Teaching Children to Love God With Everything

When a teacher of the law asked Jesus which commandment was the most important, Jesus gave him two, and the first was the one every Jewish child learned early. 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 mind and with all your strength. The second, he said, is to love your neighbor as yourself.

This guide is for households who want to take that first commandment seriously with their children, in the middle of a summer that is already half gone. It does not require a curriculum or a program. It requires attention, some repetition, and a willingness to be ordinary about holy things.

Start with the word Jesus started with, which is hear. The commandment in Deuteronomy 6 is given to a whole people, and the instruction that follows tells parents to impress these words on their children, to talk about them when sitting at home and walking along the road, when lying down and getting up. The method is not a class. It is conversation woven into the day. Faith in a household is caught before it is taught, and it is caught mostly at the kitchen table, in the car and at bedtime.

So a first practice is to say the commandment aloud together, often enough that it becomes furniture. Some families say it before dinner. Others put it by the door. Young children memorize rhythmically without effort; older children may roll their eyes and still remember it thirty years later. Do not fight the eye-roll. Keep saying it.

The second practice is to take the four words seriously as four things. Heart, soul, mind, strength. Over four weeks of summer, a household could take one each week and ask, in ordinary conversation, what it means to love God with that part of us.

Heart is the week to talk about what we want and what we love. Children understand desire. Ask what they wished for this week. Ask what they think God wishes for them. Loving God with the heart means letting him have a say in what we want.

Soul is the week for the inside life that nobody sees. For a child that might mean the fears they carry at night, the worries about friends, the questions they have not asked. Loving God with the soul means bringing him the things we hide. A parent who shares one of their own fears, simply and without drama, does more teaching here than any lesson.

Mind is the week for questions. Let children ask anything about God, the Bible or the world, and do not rush to answer. Say when you do not know. Look things up together. Loving God with the mind means thinking hard rather than shutting the thinking down, and children learn quickly whether their questions are welcome.

Strength is the week for the body and for work. Chores done well. A walk taken. Something built or cleaned or carried for someone else. Loving God with strength means offering him what our hands and legs can do, and children often find this the easiest of the four, because it is concrete.

The third practice is to connect the first commandment to the second every time. Jesus did not let the teacher of the law have one without the other. A household that loves God with everything will show it in how it treats the neighbor, the sibling, the difficult relative, the person at the door. Summer gives opportunities: a neighbor whose lawn needs mowing, a family newly moved in, an older person who has not had a visitor. Do one of those together and talk about why.

A word about the adults. Children are not fooled by parents who assign what they do not practice. The teacher of the law answered Jesus well, and Jesus told him he was not far from the kingdom. Not far is a good place to be honest about. Parents do not have to have arrived. They have to be visibly on the road, loving God with what they have and asking for more.

Finally, do not measure the summer by outcomes. You will not see hearts change in four weeks, and you are not meant to. Deuteronomy describes a lifetime of repetition. What you are doing is laying words down in a young life so that when the hard years come, and they come for everyone, the words are already there. Hear, O Israel. The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And love him with all you are.