Private Worship

I don’t know what your devotion or individual worship practices look like, but I hope you have one!  As followers of Jesus, we value worshipping together as a family of God.  In fact, this is one of our church’s three core values—gospel, COMMUNITY, and mission.  However, I hope that you also worship God individually.

Different people do this in different ways.  Some have family worship times that might involve reading the bible, singing together, praying together, and etc.  Others may spend some time at a specific point of the day reading the bible and praying.  Lots of believers even use a devotional guide to help them in this practice.  Especially at this time of the year, many people like to follow a bible reading plan.  Some believers even like to begin the day and end the day with bible reading and prayer.  In fact, Charles Spurgeon (a famous English pastor in the 1800’s) wrote a devotion guide called Morning and Evening.  It contains 2 short devotional readings for each day of the year—one for the morning and one for the evening.

Recently I came across pair of hymns written in the late 1600’s.  These hymns are complements to each other and are meant to be sing in the morning and the evening.  In fact, they are called, “A Morning Hymn” and “An Evening Hymn.”  They are both sung to the tune of the Doxology.   (Actually, as best as I can tell, this is where the doxology came from.)  The words to these two hymns are written below.

Again, I don’t know what your private worship habits are, but I hope you have some.  If not, then consider making time this year to worship the Lord alone individually or as a family praising him and honoring him for all that he has done in your life.  If singing (these hymns or other songs) help you to do that then use them as well.