The QUESTIONS episode addresses whether churches should deny membership to families using public schools, arguing that state-sponsored secularism contradicts biblical training. While affirming the incompatibility of public education with Christian upbringing, the host rejects rigid demands like immediate homeschooling as "penance," instead advocating for a reasonable timeline where families agree to theology and create transition plans. This approach avoids Roman Catholic-style heresy while critiquing feminism's economic impact on single-income models, ultimately proposing that membership hinges on theological alignment rather than instant compliance with specific lifestyle changes. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Proving Repentance Through Works00:06:59
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Question from the Youngs Do you believe that a family should be denied membership in the church if they do not homeschool or have their children in Christian education?
Me and my wife were told that we had to prove repentance.
Okay, prove repentance.
Don't like that.
By homeschooling and by my wife quitting her job to be in the home.
Before we would be considered for membership, your thoughts, please.
Great question.
Okay.
Christians cannot use public school, period.
They can't.
So I agree with that.
Go ahead with this one, Nathan.
Just keep the question up because I'm going to take a couple segments.
All right.
So Christians can't use public schools.
Public schools, neutrality is a myth.
That's what I've been doing this whole episode.
Moral neutrality is a myth.
Religious neutrality is a myth.
Worship neutrality is a myth.
All right.
So Public schools are state schools.
It's pluralism.
It's secularism.
It's, and the biblical word would be, it's polytheism.
It's public atheism.
That's what it is.
And so your children are being taught to hate the living God.
And so, yes, as a father who's commanded to train your children up in the fear and admonition of the Lord, that's mothers and fathers, but chiefly falls on fathers.
Fathers, Ephesians chapter 6, do not exasperate your children, but train them up in the fear and paideia, the Christian curriculum.
The Christian curriculum, the fear of the Lord, and Christian teaching.
Okay?
So you got to do that.
You have to do that.
You can do it.
There are multiple ways to do it, and there are debates to be had about which way is better.
But there are certain ways that you can't do it.
And you can't do it by using a public, atheistic, polytheistic, God hating school.
That's called a public school.
So you can't do that.
So your church is right that your kids can't go to public school.
Now, here's the deal, though.
This is where I would disagree with your pastors.
It's a good sentiment, but I wouldn't enforce it this way.
This is not how I would practically carry it out.
So, me and my wife were told that we had to prove repentance.
So, that you got to be careful with, all right?
So, Acts mentions this phrase, this concept of doing good works in keeping with repentance.
But there's a fine line between penance and good works in keeping with repentance.
And I've done some teaching on this before, actually with Adi Robles, I think.
But one of the ways I think, just practically, to distinguish between Penance, which is heresy, that's Roman Catholicism, working for God's grace, working for atonement, working for forgiveness, and doing good works in keeping with repentance.
Is it, this is just one way to distinguish between the two.
When it comes to penance, man will always tell you what to do, what your penance is specifically.
You must do this.
Your penance is this many Hail Marys and this many Our Fathers and this, you know, blah, blah, blah.
Whereas doing good works in keeping with repentance, the Holy Spirit, Decides in because he governs and controls your sanctification, he decides what those good works are.
So, for instance, somebody could repent.
Now, it's going to fall into the category of that particular sin, though.
So, there are some baselines.
It's not a free for all.
There's some guardrails on this.
So, if a guy is claiming to repent of sexual immorality, well, doing good works in keeping with repentance, so that we know that repentance is genuine, is going to look like him being sanctified, doing good works in repentance.
That arena of he failed in sexual.
So there's elements of sexual purity.
Okay?
But the Holy Spirit still dictates them.
So if we say, you are not repentant, we will not view you as repentant unless you repent of your sexual immorality by getting covenant eyes on your laptop and selling your iPhone and buying a flip phone.
And the guy says, well, I can't have a flip phone because of the nature of my work.
And And so, I'm not going to do that.
But I am going to get accountability partners and I'm going to do this.
I'm going to do these other things.
And then he actually is bearing good works in keeping with repentance.
As six months go by and the pastor says, But you didn't do it our way.
Well, there's your sign.
Boom.
That's a clear.
So, you see what I'm saying?
So, the specificity of what those good works in keeping with repentance are is usually a good sign of whether you're getting into the realm of penance, man saying, You must repent like this, you must do good works and keep it with repentance.
I would say yes and amen.
And this is precisely what those good works will look like.
I would say, whoa, hold it there, Pope.
That's Rome.
Cut that out.
So let's not do penance.
Let's not be heretics.
Now, here's the deal with what you're saying, and I'm sure there's a myriad of other details, variables that you could share, but based off of what you've written, me and my wife were told that we had to prove repentance.
So I'm going to interpret that, giving your pastors the most benefit of the doubt that I can.
I'm going to interpret that as me and my wife were told by our pastors that we needed to bear good works in keeping with repentance by homeschooling and by my wife quitting her job to be in the home before we would be considered for membership.
So, first, I would say I would disagree that homeschooling is the only option.
I think it's a great option.
It might be even the best option.
But I do not believe that I biblically can make an argument that it's the only option, right?
Brian Sauvay and Eric Kahn and Dan Burkholder.
The King's Hall guys, you know, with their St. Brendan, I think, St. Brendan's Academy in Ogden, Utah, with their church.
And that's their classical Christian school.
And they do great work.
And I think that's a great option.
And Eric Kahn has actually made some decent arguments for why he thinks that sending your kids to a classical Christian school is better than homeschooling.
And I think he has some merit to what he's saying.
Ruined Culture and Economics00:03:00
And I would push back on some things and I would agree with some things.
And then, you know, you've got, of course, Doug Wilson with Logos, his school.
So, number one, I would say it doesn't have to be.
So, that's getting a little bit more specific than I would like.
I think we're drifting.
I'm not saying that is penance definitively, but we're getting a little popish.
You know what I mean?
So, that's a little more popey than I would like.
Let's move away from the poopy popey into the more of the let's let the Holy Spirit decide what those good works are.
But, okay, then what can we say definitively?
Well, we can say no public school.
You can say that strictly from the Bible.
That's not penance, that's Bible.
Okay, here's the final thing that I would say though.
In our current moment, cultural moment, where Christians have been so deceived and lied to by pastors, Big Eva, Gospel Coalition, this and that, well, your kids are missionaries.
And where our economy has been destroyed by feminism, right?
Nobody loves feminism more than men, right?
Especially rich men who can now pay their employees less because when that employee says, but I have a household of five, a wife and three kids, this isn't a livable wage, the employer can just say, Well, who gave you the audacity to think that you can have a single income family?
Why is your wife not working for me, too?
Right?
Feminism liberated wives from building up the household of their man, namely their husband, to building up the house of the man, namely corporate America.
And women were foolish enough because women do tend to be deceived more easily than men.
They were foolish, and men didn't guard women from this, just like Adam failing in the garden.
Women were deceived by the serpent, in this case, Leviathan, the state, and culture, and all these kinds of things in Hollywood, to thinking, I'm liberated from the shackles of children and marriage and family.
And women now are less happy.
And they've been shackled, liberated from the shackles of a white picket fence in suburban America, and then shackled to working for some Fortune 500 company 60 hours a week and never getting to have children and watching their womb shut down and their biological clock.
You know, running out and then all of a sudden having massive regrets, right?
So, yay, feminism.
Okay, so feminism.
But that's still a reality.
So, because of the failure of the church, the failure of men not standing up, and then perverse men who love feminism because feminism serves men, doesn't serve women, it serves men, wicked men.
Because of all those things, faithful men being cowards, wicked men lying, and then foolish women taking the bait and being deceived, and all these different things.
And I would include the 19th Amendment.
And that women's suffrage, all these things ruined our country.
They did.
They did.
And they ruined our economy because everything's tied together, right?
A New Year of Grace00:08:24
It's not just independent compartments.
It's like spaghetti.
Everything affects everything.
So you ruin culture, it affects politics, it affects economics, all these different things.
Because of that, and then that's just the larger picture, right?
The last hundred years.
Well, let's just look now more narrow the last two years.
Joe Biden, inflation, all these things.
It is really, really, really hard for a family that hasn't.
Had this theology of understanding the importance of children being raised with a Christian education and a single income home and all those kinds of things, it's really hard to all of a sudden come into that theology, change your mind, but then practically and fiscally, financially make it happen.
And so I think we're just living in a time where there's going to have to be a lot of grace.
Not grace from pastors saying, oh, public school is fine.
No, but grace saying it's okay for it to take some time.
So this is what I would do in my church.
I would say, number one, it doesn't have to be homeschool, it just has to be Christian school.
Christian homeschool or Christian school, but it can't be public school because that's anti Christ school.
We don't send our kids to anti Christian school, okay?
So it's got to be Christian school, and um, and and the mom, uh, the mother, uh, she needs to be a keeper at home.
That's Titus chapter two.
That doesn't mean she can't work like Proverbs 31 you know, have her handed this or handed that, but her chief ministry is working in the home with the children.
Um, so even if if they use a Christian classical school and she has a few hours each day, it still needs to be home oriented, children oriented.
She's a lover of her children.
She is a keeper at home, those kinds of things.
So that's all non negotiable.
But what I would say is it doesn't just have to be homeschool.
Let's broaden out.
I think that's getting a little bit too specific.
There can be other Christian options of education.
And then, two, let's broaden the options of Christian education.
And then, let's also lengthen the time to make this happen.
So, what I would require if somebody was pursuing membership, I would say if it came up and I had knowledge about, oh, kids go to a public school.
And they're like, yeah, kids go to public school.
Our kids are missionaries.
We view our kids as missionaries.
And it's like, well, okay, do you enlist your seven year old in the army?
Then why are you doing it in spiritual terms?
Why are you enlisting your seven year old in a spiritual war?
No, no, no.
Kids are not missionaries.
They're not soldiers.
Kids are in training.
And once they're grown and the arrow is fully fashioned and sharpened, then we send them out.
We don't send them out when they're seven, we send them out when they're 18 or whatever, when they're men, when they're women, when they're adults.
And so I would correct them and I'd say, no, no, no, no.
You got to change the way you view kids.
Change the way you orient the home, your view of the home.
Your kid needs a distinctly Christian education, and the state will not provide that.
So you can't do that.
But then I would say, but there are multiple options.
There's homeschooling, there's hybrids, you know, there's different chapters and classical conversations, and there's Christian schools, and there's this and that, and this school of thought, and that school of thought.
And you can do Logos online with, you know, curriculums that you can get, all these different things.
So there's a lot of different options.
And because it's so hard right now, it's so hard because we've so sinned against.
The home, the household.
And there are economic implications to feminism, there's economic, you know, and political implications and all these different things.
What we would require for membership is that you simply agree.
Not that you make it happen before becoming a member, but you agree.
You agree that it is right and good for women to be oriented around the children and keepers at home.
You believe that Christian kids, Christian children must receive a Christian education and that they cannot be sent to public school.
And you agree that for the most part, you're trying, seeking for the husband to be a protective provider and work towards a, for the most part, a single income family.
Husband working out of the home, wife working in the home, some variants and things like that.
There are details, you know, but, and the kids getting a Christian education.
So, first, let's change your theology.
Repent of your bad theology.
That would be required, repenting for your bad views.
And then the good work in keeping with repentance wouldn't be that you made everything happen.
And that you're no longer a two income because that takes time.
The good works in keeping with repentance is you repent of your bad theology, and then the good works are that you're making a plan.
It doesn't mean that you accomplish it all overnight, but you're making a plan, and that you're able to say to your pastor, We've got a year plan or even a two year plan to try to scale back, you know, for me to try to make more as a husband, for us to lower our budget as a family.
And I got to go and be with my kids here in just a second, but lower our budget as a family.
To live on less, to get mom out of work or at least working part time, and for us to be able to do this with a kid's education so we don't have to do public school.
We've got a plan.
And I would say, wonderful.
Welcome into membership, right?
I think that that's the way I would handle it.
All right, all right, all right.
Stop twisting my arm.
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