Improving Family Worship

I want to be careful what I teach my children through the practice of family worship. Learning to sit quietly while the Bible is read, or prayers are said, can be a significant accomplishment for little children, but not if they've only learned to tune out what's going on. Good manners are not the end, but a means. What I want out of family worship is for them to have a focused quiet, like the kind that occurs when eating a favorite meal and all you hear is the work of the fork and spoon.

I've noticed for some time that we've lacked the focus and the enjoyment of mining the Word of the Lord during our times of family worship. Now that my two older children can read well enough, I've taken some steps to try to remedy that.

I've explained to them the ACTS (Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication) model of prayer, and on a small whiteboard I have a column for each category. As the children listen to me read through the Scriptures, I instruct them to tell me things to write down on the board for each area. This forms a large part of our prayer list each evening.

This approach, I pray, will show my children that God's Word is not to be read passively, nor to be read merely as stories, but every time you read the Scripture, you ought to lay your hand upon it and say, "It is mine, and I am to live upon it."