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Why is it important that we teach our students strategies for discernment?
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For as God grows everything. I want to point out that a impatient seed would be how God grows us through his word. Pick a seed off a impatient flower. Set this seed in a place by your front door. Water it each day with a drop of water. Each day you will see growth from this seed. As you go about your daily routine with the determination to watch growth not only in the plant but to notice all the blessings that go along with this growth. Each week the impatient grows, it formed leaves, growth and flowers. Notice as each flower closes up it produces a seed. Take the seed and place it somewhere else that it can germinate and flourish. Every seed produced will bring beauty and endless seeds. Thanking God in good and bad can produce more seeds that we could ever handle on our own. After the plant by the door has become beautiful and it starts to have babys growing around it of the seeds we didn’t see fall to the ground. This is what we didn’t see God doing and he brought miracles out of our hard work.
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The world is teaching them all kinds of lies through YouTube, TicToc, celebrity worship, reality TV, etc. If we do nothing to counteract those lies, these students will stray from the Lord. One of my biggest goals as an educator is to get students to think critically and not believe everything they hear/watch. This is one of the most beneficial things we can do as educators.
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Because they will be using it their whole lives.
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It’s an expectation God has for us. It’s part of what it means to love Him with all of our mind. We also need to not only discern right from wrong, but also the harder challenge of discerning between good and better. Developing discernment will allow us to skillfully engage the culture around us in a way that might be compelling as described in Matt. 5:16.
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If we don’t teach them, who will? Some parents take that task seriously and help their children discern what is Biblical and what isn’t, but we as educators can’t always assume that is happening at home. When we are teaching them academic knowledge and understanding, we must also include lessons in how to differentiate what God wants us to know and believe and what the world says is important. There is an avalanche of ungodly knowledge and worldly wisdom being dumped on young people today, especially through social media, movies and music. If they are not being led to search the truth out for themselves, they will easily be duped into following the world and the devil. It is a real battle for the minds and hearts of the children of our schools, churches, cities and countries. We must teach them how to question what they are being told in a godly manner, comparing the truth of scripture with the ideologies being tossed at them or they will be easy prey for those who would deceive them and use them.