Deuteronomy 6 gives a strong challenge to parents:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. (Deut. 6:5-7)
At our recent men’s conference, Dr. Don Carson encouraged men to take this responsibility seriously. Maybe you’d like to get more proactive about shepherding your family toward Jesus, but you don’t know where to start. Let me recommend a foolproof way to get your family worship off the ground:
- Read one verse every morning together as a family.
- Briefly discuss its meaning and implication for life.
- Pray together that God would help your family apply it.
Here’s how our family does it. On our smartphones, we’ve put a link on our home screen to the ESV verse-of-the-day here (also available through Twitter). When we load up the kids for school each morning, we budget an extra five minutes. After everyone’s buckled in, we read the verse, discuss, and pray together.
Once your family is in the habit of learning, growing, and praying together, you can add a weekly family worship time that allows for more in-depth times of study, discussion, and prayer. If you’re a Harborite, you can use the parent sheets from each week’s Sunday lesson (available on the Children’s Ministry page on HarborConnect).
During our extended family worship times, our kids love to be characters in the story as we read passages from Scripture. We’ll read a line, then the kid who’s been assigned to the character will repeat it. We’ve discovered some Oscar-worthy actors in our crew.
Here are a few books that have been very helpful resources for our family worship times:
- Long Story Short by Marty Machowski – a creative guide for leading kids through important Old Testament passages.
- Big Truths for Young Hearts by Bruce Ware – a theology book for 6-to-14-year-olds
- Training Hearts, Teaching Minds by Starr Meade – a systematic way to teach your kids the fundamentals of the Christian faith, using the shorter catechism.
- The Action Bible by Doug Mauss – The Bible in graphic-novel form. I can’t tell you how many deep discussions have been launched with my boys by this book (just this morning, it was “Why would God allow someone as evil as Jezebel to be queen of his people?”)