Anchor and Lighthouses in Homeschooling

In many ways, homeschooling is like a journey. Sometimes it feels like a sea journey. There are times when the voyage is smooth while at other times it’s rough. Sometimes the journey is as clear as the daylight, but there are also times when it’s uncertain and as dark as the darkest night.

Sixteen years ago, we decided to homeschool our children in spite of lack of knowledge, resources and materials, in spite of zero moral support from family and friends, and non-existence of homeschool support group like our Lighthouse Homeschool Network (LHN) now.

What I want to share with you today are some of the lessons that Cathy and I have learned from our homeschooling journey, which I’m comparing to a sea voyage, and we as amateur sailors. As I do, I would like to focus on two important things, which I call mariner’s aids or tools that help provide a stable and safer homeschooling journey. The first tool is the anchor and the second one is the lighthouse.

As homeschoolers on a journey, we have a goal and a destiny. Of course, our ultimate goal as Christians in all and every endeavor, including homeschooling, is to give glory to God. We were created to show forth the beauty and majesty of our Lord and Creator who revealed Himself clearly in the person of His Son Jesus Christ. That’s our ultimate goal in everything – to honor him.

Now, how do we get there? It’s a life-long journey, you would say. And that’s true. And our homeschool journey is an important aspect of that lifelong journey.

What do we need in order to get there? Well, like traveling at sea, we need first of all, an anchor, “that which gives the [assurance] of stability or security, or a source of abiding confidence.” An anchor symbolizes strength and stability in seafaring especially in the midst of a storm.

In the Bible anchor is used figuratively of the hope that we have in the promises of God. Hebrews 6:19 says: We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. Well, in context, the promises of God pertain to the believers’ secured position in Christ which includes our redemption from and forgiveness of sin and the hope of entering God’s glorious presence.

In other words, our hope, our anchor, is securely fastened to our faithful and unchanging God who fulfills all His promises to His children. And the anchor that firmly connects us to God is our Lord Jesus Christ.

In Him, our hope, our position, cannot be moved or shipwrecked by the storms of life. That’s how strong our anchor is! That’s how stable and solid the rock which our anchor holds on to!

Thus, like the sailors that drop their anchor in the middle of the sea in order to provide stability for the ship, especially during the storm, we also fasten our hope, we fix our eyes on our Lord Jesus Christ, our anchor, who provides us with security and firmness, as Christ intercedes and connects us to God.

The only difference between the sailors’ anchor and ours is that while the sailors drop their anchor with the hope that it would hold on to something firm and sturdy under the sea we, however, thrust our anchor, by faith, upward to heaven, where our hope is fixed, even in Christ who ministers for us at the Father’s right hand. Christ is our hope of glory who provides for us security and stability in times of trouble. Christ does this for us through His unceasing intercession and through the constant ministry of His Spirit in our lives.

How does it relate to our homeschooling? Well, it’s through this. If our aim is to please Christ or to glorify God, our homeschooling materials and resources and activities must be grounded on something that help us achieve this aim. That means that our resources and materials and activities should be Biblically-based, Christ-centered, and God-pleasing.

There are a lot of teaching materials and resources available in the internet and the market today that will help our children achieve academic excellence and earn them scholarship in prestigious institutions of higher learning. But academic excellence must not be our ultimate aim in homeschooling. It must be subordinate to our main goal of knowing and pleasing Christ.

We may have children who will become academic elite, but if they lack humility, respect for authority and genuine concern for other people and the kingdom of Christ, their academic achievements will fail them eventually.

We want children who are not only academically competent but also spiritually mature and committed to help in accomplishing the Great Commission of Christ, which is to make faithful disciples from all corners of the earth.

I want to address our children here. Children, in your studies, aim for something that’s beyond the here and now. Anchor your effort in your studies to something bigger than this world. Aim at serving Christ and glorifying Christ in your studies now. Use the gifts and talents God has given you to serve Him and to serve others and you will know that your anchor, your effort, is holding on to something stable.

Now, boys and girls, how about the lighthouse? What is a lighthouse and what is its purpose? A lighthouse “is a tower with a bright light at the top, located at an important or dangerous place regarding navigation (or travel over water). The two main purposes of a lighthouse are to serve as a navigational aid and to warn boats of dangerous areas. It is like a traffic sign on the sea.”

Historians said that the first lighthouses were actually given by nature itself. Sailors sometimes used landmarks such as glowing volcanoes to guide them. In the ancient world, trading ships were eventually built enabling navigators to sail long distances to buy and sell goods. In the days of wooden ships with sails, the wind and waves could easily push them against the rocks and wreck them. And so, the need for lighthouses as warning signals arose.

In homeschooling, we need lighthouses. We need something, or someone, to guide us on our way and to warn us when we are heading at the wrong direction. I would like to share with you only two lighthouses in our own homeschooling experience.

First, we need counselors or mentors in homeschooling. Proverbs 11:14 says, “Where there is no guidance, a people falls, but in an abundance of counselors there is safety.” The Word of God encourages us to employ the wise counsel of others in our endeavors, and homeschooling is no exception. With many unknowns and many options in homeschooling, it is important that in our journey we have fellow voyagers and pilgrims who not only give us wise counsel but also encourage us when we are down and troubled.

That’s where we’ve seen the need to start a homeschool support group in 2009. Lighthouse Homeschool Network has been a great support group for our family here in Davao City and I encourage you to avail of the wisdom and experience of our fellow homeschoolers. To some of you maybe your church support group has been serving as a lighthouse as well.

Some families can do it all by themselves, but many of us opt to pull resources together. And for us the journey has been more enjoyable and pleasing with LHN. So thank you so much for all of you who have encouraged us and helped us in our own journey. We’ve gained a lot of friends and connections through LHN. We also have grown in our knowledge of homeschooling and Christian parenting through many of you. I hope that you will continue to keep your lights shining, your Christian virtues and values, to help our fellow travelers in homeschooling.

Another lighthouse that has been guiding our homeschooling – and this is very important – is of course the Word of God, the Bible. One of the most memorable times I have in homeschooling our children is to be able to read with them the Bible and to share with one another the things that we’re learning from it. Bible reading is an important lighthouse for homeschoolers.

Aside from the Bible, we’ve also read books together, either books that help us know God more, or books about Church Fathers, Christian theologians, missionaries, pastors, and even musicians in the past. These books have enriched not only our knowledge of God and Christ and the lives of believers in the past, but they also made our homeschooling experience enjoyable and exciting. Just reading books together enlightens a lot our way.

I know many of you, if not all of you are doing this already. But, boys and girls, isn’t it a lot of fun when mommy or daddy reads books aloud for us? Of course! Maybe, sometime we could have reading stories together as a support group. That’s something that we could probably include in our joint activities in the future.

Well, I could add some more ‘lighthouses’ that could guide our way in homeschooling but I think those two are important – support group and family time. Let us remember that our greater goal in homeschooling is to bring ourselves to a deeper understanding of Christ and a greater commitment to His kingship and lordship over us.

Ultimately, we want to glorify and honor God in everything we do, including our labor to bring up and teach our children in the ways of the Lord. May the Lord continue to give us the grace and the right motive to do this!

Life (including Homeschooling) Is All About God

My wife and I have been homeschooling our children for 16 years now. Homeschooling is not always fun but one of its blessings is that, as parents, we could spend a lot of time with our children and our children see us most of the time. They feel secure and they enjoy family time a lot. Yes, we want to build a close family, of course! However, we don’t want to build a family that is inherently toxic, in that, the family is the be all and end all, and everybody else out there is bad or unimportant. Some families are built that way. It’s me and the family! But that’s not life is all about!

The way to prevent that is to show our children with our own life and our own conversation that everything revolves around God and His glory. Remember that we are just one family among many that are trying to serve God around the world. Our children’s lives must be oriented toward this principle of “Soli Deo Gloria” (To God alone be the glory!). That’s important!

As homeschooling parents our lives are exposed to our children. They know a lot about us and they are greatly influenced by our character, habits, decisions, likes and dislikes. On the one hand, this is good because as we live out our faith, as we learn to obey God and follow the Lord Jesus Christ, not only in good times but also in bad times, our children will catch much of what we want them to learn from us, that is, that life, as a battle, must be lived coram Deo (in the face of God), by the grace and power of God, and for the glory of God. Our children must understand that we can’t live life on our own strength but must depend on God all the time. He alone gives us the grace and power to live a God-glorifying life.

Yet on the other hand, this is also scary especially when they see a lot of our hypocrisy and laziness and inconsistencies and anxieties and uncontrolled temper and other bad habits. It’s humiliating to see that as homeschoolers we see a lot of our sinfulness, bad tempers and laziness and lack of zeal in our children.

This is not of course a hopeless situation. We learn a lot from our mistakes and so we try to address the matter by talking to our children, confessing our sins and weaknesses to them and pointing them to the ultimate solution to our sin-problem and our perfect life-example of all, our Lord Jesus Christ.

So our children must learn and see from us – fathers and mothers – that the most important thing in their lives is to do what God wants us to do: to live for His glory and to serve and worship Him with gladness in their hearts. Worship is the most important thing. And the apex of all of that, at least in this life, is public worship – the gathering of God’s people in His presence every Lord’s Day. Corporate worship where God is greatly delighted in meeting with His people, renewing covenant with them and ministering to His saints, is the highest point of all our worship.

So our children must know from our lips, from our prayers and from our life-example so that when they go up to God’s house of worship this is the highlight of the week. This is a grand and glorious time of encounter with the Almighty God. And God is going to be speaking to us. That’s a great thing!

But they must also know that when they do school, every day and every class hour is to be lived to the glory of God. They are to use their mind to the very best of their abilities not just to get good grades to impress father and mother, so they can look through report card and say, “That was great son!”, but more so to use their mind and intellect to the best of their ability because they are to glorify God.

That's why we always need to impress this teaching to our children’s heart – that all of life is for the glory of God. It has to keep on going all their lives because there is every tendency in every man’s deceitful heart, and that includes our children’s heart, to reject this principle and to live for self.

So this is a battle – trying to move our children away from selfishness to God-centeredness. But when we persevere and God, by His grace, comes and works in and through our children then we begin to see the real fruits of homeschooling. They say something like this to us, “Papa (or Mama), is this the right thing for me to do? Will this be pleasing to God? I’m not really sure if this glorifies God.”

When we hear our children say things like this, we could really thank the Lord for His gracious work in our children’s lives. That’s joy in every parent’s heart – when he hears his children say something like, “Papa, I want to live my life for the glory of God!”

Ultimately you and I do not matter that much to it, that we get what we want or we get our way. We all live for the glory of God. We leave fruits behind for God’s glory. And when we remain faithful to that calling we could hear Him say in that great day, “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.” That’s everything! That’s fulfilling!


(Thanks to all my fellow homeschoolers here and there, as well as to many speakers and authors on family life, marriage, childrearing and homeschooling who have taught me a lot and helped me put this article together.)

Christian Homeschooling: A Way to Educate Our Children the Christian Way

So why do we homeschool our children? Why do we use Biblical and Christ-centered curricula and materials in teaching our children? What is our goal?

First, we must see our children as God’s children. They are ultimately God’s. They are heritage from the Lord (Psalm 127:3). Our children are ultimately not our own. We are God’s representative to our children. We treat our children the way God would treat them. We are to nurture, admonish, guide, discipline, and love them as God would do it.

What’s the essence of our parenting then? We are parenting our children in God’s stead.

Second, what should our goal be in homeschooling? Of course, in everything we do, our goal should always be to glorify God by obeying His commands. The Word of God requires us parents to instruct our children in the Christian faith and the doctrine of salvation. That’s what Deuteronomy 6:4-9 tell us. That's what 2 Timothy 3:14-15 shows us. This does not mean that you are talking to your children always, 24/7, all things about the Lord and you don’t talk to them about the ordinary things in life.

When the wise men of Scripture talk about setting a good example to our children and training them in righteousness, they mean that in the context of all of life – at home, at work, along the road, at the workshop, or in the market place.

Some of us, parents, especially those who are newly converted to the Christian faith, in our zeal and passion, we have the tendency to always correct and rebuke our children and talk to them only about God to the point of embittering them by always saying all the negative things. And our children actually end up saying, “I don’t like that God for MY God. That’s a horrible religion!” It’s all negative! It’s all outward behavior and performance that we are after in our children.

However, we will never win over our children to God when our religion is primarily negative. Yes, we must be correcting and rebuking our children – we must warn them about worldliness and waywardness – but that’s not the bulk of Christianity. That’s a part of it. The bigger part is the gospel, the grace of God in Christ, the glory and the purpose, as well as the meaning and fulfillment of life in God through Jesus Christ.

Christianity is essentially positive in nature. Our God who revealed Himself through His Son Jesus Christ is not a grumpy God, always correcting and rebuking, but a very attractive, joy-filled, tender-hearted, loving, and patient God. "He does not always accuse, nor will he harbor his anger forever" (Psalm 103:9). As his children, He does rebuke us but in a very gentle way.

Here is where the education of our children comes in. We need good Christian education primarily not to get our children away from the world or ungodly children or spare them from embarrassment and bullying and materialism but PRIMARILY BECAUSE OF JESUS CHRIST! Christian education does not primarily mean teaching them good values and wisdom. That’s only a small part of it.

The bigger part of Christian education is to teach every subject or every knowledge to our children and how this knowledge relates to the Lordship of Christ and how it glorifies God! Christ is the sum and the bottom of education. He is the center of education! The positive teaching is the call of the gospel – the invitation to the fullness of Christ and the fact that Christ is both the object and subject of Christian education.

As object of Christian education, Jesus is the foundation and the goal of teaching our children. Why do we teach our children Language and Logic and Science and History and Geology and Astronomy and Anatomy and Math? So they may know God through our Lord Jesus Christ, His person and His work, His saving power and majestic rule, and in knowing Him they would learn to bow down before His Lordship and glorify Him in their knowledge.

We don’t want our children to have perfect scores in Language and Logic but they don’t understand the Bible and they do not know God. We don’t want them to have excellent grades in Science and Social Studies but they don’t bow down in adoration before the God who created our bodies and the whole universe and saved us through His Son Jesus Christ.

As Rev. Greg Lubbers writes, “This [i.e., the glory of God] is the exclusive goal of Christian education. This is what gives [Christian education] inestimable value. Where this is understood, there will be an invisible caption written above every classroom of Christian instruction and every page of Christian curriculum quoting Ecclesiastes 12:13, ‘Let us hear the conclusion of every matter: Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man’” (The Outlook, Sept/Oct 2010, p.10).

As the subject of our children’s education, Jesus is the one who imparts His divine instruction. He acts in revealing His lordship to the hearts of our children, bringing them to bow down in humble fear. Christ accomplishes this work through the ministry of the Holy Spirit. Ultimately, it is the mysterious work of the Holy Spirit within the heart of our children that reveals the sovereignty of Christ and brings the appropriate response of faith, repentance and obedience.

So as the subject of Christian education our Lord Jesus acts – He does something for us that we cannot truly understand every subject without Him and without the power of His Spirit guiding our path and illuminating our mind.

Note also Ephesians 6:4 and the emphasis of nurturing our children “in the Lord.” We don’t raise our children according to OUR ideas of nurture and admonition but the nurture and admonition of the LORD and His ideas. Spiritually, morally, socially, emotionally, intellectually, and physically, we are to raise our children on behalf of God according to His Word.

The whole book of Proverbs illustrates this. Parental, especially paternal (because the father is the primary teacher), and covenantal approach (God calls us “My son…”, “My daughter…”) is the Biblical pattern of educating our children. A Christian home must be a temple in which God is not forced down children’s throat but God is acknowledged and cherished and worshiped (Psalm 34:11-14).

That means we teach our children continually (day by day), as opportunities arise (formal or informal), but we do so primarily positively, truthfully, and honestly teach them all areas of life. And in all those areas, Christ is sovereign. He is Lord of all our lives. It’s a daunting and unending task – always teaching our children. But we have the promise of God that He will equip us as we faithfully teach them.

So Christian education, especially Christian homeschool education, is valuable because it is exclusive, in that it seeks to do something nothing else does – not the public education, not the mediocre Christian education, not the godless or humanistic or man-centered education – in bringing the student face to face with a sovereign Christ as He displays His sovereignty through His person and work, calling for a response of humble fear.

While only eternity will fully reveal the results of such labor, may we, by the grace of God, labor on with immovable hope that God will crown and reward faithful Christian Homeschool education with His blessings!

(This message was first shared at our December 2011 Lighthouse Homeschool Network General Assembly. The essence of the message was based on a lecture on parenting by Dr. Joel Beeke and an article by Rev. Greg Lubbers, “The Exclusive Goal of Christian Education” from the Christian magazine The Outlook, Sept/Oct 2010).