Enjoying Family Worship

You're a parent and you're raising your children. What is job one for you? I mean, we'll assume keeping them alive is a given. But beyond that, what's job one?

Here's Jason Hauser. There's nothing more important in all of our lives than for us to teach our kids how to follow Jesus. And parents, we are the most influential voice in our kids' lives. The greatest opportunity our kids are going to have to walk with Jesus is going to be through us. And the church and the youth pastors and kids' pastors and all the other people in their lives.

But we have the greatest voice and Jesus will empower you. So I just encourage all families, take that next step of faith, whatever that next step is for you, have courage because it will make a difference in your life and in your kids. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson.

I'm Bob Lapine. You can find us online at familylifetoday.com. One of the ways we point our kids to Jesus as we raise them is through Scripture memory, not just for them, but for us too.

We're going to talk about an easy way to do that today. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.

Thanks for joining us. When we were raising our kids, one of the things we tried to do, we tried to incorporate Scripture memory as a part of what we were doing raising the kids. Sometimes, I have to confess, we were selective about the verses we wanted them to memorize for parenting purposes, right?

So Ephesians 6 is one of those. I was going to say, honor thy father and mother. Children obey your parents in the Lord.

You go right to something like that. But our kids today, if you were to begin this verse, our kids are all grown and married, have kids of their own. If you were to begin this verse, they would recite it on cue and would roll their eyes while they were doing it. It's Proverbs 26, 18 and 19.

Here's what it says. Like a madman shooting firebrands and deadly arrows, so is one who deceives his friend and says, I was only joking. And I love that because our kids all the time would do something to their brothers or sisters, tease them, do something. And then you'd say, don't talk to your sister.

I was just joking. And so we had that at the dinner table. We would all chant the verse together, like a madman shooting firebrands or deadly arrows. That's not a typical verse to memorize as a family. You gave me 100 verses to pick of what you were going to say.

I was looking at you like, what? But isn't that a verse that every parent should be able to pull out of their hip pocket and say, you need to have this one memorized? In fact, I'm just wondering if that verse has ever been put to music and the people to find out. Are with us today.

If it hasn't been put to music, it should be. Jason Hauser is here with us from Seeds Family Worship. Jason, welcome back to Family Life Today.

It's so awesome to be here. And that is a challenge. You've thrown down the gauntlet right as we get started because I have not written a song to that now. I'm already imagining the music.

It's not a ballad, I can tell you that. When you got madman, we're going to have some electric guitars in there. Yeah, really. Along with Jason Hauser, we've got John Majors joining us. John, welcome to Family Life Today. Thank you.

It's good to be here. Jason has led Seeds Family Worship for almost two decades now, is that right? Putting Scripture to music in a way that makes it easy for moms and dads and kids and the whole family to memorize the Bible.

I love Seeds. In fact, when we were updating the Passport to Purity resource that Family Life created back in the early 90s, we had some songs, some Scripture memory songs in the first edition that were appropriate for the early 90s. I mean, a lot of synthesizer and a lot of big hair, you know, it was that kind of stuff.

And we just realized now, these songs have got to get updated. So we went to Jason and said, can you take… I'm surprised you didn't call me. I thought you were going to call me, but… You were surprised by it? Yeah. No, you went to the pro.

You got the pro. We went to Jason and said, could you create these songs for us? And so all of the Passport to Purity and Passport to Identity music was created by Jason, Scripture memory verses that are a part of those programs.

And speaking of Passport to Identity, John Majors was the leader of that project when he was here as a part of Family Life, wrote a book that goes along with Passport to Identity called True Identity that's for teenagers to read to help understand their identity, who they are. It's the big question every teenager is asking is, who am I? What am I good at?

Why should anybody like me? Why am I here? Exactly. And he said, I think there are two beliefs that determine every decision every person makes every day, whether you're five years old or 50, two beliefs, and they're sitting right here. One is theology. What do we believe about God?

That's what you're doing with Scripture to help kids understand theology. And the other is identity. Who am I? And I think every decision I made is based on do I really understand God's character and identity? Do I understand who I am? Good decisions, bad decisions are made out of that. And it's pretty cool. As you were saying that, Bob, I thought they're sitting right here.

You are influencing those two areas and that's critical. Jason, I don't know why I didn't know about this earlier, but Dave and I, as we've memorized Scripture over the years, there was one point that we were in seminary taking a hermeneutics class and the professor popped on us the night before that we had to memorize 15 verses for the final, the next day. Now, Dave is really good at memorizing Scripture. And I got so mad because he was done in like 45 minutes. I got them all and he's reciting them and I'm like on number four. And I gave up like, I'm not doing this.

I can't even remember. I needed a song. If I had a song, I could have memorized those. And so I feel like you're such a genius to help us as families and individuals to memorize Scriptures through music. It is pretty amazing, Jason, how Scripture put to music does something different in our memory and in our, I think even in our soul. I mean, God's word is living and powerful. So the spoken word, I'm a big proponent of the spoken word, but the sung word, the word with melody, there's something that is transcendent about that.

Yeah. Well, I always tell kids, you know, music is really important to God. There are songs throughout the whole Bible, but the middle of the Bible is a collection of 150 songs. And God wired us from music.

He wired us to worship him. And one of the ways we do that is through music. And of course, there's some statistics that say all of us, whether we want to or not, by the time we leave home, we're 18 or 20, we know two to 3000 songs word for word, right? Now, what those songs are, what those lyrics are that we have in our minds, I mean, that can be debated. They're not always the best.

They're not always the best lyrics, right? And we all have that. But to be able to put God's word to music and the whole Seeds Family Worship Ministry came out of just serving kids at a local church in Franklin, Tennessee, and writing scriptures for a vacation Bible school, but seeing how that impacted our kids and our teachers and how it impacted our church. And then God just opened doors for it to become what it is today. John, I want to go back to a conversation you and I had more than a decade ago. We were talking here at Family Life about how can we help moms and dads in the process of discipling their kids?

What kinds of tools could we come up with? And we kicked around an idea that really now you and Jason are working together to put legs to this idea that's more than a decade old. Talk about that. The thing that we heard all the time about Passport to Purity was you made it easy for us to win as parents. We got a huge win, great connection with my kids around a difficult topic, and Bob and I got to talking about that. How do we take that from just one event in the lifetime of your child and turn it into a daily thing, a weekly thing, and make it happen more often, and get God's word hidden in their heart? And that really led us to this idea of weekly family devotions with Scripture memory songs that plant God's word in your heart, and those will keep coming back at times you don't even expect it. In fact, Jason and I, when we were working on Passport to Purity, we laughed about some of the old salty songs. We still remembered, you know, Beloved, Let Us Love One Another, For Love Is God.

You could quote and quote. I still know that because of my kids listening to it. Right. And sometimes songs stick for the wrong reason, right? You know, you go, that tune was interesting. And that's why we pulled Jason in.

We wanted to have really memorable tunes that were also engaged the whole family, but also gave families an easy way to win. Yeah. We talked about this idea, what if we took 100 verses and we said, these are the essential 100. If every kid by the time he graduated had memorized these 100 verses, not just 100 random verses, but what if you categorized them and you really laid out a systematic theology, utilizing those 100 verses, how much farther ahead would that child be at age 18 if those 100 verses were planted in his heart so that he goes to college, maybe he veers to the left, to the right. He's still got God's Word hidden in his heart, and God's Word will not return void. I believe that he's going to still hear those verses ringing in his head for the rest of his life if he plants them there early. You guys, this year in 2020, have put together a project that's really kind of the first steps in that direction of, I don't know if it'll be 100 or more than 100, but this is what you're giving life to, right?

Yeah, we're calling it 20 in 2020. I mean, just think, as a family, you might be memorizing Scripture together, but it's often a struggle to get your kids to engage, to remember it. You might get it done, but a week later, they don't remember. But what if you can come away from the end of 2020 having memorized 20 verses together as a family? How that will begin to change your family, the ethos of your family, the conversations at the table. Part of the real value of seeds is we want to get the Word planted because Psalm 119 talks about how I've hidden God's Word in my heart so that I might not sin against you.

Let's hide it in there at a young age. And you never know how God's going to bring that about in college or wherever, but 20 verses. How many families can say, we have 20 verses together we can recite, and we memorized them effortlessly just by listening to songs? Yeah, and I know there's some dads, you know, they're sitting there right now hearing this, and maybe mom's going, oh great, I'm going to do 20, even if it's 10, but then they hear 20, but they don't have this part. They don't know the music part is going to make it fun. Because when you say this is going to be something you're going to enjoy, it changes everything. And so the music part of it, not only is it going to be stuck and memorable, but it can actually create joy around it, right?

Oh yeah, you don't have to work at it. That's the beautiful thing is as you're driving in your car, you can just be playing the music. We have playlists on Spotify and Apple Music.

You can just play the music. You know, I got a video this past week of a little girl climbing up on their couch to her little Amazon Alexa and say, Alexa, play Seeds Family Worship. And I love that, that this little one, she's been trained that she can have God's word. She's excited herself to have God's word playing in her house. And so you have God's word that you're just listening to it. You're not trying to memorize for a hermeneutics class. You're just listening as you're driving in your car, but then all of a sudden, you know these 20 verses and you can start sharing them as a family and then start sharing what they mean. That's what's so powerful about what John's piece that he's bringing into Seeds right now is really doing some devotions so families can know the verses, but then, hey, this is what this means to your life and these are stories to share. You've written three or four devotionals for each verse. Four devotions for each verse, yeah. So with 20 verses, 80 devotions, so that if a family, they might say, okay, it's going to take us two weeks to learn this verse.

That's fine. They could do it in a week. But you could have the devotions you read at a meal together. You listen to the songs throughout the week. And by the end of the week, you ought to be able to have a scripture tucked away in your heart, right?

Yeah, that's the possibility. And there's a lot of different ways to approach it. Every family has different structures. Jason and I were talking about this because in our home, we do it over breakfast. I make a big meal because food is what brings people together. Instead of trying to create some separate family worship event that can be kind of intimidating, it's like, no, just bring everybody around the table. Read the story. Let the verses play.

And hopefully, over time, that's going to saturate. Jason, they take it a little differently. Yeah, we do Sunday nights. We've decided to have a family night. It's kind of been part of our family culture and such, but it's just one night a week.

I think sometimes people think I'm in family ministry and that we do devotions every day and we do all these things. It's like, no, we just fight to have one night a week. We sit down, but we have spiritual family time and we share a meal. Like John says, food is powerful.

Food can gather, especially at all ages, but teenagers are a little harder to wrangle at times. But you make a nice meal and they'll show up, right? So you get everybody together and then we just sit down and we'll have our family time. Sometimes we're doing different things over the season, but these devotions are easy. You could literally be sitting at the table or like our family. We eat dinner and then we go into the living room, we sit around, and then we have our devotion time and then we pray.

And I think just that word, devotion time, can be intimidating for us as parents. It sounds great, we want that, but then I think we get stunk like, what's that look like? What do we do?

Do I change my voice? And so what you've done is you've made it easy. So you pull your family together. Now walk us through. What did you exactly do? You shared your meal, which is a great idea, and now you're pulling out music, the Bible.

What are you talking about? Well, so with our family, I want to keep it as, and I'm talking to the average dad out here who's going, like you said, what are you talking about? Devotion? Like that word, I've heard pastors talk about that, that's so intimidating. I'm barely getting into the word myself. I just say, look, look, look, look, just tell your family, hey, I'm not studying the Bible very much, I want two more, let's all do this together, and we're going to keep it simple. All we do is we sit down at the table for the meal, and while the kids are shoving food in their mouth and can't interrupt yet, I just start reading the story.

And they're all, they're story-based, because I think that's the reason Jesus often taught with stories. It's going to draw everybody in, even if you disagree, even if you don't like it, which can be part of the conversation as well, right? You might say, dad, I thought that was stupid. Yeah, I kind of did too. Let's talk about that. You know, that's okay. Now you're not accusing dad of that. It's some other guy who wrote it, some other story.

But I just read it. There's a question to ask to get conversation going. Just ask the question. Sometimes we'll have 10, 15 minutes of conversation, sometimes silence, and I just move on. I don't put any pressure on anyone. You know, if there's great conversation, great.

If not, no big deal. And then we pray to wrap up. Just a simple prayer. If you don't feel comfortable praying, we even wrote a prayer. You can just read the prayer. It's great if you want to pray yourself. All we care about is you start the habit of starting to connect around scripture together because there's, we're in the midst of a pandemic, but there's a bigger one where kids are leaving the church in droves after high school. They're just saying, see ya. The only way we're going to be able to reverse that is to be bringing the gospel into the home every day, saturating our homes with the gospel every day. And so we're just trying to make an easy tool for doing that. Your kids, I mean, you're partnering with Jason, so your kids are, your oldest son's 16?

He's 15 down to seven. How do they do with the music? Do you bring home some of these songs Jason has put together and they go, yeah, I don't like that song so much. My strategy with the music is just to let it play whenever we're making the meal and when we're cleaning up. And I just let it play. And then many times when we were going to school, I just let it play while people were getting ready for school. I didn't ask for permission. I didn't try to build it up. I didn't try to convince them that they're going to love it. I just let it play and just let it work in the background.

So we actually don't play any music during the devotion time at all. Now, later in the evening, sometimes my little kids will love to do the hand motion videos and they just eat that up. You know, the oldest isn't going to go anywhere near that.

And I don't put that on them. So you just kind of got to know what's your family like? You know, what's going to serve them?

What's going to meet them? One of the things that I've always found interesting about Seed's music is that it really does seem to connect with three-year-olds and 18-year-olds and 35-year-old moms and dads. I don't know what it is about what you do musically that has that broad appeal, but you're conscious of the fact that you're trying to write songs that the whole family can connect with, right?

Yes. The background of Seed's, when I first started the whole Seed's ministry, I was working with a kid named Matthew West. And he was a kid back then just getting started and I produced his first album. And so we wrote some of the first Seed's family worship songs and he sang on the albums. But they're just kind of like writing worship songs with a pop-rock feel to them.

So they're just modern worship songs. But they have a kid energy. And they have different vocals, different people singing. They have guest artists and myself.

But really having the energy, I think, connects with kids. But then they're worship songs written to the word. Disney's figured out how to connect with moms and dads and kids musically. And you bring a lot of that same pop sensibility. Exactly.

We've got a keyboard here. I think we need to hear some of these songs. Is it time to get some old music? I think our audience needs to kind of hear what a verse put to music sounds like in a Seed's project and what their family could be listening to and how they could memorize a passage, okay?

All right, awesome. Well, yeah, the song, the first song I want to do, the song I'd like to do for you guys is... It's going to be about the madman and the...

Shooting firebrands in the fire? I could write one impromptu. I'd like to hear that. Madman. We're going to, you know, Madman will be the next time we're on.

That kind of gives you another reason to have me back because we're going to hear the Madman song. But the song that I'll do is called I Believe. It's the title cut from our new album. It's John 3.36. And it testifies that we believe, it's a great song to declare that I believe in Jesus and I believe he's God's son.

While you're getting set up, I'll just let listeners know you can go to our website, familylifetoday.com, and there's a link there that'll give you information on how you can get access to the devotionals and to the songs that are part of the 20 verses in 2020 program that Seed's has put together and John's been working on. Is this one of the songs from the 20 in 2020? Yes, it is. Okay. And what's the name of it again? I Believe. All right. John 3.36.

We're ready. And whoever believes in the sun has eternal life. And whoever believes in the sun has eternal life. Whoever does not obey the sun shall not see life, not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.

The wrath of God remains on him. Oh, and whoever believes in the sun has eternal life. And whoever believes in the sun has eternal life. Whoever does not obey the sun shall not see life, not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.

The wrath of God remains on him. Oh, and whoever believes in the sun has eternal life. And whoever believes in the sun has eternal life. I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe in the sun. Yeah. I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe he's the chosen one. I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe in the sun.

I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe he's the chosen one. Yeah. All right. That's good.

That's so good. Okay, so that's the unplugged version that we heard, right? Yes. So we're talking about with drums and guitars and the whole thing, right? Yes, so a lot of, like, young people, I call them our seeds youth. They're teenagers that sing with me. So, yeah, we have big gang vocals and it just feels like high-energy worship for families. And tell everybody who's a part of the Seeds band these days. Well, you know, it's interesting.

I've been doing this long enough to grow a worship team. And so I'm actually producing the new music with my oldest son, Ben, who's 21, and then my middle, and he plays guitar. And then my middle son, Brandon, is 18. He plays keyboard. They're both just incredible musicians. They both love the Lord.

I mean, it's amazing to see what God's done in their lives. And then my nephew plays drums. Then my niece, Kylie, who's now Kylie Lynch, but she does all the hand motions.

She's a worship girl for Seeds. So we are a family team, a family band doing family ministry, so it's pretty amazing. There is a little pressure being born in your family. Well, this is an intimidating issue for a lot of moms and dads. Most moms and dads I know feel like they're not doing enough, like they're failing at this. I look back and think we could have and should have done more. I think our kids would say, you're too hard on yourself. But as parents, there's nothing we care more about than that our kids love the Lord. Dave and I didn't grow up in a church, so we never saw it modeled. We had no idea what it looked like.

So for someone to give us tools, man, that is a gift. As you guys were talking and even singing, Jason, I recalled what we used to do when our kids would go to bed. A lot of times they'd be scared or they'd be wound up, and so we would let them listen to a certain music, kind of what you talked about earlier, Salty the Singing Songbook, and that was scripture. And so I'm thinking, man, as we're in the car, as you mentioned earlier, as you're just playing Alexa or music in the house or even going to bed, if they listen to that and let God's Word sink deep into them, Jason, I was thinking, your kids grew up on this.

They did. Do they have a lot of scripture memorized? They do know a lot of scripture, and they've been on a lot of adventures going out and doing worship nights, and we've made some incredible memories just in discipleship with our kids just doing life with us. The one thing, Bob, I want to just add to what you were saying, too, about people being intimidated to do this. That's a big part of what we want to help people do is just to make it easy. And every step forward is a win.

It's the small victories. You don't have to preach sermons to your kids, but it's really stepping in and just saying, hey, we're going to just have what I call just a spiritual family time. It's a time to get together to talk about the Lord. But a scripture that I go back to over and over and I share with moms and dads, I want to share with the families here is the Great Commission, but thinking about it for families. And Jesus said, go and make disciples of all nations.

Just put your children. Go and make disciples of your children. Baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I've commanded you, and surely I'm with you always to the very end of the age. So Jesus gave his disciples a call that was so much bigger than them, just like parenting is bigger than all of us, and it's intimidating to do. But Jesus said, I will be with you in this. But there's nothing more important in all of our lives than for us to teach our kids how to follow Jesus. And parents, we are the most influential voice in our kids' lives. The greatest opportunity our kids are going to have to walk with Jesus is going to be through us, and the church and the youth pastors and kids' pastors, all the other people in their lives. But we have the greatest voice, and Jesus will empower you. So I just encourage all families, take that next step of faith, whatever that next step is for you.

Have courage, because it will make a difference in your life and in your kids. And having devotions that are story-based. I'm just imagining now kids going, are you going to read to us a story tonight? Rather than Dad having to be the one saying, OK, sit down, I've got to read this thing. What's our story tonight?

They're going to be more drawn to that. And again, I'll just point our listeners to FamilyLifeToday.com, where we've got a link to the 20 Verses in 2020 project that you guys have put together. This is free. Families have access to this. Go to FamilyLifeToday.com and take advantage of the work that John and Jason have been doing, the songs, the devotionals, all of it. Go to FamilyLifeToday.com for the 20 Verses in 2020 project, and get access to all that John and Jason have put together. And I should also mention, there's another resource available online that we put together at Family Life, that's called Take Your Marriage From Good to Great.

This is not about scripture memory for families. This is about how you can strengthen the foundation of your marriage relationship with some easy-to-access, easy-to-engage-with content. A couple of online courses, some messages you can listen to from Vody Bockham and Paul David Tripp, Julie Slattery, Gary Chapman. There's a downloadable e-book that we're making available. All of it's free, and we've got a little extra incentive for you to engage with this content.

Everybody who signs up for it and downloads it, you're automatically entered into a contest where somebody is going to win a trip to Family Life to sit in on an upcoming Family Life Today recording session, and then have dinner that night with David Ann Wilson. We'll cover the cost of your flight. We'll cover your hotel.

We'll get you a rental car and just make sure that you're taken care of while you're here. There's no purchase necessary. The contest ends August 14th.

Some restrictions do apply. You can find the official rules at familylife.com slash good contest. So check out the Take Your Marriage From Good to Great free resource, and maybe we'll see you at an upcoming Family Life Today recording session. And then finally, we're hoping that everybody who's a Family Life Today listener will get a copy of my new book, which is called Love Like You Mean It. It's a look at the biblical definition of love, which is the definition we have to embrace if we want the kind of marriage God intends for us to have.

The Bible makes it clear what real love looks like, and that's what this book is all about. The book is our gift to you this month when you make a donation to support the Ministry of Family Life Today. When you help us help others, when you give so that we can reach more people more regularly with practical biblical help and hope for their marriage and family. That's what your donation does. So if you can make a donation today, we'd love to say thank you by sending you a copy of the book Love Like You Mean It. It's our thank you gift to you.

You can donate online at familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to donate, and we're grateful for your partnership with us here in the Ministry of Family Life Today. And we hope you can join us again tomorrow when we're going to continue talking about creative ways to engage the whole family in Scripture memory. And we'll hear another song from Jason Hauser tomorrow, so I hope you can tune in for that. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas, a crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.