Me And The Mrs. Series

with Sandra. I said, what an amazing verse, so we began to pray this verse in our marriage before

we had kids. And the prayer went, “Lord, help us to see danger coming before it gets and then give us the wisdom to know what to do and then the courage to do it. Help us to see danger

coming before it gets here, then give us the wisdom to know what to do and the courage to do it.”

You’ve heard me pray this for you at the end of messages: Give us the wisdom to know what to

do with what we’ve just heard and the courage to do it. So, we began to pray this in our

relationship, and we saw God answer this prayer a lot, a lot of times.

SS: We saw God answer this prayer in several really, really big ways, but in a whole lot of little

ways—lots and lots of things where we feel like we got a little warning from God ahead of time

and were able to avoid some issues. We’ve seen it in our marriage; we’ve seen it in our

parenting. It’s one of the first verses we ever had our kids memorize. I think when they were

younger, we would entertain ourselves sometimes by making them memorize Scripture and say it

back to us because they had a hard time enunciating the funny words.

We’ve seen them now that they’ve gotten older and they’re teenagers, we’re seeing the fruit of

that, and we’ve seen them make decisions that are a direct example of this principle, and we

celebrate it like crazy. Even if it’s a little, little tiny thing that’s really not that big a deal, we

make a big deal out of it. We learned early on that what’s rewarded is repeated, and so we

reward and celebrate like crazy when we see our kids make decisions, even little things.

AS: Last week, I kind of gave you some lists. I’m sure you remember some of that. We talked to

married couples and said, Married couples, here are some things you shouldn’t do. A couple of

those things are things that we have always done. Again, because we were told early on, here are

some things you should avoid. So, one of our guardrails for both of us has been not to travel

alone with members of the opposite sex if they’re married or single, because we’re married; not

to eat alone, whether it’s coffee, lunch or dinner. We’ve just always avoided those things and

we’ve had some interesting … because of those standards, people who don’t understand that—

some people who’ve been offended by that, but it’s a guardrail. There were a couple of occasions

when I walked into a restaurant to meet a couple, and the husband decided not to come. I’m

standing there about to have dinner or lunch, usually, and in one case breakfast, with a woman.

And the interesting thing is, there’s no sin in that, but because Sandra and I had agreed on that,

my conscience just kind of lit up like, “Uh-oh.” I felt guilty. I felt bad, because that’s what a

guardrail is. It’s a personal standard. So I said, “Excuse me,” and I went and called Sandra and