Every generation has its battles for health. In my generation it was the maturation of the fast-food industry. We were never told how detrimental it would be to our nation’s corporate health thirty years later. This generation has another enemy to fight … a sedentary lifestyle. Since children spend so much time looking at screens, both in school and after school, the rate of obesity and childhood diabetes are skyrocketing. News Desk reports, “Lack of physical activity accounts for 22 percent of coronary heart disease, 22 percent of colon cancer, 18 percent of osteoporotic fractures, 12 percent of diabetes and hypertension, and 5 percent of breast cancer; furthermore, physical inactivity accounts for about 2.4 percent of U.S. healthcare expenditures or approximately $24 billion a year.” The bottom line is God made us to be active.
What many people do not realize, however, is how spiritually sedentary we are as well. The impact of this could be, well … eternal. Proverbs 1:32 says, “For the simple are killed by their turning away, and the complacency of fools destroys them.” The destruction that comes from being spiritually and physically sedentary is initially subtle because we are not actually doing anything wrong. The fact is we are not doing anything at all, and therein lies the problem. Newton’s first law states that every object that is at rest will remain at rest unless compelled to change its state by a greater action of an external force. This tendency to resist changes in a state of motion is called “inertia” by physicists.
Far too many professing Christians are living in a chronic state of inertia. They know things are not right with their home, but they are not willing to make the tough lifestyle choices that change demands. This is why I love serving the Christian homeschooling community. Not only are they concerned, they are willing to sacrifice so much in hopes their children will embrace a godly lifestyle. No, homeschooling is not salvific, but home dicipleship seems to be the most biblical way to till the soil of our children’s hearts to be prepared to receive the seed of the gospel.
I grew up in the sixties which was still a time when America was God-sensitive. Parents could coast a little bit more because culture still had their back. We prayed as a class over our food in the school cafeteria; we prayed in the school room as well. Numerous teachers shared their faith from up front. Those times are a distant memory and will not return until America is totally humbled.
What this means is that we have to be more and more intentional, yes, even as homeschooling parents. If we approach Christian training with the same intensity level of fifty years ago, we will lose the next generation of young people. Our children must be in the scriptures on a daily basis. We have to demonstrate to them how the bible influences our daily decisions. We must help them to discern truth from error and truth from half-truth, regardless of how religiously sounding those errors might be. This means we must be very active in our children’s lives and pay the price to understand their generational thoughts and tendencies because they will be different than ours. We cannot expect them to simply learn our culture, we must, as Christ did, condescend into their world because their world is different than ours.
This sounds like a lot of work. It is, but eternity hangs in the balance for our children and exponentially so for our grandchildren. If this does not stir us up, we have been bitten by the sedentary bug. Yes, how we do things matters. We need to always be learning to do our best. We cannot, however, forget that God blesses the efforts of the mustard seed, regardless of its size and ability. If we have become a spiritual or parental couch potato it high time to awake from our slumber and seek afresh the grace of God on our marriages, our families, our homeschooling, and our future.
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