Worship Christ as Lord during this Christmas Season!

This morning I pulled a book off the top shelf of the bookcase to look at it again after many years. This is a special book. I gave it to John, my husband, several years ago when we started thinking about having family worship. It's entitled: "Daily Family devotion; or, Guide to Family Worship" by the Rev. John Cumming and was published in Edinburgh, Scotland around 1700. Many years ago (about 20) we asked our friend and pastor, Scott McAlpine, who is from Scotland and now pastors a church in Washington, DC, to bring us a book like this when he took a trip to Scotland. We have treasured it ever since.

Inside the book, W. Lindsay Alexander writes an introduction which reminds us of the importance of family worship. Here is an excerpt:

The institution of family religion has come down to us from the remotest
antiquity, invested with the highest sanction, and recommended by the noblest
examples. The first social worship in our world was family worship. When the
progenitors of our race gathered around the altar hard by the gates of lost
Paradise, it was as a family group that they assembled: and though error and
ungodliness too soon introduced schism into their little society, and set up a
rival altar to that at which they worshipped, yet in the line in which the
primeval revelation was preserved, the worship of the true God by devotion and
sacrifice was followed, and the father still officiate as the priest and
minister of his household.

Abraham, the friend of God, content to dwell in tents, and to lead a nomade life, that he might show that he sought not an earthly settlement, but a heavenly inheritance, was careful, wherever he pitched his tent for any protracted stay, to build there an altar, that he might call on the name of the Lord. His example in this respect was followed by his son Isaac, and his grandson Jacob. And that in thus providing for the worship of God they sought not merely their own spiritual benefit, but were solicitous also for that of their households, is evident from ceretain statement in the brief record of their history.

More on this tomorrow.......