Three Lessons for my children

1: Closing eyes in prayer

We've been stretching our minds in our homeschool class watching R. C. Sproul's history of philosophy series "Consequences of Ideas" and learning about essence and accidens, acquiring knowledge through our senses, or not, etc. etc. etc. It has got me thinking about what it might be like for us to know essences directly, and not through our senses, as in "For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known [by God the one who perceives everything]". Today we heard the first address from Dr. Reymond's What Is God? in our Sunday school class on God's Incomprehensible Supreme Spirit, learning of God's tri-personal and incorporeal nature which we call "spirit". These things have all helped me to understand just a little bit more (a lot) what it means to worship God in spirit and in truth. So I was struck during our worship of the Trinity today how helpful it is to have my eyes closed in prayer because it serves well to cut out all the visual distractions that can keep me from giving my fullest mental concentration to the truths that are before us. For this reason I amend my own habits and ask my children to do likewise. (Unless, of course, the prayers they are offering are praise for the beauty of the earth or some other created being.)

2: Prayer of thanksgiving before meals

Life with grandparents (one from each family) was mildly stressful, to put it mildly. (Okay, stressful). So we began to put away habits of our earlier years of sitting down to every meal together. In addition to that, I have long been averse to making a ritual out of prayer that becomes empty. (When I was growing up, we said the same exact words before every meal and it became so singsong to me that it was mindless.) And we so want to live as if in continual prayer, that we have given short shrift to mealtime prayers. However, having read the following piece in John Calvin's commentary on Matthew 14:19 this week, I want to repair the ruins in this area of our lives as well. Children, note well:

As often elsewhere, 'blessing' here means giving thanks. By His example Christ taught us that food can only be holy and pure to us if we testify our gratitude to God, from whose hand it comes. And so Paul says that whatever food God bestows on us is sanctified by the Word and by prayer (1 Tim. 4:5); by which he means that brutish men who neither by faith consider God's blessing nor praise it by giving Him thanks infect and defile with the pollution of their unbelief what by nature is pure; they also pollute and corrupt the food which they eat, because to the unbelieving nothing is pure. Christ therefore lays down for His people a manner of eating so that they may not profane themselves and God's benefits with ungodly sacrilege. His lifting up of his eyes to heaven declares His earnest and vehement warmth in prayer. Not that this gesture is always necessary when we pray, but the Son of God did not wish to omit ceremonies which are useful for human weakness. And add to this that to raise up our eyes is an apt stimulus to stir up our slowness, since our minds cling too much to the earth.

3: On birthday celebrations

Also from John Calvin's commentary this week:

The old custom of celebrating one's birthday can not be disapproved in itself; for as often as it recurs the day should remind each of us that we must give thanks to the Lord for bringing us into the world and leading us by His blessing through many years; and it should also recall to our mind how we have wasted in evil and uselessness the time divinely allowed us; and lastly, it should make us commend ourselves to God's keeping for the rest of our life. But nothing is so pure but it is corrupted by the vices of the world. A birthday should be holy, but the greater part profane it with disgusting corruptions and hardly any banquet us free from dissolute wantonness . . .