The Times told about a 15-year-old girl who had been identifying as a boy at school. The mom saw a boy’s name on a homework assignment: When she asked about the name, the teenager acknowledged that, at his request, teachers and administrators at his high school in Southern California had for six months been letting him use the boy’s bathroom and calling him by male pronouns. The article went on to explain that the California school “is one of many throughout the country that allow students to socially transition – change their name, pronouns, or gender expression – without parental consent.

We know that there are good teachers and good schools out there. Many teachers are Christians – they go into the profession because they love God, love children, are passionate about their subject matter and have a gift for helping children learn.
Many do excellent work, and I’m thankful for the great teachers my children had and the good schools they attended.
But at the same time, I’m very aware that our education system has serious problems. The news is filled with stories about bad things happening in public schools – and some private – across the country.
It really feels overwhelming and like we’ve reached an urgent tipping point: Parents must have educational freedom – to give their children better opportunities to learn and grow, to protect them from chaotic classroom environments and underperforming schools, and to safeguard them against radical and sexual ideologies.
Here are just a few examples of problems in education that have been reported by news outlets. They illustrate why parents need school choice and educational freedom.
Violence and Bullying
Rod Dreher, author of Live Not by Lies, recently highlighted a story from The San Francisco Chronicle. He writes:
A Ukrainian refugee girl fleeing the war in her homeland is so disturbed by violence and anarchy in her San Francisco school that she wants to go back home — to a war zone!
The Chronicle reports that the young girl, Yana, thought school in America would be like what she saw in television shows, “idyllic settings where teenage conflict and angst ironed itself out by the end.”
But when she and her mother left Ukraine, Yana was terrified by “the chaotic scenes in her middle school classrooms … the verbal abuse, hallway conflicts and classroom outbursts.” Students stole her cell phone and threatened her.
Teachers are growing concerned, and not just in San Francisco. The Chronicle reported:
Across the country, teachers say student violence overall has more than doubled since the pandemic began and that they are “increasingly the target of disruptive behavior in the classroom,” according to a survey released Thursday by education research firm EAB.
The survey also found that 84% of teachers believe current students lack the ability to self-regulate and build relationships compared with peers prior to the pandemic.
Yana’s school “offered her a security action plan to make sure she felt safe.” But she just stopped attending and is trying to transfer to a different school. “Yana just wants to go back to her hometown in central Ukraine, back to the only school she knew before the war,” the paper reported.
Lack of Transparency
The New York Times, somewhat surprisingly, recently ran a story about teachers hiding children’s “gender identity” from parents. The paper reported on parents who were upset by this, but seemed to sympathize more with school administrators and teachers.
Read More
Related Posts:

God made marriage to reflect the holy, eternal, loving, intimate, joyful, and sacrificial love He has always cherished among the members of the Godhead. In that sense, marriage is not about you but is certainly for you. God has invited you to participate in and imitate His triune love. Perhaps this is why Scripture calls marriage the “mystery of the Gospel” because, unlike any other human relationship or institution, it most clearly and most beautifully pictures the divine. 

Recently I remembered why I had stopped noticing the sounds of war during my deployment in Operation Iraqi Freedom. When we first entered the country, every cell in my body was on heightened alert. My adrenaline was constantly pumping. Every staccatoed rat-tat-tat from a distant AK-47 was enough to make my hair stand on end. Every civilian standing in the crowd could be a suicide bomber. Every vehicle could deliver the IED that would send me home looking forever like Lieutenant Dan. And with every mortar round fired, the reality of going home in a box and my mother receiving a triangle-folded American flag pressed upon my mind. Yet, as the deployment wore on, these sounds melded into a strange kind of normalcy for me.
For instance, every morning around 3 AM, the reverberating rumbles of incoming mortar rounds would agitate the little mud brick house we lived in. Those first nights in theater, I awoke in a great alarm from every blast, alert and ready for combat, frantically putting on my equipment for readiness and protection. But, once I realized that Iraqis with Mortar rounds could not hit the proverbial sand when falling off the fictional camel, I eventually learned to sleep right through the explosions as if nothing strange was happening around me.
The thunderous eruptions, once jarring to me, became the ethereal drum tap in the desert’s lullaby. Time, like an ancient spell, wove its enchantment upon my senses, leaving me unconscious of my surroundings, which is what I believe has happened to the modern church.
In his timeless malice, Satan has assailed the sacred bond of marriage for so long that the sounds and signs of warfare upon her have faded into the cacophony of noises we have become accustomed to. While we have grown numb to the relentless onslaught at the devil’s hand, divorce, infidelity, and broken homes have become the tapestry woven into the threads of our society.
For this reason, it is incumbent upon us to wake from our slumber, recognize the war, and cling to the weapons of warfare our compassionate General has assigned us. For all who call themselves Christians, it is time to rekindle our love for the hallowed Word. As followers of Christ, we must valiantly thwart the adversary’s advances on marriage in general, and our marriages in particular, by embracing God’s designs for us, our marriages, our children, and our homes that are revealed in Holy Scripture.
Today, we begin our series on marriage by traveling back to the genesis of it, seeking solace in the profound wisdom spoken by our God in His Word. In this collection of essays on the topic of marriage, we will lean into what Scripture teaches and glean from our Maker’s timeless intention for marriage that will ever illuminate our path. Today, we begin by speaking about the design of marriage from the first Biblical text on marriage found in Genesis 1:26-28.
The Text

26 Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” 27 God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. 28 God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” – Genesis 1:26-28

The Trinitarian Design of Marriage
The Bible describes the creation of man in marital language. For instance, God did not merely create two distinctly gendered individuals, calling them “very good” in their disconnectedness, but a pair of people who would become one flesh together. In the same way that shoes come in twos and socks come in pairs, God made man as a male and female unit that would join together to become one very glorious thing, which of course, was the “very good” part.
In this, we must also notice that the creation of man was a trinitarian event. God does not create the first domestic community without blueprints. Instead, he patterns it off the divine community that has existed forever. At the height of the creation enterprise, God speaks, saying, “Let Us make mankind in Our image” When God does this, it not only serves as proof for the triunity within the Godhead but the kind of intimacy God intends to be present in the marriage.
The Trinitarian Community
For all eternity, members of the Godhead, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exist in perfect harmony and self-giving love, an exquisite dance of divine affection. This celestial community lives in exquisite blissful intimacy, lavishly pouring out fragrant love upon one another, heralding each other’s praises in melodious harmonies that echoed across the unformed realms, holding nothing back from one another across eons of affectionate fellowship.
In the embrace of the Father, love emanates as an eternal wellspring, an outpouring of perfect affection towards the Son and the Spirit. The Father’s love, boundless and unchanging, encapsulates the essence of nurturing care and tender compassion. It is a love that delights in the Son’s obedience and wholeheartedly affirms His eternal Sonship, a love that seeks to glorify and honor the Son above all.
The Son, in response, reciprocates this love with perfect devotion and filial obedience. His passion for the Father is marked by complete surrender and an unwavering desire to fulfill the Father’s will. It is a love that willingly steps into the realm of humanity, taking upon Himself the weight of the world’s sin, offering Himself as the perfect sacrifice—a demonstration of love that knows no bounds.
The Holy Spirit, the breath and life within the Trinity, embodies the love that flows between the Father and the Son. It is a love that unites, empowers, and guides. The Spirit’s love is like a gentle wind, constantly moving and animating the divine dance. It is a love that testifies to the unity and oneness of the Godhead, bringing forth the fruit of love in the hearts of believers.
Together, the love within the Trinity is a symphony of self-giving, perfect love. It is a love that transcends time and space, existing in timeless eternity. It is a love that invites us to behold the divine dance and participate in its harmonious rhythms. Through the love of the Trinity, we catch a glimpse of the infinite depth of love and are invited to enter into a transformative relationship with the Triune God, where we, too, can experience the boundless love that unites Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This, of course, is best pictured in human marriage.
As many scholars and authors attest, when our triune God patterned man according to His image, He was undoubtedly creating individuals with a rational and creative capacity to think, feel, love, and do.
Read More
Related Posts:

Hansen and Leeman make crystal clear what they mean by church: “A church is a group of Christians who assemble as an earthly embassy of Christ’s heavenly kingdom to proclaim the good news and commands of Christ the King; to affirm one another as his citizens through the ordinances; and to display God’s own holiness and love through a unified and diverse people in all the world, following the teaching and example of elders” (26). After offering this rich, multilayered definition, Hansen and Leeman analyze it phrase by phrase over the course of eight chapters. 

I still find it hard to believe. A flu virus succeeded in doing what centuries of persecution by Roman pagans, Ottoman Muslims, Hindu nationalists, Eastern European atheists, and Chinese communists could not: stop Christians from gathering together for fellowship, prayer, participation in the sacraments, and the proper discerning of the Word of God.
While our persecuted brethren from the past met together secretly in homes or caves, strengthening each other in the face of possible martyrdom, we who live in the freest nation on earth huddled in our homes, more afraid of facing public scorn than of forsaking the assembly of the saints. Yes, many people with compromised immune systems had legitimate COVID-19 fears, but most of us, myself included, allowed social and political pressure and media-fed anxiety to keep us from congregating together.
Of course, it was easy for most of us to justify the breach in fellowship since we could livestream sermons, listen to worship music on YouTube, and give to charity through PayPal. Were we not getting all the spiritual nourishment we needed in the comfort and safety of our own homes? Maybe all that business of going to a church building and meeting people face to face was old-fashioned and out-of-date. How much is really lost when we conduct our Christian walk apart from the physical church with its institutionalized programs, messy relationships, and inevitable egos and hypocrisies?
Collin Hansen and Jonathan Leeman assure us that a great deal is lost, that we are, in fact, forsaking the very commission that Christ gave us. In Rediscover Church: Why the Body of Christ Is Essential, Hansen, editor in chief of the Gospel Coalition, and Leeman, editorial director of 9Marks, provide a compact, powerful, highly accessible defense of the assembling of the saints that all people who find themselves questioning the efficacy and necessity of church should wrestle with.
Lest we try to wiggle out of that necessity by playing semantical games, Hansen and Leeman make crystal clear what they mean by church: “A church is a group of Christians who assemble as an earthly embassy of Christ’s heavenly kingdom to proclaim the good news and commands of Christ the King; to affirm one another as his citizens through the ordinances; and to display God’s own holiness and love through a unified and diverse people in all the world, following the teaching and example of elders” (26).
After offering this rich, multilayered definition, Hansen and Leeman analyze it phrase by phrase over the course of eight chapters. All the facets of the definition are insightful, but I will focus here on three facets that I found particularly illuminating and challenging and which, I believe, offer much-needed clarity as to the precise mission of the church and why we need to be there in person for that mission to be accomplished effectively.
God’s Earthly Embassy
While most Christians are aware that the Bible calls upon us to be ambassadors for Christ (2 Corinthians 5:20), few of us make the connection that if we are ambassadors, then the church is the embassy where we work. “An embassy,” Leeman explains, “is an officially sanctioned outpost of one nation inside the borders of another nation.” In that sense, it is no exaggeration to say that “[g]athered churches are embassies of heaven” (54). The church represents Christ’s kingdom the way the American embassy in France represents the political leadership, economic goals, and diverse but unified culture of America.
In keeping with his analogy, Leeman describes what we should find when we enter one of these embassies of heaven: “A whole different nation—sojourners, exiles, citizens of Christ’s kingdom. Inside such churches, you’ll hear the King of heaven’s words declared. You’ll hear heaven’s language of faith, hope, and love. You’ll get a taste of the end-time heavenly banquet through the Lord’s Supper. And you’ll be charged with its diplomatic business as you’re called to bring the gospel to your nation and every other nation” (54).
It is not enough for there to be random Americans walking around individually in Paris, embodying American values. There needs to be a physical place in that foreign land were the distinctive language and beliefs and behaviors of Christ followers can be heard and studied and seen. Apart from the physical embassy and the gathering of people within that embassy, that language and those beliefs and behaviors will remain abstractions. The witness of America, and all that she stands for, will be lessened. Parisians will be robbed of the chance to stand on American soil without ever leaving France.
Recalling a time when he had to go to the American embassy in Brussels, Belgium to have his passport renewed, Leeman muses that the “embassy didn’t make me a citizen.
Read More