What’s in this Episode?

Dr. Mike Rakes and his wife, Darla, prayed for the miracle healing of their 27-year old daughter. And then, on August 6, 2019, at 3:33 in the morning she took her last breath. How do a Mom and a Dad deal with that? Can there ever be a sense of “God let us down?” Dick Hardy and Dr. Rakes sit down to talk about his book on this gut-wrenching topic, Surrendered and Unafraid.

Read the Transcript

Dick Hardy 0:06
Hey friends, it’s great to be with you on this Church Tips Podcast and I’m here today with my good friend, Dr. Mike Rakes, the president of Evangel University. He and I have connected over the years and he’s been so kind to join me for this podcast today. Mike, great to have you with us.

Mike Rakes 0:23
Great to be with you, Dick, Thanks for the invitation. Looking forward to sharing.

Dick Hardy 0:27
You know, I had a lot of fun with Mike and Kent Ingle down at Southeastern. All three of us were vice presidents at Bible colleges, at the same time, back in the early 2000s. Then, you know, we went our ways after serving as vice presidents there. Kent is the president of Southeastern, and Mike is the president at Evangel, and I’m not the president of anything.

Mike Rakes 0:54
You are. You know, the last shall be first and you’re at the head of the line when we cross over.

Mike Rakes 1:02
Just keep it comin, man, just keep it comin.

Mike Rakes 1:06
No, seriously, you know, thanks for using your life as a platform to help others and to strengthen the local church. You know, you’ve helped other people succeed along the way. And I’m sure Kent would say that and myself. So thanks for all the tips and all the help along the way, you’re a blessing to the Kingdom.

Dick Hardy 1:23
Thank you. Very kind. Well, it goes all ways, that’s for sure. The Lord is good. Hey, today, we’re going to talk about the book that Mike has written, Surrendered and Unafraid. Now, this is a bit of a different book than we frequently cover on the Church Tips Podcast, because it emanates the flow of experience that Mike and Darla had with their daughter.

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Dick Hardy 1:23
And so I don’t know how to jump into this other than just giving it over to you, Mike, and have you talk to us about the book, talk to us about the topic.

Dick Hardy 2:01
And we want to encourage everyone watching and listening to pick this book up, wherever books are sold. And, this will be a real help to you.

Mike Rakes 2:12
Thanks. I’m looking forward to sharing. It’s a great opportunity to be with you today. I also wanted to give a shout out to Jonathan and his important book, Arrow Striker. Just basically an important voice.

Mike Rakes 2:25
The next generation, anything I can do to support the next gen. You know, he’s just calling people to live a more deliberate life every day. So, excellent book and followers of Jesus to live with zest and gusto.

Mike Rakes 2:43
He happens to be a graduate, you know, CBC. So which by virtue of the way things go, also EU then. But I’m actually now just seeing on the podcast, This Decision Just Made, so I saved it.

Mik Rakes 2:59
But here’s the few lines, “The Office of the President would like to inform you, Jonathan, that your book Arrow Striker has been selected by the office of the president team to be presented, to all religion graduates, at next year’s religion Baccalaureate service.”

Dick Hardy 3:13
Oh my goodness.

Mike Rakes 3:13
So yeah, it’s going to be in the box of books we give out to the kids and he’ll get the official letter, but I wanted to save the big news for today. So it’s going to be great.

Mike Rakes 3:25
So anyway, this book, Surrender and Unafraid, is not my daughter’s life story. It’s actually excerpts from her journal as she was walking out a four year battle with Hodgkin’s lymphoma with cancer. It was a shock to us. It’s also my interaction, both with her journals, with her music, and my own grief.

Mike Rakes 3:45
And essentially, what the book does is give you a biblical formula for flourishing through adversity. So that’s essentially what it is. It helps people get through their pain and not lose their faith in God.

Dick Hardy 4:00
You know, when I started into the book. You did a masterful job in pulling the reader in. And then, I’ll use the term, I’m not sure it’s the right word, but then the jolt, that you lost her.

Mike Rakes 4:20
Right

Dick Hardy 4:20
And then all of a sudden, because we’re friends, I’m trying to step into your pain and, oh my goodness. Then as you begin to walk this out through the book. So just talk to us, Mike, about whatever is on your heart that we should be focused on.

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Mike Rakes 4:38
Right. Well, I think you know, for the pastors that are listening or for those that are doing Christian Leadership, the three big tips I would have coming out of what I learned is, you have to face the pain. You have to surrender to what is, so you either accept it as the will of God or you embrace it as your cross to bear. And then you have to live unafraid into the future, no matter how painful it is. And so I think those three tips. In the book, we call them wisdom, integrity and tenacity, which is literally how I survived.

Mike Rakes 5:12
You know, having pastored for so many decades, like I did, I did hundreds of funerals. I mean, I helped parents bury their children, and had no clue. Until you’re sitting on the front row, listening to It Is Well with My Soul, when it’s not well with your soul, you have no idea what people are going through.

Mike Rakes 5:31
And this book, I think, would help pastors and staff just kind of enter into really the theological discussion of, how can I be charismatic, believe in miracles, when God didn’t give me what we want, or we prayed for a miracle.

Mike Rakes 5:45
So what I say in the book is, faith is not what you use to get what you want. Faith is what you have to have when you don’t get what you want. And I just kind of unpack that.

Mike Rakes 5:55
I unpack the verses where I misquoted God. I thought God made certain promises, like if children obey their parents and don’t rebel, which Whitney didn’t. So she got cancer at 23, passed away at 27.

Mike Rakes 6:10
But her whole life, even as a teenager, she just lived devoted to God. She was our worship pastor at the church. So it’s very, very hard to take that hit, and can keep one’s faith, you know.

Mike Rakes 6:23
So that’s what the book helps somebody do. If somebody in your church is suffering or going through something, this is a great book to share with them.

Dick Hardy 6:31
Well, you know, you’ve broken it up. The book, I’m gonna say, you don’t call it an easy read because of the topic.

Mike Rakes 6:39
It’s not, right.

Dick Hardy 6:42
You have to be very methodical going through, but your chapters are reasonably short. So you’re able to capture those nuggets. Is there anything, any of those chapters, in particular, you want to highlight or just bring to the forefront?

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Mike Rakes 6:58
Yeah. Well, each of them I wrote as stand alone chapters. So, you can just randomly pick it up and read wherever. So in one of the chapters I talk about, I don’t know how I missed it as a pastor.

Mike Rakes 7:12
The idea that God’s chosen people now have a wailing wall. They stand up and roll little prayer requests and stuff them in the wall. That sometimes when you’re praying to God, it feels like you’re praying to a wall.

Mike Rakes 7:27
And I don’t know how I missed all the suffering stories in the Bible. Like almost everybody that we interact with and talk with, has gone through just some horrible things in the scriptures. You know, stories in the Bible and those around us.

Mike Rakes 7:42
So, Dick, I’d say it this way, suffering is what we have in common with humanity. So we’ll be better at Kingdom work, when we kind of approach it from that standpoint.

Dick Hardy 7:55
Yeah. Oh, that is so good. You know, even just reviewing the way you concluded the book you know. A great statement here. If I can just read this here as it begins the conclusion.

Dick Hardy 8:13
Statement from Wit, “I set my eyes on you and not on sickness. Not even the solution. Eyes on you. Listening for the voice I know so well, ready to follow. I will follow where it leads, surrendered and unafraid.” And it’s unbelievable.

Mike Rakes 8:32
Yeah, unbelievable.

Mike Rakes 8:34
She was so passionate for God. So early, when the diagnosis came, she had 11 rounds of chemo. So the decision for us as a family is, do we abandon what science is saying and stand by faith? So, I talked about that in the book and unpack all of that.

Mike Rakes 8:51
We ended up doing 11 rounds of chemo. She set a chair by her bed early on, just in case Jesus wanted to come, the Healer wanted to come and sit beside her at night and heal her. She took communion. She did all the things I taught her as a kid to do.

Mike Rakes 9:04
If I could go back and teach my son or daughter, one thing I would teach is, I would teach this other side of the coin of divine healing, which is divine suffering that sometimes we are going to suffer.

Mike Rakes 9:16
Sometimes God isn’t going to give you everything you’re asking for, or in our case anything we asked for. Even her own suffering, as the cancer moved into the bone and everything, we didn’t see God’s help. We didn’t see the easing of pain, we didn’t.

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Mike Rakes 9:29
And so sometimes, in charismatic faith anyway, we get the double down folks. You double down like, by God, you know, I’m not going to. And I just decided I was going to tell the truth about this and still fight my way to a charismatic Pentecostal faith. So that quote by Whitney, we don’t focus on the miracles that God does. We focus on God Himself.

Dick Hardy 9:56
Yeah. Talk to us a little bit about Wit. I know we’ve already established we got a little bit of a timeframe here, and how do you talk about a beautiful daughter like this, but just tell us some things about Wit.

Mike Rakes 10:09
Well, she was amazing. My baby girl, we called her. We only had two kids. So, what we say now, like every conversation is awkward, you know. Like, how many kids do you have? Darla and I face that often. So, we always say, Well, we have one and we have one in heaven, her name is Whitney.

Mike Rakes 10:28
She was a worship pastor. But we prayed from the time she came home in a bassinet, God put a song in her heart. So, she wasn’t an American Idol kid, she was this poet, and just had all of these great one liners. So we called her Wit, because she had a quick wit.

Mike Rakes 10:46
So, when we were going on vacation, she would start it. We would start quoting movies, you know, back then Disney movies or whatever. We’re quoting one liners and whoever could stay the longest kind of won that.

Mike Rakes 10:53
But the “wit” is what I took to the book, which is wisdom, integrity, tenacity. It’s kind of the secret to getting through what you’re going through.

Mike Rakes 11:07
And I will say, Dick, that what I learned, course you know, having two doctorate degrees. One-third of the Psalms are lamenting, and the word lamenting was a little distant from me, a little too sanitized. It’s actually complaining.

Mike Rakes 11:21
One-third of the Psalms are writers complaining to God, about some circumstance, something God didn’t do. So I can’t sing the song, he’ll never let you down, he’ll never let you down, because he did let me down, so that doesn’t work.

Mike Rakes 11:42
But here’s what I’ve come to Dick. And, maybe this is kind of how you can head toward the wrap up, but the resurrection of Jesus is everything. And so now when we see the empty tomb, you know, they didn’t roll a stone back and oh, suddenly Jesus emerges like, Oh, thanks guys for letting me out. No, he was already the victorious Lord. They roll the stone back to show us that the graves are empty.

Mike Rakes 12:05
For all of us that are following Jesus, the graves do not hold our loved ones. To be absent from this body is to be present with the Lord. And so my wife and I, and my son and his wife, we are just fully devoted to say, We believe and thank God for Jesus and the powerful work that he did.

Mike Rakes 12:28
You know, he said, I’ve got to go away. I’ve got to go away so you can have a Comforter, because he knew things were gonna get bad. And, and they did for those early Christians, and the Holy Spirit becomes that Comforter and that Helper. So anyway, that’s it for us.

Would you like a personal leadership boost? Take the 5-day Leadership Challenge for Pastors! A 15 Minute per day investment for 5 days will change the trajectory of your leadership and influence.

Dick Hardy 12:45
Well, that’s very, very good. Surrendered and Unafraid, just an outstanding book that will challenge you. It will make you think, it will make you dig in, and it will draw you to Jesus. It really will.

Dick Hardy 12:59
So parting parting shot, Mike, if somebody listened or watched this, and they didn’t hear anything else, what do you want them to hear today?

Mike Rakes 13:09
Well, when someone is suffering, shallow vocabulary gymnastics won’t help them. Just sit with them in their pain. And what I tell people all the time is, wisdom only comes through trouble. So you can get bitter or you can sit with the Lord.

Mike Rakes 13:30
And you know, wisdom doesn’t come from a lecture or from anybody else’s experience. It comes from yours. And so, the groans and all that, the Lord is right there with you.

Mike Rakes 13:38
And you know, I wrote a free study guide. It should be on the Evangel website. There’s a free study guide that goes with the book. You don’t even have to get the book to do the study guide and walk people through just processing, either individually or in groups, processing their grief.

Mike Rakes 13:52
And, I hope that this will be a blessing to help people not walk away from their faith when they don’t get a miracle, but to really live devoted to the Lord. And the next life is going to be better than this one for sure.

Dick Hardy 14:07
Absolutely, Mike. Man, I can’t thank you enough for being willing to take time to join me on this.

Mike Rakes 14:13
Sure

Dick Hardy 14:13
I know this is so deep and personal to you. Again the book, Surrendered and Unafraid. Go wherever books are sold and pick it up.

Mike Rakes 14:22
It’s also on Audible and then go to Mikerakes.com and find ways to get it there. So thanks, Dick, for hosting me today.

Dick Hardy 14:29
Absolutely

Dick Hardy 14:31
Well, friends thanks for watching and being with us today. And if there’s anything we can do for you, don’t hesitate to contact us at Leaders.Church, [email protected]. Be glad to help in any way. But, Mike, thank you for being with us. In the meantime, make it a great one today and be blessed.

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