On Sunday, we preached that fathers and mothers are the primary tool that God intends to use to bring sons and daughters to an awareness of Himself. We were careful to distinguish between primary and only or exclusive. Parents are not the only thing that God uses, but the primary thing that God wants to use to have our children come to faith in Christ. One of the ways parents can fulfill God’s call to make disciples of their children is to see their home as mini-church and worship God there. Parents, as you seek to implement family worship in your homes, let me offer you some encouragement and some resources to help.
Keep it simple.15 minutes a few times a week is better than 45 minutes on Monday and skipping out till next month. And here are three ingredients for your time of family worship. Sing. Read. Pray. Simple. Sing a song or two. If you’re stuck, email Siby and he’ll send you the lyrics to any of the songs we sing at church. That way, your kids will even learn to sing along when we gather for corporate worship. Read the Bible. The ESV Study Bible has lots of great notes on each passage to help you talk about what you just read. And pray. Take what we’ve been talking about for the last several weeks and apply it in your home with your family.
Look to Jesus. Dads, when we think about our responsibility to pastor our mini-church and shepherd our small congregation of wife and children, our knees buckle. Who is sufficient for this? Moms, when you think of your call to support your husband, manage your home, and train up your children in the way they should go, your knees buckle. Who is sufficient for this? Jesus is! So don’t spend all your time looking at yourself. You’re not enough and you’re never going to be. Just accept it. And look to Jesus who is enough and who will always be. He alone is the One who cared for His bride and God’s children perfectly. So don’t start by promising to do better or stirring up your will. Seek grace from Him who did what you could not do. He is generous with His grace and patient with poor parents like you and me. He has been taking the inadequate, insufficient, meager parenting of weak fathers and mothers and multiplying it with His own power and grace for thousands of years.
Here’s an example.If you were a fly on the wall of our home yesterday, here’s what you would have seen. We finish dinner. Shainu’s exhausted after a long day with our two monsters. My mind is deviously running through a list of why we can skip family worship tonight. We’re tired and we have another meeting lined up after the kids go down. And the kids are particularly unruly tonight. But we pile into the living room. Hannah’s sitting in Shainu’s lap. Micah is stumbling about the room. We sing “All Creatures of Our God and King.” Mostly I sing (which isn’t pretty) cause Hannah doesn’t know all the words yet and Shainu’s trying to sing and keep her sitting still at the same time. We also sing “My God is so Big” one of Hannah’s favorites. Micah’s still stumbling about. We finish and I read Genesis 1:1-2. Hannah repeats each line after me as I read it. I talk with her about how in the beginning there was God and nothing else. No trees, no mountains, no sky, no people – just God. And then God made everything. She asks if she can pretend to be God as we act out the story of Genesis 1. So I feed her the lines, and she bellows, “Let there be light.” Then Shainu does her best to impersonate a ray of light. “Let there be animals.” Shainu and I make monkey, lion, elephant, and horse noises. We’re not very good at sound effects. Even Micah has temporarily stopped stumbling to watch. And so on we go through the days of creation until I finish by asking, “So who made everything?” Hannah answers, “God.” “And why did God make everything?” Shainu helps, “For His glory.” We end with prayer. Micah resumes stumbling. Hannah thanks God for making everything (sometimes she’ll say the Lord’s Prayer which Shainu taught her) and I ask God to bless our home and the church. Done. It definitely wasn’t pretty. It definitely needs to mature. But hopefully doing it 4,000 more times will have an impact. And please know that the way we do it doesn’t have to be the way you do it. Our example is a description not a prescription. If it helps, great. But figure out what works best for your mini-church and do it.
Some Resources to Help.
Three Main Steps to Starting Family Worship
by Ajay Thomas
Ajay lives in Philadelphia with his wife Shainu and their kids Hannah and Micah. He is responsible for preaching and vision as a pastor at Seven Mile Road.