In June the Senior High Ministry at our church traveled to Colorado for Reformed Youth Movement (RYM). I could hardly wait until the bus door closed and we started our trip to and from Colorado! Really, I loved it—24 hour bus ride and all. It was a week of hiking, rafting, mountain biking, ropes courses, horseback riding, attempting to summit a 12,000+ peak, and taking on whatever else the front range of the Rockies threw at us. Each evening we worshipped together with great teaching and a time for small group discussions.
In Stephen Pressfield’s book, Gates of Fire, you have the ancient story of the Spartan’s fabled stand at Thermopylae against the invading Persians, under the leadership of Xerxes. The story of how three hundred Spartan warriors, along with their battle slaves and their Thespaian allies, held back hundreds of thousands Persians for seven days has been recounted many times, first from antiquity by Herodotus in The Histories, and down through ages. In our own day the movie, The Three Hundred keeps this tale alive. The reason it has been told and retold is the same as when it originally happened in 480 B.C. The tale of three hundred Spartans dying to a man to give their fellow countrymen a chance was such a tale of courage, honor, and valor, that it enflamed the passion of the rest of Greece, so that eventually the Greeks rallied to defeat the Persians and Western Civilization was saved.
Worship is formative. That means it has power to shape us. We are what we sing (as Mark Noll writes in a recent article in Christianity Today.) Our hearts are drawn from other “treasures” as our eyes are opened to see Jesus for who He really is. Thomas Chalmers called this the “expulsive power of a new affection.” By that phrase he means that you never really get over one love until a new one comes along. In worship we seek to have Jesus become more beautiful and believable to us. We seek to have God restore our sanity so that we can live in line with the truth of the gospel rather than in the fantasy world in which we must earn God’s favor and manipulate Him to do whatever we want.
Worship is a whole-being response to all of who God is and what He’s done for us, encompassing all of life, empowered by the Holy Spirit, offered through Jesus, in concert with all of God’s people (past, present, and around the world), using the gifts God has given us under the regulation of His Word and in response to His revelation which culminates in Christ and Him crucified, toward the goal that His kingdom would spread to the whole of creation.
A man who is like a spiritual father to me began what he called a "family altar" with his wife before they were married, and has faithfully continued the practice through the arrival of children and grandchildren for more than fifty years. Sadly, it seems that few men among even the best evangelical churches today could speak of daily family worship in their home. In the minds of some, active church involvement eliminates the need for family worship. For others, Bible reading, prayer, and singing praises to God together as a family have been crowded out by the television, the Internet, and a non-stop schedule that makes even meals together a rarity.
Now we come to the heart of our concern: the nurture of piety in our children. During the l9th century, as Sunday schools began to be introduced in North America, resistance was encountered in a number of traditional Presbyterian churches. Their argument? That as the Sunday school was established, it would result in parental neglect of their responsibility for the spiritual training of their children. Were they right? Cause and effect would be difficult to determine. But if they were, it would be an example of the "law of unintended consequences" that is typical of the modern world. Our intentions are wonderful. We mean to improve life by the creation of labor-saving devices, the development of new methods, and the provision of supplementary resources. But are we careful to examine the net effect of our innovations? Do they, in the long run, really help? If the consequence of the proliferation of Christian meetings has been the neglect of daily family worship, then the net spiritual effect of those meetings has been negative.
Let's further explore this matter of the church’s public services and the family pew as the primary place of Christian nurture. As we have noted, many well-meaning but misinformed leaders in the Christian world would have you running hither, thither, and yon to find the magic formula for spiritual growth. They would have you out every night attending meetings for prayer, study, and fellowship. They thrust before you countless tapes, study books, methods, techniques, seminars, retreats, and programs, each promising to provide the key to your spiritual well-being and happiness. Our response is—it is not that complicated. Whatever is of fundamental importance for the Christian life has been known in every era and is reproducible in every culture. If a thing is true and necessary, it can be understood and practiced in a primitive, grass-hut civilization, an igloo, and in modern America. This is not to say that the toys of modernity can't help. We make profitable use of the tapes, videos, telephones, faxes, and computers. We access the modern means of transportation. But we shouldn't lose sight of the greater reality that all that we need to thrive spiritually may be found down the block at our local evangelical church through its regular ministry and worship. In its failure to recognize this, the church today is little better than the world in unnecessarily contributing to the frenetic pace of modern life.
What then is the first key to a Christian family's spiritual health? Though you may not have anticipated our answer, we are quite sure that we are right. The key is not new. It is not novel. It will not reveal long hidden mysteries, disclose any secret formulas, provide any new techniques, or require lengthy or costly counseling.
What is it? Simply, the first and primary key to your family's spiritual health is a commitment to the weekly public worship services of the church. The most important single commitment you have to make to ensure your family's spiritual well-being is to regular, consistent attendance at public worship.
Sound far-fetched? I'll say it even stronger. I have yet to meet a person for whom it could not be said that all of their problems, personal, marital, familial, or vocational would not be solved by such a commitment. I do not believe that the person for whom this is not true exists. By saying so, I do not minimize the seriousness of the problems that people face. Rather I maximize our confidence in the power of the gospel.
When I was a young boy, I walked to my public elementary school every school day for seven years. After school, I rode my bike to the ball park for my Little League games. Every Sunday we walked a few blocks to church. The recreation park was a little further away than the ball park and a little closer than the school. Scout Hall was behind the school, so we also rode our bikes or walked to Boy Scout meetings. Life was simple for us kids and our parents. In the suburbs of Los Angeles, the epitome of the commuter city, we lived life within a mile radius of our home. We even walked to the doctor's office.
Perhaps you have seen the bumper sticker or heard the U2 song lyric: "A woman needs a man as much as a fish needs a bicycle!" I do not know where this saying originated, but I wonder if it was penned by someone who was badly hurt in marriage and is now cynical and angry. Marriage has been compared to a beleaguered city with all those on the outside wanting to get in and all those on the inside wanting to get out. It is easy to become cynical when you look at the state of marriage in our world, but the Bible provides us with a very different picture of marriage.