Elijah 3 - Not What We Expected
Heavenly father, thank you, Lord, for your word, and we thank you for the life and the example and the struggle and the victory, that we see in Elijah's life. Lord, I would pray that you would use that you would use pastor Luke today to proclaim your word, that, it would be, lord, not for his glory, but for yours. Lord, we pray that he would speak, clear clearly and full of wisdom. Lord, your word to us, your people, we eagerly anticipate father being transformed by the ministry of your Holy Spirit this morning. We thank you in Jesus' name.
Cameron:Amen.
Luke:Amen. Thank you, Cameron. My name is Luke. I'm one of the pastors here. And I have a sweet tooth.
Luke:Does anybody else like sweets? I love yeah. Sweets. Right? Yeah.
Luke:I love I gotta tell you, I love a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie. Right? Just comes out of the oven and it's got kind of like crispiness on the outside, but then you bite into it. It's real gooey. Right?
Luke:It's just super warm. Like, I love that. I love the smell. I love the taste. It's the best.
Luke:But if you ever picked up a chocolate chip cookie, and you're, like, expecting that, and you're just, like, oh, I'm ready. And then you bite down, and you realize it was an oatmeal raisin cookie. That yeah. That the oatmeal raisins got their place. Right?
Luke:Like, I'm not not just trying to but but not trying to diss on them. They have their their their appropriate place, but it's when you're expecting a chocolate chip cookie. Right? It's when you're like, ah, I was hoping for that hit sweet of chocolate. And you're like, oh, raisins are kind of sweet, but not the same.
Luke:Right? And that is one thing that's like a it's kind of a disappointment. Right? You're just like, oh, I was a little well, what down? I still want my chocolate chip cookie that I got super savory and salivating about.
Luke:I I don't know about you guys. I want a chocolate chip cookie right now. But, man, is it lunch yet? Alright. But we get these ideas.
Luke:We run into this place where we're like, we have an expectation. We have a hope for the outcome of something. And then we get to it, and then we're let down. Our expectations are not met.
Luke:And that can happen,
Luke:certainly, with chocolate chip cookie, but it can also happen with, that next stage in life, that relationship,
Luke:that family member, the way that you were hoping things were
Luke:going to work out. And it didn't. And we could just go around the room right now. And we could just share all of the things that are not working out the way we thought they were. Situation where God's plans not really seeming to line up with your plan?
Luke:If you hopefully, I'm not the only one who's wanted to say, hey, God, can we can we go over some notes? And you're not following it. Right? Like, we were kind of like, God, well, why? I kind of thought I would have been here by now and that this would have gone this way and that I could have just totally avoided this and this would have been better than this.
Luke:And, you know, you're really not paying attention to the story I kind of want to tell for my life. What do we do in that? When things have not played out the way we expected, or wanted, or desired, or even prayed that they would. What do we do when we encounter disappointment? Expectations are broken.
Luke:Today, we're going to be in 1st Kings chapter 19. And we're going to be finishing up the story on Elijah, or at least this portion of his story. And here, we're going to encounter a story that deals with lost expectation, disappointment, and how God shows up in that and how God shows up in that. So we're gonna be in 1st Kings chapter 19. That's in the Q1 or so of your bible.
Luke:And if you can't find it, you can always go to the front of your bible as a table of contents. That'll give you a good place to find the first part of that book. And we have Bibles in the back too if you don't have a Bible. That can be your Bible. We would don't want you to leave without a Bible if you would like 1.
Luke:So First Kings chapter 19. Just a brief note. I think my microphone is just a little hot. I'm hearing a little bit of ringing. Thank you.
Luke:Thank you, guys. Our tech team does a great job. They show up early every Sunday, and they make sure everything runs smoothly for us. So if you get to see Dan back there, tell him thank you for all the work that he does here. So we're gonna be diving into kind of the ending of this part of Elijah's story.
Luke:Drought to kind of confront them and say, Baal doesn't provide rain. I provide rain. The Lord provides rain. And then it comes to a head when there's this showdown that we talked about last week between the prophets of Baal and Elijah. And they set up these 2 altars and they say, whichever God lights their altar on fire is the true God of Israel.
Luke:And the prophets of Baal fail. Baal was silent that day. And the Lord sent down a fire in a miraculous spectacular way that consumed said, the Lord, he is the God of Israel. Surely, the Lord is the God of Israel. They have this mass conversion experience.
Luke:Expectation? He went through this multi year campaign, Multiple years of drought and not being there and and being on kind of Israel's most wanted list and all of this. And then he comes and there's a spectacular display of God. These people pronounce that God is their Lord. Surely, he's expecting that, okay.
Luke:Now they're gonna get with the program. Now they're going to follow the Lord. They've got it. They've seen that the Lord truly is the Lord of Israel. Let's pick up that story.
Luke:We're gonna start in chapter 18 verse 41. So just a few chapters or few verses back from chapter 19. Chapter 18 verse 41. This is right after all of this happens. And Elijah comes up to king Ahab and he says, go eat and drink for there is a sound of heavy rain.
Luke:3 years and no rain and yet there's the sound of heavy rain coming. And Ahab went off to eat and drink, but Elijah climbed to the town top of Mount Carmel, bent down to the ground, and put his face between his knees. Go and look toward the sea, he told his servant. And he went and he looked. There is nothing he said.
Luke:7 times, Elijah said, go back. The 7th time, the servant reported a cloud as small as a man's hand is rising from the sea. So Elijah said, go and tell Ahab, hitch up your chariot and go down before the rain stops you. Meanwhile, the sky grew black with clouds. The wind rose.
Luke:A heavy rain started falling, and Ahab rode off to Jezreel in his chariots. The power of the Lord came on Elijah and tucking his cloak into his belt, he ran ahead of Ahab all the way to Jezreel. So we see this scene where Elijah comes up to Ahab and he's like, look. It's not rain for 3 years. You guys have been conserving food, conserving water.
Luke:I'm gonna tell you now, it hasn't rained yet, but you should start eating like it has. Go and feast because it is about to rain. And then he goes up and he sits on the mountain and he waits for this rain. And you just get this picture of a far off cloud. Spectacular show of God's faithfulness and a spectacular show of God's faithfulness and providing rain and keeping his word when his people came back to him.
Luke:And Elijah does this thing. He sits there and the Lord comes on him and he's suddenly filled with the power of the spirit of the Lord that he's able to run ahead of a horse and chariot. He's able to outrun them and keep pace above them and get to Jezreel before Ahab does
Luke:and paints this really interesting picture. And it paints
Luke:this really interesting picture. And so If you think, perhaps, maybe you have like an image of a triumphant king who would come back from war or a campaign or a long journey and would come into the city or into the palace and there would be a parade and there would be the army and all of those that come before the king, kind of displaying its power and all of that. Elijah is the prophet of the Lord and he's coming before the king. There's almost this symbol symbol symbolism here of Elijah, the Lord's prophet is leading the way for the king of Israel because the king of Israel is surely going to follow the Lord God of Israel now. It's kind of this public declaration that Baal is no longer the god that Ahab is going to worship, but the Lord is the god that that Ahab is going to worship.
Luke:These are the expectations. This is what's going on in this passage. And Elijah shows up to Jezreel and he's excited perhaps. He's anticipatory. It's been years.
Luke:Let's see.
Luke:We see disappointment and broken expectations in verse 1
Luke:of chapter 19 says, now, Ahab told Jezebel everything that Elijah had done and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. So Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah to say, may the gods deal with me. She makes an oath with herself. She's like, if I don't kill you, might I die? She makes this death threat to Elijah.
Luke:Ahab has come home. He tells his queen what happened. And rather than her saying, wow, the Lord is truly God. Why are we wasting our time worshiping these false idols? Instead, she doubles down.
Luke:She actually just continues to do the same thing that she has been doing. Earlier in the story, we heard about her slaughtering all of the profits of the Lord. To be reckoned with. In some ways, she
Luke:almost exercises more power than Ahab in many
Luke:of these stories. And she's not someone to be taken lightly with. She has killed all the other
Luke:prophets.
Luke:For the people to worship the Lord. And all of a sudden, Jezebel's like he left his servant there. And while him he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness, he came to a broom bush. He sat down under and prayed that he might die. I have had enough, lord, he said.
Luke:Take my life. I am no better than my ancestors. And then he lay down under the bush and he fell asleep. Elijah kind of goes through this spiraling moment. He's almost he's disoriented through what happens here.
Luke:He's this isn't what I expected. This isn't the way I thought God's plan was going to work out. I thought the all the people in Israel were going to turn back to him, but they didn't. And instead, I'm faced with a death threat from the Queen. And then he runs.
Luke:And, and what he's doing is I don't have a map to show you, but we're in Israel where this story takes place, which is the northern kingdom. So up north, he runs all the way out of Israel, and he runs all the way through the southern kingdom. He gets to the bottom of the southern kingdom which is Beersheba. And then he leaves there and he walks out into the wilderness. He's gone about as far as he possibly can from Ahab and Jezebel.
Luke:He's gone out into the wilderness where there is no one else. And with him all this time has been this servant. And Elijah didn't have a servant because he was wealthy or that was the thing to do. He had a servant because he was the prophet of the Lord. He was to have a servant to take care of certain things for him and all of this.
Luke:And Elijah tells his servant, he's like, stay here. I'm I'm done. You're fired because I don't need you anymore. I'm I'm done being a prophet. I'm quitting.
Luke:This is it. This is the end. And he leaves the servant, and he goes and he walks out into the wilderness. And he cries out to the lord and says, lord, I wish to die. And he goes to sleep underneath a bush in the middle of nowhere.
Luke:The story actually reminds us of another story in the bible. If you as you as you read your bible, you know, this kind of a bible reading, like, nerd thing. But if you read your bible and you pay attention, anytime you see a bush, a tree that comes up in the bible, pay attention because there's something happening or something is about to happen. If we think about the very first story of the bible, there are 2 individuals, Adam and Eve, who make a significant decision underneath the tree. If we go forward in the story, we come to a story that sounds very similar that actually happened in the same area.
Luke:If we look to the story of Hagar, the servant of Abraham and Sarai, who bore the son Ishmael. She and her son are kicked out of Abraham's camp. They're sent away with a handful of water and told to walk away into the wilderness. And Hagar being sent from her home, And Hagar being sent from her home, having nowhere to go, takes her young child and sets her young child underneath a bush in the area of Beersheba. And then she walks away from her child about an arrow's throat so that she could hear the child cry, but she could still see him.
Luke:And she cries out to the Lord. She's like, I can't bear to watch my son. And then God shows up in that dire situation. Another situation where death where the end of the story seemed like it was happening and God shows up. He provides.
Luke:He is with them and provides for them and even turns Ishmael into his own nation. So here we are again under a very similar bush in the same area at what seems like at the end of another story, or at least Elijah thinks it's the end of his story. But that's not where we are left. That's not where God leaves Elijah. Let's see where Elijah or what the Lord says.
Luke:Where Elijah or what the Lord says. At the second half of verse 5, it says this, all at once, an angel touched him and said, get up and eat. He looked all around and there by his head was some bread baked over hot coals and a jar of water. He ate and drank and then he lay down again. The angel of the Lord came back a second time and touched him and said, get up and eat for the journey is too much for you.
Luke:So he got up and he ate and drank and strengthened by that food. He traveled 40 days 40 nights until he reached Mount Orum, the mountain of God. Or another name for this mountain would be Mount Sinai. There, he went into a cave and he spent the night. Here we see Elijah's story matching up and mirroring another important person in the Bible.
Luke:Who else was it that met God at a bush, ended up traveling 40 years in a wilderness and found himself at Mount Sinai where he was given the 10 commandments. Right? Moses was the first prophet of the Lord in many ways and probably the one of the greatest prophets. And he finds himself at Mount Sinai. And Elijah is led on this journey through the wilderness to Mount Sinai, the the place where the Lord met Moses.
Luke:And perhaps Elijah is expecting maybe maybe the Lord will meet me here too. Another set of expectations perhaps begin to arise. But what happens? We come to sort of the climax of this story when we get to the second half of verse 9. It says this.
Luke:And the word of the Lord came to Elijah who was spending the night in the cave. He says, what are you doing here, Elijah? He replied, I I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, and they have put to death with the sword your I'm the only one left. And now, they are trying to kill me.
Luke:So it gives this long complaint. What am I doing here? I'm at the end of my rope. Everything has gone wrong. What do you mean?
Luke:What am I doing here? The Lord said, go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord for the Lord is about to pass by, just like the Lord passed by Moses on this mountain. Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountain apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind, there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire.
Luke:And after the fire came a gentle whisper or a small still voice. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and he went out and stood at the mouth of the cave. Then a voice said to him, what are you doing here, Elijah? And he replied, I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars and put the prophets to death with the sword.
Luke:I am the only one left and now they're trying to kill me too. We see this dramatic sequence play out on this mountain, the mountain of the Lord. We see wind. Wind so strong that it's knocking rocks over. An earthquake and fire.
Luke:Was it not just Elijah maybe only a month ago at this time and he was standing at a different mountain and there was fire that came down from the sky and consumed the sacrifice? Any of them. And Elijah is just sitting there in the cave and he's waiting for the Lord's presence. And it's not until there is what your translations say, a quiet gentle whisper or this like almost dead silence, this kind of And he goes out and he encounters God in it. It's almost similar to the call of Samuel.
Luke:If you remember the prophet Samuel, he was a young man and he was sleeping at night and he kept hearing someone call him Samuel. And he would get up thinking that it was the priest that he was serving and he would wake the priest and the priest like, I am not calling you. Let me go back to bed. And this happened several times until the priest recognizes like, the Lord is calling you. It was such a gentle and quiet whisper that Samuel almost mistook it for just somebody calling his name.
Luke:Character of God through this entire story. Elijah is kind of spiraling. He's rehearsing this narrative of himself that I've failed, that I'm in this terrible spot. This is the end of my story. It doesn't get better from here.
Luke:And God doesn't, at any point in this story, just come down and slap him and say wake up. Snap out of it. Passage in Isaiah chapter 42 verses 1 through 3. This might be a familiar passage for you. It's quoted in Matthew as well.
Luke:Verse chapter 42 of Isaiah verse 1 through 3 says this. This is describing the servant of the Lord who we know to be Christ, but it also displays for us the character of God. It says, here is my servant whom I uphold. My chosen one in whom I delight, I will put my spirit on him and he will bring justice to the nations. He will not shout or cry out or raise a voice in the streets.
Luke:A bruised reed, he will not break. A smoldering wick, he will not snuff out. In faithfulness, he will bring forth justice. A bruised reed, he will not break. A smoldering wick, he will not snuff out.
Luke:You picture this idea of like a reed. Reeds are not the most strong thing in the world. You see a read that's kind of bruised. It's leaning. It's bent.
Luke:He's not gonna come up and break it. He's gonna care for it. You picture a candle on its last leg. If you breathe too hard near it,
Luke:it might go out.
Luke:The Lord will not come and snuff it out. Go out. The Lord will not come and snuff it out. He has a tender care to come near and be with the broken hearted. This is the thing that we see in this story as he comes near to Elijah.
Luke:As he feeds him and invites him into his presence through a small gentle whisper. And then the Lord reorients Elijah. He says that, Elijah, you think this is the end of the story, but I'm actually going to give you new commands, new directions that are gonna show and tell you what the next part of the story is going to be. Says this. He says verse 15.
Luke:This is the Lord's response to Elijah. He says, go back the way you came and go to the desert of Damascus. And when you get there, anoint Hazael king over Aram. Also, anoint Jehu, son of Nimshi, king over Israel, and then anoint Elisha, son of Shaphat, of Abel and Mahola to succeed you as a prophet. Jehu will put to death any who escaped the sword of Hazor.
Luke:And Elijah will put to death any who escaped the sword of Jehu. Yet, I reserved 7,000 in Israel, all whose knees have not bowed down to Balaam and those whose mouths have not kissed him. So it might be at first, like, what is all that got to do with anything? Elijah is given a task of anointing a new king over Israel who will replace Abraham and a new king over a foreign kingdom who is going to bring about judgment and justice for having strayed from the Lord and then anoint a new prophet. The Lord is saying, yeah.
Luke:It didn't go out the way you thought it was going to. But my justice is still gonna happen. I will bring about justice in the consequences for the people of not having followed me and having killed my profits. But Elijah, I want you to know something else that not only do I have a plan for how this story is going to work out, I I want you to know that you're actually not alone. Notice it said that I reserved yet 7,000 people who have never worshipped Baal in any way.
Luke:Narrative to himself, I'm
Luke:the only one. I'm the only one. I'm alone. I'm alone. I'm the only prophet.
Luke:Everyone else has abandoned the Lord. But the story tells us very plainly. Elijah is not the only one. Profits from Jezebel so that they could not be killed. So we know that there's at least prophets who survived the killings of Jezebel.
Luke:Stories that come in the next chapters of First Kings all involve 2 different prophets that are not Elijah or Elijah. Elijah is not the only prophet. Just not the way that you thought it was. God responds to Elijah's lament with justice, but that justice is gonna come about through ordinary means. It's not gonna be any more fire from the sky, but it will be expectation of coming in to the
Luke:city with King Ahab and then bowing
Luke:to the lord, him becoming, the court profit. And none of that happened. Instead, he gets a death threat. Mountain where he expects to meet the Lord, and he meets the Lord in yet another unexpected way. Elijah got to his he was disoriented.
Luke:He didn't know what he was going to do. He got to this place where he got into this bush at the in the middle of the wilderness. And he said, this is the end of my story. He's like, I'm done. This is it.
Luke:It didn't work out the way I wanted it to, and I'm done. And God meets him in that disorientation, in that disappointment, in that frustration, in that sadness and depression, and says your story is not over yet. God wants to meet you in your disorientation in order to finish your story. In the middle of our own disorientation, perhaps we've had those moments where we are in that moment where we're underneath the bush, and we're like, this is not how I expected it to play out. This is not the end of the story I wanted, but it's just I can't see how it's going to work out from here.
Luke:And I guess it's just going to be an awful thing. God wants to meet us in that moment.
Luke:And he wants to say, this isn't the end of your story. And he wants to say, this isn't the end of your story.
Luke:And this isn't the end of your story. Disorientation is an awful thing. It's a thing we all kind of have experienced at some point or another. Sometimes, we experience physical disorientation. Right?
Luke:Sometimes, we willingly subject ourselves to physical disorientation. Have you ever done any of those? I don't know why we do these, but these events where you, like, put a baseball bat on the ground and your head on top of the baseball bat, you begin to spin. Right? I don't know why we do that, but we do it thinking it's funny.
Luke:And we spin around until we're very disoriented, and then we try and run a race. Right? And it's hilarious to watch terrible to be in. Right? Why would we do that to ourselves?
Luke:We can't tell if the land is we're walking on is flat and which way is up and which way is straight and which way is right or left. We get disoriented. I think about this in perhaps, you know, a less fun or humorous way of experiencing disorientation is I remember being in the car of my dad one summer day. We had bought in this new car. It was a convertible.
Luke:We were driving home, and we're going through the intersection. And all of a sudden, we heard a crash, and the whole world started to spin. I remember being I don't remember how old I was, but I do remember looking up and seeing off the convertible top down the sky spinning. And I remember when we finally stopped moving, the car was in the ditch. It was totaled, and we were facing the other direction.
Luke:I remember feeling so scared and shocked. And that's often what disorientation feels like in our own lives. We have an expectation for where we're going and how we're gonna get there. We're going along until all of a sudden something, circumstances, another person, sin, suffering comes out of nowhere, derails us, and disorients us. And all of a sudden, what we thought was true was no longer true.
Luke:Where we're going is no longer where we're facing. How are we gonna get there? Where am I? And what's next? All become the questions.
Luke:Disorientation is when our expectations of life are shattered, and we don't know where to go next. I know that you guys all know what that feels like. So I know what that feels like on both small scale and large scale things. So what do we do with this? That's the problem.
Luke:That's the place in which we find ourselves in where our expectations are shattered and we become disoriented. Well, I wanna look here at this story and look back at a few details and see perhaps there's some hope for us who are experiencing disorientation. 1st is to note that, you know, like, main character that's experiencing this disorientation is Elijah. And Elijah is, like, not not a small deal. Like, he's a big deal in the bible.
Luke:Right? Like, he's such a big deal that God came down, picked him up in a chariot, and took him up to heaven. He didn't actually die. He just ascended up into heaven because he walked so closely with the Lord. That's a pretty big deal.
Luke:Right? He's the one who's disoriented. He's the one who's having a depressive episode out in the wilderness. Disorientation is not a sign of spiritual weakness or immaturity. It is a sign of brokenness in the world.
Luke:So often, when we encounter suffering in this world, a lot of times we run to these kind of Christian or spiritual sayings or things are like, well, you know, if you just prayed or you just had faith or you just did this or if you were just more spiritually mature, you would be navigating this and you wouldn't be feeling all of this. And I don't think that that's the primary thing. I think that when we experience disorientation, it's not a sign of my maturity or immaturity. It's a sign of the brokenness of the world in which we live. Heart, cried out to the Lord more times than can count in the Psalms saying, Lord, what are you doing?
Luke:Lord, are you listening to me? What is going on? Night of his crucifixion, sweated blood and preyed alone in a garden, Lord, if you could make this pass cup pass by, but not my will, but yours. Even in the middle of his suffering, knowing it was the plan, was still experiencing this darkness, this unsurety, this confusion over is this is this what I got to do? Is this the way the story is going to play out?
Luke:Disorientation is not primarily a signal of your spiritual immaturity or weakness. It is a sign of the brokenness of the world in which we live. I wanna point out that how God responds to Elijah underneath the bush. Touched him and then God sent an angel who came and did that twice. I gotta share a little bit of my own personal story.
Luke:And some of you may have heard some of this before. I've dealt with depression significantly throughout my life at different points. And there was a point at which I had gone a couple of days without getting out of bed. I wasn't really eating. And I decided I can't do this anymore, and I needed to go to therapy.
Luke:So I reached out. I got a appointment with a counselor. I went and met with her, and I was like, okay. Yeah. This will be the thing.
Luke:This is gonna fix me. Maybe I'll kinda turn things around from here. We get to the end of our first session, and she's just like, okay. Well, thank you for sharing all of that. We'll have some more conversations as time goes on.
Luke:But I wanted to ask you before we end our session today, what are you gonna eat when you get home? I was like, I didn't think I went to the doctor's office. I thought I went to a counselor. Like, I'm
Luke:emotionally distraught here, and you wanna counsel me to go buy a bunch of apples.
Luke:And you wanna counsel me to go buy a bunch of apples? Like, why are you telling me that I need to eat? And she's like, well, your body taking care of your physical self is just as important as taking care of your mental self, your emotional self, and they're all tied together. We so often get into this sense where we kind of prioritize the spiritual and the
Luke:mental, and we ignore the impact that
Luke:our bodies, our inner relationships are having on us. Addiction recovery program of any kind, Alcoholics Anonymous or NA or anything like that, there's this acronym that gets tossed around and passed around. And I think it's something that, honestly, the whole world would do a little bit better to know this acronym. It's called HALT. You know, like, stopping HALT.
Luke:Stay in place. And so this is kind of like a warning sign. If one of these things is happening to you, you need to pause and you need to reorient yourself. You need to address one of these because you're kind of running in danger zone. You're redlining yourself.
Luke:So HALT stands for hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. I cannot tell you guys. You know how often hungry turns into angry? We call it anger, right? Right?
Luke:And and loneliness just leads to more isolation and doesn't lead to making good decisions. You know what? Sometimes the most spiritual thing is that I can do in a day is eat a good meal and go to bed. Because I know that if I'm hungry, if I'm lonely, if I'm if I'm tired, that everything else is getting distorted. You guys know what this is.
Luke:Like, you've ever been maybe in a confrontation of somebody and you're just kinda angry and then later you eat and you're just like, oh, everything seems okay now. Right? This plays out in those, those snicker commercials all the time. Right? Here.
Luke:Eat a snickers. Right? We know this from experience. What's going on with our body impacts our mind, impacts our soul, whether we're rested, whether we're alone. All of these things impact us as whole people.
Luke:And we're impact us as whole people. And we got to address those. God addresses it. God doesn't just say, Elijah, you need to pray to me more. God shows up and gives him food.
Luke:And then leads him on a journey where he encounters him. I'm not saying the spiritual is insignificant either, but it's a balance. We need to care for our whole selves. And then the final thing I would say about Elijah is that Elijah never turned from wrestling with God. A lot of times, we live in this culture of kind of religiosity And we think that, oh, well, I'm angry, if I'm frustrated, if I've got all of this difficulty going on in my life, surely I can't bring that to God.
Luke:And when gods actually is just saying, no, actually, I want you to come to me during the day. I actually want to meet with you in a special way through that. I actually want special way through that. I say this often. I probably sound like a broken record.
Luke:But if you turn to the book of Psalms and you just read through it long enough, you will encounter after som of someone, restly with God. Someone who's saying God, are you listening? God, why are the wicked? Why are is evil prospering? And yet, I seem to be doing what is right, and yet nothing is working out.
Luke:The pit of despair. We believe that God put together his word that this is not just all by accident. Middle of it. God would rather have you wrestle him than just walk away from him. He wants you to bring your doubts, your frustration, your disappointment to him so that he can meet you in that.
Luke:So how does God meet us in that? How does that look like? And we see from the story that God meets us in our disorientation with a quiet invitation amidst the chaos. It's so often in the middle of chaos, in the middle of disorientation, we're just like, what do we focus on? What are we gonna do?
Luke:How do we get this under control? And God's saying, be still for a moment. Be quiet for a moment, and I will meet you there. That's so counterintuitive. Because we wish God would show up with this like giant neon sign or would do this dramatic thing.
Luke:But God doesn't show up how we might like or expect. And that's because he's doing something we don't expect. We hope and want and desire for God to show up exactly how we want him to. Sometimes he will, but oh so often, he shows up in a way we had no idea. We had no expectation over.
Luke:Elijah meets God in this unexpected way, meets his presence on this mountain, same way that Moses did. And then later in the Bible, both Moses and Elijah meet God again on a different mountain. They meet Jesus on the mount of transfiguration, where Jesus takes some of his disciples up and he's transfigured in this display of glory. And with him are Elijah and Moses. Jesus is the ultimate unexpected way that God showed up.
Luke:No one expected Jesus to show up like he did as a carpenter, as a guy who had a family, who had a name, who grew up in Nazareth of all places. And then he starts to gather a crowd. He's performing miracles. Surely, he's gonna overthrow the Roman Empire. And what does he do?
Luke:He gets crucified. He dies on a cross, the most disgraceful way possible, God shows upside down confusing ways in order to redeem the world. Who would have
Luke:thought that
Luke:God would have to come and endure suffering and bear flesh and die on a cross and die so that he could put to death death. So that he could tell a story of redemption. Out, in this place of I don't know how or why or where I'm supposed to go and how this is supposed to work out. And he's like, I know But if you keep walking with me, it And if you keep walking with me, you'll eventually see a picture of my son Christ in it. It's not going to look pretty.
Luke:It's not going to work out exactly the way you want it to look out. But it will tell my story. It will tell a story of grace. It will tell a story of redemption. It will have the good parts and the bad parts in it.
Luke:It will tell a redemptive story. Lord? How do we, as people because I know that as I'm talking about this, I'm not unaware. All of us know what this feels like. Some of us right now are identifying so heavily.
Luke:We're like, yeah. I feel disoriented. I know what that feels like because I'm there in some way, small or big. So how do we take a step? How do we say yes to the Lord in his quiet invitation?
Luke:How do we step into the story that he wants to tell in our lives? And I'm gonna walk through some practical advice here and some conclusions. I want you to know that, you know, as we're kind of go through these kind of quickly, I don't want you to feel like you need to rush to get your notes down if you don't want to. You can kind of sit with them. I've got all of these notes including the prayer we're gonna pray here at the end together, on the Church Center app.
Luke:So if you've got the Church Center app on your phone, you can open it up. Go to discipleship weekly, that button that says that. Click on that in the sermon Elijah number 3, and you have all of the questions and all of the, suggestions I'm about to walk through will be there. So how do we go about accepting this quiet invitation? 1st is to care for ourselves holistically as whole people.
Luke:Say this in this way. If the body needs healing, care for the soul. If the soul needs healing, care for the body. So often, we get into a place where my physical body needs healing. Care for my stored I can go out and I can get some I can be with people who love me and love the Lord and how that affects our body in places we don't have to draw.
Luke:Or if the soul is sorrowful and it's hurting and it needs desperate attention and we're doing all the things. We're talking to the people and we're we need to sometimes care for our body, go and feed ourselves, go and walk around, get our body moving, enjoy So care for ourselves holistically. Let us take every advantage of god's good gift through medicine and through counselors and all that is there. But let us also take every advantage of the body of Christ and his spirit. 2nd is to practice moments of silence amidst chaos.
Luke:So often, we're so familiar with this kind of grocery list way of praying where we're just like, okay. Dear Lord, thank you for the day. Thank you for this. Thank you for this. Okay.
Luke:Lord, I need this, this, this, this. Lord wants us to pause sometimes. Sometimes, all you need to do in prayer is actually just sit in silence for a little bit and just rest to perhaps say, Lord, I know that you are here present with me, taking moments of silence amidst the chaos to cease striving and worrying for a moment and say, Laura, I know that by my worrying, I can add no hours to my life. I cannot control anything more by worrying about it more. Let me sit in silence.
Luke:3rd is to pray the prayers of scripture. The prayer, Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner, is a prayer. I have prayed more times than I can count. Get into places of suffering and disorientation. We don't have words.
Luke:And in those moments, we simply need to take the words of scripture and words of saints who've come before us and say, Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me in this situation. Or perhaps we need to just pray, our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Or perhaps pray from scripture, be still my soul and know that he is God. Be still my soul and know that he is God. Simple prayers like that over and over again can begin to shift and move our heart and soul in a way that eloquent prayers that come out of our mouth could never move us.
Luke:And then finally, is to begin to move into the story that we don't see yet. Begin to look and ask the Lord to open our eyes to the story that he's gonna tell that we don't see or understand yet. And this we can do through prayer. We can say, Lord, we're gonna name and we're gonna surrender my broken expectations. We're gonna name the situation I find myself in.
Luke:Surrender that to you, Lord.
Luke:I'm not going to hold on to that and demand that anymore.
Luke:But then also, I'm going to open myself up and say, Lord, how are you working around me that I'm not noticing yet? Where is the spirit at work? Where are those opportunities for the gospel? Where are the opportunities for this to display your glory in a unique way? Lord, open my eyes and open my heart to see that.
Luke:So what we're going to do is we're going to take, communion here in just a little bit. But before we do that, we're going to pray a prayer together. And again, this prayer is on the, on the app. And we're gonna pray this I'm gonna pray this over you. And my encouragement for you is to make these words yours.
Luke:Say these along with me in your heart and pray them to the Lord as a, perhaps, a way of letting go and asking, Lord, meet me in my disorientation. So go ahead and take a moment. Close your eyes. Settle into the moment. Make these words your own.
Luke:Lord, you are the God of those who wander the wildernesses. You are the God who sees me and my circumstances. Take a moment and name that circumstance, that place of disorientation you find yourself, how it feels. How it feels. God, the story I was hoping for my life was name whatever that expectation that's not come to pass is.
Luke:Lord, you are not surprised by the brokenness of this world, nor are you afraid of my pain or my emotions. You will not extinguish the dwindling flame or break the bruised reed. I surrender to you both my expectations and my situation. Lord, help me to do this as often as I need. Give me the peace and the serenity that I can find only in your presence.
Luke:Lord, open my eyes to all the little ways that you are working around me that I cannot see. Give me ears to hear. Give me your face and your presence. I open myself up to your story in my life. Amen.
Luke:Conduit, my prayer for you this morning is that you would encounter God in silence amidst the chaos, that whether you are walking on a mountain or through a valley, that you would know that he walks with you in every step. Conduit, go in peace and know that you're loved.
