Rick Warren wasn’t scheduled to preach the day his 27-year-old son, Matthew, took his own life. He was recovering from pneumonia and asked his teaching pastor, Tom Holladay, to speak about a book he was reading.
The title of that book was tragically prophetic: What to Do on the Worst Day of Your Life by Brian Zahnd. Indeed, news of his son’s suicide had to be the worst day of Warren’s life.
“Even before they knew what was happening, all of what was happening, this is the message that he wanted to be passed along to us this weekend,” Holladay said.
The examples and principles in Zahnd’s book may console Warren and others facing personal tragedies. Basing his book on the biblical story of King David and the disaster at Ziklag, Zahnd shares how to draw strength from the actions of the king known in Scripture as a “man after God’s own heart.”
“Today a lot of people are going through a hard time,” says Zahnd, senior pastor of Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, Mo. “It’s for these people that the story of David’s calamity at Ziklag and how he eventually recovered is so relevant. God’s great work in David’s life was not an odd, one-off miracle, but a pattern of faith for all.”
Please continue to pray for the Warren family.
