Introduction

In the days where activities demand for human’s time than required, everybody seems to be busy for nothing.  Time management has become an essential commodity that every Christian home should learn how to incorporate into their daily living.  Economic hardship has made parents to work more hours in order to meet up with essential financial commitments.  Having time for God and His Word seem impossible due to lack of time.  This is a serious issue among Christian homes.  This is a direct attack from kingdom of hell to Christian homes.  When a Christian family could no longer gather together on the altar of Worship, they have opened the door for unnecessary attacks.  This has brought about satanic arrows of sickness, dangerous disaster, and untimely death visiting Christian homes as never before in the history of Christianity.

True worship, in other words, is defined by the priority we place on who God is in our lives and where God is on our list of priorities. True worship is a matter of the heart expressed through a lifestyle of holiness. Thus, if your lifestyle does not express the beauty of holiness through an extravagant or exaggerated love for God, and you do not live in extreme or excessive submission to God, then I invite you to make worship a non-negotiable priority in your life.

We worship God because He is God. Period. Our extravagant love and extreme submission to the Holy One flows out of the reality that God loved us first. It is highly appropriate to thank God for all the things he has done for us. However, true worship is shallow if it is solely an acknowledgement of God’s wealth. Psalm 96:5-6 says, “For all the gods of the nations are idols, but the LORD made the heavens. Splendor and majesty are before him; strength and glory are in his sanctuary.” In other words, our worship must be toward the one who is worthy simply because of his identity as the Omnipotent, Omniscient, and Omnipresent One, and not just because God is wealthy and able to meet our needs and answer our prayers. We must focus our practice of worship on the worthiness of God and not his wealthiness.

The Person We Worship

Think about this: Would you continue to worship God if, from this day forward, God’s miraculous signs and wonders were not so profoundly evident in your life? Would God still be worthy of your worship? Or is your worship completely dependent upon the abundance of God’s blessings upon your life? Do you only worship God for what he can do for you?

The Promise of Worship

Because of our God’s unimaginable generosity toward us, God, in all of his glory, chooses to respond to us through our worship. This is the promise—that when we worship God with extravagant love and extreme submission, God will come and commune with us. The promise is not that we will feel great or that our heavy load will be lifted, but that God will come. And when God comes in his own time as a response to our worship, Psalm 96:13 declares, “Let all creation rejoice before the LORD, for he comes, he comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world in righteousness and the peoples in his faithfulness.”

In other words, when we worship our God, he will inspect our hearts first; the other benefits that we tend to expect because we lift up our feeble hands and shout with our weak voices are worthless if our hearts are not right with God. My sisters and brothers, when we offer God our true worship, we are inviting him to inspect our hearts for anything that is not like him. This is the promise of worship—we can be transformed into God’s likeness because he will reveal the truth about the condition of our hearts as we worship him.

Worship is having an extravagant or exaggerated love for God, and if your life is not lived in extreme or excessive submission to him, then I invite you to make worship a non-negotiable priority in your life. Evaluate your expressions of worship so that through singing, declaring, and giving, you will “give to the LORD the glory he deserves … ” (Ps. 96:8). The promise is that when we worship God in this way, he will come and commune with us. And above all, God will respond to your worship by making your heart more like his.

Foundations of Worship

Every church desires growth. Surprisingly few churches, however, seek to promote internal church growth by stressing the need to raise children in covenantal truth. Few seriously grapple with why many adolescents become nominal members with mere notional faith or abandon evangelical truth for unbiblical doctrine and modes of worship. 

I believe one major reason for this failure is the lack of stress upon family worship. In many churches and homes family worship is an optional thing, or at most a superficial exercise such as a brief table grace before meals. Consequently, many children grow up with no experience or impression of Christian faith and worship as a daily reality.

Would we see revival among our children? Let us remember that God often uses the restoration of family worship to usher in church revival. For example, the 1677 church covenant of the Puritan congregation in Dorchester, Massachusetts, included the commitment “to reform our families, engaging ourselves to a conscientious care to set before us and to maintain the worship of God in them; and to walk in our houses with perfect hearts in a faithful discharge of all domestic duties, educating, instructing, and charging our children and households to keep the ways of the Lord.”1As goes the home, so goes the church, so goes the nation. Family worship is a most decisive factor in how the home goes.

Family worship is not the only factor, of course. Family worship is not a substitute for other parental duties. Family worship without parental example is futile. Spontaneous teaching that arises throughout a typical day is crucial, yet set times of family worship are also important. Family worship is the foundation of biblical child-rearing.

The theological foundations of family worship are rooted in the very being of God. The apostle John tells us that God’s love is inseparable from His triune life. God’s love is outgoing and overflowing. It shares its blessedness from one Person of the Trinity to the others.  God has never been a solitary individual lacking something in Himself. The fullness of light and love is eternally shared among the Father, Son, and Spirit.

The majestic triune God didn’t model Himself after our families; rather, He modeled the earthly concept of family after Himself. Our family life faintly reflects the life of the Holy Trinity. That’s why Paul speaks of “the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the family in heaven and earth is named” (Eph. 3:14-15). The love among the persons of the Trinity was so great from eternity that the Father determined to create a world of people who, though finite, would have personalities that reflected the Son. Being conformed to the Son, people could then share in the blessed holiness and joy of the Trinity’s family life. God created Adam in His own image, and Eve from Adam. From them came the entire human family so that mankind might have covenantal fellowship with God. As a two-person family, our first parents reverently worshiped God as He walked with them in the Garden of Eden (Gen. 3:8).

Adam disobeyed God, however, turning the joy of worship and fellowship with God into fear, dread, guilt, and alienation. As our representative, Adam severed the relationship between the family of God and the family of mankind. But God’s purpose could not be thwarted. While they yet stood before Him in Paradise, God held forth a new covenant, the covenant of grace, and told Adam and Eve about His Son, who as the Seed of the woman would break the power of Satan over them, and secure to them the blessings of this covenant of grace (Gen. 3:15). Through Christ’s obedience to the law and His sacrifice for sin, God opened the way to save sinners while satisfying His perfect justice. The Lamb would be slain on Golgotha to take away the sin of the world, so that poor sinners like us could be restored to our true purpose: to glorify, worship, and have fellowship with the triune God. As I John 1:3 says, “Truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.”

God deals with the human race through covenant and headship, or representation. In daily life, parents represent children, a father represents his wife and children, church office bearers represent church members, and legislators represent citizens. In spiritual life, every person is represented by either the first or the last Adam (Romans 5 and 1 Cor. 15). This principle of representation surfaces everywhere in Scripture. For example, we read of the godly line of Seth, and of Noah and Job offering sacrifices on their children’s behalf (Gen. 8:20-21; Job 1:5). God organized the human race through families and tribes, and dealt largely with them through the headship of the father. As God said to Abraham, “In thee shall all families of the earth be blessed” (Gen. 12:3).

The Mosaic economy continued the principle of the father representing the family in worship and fellowship with God. The book of Numbers particularly focuses on God’s dealing with His people in terms of families and their heads. The father was to lead the family in Passover worship and instruct his children in its meaning.

The father’s leadership role in worship continued throughout the monarchy in Israel and in the days of the Old Testament prophets. For example, Zechariah predicted that as the Holy Spirit was poured out in a future age, the people would experience Him as the Spirit of grace and supplication, moving them, family by family, to bitter and heartfelt lamentation. Particular families are named according to their heads and fathers, the house of David, of Levi, and of Shimei (Zech. 12:10-14).

The relationship between worship and family life continued in New Testament times. Peter reaffirmed the promise to Abraham, the father of the faithful (Rom. 4:11), when he declared to the Jews in his Pentecost sermon that “the promise is unto you and to your children, and to all that are afar off” (Acts 2:39). And Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 7:14 that the faith of a parent establishes the covenant status of holiness, privilege, and responsibility for his or her children.

The New Testament church, which included children with their parents as members of the body (Eph. 6:1-4), and the experience of individual believers such as Timothy (2 Tim. 1:5, 3:15), affirm the importance of faith and worship within families.

As Douglas Kelly concludes, “Family religion, which depends not a little on the household head daily leading the family before God in worship, is one of the most powerful structures that the covenant-keeping God has given for the expansion of redemption through the generations, so that countless multitudes may be brought into communion with and worship” of the living God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Duty Of Family Worship

Given the importance of family worship as a potent force in winning untold millions to gospel truth throughout the ages, we ought not be surprised that God requires heads of households do all they can to lead their families in worshiping the living God. Read Joshua 24:14-15 . Notice three things in this text: First, Joshua did not make worship or service to the living God optional. In verse 14, he has just commanded Israel to fear the Lord. In verse 15 he now stresses that the Lord wills to be worshiped and served voluntarily and deliberately in our families.

Second, in verse 15, Joshua enforces the service of God in families with his own example. Verse 1 makes plain that he is addressing the heads of households. Verse 15 declares that Joshua is going to do what he wants every other household in Israel to do: “serve the LORD.” Joshua has such command over his family that he speaks for the entire household: “as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD,” he says. Several factors reinforce this bold declaration:

When Joshua makes this declaration, he is more than 100 years old. He has remarkable zeal as an aged man.  Joshua knows that his direct control over his family will soon end. God has told him he will soon die. Yet Joshua is confident that his influence will continue in his family and that they will not abandon worship after he dies. Joshua knows that much idolatry remains in Israel. He has 7just told the people to put away false gods (v. 14). He knows his family will be swimming against the stream in continuing to serve the Lord—yet he emphatically declares that his family will do that anyway.

The historical record shows that Joshua’s influence was so pervasive that most of the nation followed his example for at least one generation. Joshua 24:31 says, “And Israel served the LORD all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the elders that overlived Joshua [i.e. for the next generation], and which had known all the works of the LORD, that he had done for Israel.” What an encouragement to God-fearing parents to know that the worship they set up in the home may last generations after them!

Third, the word serve in verse 15 is an inclusive word. It is translated as worship many times in Scripture. The original word not only includes serving God in every sphere of our lives, but also in special acts of worship. Those who interpret Joshua’s words in vague, ambiguous terms miss that critical teaching. Joshua had several things in mind, including obedience to all the ceremonial laws involving the sacrificing of animals and pointing to the coming Messiah, whose blood sacrifice would be effectual for sinners, once and for all.3 Surely every God-fearing husband, father, and pastor must say with Joshua: “As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.

We will seek the Lord, worship Him, and pray to Him as a family. We will read His Word, replete with instructions, and reinforce its teachings in our family.” Every representative father must realize, as Kelly says, “The representative principle inherent in God’s covenant dealings with our race indicates that the head of each family is to represent his family before God in divine worship and that the spiritual atmosphere and long term personal welfare of that family will be affected in large measure by the fidelity—or failure—of the family head in this area.’

According to Scripture, God should be served in special acts of worship in families today in the following three ways:

• Daily instruction in the Word of God.

God should be worshiped by daily reading and instruction from His Word. Through questions, answers, and instructions, parents and children are to daily interact with each other about sacred truth. As Deuteronomy 6:6-7. The activities this text commands are daily activities that accompany lying down at night, rising up in the morning, sitting in the house, and walking by the way. In an orderly home, these activities are done at specific times of the day. They offer opportunities for regular, consistent, and daily times of instruction. Moses wasn’t suggesting a little talk, but diligent conversation and diligent instruction that flow from the burning heart of a parent. Moses says that words from God should be in a father’s heart. Fathers must diligently teach these words to their children.

A parallel text in the New Testament is Ephesians 6:4, “And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition [i.e. instruction] of the Lord.” When fathers cannot fulfil this duty in person, they should encourage their wives to carry out this precept. For example, Timothy benefited greatly from the daily instruction of a God-fearing mother and a God-fearing grandmother.

• Daily prayer to the throne of God.

Jeremiah 10:25 says, “Pour out thy fury upon the heathen that know thee not, and upon the families that call not on thy name.” While it is true that in the context of Jeremiah 10:25, the word families refer to clans, this word also applies to individual families. We may reason from larger units to smaller units. If God’s wrath falls upon clans or groups of families that neglect communal prayer, how much more will not His wrath fall upon individual families that refuse to call on His name? All families must call upon God’s name or else subject themselves to the displeasure of God. Families must daily pray together unless providentially hindered.

Consider Psalm 128:3,  1 Timothy 4:4-5, 1 Cor. 10:31, Deut. 8:3; Matt. 4:4. Furthermore, don’t families commit daily sins? Shouldn’t they daily seek forgiveness? Does not God bless them in many ways every day? Should not these blessings be acknowledged with daily thanksgiving? Shouldn’t they daily acknowledge God in all their ways, begging Him to direct their paths? Shouldn’t they daily commend themselves to His care and protection? As Thomas Brooks said, “A family without prayer is like a house without a roof, open and exposed to all the storms of heaven.”

• Daily singing the praise of God.

Psalm 118:15. That is a clear reference to singing. The psalmist says this sound is (not simply ought to be) in the tents of the righteous. Philip Henry, father of the famed Matthew Henry, believed this text provided a biblical basis for the singing of psalms in families. He argued that joyful singing comes from the individual tents of the righteous. It involves family singing as well as temple singing. Therefore, the sound of rejoicing and salvation should rise from family homes on a daily basis. Psalm 66:1-2, Ps. 105:2; Jas. 5:13), 2 Chron. 20:19, Col. 3:16, Col 3:16.

Heads of households, we must implement family worship in the home. God requires that we worship Him not only privately as individuals, but publicly as members of the covenant body and community, and socially, as families. The Lord Jesus is worthy of it, God’s Word commands it, and conscience affirms it as our duty.

IMPLEMENTING FAMILY WORSHIP

Prepare for Family Worship

Even before family worship begins, we should privately pray for God’s blessing upon that worship. Then we should plan for the what, where, and when of family worship.

1. What: Generally speaking, this includes instruction in the Word of God, prayer before the throne of God, and singing to the glory of God. But we need to determine more of the specifics of family worship. First, have Bibles and copies of The Psalter and song sheets for all the children who can read. For children who are too young to read, read a few verses from Scripture and select one text to memorize as a family. Say it aloud together several times as a family, then reinforce that with a short Bible story to illustrate the text. Take time to teach a stanza or two of a Psalter selection to such children, and encourage them to sing with you.
2. Family worship may be held around the supper table; however, it might be better to move to the living room, where there are fewer distractions. Whatever room you select, make sure it contains all of your devotional materials. Before you start, take the phone off the hook, or plan to let your answering machine or voice mail take messages. Your children must understand that family worship is the most important activity of the day and should not be interrupted by anything.
3. When. Ideally, family worship should be conducted twice a day, in the morning and in the evening. That fits best with scriptural directions for worship—both the Old Testament economy in which the beginning and close of each day were sanctified by the offering of morning and evening sacrifices as well as morning and evening prayers, and the New Testament church which apparently followed the pattern of morning and evening prayers. The Westminster Directory of Worship states, “Family worship, which ought to be performed by every family, ordinarily morning and evening, consists in prayer, reading the Scriptures, and singing praises.”7

During family worship, aim for the following:

1. As Richard Cecil said, “Let family worship be short, savory, simple, tender, heavenly.” Family worship that is too long makes children restless and may provoke them to wrath. If you worship twice a day, try ten minutes in the morning and a little longer in the evening. A twenty-five-minute period of family worship might be divided as follows: ten minutes for Scripture reading and instruction; five minutes for reading a daily portion or an edifying book or discussing some concern in a biblical light; five minutes for singing; and five minutes for prayer.
2. It is better to have twenty minutes of family worship every day than to try for extended periods on fewer days—say forty-five minutes on Monday, then skipping Tuesday. Family worship provides us “the manna which falls every day at the door of the tent, that our souls are kept alive,” wrote James W. Alexander in his excellent book on family worship.
3. Hopeful solemnity. “Rejoice with trembling before the Lord,” Psalm 2 tells us. We need to show this balance of hope and awe, fear and faith, repentance and confidence in family worship. Speak naturally yet reverently during this time, using the tone you would use when speaking to a deeply respected friend about a serious matter. Expect great things from a great covenant-keeping God.

Conclusion:

Family worship is an essential duty that every family must undergo on daily basis.  It helps strengthens the family ties and also good in grooming your children for the future.  With advent of technology – social media – parents should take family altar very seriously.  Bible remains God’s authoritative message to the dying world.  Bible gives light.  Bible reveals more about God, the Creator of heaven and the earth.  Bible should be introduced to children as early as possible. Family altar is the lasting solutions to raising positive children in the negative world.

Click here and join  AMIN Prayer Chain Online Forum (APCOF) for daily family devotional prayer every 5:20am (WAT).  You will be glad you did.