1 Chronicles 21:18-30
The pastoral team of LUC brings greetings to you all in Jesus Name. it is our prayer that the Lord has continued to take care of you.We thank God that several of you have by now managed to come back to church. We continue to pray that all will be well and that we shall all come back to worship the Lord as we have been doing before. In the meantime, we pray that you will keep safe in all things.

Today we continue to explore the theme of family altar as the theme of this month. Last Sunday we looked at the importance and purposes of the family altar. It will be noted that raising an altar will impact your family in amazing ways as we saw last Sunday. As we build on this theme, today we focus on the question of how to raise a family altar.
 
It is common knowledge and as many families believe having a family altar or praying together is good. However, we sometimes allow our busy schedules, house chores, gadgets, and every other thing to distract us from this. Remember the story of Mary and Martha in Luka 10: 38-42.

In the Story 1 Chronicles 21:18-30 we pick out that raising of a family altar must be an assignment from God himself. It is very clear that God led David into doing the altar in the scripture above. It is inevitable that we shall be required to pray hard and purpose to raise our altars in the help of God. Without involvement of God it will not work.

The other very important lesson in the story of David is that whatever we give must cost us something. David declared that he wouldn’t give to God anything that costs him nothing! It sounded attractive that David had someone to offer him what he needed to sacrifice. It sounded like good news but David was very alert on this occasion and so he said no to the offer and said he was ready to pay the total cost of acquiring everything required for this business of the altar for God. But David is very categorical here. The lesson for us is that when thinking of how to raise the family altar let us think of the cost. Cost is attached by the value of what we offer.
 
We need to be truthful to God also. It should be clear what we offer to God.
So the question of “How” to raise the family altar arises in having an understanding that this is necessary thing to do in our homes. I suggest a few things we need to do as answer the question of how to raise the family altars at our homes then.
-Pray about this process.

-Be ready and willing to follow the direction of the Lord in matters family altar.
-Be willing to sacrifice your time, energy and invest all you can for this family altar.
-Come up with strategies and be intentional in the way of involving those near you as family members to come up with family altar.
 
In the story that is forming the basis of our study today, it is evident that God honors prayers that is made in the family altar. David had this concern of seeking healing in the land out of leprosy and sure enough the land was healed at the building of this altar. We are studying this when our land is sick with Covid-19. It is my prayer that as we build altars for God in our homes healing will come down and cure these pandemic. May the healing of God come to us as it did in the time of David as we read. Amen!