Sermon Transcript
If you have your Bible this morning, open it up to the book of 1 Kings chapter 18. 1 Kings chapter 18. Last week your pastor began a series on miracles, and he said, if you’re gonna speak in my place, you got to fall in line with the series. And it didn’t take me very long to pick which of the Old Testament miracles I was most excited about sharing with you today. It’s the story of Elijah duking it out with the prophets of Baal on top of Mount Carmel.
How many of you grew up in church, Sunday school, that kind of thing? Raise your hands. Okay, how many did not? Raise your hands. I already love this church.
It’s about 50/50, which is exactly how it ought to be. I love that. Whether this is summer reruns for you or whether this story is brand new, it’s one of the greatest accounts in all of Scripture. It is the account of the duel on the mountain. Whose God is real?
Is it Baal, the god that was being worshiped by the surrounding culture, or is it Yahweh, the one true God, We say the God of Israel, but he’s not the God of one people group, one nation. He’s the God above all gods. He is the Lord of Lords, and he is the King of Kings. And that battle is waged in 1 Kings chapter 18. For some of you, this is a very familiar story.
If you’re ever drafted at the last minute because somebody didn’t show up for Sunday school and you have to sub in a kids’ class, I highly recommend telling this story. If you tell this story and act it out, you will be voted Teacher of the Year. You really can’t mess up the story because it’s so full of action. But I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with this story. I love it because of what it teaches, what it proves, what it shows conclusively about our God.
I love it because of that. I love the details in it. I love the drama of the story. What’s not to love? The only thing not to love about it is that there’s, since I was a kid and especially as a teenager, there’s been a nagging question that this story plants in the back of my mind.
That question is this: why don’t we see more signs of God’s power in our culture, in our generation? And we can be so excited sharing this story together and go, yeah, way to go, God! And yet, isn’t there in each of us some desire to not just study church history, but to live some church history? To not just hear exposition about God’s miracles, but to actually experience one every now and then? And so as we work through this passage today, it’s a long passage, there’s a lot of verses, we won’t read all of them.
I recommend that you read all of them when you go home. Because the ones I skipped, it kills me to skip some of those verses. Let me summarize some of the story for you, but as we go through, there’s no PowerPoint today. I usually teach with PowerPoint. This isn’t Phil’s all-time favorite message pulled out of a file and the dust blown off, because Dave assigned me this random passage that fits into his series.
Not my plans. So it’s just as if we’re apologizing, just the simple Word of God. If you brought your Bible, that’s great. If not, there’s, there’s Bibles in the pew for you. Starts out in chapter 18, verse 1 of 1 Kings.
It says, after many days, the word of the Lord came to Elijah in the 3rd year, saying, go show yourself to Ahab, and I will send rain upon the earth. What’s going on here? Ahab is the king. Good king or bad king? Bad king.
Sort of bad king or really bad king? Really, really, really, really, really terrible, like legendary terrible king. I am balanced out by a wonderful wife. He did not have that advantage. His wife Jezebel, You know, there’s a lot of Bible names are very common in this generation.
I don’t meet a lot of Jezebels. There’s probably like 4 of you here today named that who just stopped listening. You might, if you get a chance someday, ask your parents how they settled on that. Her legacy is not a great legacy. She’s evil.
In fact, she seems to turn her husband away from the God of Israel to the gods where she came from. She was married probably in an attempt to consolidate his empire, but she didn’t share his faith and values. And she’s not just kind of quietly resistant, she’s actively opposing the God of Israel. She’s executing God’s prophets left and right. As a result of this, the nation becomes very evil, very weak.
Vulnerable to foreign attack, but this time God’s discipline comes in the form of a famine. Well, it doesn’t start as a famine, it starts as a drought, but as any good Northern Californian can tell you, it doesn’t take long for a drought to affect food supply, now does it? The next service, I’ve heard the average age is like 4.2 years younger than it is here in this particular service, maybe even more than that.
What’s it mean to have a drought? What’s it mean to have a famine? Well, that’s almost as bad as Wi-Fi being out for a couple of days. Whoa, no. Yeah, it’s maybe even worse than that.
So Elijah went to show himself to Ahab, and the famine was severe in Samaria. And then there’s some details of how God brings Ahab and Elijah together. They were both well known to each other, if by reputation, if nothing else. Pick up the story in verse 17. When Ahab saw Elijah, Ahab said to them, is it you, you troubler of Israel?
I doubt that’s what Elijah had printed on his business card. Elijah, troubler of Israel. But this is how he looked to the king. We have an expression, we say, don’t shoot the messenger, right? Elijah as a prophet sometimes had to bring bad news.
We as a culture in America are obsessed with good news. We wanna talk about Easter, resurrection. I just about got fired from my first church for wanting to have a Good Friday service. They said, we’ve never done that before, which is a great reason to do or not do anything in the church, by the way. And I said, why else should we not have a Good Friday service?
Well, the Lutherans have one, which again, a great reason to determine church strategy based on what the Lutherans were doing down the street. I said, can we just try it once? I got with Charlie Feller. Charlie wore these little half glasses. He’d pull them off.
He, he would start up the boiler. We’re in a little country town, so much different than where you live, 850 people. 24 miles from the nearest McDonald’s. That’s hard to do in the United States. Missionaries would come home, here we are at the Bangkok McDonald’s.
We’re like, cut their support, we don’t have a McDonald’s. It’s a crazy place to live. Charlie would fire up the boiler. Easter was early that year, or Good Friday early that year. We walked in, I had removed all plants, all signs of life from the entire room.
People walked in, man, it’s freezing in here. What is this, a tomb? And I just smiled at Charlie.
It was like a tomb in there. All we did in that service was read verses about the crucifixion and death and burial of Jesus, and we sang some pretty somber hymns. The end of that service, I simply said, what a, what a terrible way for a great man’s life to end. And I walked out. Down the center aisle.
Turned right, went into my little office, sat there, dead silence. Nobody was leaving. I’m sure they expected me to make a U-turn and come back and go, but he didn’t stay dead! But I didn’t do that. After a while, you heard a rum, rum, rum, rum, rum murmuring like in the book of Exodus.
Pretty soon I heard doors opening, I heard car doors slamming, engines starting, and here came the elderberries.
They knocked on my door, they came in, and I said, what’s up, guys? They go, we have a problem. I said, what’s the problem? They said, this is why you don’t do a Good Friday service. I said, what do you mean?
They said, you left him in the tomb. Where’s the good news? I said, well, there wasn’t any good news on Friday. Jesus was dead, crucified, and buried. One of the guys, Wes Ravens, didn’t have a lot of formal education, but one of the wisest men I’ve ever known, goes, Well then, why do we call it Good Friday?
It ought to be Really Lousy, Awfully Terrible Friday, ’cause that’s how I’m feeling in my gut right now. And I said, yeah, but isn’t Sunday morning gonna be fun? That’s all the story there was, but like good Americans, we wanna hit the fast-forward button. We wanna get to the good part. Some of representing God is being willing to give people bad news, ’cause it’s great that God loves us and has a wonderful plan for our life, but part of the story is our sin has separated us from God and we are headed for eternity in hell without his intervention, and that is bad news.
And until we embrace the bad news about ourselves, we cannot embrace the great news about his death in our place. So here we are. You’ve heard of Walk Through the Bible. I now welcome you to Run Through the Bible because we must increase our pace.
When Ahab saw Elijah, Ahab said to him, is it you, you troubler of Israel?
We might expect Elijah as a good peacemaking God follower to go, I’m sorry, sir, how have I offended you? Oh king, oh king, I— king. See, this is one of the reasons we don’t see more power in our generation, is because we often choose Compromise over confrontation. Trust me, on every personality inventory there is, I am conflict-averse to a pathological level. I’m 61 now, and God is having still to beat that out of me.
It’s affected my parenting, it’s affected our marriage in some unhealthy ways. It’s just how I grew up. It has, I’m sure, limited the worldwide impact of Walk Thru the Bible sometimes, ’cause I’m very prone to pursue peace sometimes when peace isn’t what’s needed. Elijah, no such problem. He says, I have not troubled Israel, but you have and your father’s house, because you have abandoned the commandments of the Lord and followed the Baals.
Wow, talking some smack, huh?
A trash-talking prophet. This is one of the reasons we prefer pastors over prophets. I know your pastor very well. There’s a reason he stayed 20-some years in Agoura Hills. There’s a reason he stayed 7 years in Phoenix.
There’s a reason coming up in, is it January, you’ll have been here 10 years? ‘Cause he’s not an Elijah very often. ‘Cause Elijahs are not destined for long-term ministries in any one place. They’re interventionists who come in, speak the hard truth.
Well, he throws down the truth, and then he says, now therefore send and gather all Israel to me at Mount Carmel, and the 450 prophets of Baal, and the 400 prophets of Asherah who eat at Jezebel’s table. Nurturing the false prophets. She’s providing for them even in the midst of a drought and a famine. So Ahab does exactly this. He sends out messengers.
They’re gathered together. This is 950 altogether, official prophets plus all the other people, and they gather there on the top of Mount Carmel. And if you go on a Holy Land trip today, you can go there. It’s a tremendously dramatic sight, and it must have been something else on this particular day. Verse 21, Elijah came near to all the people and said, how long will you go limping between 2 different options?
I’m preaching out of the— what is it, the ESV? Yes, the English Standard Version. For years I used NIV. I think it’s an excellent translation too. I’ve just recently switched to this.
I’ve never seen the word limping in here before. First I read it and I thought, is that because of my upcoming hip surgery? Is this special revelation from God that he is seeing my suffering? No, no, the idea is, you know, when you limp as I am right now, you’re not stable. You don’t move decisively like I’m used to doing.
There’s a hesitance there. Some of your translations I grew up with, how long halt ye between 2 opinions? There’s an uncertainty, an instability there. He just asked the people directly, how long are you going to be lukewarm about this? How long are you going to try to compromise your way through this?
He says to them, if the Lord is God, follow him, but if Baal, then follow him. How do the people respond to this? What’s the next line say?
The people did not answer him a word. I bet they didn’t make a ton of eye contact either. I bet there’s a ton of sandal-gazing going on right at that moment.
He’s calling them to make a decision. He’s calling them to plant your loyalty one place or another.
I think one of the reasons we see so little of God’s power, so few true miracles in our generation, and especially in our culture here— we are a pluralistic culture. That’s part of the greatness of America. I mean, I think there’s plenty of evidence in the founding fathers that many of them were committed Christ followers. A bunch of them surely were deists too, but we’ve never been a purely homogeneous culture. Our strength is not in our sameness.
When the whole church growth movement started in the ’70s and ’80s, I went to a bunch of those of those seminars. You know what I heard most of all? I heard if you’re gonna plant a church and if you really, really, really want to grow, you know the key to growth? You want a homogeneous unit. You know what that is?
That’s everybody’s the same. They’re the same ethnically, they’re the same in socioeconomic level, they certainly all speak the same language, they probably all vote the same in the election, You really want a church to grow rapidly? You get a church that’s all pretty much the same.
That makes me nauseous. I look around here, you know what? I see a bit of a preview of heaven. I do. It’s good that we’re not all the same.
Can you imagine how boring heaven would be if we had just one people group there?
My instructors from around the world, we have 25,000 to 30,000 men and women who teach for Walk Thru the Bible just like your pastor does all over the world. Last year we had ministry in 140-some countries. And all the time they’re saying, aren’t you glad we’re coming to heaven? My Korean friends, and I’m sorry if this is a stereotype and I don’t mean it offensively, but our Korean director says we will be in charge of logistics. Heaven will be run efficiently.
The Brits go, we don’t know what we’re in charge of. And the Filipinos go, we don’t know either, but you’re not in charge of food because we don’t want to be bored for all of eternity. And they argue this out, and it’s glorious because I think different denominations, different cultures are champions of different of God’s attributes. And in this life, we think we’re gonna say to the Methodists when we get to heaven, booyah, I was right and you were wrong. I think we’re gonna fall at our knees at Jesus’ feet and go, you were right, he’s all that.
And they’ll say, but you were right too, we couldn’t figure it out on earth. Now that’s a bit oversimplified. This is why I don’t teach in a seminary. I minister with Walk Thru the Bible.
But in a pluralistic culture, the ultimate value can become tolerance.
You’ve seen the bumper sticker, coexist. Now, while there’s a need for that, and the same rights that protect our freedom of worship must protect others’ freedom of worship— freedom of speech can’t just benefit one group. Can we all agree on that? That’s absolutely true, but it has morphed into there’s no real right, there’s no wrong, you can’t say there’s such a thing as good and such a thing as evil. And the Bible would challenge that at its very core.
You’ve probably heard the quote, our job is to comfort the afflicted but also afflict the comfortable.
I searched and searched. I thought, who’s the great preacher who said that? It was a newspaper editor about 1910. So disappointed. But you know what?
All truth is God’s truth, because he got that thought from the book of James, that God resists the proud, but he gives grace to the humble.
And that’s the ministry of our church, to comfort the afflicted, but also to shake up the categories of those who find no need for Jesus Christ in their lives. Because they’re too comfortable and they’re too self-sufficient. I think another reason why we see so little of God’s power is we seldom truly need God to intervene in our lives. We seldom truly need God to intervene in our lives. Now, we may hit a health crisis like Pastor Dave with prostate cancer, a routine exam, and all of a sudden there’s questions about the future.
There’s those crisis moments in life. There’s a job where you just found out your company’s been taken over by a multinational conglomerate and you’ve been labeled now as redundant. One of the elders in our church, we had to have a layoff a few years ago, and somebody kept talking about we’ve gotta fire this person. I said, it’s not firing, it’s a layoff. That’s very different.
And this guy who was an exec for McKesson goes, We just use the term, we’re returning him to the community. I’m like, well, doesn’t that sound bright and wonderful? Unless you’re the guy.
Complications come in our lives and suddenly then we need God. But on a day-to-day basis, as middle, upper-middle-class Americans, we’re pretty comfortable.
Self-sufficient. A few years ago, Ellen and I went to Armenia. It was our second trip there, but this trip had a specific purpose. Yeah, we met with about 100 pastors from Armenia. We trained them in a new resource from Walk Thru the Bible.
But why we really went on that trip was Armenia and Iran have visa-open status between the two countries. And on my first trip to Armenia, I had met a pastor from Iran, and through double translation from Farsi into Armenian and Armenian into English— what possibly could go wrong playing telephone like that? He said, I have a group of pastors. We’ve been cultivating our resumes, or our resumes, really our passports, for more than 10 years. We can get in and out of the country at will.
We’ve always known God would send us somebody to train us. We’ll come to Armenia if you’ll come back. How you gonna pass up on that? You know what’s going on in Iran?
I mean, the missionaries were thrown out years ago after the Iran hostage crisis. I love missionaries. You’re gonna meet a great one in a few minutes when I’m finished, but sometimes Sometimes the church thrives after the missionaries are no longer there, and that’s what’s happened in Iran. The church is growing, growing, growing. It’s just none of the leaders have much, in some cases not any formal Bible teaching.
Said, I’ll bring 10, 15, 20 pastors, will you come? I said, absolutely I’ll come. I said, what do you want to learn? He says, we want to learn Walk Thru the Bible’s course on David called Crucible. ‘Cause we don’t just minister and teach about the crucible, we’re living in the crucible.
The heat is on where we live. We also wanna learn the course on Old Testament Joseph called Detour: Finding Purpose When Life Doesn’t Make Sense, ’cause it’s tough where we live. Beautiful. The guy with us says, we’ll make sure it gets translated into Farsi, we’ll host it. It was wonderful.
2 years later, we go back there. I’m expecting older, established pastors, probably not far from the average age in this room, ’cause that’s how old this man was. They were kind of the bishops. Found out a week before they were supposed to come, that pastor was arrested and put in jail, enduring pretty rough beatings. So were 2 of the other pastors.
They said, we operate in cells, interesting term, because one cell doesn’t know about the next cell doesn’t know about the next cell. So when we’re arrested and tortured, we can’t betray that many people. But I noticed there were 14 men and women there, 7 men, 7 women, young, 20s and 30s. They said we had to scramble a new group that could come and isn’t under suspicion. They’re all pastoring churches, underground churches.
They move frequently from house to house. The largest has almost 50 people, the smallest has 7. That’s incredible. They said, yeah, one thing you need to know, 18 months ago, every one of these men and women were Muslim. They’re brand new baby Christians.
Well, that’s pretty scary, you shouldn’t be leading the church then. That’s all they have. I’m like, this is awesome. This is fantastic. You should have seen them eat up this training.
I’ve never— Ellen, have you ever, all the places we’ve been, have you ever seen a hungrier, more responsive, more grateful group? Absolutely no possible way. At the end of it, we had printed about 400, I think, of each workbook. They had used a workbook each, but we gave them everything digitally because when they’re raided, they can just delete it. They said, what about the extra workbooks?
We said, we’ll use those for future groups that come over. They said, can’t you print more? We want to take those back with us. I go, are you kidding me? I said, what about at the border?
You’ll be stopped. They’d already told us how the women at the border, they ditched their traditional clothing and they put on makeup. They looked like they lived in California. And then they’d get very plain and bowed over and ultra, ultra, ultra inappropriately submissive. When they cross the border.
It’s so tragic, the fate of women in so many of these countries. I said, what about the searches at the border? And they go, Phil, Phil, Phil, Phil, your workbooks will be fine. God will take care of your workbooks. I don’t care about my workbooks.
I care about my new 14 friends. They said, Phil, don’t, don’t, don’t worry about your workbooks. Have you never heard of Brother Andrew? He smuggled Bibles for years in Russia. We’ve read about him.
God still blinds the eyes. You don’t think God’s arm has been shortened, do you? That God no longer has game? They didn’t say that, that’s my son’s vocabulary. Said, yes, I believe.
Phil, don’t worry about your workbooks. I’m not worried about my workbooks, I’m worried about you. What happens if you’re caught with them? I will be jailed, probably beaten severely for maybe up to a month for bringing Christian resources like that in, especially because they’re in Farsi language. And I go, yes, that’s what I’m worried.
They go, Phil, relax about your workbooks. There’s so much corruption, even if they’re confiscated, they’ll find their way to the black market. The authorities are not gonna burn them when they’re worth that much money. Your workbooks will be fine, dear Phil. Finally, I just stopped.
I’m like, go for it. You know, we heard 3 days later after the training, not one bag that had a workbook in it was opened at the border.
I don’t live that close to the edge very often. I doubt, I doubt most of you do either, and maybe that’s why we don’t see his power. More than we do. I believe that’s coming to America, by the way. If not in our generation, certainly in our kids’ and our grandkids’ generation.
It’s going to get a lot tougher to be a committed Christ follower in our land. I ask people all over the world, what’s your favorite book of the Bible? Number one answer, especially where the church is suffering, is 1 Peter.
1 Peter, because it talks about how to stand up under persecution. My mentor and friend, Dr. Howard Hendricks— loved the guy, he’s gone to glory now— he preached at the Billy Graham Cove many times. One time he went there, they were like, what are you preaching on now? He asked the director, what’s the New Testament book that’s been taught on the least here? Director thought a minute, he goes, I don’t think we’ve ever had anybody preach a series on 1 Peter.
What’s that tell us? We’re not prepared when the heat is turned up. There you go. Go home and read that one too.
Well, they have this duel. Elijah says, 2 bulls. Slaughter your bull, prepare an altar, then pray to your god Baal that he will consume the sacrifice with fire. Because there’s hundreds of you and only one of me, You get to go first. This isn’t like he wanted to be the home team in a baseball game.
If the fire comes from heaven, it’s sudden death, the game is over.
He lets them go first. They worship, they chant. He, I mean, you talk about talking smack, look at verse 27. At noon, Elijah mocked them, saying, cry aloud! For he is a god.
Either he is musing or he’s relieving himself, and that does mean what you think it means.
Aren’t you glad you don’t serve a god who needs potty breaks? Hold please, I’ve got some business to take care of in the inner sanctum. He’s humanizing their god because he’s nothing more than the invention of people’s minds. Maybe he’s on a journey.
Perhaps he’s asleep, and he must be awakened. Maybe he dozed off. Maybe your situation isn’t really that big a deal to him. He’s ridiculing them. So now they cry out loud, they even slice themselves.
We’ll show you how committed we are, Baal. They take their swords, they take their knives, they cut themselves. And yet what does the Bible say in verse 29? As midday passed, they raved on until the time of the offering of the oblation. But there was no voice.
No one answered. No one paid attention.
So we go into the bottom of the inning.
If you’re Elijah, how nervous are you at this point? I mean, maybe you can get a tie if your God doesn’t show up. At this point, that’s looking like the worst you can do. That’s a relief a bit. He didn’t come for a tie.
It’s one of the reasons soccer is not my favorite game. One reason is they only score when I get up and go to the kitchen for a snack.
The other reason is this tie nonsense, and even playing it off with penalty kicks, I don’t know about that. Tie’s like kissing your sister is how I was always raised growing up. That’s in the Hebrew here. You probably don’t see that in your English. Elijah gets the people together.
Rather than praying right away, he says, now dig a trench around the sacrifice. He repairs the Lord’s altar. They dig a trench. He fills it up 1 time, 2 times, 3 times with water. He pours water all over the sacrifice.
Yeah, let’s make this a little more difficult than it is already. I think this is another reason we don’t see God’s power very often. Because we don’t very often ask him for really big things. You know why not? ‘Cause if he doesn’t come through, we’re afraid we, but even that God, will be embarrassed.
And we view ourselves as some kind of PR people for God. We gotta protect his reputation. God slammed this truth into me. It’s been a number of years ago now because Philip, who’s 28 now, was more like 10 years old at this time. We’re in Alaska.
I’m doing some ministry up there. We emptied our frequent flyer points. We took our whole family. We hooked on a week’s vacation and we’re sightseeing down on the Kenai Peninsula. Phillip loves to fish, loves to fish.
I said, yeah, we’ll go salmon fishing. We’ve never done that before until I found out what it costs to go out on a boat salmon fishing. And then I’m in this terrible position because Phillip’s like, Dad, this is so great. And I’ve got, at the time, Larry Burkett. It would be somebody, you know, Dave Ramsey now on this shoulder going, remember thy budget and keep it holy.
And I’m going, over here is all the parenting stuff that I’ve taught and heard from other people. It’s like, but your son, your son’s been dreaming of this. And so we rent gear and I have size 16 feet. They only had size 12 boots. What is it with people that go, we only go up to size 12, but they’re wide?
These feet are not cubic inches of Jell-O. There is bone structure in there. And so we’re out there and we’re fishing from the dock and we’re catching exactly nothing. You’d cast out like that, big weights, they take out the slack, and then you jerk. It’s called snagging.
I’ve never fished that way in my life. There’s no bait on the hook. It’s a ridiculous technique, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing. ‘Cause, zoom, these things are going by. I’m like, why doesn’t OSHA require goggles for this?
It’s so, so bad. And Phillip’s like, Dad, it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine. It’s just you and me together fishing. Now I’m feeling worse.
We saw a fish swim by one of the oil slicks in the harbor, and so we’re following this fish and we’re hitting it on the head with our line. And it’s not interested. Phillip goes, Dad, I prayed that God would send us a boat for free. And I’m like, oh great, now God is not just discredited, I’m discredited.
Other way around, I meant to say that. God’s reputation is at stake. I’ll sneak off. We’ll take a second mortgage on the house. We’ll pay it off later.
It’ll be all right. I’m trying to explain this to Phillip, and right then this guy pulls up in a boat by himself. And he goes, you guys are wasting your time there. I said, yeah, we kinda know. And he says, hey, I’ve got some officials.
I work for a company. I got 2 pilots coming in next week. I gotta find where the fish are. That’s what I gotta do this afternoon. You guys wanna help me?
I said, how much? He says, how much? Nothing. He goes, get in. I called my wife.
I left her a message, meet us back at the dock. She’s not pleased. Who is this guy? I didn’t ask. He’s sent from heaven.
He’s probably an angel for all I know. How do you know he’s not a mass murderer? Because his overalls say Skipper Ron on them. He’s the real deal. I did research.
We’re out 6, 7 hours together. Phillip absolutely slayed it with salmon. We got back to the dock and he goes, you wanna help me clean these? I’m like, sure. So we’re cleaning them and we’re getting them all done, and he goes, now give me your address.
And I go, no, no, we can’t take them home with us. He goes, I know. He goes, I told you the 2 pilots are coming, they’re FedEx pilots. I work for FedEx. I’ve got a code, I can freeze it and ship it to you for free.
Do you like halibut too? Because I got a bunch of that in my freezer.
And I thought God needed my help to impress my son.
I wish I could say that’s the only time I could illustrate that error. But it’s not.
Well, he soaks the altar, the sacrifice, and I bet you know what happens. Whoo! The fire consumes it all. It even licks the water out of the trench. People fall on their faces.
The Lord! The Lord! He is God! He is God! I think for a lot of them the repentance was Genuine and lasting.
If all the crowd stories in Scripture are true, for some of them it probably turned out to be words because the same people who were yelling, Hosanna, Hosanna, he saves, when Jesus came into Jerusalem, some of the same ones are yelling, crucify him, crucify him, aren’t they? Remember your church right after 9/11? Man.
Parking lot’s packed today, honey. This is great. 2, 3 weeks, month, 2 months later, business as usual.
That’s human nature. There’s a PS to this story. Elijah says to Ahab, oh, by the way, go ahead and eat now. They kill the prophets of Baal. Ahab’s life is spared.
Because even though he’s evil, God has anointed him king, and you don’t touch God’s anointed. You better hurry and get home ’cause it’s gonna rain. Who cares about a weather report at a time like this? My wife is obsessed with the weather station. She’s got an app on her phone.
I’m like, forecast, dark tonight, brighter toward morning. I mean, who— it’s not gonna change my plans a whole lot anyway.
It’s a big deal, rain’s coming. You better go. Elijah prays, he tells his servant, look on the horizon. Don’t see anything. Prays some more, go look again.
Still nothing. 7 times he does this. And the 7th time his servant says, I see a little cloud all the way out there as far as the eye can see, about the size of a man’s hand. And it grows as it approaches, and the rains come, and God has heard, and the drought is over, and the famine is over, and the nation has been saved. You know, one of the other reasons we don’t see and experience more of God’s power, I believe, is because I think we’re very prone to explain away God’s miracles as coincidence or natural phenomenon.
I mean, you know, you knew it was going to break sometime. This stuff’s cyclical. Not when the timing’s like that. And even a lot of the things we call coincidences— in my first Bible, I heard, I heard a visiting pastor say a coincidence is merely a miracle where God has chosen to remain anonymous?
How about we give God glory when he answers our prayers? How about we pray bigger prayers? How about we take some steps of faith individually but also as a church? And I don’t know what that means for you, but I’ll bet it’s going to come up in the rest of Pastor Dave’s series on these miracles, because this isn’t just so we can go, man, God was so great back then. He’s lost a step these days.
His arm has been shortened, but we can at least read about it. Oh, there’s places in the world where Christian missionaries still battle witch doctors and show God’s power, and that’s so cool when those missionaries come home and tell us those stories. But hey, we’re in Silicon Valley, the tech capital of the world. It’s so far beyond the Enlightenment. I mean, if there’s things that need to be solved, we will solve them.
Has it ever occurred to you that every technological breakthrough, and I realize technology is neutral, it can be used for good or evil, but I view every technological breakthrough that many of you worked your careers to make happen, I think those things are an expression of God’s grace because many of them make people’s lives better. Better. So even though it may be a human invention with a patent tag to an individual or company, I see God’s hand behind that, and I think he’s worthy of our worship. Father, thank you. Thank you for this simple yet powerful, deeply profound story.
Lord, I pray even this week That we would have an encounter with you, that we would have one of those moments where in our own way we get to the end of ourselves and we’re like, God, if you don’t come through for me, I’m in big trouble. God, please show your power in my life this week. Pray and ask him that right now, would you?
And when he does, Father, when you do, don’t you dare let us explain it away as coincidence or a natural phenomenon. God, show us your power and help us to acknowledge your glory even this week. It is in the awesome name of Jesus Christ that we pray, amen. Thank you, my friends.
