How to Change Your Family Trajectory in 2025

In 2025 ICHE is doubling down on prayer. Sure, we are always supposed to make prayer a priority (1 Thes 5:17), but in certain seasons God seems to impress its need more heavily upon His people than at other times. While many Christians are relieved with President Trump’s re-election, we must not forget that politics is downstream from religion, not vice versa. The government cannot change the hearts of our children because this change comes inside out, not outside in. As the secular culture continues to wage war on Christianity, too many young homeschoolers are being seduced by the Sirens of Sophistication rather than living by faith in the Word of God.

In sincere desperation, parents barter, beg, manipulate, and threaten their aging children because life has truly taught them that the wages of sin is death. They rightfully don’t want their little ones to go the painful way of the world. Logic doesn’t work. Statistics lack convincing power as every young person thinks he is the exception to the statistic rather than its fulfillment. In sliding toward the culture, arrogant, yet naïve, young hearts find themselves standing against the power of God’s Word. What are we to do? Wring our hands? Compromise? Become fatalistic. No, we PRAY!

Our greatest weapon often lies discarded in the weeds of busyness. Christians can easily forget that prayer is the means of grace that motivates a sovereign God to action. It is not our last line of defense but is made to be our first weapon of offense.

We substitute so many things for prayer. Churches have an endless supply of programs and activities, babysitting junior rather than encouraging parents to disciple their children at home. Statistics over the last twenty-five years have borne out these results. Entertaining worship services and pizza parties for the youth does not transform lives nor does it ignite the fires of the gospel in the souls of man. It seems that prayer is simply too unsophisticated for such a learned church who has all the modern technology’s gizmos and gadgets.

I want to challenge you in 2025 to become a person, a family, of prayer even as I challenge the ICHE community to become an army of prayer warriors. What does this mean? Our first response to any news, good or bad, is prayer. When our children show a small sign of rebellion, we don’t nag, criticize, or cry. Instead, we go to prayer. We pray in the morning before our feet hit the floor, asking for God’s grace of the day. Before we start our school subjects we ask for God to penetrate our children’s hearts, enlighten their understanding, and motivate their indifference, asking God to cause them to fall in love with His creative order. Upon entering the warmth of our blankets at night, we praise God for the day He gave us.

It means we pray for our homeschooling freedoms which are likely going to be challenged more in 2025 than in previous years. We pray for the ICHE family to faithfully promote the vision of home discipleship with the centrality of Christ more than we have in the past, so that our children might become holy as well as smart. We pray sincerely for heavenly wisdom to be given to the ICHE board, staff, and volunteers to share this multi-generational vision in the most compelling terms possible.

We are going to pray that God will crown our efforts with success (Proverbs 3:6 TLB), and that He might give us His favor (Luke 4:19) in all that we do. It means we are going to pray that our homes come into biblical order, so peace and blessing can rest upon us. This is the kind of praying we are talking about.

I am personally praying that the ICHE community will be willing to “groan” in prayer this year. (Exodus 2:24) I am asking God to raise an army of intercessors to stand in the gap for the next generation of homeschoolers, so that they will not bow before the culture. (Ezekiel 22:30) May we be granted insight into “prevailing” prayer that will overcome any force that seeks to stand against us. (Is. 42:13) As David asked, “who will go with me to the enemy’s camp …” may we respond like Abishai who immediately said, “I will go down with you.” (1 Samuel 26:6) or when Jonathan asked his armor bearer to join him in attacking the Philistines and he heard the words, “Do all that is in your heart. Go then; here I am with you, according to your heart.”. (1 Samuel 14:7)

I am asking you to make prayer a priority in your life and home in 2025. For those who are willing, would you email me at ksmith@iche.org to faithfully pray for the ICHE family and various requests that are shared throughout the year?

You may feel you don’t know how to really pray. Fret not, because we will be talking about prayer all year long. Like homeschooling, the best way to learn how to pray is to start praying! If you want to improve or make major changes in the trajectory of your home in 2025, I dare you to join me at the front line of offense!

Sincerely,

Kirk

As the year ends, please pray the following with me this month:

1. Pray that God will stir the hearts of His people to seek to learn how to pray and to genuinely pray in 2025.
   1. Then everyone came whose heart was stirred, and everyone whose spirit was willing, and they brought the Lord’s offering for the work of the tabernacle of meeting, for all its service, and for the holy garments. –Ex. 35:21
   2. The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord;
      he turns it wherever he will. –Proverbs 21:1
2. Pray that we will understand and apply God’s patterns in our prayer and pray according to His will.
   1. Now Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” –Luke 11:1
   2. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. –James 4:3
3. Pray that we will rejoice in the fact that God has given us everything we need to pray successfully.
   1. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. –Romans 8:26
   2. The Lord has heard my plea; the Lord accepts my prayer. –Psalms 6:9
4. Pray that grace will be upon us to change our schedule to find some prayer time amid the busyness of homeschooling our children and working.
   1. And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed. –Mark 1:35
   2. But as for me, my prayer is to you, O Lord. At an acceptable time, O God, in the abundance of your steadfast love answer me in your saving faithfulness. –Psalms 69:13
5. Pray that prayer will become our delight in 2025.
   1. but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. –Psalms 1:2
   2. You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore. –Psalms 16:11
6. Pray that God will reveal Himself to His people in 2025.
   1. and there he built an altar and called the place El-bethel, because there God had revealed himself to him when he fled from his brother. -Gen. 35:7
   2. And the Lord appeared again at Shiloh, for the Lord revealed himself to Samuel at Shiloh by the word of the Lord. –1 Samuel 3:21