For my family, holidays are an important time to be creative with our daily worship/teaching time. I look for things that add knowledge, excitement, tradition, depth, and hope to our family worship. The holidays provide easy to secure opportunities for building family faith. Society tells us that a holiday is coming as it is broadcast from most stores and advertisements on tv and social media. However, I do not want those outlets to provide the foundation for our understanding of holiday observances.
With Easter approaching, a prime opportunity to be creative in family worship is just about here. The beautiful thing about a holiday is that you can use the same biblical passage multiple times in the same season. The Easter story can be read at the beginning of Lent or a few weeks before Easter, then again closer to Easter Sunday, then finally on Saturday before Easter service. Choose the story from different gospel accounts, or use the same account multiple times in the same season.
Now, I need to talk about the web links For the past few years we have been watching these videos as a family during Holy Week. They are short but packed with insight into the last week of Jesus before his crucifixion on the cross. The videos provide a short refresher and as the kids mature, they pick up new insights and ask different questions each year. I suggest downloading them so that you have them accessible no matter the internet situation.
In 2014 Kostenberger and Taylor published a book called The Final Days of Jesus. For Easter, this is a good overview of the biblical events of Holy Week. The publishers are the producers of this 8 part video series. Links to the videos and book are below.
