The Family Altar

How to Lead Your Table

What the episode gives you, and how to lead your household each evening.

Secret Worship

for you alone

Each episode is for the father alone. Hear it in the morning, on the road, or wherever you are before the evening comes. It reads you the day’s chapters, the catechism, a reading from the fathers, and a prayer, so that you come to your table already filled with the Word you will open to your household.

What you hear

  1. The psalm. The psalm itself, in the Scottish Psalter of 1650, which sets each psalm in rhymed lines of even length so that a household can sing it.
  2. Two chapters of Scripture. Read from the Geneva Bible of 1599. Robert Murray M’Cheyne’s calendar of 1842 gives four chapters for each day, two for the household together and two for each Christian to read alone. The episode reads you his two private chapters.
  3. The Heidelberg Catechism. One Lord’s Day each week, so that the same question stands before your household for six evenings.
  4. The fathers and a prayer. A short reading from the Reformers and Puritans on the duties of a household, and a prayer from the same faithful men, for your own instruction.
  5. Your table. The episode closes by naming M’Cheyne’s two family chapters for that evening and the question of the week. On Saturday it also names the chapters for the Lord’s Day.

Family Worship

At the table tonight

  1. Gather your household and pray briefly that God would bless his Word to your house.
  2. Sing the psalm, or read it aloud together. Most of the Scottish Psalter is in common meter, so the day’s psalm fits a familiar common-meter tune such as Crimond.
  3. Read the two family chapters from your own Bible, in the translation your household reads.
  4. Ask the week’s question and read its answer from the episode page. Ask the same question every evening of the week, and the household will learn it by repetition.
  5. Pray for your household in your own words, and close.

A quarter of an hour is enough.

This order is old

The Church of Scotland’s Directory for Family Worship (1647) names the ordinary worship of a household as prayer and praises, and the reading of the Scriptures with catechizing in a plain way. The order above follows it.

If you miss a day

Take up the next day’s chapters and go on. If you miss a week, you may begin your Week 1 again on any Monday.

New to The Family Altar? Begin with the Introduction.