In 1933 Dr. J. Gresham Machen addressed the National Union of Christian Schools with the following words of commendation and benedic­tion for the example of the teachers and sup­porters of Christian day schools.

Some of you, no doubt, are serving as teacher on salaries necessarily small. What words can I possibly find to celebrate the heroism and unselfishness of such service? Others of you are maintaining the schools by your gifts, in the midst of many burdens and despite the present poverty and the distress. When I think of such true Christian heroism as yours, I count everything that I ever tried to do in my life to be pitifully unworthy. I can only say that I stand in your presence as in the presence of brethren to whom God has given richly of His grace. You deserve the gratitude of your country. In time of spiritual intellectual and political decadence, you have given us in America something that is truly healthy ... like a precious salt that may check the ravages of decay. May that salt never lose its savor! May the distinctiveness of your Christian schools never be lost; may it never give place, by a false 'Americanization,' to a drab uniformity which is the most un-American thing that could possibly be conceived! But if you deserve the gratitude of every American patriot, how much more do you deserve the gratitude of Christian men and women! You have set an exam­ple for the whole Christian world; you have done a thing which has elsewhere been neglected, and the neglect of which is everywhere bringing disaster. You are like a city set on a hill; and may that city never be hid! May the example of your Christian schools be heeded everywhere in the Church! Above all, may our God richly bless you, and of His grace give you a reward with which all the rewards of earth are not for one moment wor­thy to be compared.

How can we reverse the spiritual decline in America? How can we hope to see our covenant youth as a body growing to serve the Lord? Along with the church and Christian home we need Christian schools whose teachers will unite in­struction of subject matter with teaching of character, and who in their personal lives will join teaching of truth with godly example so that the power of the godly examples in history and of their own lives might be unleashed before us.

1. Humanism asks Teachers to Teach Values without Requiring Morality⤒🔗

1. John Dewey and Jean Piaget have fostered a destructive attitude toward the spiritual and moral development of our children. For 50 years they have urged upon the state schools a view of children based upon Darwin's theory of evolution that children are good and evolving to better. Their views are still the basic diet in child psychology and elementary education classes in many colleges.
   
   They believed that we must let the child's nature fulfill its own destiny. God and God's Word are not to be introduced as goals or moral standards for their learn­ing, but are false and external stimuli which interfere with the pupil's learning and with the child's adaptation to his environment. We must not impose any moral rights and wrongs on them, but simply spur on their interests, and supply their needs and wants. Intellectual and moral reasoning power cannot be developed from outside influences, but only from within the child.
    
2. These Views of Dewey and Piaget form the basis for the "Values Clarification" methodology which permeates modern government-controlled education. The standard text used to inculcate prospective teachers with this methodology (Values and Teaching by Raths, Harmin, and Simon) argues that teachers should not try to "impose values" on students; they should try to "flush out" or clarify students' own value systems. They should "be concerned with the process of valuing and not particularly with the product." So, for instance, sex and contraception are to be discussed, researched, and il­lustrated, but no standards for the proper use of sex are disclosed. Is it any wonder that we face an unprecedented rise in teenage fornication, pregnancy, and abor­tion? To give information on sex without moral standards is to give a stimulation to sexual drives not different from por­nography.
   
   The general assumption of the "Values Clarification" methodology, whether the classroom is health, literature, or history, is that each student should develop a stan­dard that is right for him or her. As C.S. Lewis notes ironically in the Abolition of Man,
   
   "We continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossi­ble ... We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."
   
   We tell our students there are no moral values, and then tell them to be motivated, pure, upright, non-violent, and respectful.
   
   Throwing more money at the problems of our state-controlled schools is not the solution. As the cost per child has gone up, the problems have gotten worse. Not only are there no moral standards for children, but neither are there standards for the teachers.

2. Our Children Need the Power of Godly Examples←⤒🔗

1. We need for our children, Christian teachers who in their own lives will com­bine knowledge with moral character. The cry of many a teacher in government schools today is the same as that of the politician who has been caught in some moral scandal, "My private life does not have anything to do with my professional performance." This is simply the unbeliev­ing idea of Greek philosophy dressed in modern Levis. The Scriptures say that any such disjunction between mind and body, intellect and lifestyle, classroom and private life, tears apart the nature and per­sonality of man. We are each one person, a physio-spiritual unity. We are to love the Lord with all our heart, soul, strength, and MIND. Our Lord Jesus, as Moses before Him, spoke to us the Truth that sanctifies, and also set for us an example of humility, meekness, and servanthood. Paul urges us to be imitators of him as he also was of Christ. This is what our children need. Teachers who imitate the heroes of the faith: instructors who inculcate by their words and actions the power of a godly example. We want no disjunction between private and public life for the teachers of our youth. As the elders of the church are to have a good reputation outside the church and in their homes, may our teachers have the same. As the teachers in the church are to be examples for the flock of God, so may the teachers be to our covenant lambs. Let people who set a good example in their own home or neighborhood lead our nation, guide our churches, and especially be set before our children as teachers in our Christian schools.
    
2. Not only do we want teachers who by God's grace will silently stand before our children as godly examples; we want teachers who will help our children find in history such examples. The protestant reformation pioneered the study of history as a valuable tool to trace spiritual corruption and to recover authentic Christian example. History was not a part of the curriculum before Luther's time. Today our Christian schools are helping to revive this concern of Martin Luther. The modern trend has displaced history from the cur­riculum, in favor of civics, media studies, social studies, and life problems courses. In the Christian school we teach history to help the children understand the works of God. It is His-Story. But it is also the ac­count of men's lives lived in either obe­dience or disobedience to God, which the student must learn to criticize in the light of God's Word. In history we learn from observing acts of God's mercy, longsuffer­ing, wrath and justice. We also have in the men and women of history examples of good that should be emulated, and ex­amples of pride that should be abhorred.
   
   The exciting task of the teacher in Chris­tian School is to put back together the morality, spiritual beliefs, and intellectual accomplishments of significant figures of history.
   
   We cannot understand Bach's music apart from his signing each piece "Soli Deo Gloria."
   
   We cannot understand Karl Marx apart from his immorality with his maid and the suicide of two of his three daughters.
   
   We cannot understand the scientific discoveries of Louis Pasteur apart from his personal relationship to the Lord. Once an assistant found Louis Pasteur bent reverently over his microscope. The assis­tant later told Pasteur that it looked as if he had been praying, to which Pasteur replied, he was indeed praying to adore his Creator for the beauty of his creation that he was beholding under the microscope.
   
   We begin to understand the many stages of the writer Arthur Koestler when now we know how he ended – in a suicide pact with his wife.
   
   We cannot explain the convictions of Abraham Lincoln apart from his life-long desire to be molded by the Holy Scrip­tures. We can only understand the deep melancholy of his life when we see him as a man who most of his years was a skep­tical believer in God, who had not yet trusted in Jesus for his own salvation. He wrote to a friend. "When I came to Springfield I was not a Christian; when I left Springfield for Washington and asked you to pray for me I was not a Christian; when I received the bitterest blow of my life, the death of my son, I was not a Christian; when I went to Gettysburg I was not a Christian, but there at Gettysburg I consecrated my heart to Christ." When he stated that "this nation under God shall have a new birth," he had himself just been born anew. At Gettysburg the great emancipator was himself emancipated. His heart was changed, and he now loved the Savior. "With malice toward none, with charity for all ... may we bind up the na­tions wounds..." These words of his second inaugural were the words of a man who knew the forgiveness of God.
   
   The Christian teacher will examine how personal values affect ideas, how beliefs affect both private morality and public contributions. Biography is reunited with the entire academic spectrum. There is great power for good as our teachers place before the student their own godly ex­amples, and the examples of God's bless­ings upon the righteous since the beginning of the world.
   
   And if you have any doubt that God will powerfully bless such godly examples in these evil days, look at God's blessing upon a faithful father amidst similarly evil days in Israel.

In the Days of King Josiah God Blessed the Godly Example of Shaphan←⤒🔗

Shaphan was one of Josiah's highest ranking cabinet members – his scribe, or secretary of state. He helped administer Josiah's reforms, his tearing down of idols, and his repairing of the temple. It was Shaphan who boldly read from the rediscovered book of the law the judgments of God due the king and the king's people. Shaphan did not shrink from declar­ing the soul-piercing truth, and through this God brought about the king's repentance and renewed zeal, resulting in God's extended mercy to Josiah and his throne.

But the days of Josiah were only a brief respite in Israel's persistent march to doom. What would happen to Shaphan's sons and grandsons? His son Ahikam, who served with him alongside of Josiah, also later served in the court of wicked Jehoiakim. When the mob cried out for a death sentence for Jeremiah "the hand of Ahikam, son of Shaphan was with Jeremiah so that he was not given into the hands of the people to put him to death." When identifying himself as a friend of Jeremiah could well put his own life in danger, Ahikam courageously protected the prophet of truth. Nor was the power of the ex­ample of father and grandfather lost on Ahikam's son, Gedaliah. When Jeremiah's life was threatened a second time, the Babylonian king entrusted Jeremiah into the hands of Gedaliah. When God said to Israel, "Don't run to Egypt, but serve the king of Babylon," many disobeyed and migrated to Egypt. But not Gedaliah – he trusted the seemingly strange word of the Lord. His intellect was captive to the Lord. He stayed in the land of Palestine. He was made governor by the Babylonian king, and the poor of the land were entrusted into his care.

But what about Ahikam's wayward brother? He had none. Elasah and Gemariah were as faithful as he. And Gemariah's son Micaiah was as true as grandpa Shaphan. Gemariah and Micaiah also served as officials in the court of Jehoiakim. It was Micaiah who was in the temple and heard Jeremiah's servant Baruch read the prophet's word from God. It was Micaiah whose heart was stirred with faith and excitement. Immediately he went to his dad and the other cabinet members. He recited from memory the words that had struck his soul. It was this report that moved his father and the other officials to have the prophet's scroll read before the king. This was an urgent word that the king must hear! The king sat at his fire warming himself. As they began to read the scroll to the king, he took his knife and began to cut it into shreds and toss it into the fire. Gemariah cried our brave­ly, "No, don't burn the scroll!" He and his son faithfully blew the trumpet in warning, though the king did not heed. They were in­nocent of the king's blood, and had faithfully held aloft the banner of light in the days when the darkness settled on the kingdom.

The same power for living as godly ex­amples is with us today.

The mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting to those that fear him, and his righteousness is to children's children – to such as keep his cove­nant, and to those that remember his com­mandments to do them.

The God of Shaphan is our God, and He will still bless our godly example for the preservation of a faithful off­spring on the earth. This is what God will bless so that our children will follow in their father's footsteps unto the thousandth genera­tion, instead of the sons falling away in the second generation, and our grandchildren going to the devil in the third.

We live in evil days. Christian parents are afraid to conceive and raise children in the face of the rising tide of decadence around us. We see many covenant children turning away from the Lord. Many homes feel fortunate and comforted if one child in five love the Savior. What is needed is the power of godly ex­amples. We need the godly example of you who are members of the church family, of you who are grandparents, and of you who are parents. And we need the godly Christian ex­ample of those with whom our children will have spent at least 16,380 hours by the time they are 17 years old – their school teachers.