Seven reasons families should pray together (Pt 2).
From Thomas Doolittle, “How May the Duty of Family Prayer Be Best Managed for the Spiritual Benefit of Every One in the Family?” Puritan Sermons 1659-1689, Being the Morning Exercises at Cripplegate, Vol 2, Richard Owen Roberts, Publisher.
REASON 4: You should pray in your families daily because of your families’ daily employments and labours. Every one that puts his hand to work, his head to contrive, should set his heart to pray. For will not your trading be in vain and your labouring and working, your projecting for the world, be to no purpose without the blessing of God? Will you be convinced if God Himself doth tell you? Then read Psalm 127:1, 2: “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it. It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows.” Bread of sorrows! What bread is that” Bread gotten with much care, and labour, and toil, is “bread of sorrows.” Without God, you labour to get bread for yourselves and families in vain. You might miss of it after all your labours. And without God’s blessing, if you eat it when you have got it with much toil and care, you eat it in vain; for without Him it cannot nourish your bodies. And yet is it not necessary to pray to God to prosper and succeed you in your callings? Prayer and labour should both promote what you aim at. To pray and not to do the works of your callings would be to expect supplies while you are negligent. To labour and trade and not to pray, would be to hope for increase and provision without God. Religion that puts you upon holy duties doth not teach you to neglect your callings, nor yet to trust to your own endeavours without praying unto God. But both are to keep their place and have a share of your time. Prayer is a middle thing betwixt God’s giving and our getting. How can you receive, if God do not give? And why do you expect that God will give, if you do not ask? “Ye have not, because ye ask not” (Jam 4:2). What ye work for, pray for. And what ye pray for, work and labour for. And this is the true conjunction of labour and prayer. Or will you be like to them [whom] the apostle speaks to: “Go to now, ye that say, Today or tomorrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain” (Jam 4:13). You will? But will you not ask leave from God whether you shall or no? You will go? What! Though God cast you upon a bed of sickness or into your graves? Do, if you can. You will continue there a year? What if death drag you out as soon as you come there? If death fetch your bodies to the dust and grave and devils fetch your souls to hell, after this will you “continue in such a city for a year?” If one part of you be in the grave and the other part in hell, what is left of you to continue in the city? You will buy and sell, will you? What if God give you neither money nor credit? With whom, I wonder? And you will get gain? You are resolved upon it; you will thrive, and prosper, and grow rich. What if God curse your endeavours and say, “You shall not?” You will all this, and you would have your will; but your power is not equal to your will. Here is much will, but not a word of prayer. You should not go unto your work nor to your shops and callings, till you have first prayed unto God.
REASON 5: You should pray to God in your families daily, because you are all every day liable to temptations. As soon as you wake, the devil will be striving for your first thoughts. And when you are risen, he will be urgent with you to do him the first service and attend you all the day to draw you into some heinous sin before night. And is the devil a subtle, watchful, powerful enemy and unwearied? And do you not all need to get together in the morning that Satan might not prevail against any of you before night, till you come to God together again? How many temptations might you meet with in your callings and your company, which without God you will not be able to resist! And how might you fall and dishonour God, discredit your profession, defile your souls, disturb your peace, and wound your consciences! This Origen bewailed in his lamentation. For, that day [in which] he omitted prayer, he heinously sinned: “But I, O unhappy creature! Skipping out of my bed at the dawning of the day, could not finish my wonted devotion, neither accomplish my usual prayer; [but] folded and wrapped myself in the snares of the devil.”
REASON 6: You should pray in your families daily because all in your families are liable to daily hazards, casualties, and afflictions. And prayer might prevent them, or obtain strength to bear them, and prepare you for them. Do you know what affliction might befall your family in a day’s time or in a night’s time, either in regard of sickness, death, or outward losses in your estate? Might not you hear of one man’s breaking in your debt and gone away with so much, and another gone away with so much? And are you indeed so weaned from the world, that this shall not put you into a passion and cause you to sin against God, or that you can bear it without murmuring and discontent, that you need not pray for a composed frame of heart, if such things befall you? Do you know if you go abroad yourself or send a son or servant that you or they may return alive again? Though you go out alive, you may be brought back again dead. Had you not then need to pray to God in the morning, that He would keep you in your goings-forth and comings-in and bless Him together in the evening, if He do? How many evils is man exposed to, whether he be at home or abroad! Anacreon lost his life by the kernel of a raisin going wrong down his throat. Fabius, a senator of Rome, in a draught of milk swallowing a small hair, was strangled. Do not your daily sins cry aloud for daily punishments? And should you not in daily prayer cry as loud that God in mercy would prevent them? Or if they come upon you, to sanctify them for your good or remove them? Or, if they remain, to support you under them? Know indeed that you are nowhere safe without God’s protection, night or day. If your houses were built upon foundations of stone, and the walls were made of brass or adamant, and the doors of iron, yet you would be no longer safe than [so long as] God protects you from all dangers. Pray, then.
REASON 7: You must pray to God in your families daily, or the very Heathen will rise up against you Christians and condemn you. Those that never had the means of grace (as you have had), nor a Bible to direct and teach them (as you have), nor ministers sent to them (as you have had in abundance), do shame many that are called “Christians” and go for great professors too. When I have read the sayings of some Heathens, showing what they were wont to do, and consider and know the practice and negligence of many Christians in their families, I have been ready to conclude the Heathen to be the better men. It was their manner to sacrifice to their gods morning and evening, that they might have the favour of them and be successful in their outward estates as you may learn from their poets. Do not the Heathen shame many of you? They were wont to say, “Now we have sacrificed, let us go to bed.” You say, “Now we have supped, let us go to bed,” or, “Let us play a game or two at cards and go to bed.” Are you men or swine in the shape of men? Mr. Perkins likened such to swine that live without prayer in their families, “Which are always feeding upon the mast with greediness, but never look up to the hand that beats it down, nor to the tree from ‘whence it falleth.”