Discovering the Power of Prayer by Max Lucado

Author:Max Lucado
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Thomas Nelson Inc.
Published: 2010-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

LESSON THREE:

PRAYER—THE

SECRET STRENGTH

But he said to me, “My grace is enough for you.

When you are weak, my power is made perfect in you.”

So I am very happy to brag about my weaknesses. Then Christ’s power can live in me.

2 CORINTHIANS 12 : 9 – 10 NCV

OVERVIEW

We are tempted to wait to pray until we know how to pray. We’ve heard the prayers of the spiritually mature. We’ve read of the rigors of the disciplined. And we are convinced we’ve a long way to traverse.

And since we’d rather not pray than pray poorly, we don’t pray. Or we pray infrequently. We are waiting to pray until we learn how to pray.

But the honest prayers of hurting people reach the very heart of God and provide the strength to make it through. God is moved more by our pain than by our eloquence. And He responds. That’s what fathers do.

That’s exactly what Jim Redmond did too.

His son, Derek, a twenty-six-year-old Briton, was favored to win the four-hundred-meter race in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Halfway into his semifinal heat, a fiery pain seared through his right leg. He crumpled to the track with a torn hamstring.

As the medical attendants were approaching, Redmond fought to his feet. “It was an animal instinct,” he would later say. He set out hopping, pushing away the coaches in a crazed attempt to finish the race.

When he reached the stretch, a big man pushed through the crowd. He was wearing a T-shirt that read, “Have you hugged your child today?” and a hat that challenged, “Just Do It.” The man was Jim Redmond, Derek’s father.

“You don’t have to do this,” he told his weeping son.

“Yes, I do,” Derek declared.

“Well, then,” said Jim, “we’re going to finish this together.”

And they did. Jim wrapped Derek’s arm around his shoulder and helped him hobble to the finish line. Fighting off security men, the son’s head sometimes buried in the father’s shoulder, they stayed in Derek’s lane to the end.

The crowd clapped, then stood, then cheered, and then wept as the father and son finished the race.

What made the father do it? What made the father leave the stands to meet his son on the track? Was it the strength of his child? No, it was the pain of his child. His son was hurt and fighting to complete the race. So the father came to help him finish.

God does the same. Our prayers may be awkward. Our attempts may be feeble. But since the power of prayer is in the One who hears it and not the one who says it, our prayers do make a difference.

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