Excerpts from the
Couple Prayer Series
"Generations will reap what you sow"
This is the final Session Handout (Session Six ) of the Couple Prayer Series
Please give thoughtful consideration to that statement: “Generations will reap what you sow.”
Read it over again from time to time, even years down the road, and recognize again and again what God has begun in you, and why.
Consider that generations are involved in your commitment to pray together as a couple today.
This is not just for you, and it’s not just for now.
Your children are involved. Your grandsons and granddaughters are involved. Your great-grandchildren are involved. Wheels have been put into motion for times and places and people beyond your vision; times and places and people well beyond any present sighting of what Couple Prayer might mean to you today.
The whole family of your son or daughter may be brought into the heart of God thirty or forty or fifty years from now through what God has put into motion over the past six weeks in you and in your marriage-relationship through Couple Prayer.
The mission that your great-grandchild may live out someday to bring a million people to God in some given place, in some given year, may literally have already begun to turn and move slowly forward through the prayers you prayed together yesterday, even for a few minutes, as simple as those prayers might have been.
We cannot see with certainty all the hidden plans of God, or measure his movements. But we do know with absolute certainty that God is calling us to pray together as married couples. And we know that no prayer is ever shared in faith and in love without altering the balance of the activity of God.
So this is our appeal to you, and our final prayer for you, in closing this Series: “Fan into a flame the gift of God that is in you.” (2 Timothy 1:6)
Fan into a flame this extraordinary free gift that God has spread out before you in Couple Prayer.
Don’t let that flame burn out, not for as long as you live.
Generations will reap what you sow.
"The great leap forward is Couple Prayer"
From Session One: "The Blessings of Couple Prayer"
The great leap forward toward seeing all that God has in mind for you and your marriage -- all that he knew and intended that your marriage could be, even from Day One -- is praying together as a couple, and praying every day. It's making your seeking the intimate company of God in shared-prayer as husband and wife as important a part of your daily priorities as brushing your teeth or combing your hair or watching some TV or talking on the phone or any of the long list of things that we all prioritize enough to make time for every single day.
God has promised and God has proven and God is wanting to lay the extraordinary power of shared Couople Prayer in your hands right now. And the power of it, the incredible power of a husband and wife sharing prayer together every day, is not just rooted in the fact that God hears and answers the prayers we pray "in one accord." What you’ll experience together if you'll just give God this chance is that there are so many different wonderful things happening when you pray with one another as a married couple. It’s a matrix. It's a tapestry. There are so many different threads to it, and each one is priceless.
When you start praying together you'll find, for example, that the way you communicate changes so much for the better, all the way across the board. It really does. This is not just a wish-dream. This has been studied. This has been documented again and again. These are the facts. Communication levels improve dramatically. It becomes easier for you, it becomes deeper, it becomes more genuine, it becomes more positive. Your listening skills grow. Your trust levels grow. That's a huge thing. Your priorities start to become more in harmony, one with the other. And it’s all going on at the same time. You’re able to look at and see things in the same way so much more clearly than you were ever able to in the past. You know what’s true, and you know what isn’t true, but now you know it together.
To pray together on a daily basis is to experience a whole new world of positive changes, all growing toward a new fullness, a new intimacy, a new and better marriage, a new and deeper relationship with God and one another and your whole family.
That's God’s plan. That's what God is wanting to do for you, and it’s absolutely extraordinary.
And all we're asking you to do is give God a chance. Just give him five or ten minutes a day, that's all. Just a single sliver of your day in Couple Prayer, for just six weeks.
Don't let this chance slip by. Don't lose it, please. Give God this chance to show you all that your marriage relationship was meant to be, starting right now.
"Beg God for revelation together"
From Session Four : "Praying with Scripture Together"
After his resurrection, Jesus was walking along a road with people who didn’t recognize him, but who were good Jewish people. They had read and heard the scriptures. So Jesus started talking to them about how the scripture had been fulfilled in him. And then -- an amazing sentence -- we read that, "Jesus opened their minds so they could understand the scripture.” (Lk 24:25 JB)
What an extraordinary gift. What an awesome thing for God to do.
Obviously, they didn't "get it." Not at first. They knew the words. They had heard the scriptures read before, the same way most of us have, probably many times. But they still didn't "get it." And so Jesus himself "opened their minds." And when the Lord opened their minds, they understood, for the first time in their lives, what the words of scripture that they'd heard with their ears so many times before really and truly meant.
They not only heard and understood, but they remarked how their hearts suddenly "burned within us" for even more of the word of God. Wow.
The point we'd ask you to consider is this. What happened there on the road to Emmaus was not about simple education. What happened there was something well beyond "education."
What happened was "revelation." That was a work of God. That was God making the curtain going up, making the clouds clear, finally. That was revelation -- the supernatural gift of the the Lord "opening their minds" so they could really understand who Jesus is and what really happened to him and through him, and what it meant to them.
Education, the dictionary tells us, is “the imparting of knowledge or skills through instruction, training and study." And that’s wonderful. Education is awesome. It allows us to examine things that have been experienced before we came along and hopefully learn something helpful from them. It lets us pin the points we want to study down on a board, like insects pinned down in biology class, ready for dissection, and in the "instruction, training and study" that follows, it lets us, if all goes well, learn something that we can apply in a useful way. Thank God for education.
But revelation is not submissive to instruction, training or study. Revelation is not about people imparting their knowledge or skills to other people. Revelation is the revelation of things that are outside of our human experience. Revelation is about God unfolding truths for us that go well beyond simple human fact-finding and analysis. Revelation is about Jesus coming to a person -- coming personally to a couple struggling to "get" what certain things mean in the bible, for example, so they can pray better with the bible together -- and "opening their minds" ... Whoosh! Just in the grace of God .. so that they can understand what they didn't "get" before. And so their marriage and lives can be changed by it, in the power of God.
Revelation is about God answering your prayer that the scripture will really come alive for both of you, together, in force, in new and literally life-changing ways.
So beg God for revelation, especially before you pray together with the scripture. In fact, you can make that "coming together in the company of God and begging for the gift of revelation" the focus of your Couple Prayer any time you want. That's a wonderful prayer.
Try it. Pursue it. Just come together and ask Jesus to be there with you, and to help you understand, in real-life ways, what a specific bible incident, or a specific passage, really means. Not just in some cosmic educational way, but to you, specifically. Where are you in that passage or incident you're reading? How is that passage or parable or incident about you today, and about Jesus in your lives today, and about you and Jesus being together in more and more life-giving ways, today.
Because what you're reading and praying about will be about you. It really will, every single time.
Beg God for revelation. Beg God for revelation. Beg God for revelation.
"The importance of forgiveness"
From Session Six: "Praying for the Power to Forgive Together"
Jesus goes from one place of prayer to another place of prayer, and between the first place of prayer and the next place of prayer, the power of God is so evident in his life that his friends finally realize that there's a connection between prayer and experiencing the power of God. So they say to Jesus, “Lord, teach us how to pray!” And
Jesus does. He teaches them, and teaches each one of us, the Lord’s Prayer; the model prayer offered to every person, every single one of us, both now and for every generation still to come.
And in that singularly inspired prayer, notice this: There is just one thing that Jesus -- the all-wise presence of the all-knowing God -- chooses to include as being "our part of the deal." Just one thing. Everything else in that perfect prayer is either recognition of the glory of God or asking God's help. But there's one thing for us to do, to contribute, to engage in. And that one thing is so essential that Jesus includes it for us clear as a bell, right there in the middle. And that's forgiveness.
"Forgive us, Father, as we forgive others!” Isn't that remarkable?
Why didn't Jesus add more than that? Why not a list of ten or twelve things? He had the vocabulary. He had the time. He could have added, “as we love,” for example. Wouldn't that have been a good thing to say? He could have included how we would "act justly," or "share our blessings with the poor," or "care for widows and orphans." He could have pretty much repeated the whole Ten Commandments, or added any other list he wanted to make sure we saw as being foundational to our part of this extraordinary heavenly dynamic.
But there's only one thing.
Because Jesus wants us to realize how important our forgiving is to God. And to us.
Because Jesus wants us to stare at, and think about, the fact that for us to genuinely welcome our God-given power to forgive is for us to welcome the radically-saving power and presence of almighty God in absolutely real and extraordinary ways.
You know, you can go to any analyst or counselor or psychologist or psychiatrist -- you can line every one of them up and click right through, moving one-by-one by right down the line -- and not a single one of them will ever be able to give you the power to forgive.
The best that any of them can do for you -- maybe, if they're very skilled -- is to show you why you're angry or hurt or emotionally suffering. Maybe they can do that much; help you identify some of the core issues behind your feeling unable or unwilling to forgive.
But not one of them, and not all of them put together, can give you the power to enter into the heart of God and experience for yourself, or experience for yourselves as a couple, the power to forgive. The power to be set free from somebody else's nightmare. The power to really and truly let your life proceed with new business.
But Jesus can.
And Jesus wants to.
And Jesus will.
In response to suggestions from visitors to this site, the following excerpts offer brief sightings into a few of the main presentations
in the Couple Prayer Series. We hope you find them engaging. We hope you find them helpful.
