As parents, we have massive influence in the lives of our children but the most important things we hope to see accomplished in their lives are beyond our ability to accomplish. So we must pray.
Intro
The “Gospel Shaped Home” podcast is a family discipleship resource from Providence Baptist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina that aims to equip you and your family to be on mission with God, to the end of the street, and the ends of the earth.
Andy Owens
Welcome back to another episode of “Gospel Shaped Home.” I’m Andy Owens, pastor of Family Discipleship here at Providence. And today it’s my joy to introduce you to a special guest, David Michael. He’s the Founder Executive Director of Truth78. David, welcome to the podcast.
David Michael
It is my pleasure to be here, Andy. Thanks for having me.
Andy
Oh well, yeah, I’m really glad you’re here, brother. Could you give us a quick introduction to yourself? Tell our listeners who you are. Tell us about your family. Tell us what you do. Help our listeners get to know you just for a second.
David
Well, I am David Michael, and I am privileged to be the father of two daughters, two adult daughters, now 39 and 36. And I can hardly believe that that has come up on me so quickly. I’m also a grandfather, the children to one of those daughters, my oldest, Amy. Three grandchildren. What got all of this started, under the providence of God, was bringing my wife now of 44 years, Sally, into my life and together we’ve had the joy of following Christ, serving the church as a pastor in two different churches, Bethlehem Baptist church up in Minnesota, where we served for 33 years, and then seven years here in Central Indiana at College Park Church and have been devoting ourselves for a good share of those years to the equipping of the church and the home for the comprehensive discipleship of the next generation, which I’m doing now, full-time. I resigned from my position at College Park in order to assume full-time responsibility for Truth78, which is a organization that we founded several years ago now, and originally as Children Desiring God, and then a few years ago, renamed it to Truth78, which is committed to this comprehensive discipleship with the next generation.
Andy
Okay, great. Well again, welcome. Glad you’re here, brother. Today, we’re going to talk about praying for the next generation. So David, you and your wife Sally have both written a little booklet, published by Truth78 about praying for the next generation. Big, Bold, Biblical Prayers for the Next Generation is the title of yours, and then the other one that Sally wrote is just Praying for the Next Generation. So when we talk about praying for kids in the next generation, first off, who are we assuming is praying for the next generation? Who’s the audience when you write a book like this?
David
Yeah, I would say anybody who cares about the faith of a child, or the children in their life, or children in their church. So I’ve really challenged our churches, whether they have children or not, that we all share this responsibility for the discipleship of the next generation. And so I think the whole church should be committed to praying for the next generation, and then certainly parents and grandparents, aunts, and uncles. I mean, if you’ve got children in your life that you care about and care for their faith, then by all means we should be praying for them.
Andy
Yeah, that was a little bit of a softball pitch because I just want our listeners to hear it’s not just parents and grandparents and kids ministry leaders who pray for the next generation.
David
Exactly.
Andy
Anyone in the church who cares about the health of the church and the ongoing ministry, gospel ministry, of the church from generation to generation should care about the faith of the next generation. So this really concerns all of us.
David
Amen. Well said.
Andy
But I want to throw out the question why, knowing this also may be just utterly obvious and unnecessary, but why is praying for the next generation so important? Why is this such a big deal? Why would we devote one episode of our podcast to just saying, “Hey, pray for the next generation.”
David
I don’t know if it’s all that obvious, at least to the number of people that interact. A lot of people feel, of course, for Christians, and God commands us to pray and so certainly we should be praying and we should pray for our children. But what I often will hear others pray with regard to their children suggests that maybe we don’t understand the reason as much as perhaps we think we do. And part of the reason I wrote Big, Bold, Biblical Prayers for the Next Generation is because I’ve experienced, in my interactions as a pastor, the tendency is to pray small, weak, un-biblical prayers for our children.
Andy
Sure.
David
And so the reason this is so important is because what any Christian parent desires most for their child they cannot give them. I mean, there’s no way that we can make a child be born again. And yet what Christian parent doesn’t want their child to be born again? There’s no way we can give a child life in Christ, new life in Christ.
Andy
Yet there’s nothing more important than new life in Christ.
David
That’s right. We can point them to the truth. We can teach them the truth. We can make sure that they understand the gospel, but we can’t make them treasure Jesus. We can’t make them trust God. We can’t make them delight to do His will. And so our greatest joy John says is to see our children walking in the truth, and we can’t make that happen.
Andy
Yeah.
David
And that to me is why I feel the urgency to pray. We’re committed at Truth78 to giving parents and churches good tools to use. But as good as those tools are, they’re worthless unless the spirit of God works on the heart of our kids. And then beyond the spiritual dimensions, just reality, as parents we soon discover that we can perhaps control the behavior of a child, but we can’t give them the desires that shape those behaviors. So you can make a child eat, you can force them to eat, but you can’t make them love what they eat. We can force a child to obey, to clean up their room, to do whatever, but we can’t make them love cleaning up their room. We can’t make them delight to please their parents.
All of those, what’s really going to influence behavior of your children, we can’t make that happen, which is why prayer become so central and so crucial and needs to be such a priority for parents.
Andy
Everlasting joy to be had, but only God can give it out.
David
Exactly.
Andy
I want my kids to be maximally happy forever in God, and I can not bring that about, but God can.
David
Exactly.
Andy
Okay. So you’ve already kind of hit on this. I remember one time, this was several years ago, I was talking to a brother and he’s a solid disciple of Jesus. He’s not at our church anymore, but we were talking about praying for our kids, and he made a comment of, “I don’t really know what to pray.” He actually had a child with some health issues and said, “I can pray for her health physically, but I don’t know what else to pray. I pray she have a good day.” And I was just really shocked because I thought, “Surely this brother knows how to pray biblical prayers for his child.” So what should we pray for the next generation? What thoughts should give shape to the content of our prayers for the next generation, David?
David
Well, the reason I’m appealing for people to pray biblical prayers is because I think the Bible should shape our prayers. And when I mentioned in the book the example of the parent who prays that their child will do well on their math test. I mean, that’s an okay prayer to pray. There’s nothing wrong with praying that prayer for our child. The problem is there’s nothing in the Bible that will give me confidence that if I pray this prayer that my child will do well on the math test, that they will necessarily do well on their math test, because God is sovereign, there’s purposes behind everything that He brings into our lives, and one of those purposes might be that this child fail miserably in their math test to kill pride or to teach them more dependence on the Lord.
So when I pray God grant that my child do well on the math test, I can’t pray with the same confidence as I can when I pray, “God, would you grant that my son, my daughter, would walk in the truth. Would you grant, Lord Jesus, that their faith would not fail? Would you grant that they’d be born again to a living hope?” I mean, I can go to the Bible and know that I am praying God’s will when I pray biblical truth for them. Right now, our youngest daughter, 37, is living with us, not by her choice or ours, except the sovereignty of God. Few years ago, she started having some physical issues. She trained as a midwife. From the time of childhood, she’s wanted to be a mom, she’s wanted to have a husband. That’s never worked out for her. She got into midwifery. That was a profession she loved. And then all of that kind of came to an end when she experienced some pretty serious physical situation that has brought her back to live with us, and her life is just not working out the way she had hoped, that we had hoped for her.
Every single day, I pray that Christie’s body would be healed. And yet I can’t pray that prayer with the same level of confidence that I could pray, and that I do pray, also every single day, “Lord grant that Christie’s faith not fail.” Or I’ve just this week praying for her out of John 15, “Lord, would you grant my daughter to abide in the vine, would abide in Christ. Would you grant, Lord Jesus, that you would abide in her, and so abide in her that she bears much fruit. And if it’s through suffering that she bears fruit, praise God.”
But my confidence rises, number one, because I’m absolutely certain when I asked God that He would abide in her through Christ and that she abide in Christ and that she bear more fruit, I know I’m praying the will of God in that moment, with much more confidence than I can pray,”God, would you grant healing to my daughter?”
Andy
Yeah.
David
Every single morning she wakes up, in the last two years, healing of her body has not happened. In fact, if anything it’s gotten worse, and every
single morning she wakes up a believer, and that to me is a miracle.
Andy
Yeah.
David
And so prayer is, praying the Bible is absolutely critical, I think. And we should keep focusing our prayers in that direction.
Andy
Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you for just sharing something that’s obviously very personal and real right now in your own life. When I’ve actually, as it relates to praying for things that aren’t clearly revealed in the Bible as God’s will, I thought about how to ask for things like success on a math test or healing, things that have some, maybe minimal significance, some things have a lot of very significant, important, meaningful things that still aren’t clearly what God has revealed in the scriptures. And I think there’s an element of the two things that have got in my thought. One is, I want to pray first and mostly things that I know are in alignment with God’s will. I want to pray biblical prayers. I want to pray God’s words back to him.
I remember a Spurgeon quote in a sermon, “Put God’s promises into circulation, tell them back to him.” God, you’ve said you want to do this, and plead with him to do it. And then for those things that aren’t in his will, I’ve sought to ask for it, and to almost always acknowledge, “But God, I know that You know best. Not my will, but Your will be done.” Obviously for some things like a math test, it’s easier to be resigned, joyfully resigned to His will then for things like the healing of a sick child.
So, but I really appreciate your, again, that encouragement to letting the Bible shape our prayers. Is there any other just encouragement you would give to parents in our church or anyone else who’s listening for praying for the next generation? What thoughts, kind of a closing thought should guide our praying?
David
Maybe just to pick up a little bit more. Don’t hear from this emphasis on praying biblical prayers that praying those little prayers, there’s nothing wrong with that. And you should. I mean, He’s our father. We should ask Him for things. I should ask Him for healing. I should ask for success on the math test. The issue is we sometimes focus on those prayers to the neglect of the bigger prayers.
Andy
Yes, yes.
David
And what encourages me is to pray the big prayers, because I see answers to those again and again, and so that’s the spirit there.
Andy
Yeah. Yeah. You actually address that in the book when you’re talking about kingdom sized things and prioritizing towards the greater, and you actually reference Matthew 6, not seeking what will eat and drink, but seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and recognizing that God is going to give these lesser things. We can trust Him for these things, and he wants us to long for, yearn for, the greater things, for ourselves and for the next generation. I thought that was a, obviously you’re looking back at the Lord’s prayer in Matthew 6 as well. I thought that was just a helpful way to balance the asking for the small, but asking mostly and first for the big.
David
There’s a lot I have to say. I’ll refer you to the things I’ve written, but just a couple of things. One, to make prayer a priority it requires, like everything else in life, it requires planning. And I would just encourage parents to pick a day, pick a time in a day a week, and just say, “I’m going to at least once a week devote myself to praying a big, bold, biblical prayer for my child.” Maybe husband and wife come together perhaps, and do that, or Grandma and Grandpa or whatever. And I would encourage you to write it out.
One of the problems is I have a hard time just keeping in my head sometimes, or even thinking on the spot in the moment, taking some time to open your Bible, read a passage like John 15, and just say, “Okay,” and write out. “Lord, I’m taking your word right now and this is what I desire for a child.” So don’t be afraid to write out and be thoughtful in developing a prayer. Think of yourself almost like a lawyer standing before the judge of all the earth, a very benevolent judge, who’s for you, not against you, but just lay out your case to Him. Kind of once a week, just take some time, maybe take an hour to really craft a thoughtful, biblical, big prayer for your children. What does your heart desire?
So regularity. And then that once a week thing should be surrounded by once a day bowing before God asking him for favor on you as a parent and grace to deal with all the individual things that your children are dealing with. But that would be perhaps one thing I could commend to you.
Andy
Yeah, yeah. And then probably 100 times a day in the moment, “God help me, right now.”
David
Exactly. Exactly.
Andy
To have wisdom. Okay. Well, brother, thank you so much for joining us. If you’re willing, I’d love to ask you to pray for the next generation here at Providence as we wrap this up.
David
Well, it’d be my pleasure. Let’s pray.
Father in heaven, I thank you for all that you’ve accomplished to make these parents, parents. You’ve given them children. You’ve entrusted to them the responsibility for the raising of a child, or more, to fear you, to delight in you, to walk in faith. And as we’ve said here, Lord, we can’t make that happen. So it’s fitting here at the end that we just pray and ask that every child represented by the parents who are listening to this prayer would walk in the truth. That not one would be lost. That is our heart’s desire, more than wealth or fame for these children, more than a good education or a good job, or a nice home or healthy bodies, more than a good spouse someday, more than a long and fruitful life. We pray that every one of the hearts of every one of these children would be born again.
We pray that they would be called according to Your purpose. We pray that you would open their eyes to see their need, and then give them the will and the power to call upon the name of the Lord as their God. Lord, I pray that as you accomplish that, you would do that through the faithful prayers of these parents and grandparents, and through the prayers of a faithful church that has surrounded them and cares about the outcome of the faith of their children. So Lord, we looked and pray that even now you would exceed our prayers for our children beyond what we can ask or imagine. And we ask it in the mighty name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Andy
Amen. Amen. Well, David, thank you again, brother, for being here. So glad to have you on the podcast.
David
It is my joy. Thank you for having me.
Andy
And to you, our listeners. Thank you for joining. I hope that you’ve been encouraged by this episode and spurred on to pray big, bold, biblical prayers for the next generation that they would have eyes to see the greatness of God and savor him above all things. So thank you for joining and look forward to catching you on the next episode. See you.
Outro
Thanks for listening to this episode of the “Gospel Shaped Home” podcast. Produced by Providence Baptist Church of Raleigh, North Carolina. For more information and resources from Providence, visit us online at pray.org. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please consider subscribing and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts.