How does a family keep the Word of God central in their lives?

Calvin Beisner explains in this video that families must be steeped in God's Word -- it must be a central part of their everyday life. They must recognize Scripture as the ultimate source of authority.

In his family, he explains that for their times of family worship, he reads a Scripture passage to his family. Sometimes they discuss it and sometimes, they don't. Sometimes children have questions about the passage and on other occasions, they don't. They do faithfully God's Word every day, morning and evening. For their family, he shares that this has helped their family keep the Word of God central in their lives.

Colossians 3:16 (NKJV) - "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord."

You can't make the word of God central for your family. It's not central for yourself. So that means you have to be steeped in the word. You have to go to it all the time and that is your authority. And then, of course, we just simply adopt practices.

I'm a big fan of the KISS method, keep it simple stupid. Early on in my marriage, I tried doing devotions with my wife in which we would read a passage and then we would start reading Matthew Henry's commentary on that passage. And that lasted I think for two attempts. We just found that it was overwhelming for us at that stage in our lives and because that was overwhelming we didn't get back to it for quite a while. But then when we did we just simply adopted the KISS method, Keep It Simple Stupid, and that served us very very well through the roughly 30 years of child raising from our seven children.

And essentially what we do is quite simple. We just simply read a passage of scripture, we pray, and we sing a hymn together to the Lord. We worship. Sometimes we'll discuss the passage, sometimes we won't discuss the passage. We trust that the Spirit of God uses the written Word of God to shape our hearts.

Our children sometimes have questions about it, sometimes they don't. That's okay. I don't feel as if I'm having to be the sage who explains the passage every time. And that way, we're not intimidated from trying it. We just do it day after day.

For many years, we did it morning and evening with our family every day. That kept the word central to us.