Is Your Family Calendar Built on Faithfulness?

A call to follow God's calendar priorities

A parent in our church recently asked me to pray that they would not lose focus as a family on what’s most important as they enter a busy season filled with youth sports and end-of-the-school-year activities. This is an encouraging prayer request. It reveals something on the radar - an awareness that busyness can crowd out the things that matter most. If you’re a parent with kids grade-school age and up, you can no doubt relate.

That morning, I just “happened” to be in Psalm 112, which opens with these words:

Praise the LORD!
Blessed is the man who fears the LORD,
Who greatly delights in his commandments!
- Ps. 112:1 (ESV)

The psalm begins with active worship and then makes a statement concerning those who fear God and treasure his ways - they are blessed.

Sometimes, blessing is a word that hangs in the air, ethereal and without clear definition. If we had to explain it, the words “vaguely good,” come to mind. But in this psalm, the writer leaves no question on what he means by “blessed.” He goes on to claim that the one who fears the LORD and delights in his way will find riches in their home (verse 3), will give freely and generously to the poor (verses 5, 9), will not fear evil tidings (verse 7), and will live a life of enduring righteousness that is remembered forever (verses 4, 6, and 9). Psalm 112 is a portrait of blessing in vivid detail.

But when the author of this psalm picks up his brush to paint the first strokes of blessing, what does he seek to depict? What is the first thing he wants us to behold as he begins putting flesh on his portrait?

Praise the LORD!
Blessed is the man who fears the LORD,
Who greatly delights in his commandments!
His offspring will be mighty in the land;
The generation of the upright will be blessed.
- Ps. 112:1–2 (ESV)

Before anything else, the line of thought the psalmist chases when considering the blessed implications of someone fearing the LORD and delighting in his commandments is that person’s children. He says the children of the blessed one are “mighty in the land” - they live in the strength they need to please God and serve their neighbors. They are reputable, respected, revered. The flame of blessing and godliness continues burning strong, passing from one generation to the next. It doesn’t flicker or fade. Why? Because the parents feared the Lord and delighted in his commands.

Blessing extends to the children, in other words, because the parents reverenced and valued God above all else and prioritized what God himself prioritizes. They feared the Lord. They delighted in what God delighted in. They cherished what God cherished. Their value system followed God’s value system as revealed in his perfect word.

All Christian parents want their children to inhabit the kind of blessing ringing out in Psalm 112. We want our children to be strong, godly, and competent. We want them to love Jesus above all else and obey him as their Lord. We want them to be capable adults who have the strength and goodwill to serve their neighbors. We want them to live godly lives. Yet in our desire to build character and competency in our kids, we are sometimes tempted to use the world’s methods to get there. Especially when competency sneakily peaks over the top of our desire to build their character. And in that desire, we start to compromise. Particularly in our calendars.

Before I go further, I want to be clear that I am not anti-youth sports. I am not anti-activities for your kids. The Lord blessed my wife and I with four children and we are currently navigating two soccer practice nights a week and games on Saturdays. Having kids necessarily means being busy.

But here is where my wife and I are united - we want our family calendar to communicate to our children that we fear God and delight in his commandments. Which means we strive to prioritize our calendar around God’s priorities. We don’t do this perfectly. But we’re aiming at faithfulness. So far as we can tell from God’s word, that means our calendar must at minimum have the space for two values to take root in the life of our family tree:

1. We will not neglect the Sunday gathering of our church^⁠¹

2. We will not be so busy that we cannot be involved in meaningful relationship with others in our church^⁠²

The go-to text for defending these values, especially church attendance, is Hebrews 10:24–25:

“And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.”^⁠

This is the go-to text for good reason.³ It casts a vision of significant relationship within a local church. The author calls us to intentionally, actively think about how we can spur one another on towards greater love in both affection and action. He then contrasts two actions that you wouldn’t automatically consider opposites (though it’s perfectly consistent with the New Testament): neglect of gathering vs. encouraging one another.

These ideas are proportional. To the extent that you neglect to gather and be in relationship with your church, to the same extent you diminish and minimize and even suppress encouragement. To the extent that you faithfully gather with your church and are in meaningfully relationship with them, to the same extent the arrow on your encouragement graph goes up. And the graph the author of Hebrews points us to is one where the encouragement arrow is on an ever upwards trajectory.

If you want the blessing of Psalm 112:2 to take root in your children, then you must lead your family in encouraging those in your church all the more as you see the Day approaching. And that means prioritizing time with your church family. Life with kids will always be busy (and rightly so), but it cannot be so busy that you do not have time for meaningful friendship and relationship with others in our church. I’m not claiming to have the formula for the exact right balance here. Each family is different - different numbers of kids, different ages, different seasons of life, etc. But no matter what your family dynamics are, I would implore you to make these resolutions as a family:

1. We will not participate in an activity that takes us away from our church’s Sunday gathering

2. We will not allow our calendar to crowd out meaningful relationship with others in our church

Don’t accept the cultural lie that you need to sacrifice time with your church family in order for your kids to get ahead in the world. Fear the Lord and delight in his commandments. Getting to church a mere 50-60% of Sundays for the sake of kids activities communicates to your children a reverence for the world and a delight in its commandments (namely, “thou shalt live for thyself”). Reject this. Spend your time in accordance with God’s blueprint for building healthy kids. Pursue Psalm 112:1–2 by living out Hebrews 10:24–25. This is not a guarantee that your children will automatically grow up to become faithful and godly Christians. But it is unquestionably the path that God, through his Word, has called you to lead your family in.

Fear the Lord, obey him with your calendar, and trust him with the hearts of your children.

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1. Full disclosure: I am in vocational ministry in my local church and therefore part of my job is being at church on the vast majority of Sunday mornings. But this was a value operational in our family before I entered vocational ministry at the age of 29. We’re not doing anything we weren’t already doing before when I worked a non-ministry job.

2. There are certainly other priorities on our time as well. Time for extended family. Time for evangelism (which is part of the reason why having our kids involved in non-church activities is important. We want to be spending solid time with non-Christians). Time for serving others. But I’m focusing on these two in this article, and for the Christian these two values are non-negotiable if we want to be faithful to the New Testament.

3. Some will push back here and say, “This just means general Christian fellowship, not church attendance.” If that’s in your mind, I would encourage you to read the rest of Hebrews and pay attention to its deeply communal nature. Do you really think that gathering faithfully with your local church isn’t at least part of what the author has in mind here? He wrote the letter to encourage the church to encourage one another to keep their eyes fixed on Jesus - an encouragement that includes the call to “Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith” (Heb. 13:7). Is 30 Sunday sermons a year what the author means? Is that sufficient for hearing God’s word taught and preached and having a line of sight on your church leaders such that you have clarity on how to imitate their faith?