What does real revival look like? 

While many imagine crowded stadiums and dramatic awakenings, hosts Scott Brown, Jason Dohm, and guest Michael Foster make the case that some of God’s greatest work happens much more quietly — around the family table, as fathers faithfully read Scripture, sing, and pray with their households day after day. In this encouraging conversation, they discuss how simple, consistent family worship becomes a form of “drip irrigation” that nourishes hearts over a lifetime, and why fathers don’t need polished answers or lengthy discussions to lead their children well. They simply need to begin family devotions and make it a fixed priority in the home. 

Listen in, then download the free Read. Sing. Pray. Starter Kit and begin cultivating daily rhythms that place God's Word at the center of your home. 

Thanks for checking out the podcast. Just a quick reminder, not to use this as a replacement for the good pastoral leadership and teaching in your local church, but really just an encouragement for quiet faithfulness through the sufficiency of Scripture. Of scripture. We're here to talk about one of the most important things you'll ever do in your family, family worship, and we've created a campaign and an initiative just encouraging people to do it. We hope people sign up to engage in family worship.

We've made a video we want you to see. Check it out here. It really paints the picture of what we're praying for. The world is always changing, but it's built quietly. Because most of what lasts, no one sees.

No applause, no headlines. No spotlight, not viral, just faithfulness. Again and again. It looks small, But it's not. Bye, love you.

Faithfulness is Quiet, steady, rhythmic. More like a clock pendulum, like the tide coming in. Not like thunder, but like a prayer. Faithfulness does not begin with us, but flows through us. Through us.

Like sap flowing from the root to the branches. What is planted at one table is strengthened at another. As the family goes, so goes the church. And as the church goes, so goes the culture. Build what lasts through ordinary faithfulness.

Hey, how about that? May that tribe increase. So Jason, you know, we for years and years, you know, we pray for revival, pray that God will really pour out his spirit. We all desire revival conditions. We all desire awakening.

Did you see that film, The Great Awakening? It's fantastic. I haven't seen it yet. The George Whitefield one. I haven't seen it yet.

Oh, it was really, really inspiring. But we think about, you know, stadiums filling out, people coming to the Lord, and it's so exciting. But, you know, what do revival conditions look like? I mean I think revival conditions look like when you have a father who opens up his Bible every day in his family and they actually pray and they sing. That's actually a sign of revival.

And you know, you have this ongoing ordinary means of grace that are running. It's way better than a big revival. Because it's slow drip, it's every day. Microrivivals. Microrivivals.

And that's really the kind of revival we're looking for. And we've got Michael Foster here to talk about this whole thing. Michael, thank you so much for joining us. What are your thoughts about this? Well, every family has a family religion, right?

In my family, we would eat dinner and watch Jeopardy, I think. I think Jeopardy was on reruns or something was on right before the news, but we'd watch Jeopardy. And so I know how to phrase the answer is right. And so what you need to know, what everyone needs to know, is that they are practicing a former religion and they are discipling their kids into something. And you need to ask, what is your family religion?

What is it around? Is it around entertainment? Is it around rush, rush, rush, let's get to soccer? You know, you have seasons like that, I suppose. But is there, are you a family that stops and spends time together around God's Word and centers your family on memorizing, studying, listening, singing, and praying?

And a lot of people are intimidated by that idea because they imagine they have to reproduce this very complicated curriculum or almost like a Sunday service. But one thing that I like that you guys have been doing, and I certainly try to emphasize in my writings, is that instead of having like, think about like weightlifting. Like is it better to go lift weights for two hours every two weeks? Or is it better to have a practice of exercise every day? Well, every day.

And so you don't have to do a whole lot. You just have to be steady and consistent. And I think teaching people that to center their family on the Word just by doing devotions around breakfast or dinner, whatever works for you guys, and read a little passage, make a couple comments, right? Take some prayer requests, sing a song, do it again the next day, over and over and over again. And the power of that over the years is incredible.

If you stack wins like that for 20 years, let's say you get 20 years with a child, two decades of that. So that it's, it shatters their expectations. If there's a day when you don't, you know, you're thinking, You isolate on any one day and there's nothing transformative about it, but it's the power of doing it over and over, drip, drip, drip. It's drip irrigation for these little plants that you have in your house and it makes you so healthy over time, at least it has the potential for that. You know, I want to talk about how pivotal the role of the head of the household is in this.

Like, don't wait for your wife to do this. This is your job. But you know, the content of a man's vision, the potency of a man's vision for his family will determine the course of his family. And does that man have his eyes on God? Is his greatest desire for his family that his people would understand God.

And does he care that much about them that that's what he's going to make sure happens? Because everything rages against this. You know, if you decide to do this, then you're going to have every distraction thrown at you. And there's always a reason not to do it. And you have to have a man who has is a steeled to the vision that he's not gonna he's not gonna let it die.

So there's a campaign right now with Church of Fame of the Life. I read sing pray. You can go to the website. You can get a starter a two-week starter kit. Scott what's in the starter kit?

What do you get? I brought it in here with me. There's one, what is family worship? And it really kind of dials into just the simplicity. You know, people have come to me over the years, how do you do family worship?

And I say, look, in our church, we train people for 30 seconds. Here's the training. Open up your Bible, read it, and ask what wonderful things were there and pray about it. It's that simple. It's not rocket religion.

There's no big formula. I like what you said, Michael, you know, it doesn't have to be long, it doesn't have to be complex, it's not preaching sermon. I never did that, I never preached sermons to my kids, we just read the Bible and talked about it. In fact, especially if you have young kids, long is counterproductive. It's bad, yeah.

You want it to be the sweetest time of the day. You don't want to beat a dead horse and prolong these things. You want to get in and have it be a wonderful, impactful time. And then before you frustrated your young children with the length of it, move along. They say that Matthew Henry in his family, he would not go more than 30 minutes in what they did.

We only go a couple of minutes in our family, maybe 10, 15. Yep. Seven seasons. I'm so stressed out and tired that I just read it and say, all right, let's pray, you know, and that's that. And, every once while though, you'll, it'll capture your kid's vision, right?

They'll have imagination and they'll want to talk, talk, talk. I think you have to believe in the power of the word. And you don't have to force things. The word is so powerful that simply reading it and talking about it with some real basic commentary and asking them questions is enough to work on the heart of your children. And sometimes kids are moody and you got the two-year-old screaming, spilling stuff, whatever.

Sometimes they come alive and they ask lots of questions and there's a breakthrough moment. You don't make those happen by manipulating. You make them happen by being consistent and trusting the Spirit to do that in your family in time. And you just do it day after day after day, and God blesses it. I mean, I'm here to say that do not underestimate the power, the transforming power in your family to do this.

If a father, it's the simplest, most unadorned thing, but it's the most powerful thing in a family. And it really, it alters the course of a family. I've seen it many, many times. I've seen both worlds. And it's really helpful.

Michael, You wrote a really fun article called In the Middle of Spilled Milk. So y'all ought to go out and read that one. That's really a neat one. And then another one, Family Worship is Simpler Than You Think. So yeah, these are just, I just felt like they're very, very helpful.

We appreciate your writing those things. So what kind of counsel would you give kids? What kind of counsel would you give kids? Because there are kids that listen to this podcast. Well, first I'm impressed that you listen to this podcast.

But counsel, yeah, I would say stay curious. I love the Word of God. There's so many. Work out your heresies. Here's what I mean by that.

Like, ask all the questions and talk about all the things. And My kids say crazy things, like during family worship. Like, no, that's not the nature of God. Let me explain. You're just working it out.

You're figuring it out. You're being taught the word. I think make it, let family worship time be discussion time and whatever questions you've been thinking about, bring them to your dad and mom and listen to it and chew on it and talk about it throughout the day. I think my best counsel to you kids, other than know it's hard for your mom to do this, they're tired too. Beyond that, it's like listen and stay curious and ask good questions.

That'd be my advice, you know, and yeah, it's good stuff. Yeah. So this is compulsory education, meaning it's not optional. Your parents are gonna bring you to this and you're going to do it. Children, there are these things in your life that you don't have a choice about, you're going to do it, and they have the potential to be tremendously valuable, but you can actually get zero value from it.

And the difference between those two things is just whether you decide to extract the value from it or not. So kids, go put your heart in it. You're going, you'll be doing it one way or the other. And it has the potential to be valuable like almost nothing else in your life, but you can do it in a heartlessly, my mom and dad are making me do this kind of way that just sucks the value out of it. And the difference between one and the other is enormous and you are really deciding.

You know, when our kids got older, we started making our times longer. What we started doing is we started reading through the whole Bible. We did it for several years. And we would just read it. And what happened with my kids is they ended up with a global picture of the Bible.

And they can kind of smell a doctrinal rat right now because they've read through it several times. We would just go around, we'd read five verses, one person would read five and another child would read, we'd just go around and we would do that and it would take 40 minutes. It took a long time, sometimes longer if they had a lot of questions. But I felt like that was really helpful, particularly when they got older. I don't think that works very well when you have a two, three, four, five, six year old.

So two things I wanted to make sure that I said during this time. The first is, If other things in your home are unhealthy, and especially if your marriage is unhealthy, this won't paper over everything. So we're here to commend family worship to you, and we think you should start doing it, and it can contribute to the health of your home. But we have seen families who, over a long period of time, they practiced family worship, but they were so careless about really important things in your life, especially mom and dad's marriage. And that actually can serve to actually sour you on it.

Children come out of homes soured because there was this religious thing, and it's actually associated with a mom and dad who didn't love each other practically in the home every day. So, you know, so that is a stark warning. The other thing I wanted to make sure to say was you can you can set the content aside. This is just a thought experiment for a minute. Set the content aside, the things that would be said and done during the time.

Parents, if you make this the immovable rock in your schedule, meaning whatever else happens in the day, this is happening and overwhelmingly, that's true in your home. By prioritizing it, you've communicated without words something so powerful to your children, which is God is worthy of, God is real and he's worthy of centering our home around. And even before you've said the first word of content, they will get the picture that that's what you think because you make sure that that gets top priority. And here's one reason that's so critical. All of us, we fluctuate.

Our passion, our desire, our energy, you come home and you just don't wanna do it, okay? And so you don't. But that making it a fixed rock in your schedule, it sort of protects you and your family from your own fluctuations. I've started and stopped reading to Deborah at night, and sometimes I just don't feel like it. I don't, you know, I'm not going to read a Psalm tonight or whatever.

And then I'll go through a period of not doing it. I mean, I'm, then I'm going to get back to it, but to, to, to put a fixed rock in there, It protects everybody from your own fluctuations, at least for me. You know you've arrived, or at least in this way you've arrived, when it's that night you just don't feel like doing it and your kids are like, what? We're not doing it tonight? We're just, we're not even gonna gather to do this because you've been consistent for a long period of time and it's become the expectation in the home.

That's actually a beautiful thing when you don't feel like you're gonna do it, but your kids have such a strong expectation that you almost can't even get out of it. That's a nice place to be. So I think we just want to say, hey, you head of the households, take the bull by the horns, don't let your kids leave home without this. It's really, really important. Yeah.

This is rooted in God. It is a duty and it is something that will contribute a lot to the health of your home. But really at the, at the basis of it is that there is a real God and he ought to be worshiped. How can he not be worshiped? And if, if, If we stay silent, the rocks will cry out that he'd be worshiped.

So we should do this as much as we can, as we should have our hearts in it, as if there is a God like this, because there is a God like this. Yeah. Amen. I will comment one more thing on for head of households. And what I would say is, to just be real with your kids, just be real.

Like When they say, Dad, what does that mean? And you don't know. You say, I do not know. I am not sure. I'll think about that.

It's weird, isn't it? And that shows your kids that it's okay. You can still be a Christian and not understand everything in the Bible right away. It gives them permission. You don't want to train people to be fake.

You want to be a very honest guy. You just come to the text, you read it, you make a couple comments. You don't have to seem pious in some sort of put on sort of way. Matter of fact, there's an epidemic of dishonest Christian veneer. You give them a chance to show, You're given an opportunity every night you do this to show what it looks like to engage with God's word humbly and learn it and not have all the answers.

And it gives your children permission to ask questions, which is a big deal in Christian households. I'm watching my older boys individualate and really take hold of their own faith, right? And it's a beautiful thing. And I've seen a lot of kids have all these kind of crazy doubts blow apart, like in their teens. And I wonder how many of them are in homes where it was about falling in line and stating all the things the right way and not giving them space to process through and really understand things and think out loud.

I think seeing dad be humble, seeing dad interact with the text, seeing dad take questions that he can't answer. I don't think that actually undermines the faith of your kids as long as you're solid in the core doctrines. I think it creates a place where children can grow in sanctification and discipleship. I just say, don't be sanctimonious, just be real, read it, do it, have real joy, be willing to laugh at yourself. And one thing we've done, let's say you just are burned and you don't think you can do it at all.

We will do a Bible trivia. I have a Bible trivia app on my phone on those nights where I hate life and about as negative as could be. I'll just let's let's do 20 Bible trivia stuff. You know, like how many wives that Abraham have, you know, like and We just have the app on the phone. That way you have a little bit of a pressure release valve and a lot of life is falling off horses and getting back on.

That way you can continue to do it. I'd also tell you right now, if you're at least doing it Monday, Wednesday, Friday, that's a good place. Get your wins, build momentum, get to Monday through Friday, then just keep going and stop trying to be perfect and just try to be really faithful and normal and watch what God does. Amen. No, I love it.

I love everything. Yeah, you know, our family, we, I don't, Saturday, Saturday and Sunday were different for us. It was Monday through Friday that we did that as well. So hey, so go sign up for the campaign. Read Michael Foster's articles.

It's fantastic. It's one of the best things you'll ever do with your family. It'll be one of the most powerful things. And there's nothing sweeter than the Word of God, nothing more wonderful than the Word of God. So go do it.

Hope you sign up and thank you, Michael, for your time and thank you all for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. Let's do it again next time. FamilyLife.com