Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 2 · January 2
The Four Times
“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.”
Friend,
Somewhere in your week there is a time set aside for this, and it keeps falling apart. Maybe it is ten minutes before the day starts, or a family evening on a fixed night. It has failed so often that you have stopped planning it, and now you just feel bad about it instead.
So I want to show you where Moses puts this teaching, because it is somewhere other than where you have been trying to put it. He names four times: "when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up." That is sitting at home, travelling, going to bed and getting up. Put together, it is a whole ordinary day, and there is no special religious hour anywhere in it.
Look also at the words "teach them diligently." The Hebrew verb behind them comes from a word that means to sharpen, the way you put an edge on a knife. The picture is repetition: the same stroke, over and over, on the same edge. Nobody sharpens a blade with one stroke, and nobody watching could point to the one stroke that made the difference.
The order matters as much as the times. Before any teaching, the passage says, "And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart." The talking comes second, and it comes out of the heart. That is why the verse just before is about you and God: "thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might." You may have no children at home at all. Israel heard these words as a whole people together, so the ones watching you and learning from you are simply whoever is near you.
So here is the blessing I would ask for your house. May God's words be in you before you go looking for an hour to say them in. May the sitting and the walking, the lying down and the rising up, become the places where you speak of Him, instead of the leftovers of a day that already went wrong. May the people watching you pick up an edge from a blade you did not know you were carrying. And may you be free for good from the belief that you failed God because the ten minutes did not happen. He has given you the whole day to walk with Him.
Yours on the same road,
a fellow learner
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 2 is Enough (Lamentations 3:24).