Dial In with Jonny Ardavanis - Family Worship Guide: How to Lead Daily Bible Time | Dr. Joel Beeke

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

Dr. Beeke shares his proven method for leading meaningful family worship in just 5-15 minutes a day. Learn the four essential elements of family devotions that can transform your home's spiritual life, whether you're newly married, raising teens, or a grandparent.In this powerful teaching:The biblical foundation for family worshipSimple 4-part framework: Bible reading, prayer, discussion, and singingHow to teach children to pray using the ACTS methodPractical tips for different age groupsWhat to do if you're starting lateResources for leading family devotions confidentlyFeatured Resource: Family Worship Bible Guide (available at heritagebooks.org)Dr. Beeke shares personal stories and practical wisdom from decades of pastoral experience to help you establish this vital spiritual discipline in your home.Watch VideosVisit the Website Buy Consider the LiliesFollow on Instagram

Family worship is where you set aside 5 to 15 minutes, I would say, per day, where you sit down with your family, you're reading the Word of God daily, you're calling on God daily, you're talking to your children about the Word of God daily, and you're singing God's praise daily. I just feel so strongly, having seen the benefits of family worship, that when families do this, it actually changes the whole chemistry of the family. Dr. Beeky, thank you for sitting down. Once again, you know, one of the things that you're known for and one of the great priorities of your life and ministry is family worship.

I want you to talk about what that even means for someone that maybe is listening that's never grown up in an environment that prioritizes family worship. I want you to talk about what that even means for someone that maybe is listening that's never grown up in an environment that prioritizes family worship, would even be familiar with that term. Give me maybe a threefold answer. What is family worship? Why its importance? And then how do we do it? How do we do family worship? And maybe someone even that's disqualifying it saying, I'm a young married, I don't even have children yet, so this isn't important. Maybe just for the whole breadth of grandparents, newly marrieds, and everyone in between. Okay. That's quite a question. The what, the why, and the how. Okay. So what is family worship? Family worship is where you set aside a portion of time, whether it's five minutes, whether it's

maybe up to 15 minutes. It's not long, but five to 15 minutes, I would say, per day, where you sit down with your family and you read the Bible together. You're to do that, 2 Timothy 3, 14 through 17. You pray together. You're to do that, 1 Timothy 4, 4 and 5. And you talk to your children about the chapter you've read. So you're to do that, Deuteronomy 6, 6 and 7. You have to do it, in fact, diligently. And then where you sing together the praises of God. Psalm 118.15 says we're to do that. So all four parts of family worship are biblical. So you're reading the Word of God daily, you're calling on God daily, you're talking to your children about the Word of God daily, and you're singing God's praise daily. So that's the what. The how, that's a big deal, because for some men it's very difficult to lead family worship as the head of the household. But today there are good helps that can help you that

make it not so formidable. And you just start. You start with maybe four minutes, family worship, just really short. Read a couple verses, have a short prayer, try to stammer one or two things to your kids about it, and then you sing. But particularly today, there are good little books to help you. I myself have written a little

book on family worship. You can read it in two hours, about 90 pages, where I look at how to do all four of these things. But let me just summarize it real quickly. So when it comes to Scripture reading, I would always recommend that everyone who's able to read in your family shares in the reading. You want everyone involved. And when kids get to be nine years or older, you could just read through the whole Bible and you can explain it to them. When they're very young, you want to focus on the stories of the Bible. And then when you pray, we always, I mean, there's many ways to do that, of course. We always use the Acts formula. Adoration, you tell God how wonderful He is, you adore Him. Confession, you confess your sins. Thanksgiving, so many causes for Thanksgiving. And supplications,

you spread out your needs to God. And so I would also teach our children how to do that. And when we did family worship, I always did the opening prayer, and I had my wife and my children take turns with the closing prayer. And when they were very young, actually when they were three years old and sitting in my lap, I would teach them the Acts formula already then, but I would actually verbalize, whisper in their ear what they should pray, and then they would pray it out loud. And it made them feel actually quite important. They felt like they were doing the daddy's prayer. And when they were four years old, I just had them start praying.

And it's surprising as a four-year-old what they can come up with in prayer. And then by the time they were seven, I just said to them, and then I would help them maybe with the last half of the prayer or so, but by the time they were seven, they would be praying the whole prayer following the X formula. And the Holy Spirit alone can teach your children to pray, of course, but you're teaching them the form of prayer, the important things to say in prayer, and so that when God does save them, whether they're five or whether they're 17, prayer isn't foreign to them. They're used to praying out loud, and that's a great help in their spiritual pilgrimage. And then in terms of

instructing the children, that third part of family worship, a number of us got together and wrote a book called Family Worship Bible Guide, in which we took two or three major takeaways from each chapter and just put them in one paragraph with a question at the end of each of them. And this book is just a huge help, huge help to dad. There's literally tens of thousands of families that have had their family worship transformed by this. A lot of fathers have thanked us, thanked Reformation Heritage Books for producing this book. And what it does is after you read the Bible chapter, you just read one of those two or three takeaways, and you stop when you read the question. And you say, Calvin, what do you think the answer is? Or maybe your wife just jumps in and starts and gives an answer.

Or one of the kids spontaneously gives an answer. And you just talk about it, maybe for one minute, maybe for two minutes. And then you go to the next question, two, three minutes. And sometimes kids will take it in a different direction. That's okay, because the important thing is every day you're talking about real things. Every day you're talking about the Word of God to your children. And the beautiful thing is, if you go through the whole Bible this way in three or four years, you'll be talking with your children about every subject under the sun. And so when your children grow up and you give that daughter away to another man, you won't have any regrets that there's anything that you should have talked to your daughter about

that you didn't because it popped up at family worship. And then the last thing, of course, is you want to sing together. The Puritans always said, do that last in family worship because singing remains on the memory the longest. And you want to go into the day humming that tune, thinking those thoughts. And so we sang the Psalms a lot because they're so God-centered, but we also sang classic hymns. You find your own way there, but you want to sing something that is a fitting way to close out the family worship. Now, what would you say to the family that goes, maybe that relegates and delegates the responsibility of instructing their children to the church. My kids go to a Christian school, they go to church on Sunday

mornings and on Wednesday evenings. Why is this so important? Maybe just address that misconception that the raising up of your kids is something that the church does for you. Yeah. So you need to understand what parenting is. Parenting, you, dad, are to be a prophet, priest, and king in your own home. You're to teach your children, you're to pray for your children, you're to guide your children. And what that means is that when your children are not present with you, you're still responsible for them. So what you're doing when you give them over to the church to teach them, that is an assistance to you. But you still have to make sure that that church is very sound and teaches according to the Bible. Same thing even when you have a babysitter come in. You don't just take an unbelieving babysitter who's going to swear in front of your kids and be irreverent and be ungodly.

No, no. That babysitter is not taking your place of raising your kids, but that babysitter is assisting you for those three hours so you make sure that that babysitter has a belief system that's fairly similar to yours. Same thing with a Christian school. In other words, you're responsible for your children 24-7, and one of your great responsibilities is to teach them. Now, if you turn that all over to the church and the Christian school, here's what's going to happen. Your kids are going to say, oh, how we get all this Bible stuff at church and we get it at school. But in real life, in the home, my dad doesn't say anything to me about it. So this is all fake stuff. But if

you are focused on the scriptures in your home, you see, then the church and the Christian school are just assisting you and are reinforcing what you're doing. So children have a fully consistent pattern in their whole way of life that this book is the truth. And this is what life is all about. And I need it every day. And my dad talks to me about it every day. The Christian school teacher talks to me about it every day. And every time we go to church, the pastor's talking to me about it. And maybe elders are teaching me in catechism class. It's all one consistent pattern.

And that has a way of, with the Holy Spirit's blessing, of course, of really convicting kids and turning them to Christ alone for salvation. So helpful. And I think even as I think through with my own daughters, it's easy for me as a pastor to assume that they're going to glean what they need to glean when they hear me preaching on Sunday mornings. But the most important sermon I'm going to preach is every night in my home, you know, to a degree. And obviously, people of God need to be fed the Word of God.

But I think that priority can even get lost amongst pastors is to go, well, my kids know I teach the Bible. They know I love the Bible. They see me studying the Bible to preach it to other people. But they never are there to just in the evenings, that priority. You know, you hit on something big here. I was at a pastor's conference once with 1800 pastors and talking on family worship. And afterwards in the Q&A, I was just astonished to find out that a lot of pastors aren't doing family worship and they're just assuming that kind of thing. And what a tragedy that is, because they

got all the skill sets to do it very well, and they should be doing it. And a lot of pastors weren't even praying privately with their wives. They prayed in front of their family, but no, no, no. You need private time with your wife, where you're also pouring out your soul before God just with her as the head of the household. And together, you're parenting these children. But you have your own relationship. You need to pray for each other and with each other. And, you know, all of our kids are now married.

And so we do family worship just like our kids are at home. But it's just my wife and me. And I just love it, you know. It bonds you together as a family, but also as a married couple. Yeah. Well, thank you, Dr. Beeky. I'm so thankful for even the encouragement

and the challenge to do that. It's necessary. It's biblical. It's not a novel idea. It's a biblical reality that we're to raise them up in the word of God while in the midst of the walking, you know, in the midst of the walking, the sleeping, when they wake, it's not just an everyday thing, it's a throughout

the day thing that needs to gild the life of the believer and the family. Yeah, yeah. So let me just add a personal note here, Jonathan. When our oldest was three years old, I got an invitation to go to South Africa and speak on family worship and among other things. And I thought, well, that will be quite easy for me because I grew up in the old Dutch reform tradition where my dad always did prayer. We read the Bible at every meal, actually. And then we closed in prayer again. But on Sunday nights, he would instruct us for quite a while. So, I mean, he did do that. But day by day, there wasn't a lot of instruction from the reading. But I began to read to prepare for this talk.

And I read the Reformers. Then I read the Puritans. Wow. My eyes were open. I just kept reading. I couldn't stop preparing this talk. And I came to my wife couldn't stop preparing this talk. And I came to my wife and I said, this talk is impacting me greatly. We've got to change our family worship. I've got to be speaking to the children every day from the passage read,

and we've got to incorporate singing. And so thank God I had that opportunity to talk when our kids were only three and two and one. So we changed right there. And I went to South Africa and I gave this talk. And I just want to share with you what happened because it was very special. Most special talk I ever gave in my entire life in terms of immediate fruit. There was a president there from Pachastrom University at the time, 25,000 students. And after I gave the talk, I went to my room and everyone else went to lunch. And when I got back to lunch, like, you know, when lunch is going on, everybody's chattering away. And it was deadly quiet and nobody was eating.

Everybody was just sitting there. So I thought something's wrong. I whispered to the guy next to me, what's going on? Well, he said, the president of Potsdam just stood up and just began to weep and said, you know, he had failed as a parent in doing the main thing in raising his children, doing family worship. And he didn't even know it was a lost discipline today. He didn't even know that the Reformers or Puritans did it. But this was like 30 years ago now, and the days of the old cassette tapes, you remember them? And he said, I want every single pastor here to order a cassette tape

of this talk for every single family in your church. And he was just weeping, and it just made a profound impression. And then as we were eating lunch, he walked over to me and he asked me to turn this into a book, which I did, and to speak on it as much as possible all around the world, which I did. And so this man greatly impacted me in his response. And it became something that became part of my DNA. I just feel so strongly having seen the benefits of family worship that when families do this, it actually changes the whole chemistry of the family. Now, you mentioned one thing with this man who felt that deep sense of regret. Maybe just for a moment, touch on that.

You know, let's say hypothetically, I'm a parent. I got a 15-year-old. I miss those years of every night instruction, praying with them on my lap. I'm not putting a 15-year-old on my lap, you know, like, or I'm a grandpa or my kids are out of the home. What now? You know? Yeah. So the Bible has a wonderful,

wonderful verse that applies to so many things. God will restore the years that the locusts have eaten. So what you need to do is you need to start right away. So I would go home to that 15 year old and say, look, I read a book or I heard a talk or something on family worship, and I know I need to do it. And son, I'm sorry. Please forgive me for not doing it. And please join with me. I'm going to start very small, just going to be a few minutes. After dinner, probably in the evening,

and instead of just saying a quick prayer, we're going to pray and we're going to read a few verses from the Bible. And I'm going to read maybe just even one point from the Family Worship Bible Guide. And then, which by the way, you can get the Family Worship Bible Guide from heritagebooks.org, a nonprofit book ministry, heritagebooks.org, very reasonably. And just start with three, four minutes. And if the kids are all out of the home, you ask your children if they wouldn't mind when you're eating with them or just when you're visiting,

if you could take the grandkids around you and do it with them. And if your children have any fear of God in them at all, they'll probably say yes. Or if they are Christians, they say, Dad, that would be wonderful. Please do it. Right now, I'm teaching two of my grandchildren a Bible doctrine, eight years old and five years old. It is the most thrilling thing.

It's probably my favorite thing to teach. I mean, restore the years the locusts have eaten. And ask God for forgiveness and go forward. And he can help you greatly. I think that'll be encouraging because to some, it might be despairing to figure out and to find out, man, I missed an opportunity. But to your point, the Lord is gracious and he'll restore those years. Yeah, just begin.

And as you start doing it, you'll see what a treasure it is. And, you know, there's things about family worship that I regret. I look back and say, you know what? Even though I changed drastically, there were times when one of our child was out at a college course,

and I came home later in the night. I should have. I don't know why I didn't do this. Stupid me. I should have had just a small five-minute family worship with that child when he or she did come home. But for some reason, I never thought about it. So that's my bad. But I know that God forgives me for that. But I advise parents, do that because that's also, you know, every single child should have family worship every day. Well, that's so helpful.

Thank you, Dr. Beeky. And make sure if you're listening or watching to purchase that resource, the Family Worship Bible Guide, because it's such a, I think, a paradigm shifter and a helpful tool for you as you navigate family worship. So thank you for putting in the work, Dr. Beeky. My pleasure.