Transcript
Ben Fallon: Paul, today's question comes all the way from New Zealand. Sarah writes, “We have an almost 11-year-old who plays soccer. He's very gifted in this and would love to keep on playing in the hope of potentially going professional. As he gets older, the games will be held on Sunday mornings. As a family, we attend worship in the morning, however, there's also an evening service each week. By God's grace, we strive to walk and talk the Christian life on a daily basis, and we're involved in church in different ways. It's not just attending worship once a week. We wouldn't have this wondering if the games were later in the morning or in the afternoon on a Sunday. Are you able to offer guidance as to whether it's wrong for him to play on a Sunday morning and attend the evening worship instead?”
Paul Tripp: For me, the issue is not so much a given Sunday; the issue is being aware as a parent, I am always defining and shaping my child's values. I'm always defining to him what are the important things in life. If you just, all the time, miss worship because there's a baseball game, what is the conclusion of that child? The expendable item is not baseball–the expendable item is worship, gathered worship. I think that's a big deal because of the fact that you're defining what is essential and important in life.
I had a dad, I love this, tell me just a couple of weeks ago, his daughter is a real good soccer player; she's in a youth league and she's a goalie. And he said to the coach, “I just want you to know, my daughter won't be in the net on Sundays.” And he explained to him why, and he said, “This is a core value for us as a family, and she will play her heart out any other time, but she won't be there on Sunday.” And the coach said, “She's our best goalie. We'll do everything we can to schedule so that we have as few games as possible on Sunday.” That's wonderful! And imagine what that means to that young girl in terms of the values of life.
So, you're God's tool on site, forming the soul of that child, forming that child's sense of what is vital and important and not expendable in life. And so, the decisions you make about these things are very important.
BF: That's very helpful, Paul. I have a five-year-old, and there's a CrossFit kids’ class on Sundays that I would love for him to go to, both to get into functional fitness early and to burn off some of that pent-up energy. But there are no alternative worship service times for us or alternative class times, so it's been an easy decision for us to make. He's also five, and he doesn't know any difference. He's not asking to go. But as kids get older and there's more pressure, how can you have grace-based conversations with them to help them understand the importance of corporate worship rather than just making the decision for them and forcing them to go to church, because as the adult, you're the only one with the driver's license and your 11-year-old doesn't have the power to overrule that decision.
PT: I think one of the things that you have to do as part of the large agenda of preparing your children for Sunday worship is you have to talk early to them about worship and help them to understand that worship is not first an activity that they participate in, worship is first their identity as human beings, that they are worshipers. That means they will always live in pursuit of something. They will always live lives that are controlled by the love of, the craving for, the hope for something. And there are only two categories.
It's either, I'm living up after the creation, or I'm living in pursuit of God and his things. And so, you want to look for every way to instill that identity in your child. Maybe you do that when a child is obsessing over somebody liking them in school or being accepted by a group in school, and you can begin to talk about how those things come to rule our hearts and how we attach the happiness and the satisfaction and our identity to whether we're accepted or not. That's worship. So, you have a lot of ways of talking about that, and corporate worship is important because it puts that worship function in my life, front and center in an intentional, scheduled, focused way.
Now that won't make any sense to a child who has no concept that he's a worshiper or he has no concept of the importance of worship. So, you have to start talking early about, first your identity as a worshiper, and second that's why corporate worship is so important because our hearts wander away, and we need to be pulled back again to the importance of worshiping God.
I'd say one other thing that we do this because we were made for relationship with God. And a child's needs to understand that early. I always say that the first four words in the Bible, they are the most important words, “In the beginning God,” that life is about him. So, worship is not this strange, weird, religious activity that you just do out of duty; it really gets to the core of who I am, the core of how I operate. The earlier your children come to understand that, the more gathered worship will make sense to them.
BF: You write in the introduction to your devotional, Sunday Matters, that your dad polished your shoes every Saturday night, almost as a ritual, to prepare your family for church the next morning. Did you and Luella do anything like that with your kids, any traditions or routines?
PT: I think, for us, it was conversational. I think for us it was trying to instill these identities in our children. I tell the story of my son, who's now a sports broadcaster, was a basketball player in high school, and how he came in one afternoon and said, “When do you know a good thing like basketball has become an idol in your life?” Now I was very excited at that moment because it meant to me, he had bought into that identity, and he was thinking as a 15-year-old, this is amazing to me, about worship and about idolatry. And so, Sunday worship only makes sense if you know you were made for a relationship with God, and you know by instinct and design, you're a worshiper. And otherwise, you're going to have to drag your children to something; it makes no sense to them at all; it doesn't seem to be connected to their lives; it's weird and different than anything they're doing, and they're going to push back against it.
BF: I referenced Paul's devotional Sunday Matters. It's his latest book with 52 entries to prepare your heart for church, either as a pastor or a worship leader as you prepare to lead others, or as a congregant getting your soul ready to offer God the worship he deserves. It's available at paultripp.com/Sunday. And if you're listening to this episode on Saturday when it released, enjoy church tomorrow.
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