Some encouragement from Educating the Wholehearted Child

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I have been carefully reading through Educating the WholeHearted Child by Clay and Sally Clarkson again these past few months. There have been so many things that have encouraged me to keep going, to seek excellence in all I do, to keep my priorities right.

Today I’d like to share a few quotes from the book — things I have highlighted in my notes from the first 4 or 5 chapters. If you have not read this book, I highly recommend it. It will totally transform your way of thinking about parenting and educating your children!

Enjoy these quotes today:

A home is not a school.

Men designed schools, but God designed the home.

We have come to the place where we can honestly say that there is no distinction in our homeschool between home and school — we are living to learn and learning to live, all at the same time.

Since biblical nurture and discipleship are relational processes, then education must be a relational process too.

Your role as a home-educating parent, then, is to provide a rich and lively living and learning environment in which your children can exercise their God-given drive to learn and then to biblically train and instruct your children within the natural context of your home and family life. It’s that simple.

You don’t need to become dependent on others telling you what to do, whether it is us or someone else. God has given you all you need to train and educate your children at home — it’s in real books, real life, and real relationships.

There is no biblical formula for building a Christian home…At it’s simplest, it is really just a relational process of loving God and loving our children.

God’s will is not something hidden that needs to be found; it is something revealed that waits to be done.

The heart of parenting is not just about raising an obedient, well-behaved child, but about shaping your child’s heart to follow God and placing his feet on the same path of life that you and those before you have walked. Your faith and teaching will live on in generations to come through the hearts of your children, and their children, who hear the call of God to “follow Me”.

Like a shepherd who leads his sheep to life-giving water and pasture, your first responsibility as a parent is to lead your children to the life-giving presence and reality of Christ in your heart and home.

You are to be the primary life-giving presence of Christ to your children, through His spirit living and working in your life as a Christian parent and through His Word, just as Christ imparted life to those who came in contact with him.

From the life of Christ in their hearts, they were to spiritually feed and nourish their children.

God commands us to feed them with the life of God that fills our own lives.

When biblical nurture is neglected, children can become frustrated and discouraged. Children who are nurtured in Christ’s life by a loving parent will receive his grace to grow strong.

There is no life in Christ apart from God’s grace.

If the purpose of biblical nurture is to feed your children with God’s life, then it must involve more than just doing Christian things at home. Biblical nurture opens windows for God’s life-giving grace to enter your children’s hearts.