The Family Altar

The Family Altar

November 15, 2006

Pastor Matt Black

Midweek Service

Deuteronomy 6:4-9

Open your Bible to Deuteronomy 6. The title of tonight’s message is “The Family Altar”. We are looking at verses 4-9, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD: 5 And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. 6 And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: 7 And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. 8 And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. 9 And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates.”

Prayer: Holy Father, Creator of Heaven and earth, cleanse us from our sin. Cleanse us from iniquity. Cleanse us from idolatry, Lord. We have loved things other than you today. I pray that any heart here tonight that is hardened would be opened up by the grace of your Holy Spirit. Lord, there may be someone here tonight who is struggling against you, against your truth. I pray that you would work in their heart a softness, a light, an understanding, and a revelation, Lord. I pray that you would tenderly deal with us and not give us what we deserve. Have mercy on us. Give us what we don’t deserve. Help every one of us here to taste and see that the Lord is good. God I pray for our fathers here tonight—every father and every man of this church that we would not yield our leadership to our wife or to anyone else. But that we would stand up to the call that you’ve given to us. May we be strong, and fervent, and relentless for that which is right, and that which pleases you. God, pour your grace out on us tonight and make us people of prayer and people of the Word. Help us God to be militant in our homes—militant about love and truth and doing what is right. Lord I pray you would do these things. Accomplish them, for we pray by the power of the precious blood of Jesus who accomplishes all these things. Amen.

Introduction: Let us come to the Scriptures tonight. Last week we discussed how to lead a child to Christ. We discovered that our theology is wrong. Our theology is so far from the biblical standard. What we have taught our children in the last fifty to sixty years is that if they pray a prayer, they say the magic words, if they sign a card, if they’re baptized, if they have their hair cut the right length, then they must be saved. And where are our children today? Where are the children that were in our churches when they were bursting at the seams in the 60s, and the 70s, and the 80s? Where are these people? They are the scorners in this world today. They are scorning God. I hear their scorn in this article and that article and in documentary films that these people have made. Some of the people on MTV, some of the rock stars grew up (and they make sure that they mention this)—they grew up in fundamental Baptist homes. Why has this happened? It has happened because we have replaced the family altar with the television. We have replaced the family altar with convenience. Mom and Dad want their own way, and they have “court” in front of the children.

The truth is, we have wanted the world more than we have wanted Jesus Christ. And so it is no surprise that our children have followed our example. We need to understand the seriousness of the challenge before us. Leading our children to Christ cannot be distilled or reduced to a methodology—leading our children to Christ must be a lifestyle. We must manifest every moment of every day a broken heart, a denial of self, a contrite spirit. What is that called? Repentance. We must live a live of repentance. And we must follow Christ. What is that? Faith. Clinging to Jesus.

Teach your children. Yes, you must teach them. The Bible commands it, as our text says. But you must above all, live what you teach them. If you don’t, you will engender scorn. There is nothing to respect in an inconsistent life. Let me remind you again that all of you are an example to each of the children. A child does not need a lot of bad examples as an excuse to do wrong, he only needs ONE! You do have a responsibility to live godly in Christ Jesus before all. Any one of these children might use your inconsistent example as an excuse to sin.

Last week we talked about the importance of being genuine, sincere and telling the truth in our homes. Do you claim to know the Lord? Then live louder than you speak! Live the message first BEFORE you preach it to your children! And above all, PRAY to God! Last week we recalled the words of Robert Murray M'Cheyne, “A man is what he is on his knees before God, and nothing more.”

What are you on your knees? What are you in your home? Do you do well preaching to others but not to your own soul. It is better to close your mouth! It is better to be silent than to be a hypocrite!

Are you praying? First you need to pray for yourself, confessing your own sins and walking righteously in Christ Jesus. And then pray for those immediately around you, such as your spouse, children, and family. And then pray for your church. Are you praying for your community? Are you praying for your authorities—your government, your president? Are you praying for the world? Are you praying for missions—for God’s cause to go forth into all the world? Are you praying?

Let us now consider, as we look at our text, the roles of the parents.

I. The Responsibility of the Parents.

Look at our text: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD: 5 And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. 6 And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart:” And it goes on to say in verse 7, “And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children.”

A. The Parent is the primary role model. You parent are the primary role model and communicator of God for your children. You are the representative of God to your children. YOU are the one responsible to teach your children. It is not the job of the Sunday School to teach your children. It is not the preacher’s responsibility. YOU are to teach your children. You might say, “But you’re the pastor, you’re going to give an account!” Yes, I’m going to give an account for the duty of reinforcing what you are teaching them. But I am not the one primarily responsible for your children—you are! The church is powerless in most cases to compete with your example. The church will reinforce, but normally the church will do no good if you as the God-ordained leader are a hypocrite at home.

B. The Father is the pastor of the home. If you do not rise up to that responsibility, your home will very likely fail. What would you do if I as your pastor acted without discretion in this pulpit? What if I were to speak crudely from this place? I trust you would kick me out of this pulpit very quickly. And yet there is crude speech among some of you in the home. What about you and your qualifications for the ministry of your own home? Men, are you living the qualifications of the pastor? What about you—your responsibilities and calling? You must first fall in love with God’s Word! Because He says, “Hear, O Israel”—you mothers, you fathers, you that are going to teach your children diligently, “5 …thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. 6 And these words…shall be” where? On your lips? In your mind? No, where? “in thine heart:” Do you know what the problem with the rebellion in our children is? God’s Words are on our lips, and they’re in our mind, but they’re not in our heart—we don’t love God. We would rather watch the television than read God’s Word. Tell the truth. You are so hooked and addicted to it. You will rail on a person who calls himself a Christian yet stumbles into sin. Maybe they gossip or have noticed serious failures on their part. You call those people hypocrites, but you need to get the log out of your own eye because you yourself love things that God is not pleased with. That is called idolatry. That is why our children are leaving the home without Christ.

And what exactly are you to do at home? You are responsible. You are to teach your children “diligently”!

II. Exhortations to the Parents.
7 And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.

A. The Parents’ personal walk with God.

Last week we looked at Psalm 1 and said the parents personally each day must be:

v Separated from the world

v Saturated with the Word

v Sucessful spiritually

Your personal time with God will demonstrate on the Last Day whether you were a Christian or not. You can go to all the church services you want, get all the specialized counseling you want, but you are what you are in your private time with God.

Are you meeting with God? Perhaps you are minimizing the influence of God’s Word in your life. Can I teach you a principle about God’s Word tonight? You are to delight yourself in the Word of God “day and night.”

“Delight”—what does that have the idea of? It has the idea of responding with joy and favor. Do you, when you think about the Word of God respond with joy and favor? If not, your heart is hardened, and your children are at risk. Please, I beg you, and urge you, and I exhort you, and I rebuke you, look at the hardness of your own heart, and beg God to break you. You will reap what you sow.

As parents, we need to take our example seriously. Every moment of every day our children are looking at us. And the Bible says, this is what you are to do. It lays it out very clearly—every moment of every day you are to live godly—you are to speak for God in every avenue of life. And in order to speak for God, you must be living it. You must be loving the Lord will all your heart, soul, and might!

If you are not willing to grow in private, no amount of church attendance will help you. You might think, “My family will turn out right because we are in the church”. Hypocrisy in any form is deadly whether it is in the home or in the church. If you are not living the Word, then you are giving deadly poison to your children, to your fellow brother and sister in Christ. Wake up!

Let me make one other comment before I get into the meat of the message. Let me speak to the Mothers.

B. The Mother’s Duty to Cleave to Her Husband.

Do you know that your children ought not to be primary in your home? Your husband ought to be primary. The husband-wife relationship is primary in the home! Wives, maybe you can’t have a family altar because you’re focused on your children instead of your husband. And your children won’t allow you to have a family altar. The Bible says mother, that you are to leave your parents and cleave to your husband, not to your children. Some of you ladies have a closer relationship with your children than you do to your husband. That is wicked and wrong.

C. Exhortation to both Parents.

You must cleave to each other Mom and Dad. That’s the foundation. You’ve got to get things right with one another no matter what it takes—to live in love and harmony in the home. The family altar will be scorned if there is no harmony because if you mother and father are not joined to one another and cleaving to one another, you’ll argue about devotions. The wife will be critical of the husband for how he presented whatever he presented. And there will be total discontent and chaos until the wife is in submission to the husband and the husband has the loving leadership in the home.

D. Further exhortation to the Wife.

The wife is cleaving to the husband, cheering him on—saying “I’m here to support you.” Why? Because God created you, married woman, for one reason, and one reason alone—to give glory to Him by serving the purposes of your husband. It is very simple. It is very hard to live though. Crucifixion is what it takes. But you may say “He’s not doing it right!” Who are you to say he’s not doing it right? Are you in charge of your home? Your husband is in charge. And you wife must let go of those reins if there is to be any godliness or hope for holiness in your home. Let go of those reins. Keep your mouth quiet. It’s hard I know. You know ten times more than he does, but do you have enough faith wife to allow God to teach your husband? Who is to teach him? Are you to teach him? No! God is to teach your husband. And other godly men are to teach your husband, not you. So don’t attempt to do it. You are reversing the order, and it brings chaos.

E. Further exhortation to the Husband.

Husbands, you are not the dictator. Call your family together. Share the Word of God, but present a loving and gracious atmosphere. This is not the time to take them to task and rebuke them. This is the time to instruct them. Times in private are for the rebuking and the discipline.

Husbands, if you need to instruct your wife, do not instruct her in front of your children. Instruct her in private. Help her to know the Word and teach her in private.

III. The Structure of family worship.
7 And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.

Why do we teach our children? Why do we send them to school or teach them ourselves? We teach them so that they can read the Bible. The purpose of education for the Christian is to read the Bible and understand God’s mighty works in this world. Period. They might a lawyer or an accountant. Those things are good, but ultimately if they are a lawyer, they represent the law of God, and they are establishing His righteous standards in this earth. And if they are an accountant they are actually partaking in the Word, the “Logos”, because math is logic. Everything proclaims God. But all this foundation must begin in the home at the family altar.

When you come together for the family altar,

A. Attitude: It ought to be a serious occasion. It is not time for joking. A loving brokenness should be displayed, not an authoritarian air. They ought to see that in your heart. They need to see that you are broken over the Word of God, that you love God’s Word, and that you desperately want them to love God.

B. Presentation: You don’t have to be a great orator, husband. You simply have to speak what is written in the Word. You don’t have to be very creative. You simply have to be faithful.

C. Purpose: When I say a family altar, I mean a time that you set apart that is for the worship of God in your home. You may say, “But I thought worship took place on Sundays.” If that is what you believe, then you have a whole bunch of things you need to change. Worship takes place with every moment of our day—every second. You must stop and have a Sabbath every day with your children. You must stop and rest with your children, that is reflect with them. The purpose of the Sabbath is not to go to sleep—God never sleeps nor slumbers, but God celebrated the Sabbath by reflecting on all that He had made and being satisfied that it was very good. So our daily Sabbath (devotional time) is not for physical rest per se, but for spiritual reflecting, and thinking on and meditating on what God has done and what God is doing in your family.

Application: If I had an interview with each family here, and I said what is God doing in your life? Would I get any response? Would I get any response from the children?

D. Importance: There is a great need for the family altar. Why? Because this life is the only life that we have to live. God very well may call workers to the harvest from your home!

E. Format: The most important principle of format is not that you do something perfect, or in some certain order (though order and excellence are important). The family altar is not a liturgy. The main thing is that your children would see your heart. They need to see that God is real, and that you love God, and that they would see you living out the Word from your life. Having said that, let me ask, as we come to worship God as a family, what should we be doing?

1. Singing. One of the first things we should be doing is singing. The Scripture says that one of the signs that you are filled with the Holy Spirit is that you are speaking to yourself in “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord” (Ephesians 5:19). What there ought to be in your family is singing! Do you know the hymns of the faith? Does God bring them to your heart in times of trial? Perhaps sometimes you find yourself making up hymns and spiritual songs. If you love God you know about singing. I didn’t say you know about music. The Bible says to make a joyful noise to the Lord. But you know about singing if you are a Christian.

If your children are bring raised in a godly home, they know about singing because you are a singing family. Do you pray together? After prayer is a good time for singing. When you are on your knees with the children gathered around let dad lead in a memorized stanza of a hymn, and vary that hymn each night. Sing “A Mighty Fortress is Our God”, and as Daddy says “Amen”, he starts to sing “A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing”, and he’ll hear the little voices singing with him. On another night, Daddy says “Amen” and it is “God is so good…” or “He answers prayer” or “He died for me” or “He’s coming soon”. Do they know these truths? Do they hear you singing these truths to God with them? You do that in your family, and there’s going to be a looking forward to the family altar on a daily basis. So there should be singing. At times it is spontaneous. You don’t have to wait to sing until your family altar. You might at the end of a meal say, “What is your favorite hymn Katie?” And your little daughter responds, “I Sing the Mighty Power of God”. So we sing that song. It might be before you eat or after you eat.

Teach your children the old hymns. I love that for our Thanksgiving service, the children will be singing an old hymn of the faith by John Bunyan, author of the Pilgrim’s Progress. Most churches wouldn’t know the song they are singing (“He Who Would Valiant Be”). Why? Because few families have family altars anymore, and because our church’s hymnals are barren of the old hymns. Why? Because we’ve taken up singing the pop songs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We’ve brought them into our hymnals, and now musicians are writing our hymns instead of theologians and preachers and evangelists. The greatest hymns of old were written by those who were in the trenches. They were paying a price for the Gospel! And those hymns say something! And you may not know what some of those words mean, but you look them up and you say “Wow, that’s like a whole paragraph in one word!”

How do you teach your children the old hymns? The one thing that impressed me when I began courting my wife, is that she never looked at the hymn book. My wife knew most of the hymnal at an early age.

How do you do this? Teach them one verse for a week. Sing it slowly and annunciate. Example: “He who would valiant be ‘gainst all disaster.” --Bunyan. Explain the words. You’ll be surprised that they’ll start using them. You will increase their vocabulary. Do not allow them to slur words because this is a message of God they are carrying. I teach my children with the diligence of one who runs the Metropolitan Opera. You see our children’s praise is ten billion times more important than whatever the Opera is presenting. Our children are much more important choir members than the those in the opera because they are singing before the angels and before a holy righteous God. So teach them the words of the hymns.

2. Thankfulness: You might at the end of a meal ask the children, “What are you thankful for?” My daughter Kristen might say, “I’m thankful for my cuddly bear.” Well, Amen! Teach them to be thankful! Ask them often what are they thankful for? Remind them continually. Isn’t that what our text says? It’s not just a specified time. It most certainly is a specified time, but worship and instruction in godliness takes place in every avenue of life. Look again at verse 7: “And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.”

3. Teaching: There should be a brief and simple thought from the Bible. This varies depending on the age. One idea is to take the week’s sermon. Other families have taken a book of the Bible verse by verse. I usually share something that I’ve learned from my personal time with God. Another idea is to begin with the Ten Commandments. You see the Law will lead your children to Jesus Christ. Memorize the Ten Commandments. Go over them each family altar. We begin our family altar by having each of the children recite the commandments. And then I ask them, “What commandments have you broken today?” I help them to see their sin. And it is the constant grinding against that sin and confronting them with it that is going to bring them to Jesus Christ. Do many times in our family worship, my children have been weeping because of our sins. “Daddy, I don’t want to go over the Ten Commandments. I broke three of them today.” And they weep over their sin as they ought to. They begin to understand holiness and godliness. My children have wept a lot at our family altar, but weeping does not mean that they are ready to be saved. My daughter Katie just recently came to know the Lord, and she is seven years old. She had been weeping at various times during devotions for two years! But it took that long for God to work on her. God opened her eyes and changed her. And she kept asking, “Daddy what can I do to be saved?” And I told her, I can’t save you. You must give your life to Christ. You must understand. I cannot understand for you.

Ideas:

a. Pastor’s sermon. You may want to take one of my sermons from online. You may take a thought from that week’s message and give it to them.

b. You may use a children’s devotional book.

c. It’s not play time! The video last week spoke of taking a Biblical account and acting it out. This is probably not a good idea, because time in God’s Word is not a play time. This is a serious time. You must preach the Word to them, not just present a drama. The danger with drama, is the children may think the Bible is just a play. They will associate it with fairy tale.

d. Devotions: If you are walking with God, you will not lack anything to share with your children. You will be overflowing. You will be sincerely communicating to them.

Conclusion: Remember this BEDROCK principle: 1 Corinthians 8:1, “Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth.” You see, the family altar is not a class. It is a training time before you go out and your life is at risk against the enemy. This is not a class, this is the real thing. If you give them information, you will make proud, hypocrite heathens that are ten times worse knowing the Gospel than not knowing the Gospel.

Your children can be trained in theological correctness, but you will only raise them for God if they see your heart. What do I mean? Unless your children see a sincere unadulterated heart for God, your teaching them the Bible is about as good as a clanging cymbol. Look at I Corinthians 13:1, “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.” If you don’t have a burning love for God, you might as well take a cymbal at family altar because that’s all it’s worth. You don’t have charity, what you have is a bunch of noise. Paul goes on to say in verse 3, “And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.” You can give your body to be burned as a martyr, but if you don’t have love, then your are really just a vain show. You see, your burning love for God will NEVER fail!! So much more I could say, but we need to close.

Let me challenge you with this—have the family altar. Make your house a helpful atmosphere for worship. As our text says, put Bible verses everywhere! I’d like to start a big painting for my living room, and a Bible verse that will remind us of these truths. We ought to be about these things.

Closing Hymn: 612 God is so Good