Deuteronomy 6: 4 – 9 (NIV): Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the door-frames of your houses and on your gates.
This passage is called The Shema. It is the heart of the Jewish faith and contains the “greatest commandment” in the Christian faith (Matthew 22: 36 – 38). It begins by reminding us that there is one and only one God. We are not to worship any other gods or make any idols to worship. Then the passage tells us to love God with all that we are. To love him with every fiber of our being. All of our heart – our emotional strength; our soul – the essence of who we are; and our strength – with all of our power. This means we decide to love him and we are determined not to allow anything to compromise that love. It's not a half-hearted love or a weak commitment, it's an all-consuming determination.
Understand that love is not necessarily a fond feeling. Love is a deliberate act of the will to give ourselves to someone or something. God is not telling us to like him, he's commanding us to love him. God says his commandments are to be upon our hearts. This means we know God's laws and we never forget them. We say we know something “by heart”. That's what this means. So, we make every decision in light of God's Word. Every time we speak, every time we act.
Next, the responsibility of teaching children what God desires is placed squarely on parents. Parents are the number-one influence on our children. Parents shape our children's character. Children learn what is important in life from watching us. Their morals, their values, their character comes directly from watching their parents. It is not the church's responsibility to teach your children about God, it is yours.
God said to teach our children about him when we sit at home, when we walk along the road, when we lie down, and when we get up. That covers the whole day. We look for opportunities to talk to them and we do so. We let them see us praying and reading our bibles. Our home is full of love and of symbols of our faith. We stress to them the importance of a relationship with God, then we let them see us work on our own relationship with him. We're not perfect and they will see that soon enough, but by our actions we show what is most important to us.
Your children already know whether or not you love God. Teach them about him. Teach them to love him too.
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