Loading summary
Transcript32 lines
- [00:00]
A
I remember my son just hearing him pray and saying, oh God, would you give me more love for you? That's a good prayer. I remember my daughter praying right after him. Oh God, would you help me to obey you more? Oh, that's a good prayer. There are good nights like that. It's well worth persevering in and keeping after. Would you practice family worship for the benefit of your soul and for the benefit of your family members or those in your house and for the good and welfare of the church? It's a blessing. It's a means of grace.
- [00:40]
B
Despite how foreign the idea of family worship might be for a Christian living in the 21st century and the obstacles we might face as we try and implement the practice. As Jason Holopoulos just said, it is a means of of grace. It's not intended to be a means of guilt. So how do we start this habit? I'm Nathan W. Bingham and that will be the question we answer today on Renewing youg Mind. Reverend Helopoulos is our guest teacher today and he has taught this 11 message series on worship, reminding us that we were created for worship and that as Christians we have been recreated for worship. We'll send you this series taught with a pastor's heart, plus a physical copy of the study guide when you donate before midnight tomorrow@renewingyourmind.org as we approach Christmas and a new year, what a wonderful reality to focus on that as believers we have been recreated for worship. Well, here's Jason Holopoulos on the how of family worship.
- [01:51]
A
Our last time together we looked at family worship together a little bit and we looked at the why question of family worship. What I want to do is just look at it a little more practically together. It's something that I think is foreign to a lot of us, or most of us at least the people I have pastored over the years, my own experience, this just isn't something that is regular in the evangelical church over the last couple of generations. And so I just want to give some practical helps, things that I, I have learned from others and that I've learned over the course of years of doing this in my own family and pastoring different people. Through thinking about family worship, I want to revisit this. Let's think about family worship again, that it is a passing on of the faith even as it is a centering of our home upon Christ. And I was thinking of this before time here together 2 Timothy where Paul is writing to Timothy and he makes this comment in second Timothy Chapter one He says, I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice. And now, I am sure, dwells in you as well. I love that verse. We don't know about Timothy's father yet here his mother and his grandmother are mentioned. And it's clear that the two of them are believers. And the two of them have passed on their faith to their son in the faith and their literal son and grandson in Timothy, where he seized upon the same Christ that they had believed in.
- [03:28]
Someone has done that for all of you in this room. Could be a mother, it could be a father, could be a sibling, could be a teacher, could be a roommate, could be a friend. Could have been just somebody that handed you a trap as you were walking out of an airport. But somebody shared this gospel truth with you and shared the story of our Savior with you. And God, in his magnificent grace, poured out his grace upon you and you believed on the Lord Jesus Christ. Someone did this for you. God used them in your life.
- [04:06]
The people in our lives are not an accident.
- [04:10]
I often remind my own family that my wife and my children, as we're talking through things is, look, the Lord put us together to help one another. That's why we're together. We are put together as yoke fellows to help one another to finish the race and to place our hope and our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and to continue to walk in him. And I think family worship is one of the best ways to to help encourage one another along in that race.
- [04:41]
Again, just briefly, think again. Family worship, very simple. Let's just state it briefly again. It's just gathering those in your home together to just read the word, pray and dare to sing those three things. That easy, that simple. Let me talk to you about some of the benefits that it has. One, as we mentioned in the previous time together, it centers our home upon worshiping the Lord Jesus Christ. There are a lot of things that we do in the Holopolis home. There are a lot of things that I like to do in the Holopolis home. I love to cook. I cook an awful lot. My wife hates to cook. I love to cook. It's kind of a hobby. And so my kids, they like to cook with me, especially my son. We cook all the time together and we bake together all the time. We like to watch Julia Childs on TV in her cooking show and we like to sit there and mock her voice while she is cooking. That is part of what we like to do. As helopolises. We like to travel, we like to go out to eat every once in a while. We love to play board games together as a family. But what I want to center our family more than anything else is that we're worshipers of Christ.
- [05:51]
I hope that when they leave the home, they can say, you know what? Our parents, they weren't perfect parents. They actually weren't very good in a lot of ways. But one thing that they did was bring us before the throne of Christ regularly and constantly in our home. We couldn't leave our home without encountering Christ regularly. It just centers. The home just has a way of doing that.
- [06:20]
It's probably seven or eight years or so ago, we were having a conference at our church and there were people coming in from all over the state to come to the conference. And I was standing outside greeting people and there was a young woman that came to the conference that I hadn't seen for 10 years. I had been her pastor at another church. And she came running up to me and she said, pastor, pastor. I said, yeah, oh, so good to see you. And she said, oh, you changed my life. Well, what was that? And she said, it. It was a weekend that you and your wife went away. Do you remember that? I hadn't remembered it until she recalled it. She said, you guys went away for a weekend. We were first time parents with our daughter and we went away for a weekend and it was the first time we were leaving our daughter with someone. We don't have family that lived near us. And here was this young couple in the church, church plant that we were leaving our daughter with. And we were just going away for the weekend and we left a detailed list as neurotic first time parents. You do this at this minute and this at that minute. And one of the things we listed was family worship. And she said, you just wrote there after dinner you'll do family worship. Grayson will know what to do. Just tell her family worship. She'll go sit on the couch and you just open the passage. She'll flip open to the page we're on. You just read a short passage, allow her to pray the Lord's prayer and then you sing the bi b l e.
- [07:59]
And she said, we did that. And she said, we didn't know it could be that easy. And it changed our marriage, it changed our home.
- [08:11]
I found the same thing. I was candidating to be a pastor. It was the first church I went to. I said, last time together I had made a wreck of family worship with my Wife. We went to candidate at this church in North Carolina. We were staying with a family in their basement and the father came to the top of the stairs on the candidating weekend. I was there about becoming their pastor. And he yells down, do you want to join us for family worship? Well, he can't say no on a candidating weekend to that. And so we went upstairs and there they were, the whole family sitting in their family room, younger kids sitting on older kids laps, Bibles open on their laps and they just read the Word, they prayed and then they sang the doxology. And I remember my wife and I walking down the stairs back to go downstairs and we looked at each other and we had the exact same comment this woman had. We didn't know it could be that easy. It's that easy. And once you start doing it, it just changes your home. It centers your home upon Christ. It's very easy. Not only centers your home upon Christ, it encourages our children in Christ. As we said, we want to pass on the faith to them and this encourages them in Christ. I remember sitting with a woman years ago, a Christian woman, where she said, ah. She said, my one goal is to send my daughter out into the world as a fully functioning adult. No, that's not sufficient for us as Christians. We want to send our children out into the world as fully functioning Christian adults. We want them being worshippers of God. Now I can't force that, I can't cajole that, I can't cause that to happen. But just keep putting my children in the way of God's means of grace, where he works by his word and allow him to work. This is one of the best ways to encourage them in Christ and encourage all of us in Christ. Third, it encourages Christian character. You practice family worship. Home is where we let our hair down, if you have hair. It's where we most naturally act like who we are. And it's awfully hard to practice family worship when you've just been yelling at each other, when you've just been angry, when you've been selfish all day. It's just hard to do that when you know that you're going to gather together and you're going to open the Bible together and you're going to pray together. It encourages Christian character and everybody in the home because you're going to expose your hearts together as you sit there before the throne of God. It also encourages peace in the home.
- [10:54]
I remember years ago I was pastoring a different church and there was a woman that came to Me after I had shared about family worship and we had worked on this together and she came and very similar thought. She said, pastor, this has changed our home. I said, well, how did it change your home? She said, well, when my husband was gone at work every day, I spent the day walking around the house criticizing him. She said, I'd pick up his clothes here that he left and the mess that he made there and why didn't he fix this? She said, I spent the day criticizing him. But she said, then we started practicing family worship and it was awfully hard to sit down and to do family worship with him without asking for forgiveness first.
- [11:40]
And she said I had to start asking for forgiveness before we would worship together as a couple in the family. And she said, we now have peace in our home like we haven't had ever.
- [11:53]
Just encourages peace. It binds the family together. This is what we do as a family. Amidst all the busyness that we do. This is what we do. Yes, we go to soccer games and we go to ballet lessons and we go and watch this event together and we play games. But this is what binds us together, is that we worship together.
- [12:18]
It also just gives a common knowledge. Common knowledge. You'll notice that the relationships that you have with people, you talk about things that you have in common together, that's what populates your conversations.
- [12:35]
This hit me when I was in the grocery store with my kids when they were very little. My wife was home all day with them all through the week. And so what I would do on Mondays, my day off is when they were really little, I would take them to the grocery store and we would putter around the grocery store for three hours just to give her a break. Three hour grocery shopping trip. And as we would go up and down the aisles, it hit me one week that what they were talking about with me when they were 3 and 4 and 5 years old was what we had done in family worship the night before. They wanted to talk about those Bible passages. Now why? It was because that was our common knowledge. That's what we had shared together the night before. And so it began to inform our conversations together. As we're going up and down the cereal aisle and the bread aisle, we're talking about what we had learned in Scripture the night before together. It just gives a common knowledge. It takes your discourse to a different level. It takes your ability to know one another to a higher level.
- [13:34]
It also equips our children for corporate worship. Their lives are now marked by worship. This isn't just something that they do on Sunday as a one off. This is something that they're doing day in and day out. And so it makes it all the easier for them to sit in corporate worship because it makes it more understandable, they're more engaged, they're more ready for it, they're more equipped for it. They know the hymns because you're singing them at home, or they know the doxology because you sing it at home, or they know the songs because you sing them at home. They know these Bible passages because you've gone over them at home. And as you know, as your knowledge of the scriptures grow, when you hear a sermon or you hear teaching, there's all kinds of different things that begin to come into play. You make all kinds of connections just from the greater knowledge that you have. And it helps your children in worship just to make those connections. And worship just doesn't seem as foreign.
- [14:37]
It just feels more regular. This is what we do, this is who we are, we're worshipers. And to go all the way back to the very beginning where we started this series, that's what they were created for and that's what they will be recreated for and that's what they'll be resurrected unto, is worship. And so for them getting to see this and make all of those connections, family worship just helps with that.
- [15:03]
It also helps to reinforce spiritual headship in the home. And we need that today.
- [15:11]
We need husbands and fathers to know that they have responsibility for their families, that this charge is upon them, that they are to care for them spiritually, that they are to wash their wives in the water of the word, that they are to teach their children when they are along the way and when they rise and when they lay down, that this is something that is supposed to be happening, that this is part of their duty and should be part of their delight in this world. And a single mom, it reinforces her spiritual headship in the home that look, the children are to look to her and that she is setting before them an example and that she is pointing them to Christ. Maybe like Eunice and Lois were doing, you don't know. But in that kind of way.
- [16:00]
There are also benefits for the local church, not just benefits for your home, but when you practice family worship at home, it benefits the entire body that you belong to. Congregational singing in a church where all kinds of families are worshiping together at home is more dynamic. When they gather together, it's more full throated because they know it. They're doing this at home and now they're Doing it in the presence of the rest of God's people. I find that the children in my congregation, I have a congregation that sings. They sing and the children sing. And the children that sing the loudest, which I love, are the ones that are singing at home. They're the ones that are singing the loudest because they know.
- [16:48]
Just helps with body life, a more vibrant body. It also helps the local church and that the local church doesn't feel like it takes the place of parents, but it's coming alongside of parents. Look, this is the duty of fathers and mothers, the discipling of their children. And Sunday school isn't taking the place of what parents are to be doing throughout the week. And we're not just relying upon that. It reinforces that we're coming alongside of them. It also increases our knowledge of the congregation altogether. But maybe most importantly, it relieves tons of pastoral issues. When you are practicing family worship at home. Just relieves a lot of pastoral issues that don't need to bubble up to your pastors and your elders. Because you're bringing peace to bear in the home. Because you're worshiping together, you're working through conflict as you're coming together. You're praying for one another and bathing one another in the word and prayer. And that has an effect. So you and I not practicing family worship, it doesn't just rob my own soul. It doesn't just rob the souls of my family members. It robs actually from the corporate life of the church. We want to be built up as a family so that when we go into the church, we are also bleeding into all of these other families, that there's no overflow from us and that they're benefiting.
- [18:17]
Family worship helps to do that.
- [18:21]
Let me just give you some practical advice about how to practice this. This is not brain surgery, but this is often where the struggles are at. And just some practical things to help one have the right tools in place. Have your Bibles out. If you have kids. Every kid has a Bible in their lap. Everybody has a Bible. So everybody can see the word there and use the Bible. Use the Bible. I often have parents that will come to me and say, should we use a children's Bible or children's storybooks? Those are great. Love them. Use them outside of family worship. But in family worship, use the Bible. You want your children to understand this isn't an adult book. This book is also for you, and you can understand this. And so you use the Bible, have hymnals that are available. This used to be My son's favorite thing, he was the hymnal guy. He was going to go get the stack of hymnals. Every time we were getting together when he was little, he was going to pass out the hymnals. That was his thing. Well, have hymnals there that you can sing together. And everybody has that. Have the tools ready. Find the best time. This is different for different families. I know families that do it early in the morning. They all do it at the breakfast table before they get up from the breakfast table. That's not working in my family. My family works after dinner. We do it right after dinner, not right after dinner. My wife would like the dishes done first. So we do the dishes first. That allows her to rest a little bit. And then we go and we do family worship together. I have had a mentor that used to come home on Sunday lunch, every Sunday lunch, and he would do it with his wife over Sunday lunch. For some, it's right before bedtime. Whatever it is, find the time that works for your family.
- [20:10]
But whatever it is, make it consistent the same time so that everybody knows this is when we do it. My kids were little. They knew that when we got done with dinner and after we got done with the dishes, I didn't even have to tell them. They just knew, this is what we're going to do. We're going to do family worship. And they would ask if we weren't doing it that night, are we not doing family worship and make it the same place? The same place where there aren't distractions for us. It's always been in the living room, on the couch. So the kids, literally, after we would do dishes, would just run and they would jump on the couch and there we would do family worship. Make it same time, same place, and make it consistent. So I told you last time, if you've missed a night and you realize that, that's fine. You missed two nights, you missed three nights. You miss a week or a couple of weeks and you realize it. You're not starting the wheel back up. You're not starting all over. It's a means of grace. This is how God just communicates his grace to us. So you just pick it right back up. There's no guilt. Now. It may be that we need to adjust our schedules. If we've missed four or five nights together or we've missed a week together or two weeks together, we need to make it a priority. But no guilt. It's a means of grace for us. So with that, be flexible. Some days just don't work Just don't work and it's not the end of the world. So you're flexible. And then lastly, have the right attitude and persevere.
- [21:44]
Have the right attitude in it. It's something that you want to express joy in so that the rest of your family members see joy in it. And you keep at it. You just keep at it.
- [21:57]
There's some nights that it is frankly just duty and it's arduous, especially with young children. Feels like, oh, feel like you've just been wrestling with more than you have been worshiping with children on the couch or on the floor. But there are other nights that it's just glorious. It's wonderful. Some nights they will get distracted, you will get distracted and it will feel like, oh, we just went through the motions. And that was about it. There was a night, I remember my kids, we were reading some passage and I don't know how, but my son started talking about My Little Pony in the middle of family worship. And my daughter, that of course set her off. And so we were on the My Little Pony path. Then there was no getting off the path. No matter what I said. All my erudite commentary upon the scripture meant nothing compared to Rainbow Dash and Twilight Sparkle. We were going nowhere. And so it was, you know what? Let's just close in prayer. Let's give this one an amen. But then there are other nights. Other nights. I remember one weekend when my wife was away on a trip and my kids are sitting there and we're doing family worship up on their beds that night, getting them ready for bed and reading the Scriptures. And I remember my son saying, daddy, would you just read more? Now maybe he was prolonging going to bed, but also he wanted to read more. I remember praying that night with him. And I remember my son just hearing him pray and saying, oh, God, would you give me more love for you?
- [23:29]
That's a good prayer. I remember my daughter praying right after him, oh, God, would you help me to obey you more? Oh, that's a good prayer. There are good nights like that. It's well worth persevering in and keeping after. Did you practice family worship for the benefit of your soul and for the benefit of your family members or those in your house and for the good and welfare of the church?
- [23:59]
It's a blessing. It's a means of grace.
- [24:09]
B
It is a blessing. Even this morning, as my family was discussing what we had just read from Nehemiah, I asked a question to one of my older daughters. And although he didn't raise his hand. My youngest son blurted out the answer loudly and boldly, and it's such an encouragement as a father to know that the truths of God's Word are going down deep, even into young minds. This is the Tuesday edition of Renewing youg Mind and I'm glad you're joining us this week as we consider a topic central to the Christian life worship. If you'd like to own this series on DVD along with a physical copy of the study guide, we'll send you both when you give a donation in support of renewing your mind@renewingyourmind.org or when you call us at 800-435-4343. In addition to these two physical resources, both will be unlocked for you in the free Ligonier app so that you have convenient and and quick access even when you're on the go. Consider using this series in your small group and as you'll have the study guide, you'll be better equipped to lead or participate in the discussion. Use the link in the podcast show notes or visit renewingyourmind.org to give your gift. And if you live outside of the US and Canada, there is a digital only version of this offer waiting for you@renewingyourmind.org.
- [25:42]
Christians worship corporately as local churches, we worship as families, and we also worship privately. That will be Reverend Helopoulos Focus tomorrow here on renewing your mind.
- [26:03]
A
Sam.