These videos are deliberately not exhaustive but are interview compilations on key subjects designed to whet your family's appetite for the glorious and expansive subject of our highest duty - to worship God.

We're talking about civilization. We're talking about Christian civilization, which begins to fail with the demise of family worship. We will be glorifying Him and worshipping Him, for worship is for eternity. Let's do it now. Let's do it now and let's do it right.

We ought to see worship as something we want to do, as godly men and women. It's going to occupy us for eternity. So here on Earth, we ought to be, as it were, tuning our hearts, tuning our voices. This is but a rehearsal, and therefore we ought to already be finding great joy in worship. Welcome to the session on family worship.

I have seen miracles happen in families where a father decided to do the simplest thing in the world, and that is to pick up his Bible and read it in his family every day and to pray and to center the thoughts of that family around God. I am amazed at how powerful that is. It almost completely changes a family, but it changes a man. It's remarkable what happens when a father says, I'm going to gather my family together to worship. And then what does he do?

He does what the guy in Psalm 78 does. He declares the praises of the Lord. He talks about the great deeds that God has done. And there he is every day singing the praises of God. He's actually bringing perfect words into his house.

He's bringing words that are pure. They make wise the simple. They convert. They bless. They make happy.

They correct. They terrify. They do all the things that every family needs. Family worship is one of the most powerful things that can ever happen in the family. Beyond that, it's perhaps one of the most powerful things that happens in the world, because it prepares for the true worship of God in the congregation.

Now, in the introduction to the Westminster Catechism, there's a really remarkable idea that's presented there, and it's this idea. What's the reason for the corruption in the rising generation? What's the reason for all the problems in society? It's fathers. Fathers that are not bringing their families together in worship.

And yet at the same time it's the most life-giving thing that a father can ever do. Well let's talk about family worship. When I give premarital counsel to somebody that's about to perform their wedding, I tell them the most important thing they can do in their marriage from day one is have family worship, even if it's just the husband and the wife. From day one, as many evenings as possible so that the wife cooks a nice meal. It's nutritious.

It tastes well. The table is well set. The husband, hopefully, has brought some flowers to put on the table. They carry on a civilized conversation while they're eating. The children are taught how to be mannerly.

Then before anybody gets up and helps mother clean the table, the father gets the Bible or something like Spurgeon's Morning and Evening and reads the Bible and explains it and prays and maybe sings, at our house we sing, and then asks the children questions. If somebody wasn't listening, they get spanked, and you read it again. Because they only have to get spanked once or twice to realize this is important. Now what did I just describe? The father has been working all day.

The mother has been at home. Now the mother has cooked a nice meal. The table is well set. There are flowers on the table. Everybody has his shirt on, his hair brushed, his face washed.

They're sitting around talking about important things. The Father leads in the worship service. What are we talking about? We're talking about civilization. We're talking about Christian civilization, which begins to fail with the demise of family worship.

So what happens? What do mothers and wives complain about a lot? They complain, my husband doesn't talk to me enough. Now the husband sometimes complains, the wife talks too much. The wife complains, I want him to talk to me more.

Well, when he has a worship service with his family, she hears his voice. That satisfies a wife. On one level, the children hear him talk about important things, and he's not just barking out orders. And he's talking about things of spiritual substance. We ought to see worship as something we want to do as godly men and women.

It's going to occupy us for eternity. So here on earth, we ought to be, as it were, tuning our hearts, tuning our voices. This is but a rehearsal, and therefore we ought to already be finding great joy in worship. In homes, for instance, children ought to come and say, Daddy, Daddy, you know, is it a time? Because they look forward to the time when as a family you get together to worship God.

Similarly, the people of God, the day before the Lord's day, should already be getting ready. The engines should be revving. They can't wait to stream in from east and west and north and south to that place where their hearts cannot help but ascribe praise to the living God. I grew up in a Christian home and graduated high school from a Christian high school. I went to a Christian college and got a degree in church ministries.

Up until that point, not until after I graduated and left, and years down the road, do I ever remember hearing the term family worship? My father would have a devotion, but I never heard that phrase, family worship. Never, until much later. And I grew up in the church. I grew up going to a Christian school, going to a Christian college.

So I had these three different aspects of my Christian life through church, school, and college, and all Christian, and yet never remember hearing from the pulpit, never remember hearing it discussed in Bible class in high school, Never remember it being taught in my church training years about fathers leading families and family worship. Never heard that concept. And so, You've been loaded with all this info of how to do things when you get out there in church life. Then you hear family worship and you're like, What are we talking about? You mean fathers consistently all the time getting the family together to open the Scriptures and to teach.

I didn't know what they were talking about. Now I understood the word quiet time, and I understood the word devotion where dad would sit down, but as far as that phrase, I never heard it. I was always stressed personal devotions. I heard that a lot. Quiet time, personal devotions.

But as far as the family gathering on a daily or at least consistent basis to do that, That was foreign to me. I grew up with, and we're like fifth generation believers. There's no divorce in my family from any time anybody knows about in the Dellinger family. My father is a music minister. My dad was a deacon.

So I'm not a new guy. I've been around a long time in that sense. But I had gone through all that and never heard family worship. And so it is paramount for fathers to understand that family worship is something that is allowing us the opportunity. On a personal note, it is a great time to do child training for the corporate worship because as our younger children are to sit through the services if you're trying to train a child to do something and you only take one day a week to do it it's going to take years to get to that point.

But If you are doing it on a consistent basis throughout the week to train young children to sit and to listen and to be still, and I fell on this. As many fathers will say, I haven't mastered that. If you are consistently going back to that, we're sitting still, we're quieting our hearts, we're ready to listen. We have a younger generation who's going to be ready to receive the teaching from the pulpit and from the church family because they have seen that going on in their own homes. Tuesdays, Tuesday nights, we call it worship nights with the family, and we worship God together.

If we have guests, and most of the time we have guests, I don't remember any Tuesdays without a guest in our home. Those guests will also see what we do on Tuesdays. We come before the Lord, we sing songs, and we sing praises to our Lord, and we sit down and pray together. I'm saying Tuesdays, we don't just do this on Tuesdays, but on Tuesdays all of us play the piano, come before the Lord. And this is, it's a worship night.

We don't do anything, but, you know, after all of our work, we come before the Lord and just praise His name. And I would highly recommend pastors, elders to do this. Do it with their children. Do it with their wife and kids. And not just one day, but just do it daily.

Read the scriptures and pray with their kids and sing with their kids. Songs, participatory songs in the family unite the family together. I'm not a great singer. Some of my kids sing really well, and some of them not so well. But when we sing all together, we worship Christ together, And we participate in this worship together before God.

It builds us, and we take this worship to the church. And others see this, and we know that other families are doing this as well. And families and singles and others. And this builds the church and the church becomes a worshiping church. The apocalypses of Revelation is a curtain opening from your eyes.

And you're seeing things that you've never seen before. And John, Apostle John, is showing us things unseen before. And he's giving us this gospel. He's telling us that we will be praising God forever and ever and ever. That is our eschatology.

In our eschaton, in the last day, Even after that, there is worship of Christ. We will be glorifying Him and worshiping Him. For worship is for eternity. Let's do it now. Let's do it now and let's do it right.

Start the eternity now. It has already started. Let's just learn to do it. If we don't, we'll learn it anyway in heaven. So let's just try to do it right here.

There were some cultures still existent today, though they are in the minority, like in Holland and in South Africa. I've been there many times and seen this with my own eyes. Where the Father begins the meal with a blessing and concludes with the thanksgiving. So it's not just a prayer at the beginning. There's a prayer at the beginning and the end of every meal.

God bless this food. After they've eaten it, God thank you for this food." When you see things like that that are just a normal part of life, you realize there's going to be a lot of differences in every other aspect of the family's life. That's the fountain from which the water of life flows in every part, moistens and saturates every part of that family. So The father takes the family to church and then when he comes back from church, he sits around the table on Sunday. We do this in our church.

I've done this from my children's earliest days. They're now in their middle and late thirties. We ask, what did the preacher preach about? They have to say something worthwhile. They have to show that they have been listening.

But I mean the goal is to have regular family worship. Now if the father is going to lead the worship service in his home, That means he is going to have to do some worship of his own. He is going to have to listen to some CD's of sermons. He is going to have to read the Bible on his own. He is going to have to read some God owned books about the Bible so he can stay ahead of his wife and all of his children who are hopefully growing in grace and the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ so that he can be the spiritual leader.

But sadly, in many Reformed homes, The person that really knows the Word of God is the wife and the older children. The father knows the football statistics, but really is ignorant when it comes to understanding the Word of God. At heart he's a basic Christian, and at heart on a simple level he wants to be a Christian, But he's got to be more than that if he's going to be a godly father that's going to lead his family into the future. You know, I learned in the Bible, in modern culture, We think that the wife is the one that is to be syrupy and kissy and touchy and feely and the father is to be stern and strict and just until you look at verbs that are touchy-feely affectionate, kissy, in the Bible and more times than not the father is the subject of the verbs. Now that doesn't mean that the mother should be less affectionate, but it does mean that a very important part of a father's life is to be affectionate to his wife, let his children see him, be affectionate, and be affectionate with his children.

I have two sons. They are in their middle 30s. They kiss me on the cheek every time they see me. That is a bond that they remember when they are out and surrounded by the enemy. So if a father is going to have his family worship God, he must love Christ and let his family know he loves Christ.

Love God with all your heart and soul. The only way to do that is by believing in Jesus Christ and giving your life to Him. Worship is out of the question until you do that. Until you believe in Jesus Christ as your only Lord and Savior and devote yourself to Him. You cannot, it's not you may not, you cannot worship God in spirit and in truth.

So the thing that I would say to fathers is give your life to Christ. Unconditionally surrender every area of your life to Christ as a businessman, as a husband, as a father. And become a mighty warrior in the kingdom of God so that your children will love you and you'll be their hero, you'll be their model, You'll be the authority in their life because everybody's clamoring to be your children's authority. So that you'll be the authority. You'll be the heart of the family.

And for those men who do that, who stand in front, who are trying to decrease that Christ might increase, Here's one of the things that I always teach them. If I'm walking down a street in New York, I'm walking down a sidewalk, busy, busy sidewalk, New York, Chicago, somewhere, there's thousands of people on the sidewalk. If I want to get everyone's attention, I only have to do one thing. I don't even have to open my mouth. All I have to do is stop on the sidewalk and look up and keep looking up.

And if I do, I've done it. I've done it. And just look up. And what happens? Pretty soon people walk by and they look at me looking up and then they go… and they try to look where I'm looking.

And then eventually everybody who looks at me is looking where I'm looking. That's what it means to lead worship. That a man so filled with the Holy Spirit, so filled with a compassion and a love for Christ, he's just looking up and you look at him and immediately you go from him to what is he looking at? It must be glorious. It sets his face on fire.

It's drawn his heart out. I want to see this thing he's seeing and So I believe there is a role in in leading people in worship I don't have a problem with that, but I think that's a really good example to follow Now all of this has to be in love. The father of course could be a little tyrant and have family worship be something that's unpleasant and uncomfortable and regimented. None of that needs to be the case. It all ought to be in love, a very simple pattern, singing a hymn, reading the word of God, praying together, three elements that are all in Scripture.

That could be a very simple pattern for family worship, And that's the pattern when we have family worship that we follow in our own home. Just very simple. Sometimes it goes from 15 minutes to a lot longer when somebody gets inspired by a particular question or statement in the scripture. And Then we want to research that or talk about it and apply it and discuss it so it goes longer. But our typical family worship would be pretty short along those elements that I mentioned.

Singing, reading the word of God, and praying together. Very simple. When it comes to the dads leading the family, if you are convicted that we are to lead our families, That we are to have corporate worship. That we are faithful and participate in with our church family. And that we are to also see that groundwork laid through family worship.

I think one of the great things that our children struggle with is if the dad does all those things right, if he's consistent in leading his family, if he's consistent in having them sitting under the preaching of the word on Sundays, If Dad is doing a great job with that and he's not loving Mom as Christ loves the Church, we're going to raise a generation who is going to have a misunderstanding of God's love for the church. Because the father-mother-husband-wife relationship, I don't care how well your teaching is, I don't care how well the preaching is on Sunday, if the children that are being reared in your home are not seeing dad love mom as Christ loves the church and yet dad seems to be doing all these other things right. They're going to have a mixed message. And then when they understand that, wait a minute, Of all the relationships in Scripture, not father-child, not brother-brother, there's not friend-to-friend, of all the relationships we have in this earth, there is only one relationship That God says, this is what it looks like the way I love you. That is husbands loving their wives.

That is going to speak volumes to our children. When they see a dad who loves his wife as Christ loves the church and then turns and teaches those truths, we have given them a double portion of teaching. One that they are going to be grounded in through the Word, and another one they're going to be grounded in through the experience they have seen between their father and their mother and dad's love for mom. Because of all the relationships in Scripture, that is the only one that God says, this is how Christ loves the church. What is the value in the world of a father whose heart is so full of the good news that he speaks of it in his house, that he's pouring out the glories of the gospel, he becomes a mouthpiece for God, His heart is connected with the heart of God and He is letting it loose.

This is really the essence of worship in the family and how important it is. Richard Baxter used to say that if you neglect this, you undo all. You mess up everything that happens in the church because you don't have a foundation in the people that come to your church. But if you have fathers who really do practice the discipline and the joy of family worship, then what you have is a group of people who come into worship and their hearts have been prepared. They've been pre-warmed in order to come and worship God.

Gathering your family before God to worship, It is an act of love. It's an act of love toward God and it's an act of love toward your children. When the Lord Jesus Christ was explaining the greatest commandment, he was quoting Deuteronomy 6. And look at the way Deuteronomy 6 is structured, where there is this command to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. And then that these commandments would be in your heart.

And what do you do when you love Him? What do you do when they're in your heart? Well, you teach your children diligently. When you sit in the house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up, we are advocating the proclamation of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ in homes from morning until the time that the sun goes down, the time that everybody falls into bed. What a blessing it will be to have homes that are so full of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

You