When you have no option

I want to encourage you to keep praying!

As we continue our church-wide emphasis on prayer, I want to remind you about our 25 Minutes of Prayer Challenge. For every 25 minutes you spend in prayer throughout the week, you'll receive a Duplo building block. We're collecting those blocks and building a wall together on the stage as a visual reminder of what happens when the body of Christ comes together in prayer.

Each block represents 25 minutes someone in our church family has intentionally spent talking with God, listening to Him, seeking His direction, or lifting up the needs of others. And here's what I love about this: One block might not look like much, but when we start putting them together, something begins to take shape.

That's what I want us to understand about prayer. We're not just a bunch of individuals praying separately. We're a church family seeking God together.

The goal isn't to see how big of a wall we can build. The goal is to become a church that prays. A church where prayer isn't our last resort when everything else fails, but our first response to everything we face.

So whether you've already been spending time in prayer or haven't started yet, I want to invite you to join us. Find time this week to intentionally pray. It doesn't have to be 25 minutes all at once. Those minutes add up, and so do those blocks!

We're not building a wall to show God how much we've prayed. We're building a wall to remind ourselves how much we need Him. And speaking of needing God, have you ever had a moment when you simply didn't know what to do? You had no more resources or ideas. You didn't have any other options?

Recently, I was having dinner with my parents. They moved to town a while ago, and it’s been such a gift to have them nearby. As we were eating, I told my dad I had been writing a series of devotions about prayer and encouraging our church to pray more. I mentioned I’d been studying the story of Hezekiah and how he responded when he received a threatening letter from the king of Assyria.

My dad looked at me and said, “Have I ever told you about my Hezekiah moment?”

I had heard parts of the story before, but as he began telling it again, I realized how closely it connected to Hezekiah’s experience. Years ago, my dad was two and a half years into planting a church. The church had started with three people: my dad, my mom, and me. God had grown that little group to around 30 people, but the future still looked uncertain. Their outside financial support was being reduced by 20 percent every year, and they knew that eventually that support would disappear completely.

They needed the church to grow.

They needed land.

They needed a building.

They needed money.

And they needed people who knew how to build a building.

When my dad looked around at the small group of people in their church, he couldn’t see how any of it was going to happen.

One night, the weight of it all wouldn’t let him sleep. Sometime between 2:00 and 4:00am, he climbed into his rebuilt pickup truck with a list of eight possible properties and started driving. One by one, he drove to every property on the list. He would pull up, sit there, and pray. At some properties, he stayed longer than others. Sometimes he prayed through tears. His prayer wasn’t eloquent. It was basically:

“God, here I am in this town. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know which of these properties would work. They all seem like too much money. I can’t do this by myself. Where are we going to find the leaders we need?”

He didn’t have a solution, so he laid the problem before God.

HEZEKIAH DID THE SAME THING.

Thousands of years earlier, King Hezekiah received a letter from the king of Assyria. It was essentially a threat.

Assyria had already destroyed other nations. Now the message to Hezekiah was simple: You’re next.

Hezekiah couldn’t outmuscle them. He couldn’t pretend the threat wasn’t real. He couldn’t manufacture a solution. So here’s what he did:

“Hezekiah received the letter from the messengers and read it. Then he went up to the temple of the LORD and spread it out before the LORD.”2 Kings 19:14 (NIV)

I love that picture. He literally took the thing that was keeping him awake and spread it out before God.

Here it is, God.

Here is what they said.

Here is what I’m facing.

Here is what I cannot fix.

Here is what I cannot control.

Here is what is too big for me.

I’m giving it to You.

My dad didn’t know it that night, but while he was driving around town, praying over eight pieces of property, God was at work providing things my dad couldn’t yet see. Over the next six months, several remarkable things happened. A family moved to town. The husband had served on a church construction team for a church of around 800 people. A couple of weeks later, another family came. They had lived in the area their entire lives, owned residential and commercial property, and had their own contracting and excavation business. About a month later, another man joined the church. He was part-owner of a construction company that had built roughly a fourth of Tinker Air Force base. Then a fourth family moved in from New York. The husband was a retired Air Force major who had overseen building projects and worked directly with civilian contractors.

Six months earlier, my dad had been praying, “God, where are we going to find the leaders we need?”

And God essentially assembled a building team. Three of those four families eventually provided almost half of the church’s construction costs. But there was one more detail.

Remember those eight properties my dad drove to in the middle of the night? When it was finally time to purchase land, my Dad found out one of the construction team men happened to be friends with the owner of one of the properties. The owner agreed to sell it to the church for less than half the asking price.

My dad couldn’t have planned all those details that night. He couldn’t have recruited those exact people. He couldn’t have manufactured those relationships. He couldn’t even see six months down the road. But God could.

And I think that’s one of the reasons Hezekiah’s story matters so much for us.

Prayer isn’t pretending the problem isn’t real.

Hezekiah read the letter. He knew exactly what it said.

Faith isn’t ignoring reality.  Faith is looking directly at reality then laying it before a God who sees what we cannot.

Maybe you have your own letter today. Maybe it’s sitting on your kitchen table. Maybe it’s an email sitting in your inbox. Maybe it’s a doctor’s report, a financial situation, a problem in your marriage, a concern about one of your kids, or a difficult situation at work. Maybe it’s a decision you have to make, and every option seems impossible. Maybe you’ve been lying awake at 2:00 in the morning trying to figure out something, and you simply cannot.

You don’t have to know how God is going to solve it before you pray.  You don’t even have to know if He will solve it the way you want Him to. You simply need to know where to take it. Lay it out before the Lord.

Tell Him exactly what you’re afraid of.

Tell Him what you don’t understand.

Tell Him what you need.

Tell Him, “God, I don’t know what to do.”

Then trust the God who can already see what you can’t.

Sometimes we spend days, weeks, and even months running laps around the pool of anxiety, rehearsing every possible outcome and imagining every possible disaster. We worry about what might happen, even though God may already be moving in ways we cannot see. And sometimes, when we look back, we realize the thing we feared was never as big as we thought. The battle was already being won. The answer was already taking shape. God was already working behind the scenes. That doesn’t mean every situation will turn out exactly the way we want. But it does mean we can trust God with what we cannot control.

What do you need to let go of and lay before God?

What is something you’ve been praying about while also carrying anxiety over?

What situation has been keeping you awake or causing you to run endless laps around the anxiety pool?

Write it down.

Name the problem, the fear, the decision, or the situation you cannot control.

If you can, place it somewhere visible as a reminder to bring it to God instead of carrying it alone.

Then pray:

“God, here it is. I don’t know what to do with this. I can’t carry this by myself, so I’m laying it before You. Help me trust that You are working, even when I cannot see it.”

As you pray, also think about a time in your life when you were deeply anxious, but the situation eventually turned out differently than you feared.

Maybe it wasn’t as big a deal as you thought.

Maybe the battle had already been won.

Maybe God was already rolling the answer into place before you ever saw it.

Remember that story.

Remember what God has already done.

Then leave room for Him to work in ways you haven’t even thought of yet.