---

I. THE LIGHT IN WHICH WE OUGHT TO REGARD THE FAMILY RELATION. Parents should never forget that the family is the school in which they are training the men and women of the future age, from whom the world will gain its votaries, the church its members, heaven its redeemed spirits, and hell its victims, and that their examples are making impressions which will extend their blissful or baneful influence on their eternal destiny.

II. THE TEACHERS AND THEIR QUALIFICATIONS. Parents are constituted the teachers of their children by the express appointment of God, and any arrangement that sets aside this appointment can neither be wise nor safe. As God has thus clearly defined who are to be the teachers, so He has, in the text, no less clearly pointed out what are to be their qualifications.

III. THE MATTER AND THE MANNER OF THE TEACHING WHICH GOD HAS ENJOINED. Surely nothing is so worthy of engaging the first recollections of the mind as "the words of God," nor anything so important as to have the heart — before it is immersed in the cares of life — fully brought under the guidance of God, the grace and love of Christ, and the attractions of heaven. And to attain this should elicit the daily efforts and the daily prayers of the Christian parent, as he sits in his house, or walks by the way, or lies down, or rises up.

IV. THE HAPPINESS WHICH MAY BE EXPECTED TO RESULT FROM THIS. There are those who would make us believe that these, and all similar promises of a temporal nature, which we meet with under the Old Testament dispensation, have no place under the new. But so long as it is true that "in the keeping of God's commands there is a great reward," and that "godliness is profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, as well as of that which is to come," and that there is a natural adaptedness in a life of piety to promote the universal well-being of man, I cannot see how such interpretations of Scripture can be according to truth. It is quite true, however, that the chief and most glorious part of "the recompense of reward" is spiritual, and such as can be fully enjoyed only in the heavenly state.

(M. T. Adams.)

---

---

KJV: And ye shall teach them your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.

WEB: You shall teach them your children, talking of them, when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up.