The Couple that Prays: Paul Miller

Hey, before we dive into today's episode, we have some exciting news. Do you even know what it is?

Yes. What is it? We have an exclusive Art of Marriage preview event on November 1st. Yeah, that means there's a new Art of Marriage coming out and you get to see videos, some of the teaching, you get an insider look at this remake of our flagship, The Art of Marriage, and it's gonna literally change your life and the families in your neighborhood.

You can sign up in the show notes or on familylife.com slash coming soon. Hope you'll join us. It is wicked hard to begin to pray with your wife. I mean this is true with most people. It's hard for men especially. We really have to do believe all things, bears all things, endures all things.

That's the secret to praying today. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Shelby Abbott. Your hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson. You can find us at familylifetoday.com. This is Family Life Today. So, pastor in 30 years, easy question for you.

Okay. What gathering at the church do people attend the most? Weekend service.

Which is the least? Prayer service. Oh, you're just saying that because what we're talking about today. Is that what you would say initially? No, I think I would just because as we started, you know, we're young. We're in our early 30s when we started our church and we were so dependent on Jesus for everything and we needed him and we're praying and we have prayer teams and then 10 years in we are exploding and things are happening and all of a sudden I feel like it became more about what are we doing for the weekend and prayer seemed to take a back seat and I remember having this angst in my heart like this this doesn't feel right.

Do you remember feeling that? Oh, you're not. You're being nice. You are mad. You were mad. I mean, seriously.

Why do you think I was mad? Because you're a prayer warrior and prayer oozes out of you and I think we became a not praying church. We'd pray on stage.

We pray at the end of the message, maybe at the end of the service, but there was not a prayer room, a prayer fire furnace underneath our church. I don't know if that's unique to all churches but it was definitely true of our church and so when I picked up Paul Miller's book and Paul is in the studio with us today, a praying church, I'm like, would that be our church? Paul, welcome back to Family Life Today.

It's good to be back with you Dave and Dan. I mean, when you hear us talk about that, is that pretty common? Oh yeah, it's very common. It has been the lowest priority for churches, like even on Barna polls, it shows as the lowest priority for pastors out of 12 priorities.

It was the 12th priority and another Barna study they had showed that 70% of Americans prayed at least once in the last three months, but only 4% did it with someone else. Really? Whoa. I just, even I couldn't believe that.

I can't believe that either. Yeah, and the families of the church have become functionally prayerless. Hmm. They're praying when their kids are playing sports. Right. How many parents do you think are praying right now for their kids to do well?

Oh, and you know, for 33 years I was the chaplain of the Detroit Lions and that was my job. Sure. Pray to win. Yeah. And guess what?

We didn't win. So, I mean, it's interesting. But, you know, our listeners know you, but tell our listeners what you do. I mean, how did you end up writing a book on the praying church? Because it isn't exactly, you know, only what you do is not just about prayer. It actually goes back over 50 years to when I was 15 years old and my dad, who is a professor at Westminster Seminary up in Philadelphia where we live, and he went to Labrie and he encountered something, I mean, I'm not sure people are aware of Labrie, but Francis Schaeffer Labrie was really well known in the 60s and 70s and he's a very influential scholar, led a lot of people from the counterculture to Christ, but dad encountered something to Labrie he'd never encountered before and he was an ordained pastor and that was a community that had prayer at the center of it and it was the magic of Labrie and it's kind of the hidden magic of the church. So, out of that scene, it so impacted my dad.

So, I've been part of praying communities either in my work or in a church for really 52 years now. I mean, did he come back? Did that impact your family? The family you grew up in?

Not for several years. I mean, the the spark for him, and again, we were, you know, our background is reformed, and the spark for him was discovering that the Holy Spirit has been poured out now and the Holy Spirit functions at the center of everything. Dad didn't really get excited about prayer until he began to realize that he needed to dethrone himself from the center of his church and his life. That prayer is accessing the power of the Spirit who makes Christ present. That's a really kind of a complicated sentence, but that in a nutshell, it's not just praying, it's actually realizing that someone else wants to run my life. Someone else wants to run my family. And not in a domineering, commanding kind of way.

Yeah. But more of a loving leader who's guiding us. Well, you know, when you begin praying, he begins messing with your life.

That's true. I mean, like, one of my favorite things on that is all four Gospels mentioned, like, when the Spirit comes on Jesus, it's this gentle dove fluttering down. And then when he comes on us, it's fire. And I was thinking, well, why does Jesus get a dove and we get fire, you know? And, you know, Jesus gets a dove because he's a perfect fit. His humility is the perfect fit for the Spirit.

And for the rest of us, he needs to clear a landing zone. I've never thought of the fire like that. Now, what do you mean by that? Well, like, when I started praying really seriously in my family, it was on a camping trip. It was one of these camping trips. Aren't all camping trips pretty much? Well, this one really was.

I mean, it was just absolute, like, Jill had given up camping for Lent. And how long have you been married now? Although, this was, like, 19 years we've been married. So, we had six children. And Kim, who's disabled, stayed home with Jill. And I took five of our kids solo camping. No.

Yeah. And we had no money. It was just nothing, you know? And she didn't come.

Of course she didn't. She gave up camping for Lent because we'd had a terrible camping trip the year before. It was just awful. Anyway, without going into the details, the worst part of it was, I mean, the kids were just mean. They were just, they were age 3 to 16.

They were fighting. I was doing everything. You had one tent, I hope. We had one tent. It was a canvas tent. The zipper was broken on it.

Of course it didn't rain. I'd bought a whole camping set from one of our staff for $200. And we had lent the camping stove to friends who didn't return the little hose that connects the propane to the stove. And so we were cooking over the open fire. And I was just like, look, this is how bad it was. I saw this years later when I was looking through our photo albums.

There's a picture of Emily, who's three, standing by the campfire holding a hatchet. And Jill saw it. What?

I said, well, look, if you're not going to come, you know, that's what's going to take over. So where did prayer come into this? Well, it rained our second night. Of course it did. And it rained and it rained and it rained. And we were at the bottom of a mountain. We were absolutely soaked. And I was actually afraid we'd get pneumonia. We were like four hours away from home and it was just a disaster.

So I took them in our minivan and we went on a, I just dried them out. And it was a beautiful Pennsylvania morning and the kids fell asleep because they were all exhausted. They didn't sleep all night. And I just thought our family was a mess.

It's an absolute mess. You know, and unless Jesus, you saved this family, I could see the future. It was not happy. You know, they were just selfish and self-absorbed. And I said, Jesus, you have to save the family. That was like in June or July.

And that November, I had a burnout. You know, I thought they needed, I mean, I knew I was part of the problem, but I was a minor part because it was them that were the best. And God began to work on me and it led to me learning how to pray for them. So you think God sort of answered that prayer with that? Absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's why it's so important as you begin to pray in and with and for your family and with your friends and your community, that a life devoted to prayer brings the spirit of Jesus and the spirit brings fire. And he disrupts your stories.

And what comes out of it is beautiful. I'm so intrigued by your story because as a mom, I would have thought the kids are a mess. I would have blamed myself or Dave, you know, like, this is our fault. Dave's easier.

Yeah, Dave's easier. I was going to say, I don't know if you blame yourself. No, I totally.

And I would be guilt ridden. But you saw it as, this is beyond me. I need to pray for my kids.

And I think as our kids became teenagers, that happened to me as well. Like, this is beyond me. I have got to be praying.

I'd have to be on my knees for these kids. Yeah. Yeah. It was two years later, just in the midst of a lot of suffering that we were going through. But I wrote in my prayer journal, I need to pray.

And it was not a huge, this was not like a deep spiritual insight, but it was just, I need to pray for every one of our six kids by name thoughtfully every day, or they will kill one another. You know what I mean? It was an observation.

I wasn't bringing that out of the air, you know. And so that's what you started doing. Yeah, I started doing it. Each child by name every day. Yeah.

Did it work? Yeah. I mean, all of them came to Christ. And we live in the raw, unbelieving, mean Northeast. And maybe it's a little exaggeration, but... Well, you open the book talking about praying with your wife and your daughter, Kim. It's in some ways funny, but I mean, you know, walk us through that.

It's pretty interesting. Well, it took me about eight years to get to praying with Jill in the morning because she's very independent. She likes to do things on her own, two kids, you know, growing up with, compared to us, you know, a relatively wealthy family.

And so just, you know, she's just very independent. So I prayed for a couple years that I could pray with her. And it's just, it's amazing how scary it is to pray with your spouse.

It is, isn't it? Why do you think that is? Well, as you guys know, intimacy, you open up your heart.

And so if they use that as an opportunity of one of them to correct you, it just kind of makes it much harder. We shut down our hearts. If we're hurt, we shut down our hearts because we don't want to be intimate because we were injured during that openness. So it took us a couple years and it was really important for me to leave space for her. I finally realized that the only way I could pray with her is I had to have no opinions or will or anything. Like, however she wanted to pray.

And if that changed every other day, that was fine. So if she wanted to pray by herself one day or whatever. So I just like, it was so important that for me that we begin to pray together. We had been married 30 years and we hadn't prayed together on a regular basis.

And now it's something that we can't really think without it. So what's your morning look like? You wake up, because I was intrigued by this too, Dave, in the book, like how you wake up and your order of priority was interesting to me. Oh, in terms of praying first? Yeah, we pray together. And then, oh, one of the things I did was she liked to read through the Bible every year. So I started doing that with her so I could be on the same passage with her. Most of the time we don't even talk about her, but it's just another way to build unity. Yeah, Ann's mad at me right now because I'm behind her in our one-year Bible. She's like, catch up. Anyway, that's a whole other discussion. But I mean, one of the things I found funny is you said that often in the middle of the prayer, she'll like tell you things she wants you to do. Oh, all the time. I mean, she'll stop her praying. And I mean, and I did suggest, you know, could we hold off on that?

But whatever. So I'll pray through my prayer cards for about maybe 20, 25 minutes, and then we'll pray through all of our kids. And we pray through all the families. Every day. Yeah, every day. It is wicked hard to begin to pray with your wife.

I mean, this is true with most people. It's hard for men, especially. We really have to do believe all thing, bears all things, endures all things. That's the secret to praying together. I remember the first time Dave asked me to pray with him. It was a first date, actually.

We were both very new in our faith. I don't remember this at all. I was like, what are you talking about?

Oh, I remember it. And he had already been involved with crew on the college campus. I was- So he was organized.

He was organized. I was the first- Not very, but a little more than she was. I didn't even know of a believer in Christ. My family didn't go to church much. I've never heard anyone pray a prayer that's just their own prayer. And so Dave said, let's pray. And I started sweating. And I said, I've never done that out loud before. And he says, it's easy.

We just talk to God. And I was shaking and nervous because I thought, is he going to judge me? Is God going to judge me? Is he going to not ever want to pray with me again when he hears me and he'll think I'm such an infant in Jesus? You don't even remember it? No, I don't even remember that. Which shows, but because the first time you pray, you do remember it. Even with, as I worked with the Detroit Lions wives in a Bible study for 35 years, and most of those women had never prayed out loud or with their kids or with their husband. And so I remember saying in the group, hey, here's what we're going to do tonight.

And we even did this as a family sometimes. We're just going to say, father, thank you for, and you're just going to say something. And it was like, they were so nervous. I'm like, so what do we say again?

Father, thank you. I'm like, just add something to the sentence. One thing.

But they were panicking to pray out loud. And yet, do you think that there's a spiritual battle going on with that? Oh, absolutely. And by spirituals, I think of, obviously, as you do, satanic. Yeah. You know, it's the world of flesh and the devil.

The world doesn't give us any models. Our flesh is resistant. And Satan is back there fanning all the flames. So true. You know, I was at a pastors conference a number of years ago, Piper's big Bethlehem conference. And we had a panel of speakers. We were talking about prayer. And Francis Chan was one of the speakers. And he said, you know, I'm kind of embarrassed to say this, but my wife and I don't pray regularly. And it was just a perfect, you know, example of how you get so busy and stuff.

And a couple of the other speakers said, oh, it's easy. You know, you just tell your wife, let's pray. And I'm thinking, you know, they're not married to a Philadelphian. Well, let me ask you this. How important is it in your mind, Paul, for a husband and wife to pray together? I mean, you're doing it every single day. You're unique.

You're probably in the minority. So it's got to be important to you. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I'm still kind of discovering. So we've been doing it probably for about 10 years now. I'm still kind of discovering what God is doing through it.

I mean, if I see my wife has a struggle with something, like, say, there's some habit in her life that I think is a concern. And my first things were just to tell her what she want to know. Oh, really, Paul?

What is it? How can I improve today? Let me write this down. Let me write this down.

You know, Paul, thank you for rebuking me. You know, and sometimes, you know, obviously, I think that's important for both of us to have an honest, open, as much as possible to be able to have that. But, you know, in one another's lives, there's areas of resistance. And so much happens of good when you are bringing out, so I'm talking to husbands now, when you're praying over and for your wife, and you're praying a prayer of blessing over her. Like, maybe the things in her life are that her soul needs to be nourished directly by Jesus, and that you can't be the spirit in her life, and you need the spirit who has already imprinted her soul. You need the Holy Spirit to bring Jesus to her today and encourage her heart.

And so praying, I've just been struck by praying over her blessing, just praying for faith in her life, for the endurance that comes from faith. You know, you're filling up her soul, and we are such a soulless world. And when the soul is weak and empty and battered, it throws up all kind of junk up top, you know? And our tendency is to work on the junk, and maybe it's just pouring Christ into my wife by how I pray for her. I mean, when you hear that as a wife, don't you just melt?

Yes. I was going to add that and say that when you, Dave, you'll grab me. If I'm going through something that's really hard, I'll say, I'm really struggling with this. And he'll just grab me. He'll hug me. He'll put his hand on my head and he'll pray for me. I just want to cry every time he does that because it's one of the most intimate things that he could do, but he's hearing my heart.

He knows that he can't fix me or solve me, and I don't want him to do. But the fact that he'll go to the Father and pray over me, it's beautiful. When we went to Israel, we went to a Shabbat dinner for ultra-Orthodox Jewish families. And so they had the Sabbath dinner and the wife lights the candles. And the first thing they do is the husband, it's really Proverbs 31, he'll say, an excellent wife, who can find? And he'll stand and say that in front of all the family and all the friends. And then he'll look at his wife and he'll say the scripture over her.

Really? That's beautiful. And then he'll put his hand on her and bless her. And then he does the same for his children. He'll bless them and pray over them. Every woman on our team that was from America, we're watching this.

We want to do this every week. But how beautiful that God would make that a part of their Sabbath, that the Father and the men would pray over their women and their children. There have been times where she literally, Paul, grabs my hand and puts it on her head and says, pray for me.

I'll be walking by and it's like, I'm not even going to ask you now. I need you to pray for me. And, but here's the thing.

And you sort of talked about it. Praying with your wife is really intimate. The soul to soul part of prayer. And so I think sometimes for us husbands, it's scarier. And so we're resistant to it, even though we may know, man, she loves this and I want to do this, but sometimes it's scary for a guy, don't you think? Oh yeah. Yeah. And that's why reducing your will to zero is, you know, if your wife prays at you, just love bears all things. If the love, if she interrupts you with job duties, love bears all things. I mean, it's not complicated.

Love bears all things. You know, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. And that's how you can get at praying with your spouse. Hey, let me ask you this. Either one of you, there's a wife listening. Her husband's not right now.

Yeah. What does she do? She's dying right now. She's like, I want to get my husband to pray with me. What do you do?

How do you help her have that happen? I'm Shelby Abbott and you've been listening to Dave and Anne Wilson with Paul Miller on Family Life Today. Wow. That's a good question. Is that you? Are you feeling that?

Well, if so, we're going to get some wisdom from Paul Miller and have that question answered in just a second. But first, Paul has written a book called A Praying Church and the subtitle is, Becoming a People of Hope in a Discouraging World. This is a book that's ideal for group study with engaging and personal stories. And it's going to be our gift to you when you partner with us financially. So you can go online to familylifetoday.com or you can give us a call with your donation at 800-358-6329. Okay, so that number is 800, F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. And feel free to drop us something in the mail if you'd like.

Our address is Family Life 100 Lakehart Drive, Orlando, Florida 32832. All right, let's get your question answered by Paul Miller as you deeply desire to get your husband to pray with you. At the very simplest, I would, you know, this is the way I solve most of my problems. I get out a little three by five card and I write down my prayer that my husband would pray with me. And I pray that every day and watch. And then I find it much better to talk to God for several months before I talk to my spouse.

And he'll often create openings that I didn't anticipate, you know, so I will begin. If I want to do something spiritual, I've got to do something spiritual to make that thing happen. You can't do spiritual things with fleshly means. Prayer is tough. How do we do it when we're discouraged?

Or how do we do it when we're just busy all the time? Well, tomorrow, Paul Miller is back with Dave and Anne Wilson to talk about prayer's significance in our lives and how to address busyness and discouragement. That's tomorrow. We hope you'll join us. On behalf of Dave and Anne Wilson, I'm Shelby Abbott. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a donor supported production of Family Life, a crew ministry, helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.