In this video we learn of the importance of prioritizing the worship of God above all ells. If worship is not prioritized above all ells then we will never properly be prepared.  Until our hearts have a longing desire to be before the most holy God then we will never properly prepare ourselves and our families. Proper preparation begins by examining our hearts. 

Worship is the greatest event of the week it's the greatest event of our lives is what life is all about So you approach it in a sacred way and you're prepared for it. Ecclesiastes says, Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God, and be more ready to hear than to give the sacrifice of fools. That is a powerful word. God wants his people ready to worship him. If you are going to meet the President of the United States of America, I don't think you'd be up till midnight the night before if you're gonna meet him first thing in the morning and drop into his office disheveled one minute before the meeting.

God wants his people ready to worship him. He wants them to come joyfully into his presence with singing. He wants them to come into his presence with thanksgiving. He wants us to come ready to hear from him. When my children were growing up, I wanted them to find such enjoyment in being with the people of God.

I wanted them to anticipate it. I wanted them to sort of salivate in a way, sort of like Pavlov's dog when a certain stimulus was given. So, what I did as a father is I quote scripture to my children before church, usually in the car on the way. I would say, I was glad when they said unto me, let us go into the house of the Lord. And I said that to them over and over again.

My whole desire was to help my children understand the beauty, the goodness, the life-giving nature there was in coming into the presence of God and to be with God's people. God's imperfect people, They're in the midst of perfect words, in the midst of beautiful songs, in the midst of prayers and thanksgivings. I wanted them to long for it, but it was in my heart that they would desire to be in the courts of the Lord so much that when we got in that car they would say I was glad when they said unto me let us go into the house of the Lord. This session on preparing to worship is all about how to prepare. I hope you enjoy the time.

It's interesting how big the Puritans were on not only the act of worship for that hour and a half, which is usually the time they spent in worship, but also pre-worship and post-worship. Thomas Watson, for example, has several points about how families should prepare for worship before they come. And he has this interesting comment, he says, you need to dress your soul, not only your body, before you come. And actually, the Puritans advised people, families, to set aside time on Saturday evening already, if at all possible, to warm their souls in preparation for worship by doing extra devotions, perhaps talking about what the minister is going to preach about. Tomorrow, if he's preaching expository through one book.

They would talk about that. They'd study that text he's going to preach on in advance. One Puritan put it this way. He said, in those days, you have to bear in mind they made bread usually in the evening and they kept it in their oven, their makeshift oven overnight and it was very warm on Sunday morning. And so the Puritans said, you've got to do the same thing with your soul.

You've got to warm your soul on Saturday evening. So Sunday morning, you should get up early, you should do some extra devotions. You should pray as a family again for the minister in particular. And then go to church and get to church early enough. You can pray quietly in the pew.

And then by the time the service starts you are just eager for worship and your soul is warmed and you're ready to hear the word of God. Now compare that to today where young people stay out till midnight and they come home, they get a few hours of sleep, they get up the last minute and drop themselves into the church pew prayerless one minute before the worship service begins. Chances are they're not ready for worship. Now God can do great things and still bless them in the sermon, but the Puritans are onto something. Worship is the greatest event of the week.

It's the greatest event of our lives. It's what life is all about. So, you approach it in a sacred way and you prepare for it. If you are going to meet the President of the United States of America, I don't think you'd be up till midnight tonight before if you're gonna meet him first thing in the morning and drop into his office disheveled one minute before the meeting. But you're meeting someone far greater, the Puritans would say, in worship than the President of the United States.

You're meaning the living God. And then, let me add this, that after worship, they also said, it's our duty to retain what we've heard and our duty to continue worshiping God in the privacy of our homes. So the Puritan father would return home with his family, say he had a seven year old child, eleven year old child, sixteen year old child, he would then try to ask those children questions about the sermons, sort of test them, examine them, encourage them, comfort them, exhort them, and he'd try to bring the entire sermon at their level. So they talk their way through the sermon again. And then probably a good chance too, He'd invite some friends over, maybe Sunday night, maybe Monday, and they would talk about the sermon again.

And the kids would hear the adults talking about the sermon. Or maybe that Wednesday evening, in family worship, something would happen in the scripture they're talking about, something would transpire that would remind him of the sermon last Sunday night. He'd bring that in again. So, a father has a duty to tie in, into daily life, into family worship, into real life, the sermons of the past Sunday to his own family. If a father wanted to bring his family prepared for worship, I think the wisest thing that he could do is, before they leave in the morning, once everybody's ready to go, is to bow his head, have his wife and his children join him in prayer, and ask the living God to prepare their hearts to offer up a biblical and joyful worship to God, and to prepare their hearts to receive the Word of God that they might be transformed.

And it doesn't hurt to sing on the way to church. It's a wonderful thing to discuss on the way singing and what pastor has been preaching if they're aware of what he's going to be preaching Prepare the children that way a pleasing asked. He's said it says keep thy foot when thou goest To the house of God and be more ready to hear than to give the sacrifice of fools." That is a powerful word. God wants his people ready to worship him. He wants them to come joyfully into his presence with singing.

He wants them to come into his presence with thanksgiving. He wants us to come ready to hear from him. And I see it as a father's responsibility to have his wife and his children prepared for that. Whether they prepare at the house before they go, or whether they prepare in the car before they get there, or if they prepare in the car after they arrive. There needs to be a sense of saying, children, we're entering into the presence of God.

We want to be ready for this. I mean, when our minds are scattered with all the things of the week, sometimes even the hustle and bustles, and tragically, even the arguments between husbands and wives before they get in the car and get to worship, very often we're in an absolutely unsanctified frame of mind to go into God's presence. So what is vital for us is that we know our God, that we come for the purpose of offering up true worship in spirit and in truth, and that our whole family knows that's what we're going to do. We're not just going to hear a sermon. We're going to go into God's presence and magnify him for who he is, the glorious salvation that he purposed in his Son.

We're going to hear about his Son Jesus Christ who died and rose again that we might have life. We're going to hear about the Holy Spirit and we're going to pray that the Spirit is going to be working in our midst, that we might offer up to our God a worship of which He is worthy. Other than that, we are offering the sacrifice of fools. So dads need to be realizing that they don't want their house to walk in to God's house ready to offer the sacrifice of fools, but rather to be ready to magnify and glorify Him who loved us before the foundation of the world. If you have the opportunity to prepare your family for corporate worship, the best way to do that, I believe, is go to the scriptures.

If you can find out what is being, what's the text for that Sunday, To have a familiarity with it, to study it, to hear it, and then to examine yourself before the Lord to see If there's anything that has broken fellowship with anyone in your family, maybe even someone outside your family, you just want to get that slate as clear and clean as possible before you enter into the presence of the Lord. You prepare your heart with the Scriptures. You examine yourself. You confess. You restore relationships if necessary.

Then you start to praise the Lord and seek Him and ask Him to do a work in your heart as He is honored. Because if your desire is to walk away from worship feeling good about what you did, you've totally missed it. I think we have a lot to learn from the Jewish people who prepare their families for the Sabbath. Sunday is our Sabbath. On Saturdays we try to finish our cleaning at home.

Before the sundown we are all ready. We don't have to do anything that evening, that Saturday evening, and all the way through Sunday. We all get together around the dinner table and we read scriptures together. And we don't start this Sunday morning, we start this Saturday night. We pray for each other, we pray for the family.

My wife prays, I pray and I lead the family in the reading and we declare to our children that the Sabbath has started. Now this day is the Lord's day. We are giving this day to the Lord and this day is the day of worship. We don't even wash our dishes that day. We just leave it till Monday morning.

We won't watch movies. We won't do anything that will take our attention away from His Word. So we sing songs together. We have a piano. All of our kids will play the piano and they'll play it and they'll glorify God's name.

We sing hymns to the Lord. We sing scripture songs to the Lord. Prepare yourself. Make sure that you have no more work left. Leave it behind.

Don't work. God knows us better. God knows that we need to rest. God knows that we need to rest in his word. We need to open his word and continue glorifying him and teach this principle to our children and let others see this.

Let others learn from this example as well. When I say rest, you just don't just stay at home and sleep. We worship God. We pray. You pray for your friends.

You pray for the lost. You pray for those who gave their lives to Christ. Care for their souls. Go and talk to other Christians and help them in any way you can. Worshipping God in a congregation in the Bible is the most important kind of worship.

Now, God loves the worship that goes on in the family. It embarrasses me when I realize how many Evangelical and Reformed fathers do not have family worship. I mean, it's a death nail to Christianity. They might have homeschooling. They might call themselves Bible believing Christians and all the rest.

But it is shocking how few evangelicals and Reformed fathers do not gather their children regularly around the table and sing hymns and teach them the Word of God and pray and all the rest. That is important. Private worship is important. But if you are not regularly worshiping God yourself and spending time with God alone, there is going to be tremendous vulnerability in your life to Satan's influence. But the Psalm says that God loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwelling places of Jacob.

I wish I had memorized what Spurgeon said about that. It was one of the greatest quotes in the world. God loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwelling places of Jacob. God loves the dwelling places of Jacob. God loves our homes and our families and what goes on, particularly when we worship Him.

But God especially loves the gates of Zion and the worship that goes on at Zion. Now what was Zion? Zion was where the temple was. That was where the congregation of the Lord gathered to worship Him. So as important as all these other worships are, It is congregational worship on the Lord's Day that is the big thing.

Now during the week we have various kinds of Bible studies and things like that if people are interested in coming. But Monday through Saturday we expect fathers and families to have as their primary importance family and calling. If after you've spent time with your family and your calling adequately and you have time to come to Bible study, great. On Sunday you put your calling, you don't even work with your calling, you lay aside weekly employments and weekly recreations and you gather your family for the congregational worship of God, which begins by preparation. The worship of God in a congregation begins before you sit down in a church building.

It begins when you prepare yourself and your family for worship and you tell yourself and your children, now what are we about to do? Into whose presence are we about to come? The most important part of prayer is getting ready to pray. One of the very important parts of worship is getting ready to worship and just bearing in mind what we are about to do. Because if you come to worship cold, If you go to bed late on Saturday night, you watch television at one o'clock in the morning, you've been partying or whatever until one o'clock.

Then you get up just in time to take a shower and get all the kids in the car and go to church. You get in church one minute late and you sit down. Forget worship. You haven't prepared your heart. You have no idea what you're about to do.

Would you and I do that to some famous person we knew tomorrow we were going to go meet, this famous person, so we stay up until two o'clock in the morning and then we get up just in time to rush into his presence huffing and puffing and sweating and everything like that? No. We prepare ourselves. But we don't even think to prepare ourselves for the fact that we're coming into the presence of the living God. So that is one of the most important things fathers and mothers can do, is to prepare themselves and to show their children, by model and by word, how to get ready to worship God and not to be late.

I think another thing that when people worship God it's not that important in their lives. One of the things I've learned about worship is if you haven't really had a worshipful experience yourself, You haven't had a time of understanding who God is, what He has done, appreciated and shown Him that trembling worship before Him yourself. And that word hasn't struck you individually, you probably are not going to see your family follow suit. If it hasn't made an impression upon you, it won't make an impression upon the people you lead as a father or as a pastor in the church? To assume that this will just happen is a great tragedy in our day.

It's going to have to be intentional. If we're going to lead our families to worship, we must do it intentionally. In doing that intentionally, dads need to simply know that we have to set time aside when we have our family gathered together. We have to be willing to turn the television off. Unplug that television.

Do whatever it takes. Just simply getting away from the trappings of this world that are so easily distracting for us, and driving people, a family, that would be willing and prepared to go as a family to the gathering of the saints. We're planning on Monday to prepare ourselves, if the Lord would allow, the coming Sunday, the coming Lord's Day, this family is preparing now to gather with the saints on Sunday. For children to not wake up on Sunday morning asking are we going to go to church today. Fathers if children are asking that question on Sunday my charge to you would be Wake up on Monday and prepare your children to know that if the Lord allows the coming Lord's Day to come about, there are no questions.

We will arise, and we will go to the Lord's house, and we will gather with the Lord's people, and we will worship the Lord, and the Lord only will we worship. We're not going to put the football game above this gathering. We're not going to put a television program above this gathering. We're not putting a soccer game above this schedule. We as a family will gather with the Lord's people, and we will worship the Lord.

Well, the best text of all in scripture that, that addresses, in my opinion, the whole issue of getting ready for the Sabbath is Isaiah chapter 58. And in Isaiah's prophecy there where he talks about the importance of the Sabbath day not being about seeking your own pleasure not just Being something that pleases you but something that's very especially focused on God and On the Sabbath day there are deeds of necessity that must be done. You have to feed your animals and you have to, of course, sometimes do some meal preparation unless you had the foresight to do that on Saturday night. So there are certain things that must be done. But otherwise, the Sabbath day is a day to be focused on the worship of God, and to be focused on deeds of mercy, and to enjoy the fellowship of the people of God.

And so all of that takes some efforts for the Christian family to get themselves ready. It ought to be sort of what I would call a building throughout the week. That's the way it is for pastors. We kind of build all through the week getting ready for being with the people of God and worshiping God and preaching and teaching and all of that that takes place on the Lord's Day. And so Christian families should follow a similar pattern of as it were building up to Sunday being unique and special.

Now, there are certain things that the servant household, we don't do on the Lord's day. We don't do the ordinary things that we might do on Monday through Saturday. We don't mow the lawn on the Lord's Day. We don't watch television on the Lord's Day. We try to do those things that are unique and special to the Lord's Day.

Like being in the Lord's house, being under the preaching of God's Word, being with his people in lengthy periods of time, eating together with the people of God, talking about godly things, about what was said in Scripture, not the latest movie, not the latest sports thing that's going on, not the latest piece of news, but talking about godly things. Those are the issues on the Lord's Day. And that's what we try to do. We're not perfect in doing that, but that's our general goal of trying to make the Lord's Day special. So those are the things we try to do and make that day unique and special in the worship of the servant family.

Pretty much everything that has value requires some kind of preparation. When you're Talking about the worship of God, think of how important that preparation is. You know, there's a section in the book of Psalms that is so helpful to help us think through the whole matter of preparation. The Songs of Ascents. And they were the songs that the families were singing as they were making their way up to the house of God.

But here's the bottom of it. Preparation for worship always begins in the heart. It's a heart of desire. This is why David said in Psalm 27, One thing I have desired of the Lord, that will I seek, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in His temple. You see the desire that comes out of David's words there?

He longed for the courts of the Lord. He longed for the beauty of the Lord. He really did believe it was a beautiful thing to be before Almighty God. Now, we're always preparing for something as human beings. All of life is preparation for heaven.

And the beginning of that preparation is desire. So do you have that desire? Have you been fanning the flames of desire for God? Do you desire the courts of the Lord deep within your heart? If you want to lead your family to desire to worship, you have to desire it yourself in your own heart.

So maybe the beginning of this whole journey of preparation ought to begin by asking this question, does my heart desire and what do I need to do to warm up the desires of my heart? A second thing to consider is that Really the whole week is preparation for coming together with the people of God. Each Sabbath worship is a dress rehearsal for being before the throne of God. So you have these things that have to do with preparation. You prepare all week long to come before God, and your coming before God in the congregation is really a dress rehearsal for heaven.

Here's a really important principle. If you love to be before His feet now, and you long to be before His feet, you will most likely love to be before His feet on that great day when the Lord Jesus Christ comes with all of his holy angels and he sits on his throne, on the throne of his glory, and everyone who's ever lived will be gathered there before him. And you will either love to be before his throne or you'll be very uncomfortable before his throne. If you have loved to be in his presence here, you will most likely love to be in His presence there. And that's why we should examine our hearts and ask ourselves, do we desire the courts of the Lord?

Do we long to be in His presence? So all of this to say, let's learn how to prepare ourselves for the courts of the Lord. It's such an important thing. If you were to be before a king, you would prepare yourself. But when we come before the King of Kings, are we prepared?

And are our families prepared to see the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in His temple? You