In a recent sermon I encouraged our families to have some kind of devotion time that they do together. If you were like me and didn’t grow up doing something like that you might not know where to start, so I thought I could share with you what was shared with me in my spiritual disciplines class in seminary. My class was taught by Don Whitney, who is passionate about family worship. There are three simple components to family worship that he recommends:
Read—Depending on the age of your children you might read from a children’s Bible or if your kids are older you can simply read Scripture. Our family might read a passage or two each night, and we take a bit of time to talk through what we have read.
Pray— There are obviously many things you can pray for. What our family does is pray back to God the passage that we just read. We also rotate through a list of ministry areas at RVC, a missionary, one of our neighbors, and this year we kept all of our Christmas cards to pray for everyone who gave us a card this past year.
Sing—Neither Tia nor I are musicians, so we keep this pretty simple—all we do each time is sing the doxology. If you are more musically inclined, I would encourage you to add instruments as you sing!
In addition to these 3 components our family works on Scripture memory together. We use the Desiring God Foundation Verses.
From start to finish this might take us anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes. For our family we found that this works best for us around the dinner table although when our kids were younger we did our family worship right before they went to bed. There is a lot of freedom on how this might look for your family, but I think what is important is keeping things simple and doing them consistently!
If you have not had family worship as part of your family life I would encourage you to start! Please let me know if you want to sit in sometime with us to see first hand what we do!
Blessings,
Pastor Aaron
Follow THIS LINK to find some helpful articles from Don Whitney