DAILY VIDEO DEVOTIONAL
Genesis : Chapter 2
15) The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. 16) And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; 17) but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” 18) The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.” 19) Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 20) So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals. But for Adam[f] no suitable helper was found. 21) So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs[g] and then closed up the place with flesh. 22) Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib[h] he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. 23) The man said, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.” 24) That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.
Book of the Month
Sammy Tippit told his fiancée, “I can’t promise we’ll be rich, but life won’t be boring.”
Sammy had no idea what an understatement that would become. Beginning in the bars of Baton Rouge and the nightclubs of Chicago, Tippit has shared the news of life-changing faith in Christ all over the world – including in the middle of a revolution in Romania, the aftermath of genocide in Rwanda, and war in Burundi and the Congo.
Sammy’s lifelong adventure has come at a great price. He’s been cursed, threatened, arrested, deported, and blacklisted. He’s also been personally broken, ravaged with illness, and devastated by grief.
Yet he continues to preach to in stadiums, in open fields, and via satellite technology to hundreds of thousands around the globe. For all other books…
Family Life – 1
Sammy Tippit: I want to welcome you to this session. We’re turning a corner now. We’re going to begin to talk about family. Family life is so important, and this is going to be a special series because I have family with me. I have my wife, Tex, my son, Dave, and my daughter-in-law, Kelly Tippit. They are here with us. We’re going to be just talking about family.
We’re a family talking about family. We’re going to have just an honest, authentic conversation about family life and what it means. Let me just say that biblically, first of all, the very first institution God ordained was that of the family. He established a man and a woman, and the two would become one flesh, he said.
Of course, out of that, the first commandment he gave was to be fruitful and multiply. That meant to have a family. Those families were to multiply, so we find the family unit is so very important. Another thing I have found (we’ll be talking about this as we go on) is that Jesus said the greatest commandment was to love God with all of your heart, all of your mind, and all of your soul. The second was very similar to that. That was to love your neighbor as yourself. Well, the closest neighbor I have is sitting right next to me. Our families are really where we find the practice ground for learning to love other people. It’s in those people we’re closest to. We’re going to be talking about that, but we’re going to just start off really simply.
Dave, Kelly, we’re just so glad you could be with Tex and me and share in this. I think it would be good for everyone to just kind of get to know us, first of all, and how we met each other and built our lives together. So Tex, why don’t you start off by telling everybody how we got to know each other?
Tex Tippit: Okay. I moved from Texas to Louisiana during my senior year of high school, and then I went to college at Southeastern University. I started dating a guy who was Sammy’s best friend. We would see each other, and then all of a sudden, he started dating the girl Sammy had been dating, and I started dating Sammy. So that’s how we met.
Sammy: At that particular time, you really weren’t a follower of Jesus.
Tex: I wasn’t. That was one thing that drew me to Sammy. There was something different about him. I had been to church for all of my life, yet I didn’t have that personal relationship with Jesus Christ, so he began to share with me, and there were some girls in my dorm who began to share with me about Jesus, and I saw something different. I said, “I want what they have.” So I went up all by myself to my dorm. I had been smoking, drinking, and partying, and it hadn’t been satisfying. So I said, “God, if you’re real like you are to those other young people, would you come in and be real to me?” That was in 1967. He has never left me yet, and he has never forsaken me. He has given me a purpose in life.
Sammy: We got married in 1968, and now we’ve been married for… What? Over 47 years.
Tex: Yeah.
Sammy: We’re working on 48 and getting close to that big 50.
Tex: Yep.
Sammy: It has been good. Kelly? Dave? How did you guys meet? I know, but everybody else doesn’t know, so tell us how you met and a little bit about your journey.
Kelly Tippit: Well, Dave was the new kid in 10th grade at my school here in San Antonio. He was just different. He was somebody who really was genuinely interested in getting to know even the girls in a nice way, not trying to brag, show off, or anything. I was attracted to that. By our junior year, we had started dating. For the next 3 1/2 years, we were pretty exclusive.
We had pretty much fallen in puppy love. Then we went off to college, and in college we kind of grew apart a little bit and went through some different seasons, but eventually we ended up getting married about nine years after we had met. We’ve been married for a little over 19 years, and we have three kids. Taylor, who is 14, is our oldest daughter. Riley, who is 12, is our second daughter. Then Braden, who is 9 years old, is our little guy.
Dave Tippit: Just really quickly, on the getting married part… We dated for those 3 1/2 years, and when we were in college, we thought about getting married straight out of college, but we weren’t in the right place. We look back now and see it took us nine years of getting to the point where we were ready for marriage before we actually got married.
I just see God’s timing. If we had gotten married earlier, who knows if we’d be sitting here today, but God had that perfect timing for us to go through things before he seasoned us to that place of marriage where we needed to be.
Tex: I do have to say something, though. When they started dating, I just loved Kelly. I fell in love with her. Even when they separated for a time, I kept her picture in my wallet because I thought, “She is the one for our son.” So it’s neat to see how even though it didn’t look like it, what God started, he brought to pass in y’all’s lives. Prayer is so important.
Sammy: Yeah. I felt sorry for those other girls he dated during that time, but it was good. Y’all got married. We’ve gotten married. We’ve been married for 47 years. How long has it been now for you?
Dave: About 19 1/2 years.
Sammy: Y’all have been married for 19 1/2 years.
Kelly: That’s a long time.
Sammy: You know, one of the things about marriage is it puts you into a relationship where you experience difficulties and problems. Off the bat, let’s just… What has been one of the most difficult things you’ve faced during the past 20 years or so?
Dave: There are many obstacles you have to overcome, but I think one truth about life itself and the constant of life is that there’s always change. Nothing ever remains static. Nothing ever remains the same. That’s true about Kelly and me as well. As a young couple, when we first got married 19 1/2 years ago… We’re different people now than we were then.
If you’re not careful, you can start to drift away. You can start getting your own passions, your own priorities, your own things in life that keep you busy. I think you have to be really intentional about just connecting again on a deeper level as you see that gap start to widen. I think you discover… A lot of people are still discovering who they are when they get married.
They’re still finding out what makes them tick, what gifting they have, and all of those kinds of things. Over time, as I said, you can start to develop different passions. I think it’s really important that you maintain an interest in your spouse’s passions and vice versa. For example, Kelly has always had a heart for the needy, the voiceless, those who can’t speak up for themselves.
There are refugees who have come here to San Antonio from Iraq in the last few years. She got involved in their lives, just helping out on a practical level: helping them get involved in the community, become American citizens, go through that whole process, and understand the American culture. I was more on the sidelines of that, but as I started to watch her get more involved in that, as I got to play a little part in that, that helped to grow our connection on a deeper level.
She does the same thing for me. Over my lifetime, I have found that the way God works through me is through the mind. I love to listen to podcasts on my phone whenever I’m in the car or whenever I’m out and about, and there are things I discover. Rather than just keeping those to myself, I’ll pass along to her the ones I know will at least have some interest to her. She’ll listen to those things. So we’re very intentional about trying to connect with each other in the different ways God has made us.
Sammy: I had someone who I respect greatly say it’s like two people are on a lake in a boat, and the natural tendency for the boat is to drift apart. That’s the natural thing that happens. You really have to work toward not allowing it to drift apart and toward bringing it together. That brings me to maybe a last thing we could talk about briefly. How has marriage affected your relationship with the Lord? Has it made it deeper? How is that affected? Kelly: I think God used marriage as a tool in my life to take me deeper with him. I think that before I got married, I thought I was just a pretty easy person to get along with and not too selfish, but getting married showed me all of my selfishness and how much I liked things done a certain way or my way. God used that, I think, in my life just to show me there were areas in my life that I didn’t even see before marriage, that I didn’t even know were there, that needed to be worked on.
Sammy: Yeah. I think that’s what marriage is all about to a great extent. God chisels away at us to make us more like Christ through entering into relationships where it’s not just us but other people. “Love the Lord your God with all of your heart…” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.” That’s the great challenge for every one of us today.
About Sammy Tippit Ministries
STM has been providing inspiration and help around the world for nearly 50 years. Sammy Tippit, founder and president, is a world renowned counselor, teacher and evangelist with experience serving and helping people in over 80 countries. Sammy provides materials that help people tackle a broad array of social, societal, psychological and spiritual issues. He is particularly passionate about making materials accessible to other countries around the world. Sammy is married to Debara “Tex” Tippit, and they have two children and five grandchildren.
Sammy Tippit Ministries is a registered 501c3 non-profit organization.
Contact: info@sammytippit.org
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