The sermon on 'Family Worship' discusses the critical role it plays in both family and church life. It emphasizes that family worship is biblically mandated and highlights its simplicity, suggesting that any Christian can implement it. The sermon warns against the neglect of family worship, viewing it as a lack of love for God, one's children, and the church. Various speakers share personal testimonies on how family worship transformed their homes, addressing common issues such as marital discord and disobedient children. These are alleviated when the head of the household leads the family in daily scriptural reading, prayer, and singing. Family worship holds the father accountable, fostering maturity and respect within the family. The sermon underscores the historical significance of family worship, referencing the Puritans and church discipline. It critiques modern individualism for sidelining family worship in favor of personal quiet time, which, while important, should not replace communal worship. The sermon stresses the importance of evangelism within the family, arguing that family worship is essential for leading children to faith. The speakers advocate for prioritizing family worship over secular activities, drawing on biblical passages such as Deuteronomy 6 and Ephesians 6 to support their points. They describe practical approaches to family worship, emphasizing regularity, simplicity, and adaptability to different family routines. Ultimately, the sermon calls for a return to the practice of family worship as a foundational element of Christian life, urging families to integrate it into their daily schedules despite modern distractions.

The subject we want to deal with today has enormous implications in church and family life. And so we want to share about a glorious practice that Scripture requires of families. And we want to talk about its biblical nature. We want to talk about what it looks like. We want to talk about how simple it is.

We want to say any knucklehead can do this. At least any Christian knucklehead can do this. And so we want to talk about the subject of family worship. Here are a few things we believe about family worship. First of all, neglect of it is a sign of lack of love for God.

Secondly, it's a sign of lack of love for your children. Thirdly, we think it's a sign of lack of love for the church. We think it's a gigantic issue. So with that, let's just throw the ball up in the air and continue to discuss it. Jason, what are your thoughts on this?

Well, there's probably nothing that the four of us would rather get together and talk about. I'm confident we could spend all our time just with personal testimonies of how our own homes have been transformed by this. When you think about the day-to-day problems that are experienced in many marriages, in many homes, so many of them are helped just by this one simple unadorned practice. When husbands feel like they're not respected by their wives, when children won't obey their parents, these are the type of things that are really helped out when a father will rally his family around the Word of God every day just for the simple practice of reading scripture, of joining together to pray together, singing. These are the type of things that really accelerate the maturity curve for the head of a household and cause a wife and children to view the head of that home in a completely different way than they would if that practice is not in force.

In terms of the maturity of the head of the household, I think one of the things that happens just naturally if you're doing family worship is because the scripture is being read in the home, all of a sudden the father is being held accountable. Not necessarily that his children are saying, you sinned in this way, but there's just kind of this natural accountability that you just read that morning. Thou shalt not bear false witness. And then you're with your children and you have the temptation to say, just tell them I'm not home. And it just puts this pressure and this accountability.

So it's through those things that we mature. And so God and His grace by doing this, this is how you get mature Christians, much more so than Sunday morning. Although Sunday morning is extremely important, but that's not how you get mature Christians. I know as a Christian, and this may apply to many Christians, I always knew it was important to worship on Sunday. I always knew it was important that we be at church because that's the time we worship God corporately.

But this idea when I was first introduced to it of family worship, of me leading my family in scripture and washing my wife in the water of the word was completely foreign to me. It didn't make the connection that we were to worship God every day of the week. And I was to lead my family in the worship of God every day of the week and not just when we gather together on Sundays. And so when I heard this practice, my first thought was, wow, this is a great innovation. This is new.

Come to find out, it's not a new thing, it's an old thing. And just like we talk about reformation all the time this is a practice that had been in place centuries ago the reformation certainly brought this to light and just the fact that it was in the directory for family worship and that if a father was not conducting family worship It was a reason to confront him and possibly go down the road of church discipline if he was not feeding his family the word. That was a shock to me, but indeed it's true. It was expected. That's because God commands us to do this.

You know, the Puritans had some pretty devastating things to say about those who didn't practice family worship. You know, Matthew Henry saying, why did you give them a Christian name if you don't nourish them in Christian things every day? You know, he says, you know, morning and evening, make it your business, not a by-business. He said, you're shameless. Your home is a stye for swine if you don't have family worship.

They said some really extreme things. I mean, you had, you know, the successors of Puritans, guys like George Whitefield, who said that if you don't have family worship, it's a sign of apostasy, which is a pretty heavy thing to say. I mean, especially when you realize the kind of Christian world we live in today. Just last week, Lifeway came out with a study where they said that 9% of evangelical parents believe the spiritual development of their children is a high priority. Nine percent.

I'll just suggest that's a sign of apostasy in the church and it's reflected in the lifestyles of people in the church. They do not carefully, daily, or never twice a day, hardly conduct family worship. Scott, you hit it right on the head. I mean, this is a root problem today, but even if you went back and looked at the preface or the introduction to the Second London Baptist Confession, there's just a big section there to sum it all up, basically the problems that they were facing back then. One of the places they drew back to as a root cause of those issues was the lack of family worship.

And that's why you have Puritans like Philip Dodridge saying that it's an inhuman negligence. It's like heathenism, it's a treacherous neglect. Well that kind of language about men who do not conduct family worship should really get our attention. But you know, we live in an era where this is not an important category. So why is it not an important category?

What happened? One of the things we see in modern religious life is that it's become very individualistic. So the heavy emphasis is on personal quiet time. And not to demean that at all, is I think you can make a strong biblical case for time alone with God, definitely, but not to the exclusion of everything else. And the result of that is that men in the modern church have become repositories.

They take in great quantities of good scriptural teaching, and then they just keep it to themselves. This is a tragedy. One of the things is I was thinking about good examples of where we see a family head rallying his family around. I love the account in Acts 10 of Cornelius. He's had this vision that he's going to be visited.

He sends Peter Combs, and then in Acts 10, 24, we see these words. Now, Cornelius was waiting for them and had called together his relatives and close friends. Here's a man who was not a repository of things. When there was something important, he rallied his family and his friends around it. And this is really the heart of the practice of family worship is that we not keep the good things of God to ourselves but that we're responsible to pass it to those who are in close proximity to us.

Which is exactly what Asaph says in Psalm 78. He says, I will open my mouth in a parable I'll utter dark sayings of all and doing so he's setting an example I think go do as I do open your mouth man you know relieved your family in the worship of god and one of the things that we lose when we make it all about our own personal quiet time instead of time with our families. The reality is we've cut out evangelism entirely. Because the basic core evangelism is you should not expect an unbelieving child to have a quiet time. It makes no sense.

So if they're going to worship God the way they're going to do it is when they're led by their father They don't know they don't have that personal relationship with Christ and so it's only through through the family gathering and worship I mean for them it makes no sense So if you make it that it's about your personal quiet time what you've done is you've cut off your children from access to God. You ask, what happened? What happened? What brought us to where we are? And there's probably a lot of things, but basically we are people who are extremely busy with all sorts of things.

We have things going on all over the place and as soon as you have just a couple of children, you are just strapped for time. You are consumed with all the things we think our children need like organized sports or even church programs can really string us out and we become extremely busy and we really in the end don't love God enough because we've not prioritized the worship of Him in our homes and so when it comes to making decisions on how as a head of the household how we're going to lead and how we're going to direct our family. We don't even give a thought to family worship. We might fit it in when we can do it, but we really see these other secular things as much more important to the spiritual development of our children. And that's just not what the word of God says.

In fact, Jeremiah 10.25 should wake us up to the neglect of family worship or discipling our family. It says this, pour out your fury on the Gentiles who do not know you and on the families who do not call on your name. For they have eaten up Jacob, devoured him, and consumed him, and made his dwelling place desolate. We have got to make it the practice of making God's name known in our families. What we're advocating here is that in every home, the practice of gathering together at least once a day for worship and every day of the week become the irreducible activity in every home so that the family schedule gets set around making sure that happens every day.

And, you know, our counsel to people who would hear that and say, well, that's just not possible with all the things I've got going on. There are things, if a person hears this and says that, then there's things that need to be killed in their schedule. And we would just make a passionate plea that anybody who's in that situation would just take radical steps to amputate the things in your schedule that would prevent you from having this be the central thing that happens in your home every day. And when you look at God's Word, man cannot live by bread alone but every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. I mean look at where God is putting family worship.

He's putting it in front of eating, or at least equal with physical food. Spiritual food is at least equal with physical food. So if you say you need to cut out family worship because, you know, there's a soccer game, then cut out dinner, too. I mean, make sure that you're putting it in the same priorities. And we'll cut out family worship for all these things, but it needs to be put out there with meals.

If you're not going to cut a meal for this, then don't cut family worship for this. And that's how we need to be thinking about it. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's a very helpful thought. Let's keep talking about the biblical principles that surround this whole subject. We just talked briefly about Psalm 78, Open Your Mouth in a Parable.

And, Dan, you just brought up, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. What are some of the other biblical coordinates that we need to help us understand what to do here? So thankfully, there's a great foundation of biblical principles, but it's not mainly that. It's mainly commands. And that simplifies it because it's not observing patterns and trying to decide what we should rightly do from the patterns.

It's a simple response of obedience to commands. And the two places that are the most stark ones in my mind happen in Deuteronomy 6 where we're commanded to diligently teach the things that we put in our heart to our children. And this is about walk along, talk along discipleship. When you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, when you rise up, that's pretty comprehensive. And then that same thought is taught again by the Apostle Paul in Ephesians 6, that we would train our children in the admonition of the Lord.

You know, I've heard pastors encourage families to have at least one time of family worship a week. I think that's apostasy. I think that's rebellion against that principle that you just spoke about in Deuteronomy 6. That families would engage in some spiritual conversation once a week is nothing less than apostasy. I think that having just recently preached on that passage in Deuteronomy 6, when we think about that we can say, oh, that's in there, but it's not that important.

The reality is that's the most prominent piece of scripture. That's the most prominent piece of scripture that's been quoted, because the Jews would quote it every morning and every evening. It's the most prominent piece of scripture, because Jesus Christ said this is the greatest commandment. And so when we look at commandments, it's hard to even get beyond Deuteronomy 6 because arguably it is the most prominent passage in scripture, period, bar none. And yet, you know, our common practice today is to ignore it, To ignore the most prominent one because we like these other ones better.

But no, this is where the good life is. So how do you answer this question? No, Jesus said the greatest commandment was love the Lord your God with all your heart, not diligently teach your children. You sit in the house when you walk, by the way, when you lie down, when you rise up. How do you answer that question?

Well, in Mark, he's actually quoting the beginning of the shema and when you look at that he quotes hero israel the lord our god is one lord you shall love the lord thy god all the Jews would have immediately known that he was quoting the Shema. They said it every morning and every evening. We have nothing in our experience that we have repeated as many times as the Jews repeated this passage of scripture. So they had this memorized better than anything that we can compare it to. They had this memorized, they repeated it, it was their practice.

And so they would understand that when Moses said, hero Israel, and then he continues on that you shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, thy soul, thy strength, that The next paragraph, the next verses are the description of what that looks like. This is what it looks like to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, soul, and strength. You teach it diligently to your children. If you truly love God, if you see God as the creator of all things, he's the sustainer of all things, He's the one that has given you life, that every good and perfect gift comes from above. How can you not tell that as a practice, as a regular practice to your children?

This is why it was traditionally held to be that you weren't a believer. This was worthy of church discipline if you know the true god how would you not have a practice of telling it to your children and so we had a man that came to a conference last year he went through the constitution when he was in them new members class at the church he was going on in the kids the cause because the church was a hundred years old. So it had the standard clause, which was, if you don't practice family worship, this is grounds for church discipline. And he asked the pastor and the pastor said, oh, that's in there, but we don't follow that anymore. Well, we need to get back to, I mean, this should be grounds for church discipline if you know the living god how can you not tell your children about it you know I've had many people writing letters and come up to me after speeches you know on the subject and they'll say teaching your children the way that moses talking about deuteronomy six it's an old testament thing it's not for us that passed away and in my my responses well if that passed away then the greatest commandment passed away.

It's madness to say that the practice of Deuteronomy 6 for fathers has passed away, but the greatest commandment is in force. It makes no sense at all. It's a silly argument. And as we look at Deuteronomy 6, we see that, as Jason said, it's walk along, talk along, discipleship, it's to happen all the time. So the only way that this can happen is if your children are with you or with your wife, if you're working all the time.

So it is a daily, it's a daily thing. I think Hebrews 13, 12 and 13 also help. I'll read it. Beware, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief and departing from the living God. But exhort one another daily while it is called today, lest any of you be hardened for the deceitfulness of sin." We have to remember the deceitfulness of sin in our own families.

And I can see in my own family if we've skipped a number of days of or even just one I've seen it where we've missed one or two days possibly where I see things happening before my very eyes I see the deceitfulness of sin, I see the beginnings of the hardening of heart, and it's not been uncommon for me to just stop what we're doing and say, okay, we need to have family worship right now. And at the end of that, you see the softening of hearts, and many times, if not every time, I've had to repent of things that I've said or things that I've felt or thought or communicated. And so I try to be the first one to repent of those things. And it's amazing that the Word of God brings the right verses at the right time to convict us, to break us, and then to provide healing and reconciliation. And so it's a beautiful time for that reconciliation, for that repentance, that daily repentance that needs to be there in the family.

But I say all that to say, it's got to be a daily thing. So I think we see even in Hebrews that we're to exhort one another daily. And we do that through the mode of family worship in our family. Another indirect fruit of what you get out of family worship, most churches feel like their leadership depth isn't what it ought to be. They wish they had a longer bench of people who could participate in the leadership.

And what we learned from 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, where you see the qualifications for church leaders, is that the home is the training ground for church leaders. We'd rather have a, you know, one semester class where we teach people leadership principles and then we can graduate the students and put them into leadership. But these passages for Timothy 3 and Titus 1 make it so clear that the church isn't like that. The church functions like a family. And so the training ground for leadership in the church is the family because once you learn how to manage that well, you've acquired the skills.

And a key part of that is family worship. When you look at the qualifications, you see many things that are wrapped up in home life. It is the nature and quality of your marriage, the husband of one wife. It is having an open home that offers hospitality to people inside the church and outside the church. It is able to teach.

Now, any man who's established family worship as a centerpiece in his home knows how awkward the first several times the first week, the first several weeks are there's discomfort associated with it. But any man who's done this and stuck it out for a couple of weeks also knows that it's a little less awkward, it's a little less uncomfortable every day and every week. And over the period of years as these things are laid day at a time, a man becomes able to handle the Word of God rightly. He becomes comfortable in teaching the Scriptures. And then finally, we see children.

And 1 Timothy 3 verse 4 says this, one who rules his own house well, again this is more than just having a lawn cut on time, having your house ruled well, has everything to do with the discipleship that's happening in your home. And then it closes saying this, having his children in submission with all reverence. Now, I don't know how you do that, have your children in submission with all reverence, without the gospel. This is a fruit of the gospel. Maybe not even children who are exposed to the Gospel on a daily basis, even if they haven't made a profession of faith yet, have that as something that brings obedience and submission with reverence.

And this is why it's so core to training leaders in the church. You know there's another consideration here, you know why? Well there are a lot of reasons. One, you know, do it because you love your children. Help them to fill their hearts with the knowledge of God.

Give them a vision of Almighty God so that he is their their sustainer. Do it out of love for the church. Do you love the church? I would just like to submit this idea. If you really love the church the way that Christ loved the church, then you will present to the church disciples who've been well nourished in the Word of God, who've been washed in the water of the Word, whose minds have been cleansed and purified and directed by what's in Scripture.

What is it a sign of when a man doesn't have family worship? I would just say it's a sign that he doesn't love his children. It's a sign that he doesn't love the church. It's a sign that he doesn't love God because he hasn't set himself to assiduously, carefully, and with all of his heart, you know, to bring a vision of God to his children. There are a lot of reasons why we absolutely must do this and the future of the church is at stake.

It really strikes me, especially as Jason was talking about how we've really flipped this on its head. For me, before I ever taught my children, I had taught age-segregated Sunday school classes, I had taught couples. So to me it wasn't that uncomfortable when I started teaching my own family. But it's just so perverted from what God's word teaches. The home should be the place where you learn to teach and then those who are fit to be teachers, as James 3 says, let not many of you be teachers.

Before you understand whether you should teach publicly, you should have taught privately. Now we have Sunday school classes all over this country where the only time that those parents are teaching is when they're teaching other people's children, because they're not at home teaching their own children these things. The only time they teach is when they're teaching other people's children. Brethren, that is not how it is supposed to be. It should be just the opposite.

If you love your children, if you care for your children, you will first teach your children before you say, God has actually gifted me in this area, so now I'll go teach other people's children. Let not many of you be teachers, but that does not mean don't go teach your own children, but that's where you find out where your giftings are from God. And Jason brought up the gospel, which is critical here. And then I think you even mentioned this too, Dan, and you just did. All of us would agree that evangelization, evangelizing those who need the Lord Jesus Christ is of utmost importance.

But many times we think of another country, we think of our neighborhood or our workplace, which we need to be evangelizing. We need to be sharing the gospel across the world. And I can say this because this is true of my own home. I never thought that it would be my duty to evangelize my own children. And it's got to be done on a daily basis.

It's not just when you go to church, you hear a sermon and you hope that the gospel is presented in a way that one day they would profess faith in Christ. I mean, I pray that that would be the case, but our homes have got to be filled with the gospel of Jesus Christ, and we have to fervently pray and desire and cry out for our children's salvation. And so everything that we do in the home has got to be clothed in the gospel. I mean, the time that we worship God should not be from seven to eight, eight o'clock at night or seven to eight o'clock in the morning and that's it. No, we should be gathered together to sing, to pray, to read the word, to unfold Scripture and share it in instruction.

But the entire day has got to be focused around that. Our children, at the end of the day, have got to love God more, have got to love the Gospel more. So it would be easy to make family worship even something programmatic, even something that is just something to check off at the end of the day. And that is not what we're advocating here at all. We're advocating that this would be just an integral part, a natural part of the way of daily life, which then flows into the church.

So, Steve, just to pile on what you were just saying, we should address the issue of whether family worship is a cure-all, because we're speaking so well, but it would be easy to think that this is the centerpiece of the whole Bible. As long as you do this, everything will be wonderful. And I think to a quote in the biography of John G. Payton, who was a missionary of the centuries past. He talked about his experience growing up in his home.

He had a very godly father who truly led them in the worship of God. I think it is possible to have this in your schedule every day and not have it be the true worship of God. And that doesn't yield the same fruit at all. And the quote from this, I wish I had it directly, but essentially he was comparing his experience where their father did lead them in the true worship of God with some experience of the people that he grew up around who also had that as part of their daily schedule. But it was task work, and he actually describes it as task work.

And his friends, looking back, detested that time and couldn't wait to get out of the home. But he said him and all his brothers and sisters felt exactly the opposite, that it was the foundation of their faith and of them living a life that was faithful where they loved God from the heart going forward. So it doesn't have to actually be good in your home. You can produce exactly the opposite of what the intent of it is if there's hypocrisy involved, if it's cold and lifeless, and it's not worshiping God from the heart. Right.

If it doesn't start with the Father truly loving God, then it's not going to produce good fruit. I mean, we have those promises from Jesus Christ that a bad tree produces bad fruit. So if you are doing it just because this will make you accepted by other people, that's a waste of time. Jason was saying that it's not the centerpiece of the gospel, and that's very true. The centerpiece of the gospel is God.

God is. That's the gospel right there. You really don't need any more. The true God is true. But when we start to look at the Great Commission, and we think of the Great Commission, this is really the first step in the Great Commission.

A lot of times we want this view that, oh, let's have people that we send over to other countries and all these other things. But we should really start with if they're not discipling their own children, if they're not telling the gospel to their own children. They're obviously not fit to be sent across the country. Why would we waste those resources if they won't do the great commission right where they are so it definitely is not the center of the bible but at the other hand it is really one of the first basic things when you start to believe that you should be doing let's talk about exactly what we're talking about from a mechanical standpoint what does family worship look like what are you supposed to do what we know What are some of the better patterns? So at the Dome House, having regularity of time is really important to us.

We have the same scheduling challenges that many families have. And so it's our pattern that we gather right after dinner. And it's before the great dispersion happens. You know, after dinner, if you let people disperse, it's very difficult to call them back together again. So right at the end of dinner, we grab our Bibles, and that's when we have the time.

It's a very unadorned time. If you've ever been in our home and participated in it you would probably come away and think, you know, any knucklehead could do this. That is the point really. God has given us a simple practice that if we'll trust it, it will revolutionize our homes and it will be the greatest blessing. And the beauty of it is, you know, it does not take a genius to do it.

It takes a man who's willing to put the discipline in his life just to gather his family after dinner and open up the Bible and read it and pray with his family, talk about the scriptures, sing together. These become the most beautiful tender moments in your home. It's a time where you snuggle with your two-year-old on your lap And these are intended to be very warm, wonderful times at home. I remember when this was first introduced to me, Scott, actually, I think I may have, and I think you've gotten this question from other people. But I think I asked you, it's OK, Scott, I see the importance of doing this.

This seems so daunting. How do I do it? What do I do? I'm thinking, do I get to buy all this curriculum? I've got to go through a training class.

I didn't know what I was thinking. And you said, okay, so you have 30 seconds? And I said, sure, I got 30 seconds. And you said, here's what you do. You gather your family around.

You pray. And then you open up this book, which was the Bible, and you read it, and you share what's in it with your family. And I thought, that's it? That's all it is to it? And essentially that's it.

And that's just what Jason described. And I'll say right now that there is no formula for how to do family worship. Every one of us in this room has a different method, although the principles are still the same. And so for me, just as Jason said, the most difficult part about family worship is gathering the family together, making sure that time is carved out. And I've had to change it depending on my work schedule.

And if it is fluid, sometimes we'll do it at night, and sometimes we'll do it in the morning. It just depends on what's going on in my day. But the key is to make sure that it happens. Now, some people have a very rigid set schedule and they can do it at the same time every day. Ultimately, that's probably the easiest.

But for others, there are probably others out there listening that say they have a very fluid schedule. They really don't know what they're doing from day to day. But it's certainly no excuse. And you've got to actually plan ahead. You may have to plan ahead the night before with your wife, but it's got to be done.

You've got to plan that time out. So it's okay if it shifts, but it's got to be done. So it's got to be consistent. And so ours consists of the same things that Jason's consists of. We gather together, all the children, and I say all the children, including my seven-month-old son who can't read, who can't talk yet, who can't do any of these things.

Someone might say, what's the point of having him there? He can't understand anything. Well, who are we to presume upon God of what he can and cannot understand? He does know that the very least the families gathered around together to do something important. There's a book that's open and they're reading from it and they're singing going on.

Some way they know what's going on is very important. It's the worship of God that's very important. And so we do. We sing hymns. We sing the out of the Psalter.

We go through a book sequentially and we take sections of scripture, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. And we'll all read, every one of us. In fact, I've got a child right now who's learning to read And you often wonder, what's the point of teaching a child how to read? That's a good question because we put so much money into it, apparently, we ought to know why do we teach our children to read? Well, for me, it's so that they can read the Bible.

So that they can read the Bible for themselves and they can begin to participate also in the time of family worship. And so there's reading, there's explaining of the scripture, and then there's praying. And as Jason said, it's very unadorned, and basically how we do it at home. People often ask, what's your training program? How do you train your men in your church to do family worship?

And we're very serious when we say it's a 30-second training program. If you don't do it we're gonna put you under church discipline. And you know so it's really it's really very simple. It's not rocket science. You don't have to buy craft paper and do paper mache, you know, illustrations of this or that.

You just need to open up the Bible and bring the sweetest words that were ever written into your home life. So Steve mentioned seven-month-old Philip who may or may not understand the fine points of the gospel and that's really I guess in a way it's the point, but in a way it's not the point. If we go back to elder qualifications and the qualifications of having your children in submission with all reverence, this is a great training ground for that. Because you're requiring your children to sit somewhat still and be somewhat quiet during this time. And it's a way, don't wait until you know you're on aisle four at the grocery store to have, you know, misbehavior and have to address it there in public.

This is a way every day where there's an installment on obedience training that happens in your home. So there's many byproducts, good byproducts of family worship, even outside of bringing your children up and the training and admonition of the Lord. And we wonder now why so many children, you know, you have to have children's church and you have to have these other things in church. Well, part of it is they can't sit still for an hour, for two hours. And part of the reason they can't sit still for an hour or two hours is because they're never taught to sit still.

Unless they have something that's entertaining them on television or whatever, there's not, you sit still and listen to God. There's none of that. And they aren't prepared on Sunday because the families haven't been preparing them during the week. The worship of God, if it's happening on a daily basis, then as it comes together corporately, They're ready for worship. They're ready even to sit still and just have the patience for worship.

We don't ask our men to have this, you know, perfect pattern. Everybody does exactly the same thing. Dan, what does your family worship time look like? Ours is probably more extensive than most, as I quoted before about, you know, man shall not live by bread alone but from every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. That I take that very literally and look at spiritual food at the same way as physical food.

And so we typically eat three times a day, so I typically try to have the family eat spiritually three times a day as well. So most mornings, and my mornings vary all over the place. So sometimes that morning ends up being 12 noon is when we do our morning devotions. We actually study Greek first and then we read scripture. Sometimes when we study other books if we're caught up, we read through the Bible every year.

We've done that for probably five years now. And what my children are expected to, and my wife, reads through, one 365th of the Bible that we have a plan that we read. What we're doing this year, and it changes every year, that's one of the things that I think is worth pointing out, is that our family worship looks different year by year because we look at what works, we look at what doesn't work. I try to get my wife and my children as they read scripture to think of different things as they read that scripture. So for this year what we're doing is that every chapter of whatever the reading is, they're supposed to point out a verse that they don't understand something in so that we can discuss it as a family.

And so we read a chapter, sometimes I read all of it, sometimes we go around and different people read a chapter, and then Everybody says what verse they had a question about and we discuss what that verse means and why it's in there. You know, the question can be just why would God put this in here? Why would God repeat this five times? Or it can be who was this or, you know, it can be anything and we just try to figure out the answer and it's caused great discussion. So we do that in the morning, we do the same thing, unless we go to prayer with church or something, every evening we do it.

So once a day they feed themselves, the other two times a day as a family, we gather together and we worship God. But one of the things that that is not the practice we started with. We started with a very simple practice, but as the home more and more revolved around the Word of God, it got more and more extensive. It's just such a time of great joy. Why wouldn't you make it more extensive?

Yeah. I think a very important aspect of the family worship time is the application of the word. And what better person to do that than the father and the mother who have been with the children all day long. And so there's a reading of the scripture. There's an explaining of it.

And then it's fitting that square block, you know, that little toy, into that square hole. It's taking that block, explaining it. So it's explaining the biblical principles and then placing it in the proper hole, which is to apply it to that situation. I know in my own home, there are plenty of occasions that come up through the whole day in which to apply a biblical principle. There is plenty of occasion for repentance, whether it be amongst siblings or a parent to parent or parent to child.

There's never a lack of a moment that we can't repent or apply this as something that has happened in the home that day. If we just keep it in that, you know, the time of family worship and don't make it about the whole day, then we've really failed. Our desire should be for our children to rightly handle the word of truth. And so it has to be, I'm in this situation, what do I do? That's one of the desires is that they understand what God would have them to do.

And so we do worship God and we do the praise to God and we do all these other things so that they have a Godward focus as they walk through the day and as they walk through their lives. Yeah, in our family, our practices have changed a little bit, not much. As our children get older, it seems like we're changing a little bit more. Our basic practice has been to get together twice a day. We begin with prayer.

We try to read through the Bible every year. Each one around the circle reads five verses, and we, you know, ends up about four chapters a day. You have to read to get through the Bible in a year. And then we pray. Pray for one another.

Pray for the lost. There's a section of a sermon Matthew Henry preached, a church in the house that contains wonderful advice for families for how they should conduct their family prayers. We found it really helpful. Every time we use this pattern, They're just enormous blessings. Back to Deuteronomy 6, we have the command to have this be a practice in our home.

Then in the end of the chapter, it does give us some practical tips on how we do this. And it starts out by saying, in time to come when your son asks you about these things, what's the meaning of these things, then you tell him a series of things. And that series of things starts out with, you were slaves of Pharaoh in the land of Egypt, but the Lord brought you out with the mighty hand." This is at the center of what family worship is about, that we have a great God who has been very kind and faithful to his people. And our children have to know that. We can't rest until all our children know that we were slaves in a land of bondage, but God set us free by a mighty hand.

And the world is going to fight against that tooth and nail. We have to understand that when we decide to do this, that Satan is going to resist us, the world is going to resist us, everything is going to resist us because they want our children. And this is God's plan. This is God's plan about how our children hear the gospel. This is God's plan of how they get salvation.

And we just have to be prepared. We have to be prepared to say, when our flesh is saying, I just want to sleep in, to resist that and to fight that. And it will be a battle, but over time we'll see that God's ways are just so much more pleasant than our ways. And I'll just say, in every family situation I've ever seen, in order for family worship to live, something else has to die. That's just the hard-called reality.

But you've got to choose who you're going to serve. Family worship is a biblical principle, and if we are Christians who desire to be conforming to the image of Christ, to love God by obeying His commands, then we as fathers certainly should be leading family worship in our homes. The way that I know that I've internalized this, and I have a lot further to go, but the way that I know is that when you've missed a day or two and you actually miss it, you actually miss gathering around and getting together to worship God as a family. Or if you've gone on vacation or visit a relative or whatever and you still try to have family worship. That's when you know you've internalized it.

That's what we should be striving for, to love it, to not think of it as mechanical as Jason said earlier, but to love it to the point where you miss it when you actually miss a day or two. And when you go on vacation, you still do it. So I think our exhortation to anyone who might be listening is go get the fruit. There's wonderful fruit to be had from this. No one's ever sorry that they established this practice in their home, but there are many who look back with regret that they didn't.

One other thing that I would add, when we think of the elements of family worship is singing, especially that there's the sense of praise, there's a sense of rejoicing that comes with singing and keeping that as a biblical element, right? It's a biblical element to edify people through hymns. And it's something that we should be bringing into our home, and that singing can add joy to the time. So you know, family worship can look different in different families, But it should have all the same components. Prayer, reading of scripture and the true genuine worship of God.

Those are the things that should be there. And it's not rock and science. And it is true. You know, any Christian, any genuinely Christian knucklehead can do it. So we wish you wonderful days and weeks and months and years and decades of filling up your family life with the glory of Jesus Christ.

There is no sweeter word, There's no better thing to do in family life than to fill it up with the knowledge of God. We pray God would give you great success in it.