life of their grandchild. Second, this isn’t the role God has
given grandparents in the Bible.
Grandparents are given a God-ordained role in Scripture
that is not interchangeable with any other member of the
family. Grandparents are essential, not extras, in the life of
grandchildren. According to the Bible, a grandparent’s role
is to build a heritage of faith in the coming generations. A
grandparent is to be zealous to pass on their faith in Jesus
and to work diligently to present everyone in their family as
mature in Christ.
Christian education is an excellent partner for this
purpose. Christian education is the adjunct servant of a
godly parent and grandparent. I want to encourage you to
utilize Christian education to help your grandchildren form
faith and fortify faith in Christ. Christian education, at its
best, never replaces the spiritual role that God has given
parents and grandparents. It reinforces, strengthens, and
supports. In this way, Christian education and grandparents
have much in common regarding their role in a child’s life.
How can a grandparent utilize Christian education
to pass faith on to grandchildren?
First, grandparents and adult children need to understand
why it’s important for a child to receive a Christ-centered
and biblically-based education. In short, education is
discipleship. It transforms children into the likeness of the
educator (Luke 6:40). Children who are educated by secular
humanists begin to think like secular humanists, which is
the religion of public education in America. The reason: it’s
impossible to divorce knowledge acquisition from character
formation. There is no such thing as religious neutrality in
education. The bottom line is that a Christ-less education
never leads to a Christ-like maturity. If we want our children
and grandchildren to treasure Christ, then it makes sense to
place them with instructors, curriculum, and schools that
help toward this end.
If the need and value of Christian education is a foreign
concept, then books like Why Christian Kids Need a
Christian Education and Kingdom Education, as well as The
Renewanation Review magazine, are excellent resources that
grandparents or adult children can utilize to help family
members understand the importance of Christian educa-
tion. These resources can be excellent discussion starters
and can help families share the same strong conviction
regarding the place that Christian education should have in
a child’s spiritual life.
In addition to a philosophical shift, some families need
financial support to make Christian education possible.
Grandparents can encourage adult children to pursue
Christian education by offering to pay for some or all of
their grandchild’s tuition.
It is no secret that one of the primary deterrents to Chris-
tian education is the cost. Christian education is financially
expensive. Because of the high financial cost, some families
place their children in public schools and try to combat the
errant messages their children hear. Can I encourage you
to look at education from a different angle? Non-Christian
education is spiritually expensive. For many children, it
leads them away from Christ, and the cost is eternal separa-
tion from Jesus. In light of eternity, I don’t think families can
afford not to place their children in some form of Christian
education.
If you are a grandparent, I want to encourage you to
eliminate the financial barrier for your grandchildren to the
degree that God has made that possible with your finances.
I believe you can do this in two ways. First, you can spend
less in some area of life in order to reprioritize money for
Christian education. One grandparent told me that rather
than take their children and grandchildren to Disney World,
they used that money to send their grandchildren to a
Christian school for a year. The same idea could be applied
to the purchase of a new car or piece of furniture.
Second, most grandparents plan to leave some form of
financial inheritance to their children and grandchildren.
Based on Proverbs 13:22, that is a good thing. In this Proverb
we read, “A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s
children.” What if your financial inheritance could be used
to build a spiritual heritage by making it possible for grand-
children to attend a Christian school or college? Barbara, a
grandmother from California, told me that they help pay for
their grandchildren’s Christian education because, “allowing
them to be at a Christian school is an investment in their
spiritual growth.”
Jim, a grandfather from New York, provides the
following reasons for financially assisting
his grandchildren so they could attend a
Christian school. “I think it is more impor-
tant for a grandparent to help provide a
Christian education for grand-
children while the grandparent
is alive than it would be to give
them an inheritance after they have
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