A Young Family Sitting Together in a Church Service [guest post]

This is a guest post from a friend of mine @ Hayward Wesleyan Church. She writes:

A young family sitting together in a church service, the youngest with his head resting against his father’s shoulder. The oldest is jotting down notes as the pastor preaches. When the singing time begins the whole family rises together to join in song to worship the One who created them, loves them and unifies them.

A quaint picture isn’t it?

Quaint, but in my opinion, a necessary quaintness.

This past Sunday was a unique experience at Hayward Wesleyan Church. Instead of separating parents and their children at church, the families were sitting together in the sanctuary worshipping together.

Together, what?

Yes, for some of you this may have been awkward, even childish and simplistic. However, the way I look at it, spiritual togetherness is a very rare experience for families these days. It, along with the joys of game playing, laughing and talking around the table have become a quaint old fashioned way of living life in this fast paced American culture.

The priority of teaching scripture and God’s truth to our own children seems to have taken a back seat to the ever increasing desire to see our children excelling in academics, sports or music. Parents will gladly help their children through their homework or push them to go to their music lessons and basketball games, but when it comes to reading the Bible or sending their children to a Sunday School class, we as parents get a failing grade.

Oh, but maybe that isn’t important anymore, maybe it is more important that our children grow up to have a high class job earning more money than we do. And just maybe our child will be the next great football star or be an accomplished pianist and we think we must keep them focused on that. Yes, those things are important, but not so important as instilling truths of the Bible in our young children’s hearts.

• When was the last time we have interpreted Scripture for our children?
• When did we read him or her something from the Bible and explain to them what it means?
• Did we ever think that we could teach our children something by modeling a priority of regular church attendance or by having them sit through a church service with us, seeing us in worship to our great God?
• Is there a desire in us to learn and be taught by these men and women of God who are our pastors?

If we could take advantage of the classes they teach how much we could learn! There are also so many other ways we could be learning about the Lord. Not all our Christian growth has to happen in the church! But the question we should ask ourselves is:

Are we putting ourselves in a position where we are growing in our faith and are we modeling to our children that desiring God is important?

So take an inventory, remembering that when everything has been said and all has been done, when we breathe our final breath and stand in front of our awesome God in his heavenly palace – what will matter most? Only what we have done for Christ will last, that is all that will matter.