Hey, for instance, if you're seeing this, I'm still going positive. But I want to be with you this morning and I want to share this message. It's been sitting on my heart really for several, several weeks. It came out of my devotional life.
And sometimes I love to be able to share and to preach these sorts of messages that come out of the things that God speaks to my heart and filtering those out, asking the questions. God, is this a public word or just not? And I feel I need to bring this into you right now. But I want to ask you this question.
What happens when you don't get your way? Now, we probably all feel like that, some lesson that we learned as kids, right? Like, oh, you're not getting your way. You're supposed to mine.
We don't always get away. You're that kind of thing. The back and forth is there. But if we're honest with ourselves, disappointment and our reaction to disappointment, this runs well into adulthood.
And I think that we're always learning about that. And if we aren't, what we might find out is our failure to learn about that actually ends up stunting our growth as people. So what happens when we don't get our way or when things don't go is we expect them to, especially when we feel like we have done everything right. That's a question I think that we have to ask ourselves.
One of the things I love at the Bible is that it's a story of real people. And if you're not spending time in Scripture, you might assume that everybody in here is perfect and things always go their way and they never do anything wrong, that sort of thing. But guys, I got to tell you that that is the very, very far from the truth. We've got all sorts of folks in Scripture.
We have all sorts of things that are going on in Scripture, things that are going through. Now, there's a lot of human truthfulness that's in Scripture and how people have had to go through the tough work of redefining faithfulness and why of how they are engaging and interacting and being transformed by the living God. And so today I want to talk about one of my favorite people in Scripture. And it's one of my favorite larger stories, but I want us to also dig into the idea of how we can grow as people and as followers of Jesus Christ by understanding how someone else's reaction to things, not going the way they planned, can give us truthfulness to our lives.
So the story of Elijah and Nicole read this passage for us earlier this morning. But I want us to go into the back end of it, the where and the what of this whole story. Elijah has been a prophet for years now. He is legendary for his prayer life and for his ability to communicate with God.
You know, he's been going up against King Ahab and his wife Jezebel for years. And the last kind of fun thing that he got to do was to pray for it to not reign for three years. And it hasn't. And then he ended up getting into a showdown with the prophets of another God named Baal, this fertility God that has been just driving the practice of idolatry in Israel.
Long story short, I've preached on this passage a few times here at the church. But Elijah challenged hundreds of these priests to call down fire from heaven and they couldn't. But Elijah could. And then he killed all the false priests and it started raining.
But Ahab and Jezebel were still doing Ahab and Jezebel things. Elijah became depressed and he ran clear across the country to meet with God. I want to show you what this looks like. It's what Graham Burke's called Chad's Nerdy Book of Bible Mass.
But we're going to speak right there. Like he went from the very tip of Israel all the way across the country below the borders and to Mount Hore over to Mount Sinai, the special place in the life of God's people. And this is where we find ourselves today. So a little more on Ahab.
The dude was a joke. Ahab really was the worst. Conflict was the story of his life and not so much conflict. But his attempts to just always be avoiding conflict.
He was obsessed with avoiding his enemies. He married Jezebel, the priestess of Baal. And she was also a princess and another kingdom. And he married her really just to make sure they would not attack him.
Ahab was absolutely reckless in his pursuit of avoiding conflict. He was weak. He was needy. He was wishy-washy.
And Elijah was almost certain that this whole showdown on Mount Carmel would take care of things. But it didn't because Ahab was the worst. So Elijah escapes in his own frustration, his clear across the country and down in there. And Sinai is this place where God has historically expanded leaders minds beyond themselves.
It actually happened to Moses two times here, both in how God called Moses to go back to Egypt and to bring the Jewish people out of Egypt. But then also when he gave him the Ten Commandments twice on the mountain. This is what happens when people go up to this mountain. They go to meet with God to have their vision for life expanded.
It would be easy for us to look at this story of Elijah and think that he's at some bottom level of desperation. But if we pull back and we look at the wider cues, what we realize is Elijah is coming to a place to where he knows he needs to meet with God because his heart needs a check. Here's the thing that when we get frustrated, when things aren't going our way or the way that we feel like they should based off of our actions, this feeling of arrogance and selfishness it kicks in. And when that happens and we realize that we need to go pull and Elijah.
We need to go back to the start. Because many times we think our best actions or just our actions in general are going to equal to the change that we want to see in life. Especially when our actions become deeply personal or they become expensive as far as our efforts or our energy is involved. Elijah is learning this on a much deeper level in this story.
So let's pause. Elijah, the guy who can pray and not make it rain for three years. Elijah, the guy who can call down fire from heaven. Elijah, the guy who got shelters in the wilderness and has birds come for him, bring him food.
Elijah, the guy who asked a woman to make a small piece of bread for him and she was making a small piece of bread for her and her son to have their dying meal during a famine and then the oil in the flower miraculously lasts for years feeding both Elijah and her and her son. And then this woman's son ends up dying in a fever and Elijah brings him back to life. That Elijah, that Elijah is in need of the living God to rest and to repair him and expand his understanding of what God can do. So do you think your stuff is that big of a deal now?
And can we all admit that we need to learn about reliance on a deeper level? So three lessons from Elijah's lesson that we can lean on. The first one is this, the presence of the Lord. Now many of you know that I am obsessed with the book of Psalms and I have this running note in the back of my Bible that is comparing all of the times that God speaks about him dwelling with us.
And what's so interesting is how this seems to occur specifically when we have deep needs. So when a teen says this, when hard pressed I cried to the Lord and he brought me into a spacious place. The Lord is with me. I am not afraid.
What can mere mortals do to me? The Lord is with me. He is my helper. I look in triumph on my enemies.
I think that when we find ourselves in some sort of a situation or a season that seems to be radically tearing us apart or when we start to question ourselves, is God even doing things through me? Is God even doing things in me? Is God even doing things for me? One of the places where we begin to struggle is with our own internal definition.
What we read here in the Psalm is that God wants to bring us to a spacious place. We find this idea of a spacious place or a broad place in several places throughout the book of Psalms. But we find this meaning in Genesis chapter 26, 22, the story of Abraham and his son's as they are trying to spread out across this land, God has promised him. And it says this, he moved on from there and dug another well and no one quarreled over it.
He named it Roboth saying, now the Lord has given us room and we will flourish in the land. This is where we get this idea of spaciousness in Psalms from. Abraham had been repeated conflict about digging these wells and the folks that were local kept coming and taking over his wells and driving them away and he didn't have the water to feed himself or to water his flocks or to water his family, any of these things. And in the situation we read about in Genesis, they realize that they have the room and the space to flourish.
It isn't just about safety, but room to grow, room to be yourself, room to be open, room to relax, room to let your guard down. And when we're willing to be honest, we find comfort in the presence of the Lord. We find a spacious place in the presence of the Lord. So Elijah goes back to Mount Sinai where the whole thing started.
He finds the presence that he expects to encounter and isn't fair. He thinks he needs it big and flashy because that's what God does, big and flashy, so thunderstorm. Like all these big biblical images for the presence of God coming, we read the book of Psalms, all these rescuing images of how God comes down from on high and rides on the clouds. All this kind of stuff is happening, but Elijah doesn't find the presence of God inside of it.
What Elijah actually needs is small. He needs quiet, but he needs something with the ability to probe into his heart in a way that nothing else can. We can't get frustrated when our expectations and God's actions don't line up 100%. Many times we might be asking that question, why aren't things right?
We probably should instead be asking and should be trying to make a figure out why we can't pay attention to God. Are we trying to get God to pay attention to our agenda? Or are we paying attention to him and what his presence is showing? The second thing that Elijah goes through is he has to realize the way back home.
I showed him that map. He went clear across the country out of the borders, back into a space of wondering where things have happened. And God instead sends him back. He's called to do a few things.
All these things are involving anointing people, anointing Elijah, his successor, his prophet, anointing a couple of different kings. Here's the thing, Elijah knew that his call in life was involving King Ahab and the downfall of his rule in kingdom. After the big huge scene at Mount Carmel, how could this not automatically be happening? This also goes back to Elijah's assumptions of how this would work out.
I imagine it probably had something to do with the fact that Elijah wanted to make all the sacrifices he had made to the years seem valued. If you spent a couple of years living by a brook in the middle of the wilderness with birds bringing you food, you'd call that a sacrifice. You'd want other people to know you've made. Right?
I think that when we ask ourselves the question, winner, good things, going to happen to me because I've done all the right things. But we're also looking for some sort of valuation that places us in a different level of relationships with others. I know that at least for me, that's one of the things that I have to personally fight. Like when we don't feel vindicated, we want people to know that wrong things have happened.
And instead, what we see here is God calling him to go back to his prophetic office, to go do prophet things, to go do anointing things, to mark people out for unique calls. We see how God is going to bring down ahab in Jezebel. God's way, not Elijah's way. God's way, not our way.
Third thing is this. The things we think are true in our grief sometimes need to be corrected. In this passage, Elijah repeats the same phrase twice. I'll read it to you.
I've been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty that Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars and put your prophets to death with the sword. I'm the only one who left and now they're trying to kill me too. Elijah has a beef that he brings up. He says this at the beginning of the passage and he says it in the middle of the passage.
He wants to put this in front. He feels wronged. In the very last verse of the whole passage, what God tells us is, hey, Elijah, I've preserved 7,000 people who have not touched Baal or come close to worshiping him. Let's go back to a place of honesty.
Sometimes we have a tendency to stretch things out, to speak in generalities, or just to go too far in our frustration. We see Elijah doing that here and sometimes God has to reveal our own blindness to us. We pray all throughout the scripture to have eyes to see and ears to hear. We pray this as a positive prayer, but then also sometimes it's a prayer we have to ask God to reveal things to us that are simply not true and we don't want to accept it, to pray for eyes to see and ears to hear, sometimes asking for God's correction to come down.
I think that this might happen because of that whole why aren't things working out really is a journey of interior validation. Instead of us doing the tough work of accepting that the validation we're looking for, the love we're looking for, the joy we're looking for, the purpose we're looking for, that it doesn't come instantly but it comes from God and that's absolutely better. Psalm 6612 says this, you let people ride over our heads and we went through fire and water, but you brought us out to a place of abundance. I think that verse is kind of the perfect way to tie things up here.
It acknowledges that we feel bad things have happened. Things have been super tough. They've been consuming. They've been exhausting the whole nine yards, but we're trusting you to bring us out into a place of abundance.
This is future hope. This is trusting. This is us living a life of abandonment to the world and to ourselves because we know that God is doing something significantly larger than we can self-generate. So, when we come into this, there's really just a couple of questions.
I encourage you, go to the home sheet this week. It's going to be, we'll have it out front. We'll also have it online, we can do every week, but the home sheet this week really is kind of a journey of interior realization of this. We're also going to go through Psalm 17, a fantastic story of what does it mean for us to ask for vindication inside of our holiness.
But really, a couple of questions. One is this. Where do we have these spaces in life? Where are the things going on in your life where you feel like, say, hey, I've done everything right.
Why has this not happened out? Where are those places? I encourage you to name those spaces, but then apply this kind of filter we see through Elijah over them, asking yourself, am I speaking generalities? Am I trying to live in an untruth that will validate me quicker than you can validate me, God?
I'm willing to go back into your presence to search and define these things. Do I realize what you're asking me to do is always going to be in line with what you originally called me to do? So where are those frustrations? Where are those things lying?
I want to encourage you to spend the time this week to identify and process through those. But really, the end is this. How do we need to enter into space with God in order for us to go through the same journey Elijah did? The good news is he wants to do this with us.
He wants us to learn. He wants to take us through a journey of trust and of truth and of experience. He just wants us to start taking these steps. So let's parade together.
Father, we realize that we have things in our heart, God, and sometimes these are things that you've placed on us, God, sometimes these are things that we've placed on ourselves, Lord. We all have these spaces of hope and of frustration and all of this kind of stuff, Lord. What we're praying for is we come into a new year as we are in a season of evaluation and of thought, God, can we pray for a closure to these broken spaces, God, that cannot provide for us as well as you can provide for us, God. So we name these things and we lift these things up.
God, we pray that for every space that we create, God is not a new space of emptiness or sadness or void in our life, but instead of space that you can fill up. And we pray. Amen.