By Peihe, Hubei Province

I always believed that my husband and I passed our lives “with our faces to the soil and our backs to the sun” because we didn’t study enough, and because we had no knowledge. That’s why I decided that no matter how hard or how much I had to suffer, I would send our children to school so that they could accomplish something and stand out from the crowd, and wouldn’t have to follow in our footsteps. With that guiding us, my husband and I ate and dressed simply and squeezed every penny to send our oldest daughter to technical school and our oldest son to university. We still had two more children, so to send them to university, my husband had to leave home to work for years, and I tended the fields and the pigs at home from dawn to dusk. Whenever the farm work got too exhausting, I wished I could simply stop. But at the thought of how competitive society is today, if I didn’t send my children to school, they would only have a future working in the mud like me, they would never achieve anything and would be looked down upon. Only by getting into university could they find a good job or become an official, achieve something, gain a future for themselves, and gain glory for us. When I thought of this, I felt that the pain and exhaustion I suffered would be worth it. And so, every day when I woke up, I kept myself so busy with my work that often I had no time to read God’s words or for a normal spiritual life, and even less time for a normal church life or to perform my duties, but I thought nothing of it, and continued to work myself to the bone for my children …

Recently, I read these words of God: “Regarding the treatment of children: All parents hope their children will receive a higher education, and, one day, will make a name for themselves and have a role to play in society, with a steady income and influence. This alone would honor their ancestors. This concept is common to everyone. ‘May my son be a dragon, and my daughter a phoenix,’ as the saying goes. Is this concept correct? Everyone wants their children to attend a prestigious university, followed by postgraduate studies. They believe that once they have gotten their degrees, their children will make names for themselves, for all people, in their hearts, worship knowledge. ‘The worth of other pursuits is small, the study of books excels them all,’ they believe. Moreover, today’s society is extremely competitive. Without a degree, one might not eat—this is how all people think, and the view they hold. … yet have you ever considered how many of Satan’s poisons this education will have instilled in them by the time they are done? How many of its thoughts and theories will be instilled in your children? … the day will come when your children come home, and you speak to them of believing in God, and they are repulsed. When you speak to them of the truth, they will call you silly, and laugh at you, and view your words with contempt. When that day comes, you will feel you chose the wrong path in sending your children to such a school to receive such an education, but, by then, it will be too late for regret. … When it comes to their own children, no one willingly brings them before God for the sole purpose of accepting the truth of His words, of behaving according to the truth and God’s requirements. People are unwilling to do this, and they dare not, lest their children have no livelihood or future in society. What does this view confirm? It confirms that people are uninterested in the truth and believing in God. They have no faith in God, much less true faith in Him, and, in their hearts, what they look up to and worship remains this world. They feel that, if they leave the world behind, they will have no way to live…. These human ideas and viewpoints are in opposition to God, are a betrayal and rejection of God, and are incompatible with the truth” (“Only by Recognizing Your Misguided Views Can You Know Yourself” in Records of Christ’s Talks). Each and every one of God’s words moved me deeply. So many years of enduring all kinds of hardships, laborious work, and sparing no expense so that my children could go to university, and why? Because I believed Satan’s rule of survival: “The worth of other pursuits is small, the study of books excels them all”! Under the influence of Satan’s poison, I put knowledge above all else, and thought that only with knowledge could one stand out, accomplish things, have a future, and gain status in society. I thought those without education were an underclass deserving of disdain, the lowest of the low. So, to ensure my children could succeed in the world and avoid lives “with their faces to the soil and their backs to the sun,” I did everything in my power to send them to study and provide them a higher education. For so many years, I put my goal before anything else, meanwhile I buried God’s words, my duties, and my own salvation in the back of my mind. Satan’s poison hurt me so deeply! Even though I had followed God for years, I had not obtained the truth, and my viewpoints hadn’t changed at all. What I worshiped was still knowledge, and what I yearned for and relied on was Satan. I was totally an unbeliever who pursued worldly trends and resisted God!

Later, by constantly reading God’s words, I understood that some knowledge can allow us to have some things such as common sense, insights and principles in life, and this kind of knowledge can be somewhat beneficial to us. Most knowledge, however, comes from various theories of Satan, and is fallacies and heresies that Satan uses to deceive and corrupt people. Satan uses study and learning to trick people into receiving its education, and thereupon it pours its poison and thoughts into their minds, and once the poison is delivered, people are completely taken over by atheist thoughts and fallacies that deny and resist God, so that Satan achieves its goals of corrupting and devouring people. Phrases such as “There has never been any Savior,” “Humans evolved from apes,” “All weathers are formed by nature,” “One’s destiny is in his own hand,” “Everyone for himself and the devil take the hindmost,” are all ideas and viewpoints concerning the theories of materialism and evolution. They have been injected into the deepest parts of our hearts, and they make us resist God and deny His existence more and more. Because I couldn’t see through Satan’s trick, I eagerly sent my children off to receive a satanic education, handing them to Satan without ever considering how to bring them before God or make them accept the truth that comes from God and make them live according to God’s requirements. Recently, my son graduated from university, and even though he gained much knowledge, he was saturated with all the fallacies and heresies of Satan. When I mentioned anything about belief in God, he paraded all kinds of scientific knowledge and theories to refute me, he called me uneducated, ignorant, and undiscerning, he said I should believe in science…. Facing all this, I felt such regret, and only then did I realize that all satanic culture and knowledge are contrary to the truth and hostile to God. They are the tools Satan uses to corrupt and control people. I also came to understand that having a lot of knowledge is not a good thing. The higher an education people receive, and the more knowledge they grasp, the more satanic poisons there are instilled within them, the further they become from God, the harder it is for them to accept the truth, and the harder it is for them to receive God’s salvation. One could say that the more books a person reads and the more knowledge they have, the more serious their resistance to God. This kind of knowledge is a very dangerous thing!

Enlightenment from God finally made me understand that “The worth of other pursuits is small, the study of books excels them all” is a satanic fallacy, just one of Satan’s lies to deceive, delude, and corrupt people. I understood that, by living under Satan’s domain and accepting Satan’s ideological education, we can only become more and more corrupted. At the same time, I understood that only by bringing our children before God to read God’s words and behave in accordance with His requirements can they live out meaningful lives. Just then, I came before God and poured out my heart to Him: “God, I don’t want to be deceived and afflicted by Satan anymore, I want to proactively pursue the truth and change all my own fallacious views, I want Your words to be the foundation of my existence, and I want to bring my two youngest children before You, so that they can receive Your salvation and become genuine people.”