What happens when a father opens the Bible and makes the worship of God a fixed priority in his home? 

Hosts Scott Brown and Jason Dohm are joined by Joel Beeke to discuss the recovery of family worship and the profound influence it can have across generations. Drawing from his own childhood and decades of teaching on the subject, Beeke encourages dads to keep it simple: read the Word, discuss it with your children, sing, and pray. Their encouragement is this: Like a “steady dripping,” ten or fifteen faithful minutes each morning or evening will shape a child’s heart as God and His Word are made the center of daily life. 

Ready to start — or restart — family worship in your home? Download our free Restore Family Worship Starter Kit for simple, biblical tools to help you make family devotions a daily rhythm that anchors your household. 

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. Scripture. So Jason, we want to be used of the Lord to encourage families to saturate themselves in the Word of God and to really recover a very old practice that you and I growing up and our whole generation in mainstream evangelicalism didn't grow up doing family worship. It was almost impossible to find fathers who did this, even godly men.

And so we want to really encourage an uprising of two things. We want to encourage men who've fallen off on family worship to get back to it. And we also wanna inspire anybody who hasn't been doing it to start doing it. And guess what? We have Joel Beeke to help us talk about this.

He's the perfect person to bring in. Yeah, no kidding. Joel, we're so grateful for all of you who've done in this whole space. We want to encourage people to open up their Bibles, to read it, to speak of it, to sing and to pray. We're actually launching a campaign.

We want people to join this movement. We want it to be a rising movement. And it is a rising movement in many ways. But while Jason and I, Joel, grew up in an evangelical tradition that ignored it, that wasn't the case for you. So I want you to tell us about that, but I'd also like to talk, maybe have us diagnose why it died in Christianity, particularly in America.

So yeah, tell us about your experience. I'd like to say that there's three spiritual disciplines that our forefathers did, especially, I'm speaking especially of the reformers and the Puritans, family worship, meditation, and fasting that we generally don't do today. And I did grow up in the Dutch reform tradition where I like to call it now maybe a halfway family worship. And what we did, all the people are interested in this, You always prayed before each meal, maybe two, three minutes, and then you read the Bible after each meal. So you read the Bible with your family three times a day, actually.

And then you closed the Bible, but you didn't talk to your children about it. And then you prayed again. And so that was just the way we grew up. We heard the Bible three times a day and sometimes we listened, sometimes we didn't. My dad always did all the reading.

Didn't ask us many questions about it, but my dad was unusual in that he did a very special Sunday evening family worship, which he read Pilgrim's Progress to us over and over again, and we sang seven psalters, one for every member of the family, and read and prayed and he talked to us. And that was a prolonged family worship. I'm not suggesting anybody does it that long, but it was unforgettable for all five of us children. It really transformed our lives in many ways. And we peppered my dad with questions and he would set the book down or set the Bible down and then he'd talk to us and often be weeping while he's talking to us about our souls.

So when my parents had their 50th anniversary, all five of us thanked my dad for one thing, my mom for one thing, but all five of us thanked my dad for the Sunday evening family worship. Well, what happened, Scott, was when my oldest child was three years old, I was given the assignment to come to South Africa and speak on family worship. And I thought I would just talk about what I just told you. But I started studying reformers, puritans, especially the puritans. Wow!

I went to my wife and I said, our family worship is going to change from here on in. Because we are not only going to read the Bible and pray and sing, but it's my responsibility to bring to my children the major takeaways from that chapter so that when we go through the whole Bible, which talks about every subject under the sun, our children will hear from my lips what the Word of God has to say to them about every subject under the sun, honey, we're going back to the way our forefathers did family worship." And she said, yeah, great, wonderful. And so I started doing that and I started...anyway, when I spoke in South Africa, It was the most profound experience I've ever had any conference in my whole life. The men were just silent afterwards around the lunch. Nobody said a word because the Potsch of Strom University president stood up and said, these are the days of cassette tapes.

I want every single pastor here to get enough cassette tapes to hand them to every single father. We've been sinning, we haven't been doing family worship, we need to get back to it, and so on. But he walked over to me after the quiet new meal when people were just sober, and he said, I want you to promise me something. I want you to promise me something. I want you to promise me that you'll write a book on family worship and you'll speak about this more.

And I promised him right there and it changed my whole, I mean, my center of my ministry is Reformed Experiential Preaching, but now I have two centers. The other is family worship, and I've spoken on family worship, I don't know, 400 to 500 times in dozens of countries around the world. Wherever I go, It's the same problem, Scott. People aren't doing it or they're doing it very briefly. And so finally what happened, so many fathers were frustrated that they didn't know how to take the main takeaways and bring them to their kids.

That's when we got together with four men, yeah, and we were a little bit more than four men, but four men coalesced on it and wrote the family worship Bible guide and actually gave to the men what to say after they read the Bible chapter with a question at the end of each little thing. It takes about 30 seconds to read. Right. And then that generates a discussion. And that is what has transformed tens of thousands of family worships around the world by the grace of God, only by the grace of God.

But fathers do find this extremely helpful. And once that question is out there and your wife jumps in and starts helping kids jump in or you ask one particular child, then dads seem to be able to navigate the conversation and the kids sometimes begin new things. And That's great because you're talking about that Bible chapter every day that you read, and that's the goal. So you read the Bible, you talk about the Bible, use the family worship, Baba God, I would say, and you'll find it extremely helpful. You talk maybe, start out this way, read 10 verses, one minute, do the family worship, but you can do that maybe in two, three minutes, and then you pray for two minutes, and then you sing two stanzas of a song, a hymn or a psalter.

And maybe that's six, seven minutes. Just start out like that and gradually you'll find you'll expand a little bit, the conversation will flow easier and build up to 10 to 15 minutes. The goal is not to do our family worship every day. If you did 10 or 15 minutes, it's a steady dripping. But the goal is to do it every day.

Don't skip a day. Once you skip a day one week, you're going to skip two days the next week, you're going to skip three days the next week. Make it an automatic time, just like you sit down to eat, so you sit down and do family worship. Well, hey, and we really appreciate you making that family worship guide available. We're including in our campaign the first two chapters for free.

Hopefully, people will get a taste of it and go out and buy it. Really interesting, a similar thing happened that you described to me in Vodi Bacchum about 20 years ago in Romania. We were preaching in Romania and we had this room full of men preaching on family worship and the father's responsibility. And we're looking around the room and these men are weeping. They're weeping because they had never heard anything like that.

Exactly. And it's like you said, this is a need all over the world. It's the same problem everywhere you ever travel. It's centered on fathers who really bring the Word of God into their homes. Now, I want to talk about what happened because particularly here in America, the practice was lost.

It was lost, except for maybe in your circles, and your circles were very small circles as well. But I've often wondered what was the driver of this? Was it the rising pragmatism of the 20th century where the church got focused on an inordinate number of programs and techniques and circuses that distracted the people of God from the ordinary means of grace. Was it that or what's your view, Joel? What happened in the 20th century?

Well, I think what's happening already in the 19th century, there was a fading away of family worship. I think whenever the church loses that fervent, zealous call to holiness, daily holiness, then all the means of grace will suffer. Your prayer times, private prayer times will suffer, your private devotional times will suffer, your honesty before God in secret in your family will suffer. So all the spiritual disciplines kind of dissipate. The the bad thing about family worship is it disappeared completely and fathers did, many fathers I speak to don't even know they're supposed to be doing it and so I always talk about these four things, and I always give them scripture proofs, right?

I mean, 2 Timothy 3, 14 to 17, we should be reading the scriptures every day, like Timothy experienced. And then you've got the diligent talking to your children, Deuteronomy 6, 6 and 7, every day when you rise up, when you lay down, it's just a Hebrew idiom for daily and then you've got the The the the prayer Jeremiah says God will pour out his fury on the family that does not pray together. And then you've got the singing, Psalm 118 verse 15, which says you could hear the singing in the tents of the righteous. So this wasn't synagogue singing, this was family singing of the Psalms. So once you have that down path these are your four duties or if you collapse the reading and instruction into one, three duties, but you're doing the same thing whichever way you look at that.

But the point is this is your duty and it's spelled out clearly in scripture. And then go to a couple major books like J.W. Alexander in the 19th century. Family Worship is a fantastic book. I wrote a little 75 page book, so did Don Whitney, so did, and of course you've done a lot of stuff Scott, and like The Family That Singed You just came out with a great book on that, and Jerry Marcelino came out with a nice little book on family worship.

Read one of those books, that will help you as well, give you practical tips how to do all three or four parts. But I think once we understand our scriptural duty and we realize how our forefathers did it, I think most godly men will realize, hey, this is my duty. I got to start doing it. And with the helps that are given now today, I think, as Matthew Henry already said, you don't need any uncommon ability to do an edifying family worship with your family. And think of it this way, that Once you start to do it, you will understand that whether you send your kids to Christian schools or your home school, but you'll see all of life in one piece in the Dutch style.

They built up a lot of Christian schools as you know. So they said raising your children is a three-legged stool. You've got family worship at home and godly living, and then you've got the worship at church, and then you've got the worship and the training at the Christian school or homeschooling, and those three are all speaking the same language. If you don't have family worship at home, what happens is the kids say, Oh, well, the church is kind of fake. That's not the real world.

My dad never talks to me about God at home, so this is the real world. No, no, no. Kids need to have consistency in every area of their lives. And that's what the Reformers and Puritans taught and what the Dutch emphasized. Every area of life, they need to be hearing the same things centered on God and His word.

Let's consider the quote unquote normal American family. Two or three kids, The dad hears this and he says, you know, my sons are in little league, my daughters are in dance. We can't hardly get a dinner together. And he doesn't even see how this could possibly be worked into his life. What do you say to him?

Find a time. It's too important. J.W. Alexander said, don't you have any time for what's the most important thing of your life? Family worship is your most important duty as a father.

There's nothing you do in your entire life more important than family worship. And do it with all your heart. Show your children that you get more excited about doing family worship and the great truths you're bringing your kids about Jesus Christ and the gospel than you do about any Super Bowl game. Stop getting so excited about the things of this world and stop bailing out on talking to your children every day. So how do you find time?

When your children are young, you can state the time. You find the time when you're all together. For some people, that's around the breakfast table. And you just kick back after breakfast and you go have your 10-minute family worship. That never worked for us.

We nor our kids were not mourning people. So we always did it after supper in the evening. And my wife would cook the meal early enough so that if we had church activities in the evening our family worship time was still there. So we would always do family worship say around 6 15 to 6 30 and then we go out do our evening activities. The problem is when kids are in college and they have a class or something.

And what I wish I had done, I didn't do, but I wish I had done, is when one of them, it was it was rare, but when one of them had a class and was missing, I should have taken that child aside, say that 19 year old, when he came home at 10 o'clock at night and say, hey, son, let's just do a five-minute family worship and just done something. But I didn't do that and I regret that till today. But For kids, you just have to find the time. So you talk about it. When's the best time?

This time is non-negotiable. Everyone tries to keep this time open. And usually it's either the morning or the evening, early evening. Yeah, here's what we'd like to say. These things are not radical things.

200 years ago, they would have been a matter of course. What's actually radical are the claims of the gospel on our lives. We're bought with a price. And so we want to tell people to change their lives. If that's true of your schedule, then change your schedule and eliminate the things that are competing and replace it with something that is more important and that your children will get a lot more benefit out of.

Well, and this really highlights how damaging it is to have a chaotic life. People misunderstand, they miscalculate how harmful it is to not have a rhythmic, regular schedule. Because what we're talking about, it will not happen unless you have a regular, fixed time that nothing else in the world can get in the way because everything in the world wants to get in the way of it, whether it's friends and activities or whatever it is. C.S. Lewis used to talk about whatever the devil you'll use, you'll go straighten the picture on that wall to keep you away from worshiping God in the morning.

Well, they're just...everything wages war. The devil hates this. And so there are all these, you know, there's all this clatter of life, but unless you have a rhythmic, orderly life, it will not happen. Yes, and you've got to stress with your kids. This is the most important thing we do in all of life.

So I mean when you just said you know they hardly have a meal together that was like a red flag going up for me. Right. Right. Something wrong with a family. I mean it's not just family worship you got to supplement family worship with my wife has a talk called dinner conversation.

Right. You know, have meaningful discussions about things when you're sitting around the dinner table. But, and your rhythmic life is very important, Scott. The Puritans called it developing holy habits. Holy habits every day.

So you go to the same place every day, in the morning, to get on your knees and cry out to God privately. You have that rhythm of holy habits. And you develop holy, we would say maybe even traditions that you do so that it becomes natural. You don't even think about doing it because of course you're going to do it. And that, but your question is not, well, I have family worship, but oh Lord, let my family worship today be to thy glory and to the good of the souls of my children.

That's what you're concerned about. So if I walked away from the dinner table when our kids were young, and we still do it by the way, my wife and I, we still use the family worship, Baba Gavri, empty nesters, right after supper. We go in the living room, we sit down, we do the same thing we've always done. Where two or three are gathered in my name, I'll be in the midst of them, right? So, and we talk to each other, and That's a sweet time.

But if I had left the family dinner table and walked away, my kids would have said, Dad, what's wrong with you? Are you sick? I mean, what in the world are you doing? Or If I said, oh, I'm too tired to do family worship, they'd say, what? Too tired?

Jesus went to the cross for us and was succumbing beneath the cross and he persevered to the end? And you're too tired to do a 10 minute family worship? What's wrong with you, Dad? See, it becomes a holy habit. And it's not something you ask, will we do it?

You just automatically do it. Yeah. Well, and that's what we really want to encourage. But by the way, the worm has turned. Things are different than they were.

I remember over 20 years ago, I was giving a message to fathers, about 700 men in the room, and I said, how many of you ever had your father read the Bible to you? Only a handful of hands went up, ever. Okay? But you know what, Joel, guess what? If we ask that question at our conferences, hundreds, hundreds of hands will go up.

Things have changed. I think there's a lot of reason to be encouraged. Join the movement. I mean, Let's either, we want encouragement to either get back to it because they've let it slide or to start it like they never did before. Yeah, and one reason why I think people are going back to it isn't only efforts of you and me and other men who are out talking about family worship.

I mean, that helps. But I think what we're seeing today is Christianity has become so incredibly shallow. Right. And a lot of people are realizing this waking up to this. Yeah.

And they really want a deeper life with God, to battle against all the worldliness, all the sin, all the insanity going on. And they're hungry. And so, you know this too, Scott, wherever we go in the world today, I mean, it's exciting. I know the cream of people often are the ones that come to the conferences So I don't want to I don't be unrealistic But there's a hunger out there That's tenfold what it was 20 years ago all around the world and I get to see that and experience that. I'm like, I'm like dreaming that this is what I long for for so many years to see all these hungry and a lot of men, men hungry and I just hope that it continues and right now in the Spanish-speaking world in Latin America it's going full bore and it's exciting.

But, oh Lord, bring revival to the whole world through family worship and through faithful church attendance and good preaching and use all the spiritual disciplines Lord to bring revival from sea to sea. That's what I long for. And it's I'm encouraged. I'm encouraged. Well Joel thank you for joining us.

It's always a joy to talk to you about these wonderful, very, very powerful things. I just want to say one more thing. Here's what I've seen. When a man opens his Bible in his home, everything changes in that home. There's something so powerful it's almost magical.

There's a new center of a home and God is in the center. It's a wonderful thing. It is. And when a man makes it at the center of his home, see, then you don't think about answering the phone when you're in family worship. Of course not.

You're in the presence of the almighty king. This is your little private family worship service. They'll leave a message on the answering machine. This is number one. Bring the Word of God to your kids.

Amen. Joel, thank you. Thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. And I hope everybody goes out and grabs our resources for really stimulating family worship in the world today. Hope you can join us next time with the Church and Family Life podcast.

Church and Family Life is proclaiming the sufficiency of scripture by helping build strong families and strong churches. If you found this resource helpful, we encourage you to check out ChurchAndFamilyLife.com.