Words to Tie Onto Your Heart

Do you know what Moses did, when the people he loved were almost home?

He gathered them close. All of them. The mothers and the fathers, the grandparents with tired eyes, the children who had only ever known the desert. After forty years of walking, they stood at the very edge of everything God had promised, and Moses had words he could not let them lose.

So he made them small enough to hold.

Listen, he said. The Lord your God is one. There is no other. Not a god of the hills who forgets you down in the valley, not a god you have to win, but one God, and he is yours. So here is the center of everything: love him.

Love him with your whole heart. With every breath in you. With everything you have and everything you are.

That is a big kind of love. Bigger than loving him a little, bigger than loving him only on the days you remember. Love him the way the morning loves the sun.

And then Moses said something tender. He said: keep these words on your heart. Not shut away in a box on a high shelf, but on your heart, close enough to feel.

Teach them to your children, he said. Say them when you sit down to supper and when you walk along the road. Say them at bedtime, when the dark comes. Say them in the morning, when the light comes back. Tie them on your hand so you see them while you work. Bind them near your eyes. Write them on your doorframe, so that going out and coming in, you remember whose you are.

Whose you are. Of everything Moses said that day, he wanted them to hold those words tightest. The people were about to walk into a land full of new things, and Moses knew how a heart can wander. How you can have a home and still feel like you might lose it. He wanted them to belong to Someone they could never, ever lose.

But a sad thing was hiding inside the beautiful words. No one ever loved God like that. The people tried, and forgot, and tried again, and wandered off. Their hearts were like yours and mine. They could not love perfectly, no matter how many words they tied on.

So Someone had to.

And one day, a long time after, a man named Jesus stood among people just like these, and someone asked him: what is the greatest command of all? And he answered with the very words of Moses. Love the Lord your God with all your heart.

And then he did it.

He loved his Father with everything, all the way down, on the bright days and in the dark garden, all the way to the cross. He kept every word. He never once wandered. He loved perfectly, in your place, so that you could be brought in close and called his own.

That is the belonging the words were pointing to all along: a family you are loved into, by the One who loved God for you. You don't have to earn your way to the center. He has already carried you there.

And Moses was not finished speaking. Old as he was, he had one more promise to give, about Someone who was coming. Turn the page, and hear it.