Family Worship
FROM THE STUDY
Dear friends,
The plates are still on the table. The youngest has slid halfway underneath it, and you have been awake since before the sun came up over the ridge. This is the hour when family worship quietly dies in many Christian homes. Not over any point of doctrine, but over plain tiredness.
Moses set the bar where a tired man or woman can reach it. You shall teach them diligently to your children … and shall talk of them when you sit in your house (Deuteronomy 6:7). When you sit. Take note of that word, sit. Not when you have built something grand and beautiful, not when the children are scrubbed and solemn, and the room has gone quiet on its own. When you sit, plates and crumbs and all.
Most of what gets written about family worship leaves a man condemned before he has opened the Book. He reads how the Puritans gathered the household morning and evening, concludes he is too far behind to begin, and so he never begins. Let me take that weight off you. Family worship is not a work that earns you anything. Our confession simply says God is to be worshipped “in private families daily,” and sets that beside secret worship and public worship as one ordinary stream of grace. Hold on to that word. Ordinary. God feeds His people, as a rule, by ordinary means: His Word read aloud, prayer offered up, His praise sung. Family worship invents nothing. It carries those same means in under your own roof, to the few souls He has placed in your care. You are not conjuring grace by the strength of your performance. You are simply setting a table, and trusting the One who has always provided the bread.
And it is slow, is it not? Asaph sang of one generation telling the next, that they should set their hope in God and not forget His works. The point is the drip, not the flood. Forty years of Thursdays, most of which will feel like nothing at all while they are happening. That is how most of God’s deepest work feels from the inside. He said of Abraham, I have chosen him, that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord (Genesis 18:19). The way is kept, mostly, in small and unremarkable rooms.
A VOICE FROM THE PAST
Matthew Henry, whose commentary still sits on most of our shelves, preached a sermon in 1704 he called A Church in the House. His counsel on the family altar has never been bettered for plainness:
They that pray in their families do well; they that pray and read the Scriptures do better; but they that pray, and read, and sing the praises of God, do best of all.
Just a few small things. Most of us can manage all three before the table is even cleared.
A WORD FROM JOEL
So here is the whole of it, small enough to keep and remember. Read a little: ten verses, sometimes fewer, and say in a sentence what they plainly mean. Sing a little: one psalm or hymn, even if you cannot sing, and most of us cannot; your children are not music critics, and the God who made the mockingbird is not wincing. Pray a little: a plain prayer that names their actual troubles, the unkind friend, the loose tooth, the grandmother who is ill. No fancy words, no trying to impress your spouse. Just an honest laying of it all before our Lord, who cares deeply for us. Ten minutes. Some evenings seven. Keep it short enough that they are sorry when it ends.
You will not, in the end, be the one who saves your children. That work is God’s, as you of all people know. Saving grace is not hereditary. You are only the one who sets the table and calls the family to it, evening after ordinary evening. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord (Joshua 24:15). So tonight, when the plates are still out and you are tired and the youngest is under the table, do not reach for the grand thing. Reach for the Bible. Just begin.
Yours in the valley,
— Joel Taylor
Abingdon, Virginia
