Praying the Scriptures for Your Teens: Discover How to Pray God's Purpose for Their Lives

Introduction to the New Edition

Whack-a-Mole Parenting

If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.

John 15:7

When I was working on the original edition of this book, the folks at Zondervan let me know they were meeting to discuss the cover design. Do you, they asked, have any specific ideas or input to contribute?

Well, I said, if you were to poll my friends who are raising teens right now, they’d probably tell you to just go ahead and make the cover black.

Black?

Yes, but you could put a ray of light cutting across the darkness to symbolize God’s intervention in our desperate lives.

I was kidding—sort of. Ty Saltzgiver (the guy who wrote the foreword and who spent more than forty years hanging out with adolescents in his work with Young Life) taught me that you are never just kidding. There’s always a kernel of truth in there somewhere. And in this case, Ty was right: My friends and I knew that God loved our kids and that he was at work in their lives, but there were plenty of days when our hearts just felt . . . dark. Our spirits were heavy. The list of what-ifs and worries—safety on the road, substance abuse, eating disorders, anxiety, sexual purity, spiritual doubt—seemed limitless. No sooner would we finish praying about one thing than another would, like a crazed whack-a-mole, pop its head out of the hole.

Robbie and I had four kids in six years (which translated, I think, to four teens over thirteen consecutive years), and during the time it took to write and publish this book, we prayed our way through almost every topic you’ll find in these pages. I even found myself wondering whether God—in that Godlike way of his—allowed some specific challenges to manifest themselves in our family just to remove any lingering threads of self-sufficiency, pride, or judgmental attitudes I might have tried to hang on to had I not found myself in the parenting gutter so many times.

Case in point: As I was working on the chapter about praying for our teens’ attire and thinking about the importance of modesty, God reminded me of the time that our daughter and two of her friends went to a rock concert dressed—unbeknownst to us—in skimpy shirts they had made themselves. Lest you think I should have been proud of a teen who could sew, I’ll just go ahead and tell you that the girls used staples, not thread. And the shimmery gold fabric they thought looked so fetching? They had ransacked it from a neighbor’s nativity set.

Wrong, on so many levels.

Our kids’ fashion choices are but one of an untold number of things we may find ourselves praying about. There are other topics—so many topics—that you won’t find in the table of contents, not because I didn’t think they were important or because we didn’t walk down those roads, but simply because—to borrow an explanation from the apostle John as he wrote about the mighty works Jesus did—If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.¹ Academic struggles, sibling relationships, teen pregnancy, parental divorce, the loss of a loved one . . . if you find yourself—if you find your teen—coming up against one of these challenging places, know this: There is no need we will face that God has not already thought of, and provided for, in his Word. He understands. He’s been there. He is there with you still.

And he invites you—he invites us—to anchor our trust in his promises.

If you read Praying the Scriptures for Your Children—better yet, if you prayed your way through that book—you know that God’s Word is powerful and effective. You know that it does not return empty but always accomplishes God’s purposes and desires. And perhaps more than anything else, you know that it holds the key to endurance and hope.²

Which, in a nutshell, is what this book is all about.

As a mom, I’ve always considered prayer to be a vital part of my job description (as someone once said, If you’re not praying for your child, who is?), but when I began using Scripture as the basis for my prayers—taking the actual words in the Bible and using them to shape my requests—I found that prayer became less of a duty and more of an adventure. When I read my Bible, I would discover phrases and promises that I could pray over my kids. My conversations with God began to take on a whole new dimension. Gone were the repetitive and sometimes—dare I say it?—boring petitions for generic blessings and protection; my prayers became interesting and creative and infused with a fresh kind of power. I shouldn’t have been surprised—God’s word is, after all, active and alive³—but I wasn’t prepared for the depth of connection that came with speaking to God in the language he first spoke to me, nor could I have anticipated the fulfillment, joy, and confidence that came with tapping into words that had been conceived and shaped in God’s heart!

My desire in writing this book is to give you that same sense of connection, fulfillment, and joy. I want you to pray with confidence, knowing that when you come before God, you will receive mercy and find grace for your every need—for your teen’s every need.⁴

In the pages to come, you’ll meet parents who have wrestled and prayed their way through everything from their teen’s questions about God to issues like loneliness, anger, parties, and relationships. You’ll meet teens—musicians and athletes, popular kids and loners, churchgoers and rebels—and see how God has worked in their lives. And although I’ve often changed names or small details to protect their identities, all of the people in this book are real.

They are also people who believe that God is still writing our stories. They know—as I do—that when God delivers their teen from the concern or crisis du jour, the next one might be only a history class, a party, or a boyfriend away. This reality—that our kids are still under construction—actually served as a bit of a stumbling block for some of the parents I interviewed. Knowing that their teens had hurdles yet to cross, they were reluctant to discuss the good things that God had already accomplished, lest they appear to be counting their chickens too soon. Not only that, but one mother I spoke with worried that if she talked about what God had done in her daughter’s life—the answers to prayer she had experienced—it could look as though she was being boastful.

As I wondered about these concerns, God directed me to 1 Samuel 7, the passage where the threat of a Philistine assault has the Israelites shaking in their sandals. Do not stop crying out to the LORD our God for us, the Israelites beg Samuel, that he may rescue us from the hand of the Philistines.

Samuel prays, God answers, and the Israelites slaughter the bad guys. Afterward, Samuel takes a stone and sets it up not far from the battlefield. He names the stone Ebenezer—which means stone of help—saying, Thus far the LORD has helped us.⁵

Did Samuel think that the Philistines had been banished forever? I doubt it; they were a constant source of trouble, both before and after this victory. But did it stop him from thanking God or from giving him public glory? Not at all! Samuel built his Ebenezer as a marker—a sign of remembrance—so that generations to come would be able to see it and say, God did that.

As praying parents, we need to do the same thing. Rather than cower in worry or fear over our particular Philistines and the threat of what they might do in the future, we need to stop and thank God for what he has already done. When God works in answer to our prayers, we need to raise our own Ebenezers, acknowledging his provision thus far—and counting on him to help us in the future.

The verse at the beginning of this introduction—John 15:7—says that if we remain in Christ and his words remain in us, we can ask whatever we wish, and it will be done for us. That’s a beautiful promise, but it’s only part of the story. In the very next verse, Jesus explains the reason he wants us to pray: This is to my Father’s glory, he says, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.

The true purpose in prayer, wrote R. A. Torrey, is that God may be glorified in the answer.⁶ I believe that—but I also know how easy it can be for contemporary parents (well, this parent at least) to glorify or idolize our children. Not overtly, of course, but when we center our thoughts on our kids—either because they have made us so proud or because they have made us so anxious—we inadvertently elbow God out of the picture.

So let’s not. Let’s release our teens to God and pray with thanksgiving—no matter what the present circumstances are or the future what-ifs might look like—knowing that God has everything under control. Let’s pray with a heart that desires, above anything else, to bring honor and glory to God.

Will there be times when our hearts feel dark and our spirits are heavy? Of course. But from where I sit now, praying four all-grown-up children through the whack-a-mole issues in their young adult lives, I will tell you that I am glad the original edition of this book was not covered in black. And I’m even more glad, as I look back over my kids’ teen years and see the fingerprints of God’s faithfulness, that the new cover looks like it does. To me, it speaks of hope, light, and the power of God’s Word to open doors in our teens’ lives.

In his letter to the Colossians, Paul asked them to pray that God would open a door so that he and his companions could proclaim the mystery of Christ.⁷

As you open this book, may God open a door for his Word in your heart, equipping you to proclaim his praise from generation to generation.⁸ May he use you and your prayers to accomplish his purposes in the lives of the people you love.

Part 1

Praying for Your Teen’s Relationships

Chapter 1

Praying for Your Teen’s Relationship with Christ

So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.

Colossians 2:6–7

After dropping off our combined eight children on the first day of school, my friend Anne and I decided to stop for a cup of coffee. We headed to Starbucks, where we were delighted to run into a friend—let’s call her Darcy—we hadn’t seen in a while.

How old are your kids now? Darcy asked.

When she learned that Anne and I had four teens between us, Darcy broke into a huge smile. I remember those days! she cried. And I want you to meet my friend Patty.

Darcy pulled Patty into our circle. Our kids grew up together, she explained, and we stayed in touch, even after our family moved—and then her son married my daughter!

Remember when we took that vacation to St. Simon’s Island? Patty prompted.

Oh, yes! Darcy said. Our kids were teens—and you can imagine the kinds of things that were weighing on our hearts. Patty and I snuck off one day and found this little chapel where we could pray. We spent the entire morning pouring out our hearts to the Lord, like it says in Lamentations 2:19, lifting up our hands to him for the lives of our children.

We prayed for each of them by name, one at a time— Patty added.

—and we never dreamed that two of them would grow up and get married to each other! Darcy finished.

As Darcy and Patty continued to reminisce, Anne and I exchanged a look. I knew what she was thinking: we needed to get away and take time to pray for our kids, one by one.

Let’s do it tomorrow, Anne suggested.

The next day we met at the beach, right next to the big wooden cross that marks the spot where the Jamestown colonists landed, thirteen years before the Pilgrims arrived. We poured out our hearts, and then—just as we finished—the sky poured down rain. We snatched up our prayer journals and bolted for the car.

We need to do this again! Anne said, laughing.

Yes, I agreed, just as soon as my Bible dries out.

I’m grateful to God for how he set up our meeting with Darcy and Patty that day. Their friendship and their commitment to praying together (even in the hard and vulnerable seasons) stands as a testimony to the power of unified prayer.¹ If you don’t already have a friend you can confide in and pray with, ask God to give you a trusted prayer partner. First, though, I want to share one of Darcy’s stories with you . . .

Darcy and Wayne loved the fact that their kids were friends with all sorts of people. Rather than hang out in any particular clique or group at school, their son Mark enjoyed being with the prepsters, the church kids, the skaters, and—perhaps most of all—the athletes. As a six-year-old boy, Mark had met his idol, Michael Jordan, and his greatest desire was to follow in the basketball player’s footsteps.

By the time Mark hit high school, it looked as though his dream might come true. A star player on the school’s basketball team, he set his sights on playing Division I ball. In addition to his athletic talent, he seemed to have everything a teen boy could wish for—a cute girlfriend, a pack of guys to run around with, and parents who truly loved him.

In Wayne and Darcy’s mind, though, something was missing. Mark had been raised in the church, and at the age of five, he had asked to be baptized. Once he got his driver’s license, he drove all over town, picking up kids and bringing them to a nondenominational youth group, where many of them came to faith in Christ. Deep down, though, Darcy knew her son was not walking closely with God. Basketball was the only thing he really cared about.

Make him a man, Wayne prayed day in and day out. Make him a man of God.

Darcy wanted to believe God would answer that prayer, but—looking at Mark’s friends (many of whom were making some seriously bad choices) and his total lack of interest in anything remotely connected to church (except for the socially oriented youth group)—she didn’t see how it could happen. And when Mark graduated from high school and got a job busing tables at a local nightclub, Darcy feared he’d slip even further away.

He can’t work in that horrible place! she said to Wayne. You’ve got to do something.

He got a summer job like we asked. Don’t worry, Wayne said. He’ll be fine.

One night, some of Darcy and Wayne’s friends—a family in town for the weekend—decided to visit the nightclub. Let’s go say hi to Mark at work, one of the college-aged visitors suggested. We can dance; it’ll be fun!

The group trooped off to the night spot, only to find it closed for the evening, with no sign of Mark. Darcy tried to hide her concern, but when her son still hadn’t returned by three in the morning—four hours after his curfew—she was frantic.

Once again, Wayne provided a calming presence. He’ll be back, he said.

Mark did come back—and found himself facing his father’s wrath. You need to stay by my side for the rest of the weekend so you can be with our guests. After that, you’re moving out.

What? Mark asked.

You heard me. You can’t live in our house if you’re going to show such total disregard for our rules. You’re heading off to college in six weeks. I’m sure you’ll find someplace to live until then.

Mark moved into an apartment with a couple of guys. Had Darcy known what he was eating—leftover scraps from the tables he bused—she might have worried even more than she initially did, but she understood the importance of being united with her husband and agreed that making her son face the consequences of his actions was, in the end, the right thing to do.

PRAYER PRINCIPLE

When you have to make hard choices in parenting, ask God to give you courage and (if you are married) seek unity with your spouse.

Mark hit the college campus without his hoped-for scholarship, but he landed a spot on the basketball team as a walk-on. Meanwhile, Darcy continued to pray for her son’s relationship with the Lord. She would go into his empty bedroom, put her hands on his bed, and cry out to God. Let Mark know how much you love him, she prayed. Let him grasp how wide and long and high and deep your love is—and cause him to surrender his life to you.²

She also sent care packages to Mark’s dorm—including stacks of Christian music CDs that she hoped he would play. If nothing else, she knew the CDs would make him at least think about God—and serve as a reminder that his mother was praying.

PRAYER PRINCIPLE

Pray in your teen’s bedroom when they’re not home. Ask the Holy Spirit to show them how much they are loved.

Mark’s first year at school passed without incident. He loved playing basketball and seemed to get along well with the other players. During the fall of his second year, however, Mark called home, and Darcy could tell he was upset.

You’re playing basketball at a Division I school, right? Darcy asked.

Right.

And you’re dating a beautiful girl?

Right.

And you’re not all that happy.

Right.

Well, Darcy sighed, I don’t know what else to say, other than what Daddy and I have always told you. Until you really surrender your life to the Lord, you will never find the peace and the joy that you’re looking for.

Mark didn’t say much, and so Darcy continued. I love you, son. You know I do. But this is a decision you need to make for yourself; I can’t do it for you.

She hung up the telephone, thinking she’d said the same thing to Mark—that he needed to give his life completely to Jesus—a hundred times before. Would he ever listen?

For reasons even Mark