29 - Preparing Your Family for Persecution (with Andrew Pudewa)

Today's guest is Andrew Pudewa, a wonderful and influential thinker and speaker and educator and someone who has so much to teach us about godly living. Andrew is a gifted communicator who loves helping families educate their children and is the founder of an awesome organization called the Institute for Excellence in Writing. He's also the host of the Arts of Language Podcast, which is also excellent. In this episode, Andrew helps us think strategically and soberly about how to prepare well for persecution, and relays the back story of how he got thinking on the topic. As Christians and Christian families, we would do well to heed his words and be careful to fill our minds and hearts with goodness and truth and beauty, thereby allowing ourselves and our children to more easily repel the lies of the world, the flesh and the devil, which war against the truth.

Topics we discuss include:

A majority of kids are leaving the church when they get older, but the statistics are reversed for those in homes where the families are working together, where parents are protecting their kids from anti-religious indoctrination.
The great lie of the culture of relativism is that all truths are equal.
It is a very hard thing to undue lies because the world, the flesh and the devil are warring against truth.
In our homes, we need to teach our kids that Truth has a capital T!
A lot of what is being taught today is not just anti-religious but anti-biology.
His story about focusing on his physical health and the tie to spiritual health.
How important it is to suffer to bring us closer to Christ.
Physical discomfort amplifies the spiritual work you're trying to do.
The need to help our kids see the joy in living a life of sacrificing.
How he's been starting to imagine what would life be like if everything were stripped away.
It's so important to help our kids know who they are; and if they don't, the world will start to define it for them.
Properly thinking about our own identifies as followers of Christ. And being a follower of Christ is being willing to do what Christ did.
The framework of code, creed and culture and how those help shape our identities.
Our culture tries to convince us that rules take away our freedom. But God's laws protect us and are for our happiness.
Why it's so important to remember our creeds and repeat them over and over.
Years ago, you could assume that essentially people shared the same values. This is no longer the case and so we need to be very intentional about the relationships we form. Accidental relationships will not sustain up.
Spending time with like-minded people is crucial.
The stronger our like-minded communities, the better our children will be able to internalize the code and creed.
We need to teach our kids the great songs/hymns of our faith.
We can't do much to control whether our culture produces good things or awful things. But we can control what comes into our homes.
The purpose of culture is to grow things. We want to have an environment where the values we want to grow are growing.
A great idea to memorize five songs, five prayers, five Scriptures and five stories. Memorizing things actually affect who you are and help to inform your conscious and subconcious thinking, which affects your identity.
You may have to live in a world of lies -- but you don't have to let the lies live in you. So we need to be full of other good things. This will help you repel the lies of the world.
You want to memorize things so well that they will become second nature.
If everything is taken away, all that we'll have left is what we carry around in our minds and in our hearts.
Andrew Pudewa's list of 5 Songs, 5 Scriptures, Five Prayers/Quotes and 5 Stories:
- Five Songs: Be Thou My Vision, It Is Well with My Soul, Amazing Grace, My Anchor Holds, Faith of Our Fathers
- Five Scripture Selections: Beatitutde (Matthew 5:3-10), Paul on Persecution (2 Corinthians), Matthew 10:22 (You will be hated...), Psalm 23 (or other psalms), "Forgive them, for they know not what they do..." (Luke 23)
- Five Prayers/Quotes: The Lord's Prayer, The Apostle's Cree, Anima Christi, Sam's Speech from The Lord of the Rings, Serenity Prayer (original)
- Five Stories (for Children: Aesop's Fables, C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia, J.R.R. Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings, S.D. Smith's The Green Ember series, stories of martyrs (old & new)

Scripture referenced:

Scriptures Referenced: Philippians 3:10-11

Resources:

The Arts of Language podcast
The Institute for Excellence in Writing (IEW)
Live Not By Lies, by Rod Dreher

Music:

Intro: Life of a Traveler, by Black Rhomb (License #3565685)
Outtro: Avocado Street, by Wes Hutchinson (Courtesy of YouTube Music)

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