Life, the Teacher

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 doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

Deuteronomy 6:7-9

How should parents impart the truth about God to their children? The answer is, talk about it — that's all! Talk about these things — don't preach, don't lecture, don't send them off to Sunday school. It simply says, Talk, that's all — in as natural and normal and unforced a way as conversation about sports, music, or anything else. God should enter the home in that same way.

As you talk about God, it is helpful to follow a simple format of discovery and response. That is the normal natural way of teaching anything. Discover something, and then react to it, and lead a child in that. I must confess that I have come to an understanding of this after years of doing it the wrong way, of trying to teach by formal methods, of bringing the classroom or the Sunday school into the home. But that doesn't work well. What is necessary is to understand that all things reveal God — people as well as matter, circumstances and incidents as well as mountains and sea — and that you can find your way to an understanding of God in every incident and every circumstance of life. This is the way God ought to come into the home. Discover God in these everyday events, and then lead the child in the proper response to him, whatever the events demand.

Another response which needs to be taught is petition, asking for help or healing, for God is the healer of hurts and the supplier of needs. He speaks to those who are without. He meets the fatherless, the widows, the suffering. There is where his promises are directed — more than anywhere else. So when you find your children hurting and needing help, this is the time to talk about God, and about the way that God can maneuver life to supply the help they are looking for. Or perhaps the necessary response is simply an acknowledgment of wonder or joy in what God has done and what he has made.

So that is the suggestion of Moses: Talk! Talk about God. Let it be as normal and natural a part of your conversation as anything else. Without preaching, without moralizing, without lecturing all the time, nevertheless let many circumstances — not all of them — lead to an understanding of the glory and the love of God. And remember that the figure of God which you paint must not be that of a policeman sitting in angry supervision over life, ready to yell down, CUT THAT OUT! but rather that of a loving Father who is interested and concerned, and yet who can be firm and insistent at times, even relentless, in his discipline.

Teach me, Father, to see you in all of life and to share that with my family, not lecturing and moralizing, but as a natural outgrowth of my relationship with you.