simple and straightforward and I'll get there in just a moment after I read a text, but hopefully we'll be able to open things up for some good discussion as we go through as well. This is a practical topic with lots of practical suggestions. There are things that we should do. other things that we might do in other words there are biblical principles to follow but there are also principles of sanctified wisdom and different ways something like family worship finds expression And in that category, there are things that are helpful or unhelpful that many of us have found by trial and error. So as we think about family worship, this will be a combination of going through principle and practice and back and forth between the two. What I wanna do is just read a few verses from Proverbs 6 to get us going. This doesn't directly address the issue of family worship, but what I want to suggest is it does assume it, and most of the time when we think about a topic like this, that's what we see in scripture. There's an assumption, there's something in the background rather than anything direct that's telling us to do family worship and how to do it. So Proverbs chapter six, verses 20 down to 23. My son, keep your father's command. Do not forsake the law of your mother. Bind them continually on your heart. Tie them around your neck. When you roam, they will lead you. When you sleep, they will keep you. And when you awake, they will speak with you. For the commandment is a lamp and the law a light. Reproofs of instruction are the way of life. And then the rest of the chapter warns the son, whom the father here is addressing against the immoral woman, which I'm taking as one application of the principles that he just gave us. So in general, we have the law before us, the law is taught in the home, and children are to learn it from parents. And that's the big issue that's standing behind this text. So with that, let's open with a word of prayer. Blessed Father, we thank you for the Lord's day. We ask for your blessing upon us and we pray that you would be with us in our time together this morning, be with us in public worship as well, and be with Pastor Thomas as he prepares to bring the gospel to us. We pray that you would be with our ministers as they are out of town this weekend. that you would refresh and strengthen them by your gracious presence. And we ask, Lord, in our discussion this morning, you would guide us by your gracious spirit, that you would be well-pleased to glorify your Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and that you would fill us with joy in his gracious and glorious presence. And we ask it in Christ's name, amen. All right, well, as we come to the topic of family worship, I'm reminded, I suppose, of the first time that I thought about the topic of family worship. And the question that came to my mind might be one that many of you are thinking or have thought at different points of your lives. Where is family worship in the Bible? In other words, what we're often looking for when we ask a question like that is, says, you must read the Bible with your family every day, you ought to pray together, you ought to sing together, and those are the things we usually associate with family worship. And if that is the kind of question we're asking and that stands behind the question, then we're probably going to come up dry because there is no chapter and verse where God says, you shall worship the Lord by reading the scriptures, praying together, singing together in a daily rhythmic cycle and worship the Lord as a family. Now, obviously, if I've been asked to present the topic of family worship today, I believe that family worship is a good biblical practice and others in our church do as well. And the question then becomes, how do we see the need for family worship from scripture? If it's not just going to the chapter and verse. We could even ask there, if there's not chapter and verse for it, is it even biblical? But if it is, then what should it look like? and how do we practice it? And that goes back to what I said before the scripture reading. There are certain things we ought to do, there are certain things we might do or may do, and we're going to try to pull those two things together. So what I'm gonna do is really proceed along those lines and try to establish the need for family worship and the practice of family worship and divide that statement into two parts. Why family worship? and how to do family worship are the two questions. So if I started with the broad question, why should we do family worship? Where could we begin? I actually have a lot of big picture stuff in my mind, but I'm just gonna throw the question out first. Why family worship? Mr. Van Voorhis. This is not related exactly to the thing you're talking about, but it is related. Psalm 71, 17 and 18. Oh God, you've taught me from my youth, and to this day I declare your wondrous works. Now also, when I am old and gray-headed, oh God, do not forsake me. until I declare your strength to this generation, your power to everyone who is to come. So it's a challenge to fathers, grandfathers, to teach it to those under our care. Yeah, so as Mr. Van Boris mentioned from Psalm 71, the psalmist notes that the Lord taught him from youth and prays he wouldn't forsake him in old age, and sustains his life until he can teach the generation to come. So notice what's implied there. You actually have the psalmist learning from you, and presumably this wasn't the still small voice in his ear, guiding him and leading him, but from someone, somewhere, he's hearing the word, he's hearing the law. And if you look at the big picture, he gives us an indication of where he heard that. His parents taught him, and through that, God taught him. And now God continues with him into old age so that he can do the same thing with the next generation. So one thing we should think about with family worship is the promises of God and the commands of God need to go down generational. And actually under this why family worship, the idea of promises and commands hover around in my mind. Let's branch out from that. So you have sort of an assumption that there's a situation in the home in which the law is being taught, the word of God is being taught. What would that actually look like? Maybe I'll just say what I'm getting at because with my initial set of questions of where's family worship in the Bible, give me the chapter and verse, what I often was looking for initially was You need to read the Bible, you need to pray, you need to sing together, and you need to do this at regular intervals, et cetera. Show me in the Bible, and if it's not there, is it biblical? But here's the problem. If we're called just with children, we'll get beyond children in a moment, but let's start there, because that's the verse that Mr. Van Voorhis gave us, and a good place to begin, where And in what context are we actually teaching them the Word? There has to be something regular, doesn't there? In other words, we can't just say, well, I'm going to teach the next generation the Word of God, but I don't have any plan to do so. Make sense? So basically if you've got this generational teaching, that's a foundational thing for family worship. What else could we say as far as foundational principles, why family worship? Go ahead. Deuteronomy chapter six. Yeah. Where the Lord commands his people to teach his word to their children. And it's really the context that they would like. Yeah. That is about any specific times of Bible reading and prayer should be done in the context of what I would call whole-life catechesis. Yeah, so... And I'm glad you mentioned that text because that was one I want to go to. And the text is Deuteronomy 6. that you're to teach these things to your children when you sit down, when you rise up, when you walk by the way. And as Jim rightly mentioned, more than family worship is there. So in other words, in your speech, you ought to speak the word of God to one another. In your work, you ought to think in terms of the word of God and lead your children to do so. in your rest and your recreation, whatever you do, whether you eat or drink, do all things to the glory of God. And so the word of God starts permeating life. And so when we're talking about family worship, again, someone might say, well, the issue is not sitting down and reading the Bible and praying and singing together. The issue is how do you live your life? How does the Bible permeate everything you do? How do you walk with God? in day-to-day Christian living. But again, as I mentioned before, if you don't have a plan to be in the Word regularly, how can you do all these other things? Let me draw an analogy to worship on the Lord's Day. One of the great blessings of being here on Sunday, on the Lord's Day, is that the Lord is training us how to live the rest of the time. So in other words, deny yourself, put aside your worldly cares, your employments, your recreations, devote yourself to the worship of God, set the day apart as holy, live as it were one seventh of your time as if you're in heaven, so that the rest of the time, you can do whatever you do, whether you eat or drink to the glory of God. So the Lord's day sets a pattern and it puts us on the right trajectory. And in a similar way, set times of family worship do that for day-to-day living too. So in other words, as we read the word, as we pray, as we sing together, it actually sets a tone for going to work for enjoying recreation, even for sleep and rest and everything else that we do. And notice in the text that I read from Proverbs, you have the young man learning the law of God in his parents' home. And the benefits of learning the law of God every single day in the parents' home is that whether he's awake or he's asleep or whatever he's doing, God's Word is guiding him, ultimately because God is working through the Word. God teaches through the Word by the Spirit. So as the Spirit blesses the Word, accompanies the Word, whether we wake, whether we sleep, family worship starts directing everything that we do. What else can we say about family worship? And think about my broad categories. God gives us promises to families, and God gives us commands. So far, I think what we've focused on largely, Psalm 71 accepted, is really the command side. You've got the issue, you must do this, you must teach your children, you must permeate your home with scripture so that your lives can be filled with scripture. What about promises that might drive us to want to do family worship is what I'm getting at. Any thoughts? What does God promise to Christian families? And the area that I think needs to stand out more is the fact that we, as Christians, we love the Lord Jesus Christ. And if that's real in our experience, real in our relationship to our children, they will know that this is someone we love and that we want them to love. So it's more than academic, just thinking about, yes, we could do this by this rule or that rule. It should be a natural outflow of our Christian experience. Yeah. So as Mr. Van Boris mentioned, we love Jesus Christ. We want our families to love Jesus Christ. Things like family worship should develop out of that and out of that base. And in a way, this is why when I asked the question initially, I said, why should we want to do family worship? That's what you're getting at. Why should we want to? And if we love Jesus Christ, we want those who are closest with us to love Jesus Christ. And we want to take them to the means through which we love Jesus Christ. Which would be the word here. Yes. I'm not sure. Maybe you know more than I do. Probably. What are the front lips? Book of Deuteronomy. Yeah. Yeah. So what are the promises or what would be the commands as well? What are the frontlets? So that also ties back to the Deuteronomy 6 text where they shall be as frontlets between your eyes and and And actually, you had the priest wearing the tassels on the garments, reminding them of the law of God. That still happens in some forms of modern Judaism. And the issue there, I don't think, is to have physical signs and symbols on us. Although, well, let me connect this to Mr. Menboris' statement of love to Christ. I'm reminded of the Book of Revelation. with the Mark of the Beast. We focus so much on the Mark of the Beast. There's going to be a sign on your forehead, a sign on your hand, but you realize that where that language comes from is actually text like Deuteronomy 6. The law will be on your forehead, between your eyes, and in your hand. And what does that actually mean? What it means is in my thoughts and my deeds, my loyalty is to the Lord. So in my thoughts and my deeds, I'm as a Christian loyal to Jesus Christ, which is why in Revelation, the main focus is not the mark of the beast, but the mark of the lamb. And people get all bent out of shape of, you know, speculating about microchips in our hands or foreheads or things like that. But you realize the biblical explanation goes back to the Old Testament, Deuteronomy. And the issue is whose loyalty, who has your loyalty? Are you loyal to Christ? Or are you loyal to Satan? How do you think, how do you live? And is it the law of God, which answers your question here, is the law just the commands or is it just the promises? I think there it's all of it. In other words, everything that God has promised to you and everything God requires of you is to shape and dominate the way you think and the way you live in relationship to Jesus Christ. So, back to my revelation illustration there. Every human being on the planet today either has the Mark of the Lamb or the Mark of the Beast. We're either loyal to Christ or we're not. And if we're not, we're loyal to Satan. If we're loyal to Christ, go back to Deuteronomy 6, what does that mean? It means we love His Word. We love His ways. Through His Word, through His promises and commands, we seek to know Him and we seek to bring those around us to know Him as well. The baptismal sign too. The baptismal sign. Okay, and the baptismal sign as well. That's what we're urged to tell our children. Yeah, so we can use baptism and in family worship I appeal to baptism often. What does your baptism teach you? that God is your Father, Jesus is your Savior, and the Spirit dwells in your heart. Trust the Spirit to change your heart, look to Jesus as your Savior, and look to God as your Father. So, simple. That's the message baptism gives us, gives our children. Promises, when I ask the question, what promises would drive us to family worship, I'm actually thinking of a lot of things. And maybe what I'll do is just verbally, I almost said vomit them out, but basically verbally throw some at you and then maybe hover around one that I focused on before here. It's just been a while, but God promises, for example, to circumcise our hearts and the hearts of our children after us. God promises to be God to us, God to our children after us. God makes a covenant with Abraham telling Abraham, I know that you will teach your children, your household, my ways and my commands. Joshua says, as for me and my house, we will call upon the Lord, we will worship the Lord. and I could keep going and keep adding examples and promises all throughout scripture, one that often strikes me the most, for a lot of reasons, is Isaiah 59, and that's the one I've talked about at different connections before. But to summarize the text, what Isaiah tells God's people is that the Redeemer will come to Zion, and turn people away from iniquity. So the Christ is coming, the one who would suffer for his people in Isaiah chapter 53, the one on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all and who intercedes for transgressors, the Redeemer will come and his work will be effective. He will turn us away from transgression and sin, bring us back to God. But when the Redeemer comes, he also brings with him a promise of word and spirit to families. So in other words, the word that's in the prophet's mouth will not depart from the mouth of his descendants or his descendants' descendants, and the spirit of God which is in him will also continue with his children and children's children. So I'm summarizing really verses 20 and 21 towards the end of that chapter in Isaiah 59. But if you think about it this way, what's God actually saying? God is saying that those who are saved in Jesus Christ have the spirit of God in their hearts, applying the word of God to them or applying God and his benefits to them through the word. and that this promise goes through families. So if you're looking at that and you're thinking through the implications of what God is actually saying he will do, now we can tie together all the things we've been talking about. What do we want? What should our lives look like? What do we desire? Well, we want to know the Redeemer for ourselves and for others, don't we? And if God is promising that the word will be in our mouths and the spirit in our hearts and in those of our children and children's children, would that not very naturally drive us to look for ways to bring the word into our families? In other words, if you're reading the word together and you're praying together for God's blessing upon the word, and you're singing the praises of the God who redeems and saves you in Jesus Christ, what are you doing other than saying, Lord, fulfill Isaiah 59? Direct us to Christ, enable us to know him and love him together. bless the word with the spirit, and this is why I'm now reading the word with my family, with my household, why I'm praying for God's blessing, why we're singing your praises together. And that singing part actually picks up on something Mr. Van Voorhis said, that this is not intellectual or academic, this is not just gaining Bible knowledge and gaining information, but this is coming as a household to worship. and desiring to worship. And notice when I say at the end, coming as a household to worship, what I'm implying here is even though a lot of the texts that we've talked about and skirted the surface of deal with children, God's promises are to households and to families. And I'm stressing that for one simple reason. Family worship includes children. but families don't consist in children. So what I'm saying is that though we use an expression like, I'd like to start a family, meaning I'm already married and now we wanna have children. In the Bible, you start a family when you take your wedding vows. your marriage vows. So in other words, a husband and a wife, even if God never blesses them with children, are a household, are a family. Or for that matter, husbands and wives whose children are grown and out of the house, are still a household, a family. And if we are looking to God's promises, we're looking to the Redeemer, we're looking to the Spirit blessing the word in our souls, what I'm really getting at is, why would we not read together, pray together, worship God, sing together, even as husbands and wives. And then children, as it were, are brought into that context and grandchildren as well, as Mr. Van Boris mentioned. So what we're looking at is we do family worship because we lay hold of God's promises. We want to keep his commands regarding saturating our homes with scripture and the worship of God. And we want our praise and our worship to be contagious. So do we need a chapter verse proof text to say you must do family worship? Hopefully by now you're saying, well, no, because all of the things we're talking about, the promises of God to believing households, the commands of God to children like the one we saw in Proverbs 4, and to parents to train their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, to teach them when you sit down, when you rise up, when you walk by the way, all of those things are going to drive us back to these simple realities. We ought to be reading the Bible together. We ought to be praying together. We ought to celebrate the praise and the worship of God together. So that's sort of our foundation. The next part is going to be really the how-to and what shape can this take, what can this actually look like. But before I get to that second half, as it were, are there any other questions or comments on the principles? thus far. I know we're jumping through a lot of stuff. So Tim, go ahead. Could you speak to perhaps the reasoning or benefit as the label family worship as opposed to singing time, family, just other labels that are, you know, maybe it's not that big a deal, but I've found it to be quite helpful. Yeah. I'm actually really glad you asked that question. What about the label? Why do we call it family worship? I actually bring this out usually with private worship too because we'll often talk about, for example, our devotion time or our quiet time or something like that and now are we having some sort of family equivalent of devotion and quiet time. And I'll say as a preface, I don't object to using terms like devotion, quiet time. So if we're talking and you say, oh, I was doing my devotions this week, I'm not going to say, well, do you know? And you're using the wrong term here. But I think it's helpful in our thinking to use a term like worship just because it makes us reflect on what we're doing. So I'll give a simple example with Bible reading that I've used here before and then transfer this to family worship. If I am reading the Bible and really I'm thinking, what am I going to get out of this today? Right? How am I going to express my devotions? How am I going to learn how to live my life better today? And that sort of thing. That will help you a lot of the time. But not all the time. And this is why when people get to Leviticus and genealogies and chronicles and things like that, they say, well, I really don't see anything devotional here. You know, there's nothing really guiding me to live my life. And part of the issue there is that if you look at a text like that or text like those, if you say, okay, the first thing that I'm here to do is not learn, you know, five keys how to be a better wife or husband today or how to rear my children, but the first thing I'm here to do is to worship. Then you go back to the text and what happens? God, what does this text teach me about you? How does it show me your faithfulness to your promises which culminate in Jesus Christ? How is your spirit pointing to the sun? In other words, a very God-word focus. So if we say worship, things sort of turn around. Now I can read. First Chronicles and nine chapters of genealogy and they're not going to be my favorite verses and texts all the time. There's some bright spots that jump out of the pages there. But what I am going to do is say God has kept his covenant promise for generations and he's never failed. He's preserved his church, he's preserved his seed because the story's going somewhere. David's the hero in that narrative because Jesus is the hero of the whole book and ultimately the one who stands out. And so now I worship the Lord, I thank the Lord for keeping his promises, for showing me his glory through a text like this. and so worship turns your focus a different direction, and I think that's true in family worship as well. So, for example, sometimes when people, this will spill into the practical part, but people struggle with family worship with small children. And they say, well, basically, the kids don't get much out of what we're doing. So instead of say, reading a chapter of the Bible, I'm just going to read one verse, or we're going to do something else. Well, of course, that's good. It's better to be in the word than not be in the word at all. But I think it's better still to say, the issue is not what they understand. The issue is, are we hearing the word and are we worshiping God together? And I think all of us know, whether you've grown up in a Christian home, whether you've come to Christ later in life, at some point, you're learning your ABCs. And just like learning a language, people start speaking to you in English before you understand anything at all. And lo and behold, several years later, you're speaking English and you're learning to adapt to the language and communicate well. I think the Bible's the same way. So if we're focusing on worship, what we're saying is we need to hear God speak and we need to praise him as a result. And as we grow in maturity, as we grow in years, as we grow in experience, we'll be able to do that better. but we need the input. So I think worship makes us focus in that direction. So even the term can be helpful. So again, no correction if you use a different term, but for our private worship and our family worship, I think it is helpful for creating a seamless tie to our public worship also. So maybe one way we can approach our Bible reading, our family worship, even our public worship today, is not just to come to say, what's in it for me, what do I get out of it? But am I here to proclaim the praises of him who called me out of darkness into his marvelous light? Am I being transformed by beholding the glory of God in the face of Christ? That's what we want when we read the Bible, that's what we want for our families, that's what we want today as we worship. Go ahead, Joseph. and usually when I have difficulty, I'm reading to the kids, like to a Old Testament narrative. I try to step back and just ask that question, what is God doing here? What is he like? How is he dealing with these people rather than just the standard, oh, what is this person doing? Or what did they do wrong? What did they do right? I go back to Psalm 78. Yeah. There's always that emphasis of remember, do not forget, remember. We're prone to forgetfulness. Yeah. So as Joseph mentioned there with Psalm 78 in particular, you tell the generation the wondrous works of God, generations to come. And again, that stresses the good things our brother just mentioned. Any text you're reading, you can say to the whole family, what does this show us about God and His work? So how do we see the Lord through the text is, I think, the big issue here. And as I've stated a moment ago, this transforms how you read your Bible in private, as well as family worship, and hopefully preaching and public worship, too, as we're looking for the Lord in his works. Go ahead, Mr. Ellis. Public worship began to blend together when you look at Abraham, maybe even before Abraham. It was a family. What else did they do besides family worship? How did it grow out of that, out of the family worship? The public worship took place, I don't know. Yeah, so as Mr. Ellis mentioned, in some ways you could say when you're reading the Old Testament, especially Genesis, you see that public worship began in the family and then morphed into public worship proper, which is an interesting thing to think about. You ever notice, for example, when you're reading through the book of Genesis, it seems like everywhere Abraham goes, he builds an altar. And then same thing happens with Isaac and Jacob after him, build an altar to the Lord. And there, what's going on is, well, certainly there's instruction in the word, and I already mentioned that from Genesis, well, 15, 18, 17, I alluded to all of these as we were going through, but God says, I know you will teach your children after you, you'll teach them my ways. So certainly you have the prayers of the saints and the word of God in the household and the praises of God on our lips, but you also have Abraham offering sacrifices. Now later on, Sacrifices were relegated to priests and to place. So they had to go to the altar through the priests in the right place, which ultimately became the temple. But before all that happened, all of that kind of worship happened in the household and the family. And so really, you have God working in families, then building into a broader structure of the church and broader worship of God. That doesn't mean to say, well, you know, family worship trumps public worship. And therefore, it always... takes priority. And what I'm getting at what I'm thinking in my mind actually is I've had a lot of people I've met over the years that take their their head of household responsibility so seriously that they start to believe no one can ever teach my family or my children other than me. And therefore, we don't need the church. We don't need public worship. And so in the back of my mind, I'm thinking of the train wreck, that that kind of thinking is made of so many lives. Because ultimately, yes, we worship God as a family, but think about life. You worship God yourself. You worship God with your household. Because together, you come together and worship God as a church. And in heaven, there's no examples of private worship in the Bible. You know, I'm thinking of the book of Revelation. It's all leading to the gathered church and corporate worship. And I'm not saying that to pit any of those against each other. You must know the Lord for yourself. You ought to worship him as families. But ultimately, we should look most of all to the full corporate gathering of the church in the presence of Christ in glory. And we have a foretaste on earth. so we need to hang these things together. Let me say a few things briefly about the how, and let me just give you some basic suggestions. We've been talking about why, but how do we go about doing family worship? Let me say a few things and then maybe make a circumstantial comment that hopefully might help drive this home a little bit. With family worship, I've already mentioned several times that the basic things we should pursue are prayer, reading the scriptures, and celebrating singing God's praise. So that's pretty simple. So my first suggestion is, with family worship, keep it simple. And what I'm getting at here is I have actually seen some family worship guides that I've read in the past. Maybe some of you probably know what I'm talking about and are familiar with it where the family worship time starts with a whole liturgy and it's got a call to worship and multiple scripture readings and several songs that you're singing and then your catechism component and then the benediction at the end. And you're sitting here reading this thinking, we're going to be here for a solid hour if this is what we do. And what happens when people try to do something like that? Most of us get discouraged and quit. In other words, you just can't keep it up. You're reading your Bible, you're going to church on Sunday, you've got Sunday school, you've got two worship services, you've got a prayer meeting Wednesday night, you've gotta get to work on time, you've got all these other things that are pressing, and the more complex and longer you make your family worship, the less likely you are to do it. So keep it simple. So what can that look like? And notice I'm saying, what can that look like? One thing that is helpful is to pray a short prayer and different members of the family perhaps can pray different times. And I don't mean turn this into a giant prayer meeting with everyone going around in turn. You can do that as well. But again, think about what's sustainable. Somebody prays, read a chapter of the Bible, And I suggest that, notice I'm using language like can, suggest, that kind of thing. I suggest reading a chapter of the Bible because it accumulates. So in other words, if you're reading, let's say one chapter a day, then you are going to get through the entire Bible eventually. And then you're gonna repeat the process. And if you have children in the home, you're gonna repeat that process many times before those children are out of the home. And you will be surprised how much they learn to think and speak Bible. Because a whole Bible, as A.W. Tozer says, makes a whole Christian. And so we want constant exposure to the whole thing. And when I say can, you know, one thing we started doing years ago is did a short family worship. in the morning with breakfast, and then a short family worship in the evening with dinner. And we ended up doing Old Testament for one, New Testament for the other. So what that basically means is you'll get through the New Testament at least once a year, if not a little bit more, and the Old Testament every two years-ish, something like that. and just the regular rhythm it adds up. So notice, I'm not saying, thus says the Lord, thou shalt do family worship every morning and every evening. Family schedules are different, and we have to be creative with these sort of things. What works, what time can we gather people? But my point is, if you keep it short and simple, you're more likely to do it well and profitably. Another thing that I'll add there is it's helpful to keep family worship predictable. So in other words, I mentioned doing this at mealtimes. because it's predictable. I've seen other cases where, for instance, the head of household decides that he's going to lead family worship when convenient. So everybody finishes dinner, they go their own ways, kids are doing homework over here, you know, little kids are being put to bed over here, and all kinds of other things are going on, and then suddenly dad comes in and says, all right, everybody, we're doing family worship. And now you've got the kids doing the homework a little bit upset because they can't finish the work that they were going to do. And then you've got mom upset because she's putting the toddler to bed. And now you've got to pull them out of bed. And you get the idea, right? It's just a little bit disruptive. And when those types of things happen, when family worship occurs, the answer to that may be different for different families. If dad's working night shift and he gets home, maybe he decides, I'm gonna go to bed, but before I do, we're gonna do our family worship first. And it's gonna be short, then I'm going to bed. Dad works late, same thing. I'm gonna come in and first thing we're gonna do is family worship and then go about all the other things we do. But you see what I'm getting at. is whether it's dinner, whether it's after night shift, whether it's getting home late, there's something predictable. There's something regular. And I think that helps everyone enjoy the time better. In other words, it's less disruptive. So again, I'm just making practical suggestions here. These are things that can be helpful as you're thinking about family worship. So keep it short, keep it simple, be regular. Find a time that works well with your family, whatever time that is. And as children get older and sometimes get jobs or have classes they're taking in early college or other things like that, you don't always have everyone there. And so the general rule then becomes take who you could get. Right? Still be regular, still be predictable. If you can adjust the time, incorporate everyone, great. But those who are in that stage of life as we are know that that doesn't always happen. But seek to be short, seek to be simple, seek to be predictable. There are other things that we could suggest here. Our family does lots of big road trips and basically live in the car for a couple of days and eat in the car and sort of sleep in the car and then threaten to burn the car when you get home because of those other things. But basically, We just keep going. This is our house for the next two days. And so we're just gonna do our family worship while we're driving. Somebody's gonna pray, somebody's gonna read. We're gonna sing something that we know together and just make it fit, make it work. But these are some simple ideas. Maybe I'll pause there. and ask if there are any other comments or questions or suggestions. There's a lot more to say, because if you're picking up what I'm giving you, there's a combination here of biblical principle and sanctified common sense. So in other words, what you must do, what you may do, which I said at the beginning. Mr. Van Boris. I think parents need to always guard against hypocrisy. That is, for example, we spend considerable time teaching them about the Lord's standards for keeping his day holy, and then watch football all afternoon. Children are gonna quickly say, well, he says that, but that's not really what he believes. Yeah, so you can have a double standard and a beware of hypocrisy. You mentioned the Lord's Day example of teaching a principle, but then Sunday afternoon you're watching your sports games, et cetera. If I extrapolate something from that that I can broaden out a bit, what do you really value? What do you really prioritize in life? Do you with family worship for example? Do we love to do family worship? Now this is a little bit subjective but Think of it this way, you know, maybe part of this relates to the tone that we set for family worship. I mean, we're all tired at different times. If I give the scenario of, okay, we're doing family worship at dinner. Dad's had a long day at work. Mom's had a long day taking care of the kids. Everybody's doing all their own things and everybody's tired, everybody's busy. But if we come to family worship and the tone is something like, all right, well, let's open the Bible. I guess we'll read. Anyone want to pray? You get the idea, right? It's just kind of, we don't want to do this. Now you could legitimately say, you know, I'm really tired. But I'm grateful we can worship, so let's do it. Let's worship. And even just a simple thing of setting a positive tone, that this is something we actually love doing, something we want to do, even when we don't feel like doing it, and when we're tired, and we feel bad, or we've been resolving conflict in the family. you know, what better way to finally resolve a conflict among siblings or in the family than everybody asks forgiveness and repents and now let's worship together. Let's go to the Lord. And so again, what tone are we setting? That's another practical thing. Anything else? The question is, how do you deal with guests in the home and going other places? There's a lot of good things we can do and say there. Let me mention a few things. If family worship, for example, is at mealtime, then I think something very natural there is if you have guests in the home at mealtime, then you rope them in. Incorporate them into your family worship, go about your normal routine. If people aren't used to those kinds of practices, I usually try to give them a bit of heads up. Oh, by the way, after the meal, we like to pray briefly together and read a passage of scripture and sing together. We'd love to have you with us. We've even been able to do this at different points, even with with non-Christians. So on Sundays, for example, instead of in the evening, we'll do the afternoon. And it just helps us with the Lord's Day and gives us one more good thing to do on the Lord's Day together as we're worshiping the Lord. And if people are coming into the home, we've even had non-Christians come. and tell them ahead of time, just so you know, you know, they don't know what family worship is or anything that we're doing, but our family practices, we pray together, we're going to read the Bible and we're going to sing, we'd love to have you be with us. And at least in my experience, when we've had non-Christians, almost always, They say, oh, great. Thanks for letting me know. And they'll stay. Whereas, if you don't give the heads up, you might have the danger of them feeling like, well, now the non-Christians in the home, we're having a special Bible study for them, and that's what we're doing. And I just wanna make it clear so they're not caught off guard. This is just how we live. This is just who we are. We're really happy you're in our home, and we're glad to have you with us while we're doing this. So in that sense, if you're thinking about evangelism, for example, pick up on what I'm saying because I'm offering some low-hanging fruit, right? Invite the non-Christian neighbors to Sunday lunch and hey, invite some church people too, you know, let them meet some other people and just tell them, you know, we're gonna pray, we're gonna sing, we're gonna read the Bible, we'd love to have you here. And now you have a very natural opportunity for evangelism that's a bit indirect because you're just living life. If we're going places, let's say we're visiting non-Christian family or something like that, I'm not going to say, you know, all right, well, we lead family worship, I'm in your home. and too bad for you, put up with it. What we're basically going to do is carry on ourselves. So maybe if we're going somewhere in the car on the way there, we pray, we read, we sing. If we're staying in a non-Christian family member's home, When we wake up in the morning before we go meet them for breakfast, for example, we might do a short family worship by ourselves. So you can be creative with that and think through that a little bit. We got two minutes left. Any other questions or comments? What would be the most confessional sin? What would be the place of confession of sin? Going back to my first practical comment of keep it simple. My opinion is I would envelop such things into prayer. So in other words, whoever's leading in the prayer, the head of the household, for example, we would pray, giving thanks to the Lord, worshiping the Lord, laying the needs of family, of other friends, of church members, et cetera, but also confession of sin. and humbling ourselves before the Lord. So I wouldn't make that a separate formal element. I tend to envelop it into the prayer. But think of the shorter catechism on prayer. You know, you have certain components that are there, such as thanksgiving and with the confession of our sins. And so if we're thinking about what should prayer be like in general, we're always going to have that aspect of humility and confession before the Lord. And that would apply here too. You know, I can't resist just one comment with prayer. There's a lot of things you can do for family worship. And so, for example, one thing that our family has done at different points is pick a family of the week from the church And I got this idea from my father-in-law who did this in his pastor. They always had a family week that they would pray for. And we just transferred it to the home. And so every day that week, we're going to pray for that family. And even small children could write notes to them and write a Bible verse on the card or something like that. And now you're able to start investing in other people in a very simple way that doesn't add much time and gives even small children in the home ministry opportunities to reach out to other people as well. So as you can see by some of these examples, there's a lot you can do. I didn't even mention reviewing catechism and other things like that. But be prayerfully creative. with family worship and seek to find what works best. But the end goal is, do we love Jesus Christ? Do we want those nearest and dearest to us to love him as well? And are we using means to do it? In this case, the means being family worship. Well, let's close with a word of prayer. Blessed and everlasting Father, we thank you for bringing us together on the Lord's day. We thank you for the discussion that you have blessed us in this morning, and we pray that you would give us joy in public worship. Grant us your Holy Spirit, bless your word to our souls, and keep us from the evil one, forgiving our sins for Jesus' sake, amen.