A Curriculum for the Home

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.

Deuteronomy 6:4-5

Here is the curriculum for the home. This marks the difference between a Christian home and a secular home. A Christian home is to teach about God, and about our relationship to God, which is to characterized by love.

We have been in homes where there is no testimony to God or recognition of him at all. They may be orderly homes, moral homes, loving homes where the children are obviously well adjusted and able to cope with life. Often, if you investigate a home like that, you will find that just a generation or so back there has been a deep-seated Christian conviction somewhere in that family. Secular homes of that character are living on the capital of faith which has been invested by a previous generation. This is what our whole nation has been doing. We have been living on the spiritual bank account of our forefathers. But decades ago we ran out, and the glue which has held us together as a people is beginning to disintegrate. Now even the basics of raising children are being lost. That is why the central teaching emphasized here in this paragraph is that the Christian family must begin, and end, and have its being, in facing the fact of the oneness of God, the fact that God is at the heart of all things. God provides the place to begin to solve the riddle of existence.

This encompasses more than the mere fact that he exists. But the Scriptures exhort us to understand that the Lord our God is one Lord. So the heart of this curriculum is that at the center of the universe there is a single intelligent Being. The beginning of understanding, wisdom and knowledge is the recognition of this great, intelligent Being who sits at the heart of all things. What this means in terms of our experience is that all the riddle of life is explained by the unfolding and self-disclosure of God to us. Christian homes must start by understanding that God defines and reveals reality, that we can't tell the difference between illusion and the real thing apart from him.

We must also recognize our responsibility to him, which is that of trustful obedience. That is what love is. It is giving yourself to someone or something. What you love, you give yourself to. And giving yourself is obedience. So when you love God you give yourself to him, you obey him, you trust him and thus obey what he says. Love is trustful obedience. It is doing what he says. That is why Jesus said to his disciples, If you love me, you will keep my commandments (John 14:15). Love and trustful obedience are the same thing. That trustful obedience is the natural outgrowth of love.

I love you, Lord, and bow before you as the Creator and Sustainer of all things, the center of the universe who defines reality.