Welcome to the Ask Pastor John Podcast. Today we are joined by our friend Ted Tripp, known

for his bestselling book, Shepherding a Child's Heart and Instructing a Child's Heart. Dr. Tripp,

we often get questions in the inbox about family worship. It's a practice many Christian

families engage in together at home, but what is it? I mean, what does family worship look

like for you? And what are the aims and goals of it? Well, I think family worship is such an

important thing because it gives weight and math to the spiritual reality you're talking to your

kids about. I mean, if you're talking to your kids about vitality of knowing and loving God and

the joys of loving God and the goodness of God, it makes sense that you would spend, you know,

10 or 15 minutes in a day reading the Bible praying together, acknowledging God and seeking God in

your life as family. So I think that it's a very, very important thing. Now, one of the things in

terms of what it looks like, I think of the most simple terms of three things. I want to read, sing,

and pray with the kids. So I want to sing together. I want to read the Bible together and talk about

the passage that we looked at and all our pray together. And I think you engage the kids in that.

I mean, singing is such a wonderful thing because singing puts truth into your head in memorable

ways. It ties truth to rhythm and melody and it's a great way to memorize. I had, we had such a

fun time this summer. We were watching five of our grandchildren for a week where their parents were

in England. And we rode along one day. We're driving in the car together and we sang for probably

an hour, just sang hymns from memory. And these kids had learned all these hymns that they had

been singing at home with their parents. And it was great fun. They were singing away and we,

it was just wonderful. I think singing is such an important part of family worship. Reading the

Bible, reading the passage, looking at the passage, talking about it is key and then of course

praying. And saying to the kids, you know, we want to pray, we want to pray about the passage,

...