“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” Deuteronomy 6:7
I have been sharing at length about our morning devotions and our kids’ personal devotions in expanding on the portion of Deuteronomy 6:7 that describes teaching God’s precepts to our children when we rise up. Along those same lines, we have, through the years, had various times of devotions, family worship, and read alouds. I would like to share a little bit about those in case some of you are still not seeing how all of this can fit in your day.
First of all, of course, teaching our children about God must be a priority to us. A priority is what we do. Thus, anything that we say is a priority but is not done consistently (“more often than not”) is not truly a priority. It is an unfulfilled wish.
Most of the time, in order to move something into priority position in our lives, we must move something else out. We must be purposeful in doing this. We must make a conscious decision to remove thirty minutes of television every evening and put in its place a reading or teaching time for our children. We must, with great fortitude and resolve, reduce our sleep from eight hours to seven and a half hours and replace that reduced sleep with something that is even more important to us.
We cannot wish that we were teaching our kids spiritual truths and have it happen. We cannot plan it in our minds and then make it so. We cannot talk to others about it, read about, or write it down on a “to do list” and see it come to fruition. It must be something that we do. Purposeful. Prioritized. Planned. Carried out.
More on this tomorrow!
