Shaping Your Child's Heart Starts With Shaping Yours: Deuteronomy 6:4-9

Deuteronomy 6:4-9

“Listen, Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is One. 5 Love the Lord

 your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. 

6 These words that I am giving you today are to be in your heart. 

7 Repeat them to your children. Talk about them when you sit in your house

and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 

8 Bind them as a sign on your hand and let them be a symbol on your forehead. 

9 Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

(Pray)

King of England Illustration

Background on where we find ourselves in Deuteronomy -

Moses gives multiple speeches to the Israelite people

In this passage- We find ourselves in the middle of one of those speeches. He has just recapped the 10 commandments, and now He is beginning to break out into a discourse digging in to each of the commandments individually. Starting with the first commandment — “You shall have no other gods before Me”

1. Love God

Deuteronomy 6:4–6

Our text is part of an ancient Jewish prayer called The Shema. The Shema, which literally means “Hear” or “listen”, has been recited every morning and night by the most devout Jews for centuries. Reciting it day and night is their way of following the latter part of the text which we’ll get to in a moment, “talk about them...when you lie down and when you rise up.” — Listen, Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is ONE

Loving God with all your heart begins with the knowledge that He alone is God. He is the ONE God. We have to know in our hearts and in our minds that He is the ONLY authority. Matthew 6:24 says “No one can be a slave of two masters, since either he will hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other.” He must be our ONE master.

This exact wording would have been so important in the context of the day because the fact that there is only ONE God would have been counter-cultural. This was a primary differentiating factor between Christianity and the pagan religions of the day. We have ONE God and He alone has authority.

If you don’t remember, the Israelites struggled with this command — Exodus 32 “When the people saw that Moses delayed in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said to him, “Come, make us a god who will go before us because this Moses, the man who brought us up from the land of Egypt—we don’t know what has happened to him!”

And then to make matters worse—Aaron, the man God hand-selected to aid Moses in his leadership of Israel, goes and HELPS them make the Golden Calf.

But this made sense to them. In their culture, the “anxiety response,” if you will, to any situation was to find another God to worship. If worshipping one God didn’t work then you must need to find another God to worship, to put your faith in.

And we can easily sit on our high horse and say, “well how in the world could they have done that? How could they have possibly abandoned their faith and love for the Lord and sought another god to worship?”

But church...do we not do the same thing? Do we not so very often abandon our faith and love for the Lord? If we don’t hear from Him on something we are anxious about do we not turn our faith toward our money? Our success? Our relationships? Our political leaders? Our references? And so many other things.

We do this because we do not view Him in our hearts as the ONE God. We say that we do, sure. We have a head knowledge that he is, but we treat other people or things as though they have authority over our needs and situations. How would our lives look differently if we treated God as THE God of everything...Including our lives.

SO we have to start with KNOWING the He alone is God.

If we know rightly that he is the ONE God, the one authority, THE one, we must then arrive at

Deuteronomy 6:5–6 “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. These words that I am giving you today are to be in your heart.”

You have probably heard these words before. This is known throughout Jewish and Christian history as the Great Commandment. Jesus recites this commandment in multiple places in the Gospels.

This command is Moses’ way of encapsulating not just the first commandment, “You shall have no other gods besides Me,” but also the whole of the 10 commandments and the entirety of the book of the law itself. Simply stated, Moses wanted Israel to understand that if this statement is true, if we love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength, then we will undoubtedly follow the rest of the law as well, because to love God is to obey His commands.

What does it mean to love God?

I think there are a few answers to this question. But before we learn how to love GOD, we must first understand what the word love even means — this is demonstrated throughout the entirety of scripture. It’s the hinge upon which the entire story of creation and redemption swings upon.

John 3:16 ““For God loved the world in this way: He gave His One and Only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life.”

John 15:13 “No one has greater love than this, that someone would lay down his life for his friends.”

1 John 4:8 “The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

2. Love Your Children

Deuteronomy 6:7-9

Deuteronomy 6:7a “Repeat them to your children.”

This is one of the first frameworks we see in all of scripture for what biblical family discipleship should look like. Perhaps it is the best one period.

It is a command. It’s an imperative. And it’s used in the masculine form in the original language which means it’s directed at men and more specifically fathers. This verse is certainly calling out all of us but fathers we undoubtedly have a vital part to play here. It is OUR job to teach our sons and daughters the word.

The Hebrew word seen for “repeat” here could be better translated, “sharpen” or even “pierce”. We ought to be PIERCING our children’s hearts and minds with the penetrating Sword of the Spirit — With God’s word.

My child, she’s 2, on Friday morning sitting at the breakfast table out of nowhere looked at us and said, “Ephesians 4:32 “Be kind to one another.” And as proud as I was, as elated as I was to hear my child say that, I couldn’t help but be a little bit convicted.

You see, she did not learn that verse from me— she did not learn it from her mother, she learned it from daycare. And though I’m thankful she attends a bible believing, Christ-centered daycare, my conviction came from the realization that I haven’t prioritized that with my daughter.

To be honest, I’m not even sure that I realized that she was capable of memorizing scripture...but here’s where the conviction comes in — I should have known that.

We’re a musical family. We love to sing and play music. My wife and I are worship leaders. She’s an incredibly talented pianist and I’m just along for the ride!

But our daughter has been singing and memorizing songs since she was 1 and even younger. And sure, we taught her worship songs here and there, but there is nothing that can replace writing scripture on your heart—See verse 6. Even at 2 years old, I know that the piercing Word of God will impact her in ways she won’t even understand because it is being written on her heart.

Fathers, this should matter to us. We should care more about telling our children about God and about His love and teaching them His word than we do about telling them all about the players on our favorite football team.

We should care more about speaking scripture over our children and helping them to write it on their hearts than we do even helping them with math homework or science projects.

This one might get me never invited back — we should care more about teaching them God’s word and about His love than we do about teaching them our political opinions.

It should be the absolute most important thing on our minds. NOT because we want to make them be “good” or “well behaved” — But because we want them know that “the Lord our God is ONE” (v4) — because we want them to “love the Lord their God with all their heart, soul, and strength” (v5) — Because we know that as Proverbs 9:10 says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.” And because they are better off being raised in the Word than being, in southern terms, “Raised right.” Whatever we mean by that.

Also, make note that this is being spoken to Israel, a patriarchal society. “Fathers” were often considered any man that was older than you or in leadership over you. Moses would have been everyones “father” in this sense. This means men, the responsibility to repeat these words is not just in regard to your own children, but to all children. Not every child has a father, will you stand in the gap so they might come to love this God whom you love? Women, the same goes for you. Will you stand in the gap for vulnerable children who do not know the Lord?

This is what we are passionate about at ABCH. We want to be those who “repeat these words to our children.”

Deuteronomy 6:7 - Talk about them when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.”

Really, its as simple as it sounds folks — We talk about the stuff we love. Have you ever been around someone that loves hunting or fishing?

I have a tendency to get hyper-fixated on things. So when I get into something new, my poor wife has to hear me talk about it non-stop. Right now for me thats running. I talk about it all the time.

So what kind of man does this? What kind of man repeats these words over and over daily?

The kind of man we see in v4-5 — in the Shema — One that knows that there is only one true God and that loves that God with all of his heart, soul, mind, and strength. A man who consumed with passion for God and who he is.

We should be in awe of who God is. We should be so amazed by His greatness and His goodness and splendor that it's all that we want to talk about, all that we want to think about. And it is out of this passion, that we ought to instill that same fire into our children.

Deuteronomy 6:8–9 “Bind them as a sign on your hand and let them be a symbol on your forehead. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”

Mezuzah and Teflin—

We ought to love God in our actions. 1 John 3:18 “Little children, we must not love with word or speech, but with truth and action.”

Think about the wording — on your hand, and on your forehead. These are the “action centers” of our bodies. There is not a single action that you take that does not start with your eyes/mind and then is followed through with your hands. He wants us to look upon Him, think upon Him, and act upon Him.

It is also worth noting that in Revelation 13:16–17 it says “And he requires everyone—small and great, rich and poor, free and slave—to be given a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark: the beast’s name or the number of his name.”

The enemy knows the word. The locations of the “mark of the beast” are the exact same locations we’re called to bind God’s words. The “mark of the beast” is his way of counteracting this command of the Lords.

I pray that I bear the markings of God and His words, and not the enemies.

If you do not think that actions are an important manner of teaching children God’s word, think about how your child emulates you.

I cannot believe I’m about to use a country song in an illustration but here we go —

He said I've been watching you dad, ain't that cool

I'm your buckaroo, I wanna be like you

And eat all my food and grow as tall as you are

We got cowboy boots and camo pants

Yeah we're just alike, hey ain't we dad

I wanna do everything you do

So I've been watching you

Your children should see you worship. Your children should see you care for the widow and the orphan (James 1:27). Your children should see you prioritize your love for God and His word above all else. Your children should see you pray. Your children should see serve. And if they see it, they will emulate it and it will change their life for ever. Proverbs 22:6 “Teach a youth about the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.”