Law Enforcement: Meeting the Needs of Our Local Communities

After years in law enforcement, Adam Davis' own marriage was on the brink and took a wake-up call for God to heal his relationship with his wife. Today, he's challenging husbands to keep their priorities straight. Whenever I talk to a brother who is law enforcement or just a man struggling with his marriage, his relationship with Christ, one of the first things I tell them is face it, now it's already been paid for. Let's move on. Now here's what you're going to do going forward. Stop making excuses, get a routine of discipline, take some self-control, and give it to God.

And go and do the things that you're supposed to do every single day. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Anne Wilson.

I'm Bob Lapine. You can find us online at familylifetoday.com. You can make a decision whether you're going to fight in your marriage or fight for your marriage. Adam Davis is here to talk with us about that today. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.

Thanks for joining us. Have you ever done a ride-along where you're in the backseat of a police cruiser? I've been in the backseat, but not a ride-along. Wait, wait, wait. What?

What do you mean, what? When was this? Well, it was before we were married, but I spent a night. Did you? You didn't know that?

I did not know this. I think we put it in one of our books. Well, your wife is looking like, I don't remember this. I don't even know what you're talking about.

She didn't read that chapter. You spent a night in jail. Well, I was going to spend the night. My mom came. Wait, wait.

Get back to what happened. You don't want to know. No, I mean, honestly, it was simply 1970s craziness, you know, on a Friday night with my buddies.

I-75. Before you were a believer. Before I was a believer. You're 18, 19 years old? I think I was 17, probably junior in high school, drinking. We decided to moon the car beside us.

I think I did. And, you know, did the old moon shot. And next thing you know, the police are after us. And we avoid when we turn into this town and start racing through a little tiny town and end up, like, in a car wash thinking, oh, they'll never find us.

And they pull right up, car in front, car in back, get out, and they take us all to jail. And they basically say, you're spending the night. And, you know, not only did we moon somebody, which, you know, I hate to say this on radio as your Family Life radio host, but, you know, then avoiding, I guess, arrest, I don't know. Anyway, they allowed our parents to come. And I had a single mom, and she came, and they let her take me home at 2, 3 a.m. So I didn't end up spending the night, but, man, did I get reamed out by my mom. And, hey, here's the good news, I've never mooned anybody since.

But, yeah, that was my one night. In the back of a police car. In the back of a police car, yeah. We have Officer Adam Davis joining us on Family Life today. Former, former officer. But, Adam, welcome back to Family Life today. Thank you so much, Bob. And I referred to you as officer because if you had been behind a group of teenage boys monkeying around like this.

No, I tell you, I never saw that happen. Good. Adam worked for six years in law enforcement, and since then has been a writer, a conference speaker. He's written books aimed at the guys in the profession that you are a part of. You have a heart for reaching police officers, police officers' families, because you know that these are guys who are not just on the front line in terms of what they're experiencing in the culture, but they're in a spiritual battlefield, too. Oh, mercy. Everything that you see occurring in our physical world is a result of what's going on in the spirit world. There is a battle for your soul. And, you know, the word says, it says the enemy comes to kill, steal, and destroy. We have laws against that in the natural. Well, there's a law against that in the spirit. And Jesus came to fulfill that law.

He completely defeated him. But what I come to learn through my interrogation of God, which humbled me. Stop right there. I mean, you mentioned it earlier. You interrogated God. Take us into that a little bit. I mean, was it like interrogating a— Well, he never lied. Yeah. Have you ever had a question that maybe just you'd be frowned on if you asked in church, why do these things happen?

I'm not going to list them, because everybody's got their own thing. But for me, interrogating him, I realized why cops are needed, because somewhere today a little girl or a little boy has been abused, and they're hunkered down in a closet somewhere, and they're crying. They're afraid. They're hurt.

They don't know what love feels like from a parent. And they're asking God to send somebody to them. Send me an angel.

Help me get out of this. The angel will come, and he's in the form of a man or a woman wearing a blue uniform most of the time with a badge, and he's going to come and take that baby away from there and put them in a home where somebody will love them. And it's our job as the body of Christ to equip those men and women with the love of Jesus, with his word, and make sure we take care of them as part of the body. If we don't, we will be held accountable for that, because they are stewards of peace and law and order, and we have to take care of our public servants. And so for the little girl or the little boy or the abused wife who may be crying for an angel today, we have to invest in cops, because who better to send into broken situations than men and women who have been changed by the love of the living God?

That's my passion. When you talk about reaching cops for him, that's why, because it's not just cops we're touching. We're dispatching them into every community across the nation, and it could create a sweeping move of God's presence and change across the country that's dying. And it starts, I fully believe it could start within cops and within their marriages, and we could see a change in our country. And it may not look like we've seen in the past where churches are filled, but it could be where homes are filled with the love of God and abuse has been remedied and justice has been served for people who have created violent crimes. And so I think that's one of the reasons why you see some of the things going on today, is because we're on the brink of one of the biggest moves of God in American history, and it starts within the life of a cop. I'm thinking in most police departments there are maybe a handful of people who are actually trying to live out their faith in uniform. I'm also thinking that their fellow officers might kind of look on them as soft. Is that the case?

Yeah. That's how I felt. I felt like if I listen to some Southern gospel music on the radio in my patrol car, when the guy got in who just beat somebody into a brick, that he's going to see me as soft, you know? Or that I'm going to say, they're having a bad day. Show them mercy and let them go.

No, but that's the thing. I developed this theory through my own experience that faith doesn't make you weak. It makes you unbeatable, because with Him, you are never defeated. You may face battles. And so I adopted the phrase semper invictus, which means always undefeated.

And it just sounds really cool. I could just say always undefeated. But that faith doesn't make you weak. It makes you unbeatable, as long as your faith is in the right place. Yeah, I know that, you know, Bob, as you asked that question, and again, I don't want to make comparisons, but it does seem similar in some ways to the NFL or to being a pro athlete or an athlete. In the locker rooms, there was the same mentality. You give your life to Christ, even head coaches would say, oh, I just lost a great player.

He's going to be soft. He's going to, you know, hit somebody in the field and say, hey, are you okay? You know, and I remember often trying to help even head coaches who sort of looked at me as a chaplain, like, I don't know if I want my player spending a lot of time with you because you're going to make him soft. One of my jobs was like, let me tell you what an athlete should be like if he's a follower of Christ on the field.

I always called it the three I's. He should be the most intense player, not just game day, but in practice, because he's like, this matters. I'm not playing for a head coach anymore or an owner. I'm playing for the Lord Jesus Christ who gave his life for me.

So every time I'm looking at film, every time I'm taking a practice rep, I am 100 percent in. I'm there early. I'm there late. Every coach should go, I want everybody in my locker room to be like that guy.

The Christians should model what it looks like. That's the first I. The second one's integrity, that they should be the people you can take them at their word. Why? Because they honor somebody bigger than the head coach. It's like I'm playing for. So if I give you my word, it's going to be my bond.

You're going to be a man I can trust. And then third was intentionality. Intentionality is like I'm playing for something more than just winning a game. I want people to see Christ so I'm intentional about how I work and then even how I handle an interview afterwards. I'm thinking that's exactly the same thing in a police department.

In the military. I think that it is our responsibility. We have to look back and take responsibility as the church, as people. Whenever I talk to a brother who is law enforcement or just a man struggling with his marriage, his relationship with Christ, one of the first things I tell him is, look at what you've done, face it.

Now it's already been paid for. Let's move on. Now here's what you're going to do going forward. Stop making excuses. Get a routine of discipline.

Take some self-control and give it to God and go and do the things that you're supposed to do every single day. And stop telling me what's wrong if you're not going to bring something to the table and what you're going to do to fix it. And so it's time for the church to rise. It's time for men of God to rise up, men who are armed with his word, who know how to pray, who are willing to take a stand.

The nation needs you now, needs every one of us now. Did your fellow officers think that you had softened when you came to faith? You know, there were some that did, yeah, absolutely.

Did they razz you? Oh, of course, yeah, but that's part of it. I mean, what did that sound like?

What would they say to you? I can't say it on Christian radio, Bob. No, but it was, you know, but that's part of it to an extent, and you just have to be willing. And I wasn't perfect, and I think that that's what we have to get to the point is I'm not perfect. I'm going to mess up. I'm going to fall at some point, something. I'm going to mess up.

Don't put that on me. There was only one perfect, and he's my best friend, and I'm trying, but I've caught a lot of flak. And I've caught a lot of questions from people who said, well, why did you leave law enforcement after only six years? Why didn't you retire? Frankly, there's only 24 hours in a day, and there's only so much I could do, the vision I had, where I was at. And it was a matter of calculated risk and massive faith, I'm going to tell you. I didn't know what was in front of me except for one step, and then I took that step in obedience and faith, and God has honored every step of the way, and that's how I got to Little Rock, Arkansas today.

And it's one step of faith at a time. And I knew that it wouldn't be popular, but I would rather be known as faithful over famous. I want to honor him. It's all about him. He's the hero of my story, not me.

He is the number one hero. Did you ever find guys in the department or guys you worked with that previously mocked you, made fun of you? I mean, I saw it in the locker room, like, dude, you don't drink anymore. You don't go to strip clubs anymore. What happened to you?

You go home to your wife, you loser. Six months, nine months later, that guy is going through something, and guess where he goes? Buddy, they call me to this point. And it may not always be the ones that I worked with, but I have had people that I worked with come to me, and it's taken time. I've had them drop by my house and say, hey, do you have a book, or do you want to talk, or I got a question. They call me in tears. But I talk to cops across the country that are in different stages of life, whether they're marriage or they're dealing with stuff.

I'm not a counselor, I'm not a doctor. I'm just a brother who's been where you've been in many cases. Understanding how to navigate through that and still keep yourself intact and not lose your faith, not that it's something that you have in a bag that can be lost, but understanding that no matter what happens today or tomorrow, that he is still God and that he is always good, no matter the circumstances. And it is our responsibility to walk out and be the hands and feet of Christ in this world and to literally be the salt and the lime.

And when we can go into these dark places like that, we're fulfilling what he's called us to do. How did your policing change after you committed your life to Christ? Were you a different police officer afterwards than you had been before? No, I probably was more aggressive as far as looking for stuff because there was a freedom. What do you mean, looking for stuff?

Instead of going and sitting in a parking lot every once in a while when I'm tired or doing a report, I wanted to find people breaking the law. I wanted to pursue what was being done wrong. I wanted to be more thorough. I wanted to be perfect in what I did. The intensity Dave was talking about, that first eye. It turned out white hot. And it was nothing that I was taught necessarily. It wasn't like I had it on a poster card in my patrol car. It was just like, I feel alive again.

And there's a line that wants to roar and let's go roar. Were there character issues that had to get worked out, things that you might have done differently before you came to Christ? I never did anything like that on the job, ever. I had things I had to deal with in my marriage, but we dealt with that, me and my wife and God, and got some help. And it doesn't matter to what degree unfaithfulness occurred, it occurred. Today, we have to go back and look at what defines unfaithfulness in a marriage. Text messaging, inappropriately, can be unfaithfulness in your marriage.

It doesn't have to be something only under the sheets. And so, we dealt with that. So, I feel freedom to talk about it, and I've talked about it in Bulletproof Marriage and in the conferences I speak at, and look for the signs of it, how to avoid it, how to run from it. And one of the greatest weapons you have in your marriage is transparency.

And I was not. You know, when I shut down, we talked about it earlier, when I'd go home and I'd take off my gear, that is an invitation from Satan. When you want to withdraw and be silent and isolate, because now you're isolated and you don't want to talk about what's going on. Now, when you've already shut her down, she's a human being.

She's going to say, well, you're being a jerk. When did you become such a jerk? You used to be a great husband and a great man and a great father.

Now you don't talk to us anymore. And, you know, now you've got resentment and division in your home. And now the enemy comes in, in the form of somebody who's telling you how great you look or how good of a man you are and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's the way he works. And so, understanding those strategies of Satan and how we can combat those strategies is one of the reasons why Bulletproof Marriage was written.

And that's why I was so, you know, I wrote that book in 45 days, not because I'm that good, because they gave me a deadline of 45 days. So, you know, it's tough. Talk about that a little bit, too, for wives, because not only in the police force, but I mean, wives are struggling so many times, wanting their husbands to open up, wanting them to share. But maybe they – I think she's talking about her husband. No, you're really good at this.

You're so good at this. But I've talked to so many who maybe their husband sits down and all he does is watch TV and drink beer the rest of the night. And she's feeling so isolated from him. How can we help his wives? Do we use tough love? What are the things that would be helpful? For me, it's giving me a safe place to address hard things. I don't need somebody else to tell me what I've done wrong or to criticize what I've already done or to question everything, every decision I had to make in a microsecond.

That most people couldn't make in a lifetime. I want it to be a place to where she literally holds me in her arms and says, there's nothing that you can say that's off limits to me. I am your safe place. And so if I've got to rant, she's like, okay, and she can toss it, she can discard it, she can handle it.

But it's not always sitting down and saying, how was your day? Fine. Great. Move on.

That's boring. Nobody wants a marriage like that. And so having a man that's willing to stand up and say, man, your hair looks great. Or, hey, don't worry about dishes. I've got this. Just take an initiative or having the conversation. And it doesn't always have to be, let's sit down at the table with the, you know, with the kids put away in bed and we're going to sit here and just stare at each other and talk about things.

And man, make it interesting. It's a life. We were created to thrive. He came to give us life and sometimes this has been twisted out of context and more abundantly. And that's not always financially stuff. I don't think it means that at all. But he created us to thrive because when we thrive in him, we crush the enemy in this world.

And we're the only hope for this world when we walk in the purpose that he's created us to walk in. And there is a world that needs men and women who are willing to have those conversations in the home. Because there's a whole other generation coming behind them that if we don't show them how to do it, how are they going to know how to do it? We had somebody early in our marriage who suggested that when I get home from work, the first thing that needs to happen is, and the term they used was couch time. You need to set aside 15 minutes and you need to put everything else aside and you have 15 minutes of couch time.

Kids cannot be involved in couch time. It can just be the husband and the wife and it's where you debrief about the day. What was your day like?

What was my day like? It's just the two of you. Does couch time sound scary to guys?

Absolutely not. Here's what I had to calibrate for it because I had to recognize as I'm coming home, that's on my schedule. Okay, so I'm going to get home. It's going to be 5.30.

5.30 to 5.45 is couch time. I've got an appointment. I've got a meeting with my wife. We're going to talk about these things.

And it's not that it was scary, but if it wasn't purposeful and intentional, if it wasn't planned, I could easily let that slide. It wasn't what I was thinking when I get home, the first thing I want to do is sit down and debrief about my day. I'd rather get home and relax, do something else. And maybe I needed 15 minutes to do that before couch time, right?

I think you can work all of this out. But I had a friend who said on his way home from work every day, he used to pull into a parking lot between the office and his house. And he would spend five minutes in that parking lot, and he would intentionally recalibrate and go, I'm going to my second job. And this second job needs as much of me as my first job.

And so I need to get out of the mode I've been in, kind of shut that off. I need to prepare for what I'm entering into, and I need to arrive home ready to go to work. And I thought that's the mindset we need to have as dads, and part of going to work is we've got to have this 15-minute meeting between the CEO and the COO of the family corporation. We've got to talk about what's going on around here, how are the kids, what's happened with you, what's happened with me.

Okay, now let's go have dinner and we can take the rest of the evening. Yeah, and I think what, Adam, what you said, a great word, safe place. If a spouse feels like his wife or her husband is a safe place where I can be me and be affirmed and understood, then they are going to open up.

But if it isn't, like you said, if it's critique or they're going to shut down. And so I think that's what a man longs for, and I'm guessing a wife does, too. It's like, wow, I would run to that. Gee whiz, this is a place where I feel firmed, I feel heard, whether it's 15 minutes on the couch or 10 minutes before we go to bed or whatever. Just daily, a rhythm that there's a place in my life that I'm understood and I'm affirmed. So needed.

I'm running there. And I would add one more tip, because I did this very poorly for so many years in our relationship and our marriage. Dave would come home and I had all these expectations, and then when he didn't meet the expectations, I was critical, I was grumpy, and I don't think it was a great safe place to come home to.

And I would remind women, too, that a lot of men will bond shoulder to shoulder. And so even I think I got boring. We stopped playing, we stopped laughing, we stopped doing fun things because life is demanding.

We have kids, we have stress. I remember Dave and I went out not too long ago and he said, I'm going to go play golf, and I'm not a golfer, but I just went to ride along in the cart. And I remember he's getting ready to swing the club, and I just said, wow, you look good. He's laughing, but, you know, it's just a little sentence, that's it. But it's amazing how just laughing together, admiring your spouse, and going somewhere where I think the table at first can feel intimidating if you feel like you're going to be interrogated.

Like you're sitting down with a principal. Exactly. But if you're having fun and you're complimenting and you're telling your spouse the good things that they've done, that opens the door to create great conversation. And I'll add one last thing, if you and your spouse decided for the next 90 days, we're going to go into a training program to make our marriage better. We do it all the time with our bodies, with our diets.

Working out. It's like 30 days, 60 to 90 days. You pick up Bulletproof Marriage, which I did, and I thought, well, I might relate to it because it's not really written to, I'm not a police officer.

It relates to anybody, not just police officers. You start reading it and you're like, oh my goodness, if my wife and I did this for 90 days, I'm guessing there's a guarantee on the end of that 90 days. Your marriage is going to be in a different place than it was on day one.

Great questions. You're going to communicate better if you go through it and do the work every day for 90 days. I had a marriage counselor, she recorded a video and held the book up. And she said, if every one of the couples who come to me would go through this book every year, you would never have to see me. She said your marriage would be on a whole other level.

And I'm greatly honored by that. However, it is not a replacement for receiving professional help if you need it. But yes, if you put those principles to work, you're going to be better communicators. And if we're good communicators, we are better husbands and wives and lovers. Well, if most wives came to their husband and said, let's do a devotional together, the husband's like, I don't want to do that. Bring them bulletproof marriage, and they're like, okay, I'll look at this one.

And each day takes, I don't know, five minutes, 10 minutes to go through this? Yeah, absolutely. What a great investment of your time and your day written by a guy who understands what it's like on the front lines of life and of marriage. I just think a guy would go, I'm open to this. Bulletproof marriage sounds like the kind of devotional I could go through.

And I'll tell guys this. You may, and I hope you do, you may have a great marriage right now. But every once in a while, they start to get a little boring if you're not careful.

A little stale. If you want to immediately put some of that pre-lit, pre-soaked charcoal on your marriage and throw a match on it, go home to your wife and say, babe, let's do a bulletproof marriage for 90 days. Let's do a devotional together. Let's do a devotional together. She might just give you the look.

Oh, it's on. I can't guarantee you a lot of things, but things are going to go, or she's going to say what's wrong. Adam, I want to let listeners know how they can get bulletproof marriage. Before I do that, a lot of our listeners will be in a restaurant today or a coffee shop someplace. They're going to see a couple of people in uniform, men and women. And they're probably going to be the folks who will go up to them and say, thank you for your service.

I'm sure that's meaningful at some level to an officer. Is there something else we could say, something better we could say? How can we honor those who are serving us? Thank you goes a long way. But in a world that screams, I hate you so loudly, I think we have to turn love up a notch. And whether you get them a copy of Behind the Badge or Bulletproof Marriage, or if you're in a restaurant and you buy their meal, or if you leave a note at the counter, if you don't want to approach them, if you don't feel comfortable approaching, which you can, buy their meal, leave them a note, write a scripture out, give them something that's meaningful. Thank you is meaningful. And I'm not devaluing that, but I'm just saying in a world where hate is being turned up at a level like it's never been turned up to before, I think we've got to turn ours up a little bit louder and let them know that we love them and we support them and we're praying for them.

That's a good word. Adam, thank you. Thanks for being here.

Thank you so much for having me. And thanks for these resources that we can give as a gift to people we know who are involved in law enforcement. Or I'm just thinking about showing up at a local precinct or at the police station with a box of these books and saying, I brought these down to give as a gift to any officer who might need it. A church could do that.

You could do that as an individual. Adam's written a marriage devotional, a 90-day devotional for marriages called Bulletproof Marriage. He's got a 365-day devotional for officers called Behind the Badge, and then a book called On Spiritual Combat, 30 Missions for Victorious Spiritual Warfare. Again, you can see all that Adam has written when you go to our website, familylifetoday.com. Order any of these books from us online at familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to get a copy of any of Adam's books. Again, the three titles, Bulletproof Marriage, Behind the Badge, and On Spiritual Combat. Find out more at familylifetoday.com or call to order 1-800-358-6329.

That's 1-800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word Today. You know, we've talked about how people in law enforcement are in high-risk situations when it comes to marriage. But stop and think about it. In this culture, in this year, all that's been going on, there are a lot of marriages that have been pushed to the edge. And there are people in your church, people in your community, people you know. You may not know the strain they're under in their marriage. You may not recognize the conflict that's going on.

But I guarantee you, there's more happening than you realize. Here at Family Life, our goal is to provide a lifeline to be able to help pull people out of the ditch they may be in and get their marriage, get their family pointed in the right direction, headed down the road again. Our goal is to effectively develop godly marriages and families.

We do it through this radio program, our podcasts, our website, the events that we're able to hold when we're able to hold events. And you make all of this possible as you support the ministry of Family Life Today. And we're grateful for those regular listeners who, either as monthly legacy partners or with an occasional donation, invest in the lives of so many people all around the world. Thank you for your support of Family Life Today. If you're a longtime listener and you've never made a donation, or if you're a regular listener and it's been a while, go to our website, familylifetoday.com today and make a donation or call us at 1-800-FL-TODAY to donate so that we can continue providing practical, biblical help and hope for marriages and families all around the world.

Thanks for helping to make that possible. And we hope you can join us again tomorrow when we're going to talk about some of the people in the Bible whose reputations are not all that great. Nancy Guthrie is going to join us and we're going to talk not just about the saints, but about some of the scoundrels we read about in both the Old and New Testament. I hope you can tune in for that conversation. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas, a crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.