For the father who fears he has deprived his children of something he cannot name.
The map is a paper one, folded wrong, with a tear starting where the creek bends south.
Your daughter has it flat on the picnic blanket with a stone on each corner. She's nine. She wants to know how the water knows to go that way, whether God made it go that way, and whether He made every creek or only some of them.
Your son, who is six, wants to know whether God gets tired.
You answer both, more or less, with a sandwich in one hand. Then the two of them go off to look at the actual water. You sit on the blanket with a torn map and a sensation you've had a hundred times, and never once said out loud to your wife.
It's the sensation of being the wrong man for this job. Somebody should have trained you for it, years ago, before any of this started. There should have been a building, and a person in it who knew how to answer a question about creeks.
The blame you carry was never handed to you, and the passage refuses to put it there. Moses wrote the instruction in terms of a parent talking, and the Spirit was in a folded map and two sandwiches.
Where You Learned to Feel Unqualified
Trace the feeling back, because it did not come from Scripture and it is worth knowing where it did come from.
Somewhere along the way you absorbed a model in which faith is transmitted by qualified people in appropriate settings. A person with training stands in front, and the transmission happens there, and parents are a supporting cast who reinforce at home what was properly delivered elsewhere.
Under that model you're indeed unqualified. You've no training, you can't answer a creek question properly, and you're a supporting cast member who has lost the lead actor. The whole production is collapsing on a picnic blanket.
It's worth asking who benefits from that model, and the honest answer is that mostly nobody intended it. It grew up around buildings because buildings need a reason to exist, and the reason that was available was expertise. Once expertise is the reason, everybody without it becomes an assistant.
Notice that nothing in the passage you are failing at says any of this. The model came from somewhere, and it did not come from Deuteronomy.
You are failing a model that Scripture never wrote down anywhere. Scripture hands the talking to parents rather than to specialists, and the Spirit is the one doing the work through either.
The Instruction Was Given to Parents
Here is the passage, and the striking thing is who is holding it.
And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.Deuteronomy 6:6-7 (KJV)
Thou shalt teach them. Not the Levites, who existed, were trained, and were available. Not the elders at the gate. The parent, in the parent's own house, on the parent's own road.
Israel had a priesthood with a full curriculum and a national sanctuary. God still put this particular job in the hands of ordinary mothers and fathers who couldn't have passed any examination in it.
That wasn't an oversight, and it wasn't a temporary arrangement for a people between two places. The priests had their work and it was real work. This piece of it was handed somewhere else on purpose, to the people who were going to be present at every meal and on every road.
Moses spoke that to parents who were largely illiterate and had no schools of any kind, and it carries over to you on a blanket beside a creek.
The job was given to parents by name, and you are the parent. Scripture's instruction says thou shalt teach rather than the priest shall teach, and the Spirit has been working through the one He assigned.
You Answered Both of Them
Go back to what actually happened, because you skipped over it to get to the shame.
She asked you three questions about creeks and God. He asked whether God gets tired. You answered both, more or less, while holding a sandwich.
That is the entire content of the instruction, executed on a Saturday afternoon without you noticing you were doing it. The passage does not ask for a correct answer. It asks for talking, in the ordinary places, when the ordinary questions come.
More or less is the honest description of every parent who ever obeyed this verse, including the ones with training. Nobody has ever answered a six year old about the tiredness of God with full accuracy.
And notice what your son will actually keep out of it. He won't keep your answer, because he'll have forgotten the words by Tuesday. He'll keep that he asked his father whether God gets tired and his father took the question seriously enough to try.
More or less with a sandwich in your hand is what the verse asks for. The written Word's instruction names talking rather than accuracy, and the Spirit does not wait for a better qualified answer.
I Am Not Telling You Teaching Does Not Matter
Be honest about the limits of what I am arguing, because the opposite error is real.
I am not saying knowledge is unimportant. It matters a great deal, and a father who reads and thinks will have better answers next year than he has today. Get better at it if you can. There are books.
Nor am I saying that a gifted teacher has nothing to offer your children. One might have a great deal. If such a person comes into their lives, thank God for them.
What I want off you is the word deprived. Not the wish to be better at it. Not the ache on the blanket.
The Map Was Already the Answer
Here is the turn, and it was in your hands the whole time.
You sat on that blanket feeling unqualified while holding the object that had just produced three questions about God from a nine year old. The map did that, and the creek did, and so did an afternoon with nothing scheduled in it.
She did not ask those questions because somebody scheduled a lesson. She asked because she was somewhere real with her father, looking at real water, with enough time and enough safety to wonder out loud.
That is the condition the passage describes, and you cannot buy it or book it. You made it by taking two children to a creek on a Saturday with a paper map and no plan at all.
You built the conditions the instruction describes without once calling it teaching. Scripture's instruction puts the words into the ordinary hours, and the Spirit raised three questions out of a torn map.
Declare this over yourself
You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so what follows is not a claim made out of your own authority. It is agreement, said back to God in His own words, while the Holy Spirit carries it. How He orders the rest of it is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own time.
You are not raising your own authority when you speak. Christ's indwelling is the ground, the Spirit is the carrier, and the answer and its hour stay with God.
Say it in the voice you use for ordinary facts.
The blame I have been carrying was never handed to me, and I am putting it down beside the creek. Scripture says that I am the one to teach these words to my children, in my own house and on my own road, and he wrote it to parents who could not read. The Spirit has been working through the man He actually assigned. I am not the wrong man for this. Two children asked me three questions about God on a Saturday, and I answered them more or less with a sandwich in my hand, which is the whole of what the verse asks. I give the outcome to God and refuse the word deprived.
Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.
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Deuteronomy 6:6-7
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