I’m taking a little break from becoming a godly wife and focusing a bit on becoming a godly family. My brain has been full this week and this has been something on my heart lately. I hope it speaks to you.
Family worship was a totally foreign concept to me until recently. But we’ve been incorporating most evenings in our family for the last couple of years. It looks a little different each night, but it has been such a blessing. I would encourage you to begin some type of family worship in your family.
We’ve found that family worship gives us a time to bond as a family, it’s been time for us to really discuss issues that we may be facing as a family, it’s proven to be a great training opportunity and it’s been huge in providing spiritual growth for our family. We look at family worship at building a family legacy, we are building the legacy of a family built on faith and a family built of God.
Here are some of the things we’ve done as a family during our worship. We usually start the worship time off with time in the Word. We don’t have a perscription or a guide. We usually study a book, piece by piece. We started off with Luke. We’ve also studied the 10 commandments and are currently in Genesis. Dad (Kerry) usually reads our passage, although we’ve mixed it up a bit lately. We’ve been listening to a dramatized version of the Bible we bought on CD last year. As a family, we generally enjoy audio books so it’s been a nice change of pace. Sometimes we cover 2 or 3 verses and other times we cover 20 or 25. It depends on the content of the passage and how many questions the boys have about what we’re reading. We use our time to talk about what the passage means, how it applies to our lives and what it might look like to live it out.
After we read our passage we will sometimes sing a few hymns. We try to sing the same one or two hymns a week so that we learn them well as a family and the boys learn the words. It’s been so fun to hear our family sing in the evenings. It’s even cooler to hear the boys sing the hymns during the day while they’re doing their daily chores or just playing. We’re kind of a musical family so it’s been fun and it has turned into such a blessing for me.
After we sing we take time to pray. Sometimes we’ll ask all of the boys to pray individually and then Kerry and I will pray. Sometimes we’ll just have one or two of us pray. We look over prayer requests from Sunday or through our prayer chain. We’ll also ask each of the boys for prayer requests, specifically what we can pray for them each day. Occassionally we’ll focus on a specific character quality we’ve struggled with during the week.
Family worship has been a integral part of our days and evenings. If we miss a night, we feel kind of crummy the next day. We feel “off” as a family. We look forward to our time together each night. We have a rule that we don’t answer the phone (I even shut of my email alerts for my cell phone), we don’t have any TV or radio on so that we can focus totally on worship together as a family. If you have young ones, this is a great time to teach them reverent behavior for church. Not to say our kids sit perfectly still and don’t fidget during church, but they do sit still during prayer (most of the time) and we’ve taught them how to be respectful during the service.
I should note that this family worship is separate from our morning devotions or Bible time as part of our school. We usually use that time in the mornings to read our Proverb of the day and morning prayer. I would encourage you as a family to begin some kind of worship time each day. If you miss a day, no biggie. Do it again the next day. Your Lord will be glorified and you will be blessed.
Ladies, one of the big challenges can sometimes be if your hubby doesn’t feel comfortable taking the leadership role during family worship. You don’t want to be a nag about this. It’s great if you can suggest to him that you start family worship together, or you can gently remind him that this is something you wanted to start. Maybe things like “honey, do you want me to read our passage tonight or would you like to? I’d be happy to do it, but remember you asked me to remind you we wanted to start this with the kids” or “Kids! Go get the Bible…Daddy is going to read it to us!” And for those of you who don’t think you can sing…get a good worship song DVD, you can find the lyrics online and sing to your heart’s content! Who cares if you’re off key. It’s delightful to your Father!
The biggest thing is, start building that legacy.