✝️ Deuteronomy 6:7 | The Command You Can't Keep on Your Own

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You shall _____ ____ __________ __ ____ children, and shall ____ __ them ____ you ___ in ____ house, and ____ ___ ____ by the ___, and ____ ___ ___ ____, ___ ____ ___ rise.

Deuteronomy 6:7

All week this verse has been about getting God’s words onto the heart, first ours, and then the next generation’s.

But there is just one problem. On our own, we can’t actually do that.

Moses seems to know it. In the same book, he tells Israel their true condition and then makes a stunning promise:

Circumcise your heart…The change that has to happen inside a person is surgery only God can perform.

Teaching can point to it, but teaching can’t create it.

Judges shows the stakes.

A generation after Joshua, “there arose another generation after them who did not know the LORD” (Judges 2:10).

It isn’t that no one taught them. It’s that knowing God is more than information, and it can’t be manufactured from the outside.

So God promised to do himself what no command could accomplish:

That is the new covenant. And centuries later, at a Passover table, Jesus lifted a cup and said, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:20).

Jesus is the one who finally loved the LORD with all his heart, soul, and might. He kept the Shema perfectly, in our place.

And by his Spirit he writes God’s words onto hearts that could never engrave themselves.

That changes how we teach.

We repeat, we pray, we model, and we trust God to do the one thing we can’t: give a new heart.

🤔 Reflect

Where are you trying to force a heart change, in yourself or in someone you love, that only God can make?

🏃‍♂ Act

Name that person or that struggle, and ask God to do what you can’t. Keep teaching faithfully, but hand the heart itself over to the one who made it.

🙏 Pray

Father, I can’t engrave your Word on anyone’s heart, not even my own. Only you can. Thank you for the new covenant sealed in Jesus’ blood. Write your law in me, and in the ones I’m praying for, by your Spirit. Amen.

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A prayerful, easy explanation of the verses that includes all the information. Bless you and thank you. I read this every morning.

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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.

Deuteronomy 6:7