I haven’t always been a family devotion guy. It’s not because I didn’t want or aspire to be; I did. But we went a long time as a family before pulling the trigger and trying to integrate this practice into the regular rhythm of our family life.
We’ve been doing morning devotions together for over 15 years now – long enough that our kids expect that we will. It’s a long road, as are most things with young children I’m finding out. Though revival doesn’t break out every morning over eggs and toast, our continued hope and prayer is that times like these builds into the love and discipline our children will have in the future when it comes to God’s Word.
And through those 15 years, we’ve tried different things, failed at a bunch, and maybe learned some things about starting and continuing in this pattern. I hope some of these things will be encouraging to you to kick this off, or affirming to you if you’ve found yourself in the middle of it.
In my opinion, then, here are 6 things you must have to start a family devotion:
1. Consistency.
There’s a pattern to everything, a routine for most every part of life. And any time you disrupt that routine, even for the noblest of reasons, there is going to be backlash. So before you get started, you’ve got to commit to consistency. Decide on the time of day. And keep it at that time.
For us, it’s 6:45 am at breakfast. That still might change in the coming years, but if you don’t pick a consistent time then it’s doubly difficult to keep the practice going.
What’s more, in our experience, the days that feel like discipline to do this far outweigh the days where you feel like the kids are actually engaged and learning something. But then again, isn’t that often the case in our own lives with our own spiritual growth and development? And yet we keep going because we believe in the power of God and the power of His Word.
2. Variety.
For us, we try to change things up once a week. Monday through Thursday, we do a Bible study and prayer (probably around 15 minutes), but Friday is different.
On Friday, everyone shares one specific thing they are thankful for that week, and one prayer request.
For a while, those prayer requests were pretty predictable – that I would have a good day, that I would do well on a test, that I would be kind to friends… that kind of thing. In recent days, we’re tried to bring more variety into those prayer requests as well, asking the kids to share a prayer not for themselves but for someone else, or to share something they’re thankful for that’s not about an activity they get to do that weekend.

The successful Bud Light boycott has already had something of a chilling effect on other corporations. For some companies, pushing LGBT ideology won’t be so readily seen as an automatic win. The fact that consumers could cost a major corporation billions of dollars to send them a message also revealed, once again, that the silent majority is not on board with all of this stuff. 

The verdict is in: the social conservative backlash to Bud Light’s decision to use transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney as a brand ambassador constitutes one of the most successful boycotts in recent political history. From the New York Post:  
Many Anheuser-Busch distributors say they are resigned to their painful Bud Light losses — and that they have given up on luring back disaffected customers following the Dylan Mulvaney fiasco, The Post has learned. After four months of hiring freezes and layoffs — with some beer truck drivers getting heckled and harassed even as Bud Light sales have dropped by more than 25% — Anheuser-Busch wholesalers have accepted that they have lost a chunk of their customers for good — and need to focus on a new crop of drinkers.
“Consumers have made a choice,” said an executive at a Texas-based beer distributor who did not want to be identified. “They have left [Bud Light] and that’s how it’s going to be. I don’t envision a big percentage of them coming back.”
In fact, industry insiders expect Bud Light sales to continue to decline, even after a few attempts at recovering a blue-collar image with more traditional advertising campaigns. Bud Light has become a symbol of woke over-reach, of corporate contempt for consumers, and of the relentless pushing of the LGBT agenda in nearly every aspect of society. Many people are fed up with it, and for once that frustration coalesced around a single brand.
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The devil doesn’t want you to think that way about sin. He doesn’t want you to know about the “deceitfulness of sin” (Heb 3:13). He wants you to hide your sin. He wants you to secretly love your sin. He definitely doesn’t want you to kill it. He wants to convince you that all will be well if you just cut back on sin. He’s going to hide from you that sin is crouching at the door. He’s going to let you get away with sin and stop opposing you while you persist in sin. He wants to lull you to sleep. He loves a good hypocrite.

Put to death therefore what is earthly in you… Colossians 3:5
When God calls you to deal with your sin, He has very specific instructions. He doesn’t tell you to maim sin. He doesn’t tell you to wound sin grievously. He doesn’t tell you to lock sin in a box and never look at it again. He tells you to kill it. We’ve got to quit playing games with sin.
The Games We Play
What are the games we play with sin? We hide sin from others in order to appear better than we are. We put sin away for a while and only entertain it in certain seasons. We disguise sin as a virtue. We dress it up in new clothes and call it by a new name so as to persist in it respectably. But these are the games that must stop if anyone is ever to see the Lord (Heb 12:14).
Sin Will Kill You
Sin is dangerous. Sin does not have light consequences. Before we come to Christ, we come to an understanding that the wages of sin is death (Rom 6:23). John writes that the one who makes a practice of sinning has not been born of God (1 John 3:9). 
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