Dennis Rainey’s Legacy

And welcome to Family Life Today. Thanks for joining us. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson. I'm Bob Lapine.

You can find us online at familylifetoday.com. You know, you cannot spend the number of hours, the number of years. I mean, if you put them in hours, it'd still be years. I've been in this studio for 26 years with Dennis Rainey, and then for the last two plus years with you guys. You can't spend that much time together with people without influencing one another.

Those people, yeah, rubbing off on you. And we're spending some time this week looking back at the last 28 plus years because we're wrapping things up this week for me. This is the last week that I'll be on Family Life Today as a co-host with you guys.

You guys will take it from here. So we're looking back at the last 28 years and the many lessons. Honestly, I wish I could have put a list of about 80 lessons over the... I had to say, what are the things that have really marked me over the years? But I wanted to share with listeners, those of you who have been along with us for an extended period of time, I know you've been marked by some of these things. You just need to know I have too.

If you were tuned in going, those guys have got it together and I need help. You just need to know we need help too. And as we have guests come in, I mean, how many days have you guys left the studio after we've had a guest and gone, boy, I needed to hear that.

Almost every day. Every time we're done recording, we think I have grown and learned so much, so inspired. And no one can be around you, Bob and Dennis without being marked. And so it's fun to get to... I'm looking over at her now, she's got tears in your eyes. I wanna know how Bob's feeling over there. I am just settled in the fact that this transition is... This is God's timing. I've been confident in that from the beginning and people have said, so how does it feel?

How are you doing? And ask me six months from now when I haven't been doing it, I'm sure it will be a different rhythm of life, but I'm just confident this is God's purpose and God's timing. And I'm grateful for how God has used this program over the last 28 years. I'm grateful for the way God has built into my life over the last 28 years. And I'm also thrilled about the fact that the next 28 years, which will include you, but will go beyond you. Yeah.

I was gonna say, we're not gonna be here 28 years. But my prayer is that when you step out, whoever takes it, I was thinking about this, like the Today Show. The Today Show has been on forever, right? Yeah.

You go back into the 60s, they were doing the Today Show and they woke you up every morning, whoever it was, it was different people during the years, but they brought you the news, they talked about your life. We have a little bigger purpose, I think, than the Today Show because we're pointing people to Jesus every day. But at the end of the day, it's not about us. We know that. It's about the mission. And so in handing things off to you guys and then you guys handing it off to whoever's next, we just wanna see the legacy continue.

Yeah, we do. But at the same time, it's hard when you're the listener and your favorite quarterback is riding off into the sun. And you're not riding off into the sun, you're on to the next thing. You've got a full life doing pastoring of your church and a lot of things, but it's a bittersweet week. It is a bittersweet week. And we can't let this week pass without thinking about the impact that all three of us have experienced from Dennis Rainey, the founder and then president of Family Life and who sat here in this room with me for 26 years. And both of us learned and grew. But he was, Dennis was, he's eight years older than me. And so his kids were always like six grades ahead of our kids.

Step ahead. His marriage was always one season ahead of our marriage. So I'm just soaking it in every day hearing what he's going through and going, oh yeah, the empty nest will come for us. We better be ready for that.

Oh yeah, teenagers are gonna be like this. I better get ready for that. All of these things I was learning from Dennis through the years as we learned together. So I thought today I'd go, what were the core things from Dennis that have marked me in the 28 years? Because that's been a big part of all of this. And it all goes back to before we recorded our very first radio program. So I'll tell you the story. Okay. Yeah, let's hear it.

Yeah. Dennis called me in May of 1992. I was living in San Antonio. I had interviewed him twice on my call-in talk show in San Antonio where I said, welcome to Crosscurrents. We've got on the phone line with us, the president from Family Life, Dennis Rainey.

Hey, Dennis, how you doing? I interviewed him. I hung up from the interview thinking he was a pretty good guest.

He hung up going, he was a better than average interviewer. So we have that. That's all we knew of each other. He calls me one day in May and he said, we're thinking about starting a radio program. We need some help. I said, you're looking for a consultant. He said, no, somebody full time. I said, are you, do you want to move the ministry to San Antonio? He said, no. I said, well, I said, we're happy here.

We like what we're doing. I said, you know, I want to be open to whatever the Lord has, but I can't see us moving. Well, fast forward five months, God made it clear to Mary Ann and me, this is where we were supposed to be.

But I remember sitting in a conference room with Dennis and Dennis said, I've got a question to ask you. This is our first meeting. It's kind of a job interview, but I'm really thinking I'm not coming to Little Rock.

I'm staying in San Antonio. So I wasn't treating it like a job interview. Like I got to get the questions right. So he says, let me ask you, does marriage and family, does it make you weep and pound the table? And I thought, okay, do I weep and pound the table about marriage and family? And I said, here's what makes me weep and pound the table. Theology makes me weep and pound the table. Understanding God, understanding the Bible, getting that right, that makes me, that's what keeps me up at night. I said to the extent that marriage and family is on the heart of God, then yeah, I'm passionate about it.

And I don't know, again, if that was the wrong answer, he hired me, so it couldn't have been too wrong. Here's what I didn't realize when he asked that question. I did not realize how much marriage and family is on the heart of God. Dennis did. Yeah. I don't know if he understood it instinctively or if he understood it from reading the scriptures or some combination.

Or if it's just his call. He knew that marriage and family is central to God's purposes for humankind being lived out and for human flourishing. I saw it as kind of an important thing, but not as essential as he saw it. And I remember years later looking at the Great Commandment in Matthew 22, where it says, the greatest commandments, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind and strength. And I thought, well, that's answer number one for me.

What makes me weep and pound the table is theology, knowing God. And the second is like unto it, love your neighbor as yourself. And we always think about your neighbor as being the next door person or the guy at church. What I realized over the years is I'm married to my neighbor. My closest neighbor is my wife.

My next closest neighbor is down the hall, my kids. Everything that the Bible has to say about how we get along with one another in the horizontal plane is really about marriage. So when the Bible says, be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, that's a marriage verse. When the Bible says, encourage one another. When the Bible says, if your brother is in need, do that. Those are marriage passages.

And I didn't see that as being as central as it was. So when I said, yes, we're coming to family life in August of 1992, Dennis sent me a cassette album of him and Barbara teaching through Building Your Mate's Self-Esteem. The book had come out a few years before that. When Mary Ann and I and the kids, we were headed on a family vacation to Colorado before I'd even come here to start my first day of work. So I take the cassette album and we're listening to Dennis Rainey tapes. This is my new boss. I got to do a radio show with this guy. I better know what he's all about. Well, it was either tape three or tape four in that series on Building Your Mate's Self-Esteem where he takes this little excursus and talks about the power of honoring your parents, which I'm thinking, what does this have to do with your mate's self-esteem?

Well, he explains that it has a lot to do with everything about your relationship. But I remember listening to this idea of honoring your parents and going, nobody's talking about that for adult kids. We tell our little kids honor your mom and your dad. But Dennis, I remember him saying, there's no expiration date on the fifth commandment.

It's not like you turn 21 and then you don't have to do that one anymore. I thought that's great. We remember hearing that for the first time too.

And it stopped us. We thought the same thing. Here's him explaining how this became a life message for him.

This is amazing. I want to venture back to the summer of 1966. I just graduated from high school and I stood on the white gravel chat driveway that had a basketball goal against the garage where I'd shot a billion shots. And my mom and dad were standing there. My mom seemed awfully small that day. As I loaded up my Bel Air Chevrolet, a four-door, six-cylinder shift, my dad wouldn't trust me with a V8.

And I wouldn't have either. And I was saying goodbye to my parents as I was leaving for college. Had to be God. He prompted me to look my mom and dad in the eye and tell them, I think for the first time in my life, I love you. I backed out of that driveway and headed out and looked over my shoulder at my mom and dad standing there.

It was an incredible moment. So much so, it took almost a decade later before I reflected on that and began to realize that I had been a neglectful son, assuming their love, assuming their presence. And as I had started in the high school ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ some years later, I spoke to high school students about honoring their parents.

And it would get very quiet in the room. I then spoke to college students and young men and women coming on staff with crew. And after I spoke about the forgotten commandment, they would come and stand in line to tell the stories of abusive fathers, the fathers that they had neglected to honor. One person handed me this note after the class was over.

Dear Dennis, I appreciate your talk today. It brought back some memories I have about my dad that I would like to share with you. Every day that I can remember, my dad took me, hugged me, kissed me and said, good night. And every night he verbally told me that he loved me. My dad died four and a half years ago when I was a freshman in college. I was with him that night when he died. That night he hugged me, kissed me and told me he loved me. And I was too embarrassed to tell him that I loved him. He died of a sudden heart attack two and a half hours after I went to bed. I remember standing over his body saying, Dad, I love you.

I love. But it was a couple hours too late. I think God in his providence put us in families to teach us a lot of lessons. And when we're obedient to his word, we not only get to know him in the process because it says he discloses himself to those who obey him, but we also grow spiritually as we honor our parents. Reflecting back on that driveway experience in 1966, some years later, in fact, a decade to be exact, my dad died. I had spent those previous 10 years in a very baby step way of attempting to honor my dad, let him know that I loved him, appreciated him, and just sought him out to let him know how much I cared about him.

But still, as they summarized his life in a 30 to 35 minute ceremony, life didn't seem very fair. How could you summarize such a great man's life in such a brief period of time? And so I set about to write a tribute to my mom. I'd like to say that I finished it that year in 1976.

I didn't. It was 1982 before I finished my tribute to my mom. I sent that tribute to my mom instead of taking it to her and reading it to her. And when she got it on a cold February day, she called me on the phone and she said, is this about your mean old mom? Is this about me?

And I said, it sure is mom. She hung it right above where she had breakfast every day. She made the mailman read it, the repair man, the plumber. There was a lot of captive people who had to ultimately read that tribute. Why is that?

Why? Because parenting is hard work, really hard work. Then a lot of things in my life led a lot of different endeavors. Nothing was as challenging as raising four teenagers at one time and then raising all six of them through the teenage years, pressing me to Jesus Christ.

I'm telling you, there's a lot of exhaustion about being a parent. And in your later years, you begin to realize that parents don't get the appreciation and the praise that they deserve. Why do you think God wants us to honor our parents?

Well, I think first of all, because honoring our parents is foundational to any nation or society. Thinking back to the summer of 1992 and hearing Dennis for the first time talk about keeping the fifth commandment, even as an adult, this needs to be talked about. I needed to hear it.

We all do. I remember when I got here, I said, we're putting that message on Family Life Today. It was week one that we aired that message. We thought, OK, if we're going to do this, people are going to want some kind of a guide, a little booklet on how do I write a tribute? And so I said, we'll offer a booklet and then somebody's got to write it. So Dave Bohai, who worked here, Dave said, OK, I'll put a booklet together.

Well, we aired it the first week we were on Family Life Today. Dave had not yet written the booklet and I'm offering the booklet and people are calling and going, can I get that FedExed to me? I need it now. And we're going, it doesn't exist yet, but we'll get it to you as soon as we can. That's when we recognize that just really resonated with people. Such a powerful message. I ended up getting the book when Dennis ended up writing the book called The Tribute at the time, now called The Forgotten Commandment. But I wrote a tribute to my mom. And just like Dennis's mom, she put it right there. I mean, I'd given her a lot of gifts. That was the most precious gift she ever got.

Thank you, Dennis, for inspiring us to do it. I ended up writing Tribute to both my mom and my dad. I put it in a scrapbook for their, maybe their 60th wedding anniversary. But I had my brothers and my sister write in it, too, as well as all of their grandsons, because they didn't have any granddaughters. And I'm telling you, I bet they went through it hundreds of times. And they left it out on their coffee table.

So everyone would look at it when they came in. And I would say to our listeners who weren't around in 92 or in the years when we've talked about this, this idea of honoring your parents and you go, but you don't know my parents, you don't know my story. Dennis's book is still available. Get a copy of The Forgotten Commandment, read it, meditate on it, figure out how you can speak words of honor to your parents. Pray about it. Absolutely.

And ask God, how do I do this? The thing that I saw over and over again about Dennis is that when it came to marriage and family, I was much more reactive. Dennis was much more intentional. He was purposeful about his marriage and family.

I was kind of like, well, adjust. He came in with a game plan. I came in in the middle of the game and said, okay, what are we doing? Yeah.

What place should we call this time? So his intentionality spoke volumes to me about the need not just to be reactive, but as a husband, as a father, to have a game plan, to know where you're going, to be purposeful, to be intentional. And I don't know that I had that word assigned to it.

I don't know that intentionality was the word I put to it immediately. But I remember Dennis talking about the word that his kids would use to define him. And that was the word. In fact, he shared this story at one point.

This is kind of fun to listen to. Listen to him tell this. A number of years ago, I had the privilege of watching my baseball team, the Cardinals, playing the World Series. Yeah. All right.

Unfortunately, we weren't doing too well in this one game. And I had my son there with me, Benjamin. And the guy who had hosted us turned to me and Ben. And he turned to Ben and he said, Ben, what one word would you use to describe your dad? And I thought, oh, this is going to be good. It's going to be love, kind, generous, great dad. You know, what's he going to say? So I listened and Ben said, oh, that's easy.

Intentional. I looked at my son. I said, son, you come from better stock than that. You can do a better word than that, can't you?

He goes, no, dad. That defines you. That's who you are. You are intentional as you've raised us kids, as you love mom. As we go about our family, you're very intentional about what you do. And so the next time our family got together, I got them all together. And I said, now, what do you all think about this word that Ben used to describe me?

And they all start nodding their heads. So I decided I had to learn to like it. Actually, it is a good word because being intentional for the right thing can make a huge difference.

It's a fun story, right? But the point that it drives home is that intentionality matters. How much different would marriages and families be if husbands and wives would said, we're going to be intentional about this. We're going to have a game plan. We know where we're going. We know what the goal is.

We know what we're trying to accomplish in all of this. That's not how we started our marriage. That's been an evolving process for me. I wish I could go back to the beginning and have that sense of purpose in year one, but just to have it dawn on me and to have it start to creep into what our marriage and family has been, it's one of the ways Dennis has marked my life by making me more intentional. It'd be interesting to know what your kids would say. Then what word would it be for you, for us?

I had never even heard that concept. About family until Dennis Rainey. I had heard it about our walks with God, but not about family. And I think Dennis and Barbara have probably shaped us more than almost anything besides Jesus.

Well, you go back to what we talked about earlier. Marriage and family is huge in the plan of God. Right. And I want our single listeners to hear this too. Singleness is a gift from God.

We're going to, in fact, we're going to hear more about that this week, but most people are going to be called to marriage. And this is central to God's design for humanity, more central than we realized. And so if it's that important, be intentional about what's important, which really goes to the last thing. And this is something you guys have talked about recently in your book, No Perfect Parents. You've talked about the significance, the importance, the power of legacy. That was a big word for Dennis.

It's not a word that I came to family life focused on or thinking that much about. And yet I began to realize, as Dennis says, everybody's leaving a legacy. It's not a question of whether you'll leave a legacy. The only question is what legacy will you leave? And that's when I started thinking, I better think more about this.

I better up my game. That's right. Listen to what Dennis shares as he talks about the power, the importance of our legacy. I believe the family is a legacy factory. It is the incubator where relationships are forged and where the truths from one generation are passed down to another. It is the most powerful place where a legacy can be shaped and given to the next generation. And that's why I'm afraid as we talk about legacy, the word that we instantly go to is inheritance. We think about how much money we want to leave the next generation.

And I don't think that's the right question. I don't think it's wrong to leave an inheritance to the next generation. The proverb says a good man leaves an inheritance to his children. But I think the most important legacies that are left are those in the heart, character, fun, memories, people who loved each other and there were relationships that were meaningful, a life that was lived on purpose that had a sense of mission and was about what God wanted. Also just the issue of identity, passing on what it means to be a man, to be a woman, how a man and a woman relate to each other in a marriage relationship. I think those are important parts of our legacies today that we don't talk enough about.

That's a big word. And Dennis helped me. He really did call me up to say, OK, what's my legacy going to be? Michael Easley in the Art of Marriage video series, he said, you know, most people aren't going to remember you. Ten years from now, people won't remember your name, he said, but your kids will. Your grandkids might. So the question is, are you making the deposits there you need to make?

Are you investing where you need to invest? Are you leaving a godly legacy? The psalmist says, behold, my heritage is beautiful.

You can look back and say, I've been given a great gift. I've been given a heritage that is beautiful. And we leave legacies. We inherit heritage. So I want my kids to be able to look back and say my heritage is a beautiful heritage.

Yeah. You know, as we've been talking, Dennis inspired me, us, to think legacy. And Bob Lapine has inspired us to think legacy. So you guys have a legacy. We're part of it. And part of family life today is we hope to carry on that legacy of literally life changing legacies around the world that we could be spreading the word of God and God's heart for family and helping literally change, you know, maybe ungodly legacies to godly legacies.

I think that we're all hoping to point people to Jesus. And Bob, you've done that. You really have done that for 28 years alongside Dennis and Barbara and Mary Ann.

You guys have continually taken us back to the truth of God's word and the importance of what a family is. Well, you guys need to know how thrilling it is to know that when you step away, things don't get different, that the same focus, the same purpose, the same passion, the same goals are still in place. I ran relay races in track in high school. And to know when you hand off the baton, that the person who's running the next leg is running just as fast and just as hard as they can to run the race just like you were doing before them and like the person before was doing before them. So that's what I'm thrilled about as I think about the baton handoff and stepping out of the lane and letting you guys run. I'm just thrilled. It's going to go faster and better and farther than ever.

I'm thrilled. And we're going to run as fast as we can, as scared as we are. Yeah, exactly. And I was thinking the thing that we all have in common, all of us, we're all very different. But the thing we all have in common is we're all pointing people to the same place.

And that is Jesus and the hope and the help that he brings. Well, I imagine there are a lot of listeners who, like me, are thinking today, you know, Dennis Raney had a significant impact in my life as well over the decades that we all listened to him. And I imagine some of those listeners would like to have a copy of this conversation we've had today. We've taken this week's conversations about the 28 lessons I've learned in 28 years of co-hosting Family Life Today, put those conversations on a flash drive along with the original programs from which these lessons came.

What has been seminal in my life, helping me develop as a husband, a father, as a follower of Christ. We're making that flash drive available this week to Family Life Today listeners who can make a donation to help extend the reach of this ministry. Your donations help us take family life today to more people, more often.

You make this program possible in your community and for listeners all around the world, hundreds of thousands of listeners every day who are being impacted with practical biblical help and hope on family life today. Right now, we've got some friends of the ministry who have agreed that they will match every donation we received during the month of May up to a total of $350,000. They're matching a dollar for dollar, so you make a $25 donation today and we are able to withdraw $25 from the matching gift fund they've established. Whatever you do, we can withdraw an equal amount from that matching gift fund. We're asking you to be as generous as you can be so that we can take full advantage of this matching gift fund. It expires the last day of May, so it's important that we hear from you today if possible. Along with the flash drive, we'd also like to send you a couple of books from Aaron and Jamie Ivy, books called Compliment.

Aaron wrote a book to husbands, Jamie wrote a book to wives, and these books have the same title and the same chapter headings, just ones for men, ones for women. We'll send you the books and the flash drive when you make a donation. Then let me say a word to those of you who are longtime family life today listeners, you're a regular listener to this program. You've heard us talk about our monthly legacy partners, people who will donate $25 or $50 a month, whatever the amount is to help provide the financial stability for this program on an ongoing basis. We could not do this without our legacy partners. If you're a longtime listener, let me challenge you to become a legacy partner today, make an ongoing investment in your family and in your community. When you do that, in addition to the flash drive and the books I just talked about, we're going to send you a certificate to attend an upcoming weekend to remember marriage getaway. The getaways are back.

We still have a few of those this spring, and then we have getaways happening this fall. The certificate is transferable. If you want to give that as a gift to somebody else, you can do that. In addition, your donations month in and month out are going to be matched dollar for dollar for the next year until the funds in the matching gift fund are gone. You will help us take advantage of the matching gift opportunity when you become a legacy partner.

There's a lot I've covered there. Go to familylifetoday.com. All of the information about making a one-time gift or becoming a monthly legacy partner, all of that's available online at familylifetoday.com, or you can call us at 1-800-FL-TODAY. We look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks in advance for your financial support of this ministry. Now, tomorrow, we'll just kind of go through, got a little potpourri, just a mixed bag of key principles, key ways that guests on this program have marked my life over the last 28 years. We'll dive into some of those as we wrap things up tomorrow. Hope you can tune in for that. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, got some extra help from Bruce Goff and our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you 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. Hope for today. Hope for tomorrow.