Family worship

“ The true family consists of husband, wife, and children. And that the family may be a home, union and peace must dwell there. To have this, religion must be the prevailing spirit of the family. Anything and everything that tends to keep alive and promote this, should be used and encouraged, and there is nothing that has a more happy tendency in this direction than regular and stated family worship. Therefore family worship ought to be established in every Christian home. There are three different kinds of prayer that should be observed in the home. ”

“ Is there, out of heaven, a sight more deeply interesting than a family, gathered at morning or evening prayer, where the worship is what it ought to be?"
It is hardly to be supposed that any pious heads, or pious members, of American households, are in doubt whether family worship be a duty. We are rather to take it for granted, as a duty universally acknowledged among Christians, nature itself serving to suggest and teach it, and the word of God abundantly confirming and enforcing it, both by precept and example. ”

“ Family worship furnishes opportunity for direct religious instruction. When the home life has its regular institution, as regular as meals and play, the formality, the apparent abnormality of conversation about religion, is absent. Children expect and look forward to the period when the family will lay other things aside to think on the eternal values. Their questions in the breathing-space that always ought to follow worship become perfectly natural and sincere. ”

“ Family worship is a most amiable and becoming thing when performed according to truth. What a pity that so few families show such zeal for the worship of God as those apostate Israelites did for that of their idols! ”

“ But the fact today is that family worship is so rare as to be counted phenomenal wherever found. The instances, though not general, were common a generation ago. Many are living to whom family worship afforded the largest part of their conscious and formal religious education. Following the morning meal, or, occasionally, the evening meal, the family waited while the father, or the mother in his absence, read a portion of the Scriptures and offered prayer. ”

“ They answer the bell for prayers as they answer the bell for coals: for exactly three minutes in the day you all kneel together on one carpet—and, the desires and petitions of the servants and masters over, the rite called family worship is ended. ”

“ Placing the Home Under the Care of God.—There is a need of the reinstatement of the custom of family worship; the place and time where and when the family is commended to God and placed under His care. As children of the great household of God we need constantly to keep in touch with our Father. ”

“ It is well known that in some Christian families in the world, it is the custom to make the reading of the scriptures a part of the family worship, and our Elders when visiting in such families are called upon to read the scripture lesson before engaging in prayer—an example that could be followed with profit in our own family worship. ”

“ We must solemnly commit ourselves, our families, and all our family affairs, to God's guidance and care, must pray for his presence and blessing, must devote ourselves and all ours to his glory, and must resolve both that we put away iniquity far from our tabernacles and that we and our houses will serve the Lord both in the duties of family worship and in all instances of gospel obedience. ”

“ Parents need to see the values in family worship. We have been insisting on the primary importance of the religious interpretation of the family as an 128institution, on the power of the religious motive, and the atmosphere of religion. But wherever there is a truly religious motive and a permanent religious atmosphere these will find definite expression in acts easily recognized as religious. Love is the motive and atmosphere of the true home, but love blossoms into words and bears fruit in a thousand deeds. The life of love dies without reality in act. ”

“ Family worship has declined until, at least in the United States, the percentage of families practicing daily worship in the home is so small as to be negligible. If this meant that a general institution of religion had passed out of existence the fact would be highly significant. But it is well to remember that family worship has never been a general institution. ”

“ The reality of that feeling is stimulated in the daily, common life of the right family; the hour of worship is one out of many definite forms of its concrete expression. It is the form which gathers up the totality of feeling and aspiration into an act of worship and praise toward God, the Father of all families. It is evident there cannot be true worship in the family that is irreligious in its essential qualities, in its character, in its ideals and atmosphere. ”

“ Just as the individual must not only feel the religious emotion but must also do the thing called for, so must this united personality of the family give expression to its faith and aspiration, its motives and emotions, in such a manner that, acting as a social unit, all can together put the inner life into the outer form. The social value of family worship is the strongest reason for its maintenance. It is the united act129 of the family group, the one in which group consciousness is expressly directed to the highest possible aims. ”

“ Really everything depends at first on how much we desire to have family worship, whether we see its beauty and value in the knitting of home ties, in the elevation of the family spirit, and in the quickening of the religious ideas. We find time to eat simply because we must ”

“ Every period of worship brings the family into unity at an ideal level.
The expression of religion in definite forms is necessary for children, too, as furnishing a means by which they can manifest their feeling of the higher meaning of family life. ”

“ There are many bonds which bind the family together—the bonds of sympathy, of common pleasures, of common sorrows; when a death occurs, all the members go into mourning; when there is a birth or a wedding, the whole family rejoices. Then above all is the family deity, some image of Vishnu, the preserver; his place is in a separate room, generally known as the room of God, or in well-to-do families in a temple attached to the house, where the family performs its daily worship. ”

“ In an age when, amongst our peasantry in particular, family prayer is so extensively and mournfully neglected—when the farmer, the manufacturer, the mechanic, not to mention the more elevated orders, have ceased to obey the injunction laid upon all Presbyterian parents in baptism—it is refreshing to look back to the time when the taking of the book, as it was termed, returned as regularly as the rising and the setting of the sun—when the whole household convened together, morning and evening, to worship the God of their fathers. ”

“ Note, Sometimes those that have the smallest estates have the most numerous progeny; but he that sends mouths will be sure to send meat. 2. That religion shall continue in the family: " He shall not want a man to stand before me, to serve me." Though they are neither priests nor levites, nor appear to have had any post in the temple service, yet in a constant course of regular devotion, they stand before God, to minister to him. Note, (1.) The greatest blessing that can be entailed upon a family is to have the worship of God kept up in it from generation to generation. ”

“ The human part of the family brings in a new member, but it has to be assured that the divine part is willing to accept her before the step taken can be regarded as complete. She has to enter the family in such a way as to be able to share in its sacra, i.e. in the worship of the household spirits, the ancestors in their tombs, or in any special cult attached to the family. ”

“ The family may help directly toward the realization of this ideal by an insistence on the family conception and the family program in the church. Bring the children with you to the church and seek to find there a place for each as natural as the place he occupies in the home. If the church makes no such provision, if it has no place for children, in the name of our wider spiritual family relationships we must demand it. Let the voice of the family be heard insisting on suitable buildings and specially designed worship for child-life—suitable forms of service and activity. ”

“ That is what the church meeting and service ought to be: our Father's larger family getting together on the day of the life that makes them one. For the child the church school and the children's service of worship are their immediate points of vital touch with the church family. If we think of the day as affording148 us the pleasure of social mingling with friends and members of that family, Sunday morning will cease to be a period of unwilling observance of empty duties. ”

“ The father must speak out of the children. The proper instruction of children is their most direct way to heaven, and hell is not more easily earned than by neglecting them! They were taught to pray and to read the Scriptures and other devotional books in the presence of the family. Particularly during their meals did he address them in impressive, paternal admonitions. Morning and evening he assembled his numerous family, house-teachers, guests, and domestics, to worship. ”

“ Family life was consecrated. Men and women belonged to the43 new order with their whole households. Religion became largely a family matter. The worship that had been confined to the temple now made an altar in every home and a holy of holies in the midst of every family. The scriptures that belonged to the synagogue now belonged in the home. Above all, this family existed for the purposes taught by Jesus, that men might grow in brotherhood toward the likeness of the divine Fatherhood. ”

“ Children may not understand all the reading nor enter into the motives for all parts of the petition, but they do feel that this moment is the one in which the family enters a holy place. They feel that God is real and that their family life is a part of his whole care and of his life. One short period of natural reverence sends light and calm all131 through the day. Where the home is the place where true prayer is offered, the family is the group which meets in an act of worship ”

“ They must answer to God for every blessing there enjoyed. If they turn a deaf ear and a cold heart to all the entreaties of their parents, and resist those saving influences which are brought to bear upon them, and as a consequence, become outcasts from society and from heaven, then let me warn them that, every prayer they heard at the family altar, every lesson given, every admonition delivered, and every holy example set them, by their pious parents, will be ingredients in that bitter cup which it will take eternity for them to exhaust! Oh, children of the Christian home! ”

“ Home-sympathy will prompt to family devotion. The latter is the fruit of the former. A prayerless home is destitute of religious sympathy. The family demands prayer. Its relation to God, its dependence and specific duties, involve devotion. Communion with God constitutes a part of the intercourse and society of home. The necessity of family prayer arises out of the home-constitution and mission. ”

“ The custom of having family prayers is held in honor wherever there is real Christian life, and it is the one thing which more than any other knits together the loose threads of a home, and unites its various members before God. The religious service in which parents, children, and friends daily join in praise and prayer is at once an acknowledgment of dependence on the Heavenly Father and a renewal of consecration to his work in the world. ”

“ Is it any wonder, when we consider this common disagreement between the prayers of the family, and all other concerns, ends, and enjoyments of the common life beside, that so many fine shows of family piety are yet followed by so much of godless, and even reprobate, character in the children? ”

“ The highest family life is that consecrated by Religion. The household where God is acknowledged, from which the members go regularly together to the house of God, within whose walls is heard the voice of prayer and praise, is the ideal Christian family. In such a family the father is the priest, daily offering up prayers for those whom God has given him, at the family altar. He makes it his duty, and regards it as his privilege to bring up his children in "the nurture and admonition of the Lord," and by personal example and teaching to train them up as members of the household of faith. ”

“ The members of the family look confidently to the head; and this sense of dependence favours, at the same time, the proper reception of that which is dearest to mankind, namely, the religious feeling. If the life of the family is permeated by a noble piety, a sincere religious faith will take root in the hearts of the children. ”

“ Do the women, when they pray, remember their husbands? Do you pray for brother Brigham? Yes, you should always pray for him. But when you pray for him, do you pray also for your own husband, that he may have the inspiration of the Almighty to lead and govern his family as the lord? Do you uphold your husband before God as your lord? ”

“ Prayer is the very soul of holiness.
It has been the sense of the Church from the days of the apostles to our own, that this first miracle of our Lord, performed at the urgent solicitation of His Mother, gave a new and solemn sanction to the institution of matrimony. The sanctity and happiness of family life, the unity and permanence of the tie which, in the Christian home, binds to each other the father and the mother, the parents and the children, is the foundation of Christian society, Christian civilization. ”