God thinks we can never have too much of His Word practically applied to our family lives.
We’ve seen that the first responsibility of parents is to communicate to our children the importance of knowing and loving God. Do the Hebrew Scriptures know nothing of the Trinity? We saw in our last study that God’s complex unity is seen from its first pages. And before we move on, here is a statement from Isaiah: “Listen to Me, O Jacob, and Israel, My called: I am He, I am the First, I am also the Last…Come near to Me, hear this: I have not spoken in secret from the beginning; from the time that it was, I was there. And now the Lord God and His Spirit have sent Me” (see Isa 48:12-16). Obviously the “Me” is also “the First” and “the Last” and we know who that is (see Rev 22:13-16)! But the instruction for parents continues. “These words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates” (Deut 6:6-9). People who like exotic words would call this a plea for ubiquity. To ordinary folks, it means, “Spread God’s word everywhere!” First, it “shall be in your heart.” Let’s not teach our children to be hypocrites! Then it should be “in your house.” It should also be woven into life’s humdrum: “when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up.” It should affect what “your hand” is doing, and what’s going on in our heads: “they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.” And it should affect what comes in and out of our gates, too. God’s secret of family success? Look in and live out the Book.