Giving Your Words: The Lifegiving Power of a Verbal Home for Family Faith FormationSample

Verbal parenting

Verbal parenting—giving your words—should be at the very heart of your parenting by faith. God has designed us, from the beginning, to give our words, and His word, to our children. The prophet Isaiah said that just as rain and snow accomplish their purposes in God’s creation, so will God’s word accomplish its purpose. In the same way, God’s words will accomplish the purposes for which He has given them to us, so that we may give our words to others.

After reading the Ten Commandments, Moses declares to the people what will become the most important passage in the holy writings for faithful Jews. It will later be called the Shema, from the first words in Hebrew in this passage, Shema Yisra’el: “Hear, O Israel!”

The Shema commands the Israelites to teach their children diligently and unceasingly to “love the Lord [their] God with all [their] heart and with all [their] soul and with all [their] might.”

As Israel prepares to enter the Promised Land, Moses reflects God’s charge to him in his charge to the families standing before him—the words given to him, that he is giving to them, are to be given to their children.

When Moses charges parents to teach their children diligently, he uses the term sanan, which means to “sharpen.” The words parents give to their children should act like a symbolic whetstone to sharpen them for God, not just once but repeatedly. The primary way to sharpen their children with words was to “talk of them.” They were to diligently teach and talk to their children.

To our modern ears, attuned to literal language, we hear Moses saying that should happen at specific places and times. We think, “Let me get my calendar and get those scheduled into my day,” but to Jewish ears attuned to Hebrew parallelism that would use two opposites to express a whole, they heard Moses say it should happen in every place and at every time. In other words, there was no place and no time in which they were not to be teaching and talking—giving their words—to their children. It was a picture of verbal parenting.

The Shema is, arguably, the primary biblical passage for verbal parenting. Giving your words starts here. Though we are no longer under the Law that Jewish parents were when these words were first spoken, the principles of verbal parenting expressed in the Shema are no less timely and relevant for us as Christian parents today, more than three millennia later. God has designed us, from the beginning, to give our words, and His word, to our children.