Bernard of Clairvaux, the twelfth-century doctor of the church who penned the hymn “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded,” opens his devotional classic On Loving God with the following words: “You wish for me to tell you why and how God should be loved. My answer is that God himself is the reason why He is to be loved. As for how He is to be loved, there is to be no limit to that love.” Similarly, the Shema leads us from a contemplation of the being and essence of God to our response in loving Him. For this article, we will consider particularly the duty (and delight) of parents to instruct their children to love the Lord God.
Even this parental obligation is rooted in the nature of God’s oneness as it unfolds into His eternality. Because God is, as Moses writes elsewhere, “from everlasting to everlasting,” while the span of a man’s life is like that of the grass that quickly flourishes in the morning only to be cut down by evening (Ps. 90), then one way to ensure that our love for Him has “no limit” is to labor generationally, the current generation praising His works and declaring His mighty acts to the next (Ps. 145:4). Keep reading
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