Pursuing Hard Things So We Don't Miss Heaven

By Benjamin Inglis

The following article is used with permission from Dominion Press.

Rigour - The quality of being extremely thorough, exhaustive, or accurate.

It took me a while to find a positive definition of rigour. Most included a combination of adjectives along the lines of “difficult,” “unpleasant,” or “austere.” Just start talking about a rigorous education, for example, and see how quickly you’ll lose people to visions of slate writing boards, professorial gowns, and warm June afternoons spent languishing in the iron maiden.

I want to push back on this narrative. Not just because it gives me an excuse to repurpose the old, but still brilliant, New Saint Andrew’s maxim — “Not all rigour is mortis.” But because I believe the time has long come for all Christians everywhere to start viewing “rigour” as the most reasonable course of action for those who name the name of Christ.

Especially as it concerns education.

I felt compelled to write the following after finding the above quote posted on a popular Canadian homeschool forum. Not that I want to place a burden on the inspirational quoting community it was never meant to bear, but that I want to challenge Christians, and Christian parents in particular, to confront a long-held dichotomy that is gutting our households, churches, and institutions. Boiled down, it is the belief that rigour (as defined above) is, if not directly opposed to, at least incidental to, education.

This isn’t intended to be a mean-spirited attack on homeschoolers, or even homeschooling as an educational category. I know homeschooling families whose education can rightly be described as “rigorous.” I know there are homeschooling families who legitimately have no other options and are doing the best they can under the circumstances. There will be other exceptions I’ve missed.

My intention here is to address a prevailing disposition I’ve observed among the broader homeschooling community. To a larger extent, it is an attack on the presumptive, anti-intellectual, anti-rigorous, anti-Gospel ethos wherever it may be found.

What Happens When Grace ≠ Rigour

Part of the challenge here is that I probably don’t disagree with the substance, or at least the intention, of the above quote. It is, of course, true that ultimately we’re all progressing towards a much bigger destiny than Harvard or a career in cardiology. It is also true that if we educate our children in a manner that allows them to soar past an ivy league entrance exam, but renders them godless materialists, we have utterly failed as parents.

What it fails to communicate, however, is that there’s more than one way to fail our children. The fact that your child is unable to get into Harvard isn’t necessarily an indication that your education project has been a success. It may even be an indication that your education project has been a failure. Especially considering the kind of work Harvard considers “rigorous” these days. 

There are certain things in life — such as a familiarity with law, medicine, and chemical engineering — that can’t be achieved apart from rigour. Not knowing how the poster defines stress, I can’t comment infallibly on her motives, but I do know that what many people think of as stress today is really just the natural response of doing something hard; of doing something our flesh doesn’t want to do. This kind of “stress” isn’t bad. In fact, it’s absolutely necessary. In fact, it’s called sanctification.

To exclude stressful things when they’re actually only just hard things, isn’t just to exclude us from high-paying jobs. It’s to exclude us from heaven.

Consider the following:

Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. 1 Corinthians 9:24

“Therefore I do not run aimlessly; I do not fight like I am beating the air. No, I discipline my body and make it my slave, so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified.” 1 Corinthians 9:27

But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. 1 Corinthians 15:10

I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Philippians 3:14

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us. Hebrews 12:1

Notice Paul’s life was one marked by rigour, not a pathological avoidance of “stress.” Throughout his life, we observe no antithesis between the grace he received and the effort he expends. In fact, it’s completely the opposite. It was because he’d received the grace of God that he worked harder than everyone else. This wasn’t a rigour driven by guilt, self, or selfish ambition — such would have characterised his former life as a pharisee. His rigour had been redeemed, and was now the inevitable outflow of gratitude.

In case we’ve forgotten, the call of Christ is to deny ourselves, take up our cross (which is nothing if not an instrument of stress), and follow him on the path of bloody rigour. But because many Christians have been influenced by the self-care movement more than by biblical priorities, “stressful” things — such as the rigour of planning a year of homeschooling — are often swept away.

I worry that this false view of education (that rigour is secondary to self-care) is reflective of an underlying false view of religion. The fact that the road to life is narrow and the road to destruction is broad may lead to the ditch of striving in unbelief, but it definitely shouldn’t lead to the ditch of suicidal presumption. Such an attitude reflects, I believe, a profound misunderstanding of grace, and the rigour that grace promotes.

Serving Others Above Ourselves

Having been in proximity to various homeschooling events over the years — and again, with no malice intended — I’d be hard pressed to describe the prevailing mood as “rigorous.” More often than not, I’ve left thinking, “These are lovely, well-mannered kids who I would absolutely not want operating on my heart or defending me in court.” Rarely do I leave thinking to myself, “These parents need to stop stressing.” If anything, it’s been, “These parents should probably start stressing more.”

And from one angle, fair enough. As those who’ve been in the trenches of home schooling, it’s hard enough going it alone, and even more difficult to identify when and where one is falling behind. Oddly, however, the response from parents when such things are revealed is rarely met with renewed urgency or an impulse to call each other up. Rather, the general response seems to be to double down on mutual empathy and affirmation. 

If we’re honest, perhaps our resistance to rigour isn’t really about the good of others, the glory of God, or the betterment of our children, but our own fears of inadequacy and failure. Pastor Alex summarizes it well:

It’s a position that prioritizes easing one’s conscience rather than an honest consideration of what our children need to flourish. Instead of honestly asking, “What is my duty to God and my neighbour,” and asking for grace and strength to bear it, it encourages you to be the kind of person who asks “How can I keep changing my duties so, “I got this.”  

Nor is this attitude particular to parents.

Faced with the righteous requirement of God’s law, our natural inclination isn’t to cry out to God for grace to love and obey, but to readjust the standard. In this way, our hearts are kept from the inconvenient rhythms of grace and rigour. Such an attitude produces defensive, unteachable, prickly people who aren’t as interested in doing what’s best for others as they are in maintaining an image of togetherness and self-reliance.

We avoid rigour because rigour reveals our weakness. But recall that weakness isn’t a flaw of the Gospel — it’s a feature. In constantly retreating to a narrative that puts our failures in a better light, we are actively engaged in constructing “some other gospel.”

Time for a Test Drive

What if, as parents, instead of making decisions that were easiest for us, we made decisions that were truly best for our children and, in turn, brought the most glory to God?

Let’s say you’ve just (very sensibly) removed your kids from the marxist indoctrination centres known as public school. Where do you go from there? No doubt some friend or acquaintance will, with the best of intentions, recommend homeschooling. The advantages aren’t hard to sell — it’s easier, cheaper, and more flexible. But are those really the metrics that ought to guide our decisions? It may be that homeschooling is the right decision for your kids. But you better make sure you’re going about the decision honestly. And by honestly, I mean apart from the baseline of “What’s going to be easiest for me?”

Will you be able to create a truly rigorous home-learning environment? Will you be able to generate and maintain a standard of excellence for you and your children? Will you be able to resist the urge to take random days off because it’s nice outside or because you just don’t feel like teaching today? Will you be able to push your kids beyond their innate likes and dislikes? Will you be able to push yourself beyond your own innate likes and dislikes? Will you be able to set aside the convenience of “good enough” and rise to meet the challenge of, “This needs to be better”?

An underlying motto present in many, though not all, homeschooling families, goes something like this: “As long as my kids can add, subtract, and read, we’ve done our job.” In fact, I’ve heard this exact phrase numerous times. But do such “achievements” actually mean we’ve done our jobs? Is settling for the minimum base requirement of adulthood a uniquely Christian attitude? Does such a sentiment remotely resemble the rigorous reformational ethic which led to an explosion of universities, hospitals, and enduring civic institutions?

Because of the grace we’ve received, shouldn’t we want to pursue the best, most rigorous education we can muster? Shouldn’t we want to produce a generation of humble, intelligent, Christ-centred doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, scientists, tradespeople, and parents? Is it loving our neighbour to resign them to a world in which Dads have to research their kid’s symptoms on google because there’s no principled doctors left he can trust? 

The homeschooling movement, as an alternative to the degradation of the public system, has been a commendable response. But a perennial danger I’ve seen over and over again is an inability, or unwillingness, to engage in honest self-reflection and reform.

Another kind of opposition to rigour manifests not among homeschooling parents, but among parents drawn to institutional learning. Such parents may be drawn to formal learning institutions not because of the excellence of their education but because of their own reluctance to take up the rigours of leadership and consistent discipline. 

But this, again, is to prioritize our own interests above those of our children. Just as there is no such thing as conversion by proxy, there is no such thing as parenting by proxy. Though institutions may come alongside to partner with parents, they can never take the place of parents. A failure to discipline at home will not be corrected by enrolling Johnny in a Christian school and letting his teachers figure it out. Where such thinking exists, love may look like holding off enrollment so that further training can take place at home. 

There is no way to faithfully live the Christian life and avoid hard, stressful things. Loving and serving others will necessarily come with anxiety, stress, and challenges we must meet with faithful rigour and not retreat.

As it concerns Christian education, the way forward, as our principal recently said, isn’t in making the educational endeavour “easier.” It is acknowledging the magnitude of the endeavour.

This forces us to be dependent on the Lord, and brings him the most glory.

BENJAMIN INGLIS

Ben is a founding board member of KCCS. He lives in Peterborough, Ontario where he is a also an elder at Hill City Baptist Church. He is the proprietor at benjamininglis.ca and you can also find him occasionally writing at dragonsetc.ca or getting stomped at Yahtzee by one of his three children.