God can use the small act of faithfulness in gathering your family together to pray or sing or read His Word for His great ends. There will always be more that you want to do with your family worship time. But by starting small and incrementally building and by adjusting your plans as needed you can ensure that your family keeps up the habit of growing in the knowledge and love of the Lord together.

When I was a single college student, I operated under the assumption that family worship is simple to implement and execute. I expected to find the “perfect formula” soon after I was married and then spend the rest of my life executing that perfect plan. How wrong I was. I am sure for some people, implementing family worship is easy and straightforward. But I would wager for most people, even though you have a desire to start and continue regular family worship, you find that it is easier said than done. This can quickly become discouraging if you don’t remember that family worship is typically incremental and iterative.
Incremental: Little Victories Build to Bigger Victories
What do I mean by incremental? Oftentimes, your family worship will not start with a long, complicated liturgy right off the bat. There are a dozen different things you can do with your time: Bible reading, catechism memorization, hymn singing, prayer for your local Church, and on and on the list goes. If you try to do too much all at once, the habit of worshiping together as a family each day actually becomes more difficult to nurture. There is a lot you could do with your family worship time. The question is what is most realistic, spiritually edifying, and glorifying to God way to spend the time that you have.
If you want to start worshiping God together as a family on a consistent basis, start small. Focus on one or two activities primarily, like reading a chapter of the Bible together and then singing a hymn. Your family worship time does not need to become a daily mini-Church service right away. In fact, biting off more than you can chew with family worship is, in my opinion, one of the main reasons so many families with good intentions end up giving up on it. Start small and build up as you go.
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God will vindicate his people and fight for them. God will fight against his enemies and he will prevail. So everyone faces this coming day of judgment, but depending on who you are and where you stand with your Creator will fully determine how you stand before him as Judge.

What do you think of when you hear the word “judgment”? It will normally depend on who you are and the actual context. If for example you did some heroic or brave or sacrificial feat for another person, you might at one point have a day of reckoning. There might be a public award ceremony where your valiant efforts are recognised and rewarded.
Or you might have been caught out doing something wrong, and you know a day of reckoning is coming, and you do NOT look forward to that. Payday is coming, and you know you do not want to be there. We all likely have experienced both scenarios.
Let me offer one example of the latter, going way back when I was quite wrong. I had gone to a nearby small shop, and for some reason, decided I would snatch some candy or something. The gal there caught me. She took my name and phone number (I was not smart enough to come up with fake ones), and I was in great fear as I walked home.
When I got home, the phone did ring. But my mom was having a shower, so it never did get answered. So I missed out on my mini-judgement day way back then. Needless to say, I was greatly relieved. Judgment was avoided – at least on that occasion.
But there is of course a full and final judgment day coming, one that we ALL will be involved in. None of us will miss out on it. And of course there will be only two options available to all of mankind. Either you are right with God through Christ, and he has taken the judgment we deserved, or you are not right with God, and your judgment awaits.
We make that choice now. If we do not say no to sin and self now, and cast ourselves upon the mercy of Christ and his substitutionary atonement for our sins, then the day of judgment is coming, and NO one will want to be there. But if we have availed ourselves of the forgiveness of sins through faith and repentance, then we can indeed look forward to that day. So it all depends on which camp you happen to be in.
I want to tease this out just a bit further by discussing a few passages I have once again come upon in my daily Bible reading. I am once more back in the Old Testament prophets, and three similar and familiar passages can be discussed here. All three have to do with eschatological judgment.
As mentioned, for those who are his, it will be a day of real good news. For those who are not his, it will be a day of real bad news. The three texts contain a very familiar phrase, but two of the passages use it in quite a different manner than the third one.
We have all heard about beating ‘swords into plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks’. Both Isaiah 2:4 and Micah 4:3 have this. And the larger context of the two is nearly identical (Is. 2:1-5 and Mic. 4:1-5). Both of course refer to the coming day of the Lord when weapons of warfare will no longer be needed.
However, consider an interesting reversal of all this as found in Joel 3:9-10:
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At the heart of modern liberalism is the belief that we belong to ourselves. The “my body, my choice” worldview offers a sense of control but provides no solutions when things are out of control, and liberals are convinced of nothing if not the fact that things are going poorly: The American dream is a sham, climate change will kill us all, and systemic racism is eternal. Not only does modern liberalism require awareness of the problems, both real and imagined, it demands a fixation on them. 

We know America is experiencing a mental health crisis, but the Youth Risk Behavior Survey released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) illustrates just how serious the problem has become for America’s young people. Almost three in five teenage girls felt persistent sadness in 2021. Girls are twice as likely to be depressed as boys and one in three girls said they seriously considered suicide.
Several factors are relevant. Social media had negatively impacted mental health long before the response to COVID-19 made the problem worse. Perhaps most surprising data concerned the CDC’s conclusion that a teenager’s political views impacted his or her levels of depression.
The study, released in December of 2022, found that liberal teens are more likely to be depressed than their conservative peers. In fact, liberal boys are more likely to be depressed than conservative girls, which suggests that political beliefs are more significant than gender when it comes to depression.
The authors of the study attempted to explain the depression of liberal teenagers in two ways. First, the authors suggest liberal teens are depressed because they live in a world dominated by conservative values.
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