This post stems from the past few posts I have written about raising children and being a Godly father. My wife scared me on our way home from church when she pointed out how she sees the marriage covenant we share are being a type of the covenant Jesus has with his church. Now not only do I represent the Father by bearing that title to my children but also, albeit to a very small degree, represent Christ. No pressure though.

Deuteronomy 6 says a great deal to the Israelites about how they are to live their lives and train their children on a daily basis.

4 “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 5 You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. 6 And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. 7 You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. 8 You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. 9 You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

For now I will avoid the question of whether or not this text is prescriptive or descriptive, meaning is it a command to all Christians at all times or just to this particular group of people. I believe this passage to be applicable to all of us as how to train our children. If you are not aware V4 is known as the Shemah in Judaism and is a central passage to their faith.
What stands out to me immediately is that we are to talk about the statutes of God all the time. V 7 tells us to teach them at all times to our children. I have always felt awkward for my desire to talk about Godly things more often than those around me. But I was discipled in an environment where that is really all we talked about so it came naturally to me. It seems that it is difficult, even for me, to find our faith in Jesus as common ground. I am attending a church plant where everyone is new and it is easy to start a conversation because few people know one another but still we ask “What do you do?” and other small talk questions instead about asking more about how Jesus affected their lives, is that because we have been taught that those topics are taboo in polite society or simply because Jesus isn’t all that central even in the lives of us who call themselves believers? I am not sure.
But I do know that I don’t have to worry about taboo topics within my house. I have heard that faith is more caught than taught and I have seen examples in my years as a youth pastor where parents assumed I would take care of all that spiritual stuff so they didn’t have to. After all that is what they paid their tithes for right? I can teach my children all of the right words and songs but if I am not living out my faith daily in front of my children I think it may be useless.