Scripture: Colossians 3: 12-21
Three retired guys were discussing their funeral arrangements. Then one of them asked a good question. He said, “Say, what do you want people to say about you at the funeral? What kind of stuff would you want to hear if you could?” The first one, a retired Dr., suggested that it would be nice to hear people appreciate how much he cared for his patients. And it would be nice if people recognized his contributions to medical research, so that he would always be remembered with admiration, sort of like Jonas Salk is remembered for polio vaccine.
The next guy was a retired lawyer. He talked about some of the more important and difficult cases he had seen through to a just end, and hoped people would appreciate how hard he had worked as a public defender. But then he added, “You know, more important than any of that would be to know that my wife and my kids loved me. I’d love to hear them say that I was a good husband and a great dad, with lots of love and wisdom for them. In the long run, nothing would matter to me more than that.”
The other two guys were nodding their heads to agree how great that would be. But then the last guy said, “That would all be wonderful, but you know what I’d really like to hear people say at my funeral? ... Look! He’s moving!! He’s waking up!”
Last week I forgot to mention that our life of living sacrifice is one of the big rocks. I’m still talking about the big rock priorities in our lives and family is one of them. God laid it on my heart to talk about family today.
In today’s reading, Paul, in his inspired wisdom, put some general principles about loving relationships ahead of four simply written, specific tasks for family members. And what he asked of them would have challenged them to behave differently than the cultural norm and expectation. Now as we get started, there’s a little side thought I want to share. You really ought to keep in mind that any time we look at one of the epistles that Paul wrote, or James or John for that matter, it was a letter to a church or churches, like personal mail. So, when that letter came, they probably didn’t give it to the pastor to study and get a message ready based on just a small portion of it. They probably didn’t even wait until Sunday. Immediately, the community gathered around to hear it and find out what Paul wanted to tell them!
Well anyway, we are dealing with this small section today, and that’s ok. We’re going to have to take some time to fill in some background information about the people who first heard the letter. Things that they already knew, things that are not so obvious to us. But when we are aware, it helps us to understand what Paul really meant.
Now, let’s define family. The simplest is the Mom, Dad and kids picture. But then we add in the other relatives and get the extended family. It used to be that extended family probably all lived in the same village or general vicinity before the age of cars and modern transportation. Nowadays, on raising kids, there’s a saying going around, “It takes a village.” I can see there’s some truth in that. Not too long ago the village was all family! More recently, neighborhoods still at least had that family feel. Kids couldn’t get away with anything because all the neighbors were friends who looked out for each other’s kids, and talked to any kid as if he or she was their own. Remember those days? But that’s changed a lot too.
I know people who still live in the house they were born in. But that’s getting more and more rare these days. While my young family lived in the UP, our two oldest children, Matt and Chris got to enjoy many days with Grandma and Grandpa at their house. It was just a twenty-minute drive. One of the things we did every year was go up to their property to cut down our own Christmas tree. There were lots of things to do on the farm, from fishing to helping with chores, but especially eating grandma’s good old fashioned cooking! When we moved to Maine, losing constant contact with Grandma and Grandpa was a big sacrifice, for all of us!
These days, because of college and then career opportunities, most kids grow up and move away. Many young families are starting out in life far from the family home, far from familial support and wisdom, far from free baby-sitting that could help out at the drop of a hat in an emergency. It’s a huge loss and a big strain on young, inexperienced parents who may feel like they are going it alone. That’s one place the Church could be a help. Our own kids may have moved away. But maybe there are still young people nearby that we could adopt or care about.
Thanks to Disney, I have become familiar with a Hawaiian word for family. Ohana means family (in an extended sense of the term, including blood-related, adoptive or intentional). The concept emphasizes that families are bound together and members must cooperate and remember one another. The human family is the building block of society.
Everybody knows this. Everybody wishes they had more time to spend just enjoying healthy family relationships. We’ve heard this sort of thing before. At the end of your life, if you have any regret, it won’t be that you wish you had spent more time at the office. It will be that you wish you had spent more time with your spouse and kids.
And yet, many young people today face social and economic pressures that make it hard to maintain the stability of the traditional family. I already mentioned how hard it is for college grads to find good jobs back home near mom and dad. In addition, divorce rates are still high. Abortion is still legal. There is the pressure to normalize same sex marriage. Child care is expensive. Career minded women may find children a hindrance to advancement. And many couples are choosing not to have children at all so they can travel more and enjoy a more care free life of fun leisure activities that are just easier to manage without kids.
Single parent homes are on the rise. The absence of fathers, especially in urban America contributes to all kinds of unguided children growing up in gangs and being involved in crime and drugs. Under these pressures the typical family barely exists anymore. And that’s the way the devil wants it. God is revealed to us as Father, and Paul in Ephesians clearly said that marriage is an image of the relationship between Christ and his bride, the Church. Therefore, all the anti-family social ills we are suffering from is all part of satan’s spiritual warfare tactics. The devil is hard at work to destroy the family and smudge the image of God that we are supposed to see in the family.
So as Christians, one of the big rocks and even part of our mission in this world is to rebuild, maintain and support healthy families! Paul’s inspired writing in Colossians 3:12-21 gives us a good place to start. “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.” That’s another summary of the fruit of the Spirit, the aspects of love, acted out in human relationships. Let’s notice too that the way Paul gives his list he started with the easiest thing to do and moved on to the more difficult requirements of love.
Compassion is how we respond to people who are suffering. It literally means feeling along with. It is sympathy, but more than just feeling the same feelings. Compassion includes exhibiting a caring concern that seeks to alleviate the suffering.
Kindness is to say things and do them with a smile, to help people with their tasks or needs and to appreciate the goodness in others. Humility is to be more concerned for the interests of others, putting others first. Gentleness and patience have more to do with managing conflict. It addresses how we ought to respond to people who may be frustrating us, or opposing us, or disagreeing with our views.
The next verse is, “Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone.” It follows closely after being gentle and patient. Bear with it. Put up with grievances, overlook offenses, that sort of thing. Maybe even grit your teeth, but try to make it look like a smile.
Then he adds, “Forgive as the Lord forgave you.” That fact of having been forgiven really ought to be what gives you the power and the desire to be forgiving. If you can grasp at all how perfectly God has done for you all that he is asking you to do in response to his gift of forgiveness, well, then the Holy Spirit must dwell within. Next, Paul wrote, “over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.” Love, the primary character and attribute of God our heavenly Father, of course.
And Paul goes on, Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. Wait are we really talking about how to strengthen the family? Isn’t this just about how we should treat people in general? Well of course it is. Didn’t Paul write this to a church, so it’s more about those kinds of relationships? Well sure, you could see it that way. But Paul will soon be getting specific with some instructions about family relationships. But he sets that up with this very careful preparation so that we can more easily understand what he means and do it right.
Besides, it is probably more important to apply these powerful principles to our family members. Charity begins at home, right? Mother Thresa once said, “What can you do to promote world peace? Go home and love your family.” They are the closest to us. We are safe with them and they always have to forgive us anyway, right? So, our home environment is probably the most challenging place for us to enact these relationship principles Paul has given us. One of the thoughts I like to dwell on as a life goal is that I want to care about other people as much as I care about members of my own family, and harder still, I want to be as nice to members of my own family as I am to everybody else.
Then Paul says, “Be thankful.” Let gratitude for what you have in each other be the foundation from which you start to teach and instruct your children. It’s too easy for us to find fault with others, then gripe and complain about them, and call that instruction! So, Paul says, “Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts.” If your singing your words of instruction, it’s really hard to be angry at the same time!
So, let proper constructive criticism be couched always in gracious and forgiving love. “And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” Treat the other members of your family as God would and does. Doing it all in the name of the Lord ought to remind us. Or perhaps we can picture whether the way we naturally are led to treat each other in our families is as good as how we would be spiritually led if the power of Jesus’ name was supporting our actions.
Then after all that, Paul just has four brief sentences to specifically correct areas in which our sin nature always tries to get the upper hand. Interestingly, we can observe that he has one thing to say to women, one thing to say to children, and two things to say to men! That’s significant because in that day and age a man had absolute legal authority over his family. He really was a king in his own home and there was no one who could fault him for being a tyrant, or stop him!
So, I’ll just walk you through these with just a bit of additional commentary. First, Paul says, “Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.” Please note that Paul is talking to the women, to lead them away from their more natural response of contempt for brutish men. Paul is not telling the men they have any right to make the women submit to them. Paul is telling the women, look, as hard as it is, because you’re so much smarter, have more on the ball, and care a whole more for a whole lot more things, than the guys do, you still have to try to be gentle, patient, kind and all the other Christian virtues I talked about before I brought this up. If you can put into practice all the forgiveness and peace and everything, it will look like your submitting, you know, letting him take more responsibility for his own family. And that’s a good thing. You shouldn’t have to bear the whole load while he goes fishing or whatever it is he’d rather do. And if you let him do things the way he thinks is right, he’s more likely to learn from his mistakes and get better at loving you.
Now the next thing Paul says was a truly shocking thing to say into the culture he was addressing back in the Roman civilization of the First Century. “Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them.” In that day, marriage was all about increasing your own prosperity and standing in society. It was important to pick the right woman. Feelings were not a part of the equation. So, if you happened to fall in love too, well that was just a lucky bonus! But Paul was teaching that love was the most important part of the relationship. And even he was not talking about feelings but of sacrifice for her sake!
Paul was leading the men away from their sin nature type of brute force behavior that tried to keep and control women. He was seeking to prevent the typical abusive behavior that guys can get into when they think they own women because they paid the dowry. Even today, men very often have anger issues when they are frustrated. It’s easy for us to lose our temper, and when we do, we can do a lot of damage, physically, emotionally and spiritually in the homes we are supposed to be caring about the way God the Father does. By nature, we want to vent our wrath when we think we’re in the right. But God is merciful and kind. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, so that whoever believes in him might be saved! That’s how we fix things guys, by loving sacrifice, not brute force that demands subservience.
Now think of this, Paul addressed the children in the congregation! It doesn’t say to the parents anything like, “Tell your children to obey.” It speaks directly to the children! That tells you that the children, at least the ones who were old enough to sit still and listen, were gathered together with the whole community that received this letter, sitting in the worship service as it were, to hear the reading of this letter.
So, when Paul spoke to the children, they were right there to hear this command. This is a new thing too. It was Jesus who taught his disciples, “Let the little children come.” That right there tells you that the culture of that day didn’t think much of children and barely tolerated their presence anyplace, and certainly wouldn’t ordinarily accept them in adult company. Especially not men. Children were legally regarded as the father’s property, but were left for the women to take care of. But Christianity began to change all that!
The children were there, and they heard the command, “Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord.” It addresses them with great respect too, as if they are independent and responsible. That they can choose to obey. And Paul gives as the reason for their obedience to please the Lord. In other words, children your relationship with Jesus is more important to than your relationship with your parents. But Jesus asks you to obey your parents so things will go easier for you.
Now we all know that the children find it hard sometimes to obey their parents. Our sinful nature leads us the other way. So once again, the instruction is needed because by nature we do the opposite.
Then Paul speaks again to the Men. “Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged.” In that culture, fathers had absolute legal authority to do whatever they wanted to do to their kids. There was child abuse. But there were no laws against it at all. This legal power over children did not go away when the children reached adulthood either. As long as they both were alive, the father retained absolute legal authority over his children. In such a situation, it was especially easy for abuse to go unchallenged. But Paul challenged the men. Do not embitter your children. Love them too. Show mercy! Lead gently!
Now as we wrap up our talk about his really big rock that takes a top priority spot in our lives, I want to add that God thinks it’s a really great idea to combine some of the big rocks in one time slot. Spend time reading the Bible and praying, with your family! God approves of this concept so much that he mentioned it twice in Deuteronomy 6:7 and 11:9. Spend time with your kids talking to them about God and his wisdom. “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.” In other words, any time the kids are around, try to love them and put in a good word for how much God loves them too.
Three retired guys were discussing their funeral arrangements. Then one of them asked a good question. He said, “Say, what do you want people to say about you at the funeral? What kind of stuff would you want to hear if you could?” The first one, a retired Dr., suggested that it would be nice to hear people appreciate how much he cared for his patients. And it would be nice if people recognized his contributions to medical research, so that he would always be remembered with admiration, sort of like Jonas Salk is remembered for polio vaccine.
The next guy was a retired lawyer. He talked about some of the more important and difficult cases he had seen through to a just end, and hoped people would appreciate how hard he had worked as a public defender. But then he added, “You know, more important than any of that would be to know that my wife and my kids loved me. I’d love to hear them say that I was a good husband and a great dad, with lots of love and wisdom for them. In the long run, nothing would matter to me more than that.”
The other two guys were nodding their heads to agree how great that would be. But then the last guy said, “That would all be wonderful, but you know what I’d really like to hear people say at my funeral? ... Look! He’s moving!! He’s waking up!”
Last week I forgot to mention that our life of living sacrifice is one of the big rocks. I’m still talking about the big rock priorities in our lives and family is one of them. God laid it on my heart to talk about family today.
In today’s reading, Paul, in his inspired wisdom, put some general principles about loving relationships ahead of four simply written, specific tasks for family members. And what he asked of them would have challenged them to behave differently than the cultural norm and expectation. Now as we get started, there’s a little side thought I want to share. You really ought to keep in mind that any time we look at one of the epistles that Paul wrote, or James or John for that matter, it was a letter to a church or churches, like personal mail. So, when that letter came, they probably didn’t give it to the pastor to study and get a message ready based on just a small portion of it. They probably didn’t even wait until Sunday. Immediately, the community gathered around to hear it and find out what Paul wanted to tell them!
Well anyway, we are dealing with this small section today, and that’s ok. We’re going to have to take some time to fill in some background information about the people who first heard the letter. Things that they already knew, things that are not so obvious to us. But when we are aware, it helps us to understand what Paul really meant.
Now, let’s define family. The simplest is the Mom, Dad and kids picture. But then we add in the other relatives and get the extended family. It used to be that extended family probably all lived in the same village or general vicinity before the age of cars and modern transportation. Nowadays, on raising kids, there’s a saying going around, “It takes a village.” I can see there’s some truth in that. Not too long ago the village was all family! More recently, neighborhoods still at least had that family feel. Kids couldn’t get away with anything because all the neighbors were friends who looked out for each other’s kids, and talked to any kid as if he or she was their own. Remember those days? But that’s changed a lot too.
I know people who still live in the house they were born in. But that’s getting more and more rare these days. While my young family lived in the UP, our two oldest children, Matt and Chris got to enjoy many days with Grandma and Grandpa at their house. It was just a twenty-minute drive. One of the things we did every year was go up to their property to cut down our own Christmas tree. There were lots of things to do on the farm, from fishing to helping with chores, but especially eating grandma’s good old fashioned cooking! When we moved to Maine, losing constant contact with Grandma and Grandpa was a big sacrifice, for all of us!
These days, because of college and then career opportunities, most kids grow up and move away. Many young families are starting out in life far from the family home, far from familial support and wisdom, far from free baby-sitting that could help out at the drop of a hat in an emergency. It’s a huge loss and a big strain on young, inexperienced parents who may feel like they are going it alone. That’s one place the Church could be a help. Our own kids may have moved away. But maybe there are still young people nearby that we could adopt or care about.
Thanks to Disney, I have become familiar with a Hawaiian word for family. Ohana means family (in an extended sense of the term, including blood-related, adoptive or intentional). The concept emphasizes that families are bound together and members must cooperate and remember one another. The human family is the building block of society.
Everybody knows this. Everybody wishes they had more time to spend just enjoying healthy family relationships. We’ve heard this sort of thing before. At the end of your life, if you have any regret, it won’t be that you wish you had spent more time at the office. It will be that you wish you had spent more time with your spouse and kids.
And yet, many young people today face social and economic pressures that make it hard to maintain the stability of the traditional family. I already mentioned how hard it is for college grads to find good jobs back home near mom and dad. In addition, divorce rates are still high. Abortion is still legal. There is the pressure to normalize same sex marriage. Child care is expensive. Career minded women may find children a hindrance to advancement. And many couples are choosing not to have children at all so they can travel more and enjoy a more care free life of fun leisure activities that are just easier to manage without kids.
Single parent homes are on the rise. The absence of fathers, especially in urban America contributes to all kinds of unguided children growing up in gangs and being involved in crime and drugs. Under these pressures the typical family barely exists anymore. And that’s the way the devil wants it. God is revealed to us as Father, and Paul in Ephesians clearly said that marriage is an image of the relationship between Christ and his bride, the Church. Therefore, all the anti-family social ills we are suffering from is all part of satan’s spiritual warfare tactics. The devil is hard at work to destroy the family and smudge the image of God that we are supposed to see in the family.
So as Christians, one of the big rocks and even part of our mission in this world is to rebuild, maintain and support healthy families! Paul’s inspired writing in Colossians 3:12-21 gives us a good place to start. “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.” That’s another summary of the fruit of the Spirit, the aspects of love, acted out in human relationships. Let’s notice too that the way Paul gives his list he started with the easiest thing to do and moved on to the more difficult requirements of love.
Compassion is how we respond to people who are suffering. It literally means feeling along with. It is sympathy, but more than just feeling the same feelings. Compassion includes exhibiting a caring concern that seeks to alleviate the suffering.
Kindness is to say things and do them with a smile, to help people with their tasks or needs and to appreciate the goodness in others. Humility is to be more concerned for the interests of others, putting others first. Gentleness and patience have more to do with managing conflict. It addresses how we ought to respond to people who may be frustrating us, or opposing us, or disagreeing with our views.
The next verse is, “Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone.” It follows closely after being gentle and patient. Bear with it. Put up with grievances, overlook offenses, that sort of thing. Maybe even grit your teeth, but try to make it look like a smile.
Then he adds, “Forgive as the Lord forgave you.” That fact of having been forgiven really ought to be what gives you the power and the desire to be forgiving. If you can grasp at all how perfectly God has done for you all that he is asking you to do in response to his gift of forgiveness, well, then the Holy Spirit must dwell within. Next, Paul wrote, “over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.” Love, the primary character and attribute of God our heavenly Father, of course.
And Paul goes on, Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. Wait are we really talking about how to strengthen the family? Isn’t this just about how we should treat people in general? Well of course it is. Didn’t Paul write this to a church, so it’s more about those kinds of relationships? Well sure, you could see it that way. But Paul will soon be getting specific with some instructions about family relationships. But he sets that up with this very careful preparation so that we can more easily understand what he means and do it right.
Besides, it is probably more important to apply these powerful principles to our family members. Charity begins at home, right? Mother Thresa once said, “What can you do to promote world peace? Go home and love your family.” They are the closest to us. We are safe with them and they always have to forgive us anyway, right? So, our home environment is probably the most challenging place for us to enact these relationship principles Paul has given us. One of the thoughts I like to dwell on as a life goal is that I want to care about other people as much as I care about members of my own family, and harder still, I want to be as nice to members of my own family as I am to everybody else.
Then Paul says, “Be thankful.” Let gratitude for what you have in each other be the foundation from which you start to teach and instruct your children. It’s too easy for us to find fault with others, then gripe and complain about them, and call that instruction! So, Paul says, “Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts.” If your singing your words of instruction, it’s really hard to be angry at the same time!
So, let proper constructive criticism be couched always in gracious and forgiving love. “And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” Treat the other members of your family as God would and does. Doing it all in the name of the Lord ought to remind us. Or perhaps we can picture whether the way we naturally are led to treat each other in our families is as good as how we would be spiritually led if the power of Jesus’ name was supporting our actions.
Then after all that, Paul just has four brief sentences to specifically correct areas in which our sin nature always tries to get the upper hand. Interestingly, we can observe that he has one thing to say to women, one thing to say to children, and two things to say to men! That’s significant because in that day and age a man had absolute legal authority over his family. He really was a king in his own home and there was no one who could fault him for being a tyrant, or stop him!
So, I’ll just walk you through these with just a bit of additional commentary. First, Paul says, “Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.” Please note that Paul is talking to the women, to lead them away from their more natural response of contempt for brutish men. Paul is not telling the men they have any right to make the women submit to them. Paul is telling the women, look, as hard as it is, because you’re so much smarter, have more on the ball, and care a whole more for a whole lot more things, than the guys do, you still have to try to be gentle, patient, kind and all the other Christian virtues I talked about before I brought this up. If you can put into practice all the forgiveness and peace and everything, it will look like your submitting, you know, letting him take more responsibility for his own family. And that’s a good thing. You shouldn’t have to bear the whole load while he goes fishing or whatever it is he’d rather do. And if you let him do things the way he thinks is right, he’s more likely to learn from his mistakes and get better at loving you.
Now the next thing Paul says was a truly shocking thing to say into the culture he was addressing back in the Roman civilization of the First Century. “Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them.” In that day, marriage was all about increasing your own prosperity and standing in society. It was important to pick the right woman. Feelings were not a part of the equation. So, if you happened to fall in love too, well that was just a lucky bonus! But Paul was teaching that love was the most important part of the relationship. And even he was not talking about feelings but of sacrifice for her sake!
Paul was leading the men away from their sin nature type of brute force behavior that tried to keep and control women. He was seeking to prevent the typical abusive behavior that guys can get into when they think they own women because they paid the dowry. Even today, men very often have anger issues when they are frustrated. It’s easy for us to lose our temper, and when we do, we can do a lot of damage, physically, emotionally and spiritually in the homes we are supposed to be caring about the way God the Father does. By nature, we want to vent our wrath when we think we’re in the right. But God is merciful and kind. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, so that whoever believes in him might be saved! That’s how we fix things guys, by loving sacrifice, not brute force that demands subservience.
Now think of this, Paul addressed the children in the congregation! It doesn’t say to the parents anything like, “Tell your children to obey.” It speaks directly to the children! That tells you that the children, at least the ones who were old enough to sit still and listen, were gathered together with the whole community that received this letter, sitting in the worship service as it were, to hear the reading of this letter.
So, when Paul spoke to the children, they were right there to hear this command. This is a new thing too. It was Jesus who taught his disciples, “Let the little children come.” That right there tells you that the culture of that day didn’t think much of children and barely tolerated their presence anyplace, and certainly wouldn’t ordinarily accept them in adult company. Especially not men. Children were legally regarded as the father’s property, but were left for the women to take care of. But Christianity began to change all that!
The children were there, and they heard the command, “Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord.” It addresses them with great respect too, as if they are independent and responsible. That they can choose to obey. And Paul gives as the reason for their obedience to please the Lord. In other words, children your relationship with Jesus is more important to than your relationship with your parents. But Jesus asks you to obey your parents so things will go easier for you.
Now we all know that the children find it hard sometimes to obey their parents. Our sinful nature leads us the other way. So once again, the instruction is needed because by nature we do the opposite.
Then Paul speaks again to the Men. “Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged.” In that culture, fathers had absolute legal authority to do whatever they wanted to do to their kids. There was child abuse. But there were no laws against it at all. This legal power over children did not go away when the children reached adulthood either. As long as they both were alive, the father retained absolute legal authority over his children. In such a situation, it was especially easy for abuse to go unchallenged. But Paul challenged the men. Do not embitter your children. Love them too. Show mercy! Lead gently!
Now as we wrap up our talk about his really big rock that takes a top priority spot in our lives, I want to add that God thinks it’s a really great idea to combine some of the big rocks in one time slot. Spend time reading the Bible and praying, with your family! God approves of this concept so much that he mentioned it twice in Deuteronomy 6:7 and 11:9. Spend time with your kids talking to them about God and his wisdom. “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.” In other words, any time the kids are around, try to love them and put in a good word for how much God loves them too.
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