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:: message from the headmaster september 2005
In August, as we quickly approached another year of homeschooling and ALC, I drew your attention to Paul's prayer in Ephesians, Chapter 1:
Eph 1: 15-19a:
For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and his incomparably great power to us who believe.
Paul begins by praying that his readers would know "the hope of their calling" - what we might call a vision of abiding hope. We noted last month that this vision of abiding hope will:
- fortify your heart in the midst of disillusionment;
- enable you deal in love with those around you;
- and answer the questions that face the troubled world in which we are called to burn as candles in darkness.
But going back to Paul's prayer: the second reality on which to keep the eyes of your heart continually focused is "the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints" - the vision of personal identity.
It is the knowledge of what God will have. You are His inheritance. Do you realize how valuable you are to God? Think of all that your heavenly Father has done in eternity past within the counsel of the triune God - to where those divine decrees were enacted in space and time, culminating in the redemptive work of Jesus Christ that you might be redeemed - made His inheritance.
J.I Packer, in his book Knowing God, argues well that the climax of Christianity is not simply justification - but rather our adoption as sons, even as the revelation of God as Father was the final step in the revelatory process. In Old Testament times, God gave His people a covenant name: Yahweh - which speaks of the ultimate and holy nature of His person. Yet in the New Testament - Father has become His new covenantal name, for the covenant that now binds Him to His people is a family covenant. He is your heavenly father - you are His heirs, His heritage.
Keep the eyes of your heart continually fixed on that truth: the vision of your personal identity - for it will secure your heart in a very insecure world. And what an insecure world you and your children face. Yet we should not be surprised, for what security can emerge from the random chance processes of an impersonal world.
As Ravi Zacharias pointed out, Leo Tolstoy's memoirs entitled Confession is possibly the most important document of the last two centuries for understanding this current plight of living in an impersonal world governed by chance. The dogmas of atheistic unbelief that captured his elite circle of Russian intellectuals slowly destroyed the basis of his life. Based on those atheistic dogmas, only two realties exist: particles and progress. Tolstoy concluded, "Why do I live?"
Later this year, ALC's Christian worldview class will read the postscript that Steve Turner, the English journalist, added to his satirical poem entitled "Creed." After deriding the postmodern mind in his poem, he added the following entitled "Chance."
"Chance"
If chance be
The Father of all flesh,
Disaster is his rainbow in the sky,
And when you hear:
State of emergency!
Sniper killing ten!
Troops on the rampage!
Whites go looting!
Bomb blasts school!
It is but the sound of man
Worshipping his maker
Parents, as you set your heart on God as your vision - remember your Maker is now your heavenly Father, who adopted you as His very own. And your adoption as children of God answers Tolstoy's question, "why do I live?" Pray that God will give us the grace to live with a keen sense of identity rooted in the hope of our eternal redemption and to pass this perception on to our children.
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