“You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall teach them to your children, talking of them when you are sitting in your house, and when you are walking by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied in the land that the Lord swore to your fathers to give them, as long as the heavens are above the earth.
- Deuteronomy 11:18-21
As of today, the Major League Baseball season is in serious jeopardy of not starting on time due to a lockout imposed by the owners. Players can’t work out at team facilities, free agents can’t negotiate or sign with new clubs, and games can’t proceed. Spring training, which normally would have begun this week in Florida and Arizona, is delayed until a new collective bargaining agreement can be agreed upon. Not only is this lockout frustrating for me as a baseball fan, it’s also messing with my internal clock.
That’s because there are certain traditions that are so imprinted upon you that you don’t need a calendar to be told they’re coming up. Nobody has to tell you Christmas is on its way—you can feel it the later into November you get. Nobody has to tell a student that the school year is ending (or, in late summer, that it’s about to arrive)—it’s a part of the cycle of their year; it’s second nature to them.
In the days when God’s people were still wandering the wilderness making their way to the promised land, the Lord told them that his Word ought to be like that—second nature, something so imprinted upon their lives, their families, and their culture that it was intrinsic to who they were. God urged them to repeat his commands again and again, to study them diligently, to make them so omnipresent that they couldn’t possibly forget—or ignore—them.
That remains good advice for God’s people today. There is always a temptation to be spiritually lazy, to limit your time in God’s Word to a few verses on Sunday morning. But the Lord doesn’t just want us to read his Word, he wants us to know it, for it to be so imprinted upon our hearts that it changes how we live. He wants it to be second nature.
So
let me encourage you to spend some time in God’s Word today, and the next day,
and the day after that. Don’t wait until Sunday morning to open your Bible; don’t
let the preacher be the only one pointing you to God’s Word. Through
repetition, study, and reflection, let the gospel become more than a story for
you—let it become second nature.
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