Family Worship and How You Can Do It | The Whole Counsel

Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm Jon Snyder and with me today is Ryan Bush. Ryan is a guest speaker and he's come down from Arkansas to spend the day with us. So we're really glad to have you and this is actually the first chance that we've had to meet.

I've been seeing you on the Family Worship Guide and so you're on my television but I hadn't had a chance to meet you. But all the guys at Media Gratia really like Ryan. They say you're a nice guy. Appreciate that.

Thank you. Yeah, that's a good start. It's good to be liked. Yeah. Ryan, why don't you give us just a quick biography of what you do and then we'll jump into the topic of family worship. Yeah. So I live in Arkansas.

Married, five kids. Oldest is 14, down to four years old. Got a daughter, Sophia, and then four boys after her. I serve with International Church Planters. I'm the president of that missions organization.

And our primary focus is to train pastors in parts of the globe where the church is growing, where we see a lot of large numbers reported in terms of conversions and church plants, where there's really not much opportunity for those leaders to be trained, to receive some deeper theological education.

So we take the seminary, I guess you could say, the Bible Institute, to them. Our primary work is in Kenya. Right now in Kenya, we have three locations of groups of pastors, and they're on a three-year trajectory.

We're about halfway right now with these three groups. In fact, I'm going next week to spend 10 days there training them. We are now in the part of our training where it's teaching them to study the Bible.

So it's Bible Interpret 2, actually, is what we're going to be doing in the next few weeks. Oh, good. Good. Information about this ministry can be found in our show notes and in the links. Well, let's talk about family worship because you've put together this practical guide to family worship.

Yes. So it's been out a little bit. We've had pre-orders and now regular orders. So folks have been encouraged by it. Very practical. Really how to, especially for folks who are struggling. Yeah. I want to do that, but I'm not a pastor.

If I'm not a really good speaker, how do I lead my family in this, especially when there are a lot of difficulties? Yeah. So when we think of family worship, either beginning the day, turning the heart to the Lord, or at the end of the day, kind of pulling together all those strings of life and bringing them back under the wonderful realities of our God, there are a lot of hurdles.

What do you think are some of the difficulties that a parent or a grandparent would face in that? Yeah. And I think it is good to acknowledge that it is hard. It's not helpful. It wasn't helpful to me to see it as something that was easy for a lot of people.

And why is this hard for me? Well, the fact is it's hard for everybody. Family worship is a discipline, and it's not complex. It's quite simple. It's quite a simple thing. But that doesn't mean that it's easy.

The example I like to use is, John, if I told you to go pick up that boulder that weighs 500 pounds and set it on this table, that's not a complex task. It's simple, right? It's not easy. Now, for you, it probably would be easy, but for most of us, that'd be a tough task to complete.

So, family worship is a similar thing. It is a simple thing to know what it is, and it's not complex. Anybody can understand it. But when we face the fiery darts of the devil, when we face the selfishness of our own flesh and the distractions of the world, then it does become difficult to make that a priority in our lives.

And that's really what it is. That's the base of all the hurdles, those three things that I mentioned. And as, especially you men who are leading your family, you've got to go to battle for your family, for the sake of their spiritual well-being and their souls, to overcome those difficulties and continue with this practice, start this practice.

I think, you know, it does take... it is, in a sense, it is like pastoring. It's like pastoring your family. And the dad then is a representative, you know, as a believer, as a representative of Christ to the family, as a shepherd, you know, as an intermediary to... not as a mediator, but, you know, as a pleader.

You know, we speak with God on behalf of our family. We speak to the family on behalf of God. And as a prophet to talk to them about the things that are real, that aren't just surface. It does take wisdom to know how to do that with your family, you know.

And so the practical guide can be applied to the family, but it does take wisdom. I remember, you know, so with our three youngest kids, they're all very different personalities and in very different ways of responding to it's family worship time, you know.

Yes. Yeah. So oldest one, not so interested. He wasn't... none of them were Christians at this time, not so interested. Middle one, the girl, very well behaved. And the youngest one, a monkey, you know.

I don't know where... it's straight from the zoo. Yeah. And his name is Andrew. Yes. Andrew would just, for the first years of his life, I don't think I saw him sit on his bottom. He sat on his head. So he would sit beside me on the couch while I'm doing family worship.

And then, so we do a headstand, basically. Yes. And every once in a while, I just kind of get a little, lose my patience. I say, Andrew, Andrew, we are talking about things about God and about your soul.

And then he would burst into tears, stick his head down between the cushions and would not... he could not be consoled for 30 minutes. So I'd say, all right, so the end, family worship is over. I have to deal with Andrew.

And he would just sob and say, I'm not a Christian. And like, you know, okay, Andrew, you know, and I try to, you know, we try to walk through some... forget it. You know, he was just sobbing. So I had a lot of, I had a lot of failures.

Yeah, me too. And my monkey's name is Seth, by the way. And he's still on the monkey stage. He's four years old. In fact, last night, as we had family worship together, I generally make him sit by me because he tends to toe the line a little bit better.

But at the same time, I don't want to be a tyrant. I don't want family worship to be about me controlling their behavior. You know, there's this balance between being a compassionate shepherd and being a firm father, a firm king and ruling with joy and seriousness and a time for sit down and be quiet and a time for giggling about something silly that happened.

It does take wisdom. You're exactly right. And just a practical little help in terms of dealing with our little monkeys, our unruly little lambs. One thing that I've found with Seth is he has his own family worship.

And I can't, he can't read yet. He thinks he can, but he can't read yet. But he has his own family worship guide. He gets it just like everyone else gets theirs. He also gets something to write with. I let him go to town on that.

And you should see it. It's a sight to behold. Maybe we can post it somewhere on the show notes or something. But it is, it's beautiful. And it is the biggest mess you have ever seen. But what he's learning is that this is the tool that we use for family worship.

And my dad writes in his so I can write in mine too. And he gets to participate in some small way. So there's little strategies I think that we can use in our families to help bring them along. Because as you said, different personalities need different things.

And you'll have the child who's all on board and loves it and is excited about it. And then you'll have the one who thinks it's the worst thing they've ever had to do. Takes a lot of patience and wisdom on our part.

We have to be, I'll tell you another thing that it takes. Humility. You cannot shepherd your family well and be full of pride. It doesn't work. You'll give up because you won't get the, you won't be built up like you think you ought to be built up during that time.

If you're not willing to humble yourself and deal with some tough things, then your pride's going to get wounded. I know mine did. And it still does. Praise the Lord for that. That's another part of family worship we talk about.

But we have to come at it as a humble shepherd seeking to lead our family. And dealing with them, meeting them where they are. They're all different. If you could summarize, if you could only say one thing about family worship when it comes to the goal.

In your mind, what's the goal as you gather together daily? Yeah. Well, I think it's in the name, worship. To me, that's the number one goal. The definition I use for family worship is a special time set aside in which the head of the household gathers his family together to worship the Lord through the ordinary means of grace.

But oftentimes I'll add in another little phrase in there. And receive blessings from him. Now, I hesitate to do that because it's not about that, obviously. But man, the blessings. The blessings of worshiping with our family day in and day out.

Well, here's the bottom line. I desperately need it. I need it. And I tell my family that. I fight the condemnings of my own heart throughout the day. And the fiery darts of the devil. And my own flesh.

We typically do family worship in the evening. And when we gather together, many times, not always, but many times, it's not like, okay, we need to do this, I need to stay disciplined. It's like, for me, it's like, I need to get my heart still before the Lord with my family.

So, number one, it's worshiping the one true and living God, the chiefest and best of all beings. Number two, we need him to nourish us, to minister to us, to meet us in our deep need. As you prayed over lunch today, that was very meaningful to me, saying we're just as needy today as we've ever been.

That's true. That's true for me. Yeah. Yeah, really, a great expression of humility. And it makes me think of James 4. I tried to apply this to personal quiet times, to the churches gathering to seek the Lord, that God resists the proud, the self-sufficient.

Yes. And he gives grace, everything I need in that word, grace. He gives it freely to the humble. So, to the family or to the individual that lives by this sweet expression, I need you, you're not extra.

You mentioned heads of households as the normal leaders of family worship, but you have also mentioned in other places that there are what we think of as nontraditional families. So, kind of give us a couple of examples of those and what advice you would give.

Yeah. I think where we need to start with that is that family worship, gathering our little flock together, whoever's living under our roof, that that ought to be a regular thing. No matter what the family looks like, I think we need to start with, this is what we ought to do.

And then we ask how. It's never should. It's never should we gather together to worship the Lord as a family. There are certain family situations that can present some difficult, interesting circumstances.

Probably the most common one would be a single mom who has her children. She desires for her family, her kids to know the Lord, to grow in the Lord. She desires that for herself. She hears a family worship and she thinks, well, you know, they talk about the father leading that and him being the pastor of the household.

What about me? Well, the fact is that the mother needs and can step into that role for her children. Now, there's good reason for her to feel uncomfortable with that at times, especially if she's never done it before.

Just starting, she might feel like, I can't do that. So this guide that we put together is a helpful thing for that, but also a really helpful exercise is to join another family that's already practicing that well.

Maybe there's a family in your church that does that, that you can join with. Also, grandparents who have young children in their home, they might not have as much energy as a younger set of parents, but I would encourage them to make sure and save up some energy to dedicate that time to lead those kids in family worship.

They need it. Foster parents, there might be at times, depending on the state, some restrictions and some things that they need to be wise about, but what an opportunity the Lord has placed these children and his providence and wisdom in a household that they aren't biologically a part of.

What an opportunity to share the goodness of the Lord and the gospel with them through family worship. So, yeah, there's a bunch of different scenarios that could take place, but it should be practiced, and it should be made a priority.

It's a matter of asking the Lord for wisdom to move forward in that. What would you say to someone who says, you know, I'm really having trouble with the kids? My example would be me. Not my kids, me.

I was the trouble. When growing up in a godly home, but not one that had really ever been exposed to this much of this kind of a thought. And so I remember my father at one point, you know, he must have read about it or heard about it, and so he said, well, we're going to have family worship.

I thought, what's that? You know, we do that on church day, right? So I was probably at this time probably nearing teen years, and I was not a Christian. So I remember being quite a problem. Just disinterested.

Can we hurry up with this kind of an attitude? How would you advise a parent who's about to toss in the towel or afraid to pick up the towel because they look at their kids and think, you don't know my kids.

It's just impossible. Yeah, they're never going to go for this. I can already see them stomping to their room and slamming the door. Yeah, and that's typically a problem. That issue arises when, as you mentioned, when maybe families start a little later.

So, and with my own family, I should mention, I fell at this regularly. I'm no saint at family worship. I'm blessed to have had some good examples, and some men look me in the face and say, how are you shepherding your family?

So I started four or five years ago after I had all my kids. My little monkey was just born, I believe, is when that took place. But so I had, they were younger, but the older kids, they were very confused by it.

They thought, you know, we go to church. Why are we doing this now? So one strategy that I used that the Lord just helped me with and gave me wisdom about is starting slow, starting small. I think a lot of times we have, when a father, let's say, gets convicted about this, and they realize, I haven't been doing this.

I want to do this. I want to see my family. So they plan out an hour and a half worship service for their family for the first night of family worship. And though he's excited about it, and he's read, and he's heard the speaker, whatever it is, the family's not ready yet.

They don't, they're not there yet. So my counsel would be to start with a family meeting and explain the things that you've learned and what the Lord's teaching you, and even ask their forgiveness for failing in that for a number of years or whatever it is, and explain to them, this is what we're going to start to do, and here's the trajectory.

And tonight, I'm going to pray for us. We're going to read Psalm 23. We're going to sing the first stanza of amazing grace. Take five minutes. Give them all hugs afterwards. Tell them how much you love them.

Make it a time where you are being a reflection of God's mercy and goodness on them in a very short time of family worship. And then over time, slowly expand that. Now, that might not work. You might take that advice, and you've still got the slamming doors and the teenagers that are upset.

So I would say this. I think the answer to the question is, should I make them do it? Should we do it even if they don't want to? It's the same answer as if, should I take my children to church on Sunday even if they don't want to do it?

Yes. Now, you don't make your child join the choir, but you make sure he's sitting there next to you and behaving reasonably well. Same with family worship. My kids who have been converted and shown fruit and are growing in the Lord, they have more responsibility during family worship.

I'll have my son Samuel. He'll pray to start us out. My daughter Sophia, she'll start the singing out for us, and we'll all join her. But if I had a child who was obstinate against it, I wouldn't make this child who doesn't want to be here, he has a very bad attitude about it, okay, I want you to start the singing.

Well, that's exasperating them, but I would make sure that they were there and participate. Yeah, yeah. I guess it's like I remember reading with Hudson Taylor's parents long before he was converted. Of course, they were very careful with this, with family worship, with kind of laying truths down in his heart.

And later on, he made the comment that even after conversion, if there has not been this kindling laid up, if there hasn't been this influence, that even conversion, though it's true conversion, you still see the consequences of maybe of neglect, and you see the benefits of not neglecting.

It doesn't make you a Christian, but it's us laying up kindling and pleading with the Lord to send the spark. But one of the things that Taylor's parents really tried to do was to make Sundays the Lord's Day, the sweetest day of the week.

So they were pretty everything, they didn't have a lot of extra money. So Sundays would be the day that they would have a big dessert with a meal. And Sunday was the day that the father would stop work, of course, but he would also spend afternoons with the kids.

He'd take walks with them through the woods. Yeah. So Sunday was like everything they could do to make Sunday the favorite day of the week because it was the day that they gave completely to the Lord.

And there are little ways, like you mentioned, there are little ways that the gathering of a family can be a joyful event, even if the parents are the only ones that are joyful, but at least they can see that this isn't dad trying to become a better dad and he's using us to be a better him, but he actually loves the Lord and he finds joy.

Yes. And it's a great evangelistic tool when our kids look at us and they think, why are you so happy about this God? And I am so disinterested, because they may have been in our culture, they may have already said a sinner's prayer and then they begin to think, and yet I seem unchanged.

I love that example of laying up kindling. I think that's a wonderful way to look at it because the time that we spend with our kids in church or family devotion, family worship, before they are saved is not for naught.

It's not fruitless. The Lord uses that to draw them to himself oftentimes. And I really have never thought of it, but what a precedent that is set before them and what kindling was laid there for an ardent love for the Lord once they are converted.

And we trust the Lord for that. And that's another big question we get about family worship. What if my children aren't Christians? How does that work with family worship? And a question that accompanies that oftentimes is what role should they play in family worship if they aren't Christians?

One thing that I want to emphasize is that the Lord saves whom he will when he wills. And we ought to never demand from the Lord that he save our children by a certain time or in a certain way because we've paid our dues by doing family worship.

We're not, it's not a layaway plan. Family worship isn't a layaway plan that we pay this off and once we get it paid off, our children will be saved. We plead on their behalf. We lay the gospel truths before them and we trust, we're servants in the garden.

We trust the gardener to make the seed of faith, repentance grow in them. We can't look at family worship as an insurance policy or a layaway plan to make our children behave or make our children be Christians.

We pray for that and we hope for that, but it's not a guarantee. Yeah, that's a really helpful point. You know, we homeschooled our children and it's just very easy to find people in churches who have paid a high cost, whether it's homeschooling or family worship.

I mean, they've made choices that were different than what they grew up with. And it is a fundamental aspect of human nature is that you think it was a layaway plan. We think we're owed something. Yeah, and it's like, man, God really failed me or God paid off and that was worth it.

And if you do it like I do it, you'll have great kids too. Look at the formula. If you follow these three steps, then your son will be a preacher when he grows up. Yeah, but how different when a child sees a parent gather, not to bribe God, not to guarantee that my family won't go through the heartbreak that the family down the street's going through, but because my mom and dad love the Lord.

Yeah. And they think it's a privilege to draw near through Christ. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Well, Ryan, we have here your practical guide to family worship, which we've mentioned, but I don't want us to quit the podcast.

Before you just walk us through, what are the basic elements in this? Yeah, yeah, I'd love to. So we spent a lot of time working on this, and this really came out of my own struggle at home, as we've talked about already a bit.

When I started to do family worship with my family, the biggest issue I came up against was, I started out really excited at first and was doing family worship each day, but as life caught up and as it got, the excitement kind of wore off, it became a burden to try to get prepped for it.

It started to become really difficult, and so I'd throw something together quickly, or I just wouldn't do it at all. So I thought, I need something to help me that's there waiting, so that if I don't have any time to prep whatsoever, we have something to open up to look at, and we can have a good, solid, biblical time of family worship.

So that was the start of all of this. That's why I put together a guide to family worship. Now, in this guide, it's simply 30, really what you could say is orders of service for family worship. It includes a Bible reading, which is something that each family chooses what they'd like to do on that, a memory verse, catechism questions, a section from the 1689 Confession of Faith, a written-out Puritan prayer that we've modernized to make more readable, more prayable, and then a hymn, a solid hymn that you can sing together with your family.

So we put that together, and then as we shared this, we realized that some training would be really helpful as well. So we recorded eight teaching sessions, and that's included in the Bible study set, the family worship.

It's called A Practical Guide to Family Worship. It comes with a workbook that goes along with the teaching sessions, and of course the teaching sessions as well. Inside this workbook is the DVD and the digital access code.

So the idea here is eight 25-minute teaching sessions that you could go through really very quickly if you wanted to, or one a week, whatever, whatever you or your group decided. But it kind of lays the groundwork, the foundation for a biblical basis for family worship, how it's been viewed over Christian history, some practical aspects of it, and helps set the stage to get you ready to start using the guide to family worship with your family.

And I should mention, it's really ideal if all of the members of your family, especially the reading members, has their own copy of this. You can do it with one or two if you pass it around, but it's just a lot more convenient.

It works a lot smoother, a lot easier, if everyone has one. It's a tried and true method. It's not the only option out there, but it's one that I've, it's been forged in the fire of the Bush household over many years, and a lot of folks have shared with me how it's been a blessing to them.

One in particular, a brother in a nearby town, he keeps a stack of them handy. Anytime a family comes to him, he's a leader in his church, anytime a family comes to him seeking help, really with anything, he sets them on the path of practicing family worship.

He takes them a few copies, and he shows them how to do it. So it's my hope that this would help families to experience the joy of worshiping the Lord together, day by day. It's been such a joy in my life.

I want other families to experience it. Well, thank you for being here, Ryan. It's really been good to hear, and to hear you give some just real practical counsel on how we can gather, seek the Lord together.

It's been a pleasure.