Teaching Our Children Diligently

Deuteronomy 6:6-9
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.

Do you know how to train your children in character and God’s Word? It is important that we pray for God to grant us the diligence, patience and love to teaching them God’s Word daily. Proverbs 22:6, “Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.” But, as I break the scripture in Deut. 6:6-9 apart, God is teaching me much more on how I can train my children Godly character through His Word. As great as my intentions may be, I often read them stories from the Bible or do daily devotions, but these methods are not as great as sharing my personal insight and application. You see, the more of God’s Word I have internalized (v.6), the more I see my children’s spiritual growth.

The more I share my life’s lesson with them, the more effective God’s Word will internalize within (v. 7-9). Lou Priolo writes in Teaching Them Diligently, “ Your goal should be to increasingly become like one of the scribes Jesus speaks of in Matthew 13:52, who knows the Scriptures so well that he “brings forth out of his treasure things new and old,” that is, things he has learned from others and things he has figured out for himself.” Therefore, God is calling me to place His Word in my heart and in my soul first, so that I may ‘impress’ these things in their hearts.

If I truly believe that my life’s questions can be answered in the Word, it’s imperative that I live it out through daily meditation and reading by myself and then with my children. At this time, I am finding out there is no effective shortcut to training my children. The more I seek the scriptures for wisdom and instruction, the more I am finding my character needs altering at the same time. I do feel encouraged that as long as my children see my need for God’s grace and mercy, daily seeking change and His will, they will seek God to change their inner being through watching me.

I’d like to encourage you that as you are doing your regular Bible reading, studying, talking, and singing songs of praise with your children, you will be able to show them how the Scripture can govern all areas of your lives. Ultimately, if God’s Word is in your heart, it does affect your entire life.

I also believe as we spend more time in His Word, we will begin to feel more confident in training our children. We have been given the responsibility to indoctrinate our children, the question now is not whether we are going to teach His Word to them, but rather are we going to obey God’s Word ourselves.