This morning we're talking about doubt. When was the last time you dealt with doubt or when you struggled with doubt? You know, I think that doubt is just kind of a part of life. And this last couple of weeks, as I've been thinking about this, I'll tell you what, let me give you all a preacher secret.
Know it the best way to make something gnarly in your life happen? Make the decision to preach on it in a couple of weeks. I'll tell you what, this has been a very interesting roller coaster for me, because the second I realized this what we were talking about, I started thinking about it a few weeks ago, I started, there's doubt pops up in my life. No, sometimes, like we talked earlier about the rain season.
No, this time of the year, sometimes we think it will never be dry again. Or it will never be warm again. Like when we're cursing at the 108 degree with 95% humidity in August, we need to remember there's time for we wanted that in our life. Never hear you say that you get what you want.
Like that comes around, this is a silly size of doubt. There's also just a serious side of doubt. We'll talk about it later on, but if you've been around here before, you know that we're waiting to put a parking lot in so we can move to a more permanent worship space. I'll tell you right now, every single day, it's raining, it makes me doubt if that's ever going to happen.
Because I know like, we need like, I'm sure like every day, a couple of weeks, it goes like, I've seen five good dry days, I'm sure now it's like 10 good dry days. Just doubt, it just plagues you. No matter where we are in life, we can't get away from doubt. It's like when you grow up and you realize there's not like a magic adult button that gets pressed at some point in time.
Like there's not this button of maturity where doubt does not plague you. It just changes as we go on. But doubt's an interesting thing. And just thinking about a lot of these last few weeks, we struggle with doubt because I think many times we think that doubt and disbelief can be the same thing.
That we feel bad about doubt. When we doubt somebody, when we doubt something, when we doubt God, and we doubt really, we feel bad about doubt. But we equate doubt to be disbelief. But doubt's a very different thing.
When we doubt, we're just calling into question. That doubt is the psychological, like, no man's land between two things. And often it's the thing that we want to be true and the thing that we're scared is actually true. And that we're living on the edge of that.
And we don't know what we're going to do with it. Doubt is just this place that we can get. It's this mental state where our mind just suspended between two things. And where does doubt come from?
What happens when we deal with doubt? And the good things. In the Bible, we find doubt across almost the entire book. The entire thing from Genesis Revelation.
In some ways, you can say this is just a story of humans struggle with doubt. That edge of between what you want to be true and what you're terrified is true. And so this morning, we're going to continue the story of Elijah. We talked about him last week and all the crazy things that happened to him.
And we're going to just pick up literally like right after the fact almost today. And we're going to look at doubt and how Elijah died. We're going to look at how we can have the highest of highs and the lowest of lows within the same season of life. And what that was like for Elijah, but also what that's like for us.
And the thing that we're going to talk about the most is that we really, when we look at doubt and the dangers of doubt is just one idea and it's going to come back across this piece of scripture multiple times, but it's this. It's never roll alone. Never roll alone. So open the Bible up at first Kings chapter nine.
We're going to read eight through 18 today. And to see the opposite place where Elijah is this week from where he was last week. So the scripture says, so he got up and he drank and the food gave him enough strength to travel 40 days and 49th 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 their altars and killed every one of your prophets. I am the only one left. And now they are trying to kill me too.
Go out and stand before me on the mountain, the Lord told him. And as Elijah stood there, the Lord passed by. And 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, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire there was the sound of a gentle whisper. And Elijah heard that 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? You replied again, 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. And I am the only one left, and now they're trying to kill me too. And the Lord told him, go back the same way you came and travel to the wilderness of Damascus.
When you arrive there, and no one has a yell to be king of Aeroam, and then Jaihu, grandson of the Mishut, to be king of Israel. And then when Elijah, son of Shafat, from the town of Abu'lohah to replace you as my prophet. And anyone escaped from Hazil, be killed by Jaihu. And those who escaped Jaihu will be killed by Elisha.
Yeah, I will preserve 7,000 others in Israel who have never bowed down to Baal or kissed him. So a wild story, a bunch of crazy stuff, right? I mean, does make sense to you. Do I have to talk about this now?
I mean, you got this under control? No, it's kind of crazy. Somebody Jason Lond, they're not here that he told me last week. That's like a wild story in the Bible.
Oh, no, that's tame. There's all sorts of crazy stuff coming up. So Elijah, after all this stuff that happened just the previous chapter, so he's the prophet. He said it's not going to rain for three years.
And he goes and hides out in the woods while people are trying to kill him. And he shows back up. And he has the thunder dome of the Old Testament. And ends up calling fire down.
And he slaughters 450 prophets of this false god named Baal. And now we find him today. He takes a journey of 40 days and 49s to Mount Sinai. And we're going to talk more about Mount Sinai in a little bit.
But let's just think about that very first thing that God asked him. He says, Elijah, what are you doing here? What are you doing here? Now, there's stuff that's going on this part of this process.
Because I think that God's not just asking him a physical question, but emotionally. What happened to get you to this place emotionally? So he has all the cool stuff happen. We talked about last week.
Just talk about it now. So right after, and it was weird. This was the thing that most people want to talk about last week after the sermon. Usually people want to talk about really cool things the week after Sunday.
This last week, everyone, I got 15 text messages about it. So he slaughtered the prophets of Baal. What does that look like? It's even weirder because in the Hebrew, it didn't even work.
He's the word butcher. Or if you're a redneck, he's processed. He processed 450 prophets of it. That's weird.
So after this, he looks at the king, and he doesn't kill this king. And the reign begins to come. And reign hasn't come in three years. And so here's Elijah.
He prophesies this reign. Would not come. And God gave him the power to make the reign come again. And the reign comes again.
He's right there in front of the king. You have to imagine how excited he is. And so he literally runs alongside over in front of the king's chariot all the way back to the palace. Now, I've never seen a chariot.
You might have seen a chariot before. But I cannot imagine. I cannot run fast enough to run ahead of a chariot. And it says that he does this all the way back to the king's palace.
And he goes into and then meets the queen. And the queen hates Elijah. The queen's name is Jezebel. It's like all the pop culture references we might have at someone's a Jezebel or this kind of thing.
OK, comes from this lady. She was crazy. And she was mean. Like mean mean.
Like imagine the meanest person you know and amplify that. So here comes Elijah thinking, he's the tip top of his game. I mean, the prophet who can handle calling reign to come and reign to not come. And he runs ahead of the chariot for miles.
And he shows up in the queens. And there he's there. He's experiencing vindication. And all this can be fixed.
And everything's going to be good. And the king's like, I'm going to kill you. So then he runs and hides out in the woods again. Actually, he goes to a tree and asks God to kill him underneath the tree.
And then Angel wakes him up. We picked up the story that he says you need to eat. And you're going to travel for 40 days and 49s to Mount Sinai. And that's what he decides to do.
So Mount Sinai. This is an important place. It's like Moses, like a burning bush. If you know what this story, that's Mount Sinai.
Like the 10 Commandments, the two times that Moses got them, Mount Sinai. Like the golden calf, Mount Sinai. The whole back half of Exodus where God gave his people the plans for the tabernacle. They would worship him for the first time.
They built all this and learned how to worship and learned how to do all this kind of stuff. Mount Sinai. Jesus later spends 40 days and 49s on Mount Sinai as well. But Mount Sinai for the Jewish people.
This is like Plymouth Rock. And Mount Rushmore rolled into one alongside of the whole spiritual dimension. Like this place is super important. This is actually Mount Sinai behind you.
You can go there. They got a place where there's a monastery that's been there since the second century. There's a place, it's like Elijah's like pasture. But this is a huge important place.
And in Elijah's mind, everything that's going on the way has a doubt where he's just kind of teetering on his edge. And he's like, I need to go talk to God. You need to go talk to God. There's one place that you go.
You go to where the whole thing started. So God's saying, what are you doing here? It's a very loaded question. Like what is going on that makes you to try to encounter me like this in this way?
See, Elijah's doubt is not a truth statement. Elijah's doubt is a validity statement. He's thinking about all the cool things. He's been part of all the crazy things that God has done in front of him, all the crazy things that God has done through him, just the whole nine yards.
And he's back in the same place he started out at hiding out in the woods because a crazy woman wants to kill him. And even after God asking the second time, what are you doing here who repeats himself? I'm all by myself. Everybody's trying to kill me.
There's no one left. And I'm the best one that's out there. That's that statement kind of rolled into our everyday language. He is making assumptions about what God wanted to do, making assumptions about how God wanted to do it.
And he's worked himself into a place of disastrous doubt. Beyond like, he went through the I want to die phase 40 days before this. He's even deeper into doubt than that right now. And God is asking the question, what are you doing here?
See from where Elijah is in this story, he's become accustomed to the big dog and pony show. He's been accustomed to building altars and calling fire down from heaven. He's been accustomed to telling the rain to not come and for the weather to bind him for years. He's accustomed to running so fast and so far.
He can chase him. He can go out ahead of a chariot. He's been accustomed to just multiple things. He's accustomed to big.
He's accustomed to extravagant. He's accustomed to fancy. He's accustomed to elaborate. All these ways of God being expressed and God showing his kingdom.
But the way that he encounters God now will be very different. Think about that. He saw the storm that came in, the earthquake, the fire. If I would have seen any one of those things, I would be gone.
Imagine all that rolled into one. What kind of thing was this week? You know the image that was going across Facebook a couple of months ago, the fires in California, the freeway? I'm thinking about that.
Seeing all that kind of stuff. And God comes to him in this whisper in a very, very different way than Elijah has become accustomed to hearing from God and to experiencing God. That this false framework, Elijah's whole life has been dedicated to fighting idolatry, to fighting a false picture of God. And now Elijah has worked himself into his own false picture.
His doubt comes because he'd been accustomed to God doing things one way. And also, I think with this, what if Elijah thought he'd want? I mean, imagine what he might be feeling when he walks into the king's courtroom alongside of the king to face the king's wife who is his real enemy. And he's expecting the king to be like, listen, you're wrong.
He's right. We're going to do this his way now. And I think the exact opposite happens. Elijah probably thought that he had pulled it off.
Look at that emotion. And he's now sitting there and realizing that I'm no better than anyone else. And God is like, I'm not going to put up with your bull anymore on this. I'm going to do things.
And you're going to encounter me in the way that you came here to encounter me. But you're going to encounter me in the way that you did not expect to encounter me. You're probably waiting for me to do something even wilder than what you've already seen. And it just does not happen.
Elijah is in thick with rolling by himself and self-determining everything else. His framework is blown. So there's some dangerous things about death. There's some dangerous things about where Elijah is inside of this.
And this is it. When we create places for doubt to succeed, we're creating space for sin to enter and reign. And not sin is like this little idea of sin, just a do's and don'ts of nice moral suggestions, but of sin being the thing that can eat apart our life and destroy every single thing physically, emotionally, spiritually. Sin is the most destructive force.
And I don't know. When we create places for doubt to succeed, we create spaces for sin to enter and reign. But whenever we give these lands of doubt, these worlds of doubt that we have created, whenever we give those places we struggle with to Jesus, He will create space for holiness to thrive. This whenever we just take the power out of doubt, and then we make the decision of we're not going to live into that false truth in our life.
Because we all have the ability to create those. And we all do create those at times. We never roll alone. Let's say this.
Because what Elijah's issue is, is he thought he was by himself. This whole time, all along, and the whole story of Elijah has been, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, never roll alone. We never think that God is solely dependent on us. We never need to think that God will work in a way that always immediately makes absolute sense to us.
How many times have you outdone that? A lot. But never think that our hurts, and our pains, and our fears, and our doubts aren't a priority to God. Because they always are.
We give that space over to him. Never roll alone. And I think about doubt. And I think about the ways that I struggle with doubt.
When I remember this is this middle point between what we want to, what we know is true, and what we're scared might be true. The things that we can hold onto are the things that can absolutely spin us off into chaos. Doubts that place in the middle. Doubts about fear.
What scares you? When I was a kid, I was scared of the dark. I slept with a hall light on until I was 13 years old. After I was 13, I found out way around it.
But then when I was in college, I had a roommate that liked to sleep. But like, he's the guy that put the tape over the red light on the TV to block out that much of life. I was too, I was still, that's when I actually became not scared of the dark. I was 19.
Little Ricky Thompson. Like, we all said, I, I talked with this a lot of time. I'm scared of fish. Like legit.
If you don't believe me, as been Nicholson, he's seen it in action. Like, fears stop us. I finally, I held a, I took a fish off the line for the first time two years ago. Because my five-year-old niece made fun of me for being scared of fish.
Like, Callie. Like, she's freakishly small. I mean, she's like that tall. Is it like a fun-sized snicker bar making fun of you?
Like, doubts are in fears. My fat thing's going to kill me in my dad's like, it weighs like a half a pound. It's not going to kill you. Like, there's silly fears.
But we also have serious fears. Like, what are you scared of? Like, we talked to someone a lot of folks in the morning, like, I said, I'm scared of crowds. I'm scared of like, of crowds that are not predictable.
Like, that stops me from a lot of stuff. I drove my entire family crazy. I had an anxiety attack at a water park a few years ago. Because we were at one of these weird crossroads, also the fear of being in the way.
And like, we were at this weird crossroads trying to figure out what water saliva can take the fun-sized snicker bar niece on. And we were taking two longs. Like, we're in the way. I was like, what's going on?
Like, I almost had a guy, my parents were like, you might have to go home. Like, our fears stop us from things. And when we, like, our fears speak too much into our lives, they will create the danger, disaster zone of doubt. And they do that physically, they do that emotionally, they do it spiritually.
Each of us come to God. And what I found out, especially in the deep south, it's very, very rare that we have to make true statements about Jesus with people. Most folks like the idea of Jesus. It says validity.
It's like, is he really in charge? Can he really do this? Is it really worth me doing this? This is validity statements.
We all make those. So a few things about them. Number one, when we doubt we get irrational. Okay, this is one of the biggest stories of Elijah.
So think about this. He, I'm not going to read to you. He says it twice. The exact thing to God twice.
I'm the only one left. I have been zealous for God and everybody's trying to kill me. So the first thing, I'm the only one left. Like, yes, Elijah, you killed your 450 prophets of Baal.
You butchered processed the prophets of Baal. But this whole time, I'm the only one left. You know, there's too much going on in all these chapters to read. But, like, Obadiah has hidden 100 prophets of God in the caves.
He did that when Elijah was hiding out in the woods the first time. Later on, this passage, God says, I've preserved 7,000 people who have never bowed down to Baal. Elijah keeps saying the exact same thing. You know what?
You have a friend or a family member who gets scared. I say, they will not shut up. And like, you want to hit them over the head with a frying pan? Because nothing they're saying is true.
It's like Elijah is griping about the exact same thing over and over again. I have written down in my notes and this was from reading in this early week. I have a hashtag, dead horse. It's like, come on, dude.
I can almost, you can, this is the second time that God asks Elijah, what are you doing here? I almost think that you can see exasperation in that statement. I'm trying to imagine what that might have sounded like. But when we doubt, we get irrational.
Isaiah, he isolated and he allowed his fear to overwhelm him. And he believed the lies that sin was speaking into his heart. And he chose to make that a reality in the way that he coped with his doubt. And the second thing is when we doubt, we allow false things to control us.
Now, it's all right to be rational from time to time. We all get that. But what happens when we allow our irrationalities to turn into rationalities in our life? How can that throw you off the course?
How can that throw you off the relationships that you have with people? How can that remove you from people who will be healthy for you? And we need people to speak in our lives to tell us that we are letting things control us that absolutely have no bearing over us. Now when we doubt, we forget what we've done and what God has done through us, Elijah stopped the weather for three years.
He stopped the rain. If one of you can do that for like 30 days, I will buy you lunch for a week. He called down fire from heaven after drowning the sacrifice and gallons of water. When we doubt we've forgotten about what we've done, Elijah should realize that things are going to work out for him in the end.
He's got access to big stuff because he's been by himself. He's not have somebody to remind him. The fourth thing, when we doubt, we lose everything. Elijah was frustrated because in some ways what he was realizing is I can do this without God.
I can do this without you. And we lose this idea because we shut everyone out of our life. At this point in time, anybody else say Elijah's being reasonable? I can be a very unreasonable person when I'm living in a space of fear.
If you don't ask me, ask my five-year-old niece when I'm pan fishing in a creek. I will get irrational. I will get unreasonable. Oh, my God, it's Elijah.
I'm not going to let you go out by yourself anymore. So here are these things that you're going to do. And these people are going to take care of these things in a completely different way. And the last thing you're going to do is find this guy named Elijah and you're going to bring him along with you from this point out.
You can't be by yourself. You need a navigator. You need somebody riding shotgun. You don't have the ability to do this alone anymore.
The last thing, when we doubt, we forget how big God's world is. One of our core values at Foundry is we believe God's vision for this world is bigger than our vision for the world. When we get into rough spots, when we get into gnarly spots, places of doubt, we begin thinking that our world is very small and there's nothing that anybody has control over and there's nothing that can be done outside of what we see right. We begin to live falsely in our own vision of this world.
And God's vision for this world is significantly larger than our vision. The big world that God ended up having to show Elijah was a gentle whisper. And sometimes some of us need a gentle whisper. Sometimes some of us need something like a fire and an earthquake and a rainstorm.
But when we doubt, we forget how big God's world is. The best answer, the best thing that we have against doubt is making the decision to not do it by ourselves. To not go through this world without God and to not go through this world without other people around us. We were not meant to be by ourselves.
And if Elijah had had one person kind of keeping some sense in him, think about where he might be now. And this is the end of the story of Elijah. He does nothing else extraordinary. And some of us can look at this and say that nothing extraordinary happens because of this situation.
But I'll also know that Elijah was called the king of the prophets and that Jesus spoke about Elijah, that John the Baptist, when he came, he was a picture of Elijah and the faithfulness of Elijah. He was a story of the story and see behavior that might not be the thing that we need to do, but we also can have a bigger picture that Elijah had a big, big story to tell as part of Scripture. But you don't have to go at it by yourself. And when you begin to see doubt creeping in in any way, shape and form, the best thing that you can do is to bring somebody else into your story.
To bring somebody else into that place of doubt and to let them cast light. To bring Jesus into that doubt and let him speak the truth of who he is inside that situation. Let's pray together. Jesus, we thank you for being, just for putting up with us sometimes.
We think of the time where we've been difficult, where we have been belligerent, where we've acted like Elijah, where we step into ways and places and things where we feel that you just don't have any power over anymore, you're patient with us. And God, you're patience is a patience that speaks of love, it's a patience that speaks of truth. It's a patience that controls this whole world. And God, we thank you for being patient with us individually, also to be patient with your people.
And Lord, this morning, we all have the helpful things. We all have things that we are allowing to control our lives. And we're fighting against really hard, and some of them have let them take charge. But Jesus, this morning, we give you those doubts.
God, some of them, we're happy to throw out upon you. Some of them are just so big, they're so nervous about it that we want to hold them close, and all we can kind of let you do is just say, hey, I've got this. But God, we just give you our places of doubt. We parade to have the clarity of your world around us.
The clarity of truth, not the clarity of the things that we have constructed. But Jesus, thank you for loving us. Through and in spite, and because of everything else, we give you this. Let's see how we pray.
Amen.