In this sermon, the speaker discusses the importance of education and its impact on the future of a nation. He highlights how young people play a crucial role in shaping society and becoming leaders. However, he expresses concern about the current educational system, which focuses primarily on preparing students for college entrance exams and neglects spiritual development. The speaker emphasizes the biblical perspective on education, emphasizing the importance of family and the responsibility of parents, particularly fathers, to educate their children in the ways of God.

Hello, last week I left you with some thoughts about education and what the biblical perspective on it might be. I mentioned that I would be speaking tonight on what this would mean for our future. Many people are concerned for the future of this nation. I think that all would agree that it is the young people who are the future of any nation. As young people grow up, they move into positions of influence and eventually come to run the nation. Anyone who lived in Korea through the turbulent period of the 60s and 70s has seen how the young student radicals, many of whom spent time in jail, have moved into positions of influence and power in the modern South Korean society. In much of the same way, we have seen in the United States how the young people of the 60s, the hippies, war protesters, those who advocated free love and so forth came into positions of influence and power in the 90s. As one generation matures and comes into its own within society, business and government, we see the changes affect all aspects of the nation. The older generation bemoans the change, while the younger one thinks of it as progress. Our young people today will be the leaders of the nation tomorrow. How are we preparing them to take on these awesome responsibilities? A concern that I have often heard expressed is that our current educational system makes it extremely difficult to do more than prepare for the college entrance exams. What little time that is not taken with cramming for exams or the late hours in an after-school academy or hagwon is consumed with games and entertainment. Youth pastors are frustrated as they seek to reach out to young people spiritually. There is no time for spiritual activities, even on Sundays. Parents seem to have too little time with their children. This system is not a true educational system. Rather, it is a schooling system weighted heavily towards one major goal, getting into a good university. It is also a system that separates children from their parents, their source of love, confidence and nurture at an early age. This separation is exacerbated by the fact that fathers also work long hours, even staying with their work groups and entertaining each other late into the evening after the end of the work day. In this system, who is teaching our children about God? Who is teaching them about truth, about fairness towards others, about love? Who is instilling the virtues of service, courage, true godly humility, care for one another? What sort of leadership skills are they learning? What are our young people learning about families and how they are supposed to live? Yet it is difficult to see a way out since the system is so all-encompassing. Fathers need to earn money for their families and to pay for all their children's schooling. Students need to work hard to get into good universities in order for them to get good jobs in the future. So, what do we do? Well, let us first look at some things that scripture has to say. From the very beginning we have a strong sense of family. Then God said, Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness. And God created man in his own image. In the image of God he created him. Male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. That was Genesis 1, verses 26 to 28. And then also in Genesis 2, 24. And for this cause a man shall leave his father and his mother and shall hold fast to his wife and they shall become one flesh. To be created in the image of God is to be created not as an individual but as a family, man and woman together, holding fast to each other and having children. Can there be anything more important in all the world than our family, the very image of God? Both Jesus, recorded in Matthew 19, 4-5 and Mark 10, 7, and Paul, Ephesians 5, 31, repeat this word, that a man and a woman leave their parents to come together and form their own family. God's command to be fruitful and multiply is a command to fill the earth with the image of God. Fathers are also given an awesome responsibility to educate their children in all the ways and promises of God. This command appears twice in Scripture in exactly the same words. It truly must be important to God for Him to have it repeated this way. It also presupposes that fathers have time to spend with their children in a leisurely manner as they guide them through life. Listen to these words. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise. Deuteronomy 6, 6-7 and chapter 11, verse 19. At the same time, we are also commanded to honor God's Lordship by keeping one day a week as holy and abstaining in it from our labors. Many passages refer to the sacredness of the Sabbath. We no longer feel bound to the strict observance of the Sabbath enjoined by the Old Testament law. But I strongly believe that we have rejected a very fundamental element of this to our detriment. The keeping of the Sabbath was a constant weekly reminder that we are dependent on God for our livelihood. We are not to toil and sweat with hand or brain every day of the week as the unbelievers do. We are to depend on God for all we need. We often treat our Sabbath, whether it be Saturday or Sunday, as just another day to work or go to school because we depend not on God but on ourselves. Jesus is quite explicit in Matthew 6, 31-33. Therefore, do not be anxious saying, What shall we eat or what shall we wear? For the Gentiles seek after these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and His justice, and all these things will be added to you. All of this makes it quite plain that our modern lifestyles that keep fathers from children because they are afraid to spend time with their families rather than long hours at work, and that keep children from their families because they are afraid of not doing well on the college entrance exams, these are truly ungodly. In fact, these very efforts to assure the future actually undermine that future, both through lack of faith in God and by causing the breakdown of generational bonds and a faulty one-sided approach to education. Of course, it will take enormous faith, great trust in God, for families to break out of this harmful cycle. However, for the sake of the future of the nation, I believe it to be of the utmost importance. This is something to think and pray about. Good night.