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YOUR BIBLE AND YOU<br />
H o m e C a n B e B e a u t i f u l<br />
of architecture or paint lovely pictures on the walls or buy the choicest<br />
silverware for their tables. No. Seeking only enduring beauty, He<br />
asked them to memorize His commandments and observe them.<br />
“Now this is the commandment, the statutes and the ordinances<br />
which the Lord your God commanded me to teach you,” said Moses,<br />
“that you may do them in the land to which you are going over to<br />
possess it; that you may fear the Lord your God, you and your son<br />
and your son’s son, by keeping all his statutes and his commandments,<br />
which I command you, all the days of your life; and that your<br />
days may be prolonged. Hear therefore, O Israel, and be careful to do<br />
them; that it may go well with you” (Deuteronomy 6:1-3, RSV).<br />
“Hear, O Israel,” he went on. “The Lord our God is one Lord; and you<br />
shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul,<br />
and with all your might.<br />
“And these words which I command you this day shall be upon your<br />
heart; and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall<br />
talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the<br />
way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. And you shall bind<br />
them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between<br />
your eyes. And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house<br />
and on your gates” (verses 4-9).<br />
Here, in these few brief sentences, God revealed the secret of the<br />
truly beautiful home.<br />
That secret is love. Full, unstinted love, for God and man. Love for<br />
God demonstrated by wholehearted obedience to the first four of<br />
His Ten Commandments, and love for man revealed by the selfrestraints<br />
suggested in the last six.<br />
Law and love, discipline and affection, perfectly blended, will preserve<br />
the home from all peril and bring upon it the continual blessing<br />
of Heaven.<br />
Long years afterward Jesus repeated this good counsel. When a<br />
lawyer asked Him which was “the great commandment in the law”<br />
He replied in almost the words of Deuteronomy 6:5. “Thou shalt<br />
love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and<br />
with all thy mind. This,” He added, “is the first and great commandment.<br />
And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour<br />
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