THE GOSPEL IN THE WALLET
On a recent trip to a Sovereign Grace Church in another city, I met a man named Paul who told me about a piece of paper that traveled around in his wallet for months. It wasn’t a check, it wasn’t a ticket stub from a concert, it wasn’t even a love note from his wife. It was notes from a sermon.
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Paul told me that the notes were from the first time he heard CJ Mahaney preach a sermon on keeping the gospel of Jesus Christ at the center of your heart and life. Captivated, he scribbled furiously. Those notes traveled in Paul’s wallet for months. The message in those notes traveled in Paul’s heart for years. The truth of this message—”Keep the Main Thing the main thing”—shapes his life and how he leads his family to this day.
You may recognize “Keep the main thing the main thing” as a reference to the gospel in 1 Corinthians 15:3: “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures…” Milton Vincent says it another way: “the good news of salvation for hell-deserving sinners through the person and work of Jesus Christ.”
The gospel heart behind “Keeping the main thing the main thing” has shaped an entire generation of our family of churches.
But how can we ensure the gospel shapes future generations as well?
Gospel transfer happens through our example. We’re told that “More is caught than taught,” so faithful Christian parents strive to live authentic Christian lives in the home and the church.
Gospel transfer happens through our instruction, as we teach our children the content of the gospel and train them to make gospel connections in every area of life.
And we transfer the gospel through our discipline as we lovingly correct our children, patiently lead them to repentance, model gracious forgiveness, and help them learn that, as Elisabeth Elliot wrote, “obedience is the gateway to joy.”
We can summarize the heart of gospel transfer in a single word: education.
In other words, education—in the broadest sense—includes all the ways we strive to shape our children’s hearts, minds, and lives. G. K. Chesterton gets this just right:
What is education? … Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. Whatever the soul is like, it will have to be passed on somehow…and that transition may be called education…
If education is the soul of a society passing from one generation to another, then for Christians, the gospel—the good news of salvation in Christ Jesus for hell-deserving sinners—is the core of our curriculum, in our families and in our churches. It is holistic, molding their minds, informing their affections, directing their wills.
Whatever form education takes—formal or informal, in homes and in schools—we have to be intentional. None of us drifts into the kind of rigorous effort that faithful gospel education requires. To pass along the soul of the gospel from one generation to another demands clear vision and faith-filled dedication.
EDUCATION AS DISCIPLESHIP
A student who is in class and does homework eight hours a day, five days a week, spends at least forty of his or her 112 waking hours in school each week. That’s 35% of the time available devoted to schooling. In other words, that is over one third of his or her life during those twelve years.
No wonder that many parents put a great deal of thought into their children’s formal education, but for many different reasons. Some parents are motivated by their children’s future interests: job, career, income, status. Other parents are captivated by a method of schooling: perhaps they have a strong preference for private school, government school, or home school or a particular style of learning or curriculum. Some parents’ educational choices are dictated by their finances or family circumstances.
This is why, as Christian parents, we need to ask: Does the education we are providing for our children actually serve gospel purposes in their lives?
The transfer of the gospel and all of its glorious implications is to be, above all others, the primary goal of our children’s formal and informal education. That our children would come to know Christ and to serve him is near to the heart of every Christian parent, so the gospel should form the goal, determine the means, and shape the content of every aspect of our child’s education.
The question is not whether our children will be shaped and trained through their education, but rather, By whom? And, Into what? All education is discipleship.
THE CHRISTIAN IMPULSE TO EDUCATE
Through most of church history, Christians have had an impulse towards education.
First, in Scripture, intentional transfer of truth to the next generation is assumed from beginning to end and is often taught explicitly. Here are just a few examples:
- Deuteronomy 6:6–9 envisions parental instruction as a way of life, in all of life.
- Psalm 78:5–6 depicts a chain of generational transfer that extends through at least four generations.
- In 2 Timothy 1:5, Paul reminds Timothy that he learned the Scriptures from his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice.
- Proverbs 22:6 and Ephesians 6:4 exhort fathers to train their children, raising them in the faith.
Many more verses like these highlight the importance of teaching for the task of gospel transfer.
Second, we don’t have to look far to find examples in church history of Christians obeying the verses above. From early in church history to the scholastics of the high Middle Ages and especially during the Reformation and lives of the Puritans, intentional, deliberate, self-conscious transfer of the gospel to the next generation has been a priority. Education—again, both formal and informal—has been one of the primary vehicles of that transfer.
I know it is hard to imagine now, but many of our most famous American universities and colleges were originally founded with distinctly Christian aims. Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. Columbia, Brown, and William and Mary. Dartmouth, Rutgers, and Duke. We could do this all day.
These universities and colleges, and many others like them, once had the express aim of teaching shared values to the next generation, or equipping pastors and missionaries to do so. These schools simply expressed the educational impulse of earlier generations of Christian parents and pastors.
Third, our cultural moment is ripe for families and churches to seize the opportunity to give themselves to educating the next generation—in the fullest sense of the word “educate.”
In the West, we enjoy incredible freedoms and have access to unparalleled resources. Has there ever been a better time—or a more urgent time—for us to work hard to ensure that the gospel has been transferred, is treasured, and has begun to transform the hearts and minds of the next generation.
The task of gospel transfer can be daunting, but there is good news for Christian parents and pastors: we can expect God’s grace to empower our efforts and meet the challenge of raising our children to know the Lord in the midst of this dark and dying generation.
Education will start as evangelism, seeking to persuade our children of the truth of the gospel, of their plight as sinners, of God’s salvation in Christ, and of the urgency of faith and repentance. By God’s grace, as our children come to know Christ, education becomes discipleship. Describing gospel transfer like this sounds simple, but that doesn’t mean it is easy.
GOSPEL-CENTERED… EDUCATION
So, to finish where we started, what does it mean to keep the Main Thing the main thing in education or in anything else?
There are many ways to answer this question and in this issue of TELL, we are going to explore what it means to keep the Main Thing the main thing in education—and in families and in churches. Articles are coming for fathers, mothers, teachers, and leaders.
Though the difficulty in transferring the gospel is daunting, it is not debilitating. It pushes us to depend on the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit. To paraphrase Isaiah 50:4, “May the Lord GOD give us the tongue of those who are taught, that we may know how to sustain with a word him who is weary.” Yes and amen. May the Lord help us to give the next generation something worth keeping tucked away in their wallets and, more importantly, in their hearts.