It's not Vegas, but...(Part 2 of 3)

I'm certainly no encyclopedia of Reformed thought, but Dr. Bryan Estelle's lecture brought something to my attention that had flown under my radar: an appendix of the Westminster Directory of Worship: The Directory for Family-Worship. This was to provide instructions to families for prayer, devotions, and catechizing outside of public worship. Back in the day, this Directory was serious business, and if the man of the household neglected his duties in leading regular family worship, he was to be " suspended and debarred from the Lord's supper ." This makes me wonder about our priorities in the modern Reformed church.

I suppose everyone wants their own children to be better off than they were as a child. I don't mean this just materially - wanting a bigger house or nicer car than one had growing up. I mean especially in the spiritual sense - I certainly want my children to be stronger in the faith than I was. Don't get me wrong. I owe an unpayable debt of gratitude to my parents, who brought me up in the Lord. Church attendance was regular, and I knew the Scriptures well from my Sunday school classes and private Christian education. Godly living was always practiced and preached in my home. Simply, I am who I am today because of my parents.

However, as I grow older I also have come to form my own opinions about the way a Christian home should be and can see the defects in my own upbringing. For starters, I was not raised in a Reformed Church, nor was I catechized as a child. Looking back on it, having a Reformed worldview in my youth would have put me light-years ahead of where I was intellectually and spiritually: in a sea of bland, generic Evangelicalism. My family had only occassional prayers together, usually over a meal, but no devotions together. My own private devotions were usually limited to sporadic "quiet times" as encouraged by our youth groups.

This brings me back to Estelle's lecture. He gave his audience food for thought from his own administrations of worship in his family's life, as well as pointing us to a share of literature on the subject.

There are, I think, two temptations as I consider having my own family one day. The first temptation swings towards laziness: "I really want to have regular devotions with my family, but we're all so busy." Estelle noted that if the TV is on in the house, that's not a legitimate excuse. The second temptation is to, armed with zeal and knowledge from his lecture, bog down the family in trying to transform them all into uber-spiritual Renaissance Children and scholars-in-training. For a moment I think to myself "gosh, I could send them all to a Reformed Classical Christian school, and then I'll cram in catechism training and Koine Greek once they get home from school before dinner." But then I realize that kids just gotta be kids, too.

Cornelius VanTil wrote of his own upbringing, that "Though there were no tropical showers of revivals, the relative humidity was always very high…I was 'conditioned' in the most thorough fashion. I could not help believing in God-in the God of Christianity-in the God of the Bible!" Yeah, I like that. I want the "relative humidity" of my home to be very high, too. By God's grace alone.

I've got just one more reflection left in me, I think, that I took from the Westminster conference. Stay tuned for Part 3.

UPDATE - found a "Soli Deo Gloria" book on family worship here by George Hamond: http://www.monergismbooks.com/casefamily1690.html

Category: Theoblogia