Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - How To Pass On Your Faith | Torah | Deuteronomy 6

Episode Date: September 26, 2022

Who is responsible for sharing Jesus with your kids? Do you know how to share your faith with others? In today’s episode, Keith uses Deuteronomy 6 to explain the importance of understanding your faith and passing it on. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Deuteronomy 6

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. On November 9, 1938, Nazi forces smashed windows and set fire to 1,400 synagogues all across Germany and Austria. In the process, they destroyed thousands of tourist scrolls containing the first five books of the Bible. We've been going through the Torah here on TMBT since the beginning of 2022. Intending to intimidate, the Nazis made a public spectacle out of demolishing the Torah scrolls. In one small town, the scrolls were sent rolling down a street as Hitler youth on bicycles rode over them.

In Berlin, the scrolls were burned in a major public square. This was the night called Crystal Noct, or in English, the Night of the Broken Glass. A new book that just came out this summer called A World Without Jews, argues that in order for the Nazis to redefine Christianity, they had to cut Christianity off from everything Jewish, including the Hebrew scriptures. The symbolic and very public act of burning the Old Testament scrolls they thought would liberate Germany from the constraints

of Judeo-Christian morals, ethics, and beliefs. You see, the Nazis rightly recognized that the New Testament was rooted in the Old Testament. Now, of course, they were not trustworthy scholars, but the truth is that the story of Jesus doesn't make sense apart from the story of Israel. Sadly, though, it doesn't take much to cut modern Christians off from their theological roots. Too many Christians avoid the Old Testament, other than having a few favorite Bible verses that most likely come from the book of Psalms.

But without the Old Testament story, a person is going to have a very incomplete picture of Jesus. You might even be surprised to find that some of Jesus' most well-known teaching comes right out of the Torah. the very scrolls that were burned by the Nazis and ignored by Christians. Here's Deuteronomy 6. See if it sounds familiar. 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. I bet that does sound familiar, right? This is the Shama, and it formed the basis of a prayer that faithful Jews prayed twice a day,

once in the morning and then once again in the evening. Shima means to listen in Hebrew, but it's not referring to hearing with your ears. This is a kind of listening that means being shaped by the truth. Now remember that the Israelites were monotheists living in a polytheistic culture. They worshipped one god, Yahweh, in a world that was full of gods. In their culture, it was always a temptation to follow your neighbor's gods. Can you relate to that? Well, of course you can.

because we're tempted to worship other gods just as much as the ancient Israelites were. So praying the Shama was declaring that there was one God and that we should love him with our entire being. It was sort of like pledging your allegiance to the one that you will worship and obey. That's why they did it twice a day. Deuteronomy is full of commands to love God. Love is the right response to knowing who God is. But it's interesting that in Deuteronomy, love and obedience always go together. Here's Deuteronomy 11-1.

Love the Lord's your God and keep his requirements, his decrees, his laws, and his commands always. The fact that love can be commanded shows that it's not only an emotion. Now, love isn't less than an emotion, but it's more than that. It's a commitment to Yahweh which results in certain behavior. Jesus echoed this when he said, if you love me, keep my commandments. So let's read Deuteronomy 6 or the Shama again. 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.

The heart in Hebrew isn't so much the seat of emotions and feelings as much as it is the seat of intellect, your will, your intention. So according to the Hebrew way of looking at the world, You think in your heart, and your heart shapes your character, your choices, and your decisions. The word soul is also often misunderstood. Here it means the whole inner self with all your emotions, all your desires, all your personal characteristics, all the things that make you, you. That's what your soul is. So in Psalm 103, it says, bless the Lord, oh, my soul, and all that is within me.

My soul is all that I am. to love God with all your heart and soul means to love him with your whole self, your rationality, your mental capacity, your moral choices, your will, your inner feelings, your desires, all of you. If that's what it means to love God with all your heart and soul, then what's left? What does it mean to love God with all your strength? Well, all your strength is probably intensifying your love for God. Your love for God should be as if you're on steroids,

Love for God should always be extra. In Jesus' day, this prayer called the Shama was prayed by faithful Jews twice a day. So Jesus grew up praying this prayer. This prayer shaped Jesus' life. When he was asked the greatest commandment, he said it was to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. See what I mean when I say that some of Jesus' most well-known teaching comes right out of the Torah? that we can't really understand who Jesus was or what he's about unless we understand our Old Testament.

Well, Deuteronomy 6 goes on in the next verses to say this. 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 door frames of your houses and on your gates. You see, these great spiritual truths, They weren't just for kings or priests or leaders.

They were for everyone. The commands of God were supposed to be a part of the ordinary conversation in our homes. They weren't just for the nation of Israelites as a group, but for every individual. And the primary responsibility for the development of a child's faith lies with the home. It lies with their parents. But somewhere along the way, we got the idea that it's primarily the responsibility of the church to teach a kid their faith. And you can see how that happens. In our age of professionalism, we tend to hire experts for our kids. If you want your kid to learn a certain sport, you hire a coach. If you want them to be a dancer,

you put them in a dance studio. If you want them to be able to play piano, you hire a piano teacher. If you want them to do well academically, you might hire a tutor. If you want them to grow in their faith, then you send them to church. Oh, but that's not the way God does. designed it. It's the home, not the church, that is the one who is primarily entrusted with raising children in their faith. Even though two out of three parents with children under the age of 18 attend religious services at least once a month, the majority of parents do not spend any time during a typical week discussing spiritual matters. It's not so much about having family devotionals where everybody sits at the dinner table, minds their manners, and talks about the Bible.

Although, if that's working for you, then that's a great option. No, Deuteronomy 6 says it's when you sit at home or walk along the road, when you go to bed and when you get up in the morning. In other words, as you go about your daily life, talk about Jesus and the life he calls us to. Do it when you get ready in the morning. Do it when you're driving in the car to school. Do it while you're eating dinner or before and after TV shows you watch. do it while you attend sporting events.

And if you think about it, the only people who are there and all those various situations are mom and dad. One of the most important reasons that parents have the primary responsibility to bring their children up in the faith is because parents are the ones who are with their kids in every part of their life. In the 2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens, Greece, the American's 4x100 relay race was favored to win the gold medal. Some people thought it was the strongest relay team ever assembled.

The team featured Marion Jones, who was a sprinter who had won four gold medals at the previous games in Sydney. The American team was off to a strong start when Jones took the baton for the second leg of the race. She gained ground as she ran her 100 meters and approached Lauren Williams, a young speedster who had run the third leg. Williams began running as Jones drew near, but when she reached back to receive the baton, they couldn't complete the handoff. They tried once, twice, three times. But each time it missed William's hands. She just couldn't seem to wrap her fingers around it.

Finally, on the fourth try, they made the connection. But by that time, they had crossed out of the 20-yard exchange zone and were disqualified. Everyone knew they were the fastest team of the track. The night before, they'd had the fastest qualifying time by a mile. But when they couldn't complete the handoff, their race was over. The team with the most speed doesn't always win. It's the team that can pass the baton. If a handoff doesn't go smoothly or if the baton is dropped,

it's nearly impossible to win the race. That's why teams spend so much time practicing the handoff. The church is in a relay race, and we have a baton that we must pass. Of course, the church's baton is not a six-inch tube of metal like the baton in the Olympics. No, our baton is something far more precious than that. The baton that we must pass is nothing less than the Christian faith.

Our responsibility is to hand off our faith in Christ to the next generation. That happens best when parents and churches work together. Hey, thanks for listening. If you want to go deeper, sign up for the 10-minute Bible Talk newsletter. You'll get a short email once a week. It'll challenge you to grow in your faith, give you interesting background on today's passage, and a lot, lot more. Just click the link in the show notes to sign up.

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