Our "Faith" Story

This post will be a lot longer than usual. Today, Sarah and I gave a five-minute "testimony" in church about the priorities in our home over the past 17 years. The text of that speech is below in its entirety.

Recently, during a dinner table conversation, we were reflecting on our transition from the innocence of youth to a more complete awareness of the responsibilities of adulthood. For us, this happened around the age of thirty, coincidentally with the arrival of our second child. In many ways, this eye-opening transition was a realization of our personal call to make our entire lives an act of worship of our Creator. Today, we would like to share our passion for a lifestyle of worship in our home.

We have attended this church since 1994. We have two high schoolers, Luke and Leah. Our story is one of God’s faithfulness and our human, imperfect efforts to be obedient to His Word.

You may recognize me as the guy who sometimes plays the piano or keyboard on Sunday mornings. You may be thinking, “We can’t ‘do’ worship in the home – I don’t have the musical skills.” Before you tune out (pun intended), we want to be clear: worship is not just singing songs of praise. While we certainly can and should worship God using His wonderful gift of music, this is only one element among many facets of a lifestyle of worship.

Jesus commands us to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” (Mark 12:30) He labeled this as the most important commandment. How do we do this? In our experience, parenthood confronted us with the practical challenge of creating an environment where worship of God is more than an ideal, where we truly love God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength.

A key component of our worship at home during the preschool years was turning off the TV and memorizing scripture instead. You might be thinking, “Wait a minute! I thought you were talking about passionate worship in the home, not teaching and training children. Instead, you speak of turning off the TV and memorizing scripture.” Remember the most important commandment? Jesus was quoting the writings of Moses, inspired by God. In Deuteronomy, where God commands us to love Him with all our heart, soul, and strength, the very next verse commands us to keep His commandments in our hearts. We are to impress them on our children, to talk about them when we sit at home and when we walk along the road, when we lie down and when we get up. We are to write them on the door frames of our houses and on our gates. So, our worship is expressed in our keeping and memorizing of His commandments.

One thing we learned is that you cannot start too soon. When Luke was four and Leah was two, we thought we were drilling him on a particular verse when she chimed in with her cute two-year-old voice. We soon discovered that, if we fill a child’s mind with scripture early, he will be better equipped to filter the trash that this world will try to dump into his mind. Then, as he matures, he will be able worship God with all of his thoughts.

In our home, worship included a lot of planned family time focused on teaching our kids some scriptural principle. Over the years, the how and what have varied as our kids have grown, but the purpose has been the same: fulfilling our commission as parents to talk about these things when we sit at home, when we lie down, and when we rise up. We pray together, we read the Bible together, we read good books aloud together, and we sing together. Two very important decisions we made along the way included observing the Sabbath in our home and teaching the Westminster Shorter Catechism.

Dads, my commitment to this was important. I remember realizing as a young father that I needed to figure out how to switch gears from my current R&D project to my family worship leader responsibility during my 10-minute drive home. But, how and when was I going to choose the right devotional, plan the scripture memory program, or decide on the next family worship activity? In our case, this is where the power of teamwork between husband and wife plays a big role.

Moms, I worked hard to become my husband’s helper. I was careful not to usurp his role. I didn’t do his job, but I made it easy for him to succeed. I left that devotional book on his chair at the dinner table. I took care of the laminating for those shower verses. I worked with the kids to memorize and review their scripture verses and their catechism answers.

If you feel challenged but ill equipped, rest assured that we did not start this process with a host of programs and activities in place. Rather than being overwhelmed with the concept of making our home a place of worship 24/7, we took one step at a time. Every 6 to 12 months, we would merely add one new worshipful practice to our family’s schedule. In some cases, we would eliminate one activity or commitment to make room for another one. Once we established a pattern of obedience in that one small thing, we would take the next step.

We are thankful that God has chosen to reveal His will to us through His Word and through godly counsel in the form of mentors and good books. Looking back, our lives are pointed in a very different direction than where we started. Yet, there was no single event, no single decision, that led to a drastic change. Rather, God worked in our lives through the successive accumulation of small but important choices and decisions. Soon, our kids will be on their own. It is our prayer that God will continue to build on the foundation of His Word in their families so that their children will teach their children to live a life of worship to our God.

In closing, we want to encourage you to be purposeful in choosing an attitude and lifestyle of worship in your home, regardless of your family situation and personal giftedness. We can safely say that it is never too late to start choosing to worship God every day.

Theological Existentialism

I’ve been reading some of Francis Schaeffer’s writings lately, as well as a few chapters in Sire’s The Universe Next Door. These authors have helped me better understand the views of a variety of people in our culture. As I understand it, the theological existentialist builds an impenetrable barrier between the rational world, which includes science and history, and faith. The secular existentialists like Sartre, Camus, Jaspers, and Heidegger recognized that a system based solely on a naturalist worldview (i.e., the supernatural does not exist) leads to pessimism and ultimately nihilism. Unwilling to live with the depression and hopelessness of this worldview, each of these men sought optimism and hope in something removed from the rational world of logic and reason. However, because we are rational beings, none of their irrational sources of hope has proven to be effective for the masses.

Unfortunately, rather than discard the existential system, many theologians (like Karl Barth) tacked on faith as the source of optimism and hope for modern man. Consistent with the existential approach, these theologians rejected the traditional view that the Christian faith is a rational, reasonable faith. Instead, they chose to keep faith in a separate box, sheltered from the world of logic and reason. Thus, one could believe in the "Christian" God while claiming that the Holy Bible is filled with scientific and historical errors. The result is an irrational faith, one that is not based on revealed truth. In fact, such a faith denies truth as something that can be known. Rather, faith is defined at the personal level and is not founded on a set of propositions and historical events and figures. As I understand theological existentialism, Jesus Christ may have been a real person, but he was not really supernaturally raised from the dead. Miracles never happened. Rather, faith is some ill-defined hope in a God who cannot really be known other than through subjective, personal experience. I see no way to harmonize this view of God with the words of Jesus in John 14:6 (NIV): “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”