Family Altar

I was driving to a speaking engagement and saw a sign at a small church. It read, "A Family Altar will Alter Your Family." I have to admit that I am not a big fan of cute sayings in front of churches, yet this one brought many memories to mind.

I am sure that most people assume that a minister's family has a regular, meaningful, worshipful family altar every single day! Is that true of your family? I would guess many of you are laughing right now.

Doug and I struggled with the concept of family altar. Before our children came along, we enjoyed reading he bible together at night before bed. We often shared our day and the ways we saw God's hand on us as we walked through that day.

Enter Children!! Of course, we had dreams of our children sitting around the table in their clean, pressed clothes, smiling with halos over each head, listening to the profound wisdom of their father and watching the submissive support of their mother. Does that sound like your family altar?

Reality did finally hit and we began to try and find a way to draw our children together in worship at home. It took many trials and errors. There were times we ended up sending them to bed early and not speaking to each other!

I want to encourage you with some of our successes. I do believe we need to have a time of Bible study and prayer with our children. They need to know our home is driven by our Lord. Let me share one of the things we discovered that drew us closer to God and each other. It took perseverance and flexibility, but God rewarded our efforts many times over.

First we had to realize it was not possible every day. We each had our own quiet times every day,but family altar became a weekly and sometimes monthly event.

We learned to adapt to the ages of our children. What was it that would keep them interested and help them participate? One of the things we began to do was prayer posters. I would gather magazines, scissors, poster board and glue. We would lay it out on the table and talk about things we needed to pray for. It was a great time of fun! The boys would search for pictures of what they wanted to ask God for and be so excited when a magazine would have exactly what they wanted. As we glued it to the board we would each pray. When the board was full we would place it in a prominent place to remind us to pray daily. The best part was their growth in faith as God answered those requests! (Some days we would do praise posters, needs for others, etc.)

This is just one of the ways we had family altar.

Start this year out with a fresh family altar. God will bless your time with Him and your family.