Family Worship II: Still Waters | Behold Your God Podcast

Family Worship as a Simple, Ordinary Means of Grace

Welcome back to the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Teddy James, content producer for Media Gratia. Again, not in John's office this week, so audio, video may be a little different than what you're used to.

We do ask for additional grace in that we will be back in John's office soon, but we're still out of the office because we still wanted to talk again to Ryan Bush. Ryan, very quickly, tell us again, for someone who may have missed last week's episode, who you are and what you do.

Yeah, so my name's Ryan. I live in Hebrew Springs, Arkansas, lead a missions organization called International Church Planters, and the essence of what we do is train pastors in different parts of the world.

So Kenya is a big area that we work in, also Ecuador, a few other spots as well as online. Married, 17 years and five little ones to show for it. A few scars as well. God is good. Thanks for having me on, TJ.

I appreciate it. Hey man, I appreciate you being on, honestly. So last week we had you on and we were talking about family worship. Now, very quickly, and I think you had a really good, easy working definition of exactly what family worship is.

So could you give that to us again? What is family worship? Yeah, so this might be a little different from what I said last week, but it's simple. It's simple, and really all it is is when a family comes together under the leadership of the head of the household to worship the Lord and receive from Him through the ordinary means of grace.

And by that we simply mean through the reading of Scripture, prayer, and singing. Now, last week also we ended talking about this fantastic little book. It's called A Guide to Family Worship. And it has been such a blessing to me and to the rest of the Medio Gratia team.

Every one of us used this in our family worship. If you want to hear kind of how we came about family worship and Ryan, his journey to discovering family worship and my story of discovering family worship, that's all in last week's episode.

Let me encourage you, go back and listen to that. There's some things we're kind of assuming that you've heard and that you understand, so we prove the case. Ryan, I think you could have made a stronger case for family worship, but just not enough examples, I don't think.

I do think there's such a mountain of evidence of really the obligation and the expectation of family worship in the Scriptures and throughout church history. But go back and listen to that. This week I want to get into some of the particulars and some of the real specifics, because Ryan, you and I both have young children.

My oldest is eight and my youngest is one. And your age range is? Yeah, four to fourteen. So if you are listening to this and you think, yeah, but guys, it's probably easy for you guys to talk about family worship because it just goes smooth for you.

I can promise you that's not the case. In fact, that's one of the things that I found so encouraging is, Ryan, when you were talking to me about family worship and you actually have a teaching session that we're working on together, filming that, editing that.

We filmed it last weekend, a couple weeks ago. We're working on editing that. So make sure, listener, viewer, that you're subscribed to all the ways that we talk to you, email and social media platforms, because we want to let you know when that comes out.

Why Family Worship Became Complicated

But Ryan, tell me the story of how the guide to family worship came to be. Yeah, so I, as I mentioned before, I didn't grow up with any sort of understanding at all of what family worship is. And when I was finally introduced to it and was convinced and convicted of it, I was excited.

The Lord really put a burden and an excitement in my heart for shepherding my family. I wanted to. So maybe I was a bit zealous getting going because I thought, this is great. This is something I need to do.

I want to do it well from here on out. So I decided we do family worship every day. If not, maybe let's try it twice a day. I got to make up for lost time here, I thought. I knew family worship should consist of reading Scripture, prayer, singing, and that's simple.

And it seemed simple. And really, when I got started, it started out going well. But what happened is what started out as being simple turned into something complicated. Because to do it once, piece of cake.

I gave a simple outline that someone could do in our last episode. And that's something that someone could do for a few days, a few weeks even. But after a while, you start to have questions. And you start to think, how can I do this in a strategic way, in a way that builds on itself, in a way that does the most good to my family?

And also, it's just difficult. It was for me, anyway, to plan an order of service every day. So, you know, read Scripture. Sure, that's no problem. But, you know, it's a big book. The question came, well, what should we read?

Should we work our way through books of the Bible? So I decided to do that. Okay, well, should I prepare a teaching on that? How long should the teaching be? And right there, you get a lot of intimidation.

Because, all right, well, now if I'm going to teach, well, now there's going to be questions. And what if I'm not ready to answer those questions? And how do I have time to prepare in the midst of working and leading a family and all the things?

Yeah, and not just the teaching, even. It's, you know, how should we pray? Should we do prayer requests? Should everybody pray? Should it just be me? How long should we pray for? What song should we do?

Should we sing it along with a track, a pre-recorded track? Should I try to learn on guitar? My wife can play on piano, maybe. So all of those things, one day or two days, it's okay. You can figure it out.

But day after day of trying to reinvent the will became burdensome. And something that started out as joyful and exciting became this kind of, ah, what am I going to do today? And it turned into this kind of guilt and pressure thing.

And all of the joy went out of it. And also, I want to mention, in terms of the teaching, you don't have to teach in family worship. You don't have to. In fact, whenever I do family worship, even now, what we mainly do is we read Scripture.

We read a chapter. And whatever questions or explanation that I feel needs to be addressed in that, I will. But I don't prepare a sermon each day. And that's part of the helpful thing of the Family Worship Guide.

There's some theological development built into that, and we'll talk about that in a minute. But what I don't want people to think is I've got to prepare a sermon each day. The Scriptures, they're living and active.

Scriptures are sufficient. The Holy Spirit works through the Scriptures. And simply reading them over your family with some brief explanation is a wonderful way to lead family worship. Yeah, I completely agree.

And also, you know, one of the things that I will never forget, my kids asked me a question one night in family worship. And honestly, I can't even remember what the question was now. But I remember my answer.

I don't know. And, you know, their look was not one of shock and shame and, oh, how dare he not know the answer to my question. Yeah. Because I do think, like, there's a lot of fear of that, right? Yeah.

But it was actually, okay, so there's things that even Dad doesn't know. And the thing is, I went and did some research. I went and talked to John. I think I even talked to Chuck or other elder. Asked some people for counsel.

I was able to grow and was encouraged by that. And then I was able to come home the next night to family worship and say, hey, guys, do you remember the question that you asked me last night? They said no.

And I said, well, I do. And here's the question you asked me, and here's the answer that I went and searched. So what that did is it taught them that, one, family worship is serious enough that not only do we do it every, well, not every day, but most days.

But also that Dad thinks about it when we're not having it. Yeah. And that if I ask a question, he's going to go and try to find an answer. Yeah. And that's a great point that you bring up because it takes humility to lead a family.

And you did that. I mean, that's exactly the right thing. In any situation, really. But rather than just rattling off some maybes and some beating around the bush, skip dancing around and answer, it's much better just to be humble ourselves before our family and say, that's a good question.

I don't know. Let me let me look into that a bit and get back with you. But that was part of the problem with me having to develop this feeling like I had to develop a order of service each day. It was almost this battle of also being worried about looking silly, wanting to provide something good for them.

A lot of times not having the time to do it. And, well, I don't really have anything good to offer. So we just wouldn't do it sometimes. And, you know, there was a little bit of pride there that I needed to work through and humble myself.

And it takes a ton of humility to lead a family consistently and faithfully. But that was what led me to to start to put something together, because what I realized I needed was something that would provide accountability for me, something that would provide structure in our times of family worship, and also something that would keep us in deep waters and not settling for shallow stuff each day because I just didn't have the time to develop something deep.

So, you know, it was a period of two years or so of trying different elements of family worship, different order and different amount of time on each one to finally come down to what we have in a guide to family worship.

But it was a process. It was a process. Yeah. And before we get into the elements, I just want to kind of give a word of warning. When we're talking about going through the elements, it can seem to be very clean and very, you know, very orderly.

But that is not always how family worship goes, right? You've got, you know, you have kids, you know, teenagers down to four years old. I've got very young kids. And listen, family worship is not sterile.

It is not clean. It is often messy. Ron, can you just offer some encouragement to the parents, to the family who, you know, maybe they started doing family worship last week, and now they're kind of experiencing some discouragement because it just doesn't go the way that they intended it to go.

Faithfulness in Messy Family Worship

Yeah. Yeah, you said that's not always how it goes, nice and clean and orderly. What you should say is that is not ever how it goes. That is true. Don't give them the impression that it usually goes that way.

But no, it's, you know, you're dealing with, and every family is different. So my experience and TJ's experience might be different than yours. But I have five kids, four to 14. And particularly my youngest, Seth, he is a Tasmanian devil half the time.

And the other half, he's a snuggle bunny. You never know what you're going to get. So in family worship, it depends on the day of the week of exactly how it goes. But here's what you have to realize is your goal is not to have this nice, neat packaged family worship service that someone looking in would say, Oh, wow, look at how obedient and orderly and beautifully they sing in their family worship.

If your goal is to look good to people who are looking from the outside, then you're missing the point. You're going to have to be OK with with, you know, little ones running around and Cheerios being spilt and all sorts of wonderfully frustrating changes and distractions in family worship.

It's just not as clean as maybe we'd like it as we'd like it to be or envision it to be. Yeah. So listen, don't ever let that be a discouragement to you. In all honesty, we have an enemy who seeks to discourage as often as possible.

And, you know, like you said earlier, Ron, leading a family requires humility. And so pursue humility. We're not our goal and our aim is not perfection. It's faithfulness. And it is through the simple, repeated input of scripture and praying over our family and these very simple things that, again, there's no magic in them.

There's no magic in the formula. It's the faithfulness of God. And really, it's that's all there is to it. But speaking of the elements, last week, you had mentioned that there were three elements that that really incorporate family worship.

And that's reading the word of God, praying and singing a hymn. Yeah. Now, when we open this, Ryan, there are six. There's six things, not three. Where did the other three come from? And why do we include them?

Scripture Memory, Catechism, and Confessional Depth

Yeah, I'm sorry about that. I'm already complicating matters. Yeah, I can explain that easily. And I think it'll make sense. But let me also mention when we give a I don't know if you've ever given a dog a bath.

I've had dogs where they like it. They'll sit in there and you scrub them down and get them nice and clean. But then I've had others where I had to put the headlock, a headlock and force them to me. Now, both the end result, hopefully, usually is the same.

They both get clean. One's more difficult than the other. Now, it's not a perfect parallel, but you'd be surprised how much, especially those unruly little lambs that are running around and maybe causing some distraction during family worship.

You'd be surprised how much they're taking in. I was blown away last night. My wife and I and the kids were in our minivan coming back from my daughter's volleyball game. And our eight year old son just out of nowhere was just started kind of singing to himself.

And can it be that I should? And we kind of looked back, you know, it's a song we sing as a family, you know, and he that's just something that's in his heart and his mind. And his his mind just kind of naturally went to that.

That's incredible. Yeah, that's the kind of thing that happens when families spend time together day in and day out, availing themselves to these wonderful songs of the faith, these wonderful prayers and the scriptures.

Now, really, I've only added two elements into the family worship to extra really only one. I'm going to I'm going to give I'm going to talk my way out of this. So the first two elements are really one.

The first element is a scripture reading. And the second one is a memory verse. So we're going to combine those. That is still under the the umbrella of scripture. Now that the the the third and fourth elements, that's the new one that's introduced.

It's the catechism and the 1689. And one of the neat things is the catechism questions and the 69. A lot of days they go together, like the questions that you're reading. They correspond to the the confessional reading down below.

So those kind of are the same sort of element, just broken out two different ways to look at it. And what the reason I added that is because I really wanted some theological development in our times of family worship.

I wanted my kids to learn how to handle theological concepts, learn these theological terms. And for it to be a spur of questions in the times of family worship. And that's actually where we usually have the most discussion is in the confession, because there'll be words or concepts that are confusing, which it's good.

I want it to be. I want to be challenged by those. And we talk about them. The other thing is that the catechism. It is shocking how these little kids can remember these questions. My four year old, he knows questions one to 20 about.

We go every night in bed. Now, you know, he mumbles some of the answers out and he has his own twist on some of the answers. Now, they're not wrong. He'll just add. He'll kind of say it in his own way.

But he knows questions one through 20. I can ask him right now in how many persons does this one God exist? And he'll say it in three persons. You know, he'll get his little father, the son, the Holy Spirit.

He knows the answers that my six year old son, he knows questions one through 35 ish. And that's it's not like we go flashcards. It's because we with those two in particular, I'll go over them every single night as they go to bed.

We go through the questions together. We sing a few hymns together because I'm trying to prepare them for times of family worship is what that is. But so, yeah, I'm sorry. The theological development is kind of the fourth element that I've added in there to to add some depth to our times of family worship in the family worship guide.

Yeah, and I think that they're so helpful. I if you've never catechized your children, which is something that's been a weakness for us. Again, one of the benefits of this is that it's helping us to be consistent with that.

And the catechism is not just helpful for our kids. It's helpful for my wife and for myself. It is helping us to articulate what we do believe, what we see in the scriptures. Yeah, but it articulates it in a very succinct manner.

And also it gives it gives a framework through which we can have discussions with our children. And we found that incredibly helpful as well. One of the questions last night is my absolutely absolute favorite catechism question.

And it says, why do you need why do you need a priest? It's about Christ being the prophet, priest and king. Why do you need a priest? Because I am ignorant. That's my favorite question, because I am.

I need Christ to make me wise and to salvation through the scriptures. And I like that question because it forces me to humble myself. And I like it when it falls on me to read it. So I can tell my kids, you know, they kind of giggle at it.

They think it's funny. And I bring to their attention. I say, you know, I say this and I mean it. Your daddy needs the scriptures to make him wise and to salvation. I teach you kids and I explain a lot to you.

But anything that I get from my own wisdom or my own experience, you need to question that. What I really want to give you is what comes from the scriptures. So those questions and the catechism and the confession, as well as the other parts, those sorts of elements really produce some discussion.

And it's where I typically jump off to do some direct teaching in times of family worship. Yeah, and they are. They're just so helpful. Now, the next section that we have is a section of prayers. And these are slightly updated, slightly just kind of made a little easier for children.

But where do they come from? They come from a variety of original Puritan writings. And when I say original, I mean original. I went back to where the S's look like F's. And you have to sort through all of that.

The Value of Puritan Prayers in Family Worship

Yeah, so Louis Bailey, Charles Spurgeon, Richard Baxter, Augustus. Top lady. Top lady. I wasn't sure how to say that last name. That's how John says it. That's the only way I know how to say it. So we'll just defer to him.

And I'll tell you this. Louis Bailey has become one of my absolute favorites. I'd never read anything by Louis Bailey before, but his prayers are so warm and so sweet and so Christocentric. Yeah, yeah, they're really good.

And it's my favorite part. I think you mentioned that might be one of your favorite parts of the guide. I love the prayers. And what I really love is to hear my kids read them. I like to read them as well.

But to hear the voice of my wife and my children say these just wonderfully put phrased expressions of the gospel and the care of the Lord is nourishing to me. So, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And the reason I didn't just say pray.

And definitely impromptu prayer should be a part of family worship. We start with one. We end with one. But, again, this has to do with I'm wanting to enlarge my family's ways of worshiping the Lord. If we only pray out of our own mind, then we tend to just pray in the same way, using the same phrases, praying the same things.

But if we imitate the prayers of some of these faithful saints of the past, it really opens us up to pray in new ways to include more of the scriptural promises and truths that maybe we've neglected in our prayer lives before.

Yeah, absolutely. And also, there's always a question. How do you pray? I mean, how do you learn to pray without looking to the prayers? I remember I had such a deep conviction that I wanted to learn to pray in a way that honored God, in a way that God wants his people to pray.

And this was before I was introduced to the Puritans. It was before I really had an affection for church history. And someone told me, well, you have the Bible. Go look. And so I read through all of the scriptures, marking all of the prayers in scripture.

And it was such a helpful thing. And this is not scripture. Don't hear me say that. But it is so incredibly helpful as well. We get to hear these giants of the faith from the past as they're addressing their Lord.

And it is, like I say, it's so sweet. It's so applicable to our own lives as well as to the lives of our family. So we've just got a few minutes left here, Ryan. We end with a hymn. And a legitimate question.

I, as a young man, I got to the point that I hated hymns. I'm just being completely honest. We sang the exact same seven hymns. And we sang them over and over again. And I just had no love for hymns. Now, hymns are wonderful and beautiful and sweet.

So I know why you would specifically say hymns. But I'd like for you to articulate why, particularly why hymns. Yeah. I'm trying to think of strong enough terms to put this in. Because I used to look down upon hymns.

And honestly, during a time in my life where I was just a weaker, more immature Christian, and I preferred more experiential sort of worship and songs that made me feel something without having to make me think of something.

And I'm not trying to imply that anybody who listens to those are immature. But that was certainly my experience. And when I began to truly understand the depth and the beauty and the power of the gospel in my life and the work of God in my life and the grace of Jesus Christ, it created, it was like a fire.

And those songs that did not lead my soul back to the still waters of the gospel, I just didn't want to sing anymore. And the songs that did lead my soul back to Christ turned out to be these hymns. Because they restate...

Now, not all hymns. I'm not saying all hymns are good. There are many hymns that need to be rejected as well. But many of these old hymns, even though they're somewhat archaic in the language, they express the gospel in such forceful and new and clear ways that they transcend time.

They are just as relevant and powerful today as when they were written two, three hundred years ago. So the reason that I think we should sing those in family worship and for that matter in church, but specifically thinking of kids, because that's typically the objection is, well, you know, the kids don't understand that.

And it's a lot of words. I can't really remember all of it. I want to give my kids songs that they can grow into. I want them to learn these songs over the weeks and months and years that they're under my care, so that when they leave my authority, they leave my household, and when one of my sons is out and he is helping his wife through a miscarriage, I want the song Rock of Ages to come to his mind.

Or when my daughter is looking to get married and she's scared and nervous that the song Just As I Am comes to her mind. And here's the thing. Hymns are tough at first. They are. That's just the fact of the matter.

But then you look up and your kid, after volleyball, is singing And Can It Be to himself in the car. So my point is this. They learn the songs. My four-year-old, his favorite song for a long time was the Rocket Song, Rock of Ages.

He called it the Rocket Song because in his mind it was about a rocket. Well, he's moved past that. He now understands it's about a rock, the Rock of Ages. He doesn't understand all of that, but he's learning that song now.

And as he grows in maturity and wisdom, he will grow into that song. Another just practical thing is, for a number of reasons, a lot of the songs are in the public domain. And you don't have to worry about breaking copyright laws in your church or in your home or printing them out and dealing with all that stuff.

That's also just a helpful element of that. And they're so readily available. That's the other part. If you don't know how to sing a hymn, there's so many recordings out there. In fact, that's the case with us.

There are a lot of these hymns that we sing in church, but without having the help of a piano and a congregation singing along with us, we don't remember the tune. And so we just pull up a YouTube video.

Media Gratia, we've created a Spotify playlist just with these songs in them. And the goal of that is to help with this. So again, and I know we've spent a lot of time talking about this guide. I hope you don't come across this and think that, oh, this podcast is just supposed to be about the guy.

It's not. It's just we want to introduce you to family worship. The whole way that this began is, again, with the five episodes that John and I did, where we discussed how do you present the gospel? How do you present the doctrine of regeneration to young children?

And, you know, we looked at so many sermons by Philip Doddridge and by Edward Lawrence and Robert Murray McShane and all of these men. And we gave some wonderful examples of how to do that. But we wanted to end it with this.

How do you present the gospel to your children? It's not just one conversation. It's day in, it's day out. And really the best tool that you have to speak the gospel to your family is family worship. And this, put together by you, Ryan, is just a wonderfully helpful tool that you can have in your fingertips every day to do just that.

Family Worship, the Gospel, and the Behold Your God Resource

There are many ideas about God in our culture today. Many are not grounded in Scripture, and some are actually the opposite of what Scripture teaches. The best way to identify these ideas is to go back to the Bible and allow God to speak for himself.

Learn how God describes his character, his work in salvation, his definition of repentance, and much more through the 12-week Multimedia Bible Study, Behold Your God, Rethinking God Biblically. The heart of this study is its daily devotional workbook participants study at home in preparation for the small group session.

Each session is led by a video containing three segments. First, a biographical sketch of an individual from Christian history who was gripped by the reality of God you were studying that week. Second is a sermon from Dr. John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church, New Albany.

Lastly, are interviews from contemporary Christian pastors and authors who help apply the lessons from the week. To learn more or to see what others are saying about Behold Your God, Rethinking God Biblically, visit Mediagracie .org or click the link in the description of this episode.

Well, again, I want to thank Ryan for his time and for coming and hopping on a computer call. And again, for your grace, I know the audio and the video is not quite what you're used to with our podcast.

So we do appreciate the grace that you afford us there. As with every week, we want to end this week with a prayer. And like I mentioned last week, each of these prayers comes from this guide because it's been so helpful and so impactful to me and to my family that we wanted to kind of embrace that and install it into the podcast.

So this week's is a prayer from Philip Dodridge. Oh, great, eternal, original and author of all created beings and happiness. I adore you who has made man a creature capable of religion and taught us to say, where is God our maker?

We lament that degeneracy has spread over the whole human race, which has turned our glory into shame and has rendered the forgetfulness of God unnatural as it is so common and so universal a disease.

Holy Father, we know it is your presence and your teaching alone that can reclaim your wondering children and impress a scene of divine things on the heart. Amen. My name is Ryan Bush, and it's my privilege to lead you through eight teaching sessions dealing with the theme of the spiritual life of the family.

Now, our specific focus will be the practice of family worship. Matthew Henry said, turn your families into little churches. Now, I've personally discovered the joy of taking up that exhortation and putting plans to it and then carrying those plans out day by day.

It's my desire to help you do that as well. I want to encourage you to practice faithfully family worship, family religion, and also want to give you some instruction to help you do that on a day to day basis.