On the inside and the out
by Pastor Tim Klein
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Memorise his laws. Write down copies and tie them to your wrists and forehead (Deuteronomy 6:6,8).
I’ve often seen people walking along the road with their iPhones plugged into their ears and jogging with their smartphones bound to their upper arms or a heart monitor strapped to their chest. Have you?
At first, it was a strange sight, but nowadays, I am getting used to the idea. My GP tells me that it is not a bad idea that I strap a heart monitor to my chest when I am riding to see what my heart rate is on the readout on my handlebars. Probably good advice for a person with the dicky heart and a pacemaker.
I’m not so sure, however, about taping verses of Scripture to my forehead and wrists. I suspect that people would look at me rather strangely and wonder what kind of person I was.
But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. The Pharisees wearing the phylacteries1 on their foreheads and wrists was an outward sign of something God had commanded for the inside. When God says ‘memorise these laws’, he’s talking about internalising them – layering them down into our hearts and minds so that these life-giving words would strengthen our faith and prompt the good things on the inside to come to the outside in what we say, what we do and how we say and do it.
So, let all of us continue to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul and strength. Let’s memorise his laws. Let’s tell them to our children over and over again. Let’s talk about them all the time, whether we’re at home, walking along the road, going to bed at night or getting up in the morning. As disciples of Jesus, what he has to say in our lives (and through us) is life-giving.
Robin Mann said it well, ‘Let your word fill my days, let your music fill my years, let your song fill my life now and evermore’2.
Maybe, after all, it would be a good thing to have a smartphone in our pocket and earbuds plugged in, speaking the word into our hearts and lives – modern-day phylacteries!
Lord Jesus, prompt your Holy Spirit to keep on speaking your word into our hearts and lives so that we are so full of your word that it overflows from the inside out in faith and love. Amen.
1 A small leather box containing Hebrew texts, worn by Jewish men at morning prayer (from the Oxford Languages Dictionary)
2 Robin Mann, Let your Word Fill My Days, 1976
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