Good morning. So today's reading will be from 1 Kings chapter 19 verses 3 through 10 Elijah was afraid and fled for his life. He went to Bersheba, town in Judah and he left his servant there. Then he went on alone into the wilderness traveling all day.
He sat down under a solitary broom tree and prayed that he might die. I've had enough Lord. He said take my life for I am no better than my ancestors who have already died. Then he lay down and slept under the broom tree.
But as he was sleeping an angel touched him and told him get up and eat. He looked around and there beside his head was some bread baked on hot stones and a jar of water. So he ate and drank and lay down again. Then the angel of the Lord came again and touched him and said get up and eat some more or the journey will be too much for you.
So we got up and ate and drank and the food gave him enough strength to travel 40 days and 40 nights to Mount Sinai, the mountain of God. There he came to a cave where he spent the night. But the Lord said to him, what are you doing here Elijah Elijah replied, I have zealously served the Lord God Almighty. But the people of Israel have broken their covenant with you torn down your altars and killed every one of your prophets.
I am the only one left and now they are trying to kill me too. Amen. A lot of people in scripture that I would love to meet one day. You know, John the Baptist, I was reading this morning in the gospel of Mark.
John the Baptist is one of his people that just seems to have had this crazy life experience. One day, I hope to have a conversation with him. You know, I would get John the apostle, exile and patanus had this whole this crazy, wild vision of God's love and God's faithfulness and wrote down the book of Revelation. I love the conversation with John the apostle one day.
But I love Elijah. I've always loved Elijah. Elijah seems to be so strong. He seems to be this person who has just tremendous nerve.
He's this person that has just tremendous faithfulness completely. I mean, he, God said, I'm going to give you the power to do things. And he believes he goes and doesn't know Elijah stop the rain from coming for three years. That takes a lot of faithfulness, doesn't it?
But we see in our story this morning that, you know, Elijah also has some tough moments. You know, this morning was one of just incredible doubt. You know, it seems to have lost himself completely inside of this. And we see Elijah get suicidal in this moment.
But we find truth and honesty. What I wanted us to do today is really not to dig too deep in it. But I want us to be kind of scratching back the first layer of the idea of doubt and what does doubt look like? Where does doubt come from?
And as Christians, how do we deal with doubt? And we're just going to do that through just looking at this story of Elijah. To doubt means to be uncertain. To doubt means that we have a lack of confidence.
But that's also a larger problem. Dallas Willard, who's just like the Prince of discipleship in the 20th century, he talked about doubt and the language of ideas systems. And something that we rarely notice but have this tremendous amount of influence upon us. So these presuppositions that we have, and based on what they are, we're going to react.
We're going to make decisions based off of them. We're going to live in a certain way that we all have these ideas systems inside of us. They show us our hidden assumptions of reality and how easy it is for us to be at war in and with our own mind. You know, doubt can cause us to shut down.
Doubt can cause us to break relationships. Doubt can cause us just to completely lose ourselves. And scripture talks about this as well. The scripture talks about the mind and the power of the mind.
That's that places where those ideas systems live and dwell. You know, it's about the way that we allow our mind to work. One of the things that we let it do or one of the things that we don't let it do. And our mind is part of, if not the biggest transformation that Jesus offers us.
Philippians 2 verse 5 says this, have this mind among yourselves which is in Christ Jesus. No, we're not called just to have a good mind. We're called and given the ability to have the mind of Christ. A way that sees truthfulness, a way that speaks truthfulness, a way that experiences truthfulness in these ways.
Romans chapter 12 verse 2, it says, Do not be conformed to the world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. By testing, you may discern what is a will of God, what is good, and acceptable and perfect. You know, our mind is where we find transformation. The way that we're able to see ourselves.
Jesus wants to transform that. The way that we see the world around us. Jesus wants to transform that. The way that we choose to react or not to react situations.
Jesus wants to transform all of those things. You know, our mind is where we see Jesus do his greatest work. Think about that. This is where Jesus wants to work in our life.
You know, we have to actively contend with the space and with the activity of many things and doubts included in that. See us Lewis talks about, says there's no such thing as a person that is 100% Christian and is a person that is 100% non-Christian. Like we realize that belief exists on a spectrum, that doubt exists on a spectrum. The way that we think about things exists on a spectrum.
What I love about this analogy is it makes us really think about, okay, how much are we going to allow to influence us and what are we going to allow to influence us. And this is where we find this doubt conversation and the story of Elijah today. Now, doubts okay. It's going to happen.
And some of you might have experienced doubt at different levels. And, you know, when it comes in, it most certainly comes in. But what we find in this chapter 19, and I just kind of encourage you on the home sheet, there's paper copies of Back on the Backdesker, you can go grab it in my family's life. One of the tasks for the things for this week is there was to read First Kings 18 and 19 and telling you all the story of how Elijah journeys through doubt is amazing.
Now to kind of jump into this, we have to set the story. Elijah had just had this massive showdown with King Ahab and with the prophets of Baal. They kind of got there and Elijah, he put this thing, okay, one of us is going to cause our altar to catch on fire. And which by the way, Elijah also said it wasn't going to rain for three years or at the back end of this drought.
And so Elijah, I'm going to, we're going to command all of these things together. And the prophet of Baal, try and try and try. They never produce it. Elijah has them douse these altars with just gallons upon gallons upon gallons of water.
And not only does he call fire down from heaven to light the fire, but he burns the whole entire thing up. And then Elijah runs and he chases and he catches the 400 prophets of Baal and kills them all right then and there. So Elijah just had this massive, huge moment in his life. But to set the story up, and I didn't realize this until the last couple of weeks I was reading through this, we kind of have to talk about what Baal is and who this false God was because we find ourselves inside the situation.
So Baal was the local God of this region that God's people came into. You know, that Peter Israelites, the Jewish folks, they were sheep herders, they were goat herders, they were responsible for animals and moving animals around. And they go into the Promised Land. This is a place of agriculture, it's a place of farming, it's a place of growing things.
And they didn't have any experience in doing this. They're the Canaanites, the people who lived there before they did, they had this God named Baal. And Baal was the God of rain and he was the God of fertility. And you can see that these Jewish people, these Israelites, they're learning how to farm for the first time and they weren't able to drive out all the Canaanites and God said, you're going to want to get them out of there, trust me, and they don't go through with that promise.
And they end up finding out, okay, we're having a hard time with this whole farming thing. What are we doing wrong here? It's not about going to the storm getting fertilized or you're planning things wrong, these local folks, oh, you got to worship Baal too, man. What we begin to see in Scripture is that God's people begin to worship another God.
And it's almost as though that they have a God for everyday life, Baal, and they have a God for massive crisis, which is the Lord Yahweh, they didn't follow, who brought them out of Egypt. You know, a God for the everyday and a God for for crisis. And then they began treating the Lord like He was Baal and just kind of mixing the two together and you go all through Deuteronomy and Leviticus and numbers this idea of distinction and they're breaking that apart. They fall into a system to explain everyday life and then a God for crisis is a system for everyday life and a God for crisis.
Does that sound a little familiar to you? This is a space where we begin to understand that doubt can be a serious spiritual issue. That C.S. Lewis idea 100% Christian doesn't exist and 100% non-Christian doesn't exist.
This is a journey of faithfulness and of trust and of truth. Ahab was Israelite king. He was massively successful. He did fantastic building projects and he kept their borders free.
People were safe. All these sorts of things. But scripture also tells us that Ahab was the exact words are the champion of evil. He married a Phoenician princess.
Her name was Jezebel, which means daughter of Baal. She was a priestess of Baal worship. I'm not going to tell you this morning exactly what that job description looked like. But you can imagine.
And Ahab and his queen led God's people into evil. Into this place of not truth. And of not trust. And of doubt.
And of what if. Furthermore, into this everyday thing and further away from God. Elijah was a nobody from across the river Jordan. Some older translations talk about how he's just a wonder.
Nobody knows where he came from. It's almost like he miraculously appeared in the desert and showed up to challenge Ahab. And he did. And he triumphed.
But at his moment of greatest triumph is the scripture we had Allen read for us today. Imagine this. You have just done the biggest thing you can ever do and you have an instant emotion of absolute dejection and I want to stop and I can't go on any longer. He was scared.
He was dejected. He was suicidal. He was fearful. And he's absolutely full of doubt.
Doubt in many ways. I feel like it comes from personal frustration. I can almost hear Elijah in this moment saying I've done all of this work and it hasn't worked out the way that I expected it to. I've worked hard.
Where's my reward? This doesn't look like what I think it should look like. I also think Elijah could just flat out be exhausted. You know, profiting for three or four years, running from the king, hiding out because you made it stop raining.
That could be a little tiresome. Running on just pure adrenaline. He also said that he ran for 40 days. Is anybody else not want to run for 40 days?
I'm sorry. I don't run for 40 days. We find Elijah. He goes and he leaves his servant at the border of Israel that he runs and tries to get far away from the presence of God.
This morning I was realizing I was reading the story again again. This is almost just like Jonah. Just like running from purpose. Running from presence.
Let me get as far away from you as I can. And then we find this later in the story. First Kings of 1911 through 13. This is what it says.
Go out and stand before me on the mountain. The Lord told him. As Elijah stood there, the Lord passed by in a mighty windstorm hit the mountain. It was such a terrible blast that the rocks were torn loose.
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 there was a fire sidebar.
These are all the things you expect God to do when he shows up. Okay. He's also at Mount Sinai where God only shakes things and burns things and does earthquakey things. But after the earthquake was a fire but the world was not in the fire.
And after the fire was the sound of a gentle whisper. And when Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his cloak and he went out and stood at the entrance of the cave and the voice said, what are you doing here, Elijah? What are you doing here? Elijah didn't find God in his work.
They found it deeply in his own personal experience. The further that we fall into doubt and the range of emotions that we call doubt, the further we go into that, the more essential it is for us to focus on what we know to be true. Because God had to bring Elijah back to that moment of truth. The story it normalizes our feelings.
It lets us know it's okay to be frustrated. It's okay for us to worry. It's okay for us to have these things. But the way we get out of it is what matters the most.
You know, the really funny thing is in scripture, especially in Old Testament, there's not a word for doubt. Like the concept doesn't exist. Every time it's brought up or the word is used or it hits the whole neighborhood of thought, what you actually have is a turn of phrase that simply suggests that someone is living in a truth deficit. That they are in a moment of struggling, a moment of worry, a moment of turmoil, a moment of pain, and a moment of just life getting too much to where to kind of go back to see us in the Lewis analogy, they're swinging a little bit more to a 100% not Christian.
That they're in a space where there's a truth deficit. When doubt happens, we lose the ability to see the truth that is right in front of us. Think about what you have a conversation with a friend who seems to be experiencing this or where you're in this place of experiencing this and you're simply too hard ahead to see what people are telling you. That means we're living in a truth deficit and we can't see the truth right in front of us.
So God brings Elijah back to the place. Mount Sinai, Exodus, 10 commandments, Charlton Heston, hold on yards, like this is the place. Like this is what Mount Sinai, what's so funny is when I read this a few weeks ago getting ready for this message, I realized this is the very first time that you hear Mount Sinai talked about in scripture after you get out of Deuteronomy. It's been hundreds of years in the timeline of God's people to where the words even talked about.
He brings Elijah back to the place where God defined who his people were going to be and made a covenant, made a holy promise with them and began the relationship. But he brings Elijah back that same place. We look in the story of Moses and almost the exact scenario happens with Moses on the mountain with God revealing himself. God brings him back to the place of his presence and doesn't redefine the whole nation's relationship.
He wants to make sure Elijah knows who he is and who he's supposed to be. And we see this re-establishment, this deeply personal moment. It's an invitation not for Elijah to see who he is on his own, but to instead begin to see who God can make Elijah to be. That's how God helps Elijah on this journey out of doubt by saying you're doing a good job, you're trying really hard, but we can do so much more together.
And he sends off Elijah on a mission to do multiple things, which he accomplishes. This isn't the end of the story, but we're at this critical moment in it. And the second thing that we get to see in this story is really how Elijah is dealing and coping with things. It's this, it's our good, is it necessarily our best.
Elijah has already done his best to work. The whole prophets of Baal, Mount Carmel, like calling fire down from heaven, he's never going to do anything that cool ever again. He's already done his best work, but it took this journey for him to do his right work deeply into who God called him to be. God's saying, Hey, I'm not concerned with how big you can do things.
What I'm concerned with is where your heart is and how you can do my things. And when we look, when we overlook our personal journey out of doubt, we're gonna get stuck in it. We're never gonna go past it. And we're never going to experience the benefit that we can find through these seasons.
Thousands of years later, James, the half brother of Jesus wrote these words in James chapter one, it says this, count it all my joy, I can't enjoy my brothers when you meet trials of various kinds. For you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness and what steadfastness have its full effect that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. Two words in this, I've been on this, I've had this fascination with the idea of trials and what does it mean for us Christians for us to go through trials. We're gonna come to that later on in the year, maybe early next year, but this one was passage, I've just been honing in on two words inside of this, testing and steadfastness.
To test some things means to determine its genuineness. Figure out where the truth lies. Is this a 100% true? To be steadfast means to have the capacity to hold out or to bear up in the face of difficulty testing and steadfastness.
No, these are both truth words. These are also both doubt words. Steadfastness have its full effect. I think Elijah ran through the full effect of steadfastness that day.
He saw the power that happens in simply holding up. So a couple things for us to be practical about this. So what do we do with doubt? How do we walk through doubt in a healthy way?
How do we just kind of realize it's going to happen and what do we do when it does happen? The first thing is this, we need to know what is true. We need to know what's true. Elijah jumped into generalization.
He used words like, all and every and me and my general generalizations are never safe places to be. I'm thankful that I had someone about 10 years ago, had a very tough conversation with me about how I was using generalizations. You know, whenever we find ourselves living in generalizations, they show our weakness to admit to the truth around us. Elijah kept saying twice, if you look in chapter 19, it's the exact same verse is repeated several times.
Like, I'm the only one left. No one is here with me. They are all gone. He's living in this world of generalizations and they're creating places of untruth right in front of him.
And we need to remember what has happened in the past. We need to remember who God has revealed himself to already be. We need to remember the things he has done to speak about the things that he is doing, but the story he has told, but also the story God is telling. Whenever we find ourselves, this is kind of a personal tip for me.
Whenever I find myself living with doubt or anxiousness or any of that myriad of emotions that's right there, y'all, the book of Psalms can be our absolute best friend in those moments. And we need to know what is true. Psalm 143, 7 through 12, come quickly, Lord, and answer me for my depression deepens. Don't turn away from me or I will die.
Let me hear of your unfailing love each morning, for I am trusting you. Show me where to walk, for I give myself to you. Rescue me for my enemies, Lord, I run to you to hide me. Teach me to do your will for you or my God.
May your gracious spirit lead me forward on a firm footing. Now, when we are struggling to see truth right in front of us, learning to lean and just find a foundational scripture like that can be a very, very powerful thing. The second thing we need to do is pray for expansion. Instead of losing our faith, there is a word that's come popular lately to deconstruct our faith.
Perhaps what we need to do is we need to begin to look for a deeper experience. You know, when we can't grab onto something or we find ourselves experiencing doubt, maybe it's not because something is too small. Maybe it's because our experience is simply not big enough. You know, sometimes I think especially when it comes to our faith and we're struggling with something that doesn't sound like this is the right thing.
You know, maybe we've just siloed ourselves too much. We found a problem that is bigger than our experience with Jesus. You know, this is a huge part of my story. I was in my early 20s and I've going through a really, really super, super rough patch in life and I found myself, I worked at 4 p.m.
to 12 a.m. shift at the liquor store in Grambling. And then I would come home like hopped up on nerves and like adrenaline and began reading scripture like never before. And I'm trying to process through some just some hurt and some pain and some massive frustration with the church.
And I'm reading scripture. It doesn't seem to line up. And thankfully, there's the wisdom of somebody else that said, Hey, maybe something's not wrong. Maybe you're just not right.
I had to realize that that my experience with what was the church was about this big and I needed it to be about this big. You know, what does it mean for us to realize that sometimes we might be coming to situations where our experiences are not adequate and the right answer is not to throw away our experiences, but the right answer maybe is to expand our experience. I'm thankful for in the middle of like three o'clock in the morning, I can't sleep. I'm sitting on my front porch and wrestling losing in behind-griffs hamburgers.
Learning to read the church fathers. Learning what it looked like to find a church where it existed for thousands of years and how I don't have new questions. I actually have very old questions and the answers to those old questions aren't new answers. The answers to those old questions are very old answers.
I became a Methodist because I was searching for a place that genuinely believed in the movement of Jesus across all time for thousands of years, but also believed a deeply personal experience with him. You know, sometimes when we're in a situation, a place of doubt, we need to pray for expansion not for things to go away. You know, what I found out 20 years ago was my casual consumer Christianity simply wasn't adequate. So I had to find a more robust, a more older, more healthier, and a more stable Christianity.
The third thing that we do to kind of deal with doubt is this. We claim the promises of God. This is so much like the first one, so much like the Psalms that we find firm footing. We have to pray to find firm footing.
We have to rely on the things that we know to be true and pray through them until we find that Psalm 18, 16 through 19, it says this, he sent me from on high. He took me. He drew me out of many waters. He drew me out of the chaos of my life.
He rescued me from my strong enemy. He rescued me from the thing that I thought no one could ever take me away from. From those who hated me, for they were too mighty for me. They confronted me on the day of my calamity, but the Lord was my support.
He brought me into a broad place. He rescued me because he delighted in me. The last part of that, he took me and sent me on a broad place, a place that's spacious, a place that's wide. Have you ever been a moment of doubt or frustration on these things?
You tell me, hey, I just need space right now. Where God brings us and puts us in a place that is wide enough and it's big enough for us to find the footing that we need. He doesn't do this because he's mad at us. He's angry or he's being patient or he's doesn't scripture.
He does this for us because he delights in us. We make him our openness to him makes him happy. Our willingness to stop makes him happy. And we're in that place of claiming as Elijah was, we say, get up and drink because you're going to need some energy.
Elijah made him happy. And when we are in and on those spaces, we feel like we need him the most. We're trying to find that foundation. We make him happy.
It's okay to be at that spot. It's okay to need him in those ways. If anything, our in middle of that makes him happy. For us to realize that we don't just need a system to explain everyday things.
And then I got for crisis. But to realize that he wants us to know that he is big enough. He wants to set us in a place that is big enough and a place to make us and make our experience of who he is big enough. Father, I pray for wide spaces.
God, and all of us sometimes need a different space God. And the beauty of who you are is that you can meet us right there in that space. God, you know, some of us are ramping up to our big battle like Elijah was. We can take down the world right now.
God, some of us have hit that moment to where we feel like things are done and we just are trying to breathe deeply. God, some of us are just running away and saying, I'm done. I'm over this. I'm ready to stop.
I'm throwing in the towel. God, wherever we are, you meet us. I'm so Lord, what I pray this morning is for us to hear the truths and see the truths that are around us. We need to open ourselves up in spiritual community to allow others to speak in us.
We need that. God, for others of us to have the courage to speak with the people that we are with. But we know that you're a God who comes to us and says, get up. Eat because I want to take you to the place where you can see and find the biggest truth about yourself.
Lord, let us learn to listen. God, listen to them. God, respond. God, I trust you.
Or to see and seek your truth. God, be a people who find our foundation inside of your story and your desire and your love for us. God, because you delight in each and every person in this room. Amen.
Let us stand and see together.