FAMILY WORSHIP | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 21, 1881

FAMILY WORSHIP.

TESTIMONIES come to us from time to time concerning the great importance of the daily worship of God in the home, and by the whole household. Venerable men and women, looking back from near the end of their lives, and over a long period of years, bear witness to the value of this observance, and to the strength and comfort they have drawn from it in all their domestic experiences. And the children in their turn are able to testify not less strongly to the preciousness of the memories and associations that gather about this family service. And indeed it would be certain, apart from all testimony, that there ought to be such daily worship in every home; and that in a Christian home it must be a special occasion of sacredness and blessing.

There are, in every household, common interests and obligations which call for united recognition and acknowledgment before God. There are daily mercies for which thanksgiving is to be offered. There is the daily meeting together of the wants and the trials, whatever they may be, of the earthly life; and there is occasion for prayer together for counsel and grace and strength. There is a sharing together also of the most intimate kind, or there may be, and ought to be, in all the earliest and innermost preparations that are made for the life to come; and these preparations require the daily coming together before God. There can be no great power of Christian feeling or purpose in a home that does not seek to find for itself this utterance in united prayer.

There is nothing of good in a home that does not call to household prayer, and that is not strengthened by it; and there is nothing of evil which such prayers will not help to shut out or to remove.

Family prayer is needful to the establishment and encouragement of an acquaintance between parents and children with respect to all religious things. It cannot indeed take the place of free, personal conversation; and yet it may sometimes properly be made an occasion for the expression of parental desires which could hardly in any other way be so effectively made known.

Family prayer is also needed especially to check the tendency that may often exist to remove religious responsibility, unduly, to some point outside the home, as to the Sabbath-school or the church. These agencies have their most important use, but parental responsibility stands before them all, and no father or mother should be willing that it should ever be thought of otherwise in their own home.

And finally, this service of family prayer is not a hard one to maintain. It may seem to be hard while it is thought of and before it is begun. But all duties are apt to grow easy and delightful when once they are entered upon; and this duty stands at the head, almost, for the strength and delightfulness that are in the performance of it. Be persuaded to begin, if you have not begun, thus to pray together in your home; and after you have begun, you will not be easily persuaded to live again in a home without prayers.