The Importance of Family Worship
We want to share some of William Gearing’s words on the importance of family worship. First, who was William Gearing?
“Little is known about William Gearing. He seems to have served as a minister in Lymington in the 1650s and later at Christ Church in Surrey.
Gearing published several works that reveal intimate awareness of the church fathers, experiential Calvinism, and the spiritual need of believers. His meditative treatise on prayer, A Key to Heaven (1683), is among the finest examples of seventeenth-century piety. He was also active in publishing some of the writings of John Maynard, a member of the Westminster Assembly.”— Joel R. Beeke and Randall J. Pederson, Meet the Puritans: With a Guide to Modern Reprints, 259.
In his Sacred Diary, William Gearing writes earnestly on the practice of family worship:
Let family worship be performed constantly and seasonably, twice a day, at that hour which is most free from interruptions, not delaying it without just cause. Be sure it be reverently, seriously, and spiritually done. If greater duty hinder not, begin with a brief invocation of God’s name, and craving of his help and blessing through Christ, and then read some part of the Holy Scripture in order; and either help the hearers to understand and apply it, or if you are unable for that, then read some profitable book to them for such ends, and earnestly pour out your souls in prayer. Pretend not necessity against this duty, for it is but unwillingness, or negligence, that makese men remiss in family worship. The lively and constant performance of family duties, is a principal means to keep up the power and interest of godliness in the world, all which decays when these grow dead, slight, and formal.
Those families wherein this service of God is performed, are, as it were, little churches, yea, even a kind of paradise upon earth.
And for this purpose, St. Paul, writing to Philemon, greets the church that is in his house. And in like manner he sent salutations to the church of Corinth, from Aquila to Priscilla, and the church that was in their house (1 Cor. 16:19) . . .
Every parent ought to say of his children according to nature, as St. John did of his spiritual children, “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth,” (3 John 4).