Column entry, “Christian Family Practices: Living in Rhythm with God,” by Pettigrew and Badzinski

Column: Let’s Talk Family: Conversations about Faith and Family Flourishing

Column entry: “Christian Family Practices: Living in Rhythm with God” (Dec. 2024)

By Jonathan Pettigrew, PhD, Arizona State University; Diane Badzinski, PhD, Colorado Christian University

Column Description: Let’s Talk Family: Conversations about Faith and Family Flourishing is a monthly column offering a space to consider research-based, biblically-sound practices for family communication. We all have families. And we all experience messy family communication from time to time. Our column focuses on what works and doesn’t work for helping families be a little less messy and a lot more rewarding. Please join the conversation.

Christian Family Practices: Living in Rhythm with God

We’ve covered a lot of ground in previous columns about Christian family practices. We aren’t trying to overwhelm but to provide helpful tools for growing our relationship with God – both as individuals and as families. It’s a lifelong process that can be transformative. Like Paul, none can claim that they have “already attained” perfection, but we can all “press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 3:12-14).

To close our series on Christian Family Practices, it’s time to pause, reflect, and self-assess about the rituals and rhythms in our life. We are approaching Christmas and the year’s end, and this is often a great time for taking stock of all that has happened during the past year. We invite you to consider how Christian practices and disciplines have gone this year for you and your family.

Life flows through time. So, let’s pause to reflect, and then look ahead to the new year.

We like to think of moving through time as living in rhythm with God. So, let’s consider if our life-rhythms conform to the rhythms that God established. Let’s take a survey of the scripture to see the rhythms, then we’ll ask some questions to see how well our lives are fitting with the God-established rhythms. Let’s start with the longest stretch of time and move shorter.

Lifetime Rhythm

Perhaps you’ve heard the term “jubilee”? It was an event that was supposed to occur every 50 years. To really get a hold of jubilee, we have to understand the sabbatical year.

As a professor (Jonathan), my profession is one of the few that allows for a sabbatical—a “seventh year” break from the typical routines of teaching and service that provides me time to devote to research or other projects (like writing a book!). It is a tribute to the Judeo-Christian heritage of university systems. It happens, ideally, every 7 years. God commanded that the “land itself must observe a sabbath to the Lord. For six years sow your fields, and … gather their crops. But in the seventh year the land is to have a year of sabbath rest, a sabbath to the Lord” (Lev 25:1-4).

As a farming technique, letting land lay fallow can help it regenerate nutrients and prevent problems. While I [Jonathan] was doing my PhD, the state-wide plant nursery still practiced this principle. It divided the land into seven sections and rotated which section laid fallow each year, so crops were planted in each section for only six out of seven years.

When seven cycles of sabbaths occurred, God commanded a year of jubilee. “Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; each of you is to return to your family property and to your own clan” (Lev. 25:10).

It was to be a holy year, a celebration, a year when debts were canceled, work-contracts were terminated. It also was to be a marker in time for the Hebrew people. If a person were sold as a slave, they could be redeemed. Leviticus 25:50-52 states that the person “and their buyer are to count the time from the year they sold themselves up to the Year of Jubilee.” If there was a long time until the Jubilee, the price would be higher. If only a short time remained, the price was lower. So, the year of Jubilee was a universal marker for the people. A fixed time around which economic cycles were to revolve. A person would experience one, maybe two “Jubilees” in their entire life.

These Biblical rhythms reveal something about patterns of time across a lifespan.

Annual Rhythm

God provided a guide for how to structure each year. Annually, Leviticus 23 lists seven feasts to be celebrated by Israel. These included Passover, Feast of Unleavened Bread, and the Feast of First Fruits (around April). Then fifty days later, the Feast of Weeks or Pentecost (around June). Fall feasts include The Feast of Trumpets, the Day of Atonement, and the Feast of Tabernacles (around October). These feasts are still celebrated today by Jewish people around the world. Taken together, the feast set a rhythm of commemoration, holiday, feasting, and devotion to God. They created a pause in the normal routines and set apart time to together with other believers and reaffirm their devotion to God.

An annual rhythm is also evident in the natural realm through seasons. Be it seedtime and harvest, wet and dry seasons, or spring, summer, fall, and winter, God established annual rhythms through seasons.

What annual rhythms do you have in your family? Vacations? Holiday celebrations?

Monthly Rhythm

The Jewish calendar also had a monthly rhythm. You probably already know that we get the word “month” from “moon,” and the Hebrew calendar is a lunar calendar. In Genesis, God set the lights in the sky to be for times and seasons. The cycles of the moon can become a marker for us.

Do you have any monthly touchpoints? Maybe budget meetings in your family? Video calls with grandma? Visits to volunteer together at a food pantry?

Weekly Rhythm

Even more explicitly than a monthly rhythm is the weekly rhythm that originates with creation. Gen. 2:2-3:

And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.

The significance of this day was reiterated in the 10 commandments: “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy” (Ex. 20:8). Setting apart one day a week to rest from work or to turn away from our own pursuits and toward God (Is. 58) does more than sanctify a day; it sets up a rhythm for every week. Even if the “sanctity” of these days has been forgotten by society, the rhythm of weekday versus weekend has not been lost. For a good deal of Americans, the weekends look radically different. So, there is a de facto weekly rhythm in America that owes it to its Christian foundations.

How do you and your family “remember” the sabbath? Or set it apart to God?

Daily Rhythm

When temple and tabernacle worship were practiced, the Jewish people were commanded to offer a sacrifice in the morning and evening (Ex. 29: 38-39). This also was a stable marker in the lives of the people. Like many aspects of the Jewish ritual, this can serve Christians as a model for worship. This may explain why some have created morning and evening Bible reading plans. Charles Spurgeon, a well-known English preacher, wrote a popular devotional Morning and Evening with a passage and short exposition for each entry. Orthodox traditions include matins and vespers (or evensong) in morning and evening liturgies. As Malachi 1:11 says. “From the rising of the sun to its setting my name will be great among the nations.” The point is that God prescribed even a daily ritual. Read another way, God desires to be connected with us daily – and not just once a day but he wants us to start and end each day with him.

Families might practice a morning group prayer. Or maybe each family member would have a personal quiet time each morning. Then in the evenings, families can come together and share about their days, giving thanks to God for his watchcare and the ways he led each person that day. The evening worship—a time of prayer and singing, for example—can become part of the daily life of families. Bedtime prayers are another way to return our gaze toward the God of the universe.

So, how are you doing?

When we break down the amazing lifetime calendar that God lays out, it can be staggering. We can marvel at the foresight and kindness of God to create time and to punctuate it for us. He established the sabbath, a time when we can get out of our heads and cease our striving; where we can put our trust in him to provide for us, even if we only work six days instead of seven days a week. We can seek him in the morning and return to him in the evening.

As we have presented before, rituals are habits. We can have communication rituals in our families and also with God. And, we can have family rituals with God, like daily prayers or weekly home Bible studies.

How are the rhythms in your life established? Are they dictated by work, school, sports?
What are some annual rhythms you and your family follow?
What Christian rituals or rhythms have you helped instill in your family? What rhythm would you like to establish?
If you have children, what regular rituals or rhythms would you like your children and your children’s children to practice?

This year is almost over. As you look into the next year, what plans could you lay out that would prioritize your Spiritual growth? How could you establish or strengthen daily, weekly, monthly, or annual rhythms to connect with God, personally and as a family?

Our greatest, lifelong pursuit–the “chief end of man” as the Westminster Catechism says it– is “to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.” We pray that these columns will help you do just that.

Blessings upon blessings to you and your family.

-Jonathan and Diane

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