“Troubling times don’t have to take the life out of your life.” Max Lucado, time and again, speaks directly to my heart & after the Farmer and I drove home from dinner with Max, I turned to the Farmer and smiled quietly: “Max is just so much like Jesus…” I know no higher compliment… Max doesn’t just write about Jesus… He lives like Jesus. I’ve been savoring and finding deep sustenance in Max Lucado words for the last 20 years and I’ve been feasting on Max words about what living a life of faith truly looks like despite personal trials and cultural tribulations in his new book, Unbreakable Courage. Looking at the prophet Elijah, Max reveals how prayer is a strategic response to unprecedented pain and tragedy. It’s a ain incredible privilege to welcome Max to the farm table today…

Guest Post by Max Lucado

You can’t begin to imagine what a profound pleasure it was to sit down to talk with Max Lucado in the belltower of our 1896 old stone church — this is really a NOT TO BE MISSED CONVERSATION….  Don’t miss our powerful video convo below…

Rebecca has spent the last two years in pain.

“On a scale of one to ten,” the doctor explained, “she is a twelve every day.” Pretty tough challenge.

But Rebecca is a tough kid. She is ten years old. She has fudge-brown hair, eyes that sparkle, a weatherproof smile, and a Book of Miracles.

Rebecca’s pancreas has shut down. After a dozen operations and changes in medication, no solution is in sight. Rebecca needs a miracle.

According to her, she has enough to fill a book.

“Mommy, can you show Pastor Max my Miracle Book?”

It’s a spiral notebook with weathered edges and adorned with crayoned flowers, stars, and an occasional clown. In the handwriting of a child, miracles:

I slept all night last night.

Daddy snuck a puppy into the hospital.

Mommy is going to place a Christmas tree in the corner.

If I were in her place, I’d catalog the misery, discomfort, and difficulties. But not Rebecca. She itemizes the miracles and thanks God for each. She is going to pray it through.

No verse in the Bible promises the absence of struggle. Quite the contrary. Scripture is stained with tears, problems, injustices, immorality, and wars. Tough times come with life. But troubling times don’t have to take the life out of your life.

God gives us this invitation: “Pray it through.”

“Prayer marches the problem into the presence of the One who can solve it.“

“It” is what troubles you, fatigues you, shames you. “It” is the future you can’t control, the disease you can’t heal, the economy you can’t boost, the lawmaker you can’t stomach.

Prayer marches the problem into the presence of the One who can solve it. Prayer faces “it” by facing God immediately, consistently, doggedly, and hopefully. 

Elijah modeled this. “He prayed that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years! Then Elijah prayed again, and the rain came down from the sky, and the land produced crops again” (James 5:17–18 NCV). He is living proof that “when a believing person prays, great things happen” (v. 16 NCV).

And yet, the prophet faced tragedy. “Some time later the son of the woman who owned the house became ill. He grew worse and worse and finally stopped breathing” (1 Kings 17:17).

There is so much about the story we do not know. But the detail we are told is heartbreaking. The boy had “no breath left in him” (NKJV). The boy’s mother already lost a husband; she couldn’t bear to bury a child.

But her son began to drift from her. His limbs grew limp. His breath became shallow and skin pale.

She implored, “Don’t go! Don’t go!”

But he did. He had no breath left in him.

Maybe you can relate. Maybe you didn’t lose a child, but you lost a dream, a parent, a dear friend. Her son had no breath in him. In your case your future has no hope in it. Your career has no potential in it. Your marriage has no joy in it.

Something needs to be done.

Elijah shows us what to do.

Prayer was his strategy for the tragedy.

Elijah was resistless before God. “He stretched himself out upon the child” (v. 21 NKJV). He extended his adult body over the lifeless form. “Let this child’s soul come back to him” (v. 21 KNJV).

Elijah had no precedent upon which to base this prayer. Up to this point in Scripture, no person had been brought back to life. He didn’t learn to pray like this in Prophet Training 101. Elijah did this because he believed in a living God. Everywhere else, death. The land was dead from the famine. The hope of the mother was dead. The boy was dead. But Yahweh was alive!

There are occasions in which we rest in prayer. There are other occasions in which we wrestle in prayer. Elijah wrestled. Once was not enough. Twice was inadequate. Three times he pleaded.

Elijah prayed passionately. Dramatically. Emotionally. Thunderously. Begging. Pleading.

“We can take courage and step confidently into the front door of the throne room of God, having been invited by him and escorted in by his Son.“

Many think of speaking softly before God or “talking to the man upstairs.” But agonizing before God? Storming heaven with prayers? Isn’t such prayer irreverent? Isn’t such prayer presumptuous?

It would be had God not invited us to pray as such. “So let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God. There we will receive his mercy, and we will find grace to help us when we need it most” (Heb. 4:16 NLT).

We can take courage and step confidently into the front door of the throne room of God, having been invited by him and escorted in by his Son. We embrace God as Father, kneel before him as Lord, and earnestly make our requests known, not because of what we have achieved, but because of what Christ has done. Jesus spilled his blood for us. We can pour out our hearts before God.

Let a man spend a night fasting and praying at the bedside of his sick child and that father will not be the same man.

Let a young mother pour out her complaint to God over the death of her young child and that young mother will be changed.

Let a church challenge God to purge sin and send revival and there is no way that church will be the same.

Prayer changes the heart of the one who prays.

And prayer touches the heart of the One who hears it.

Oh, to have been present when the was-dead boy inhaled a deep breath, color returned to his face, and opened his eyes. 

Take the dead and dying portions of your life—the vigor that has faded, the ideals that have evaporated, the faith that has dwindled—take the corpses of your life and lay them before the Lord.

And next to them place our society, which seems sicker day by day. Don’t grow cynical. Become prayerful.

Don’t panic.

Pray.

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A Deeply Life-Giving Conversation: Belltower Stories

What does God say to our anxious and exhausted hearts? I cannot recommend this conversation highly enough… Life-changing!.. Ann Voskamp and Max Lucado discuss Max’s newest book, Unbreakable Courage. Come join us in BellTower Stories, up in the 1896 bell tower our little Village Table church, as “the bells are the voice of the church, with tones that touch and search.” (Longfellow)

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