Monthly Archives: January 2012

Dave and his wife Kris

This week I’m in Minneapolis for a Pastor’s conference which I atttend every year.  It’s put on by Bethlehem Baptist Church, where John Piper pastors. The family came with me minus Josh who has his nose to the grindstone at school.  It was two years ago at this conference that I ran into an old friend whom I hadn’t seen or heard from for 20 years or so: Dave Sommer.  I hope to see him again this week.

You’d love Dave. He’s a joyful guy with a gentle, godly spirit; I found out when we ran into each other that he had only become a pastor a few years back. But it was more than 25 years ago that Dave and I were roommates for a summer, and the Lord used that time in my life in a very significant way.

The previous year had been a low point in my life.  It was my junior year at the University of Illinois and you might call it my Nebuchadnezzar year.  Me, the “A or B” student, well, I had almost flunked out.  And I think I know why: You know that time in the book of Daniel when Nebuchadnezzar went out on the roof of his palace and looked at Babylon and thought about how great he was?  The result was that God made him go mad for, well, I guess about 7 years.  Without going into all the gory details, I also was afflicted with an overestimation of my own importance, and so, in God’s providence, I went mad for about a year.  I was coming to the end of it (and the end of myself) when Dave and I became roommates in a houseful of Navigator guys during the summer of ’86.

There were about 5 or 6 guys in the house that summer, (one guy rented it and the others subleased from him, as I remember) and as it turns out, there were only so many bedrooms, and so two of us were going to have to share a room.  Dave and I volunteered.  What I remember about those few months is that he and I decided we would seek the Lord together.

During the day, he worked at a local bank while I labored at University Food Service, but when we would come back in the evening, we would often slow down and pray together.  It was a healing time for me.  I remember praying the Psalms and singing hymns.  it’s funny what you recall.  For instance, I remember singing “Be Thou My Vision” and Dave slightly cracking up, having trouble singing the last verse (“High King of Heaven my victory won.  May I reach Heaven’s gates O bright Heaven’s Son…”) Apparently, he kept thinking about “hiking in heaven” and couldn’t get that picture out of his mind. I still think of that to this day.

One day we were praying the Psalm that says “Your lightning lights up the sky”, and Dave recalled the thunderstorm from earlier in the day when that very phenomenon had taken place. I guess you had to be there, but for us, it was a God moment.

Sometimes God puts special people in your life at just the right time.  By the start of school that fall, I was on my way to sanity, healing and maybe a little greater humility.  God’s work through my summer with Sommer helped to speed me on my way.

Diane and I will celebrate 20 years of marriage this coming May.  By God’s grace, that means we have been praying together almost every day for two decades.

It was Dennis and Barbara Rainey of Campus Crusade that gave us the idea, back in the day.  One or both of us (I asked her – she can’t remember either) heard some teaching by the Raineys regarding the blessings of praying daily with your spouse, and after the wedding day, we decided to really go for it.

In those first few days of praying together after our wedding, our consistent prayer request was, “Lord, enable us to establish the habit – keep us coming back.” We had to pray this – I love to start things, but I’m not always so crazy about finishing, and I had the sense that just starting to pray with Diane would be nice but not enough.  Praying together for a lifetime could be huge, so I thought that if we wanted to pray…we had to pray.  Anyway, God answered those initial prayers, and after a while it became a beautiful habit.

Our prayer times aren’t long at all – truthfully, maybe just one or two minutes. We have a TV in our bedroom (I know the experts warn against it – I never said all our habits are great) and are usually watching something for at least a short bit at the end of the day.  So there comes a moment during our “zoning” time when I will turn to her and say, “Hey, let’s pray.”  I pray and then she prays.  Sometimes the prayer time knocks her out so it’s the end of our TV for the night. Then again, sometimes I keep watching.

We pray for the kids every day, for the church sometimes, and then for whatever else is on our hearts.  The prayer for the kids is key – we also prayed for each of them every day when they were in the womb – I would daily lay my hand on her belly and beg God for His blessings on the little one we didn’t yet know.

Praying is great for fights.  There have been a few times in our married life when we were having a pretty good argument towards the end of the day. But we know what we have to do in such cases:  We reluctantly make up…and then pray.

If there is any advice we offer to the engaged or newlyweds, well, you know what it is – pray together every day.  I feel pretty blessed in my marriage to Diane, and I think prayer is the key.  A cord of three strands is not easily broken.

Dr. Grudem

Dr. Wayne Grudem was a professor of mine in seminary, and I had a sense that he was a man who really knew and loved the Lord.  One day a student asked him in class how we might teach the people in our (future) churches as well as he taught us.  He said, “Do what I do: tell stories.”  I loved that.

He also wrote one of my favorite books that I use regularly in ministry, called Systematic Theology.  For that dry title, Dr. Grudem does a terrific job, in the words of Garrison Keillor, of putting “the hay down where the goats can get it.”

What does it mean to wait for the Lord? This passage from Systematic Theology encouraged me on Tuesday.  To explain it, not surprisingly, he tells a story, and his last thought is greatly encouraging…

“After crying out to God for help in distress, David says, ‘Wait for the LORD; be strong, and let your heart take courage; yea, wait for the LORD!’ (Ps. 27:14)…

“An analogy from human experience may help us to appreciate the benefit of waiting before the Lord for a response to prayer. If I wish to invite someone home for dinner, there are various ways I can do so. First, I can issue a vague, general invitation: ‘It would be nice to have you come to dinner sometime.’ Almost no one will come to dinner based on that kind of invitation alone. This is rather like the vague, general prayer, ‘God bless all my aunts and uncles and all the missionaries. Amen.’ Second, I could make a specific but hurried and impersonal kind of invitation: ‘Fred, can you come to dinner Friday night at 6:00?’—but as soon as the words are out of my mouth, I rush away leaving Fred with a puzzled expression on his face because I didn’t allowhim time to respond. This is like many of our prayer requests. We simply speak words to God as if the very act of voicing them, without any heart involvement in what we are saying, will itself bring an answer from God. But this kind of request forgets that prayer is a relationship between two persons, myself and God.

“There is a third kind of invitation, one that is heartfelt, personal, and specific. After waiting until I’m sure I have Fred’s full attention, I can look him directly in the eye and say, ‘Fred, Margaret and I would really love to have you come to dinner at our home this Friday at 6:00 p.m. Could you come?’—and then, continuing to look him in the eye, I wait silently and patiently while he decides what to answer. He knows from my facial expression, my tone of voice, my timing, and the setting in which I chose to talk to him that I am putting my whole self into this request, and that I am relating to him as a person and as a friend. Waiting patiently for an answer shows my earnestness, my sense of expectancy, and my respect for him as a person. This third kind of request is like that of the earnest Christian who comes before God, gains a sense of being in his presence, earnestly pours out a request to him, and then waits quietly for some sense of assurance of God’s answer.

“This is not to say that all our requests must be of this nature, or even that the first two kinds of requests are wrong. Indeed, in some situations we pray quickly because we have little time before we need an answer (see Neh. 2:4). And sometimes we do pray generally because we do not have more specific information about a situation, or because it is far removed from us or because of shortness of time. But the material in Scripture on earnest prayer and on waiting for the Lord, and the fact that prayer is personal communication between ourselves and God, do indicate that prayers such as the third kind of request are much deeper and will undoubtedly bring many more answers from God.”