you if you submit to this standard of behavior disapproval if you don't yeah right and that's another really powerful thing that we can do is train our kids to constantly be asking questions to be asking what do you mean by that you know why do you believe that's true or can you explain more about this to me because a lot of times what they'll face is they'll face somebody wanting them to justify their beliefs and there are justifications for those you know we need to train our kids for that but a lot of times you know these words are just thrown out like you're not loving you know or you know like you're not doing the loving thing and it's like well what do you mean by love like several years ago i was in downtown chicago and you know like a gay rights activist was like handing out pamphlets and you know i engaged with him and he was like do you believe in equal rights and i was like well that's such an interesting question can you tell me what you mean by equal rights because you know if i had said that i wasn't in favor of homosexual marriage you know like he would have said well you don't believe in equal rights and it's like well i do believe in equal rights you know but i don't believe that that's part of the natural order i don't believe that's part of god's design so if we can train our kids to ask questions there could actually be meaningful discussions usually not but sometimes there could be um but also for them to be able to see like oh it's not me that's not being unloving it's this idea that's being supported is unsupported it's irrational right right yeah then hopefully they have the power to look at the people and be like oh you're mad at me but you're but you're wrong that's very empowering in a positive way you know like you're mad but you're also wrong so all right let's talk about lie number four uh which is that faith is the opposite of knowledge and again this is this is something i've heard from non-christians especially the atheist community online but i've even heard it from christians many times and me you know me i'm like banging my head on the wall please don't say that please stop like it's it's been very important in my christian faith my experience of following christ and to stay committed in my faith that faith is not the opposite of knowledge and um so could you walk us through this one yes and so again this is one of these things that might not be outright said but just viewed as like faith is just wishful thinking like i was just at hobby lobby yesterday which i love hobby lobby great store but i was looking at the home decor and you know like there's so many signs that just say things like this like with faith all things are possible and i'm like what kind of faith are you talking about like because i know people that have faith in like really weird things that if they like followed through with it like they probably die you know like with it's faith is not just like this wishful thinking and we even see this sometimes in christian you know like programming just as you said like in christian circles and it's just like oh my gosh like let's look biblically what faith is like let's actually look and when we see passages about faith we're always seeing that god is constantly asking us to trust in him who we cannot see because everything we can see points to him like before he gives you know in exodus 20 before he gives his people that you know like the decalogue the ten commandments he says i am the lord your god who brought you out of the land of slavery or out of the land of egypt out of the house of slavery and then he gives them you know the commands for how they're supposed to live first he reminds them of who he is and everything they just visibly saw you know for the past several months um so it's just really important that we directly address this concept with our students because our culture you know whether it's secular or unfortunately many times christians just use faith as this subjective personal opinion about things or this wishful thinking last year ligonier ministries came out with their biannual state of theology report and they found that 41 of evangelical young adults so that's not including you know the 60 that you know research has found has already walked away from the church but you know like those who have stayed and those who still consider themselves christians 41 agree that religious belief is a matter of personal opinion it is not about objective truth and it's just like our kids are going to be taught to believe you know like this is just something that you that you hope for it's not something you think through i actually saw this um in a i was teaching sunday school at the church that i was attending back when i lived in chicago and it was between services and i was out in the coffee area and this little boy comes up to me and he's like oh no it's you and i was like well it's great to see you too this morning like why are you so excited to see me and he's like well i hate it when you're our teacher and seeing you here means you're probably going to be our teacher and i'm like what is going on i was like well why do you hate it so much when i'm your teacher he's like because every time i come here i just say jesus as the answer and i always get a prize and the teacher is happy except for you you ask me why jesus is the answer and you make me think he's like you're not supposed to think at church that's what school is for and like i like wow started laughing and i was like well i know you did not mean that as a compliment but that's one of the best compliments any child has ever given me but i thought like wow how sad that he can articulate i go to school i turn my mind on i go to church i turn my mind off and that's a lot of times our attitude towards faith as a youth pastor i would go out of my way when i was asking questions for the students to make sure that the answer wasn't jesus because i didn't want them i drove me nuts now i do i wasn't raised in the church okay so i'd never had that so like to me it always felt weird if i see someone who's been let me forgive me if i say this in a clumsy way but who i'll say has been churched in the cultural sense but i'm not seeing a commitment to christ and whenever i see that i would just be like what am i looking at what is that like i never had that right like i'm the only one going to church in my family you know when i was a kid so i'm like i remember finding out that there was even such a thing as christian music and i think it was like 17 or 18 when i heard about veggie tales i was like what there's like christian media stuff out there so all that was very foreign to me salty the song book i still i still don't know any of those songs but i've heard people that was weird that was really weird it's maybe totally with you on that and and i think that i i would want to drive this point home so hard and just tell people if you have a belief that christianity um that you're a christian and cr and uh religion doesn't really matter about evidence and objective truth it's just a matter of opinion that that damage is the fundamental gospel of christ like i'm not kidding it's it's so much worse than so many other things that you could possibly do wrong because paul says like if christ isn't actually risen our faith is in vain it's futile all of our beliefs don't matter if it's not based on a factual truth of a resurrected christ and if you say then that uh the factual truth of it doesn't matter anymore i don't know if you're even christian like i don't know that you're not i don't know what you are anymore it's so fundamentally different than christianity that i'm like it it's jarring to me like i'm jarred inside to hear that they're doing a polling a significant number of christians evangelical christians at least by cultural names are saying this oh my goodness faith being the opposite of knowledge is a very dangerous doctrine that is not from scripture yeah and that passage in first corinthians 15 that you just brought up that's actually what i recommend and what i do with the kids that god has placed in my care that you know once they understand this difference between subjective preferences and objective truths then to read through that passage in first corinthians 15 and just as a side note most of the bible is written at a third grade reading level so third graders are not too young to be diving into scripture you know even on their own so just read this passage with the kids that god has placed in your care and then ask them okay with everything we've heard paul write to the corinthian church right here is he saying that christianity is a faith that's based on subjective preferences or objective truth claims and then talk through that and then talk through okay so what is he saying that so these are objective claims if these claims are objectively false then what do we do with christianity we put it to the side because it's of no value if jesus did not rise from the dead we are wasting our lives we need to move on to something else where if the object of evidence points to jesus rising from the dead then we put our faith we put our trust in him that the so that they can see and then ask okay so does the bible does it support this blind faith this wishful thinking or does it support this evidence-based trust this evidence-based faith so that they can clearly understand that you know christianity isn't subjective it's not just subjective opinion it's making objective claims and objective claims are either true or false so we have to make a decision either we think the evidence points that way and we place our trust in it or we think the evidence does not point that us that way and we you know we put it to the side right right yeah this affects so many things because it'll kill your evangelism if you think face the opposite of knowledge and all this stuff you you also won't be able to do apologetics you'll be able to give people a reason to believe what you know christianity's saying um also it won't deconversion doesn't matter because you're just following your heart to whatever belief that you think is going to benefit you and sort of you know when i talk an example this um from a previous lie would be i talked to a transgender person and i was asking what makes somebody change from being a man to a woman for instance so if i if i want to be a woman am i a woman now and then he's he says yes yes then you're a woman now i said what about if you go through the sex change now are you does that make you a woman okay yes that too i said okay but what if somebody takes you and forces you against your will and they do the sex change operation all the hormones and everything ar have you actually become a woman no you haven't because you didn't want to and i was trying to kind of narrow down right how we were defining reality what we're getting our real making properties from is i want therefore it's true and it's that applied to um to religious claims and then and then number four you bring in faith is the opposite of knowledge and you just gut any religious claims of objective truth value and all of a sudden yeah it kills evangelism who cares about apostasy and there's no and there's no apologetics this is this is dangerous stuff yeah yeah and that's why you know like what you're talking about and why we why we did truth as the first one because if we can really ground our kids in the objective nature of truth then all of these lies become so much easier to tackle because as you mentioned you know our culture is just saying that it's our subjective understanding that is what makes reality reality where it's that's not true reality is objective i don't get to play with reality by my feelings by my just wishful thinking right right if you've ever been surprised by anything you know that your beliefs don't form reality when you when you wake up and you and you um you get ready for work and then you start driving to work and you realize it's saturday and you don't have to work that day you believed you were gonna work you thought the place was open you thought it was friday you you believed it with all your heart you got up you lost sleep you took a shower you got dressed you put on real clothes and nobody was there because your your beliefs and your intentions and your heart has no truth-making pro abilities it can't just turn reality and but you know analogy i like to give we'll go to number five in a second but i just i just i love this analogy i would give it with the students and i would talk about three guys jumping out of a plane and this is an objective truth analogy and i'll say one guy he jumps out of the plane and he believes with all his heart he's gonna fly so he wears a superman suit and he because he believes he's going to fly so he jumps out of the plane with a superman suit another guy jumps out he believes he's going to go up he's going to fly up into space and so he brings a space suit right and then the third guy he believes with all his heart he's going to fall and he'll die if he hits the ground that hard so he brings a parachute what happens when they jump out of the plane and then i just leave silence right just let the kids talk let them debate it if they need to debate it or whatever and then finally they're like yeah okay okay two of the two of them die one of them lives that's what happens and i said what's weird is that when people go to the grave we think that all of a sudden whatever we believe is going to happen to us but when we jump out of a plane we don't think that so there's there's this weird fantasy land we enter when we enter into the religion zone that i don't want to be part of like i don't know interested in that and if i'm going to make up a religion i'm just going to make up one that suits me better than christianity does seriously because i'm not naturally inclined to do all the stuff that jesus is asking me to do but um anyway all right let's go to line number five so the line number five you have is humans are the product of blind unguided evolution and walk us through this what are you saying what are you not saying with this one yes so what i'm what i am saying with this one is that this is a claim that's just widely assumed it's not necessarily argued um and i'm also not saying now i do not uh i did not adhere to theistic evolution when i look at the evidence for you know creationists i understand that i don't see an evolutionary process being used but there are some christians who do think that god used that mechanism to form creation so i'm not here arguing against that but i'm saying that when i think one thing that we can all agree on as christians is that when we look at the world around us just as scripture says it all points to god's design and so what i'm saying is when we look at the evidence around us it does not lead to just randomly life forming you know out of nothing that it that we're not just we're not the accident of different biological product processes you know that we have we are here with a purpose and a lot of times what we think of you know like everybody you know has heard of evolution everyone's heard of darwin everyone you know everyone's studied this in science but a lot of times we think that this theory is just relegated simply to the public school science classroom where that's not true that this you know this belief so permeates and just undergirds everything else in our society that it you know so many different philosophies have sprung up out of it when we think about even like identity meaning purpose like those are everything that we talk about in society even like so much of just like you do you you create your own identity you create your own destiny kind of has sprung up out of some of this philosophy just because if we are the you know the products of blind unguided evolution there is no objective purpose to our life because there has been no design there is no meaning so the only thing that we're left with is to create our own subjective meaning and also there is no objective value to human life like you know we might agree or someone might agree like well you know we all agree that we have value well why just because we've subjectively as a society agreed to that so so much of what we're seeing in our society just stems from this belief that there is no objective purpose that we are these accidental products of these processes of nature and so what we want to do is we really want to point our kids to see that the evidence in the world around us points to design and then we also want to help them see the logical outworking of the belief that there is no design now this one this lie is one that just from a practical standpoint especially even with really little kids it's really easy to address just to help them see the evidence around us and if you have a scrabble game or if you have bananagrams or you can even just cut out letters you know from printed off from the computer what i'll do is i'll take two different groups of letter tiles and before i'm working with kids i'll just take one group of letter towels and i'll shake it up in a cup and dump it out on the table and then i'll take another group and i'll make it spell a sentence a lot of times i'll do something like life contains information or something like that and then i'll have the child or the children that i'm working with come in and say okay like let's be detectives today let's look at these two groups of letter tiles and we'll look at the first one i'll say okay do you see any words in that like do we see any information it'll be like oh i see an i i see an a okay so we see like one letter words there do we see is it telling us anything like no does it look like the letters got here by accident like they just got spilled or does it look like they got here on purpose and you know like really quickly the kids are like it looks like they got here by accident i'm like okay well could they be here on purpose like could someone have taken them and arranged them in exactly that order like okay yeah and then we look at the next one and say okay like let's read this okay life contains information does this have is this telling us anything is this giving us any information yeah oh my goodness it's a whole sentence like let's look at this the letters are evenly spaced you know there's spaces between the words it's giving us information and then talk about like okay does this seem like it came about on purpose or by accident you know and they can really quickly see on purpose and then we talk about well what about an accident could these letters have spilled out of the scrabble game and fallen like this you know and a lot of times kids will say yes i'm like okay let's try to do it you know like then you gather the letters you shake them up you dump them out be like oh did we get any words no we didn't okay let's try it again you know like and try it five ten fifteen and be like okay like what if we did this a hundred times a thousand times a million times would we get this much information no and then go to the science textbook you know that talks about the amount of information there is in genetic coding and talk about okay so if in the world around us we can't get information without there being an intelligent person what does that tell us about this information in dna so that they're seeing like oh the evidence around us you know like is pointing to we got here on purpose that this genetic coding was actually a plan so that they can see that and then we can take them to scripture you know and see like you know in romans one you know talking about god's invisible attributes you know that are clear to us because he's made them clear in creation in order not to see them we actually have to suppress the truth um you know then looking at other places like psalm 19 you know that just talk about all of creation pointing us towards this designer so this is a really important one um and then to to talk about you know like well what would be you know what what would be different if we got here by accident and then actually to talk through some of those things and this is again this was something the first time i went through this with students i was shocked to see how they were able to kind of connect the dots on the logical outworking of this that two two of the boys who were in my class they they were in fourth grade at the time and their teacher was taking them through a novel study that took place during the holocaust and they were talking about hitler's final solution for the jews in poland and his hatred for the jews and these two boys chimed piped in and they were like you know i wonder if it wasn't so much hatred for the jews but i wonder if it was his belief like about how life started because you know if we just kind of got here by accident then there really is no meaning to life and we could kind of help evolution along you know if we kind of played around with it now i mean i'm not saying like what happened in germany in the 1920s to 40s is very complicated politically and economically and philosophically but just that they were able to connect the dots because eugenics you know just actually you know getting rid of certain groups of un undesirable people does stem from this philosophy you know that we are the product of blind unguided evolution so it's really neat to see how kids can fill in those dots really really quickly yeah yeah i like that and so how much do you get into things like um dna and rna and all you know complicated issues like say abiogenesis the origin of life the uh you know universal common ancestry do you do you get into that kind of stuff that's it that's a good question and it's one that we actually receive frequently so what we do is we just kind of give the basics of looking at just the start of life and we look more from at like an intelligent design perspective and so we just strictly look at okay what is the what is the evidence that we find in dna what is the evidence that we find in life and then where does that point to and so we get into a little bit just behind just genetic coding but we don't get into a whole bunch of other issues like that we leave that what our goal is is our goal is to set the foundation that then other subjects and teaching can build on top of so then they can take what they've learned here and then apply that in the science what in whatever context they're learning it yeah so i you it sounds like you're using stuff from like say stephen meyer or michael baihe or those guys maybe perhaps i mean they do a lot of like detecting design type stuff that i found very beneficial and i think it's very easy to break it down to kids because it's so intuitive and natural to detect intelligence behind things and um so yeah that stuff that stuff seems pretty good i um i think that's probably one of the more challenging subjects to probably cover with kids and trying to police yourself on how much you'll get into because you if you want to pretend that you cover all the issues of science with your seven-year-old it's a joke right right and it won't be done well yeah right right and that's one thing that that we encourage you know even if people don't choose to use our curriculum if they're just going to be you know working with their kids with their own stuff we just encourage them to like okay seek out what is the main issue that you want to cover you know because unless you know you have someone in your family you know who is in microbiology you know or something like that it's going to be hard to study these concepts in enough depth to really get an in-depth understanding and to present them well to kids so just focus in on one thing that you'd really like to learn and dive deep in that rather than getting like just like a shallow broad overview of so many questions that's that's one thing we really encourage adults to do yeah yeah and so the bottom line is to say to the kids there's evidence here there's a lot of evidence here that there's an intentional design when we look around at the universe and we look inwardly at our own biology and all that and that is giving us evidence for god and then you go to romans 1 psalm 19 and you're like just like the bible says you know and so i like that a lot i think that's fantastic so um if you guys are interested we're still two more lies to cover um but it's foundation worldview.com right that's the website correct yeah and you guys can check out the curriculum there it's it's actually priced because i've looked at online curriculum and i've paid to go through programs and stuff before but you guys pricing's really good so how much is it for a parent to do it and how much is the coupon code for that we're giving them today yeah so coupon codes for 10 and for a family license it's 175. what's and that lasts for how long it lasts for a year you get to choose your start date you could buy it now and start it next june if you wanted yeah and that's and how many lessons is that in a year so we have 30 lessons so our goal is we know that parents especially are really busy with all the things that they have to do with their kids and we wanted to make it manageable so if you do it once a week for 30 weeks at maximum it takes you an hour so a school a school year is generally 40 weeks so we give you a school years plus a little bit of wiggle room for not being able to cover it here and there this is what excited me about it when you gave me these details a while ago i was like oh that's that's totally doable like that's doable for a parent who's busy you just sit down for one hour you guys watch the video stuff you you talk to your kids it doesn't take a ton of prep for the parent to do and then you have you know a year to do 30 sessions that's that's very doable and the price is is really low actually considering it's like five dollars or something each or something like that i did the math now i don't remember but let's talk about number number six uh line number six this is a very interesting one i'm interested to hear what you're gonna say about it you are the one you've been waiting for so i actually this line did not come from me i lifted it out of the second frozen movie it's like the climax of the second frozen movie when elsa it's okay it's not worth your time but but elsa's mom tells her basically you are the one you've been waiting for and so this lie isn't said many places in that in those words outside of frozen two but it is told in so many different ways in our culture um that you know like you are enough you know like look within for the strength that you need you can be anything that you want to be you determine your destiny basically you can rescue yourself because it's it's this view that okay the problem is out there like all of this guilt and shame and fear and brokenness that you feel it's just this pressure from the outside you have all that you need within and i actually even see this a lot of times within the christian community like i i saw a facebook post recently from um from someone that i knew a mom of a former student and she had posted how like written on the bathroom wall in the christian high school was this you know it just said like you are enough and i mean like granted of all the things people could be writing on the bathroom wall that's really not that awful so like yay yay for the win there but she had just written she was like i she was like i love this like hashtag truth and then i was like really truth like you are enough like that's kind of the exact opposite of the gospel that you know like that we are created in god's image and so we have this value that no one can strip from us but we are also irreversibly broken you know like we cannot rescue ourselves like the price was god himself you know bearing our sin and so this is a lie that that you know we really want to make sure that we're covering with our kids because from the biblical worldview like yes we can wholeheartedly affirm like you are unique you are special not because of your gifting not because of your looks not because of the things that you do but because you bear the image of the holy god like you are incredibly valuable but then we're going to depart from culture and that we're going to say no the problem like yes there are problems out here that do affect us but the primary brokenness is within and the only hope the only solution for that is jesus so we want to do two things we want to make sure that we help our kids see their objective value and the grounding for that value and their internal brokenness um so this is again like keep going back to line number one because everything you know like everything is grounded in that understanding of objective truth and just talk about like okay so every human does every human have value you know and asking our kids that and giving them an opportunity to talk through that and then ask where does that value come from is it like an objective truth or is it a subjective feeling and so then talking through okay like if we believe that we got here accidentally you know if we're just the product of blind unguided evolution we got here accidentally where does that value come from it doesn't come like there is no objective value it's just subjective like maybe our society we all agree like yeah humans all have value but that's still subjective because then when society changes its opinion what are we going to do then there's not going to be that value anymore we can also help them really just like see you know like in christianity that this is grounded you know objectively by taking them directly to genesis 1 26-28 you know that talks about humans being created in the image and likeness of god that this is something that is so powerful in the christian worldview for those who hear that their value comes from themselves one of the big problems with this on a real experiential level is that a lot of people don't feel that valuable and so they bolster themselves up with with confidence makers you know so whether it's you know trying to get people to like their appearance or like the way they act or find some skill they're good at that they can kind of make their identity or maybe find a niche identity usually it's certain identities have a certain kind of approval so like punk rockers a little while back you know there was it gave you like a niche it gave you like a person people to belong to and you could find your your value in that and so it kind of creates a sense of confidence or many people they find their confidence in their transgender homosexual lesbian identity whatever it is and these are to me they're kind of confidence makers because confidence is my value and so i feel like i really really need that confidence and christianity kind of takes a whole different approach and says you you actually feeling insufficient is part of what causes you to be dependent upon the lord and you don't have to fix that you don't have to fix the fact that you don't feel like you're enough that's okay neither am i jesus is enough god's enough your value ultimately comes from him so that's unstained by your not enoughness and your and you're and your confidence is in christ and your boasting is in christ and your comfort is in christ and your weakness makes you even more dependent on him so but paul says i've learned to rejoice in my infirmities i've learned to to rejoice about my weaknesses because then the power of christ can rest upon me and he looks up and he's like my whole ministry it's all glory to god oh look at what what how wonderful god is and so this to me is a healthy value and a healthy confidence it's a confidence placed in someone else that bolsters up your own courage that's not based upon your self-evaluation and that to me is so valuable and so good and and it's hard to give it to people who feel that what you're really doing is you're robbing them from their sense of value because you're telling them that they're not enough right you're taking my value away and i'm like no that never gave you value anyways you're just creating psychosis like all you're doing yeah creating all kinds of like like weird psychological problems for yourself yeah i mean we can't bear the weight of that because as you said you know like when we're anchoring that in christ you know like in our identity in him and in being image bearers of god like god is the only one who can bear that weight you know like we can't that's just like crushing um you know so yeah just praying that as we evangelize that people see the truth and the beauty of the gospel and just that that you know like god is the only one he's sufficient to bear that weight i'm not the one i've been waiting for i'm not good enough i'll never be enough i will never be enough but by the grace of christ i'm given the courage and hope to press on to seek and serve him and to know that my ultimately to me my enoughness comes at the glorification when when we're entering to god's kingdom we have a resurrection and and uh we're given you know this corruption must put on incorruption and all that until then i'm just learning how to be not enough and for him to be enough and that's an incredible character growth thing um and i feel like the youth are especially prone to this because the older people tend to be they've gone through so many humbling experiences that that they they just can't have that kind of shallow arrogance as easily as the youth can't because they just they do they tend to you know they just don't see they don't get it and they will when they're older they'll be like man i don't know what i was thinking well that's also i mean that that's one of the reasons why it's so important that we be wise in not sheltering our kids completely from difficulty i know i'm i'm not a parent so i don't know the emotional struggle and difficulty that is you know firsthand of allowing our kids to walk through difficult things but by allowing them to walk through challenges and to walk through struggles that's part of what this does you know is teaching them to rely on the gospel you know like to rely on christ that they are not enough that they do not control their destiny you know like yes we make decisions that are going to affect the way that our life is going to go but ultimately we are not the ones that are in control of that so that's really important that we don't just smooth the road out completely for our children yeah yeah and let me just remind everybody that the value of what elizabeth is talking about and the things that we're talking these seven lies is that what they do is they give you know what i keep thinking of it's kind of a weird analogy but of diagnostic tools like these are the this is the way you assess a problem so i used to work at a computer place assembling computers and i would do some kind of tech stuff like hardware you know checking to make sure hardware is working at one point i went to a person's house right and or their business excuse me and they their computer wouldn't work we had built a computer and installed it for them and i start you know one of the things you do you start unplugging everything and then you boot up the system and you see if you get the beep for the memory check and all this and you're checking to see is it working right and i blew it up and it works so then one by one i start plugging back in all of the stuff that was previously plugged into the system the monitor the keyboard the mouse the printer through the pro process i found out the printer was keeping the computer from functioning this is a really weird problem like this is not normal but with the printer plugged in it wouldn't boot properly and so then we ended up like doing i forget what it was many years ago like whether it was just drivers or something we ended up fixing the problem what this program does is it kind of like unplugs everything so to speak and then gives the ability to sort of put back in these ideas how do you see value how do you see truth how do you see confrontation see disagreement things like this and then you find out where the problems are and you address those issues and then it can like boot properly in my analogy so your kid's brain can be can be clear and and thoughtful and biblically minded so right and even sometimes just to know if you know even know where do we need to dive in deeper you know that we're going to be covering all these things but where do we need to camp out and where is our kid really struggling and where are they not believing truth like that's it's really important just for those things to come to the surface yes yes so oh the value of it is really big and i'm really grateful you guys are doing it so what's line number seven the last lie what is that lie um a good god wouldn't judge that this this is one that i didn't i wish i had recognized earlier on in my teaching um and i didn't recognize it till later but our kids are just like we are they're constantly hearing the message don't judge it's wrong to judge who are you to judge and the first time that i realized that this was an issue even with my third graders because i thought like oh yeah i'm hearing this all the time but i mean my gosh they're eight years old they're not hearing this yet one day one afternoon i was teaching handwriting and i was walking around and i was correcting you know my kid's handwriting and one of my students as i was correcting let's say it was the cursive letter j i don't remember what letter it was but i was like oh you know what actually you made this j backwards you need to go this way she looks up at me and she goes don't judge me and i was like so taken aback i like burst out laughing and i was like okay let's let's take a step back here let's talk about this and i was like is there a right way to make a letter j and she's like yeah i was like okay then are there some wrong ways yeah okay so it's objective um as your teacher is it my job to help you make it correctly yes so i do need to judge your letter j um but this is something that our kids just really quickly absorb but now just with the prevalence you know over the past five ten years of progressive christianity that the lie has gone even further that not only are we not to judge but if god was a good god if he's a good and loving god then he won't judge that god won't judge and now i mean on on the surface level this sounds appealing you know because we're just so used to hearing don't judge it sounds like yeah of course god is going to be loving of course he's going to be compassionate like of course he's not going to judge we're we're buying into those false definitions of love and compassion because this you know like this idea of a good god not judging you know it's not supported biblically and it's not even just supported by reality in the world around us like think of a like think of somebody who's on trial for rape you know like someone that like violently raped someone else and the judge just sitting there and saying you know what i'm just gonna i'm gonna take it easy on you this time you know what just don't do this again like i mean can you imagine like the person and their family who was like you know like brutally raped and then now this rapist is just left you know to continue you know harming other people like a good judge wouldn't do that and so what we need to do is we need to directly address this with our kids is we need to help them see that judgment that that just judgment is both good and it's loving so what we need to do again we need to circle back to the definition of words it's really important we get our kids in the habit of asking what does this word mean you know what does this person mean when they use this word and so looking at well what does it mean to be good what would it mean for god to be good you know like in looking at biblically it means that to be morally perfect you know in that in that term and so then okay if god is perfect would a perfect being judge now a really practical way to do this like a lot of these things like philosophically our kids are just gonna be like i don't know what you're talking about so just get really practical so play you can either play a board game or you can play a game out you know like a game outside in your yard and have one of your kids not follow the rules like tell them specifically like i want you to do whatever you want in this game you know like as long as you don't you know physically hurt someone like i want you to stream whatever you want you don't even have to ask there's always a kid somebody's gonna do it um but just just do that and then you as the ref don't call anything you know and like kids are gonna get so frustrated because we have this innate sense of justice that like this is the rule and you didn't follow it and you're in charge and you need to do something about it and so don't let it go on too long because there could be real anger issues but you know like stop it and then debrief and talk about what just happened you know okay so there were these rules there was a right way to play this game and this person didn't play by them and then what did i do oh was i a good judge in this game was i a good wrath no i wasn't and so then to take them back to scripture you know like in passages of scripture that talk about judgment you know in matthew 25 when jesus is separating the sheep from the goats you know in second peter just talking about the day of the lord coming but that god is he's not slow to keep his promises as some consider slowness but he he desires that we'll come to repentance so god is a just judge and he also made a way for us to be forgiven and he wants us to be reconciled to himself so this is just a really important one because our kids are going to continually hear in culture you know not to judge i think another fun exercise you could add to that would be if if one team in particular is cheating then you as you as the judge you know as the coach or whatever the person who's the arbiter rules could ask them to all raise hands who wants me to step in and make a judgment here who doesn't want me to step in and make a judgment here and you'll watch the violating team raises their hand i don't want you to the team that's been wounded i do want you to right and then vice versa this will probably keep happening back and forth right and until you hopefully have kids that are just raising their hand going yeah we just need we just need it because what i find is that um the people who think that the justice system is the most messed up are usually the people who are in prison as a result of the justice system now i'm not saying it's not messed up i'm not pretending it's perfect god's perfect our justice system is of course involves a bunch of humans and we're we're the way we are so um yeah so it's got problems but the people who kick the most against judgment are those who realize that it would fall upon themselves and i feel like this is a big deal here a good god wouldn't judge is is also coupled with this sense that people have of like i really don't want to be judged you know and then let's tie it all together right and and i am the one i've been waiting for so i'm i'm actually a lot better than than than what this bible seems to say than i am plus truth is you know it's not really objective it's more subjective and my faith can kind of create my reality and so i'm going to believe that god won't judge me because i want to believe that i'm a good person because a good god in my version of good which is perfectly acceptable wouldn't judge and then all of a sudden you have like what i would call pop christianity or pop religion kind of world culture type religion that's just a bunch of um it's it's the old picture of the guy picking himself up by his own bootstraps like he grabs his he grabs his it's funny you know it's an old saying because it uses the phrase bootstraps like what is even a bootstrap what's a but i guess shoelaces i don't know so he grabs his own shoelaces he's lifting himself up off the ground like that's what all of these lies end up resulting in yeah except he's not actually off the ground he's just trying to convince himself he's off the ground yeah his speed maybe yeah so okay foundationworldview.com you guys can go check it out i hope you will the the coupon code for you 10 off is from is use use the word bible thinker one word there bible thinker and um elizabeth urbanowicz thank you so much for joining us any last encouragement you want to offer or word of advice maybe to parents and people in the audience well i just want to encourage them that the fact that they're watching this means that they care and that's a really important thing that god you know god entrusting you with a child and with their discipleship is it is a weighty matter so i would just encourage you to continue seeking god because that's going to be one of the primary you know influencers in your own child's life and then to really be intentional about making sure that they understand the objective truth claims of the christian worldview amen amen have have hope it is not time to despair because of the darkness it is a time to shine because you're the light and the harder it is the the harder we have to wake up and pay attention to these things and it might mean being tired and committing to doing a little bit of extra work but it's actually not much i mean one class 30 times a year for an hour like 30 hours a year like that's i think that's doable i think that's doable so thank you so much for joining us everybody lord bless you i'll be with you on friday for another q a we're going to do taco your questions which you've probably added several in the comments that i was unable to look at today so we'll tackle that on friday and i look forward to it

Channel: Mike Winger

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Id: Xxog0VWWOEw

Length: 77min 0sec (4620 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 27 2021