Sermon Transcript
Boy, thanks Stephanie Band. That was fantastic. Stephanie, you guys want to move back here? It’d be fantastic to have you here every week. See, they moved to Oregon, so, uh, you know, whenever they come back into town, we have to get these guys over, right Bobby?
Bobby’s sitting back over there. All right. Hey, let’s have the lights up so you could see too, see your Bible and whatever you’re going to be looking at this morning. Also, I just wanna say thank you to all of you who are gonna be helping with the camp this week. If you’re gonna be helping with the camp, would you just stand up?
We wanna say thank you for all the work you’re gonna do. Yeah, this is gonna be great. Appreciate it. Well, aren’t you guys involved in the camp? Okay, we’ll have them stand up special, the ones with the special shirts.
Yeah. We’re really excited about all the good things that are gonna be coming out of camp. So thanks for coming, thanks for being here, thanks for volunteering. Let’s just keep them in our prayers all week as Scott was praying as they get things going this week. Well, we’re gonna jump into a new study.
We’ve just finished the study on Colossians. Pastor Steve did a fantastic job of bringing together the unknown names that are found in the final part of chapter 4 of Colossians. And last week he took us through that. I got to watch that online and it was really, really good. I just, I was amazed how much he pulled out of that passage.
You probably were too and got a lot out of it. But we’re gonna take the month of July, most of it, 4 Sundays, we’re gonna focus on the life of Elijah from 1 Kings chapter 19. And as I got to praying and thinking about this, I just realized again, you know, summertime and replenishment, they go together. At least they should go together, kind of like you know, macaroni and cheese or fish and chips or whatever. Refreshment and summertime should fit together because often what happens, we get to the summer, we’re spent, we’re depleted, we’re drained, we’re burned out, we’re weary, and we don’t wanna come out of the other side of the summer still drained, weary, burned out, tired, all the rest of that.
We want to experience some replenishment. So hopefully summertime and replenishment come together. We’re energized, we’re filled up, we’re pumped up, we’re just ready to go. Once we finish summer. Couple weeks ago, Bernice and I were over at Trader Joe’s.
We were doing a little bit of shopping. We went in there and we said we’re gonna just get a few things, which turned out to be a lot of things. If you’ve ever gone into Trader Joe’s, such good prices. But anyway, so we got to the checkout stand and the checker, they’re very friendly. Most of them wanna engage in a conversation, so this checker engaged us in a conversation and says, so what are you doing today?
And I said, well, we’re doing all the normal stuff, you know, all the to-do list, and I’m also working on a talk. He said, a talk? And I said— well, actually, I didn’t say anything. Before I could speak, Bernice jumped in. She said, yeah, he talks for a living, which is, you know, I didn’t know how to interpret that.
But anyway, so he asked me what my talk was gonna be about, and I said, well, it’s gonna be about replenishment. I’m working on a talk about all the pressures that we face in life and How we really need replenishment, especially here in the Silicon Valley. He said, oh man, that’s me for sure. I understand, totally get that because, you know, it’s just all the stuff, you know. And so we asked him a few questions about his life.
He said he starts work at 4 AM in the morning, works to 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and then he goes home and then he has all the duties there, but he also takes responsibility for the children once he gets home. It’s dad responsibility to take care of the kids ’cause the wife goes off and does some other work and that sort of thing. So I realized at that moment checkers need replenishment in the Silicon Valley. And of course if you’re a teacher, you know how important the summer is for you. The summer’s a time where you’ve been working all year long with the students and all of that.
You love your summers. You wanna push pause and replenish over the summer months and hopefully that happens. And it’s not just teachers, but it’s students, right? I mean, as a student, you can hardly wait for the summer to get beyond the academic pressures that you’ve been faced with, the demands that are so much a part of our culture around here, and you just wanna enjoy the summer as much as you possibly can and finish the summer and feel better than you felt coming into the summer. One time for me, I took summer school.
One time, that was it. I took some classes in summer school And I remember I felt like I cheated myself out of my vacation, you know? So I never did that again. Why? Because we just wanna enjoy it if we can.
So if you’re a checker, you’re a teacher, you’re a student, you know how important replenishment is in the summer months. But it’s not just checkers and teachers and students, it’s really all of us. If you work, you know your job drains you, the number of hours that you put in, the constant demands that you’re under. There’s always something more to do. People deplete us, especially when they’re hard to work with or they’re people that are just difficult to get along with.
They maybe annoy you. They’re, you know, constantly giving you problems. Maybe they give you a piece of their mind, a piece of their mind that it would have been better if they would have just kept to themselves, you know. Daily demands, the pressures of all of that drain us. They drain our tanks.
Drain our physical tanks, our emotional tanks, our spiritual tanks, our relational tanks. There are constant endless things out there that drain us, so there’s always something more to do, some other activity to attend, maybe a meal to prepare, a diaper to change, another email to answer, a meeting to lead, another workout to get in, another person to help, another command to obey, another leading to follow. So, all of that got me thinking, you know, it would be really good if we would spend a few weeks just talking about replenishment, and we can do that through the life of Elijah. So, we’re going to look at 1 Kings chapter 19. If you haven’t found it yet, try to find it in your Bible, and I’ll give you just a couple more seconds to do that.
It’s probably in one of those parts of the Bible where the pages are stuck together. We don’t usually read much out of Kings. There’s a story told here about Elijah, Elijah the Tishbite, Elijah the Tishbite. You might be familiar with this story, but here’s what we know. When we get to chapter 19, Elijah is in need of replenishment.
He’s physically, emotionally, relationally, and spiritually exhausted. So if those are tanks, his tanks need to be replenished. They need to be refilled. He’s basically running on fumes. And what we’re interested in knowing is where did he find his replenishment so that, because as you read the story after this story, he goes on and he lives out the life that God had intended for him to live, and the challenges that he’s come through, he’s able to pick up and continue that story.
So his story is of immense help to those of us who perhaps even this morning are running on empty, or we face challenges like that. Down the road somewhere, or we know somebody who’s running on empty, and we could possibly be a help to them. But before we jump into 1 Kings 19, I gotta give you a little backstory, okay, because it’ll help you understand the context of Elijah’s state of exhaustion. It’s really connected to the call and responsibility that God gave Elijah to go to King Ahab. And King Ahab, by the way, is one of those evil kings.
So when you read the book of Kings, you’ll see that often these kings are described as either an evil king or a good king. And Ahab was an evil king. He was married to Jezebel, and Jezebel and Ahab worshiped Baal. And so Elijah’s going to be called to deal with that. He’s also going to be called to deal with the prophets of Baal, 450 prophets of Baal.
So what happens is, is that the Lord sends Elijah to Ahab to confront him. And to confront his leadership of God’s people into Baal worship. And in 1 Kings chapter 16, verse 33, it says that Elijah said to Ahab, the Lord sent me to tell you there will be no rain or dew for the next few years. Now, if you’re, you know, Ahab, and you’re hearing this through your god of Baal, Now, this doesn’t mean much to you because Baal was known as the god of rain, which meant he was the one who controlled rain. Baal worshiped— or Baal controlled rain.
So when it rained, that was connected to Baal. When it didn’t rain, that was connected to Baal. So Ahab hearing these words that there’s going to be a drought and there’s not even going to be any dew, essentially he would have in his mind nothing to worry about. Well, after Elijah passed that message on to Ahab, God sent him away to stay by a stream where he was going to be taken care of during this time of drought. It was in the Kish ravine, we’re told, and God provided water there for him.
He provided bread. He provided meat for him. He was able to sleep there. It was a great time until the brook dried up. After the brook dried up, God led Elijah away from there, and he led him to meet a widow.
Some of you know this story. A widow who had a son, and they basically had nothing. It was a poor widow, but Elijah goes to this widow and asks for something to eat, and she says, well, you know, I got enough to give you one meal, but that’s about it because it was gonna be my last meal. We’re gonna die. She’s expecting to die, but she does what it is that Elijah asked her to do, and God miraculously provided not only that meal, but he continued to provide throughout the drought.
Which was about 3 years. Well, 3 years into the drought, God sent Elijah back to Ahab with another message. This time he told Ahab to gather the prophets of Baal, the 450 prophets of Baal, as well as some prophets of Asherah, and they were to gather the prophets for a showdown. So there was going to be a showdown, a contest, if you will, a winner-take-all contest between the Lord God and the god of Baal. And so this is what Elijah said in 1 Kings 18, verses 23 and 24, get 2 bulls for us.
Let them choose one for themselves— this is the prophets of Baal— and let them cut it into pieces and put it on the wood, but not set fire to it. I will prepare the other bull and put it on the wood, but not set fire to it. Then you call on the name of your god, And I will call on the name of the Lord. The God who answers by fire, he is God. Then all the people said, what you say is good.
So that sounds like a good thing. Yeah, let’s find out for sure who is the God here anyway. Is it Baal or is it the Lord God? The prophets of Baal competed first. They built an altar.
They added wood to the altar. They put their sacrifice, their bull, on top of the altar. And then it says in verse 26, they called on the name of Baal. O Baal, answer us! they shouted.
But there was no response. Nobody answered. So if you read the account, this is really where it gets kind of funny, quite frankly. Elijah starts taunting them and suggesting maybe they needed to yell louder to their god, which they did that afternoon. They cried out to Baal, but Baal never showed up.
So now it’s Elijah’s turn to compete. He builds an altar, he adds wood to the altar, he puts his bull on top of the wood, and then he even went a step farther, which was he dug a ditch around the altar and he poured 12 large jars of water on the offering and on the wood. And then we’re told in 1 Kings 18:36, at the time of sacrifice, the prophet Elijah stepped forward and prayed, O Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, Let it be known today that you are the God in Israel and that I am your servant, and I’ve done all these things at your command. Answer me, O Lord, answer me, so these people will know that you, O Lord, are God and that you are turning their hearts back again. Because they see they’ve turned away from God.
Then the fire of the Lord fell and burned up the sacrifice, the wood, the stones, and the soil, and also licked up the water in the trench. And when all the people saw this, they fell prostrate and cried, The Lord, he is God. The Lord, he is God. Now you get the picture, right? Things turned out pretty well here because God demonstrated that he’s the greater God in this situation.
I mean, if this was a scoreboard, we’d say God 1, Baal 0. And ultimately out of that then came the death of the prophets of Baal. People shifted their allegiance to God. The battle was done, and God sent rain, and the drought was over. Now after that supernatural outcome, think about Elijah.
You would think at this point Elijah’s thinking, this is so cool, you know. I mean, he’s like bumping heaven, pumped up, high-fiving, everybody singing We Are the Champions. Oh yeah, at the very least you would expect that he would be walking around with his head up and his chest out, you know, chest pumping some people, whatever. But that didn’t happen. What happens is what we find in chapter 19.
So pick it up there with me. 1 Kings 19:1. Now Ahab told Jezebel everything Elijah had done and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. So Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah to say, may the gods deal with me, be it ever so severely, if by this time tomorrow I do not make your life like one of Now, what’s that? That’s a death threat, isn’t it?
I’m gonna kill you. I’m gonna kill you for what you did. You’re a dead man walking. By this time tomorrow, you are dead. Now, if you’re Elijah at this point, Elijah the prophet, Elijah the Tishbite, if you’re Elijah at this point, what would be your first course of action?
I mean, what would be the first thing that you would do? You would do. You’ve just seen God do the absolute amazing miracles. So this little threat from this woman Jezebel, I mean, how would you handle this threat if you’re Elijah? Would you at least have asked God to intervene?
Lord, did you hear this lady? Would you have checked in with her to find out, hey Lord, how do you want to handle this one? Do you hear what she’s saying? She’s gonna take me out. But that wasn’t Elijah’s response.
It’s not even close to that. Look at what happens, verse 3. Elijah was afraid and ran for his life. And when he came to Beersheba in Judah, he left a servant there, and while he himself went a day’s journey into the desert, he came to a broom tree, sat down under it, and prayed that he might die. I have had enough, Lord, he said.
Take my life. I’m no better than my ancestors. And then he lay down under the tree and he fell asleep. When you look at that response, if you ask me, that is completely different than what you would expect from Elijah, because all we know up to this point in time is that Elijah is this bold, confident, filled with faith, in-your-face prophet. What happened to that guy?
What happened to What God had just done through Elijah, the gigantic victories, predicting the drought, surviving the drought, defeating the prophets of Baal, God sending rain again. I mean, like, where did that prophet go? My guess is, is that he was still there. That prophet was still there. He was in there somewhere, but at this moment, his actions, don’t miss this, his actions show somebody who’s spent.
Who’s physically exhausted, who’s emotionally depleted, and who is spiritually defeated. And he’s basically got nothing left. He was running on empty. What had happened? A number of wonderful things had happened.
Great things. Big wins. Now some of you can identify with this. You’ve experienced defeat after a big win. After a big accomplishment, defeat follows.
After being on a mountaintop experience, defeat follows. After taking a big exam or a number of exams, oh man, you feel like you’re going to the pit after all of that. After completing a major project, after enduring a crazy product launch, after surviving the first 2 to 3 months of the new baby’s life, the new baby that’s in your home, and you’re thinking, I can’t do this anymore. Lord, would you just take my life? I’ve experienced not the baby thing, but I’ve experienced the exhaustion emotionally, physically, spiritually.
A lot of times on Monday, I call it Melancholy Monday. Melancholy Monday. It comes after expending a large amount of energy on Sunday, it could come after a contest that you have, after you’ve expended a lot of energy, and easily, when you get like that, you could wanna run away. I’ve wanted to run away even without a death threat, and you know, others might have at that point, because of my situation and how I was coming across, wanted me to run away as well. Why don’t you just get away?
This week I was at a conference where Rick Warren spoke, and Rick talked about how he’s been there at Saddleback Church in the Orange County area for 37 years now, And he said, you know, just about every Monday I’ve wanted to quit the ministry. Every Monday. What’s this saying? What’s going on here? What’s happening here?
What’s Elijah’s first need? Do you see it here? Do you see the first need? What’s the first need? What was the first thing that God did for Elijah?
Well, it had to do with the physical. He physically replenished him. Before God did anything else, he took care of Elijah’s physical needs. Notice it, just pick it up in verse 5. Then he lay down under the tree, Elijah did, and he fell asleep.
And all at once an angel touched him and said, get up and eat. He looked around and there by his head was a cake of bread baked over hot coals and a jar of water. He ate and drank and then lay down again. The angel of the Lord came back a second time and touched him and said, get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you. So he got up, ate, and drank.
Before God did anything else with Elijah, notice this, Before God even says anything to Elijah. God’s not even said anything to Elijah up to this point in time. There are no corrective words. There are no words like, come on, that’s just Jezebel. Are you kidding?
What’s wrong with you? Get a little perspective on this. None of that. Before he even goes down that kind of a road, what he does is he meets Elijah’s basic needs. His physical needs, his needs for sleep and his needs for food and his need for water.
3 basic needs. As I was reading that account, I was thinking back to when I was in Psychology 101 in college and how in Psychology 101 they introduced us to Maslow’s hierarchy. You remember that? That chart, that pyramid, and how this pyramid begins with the physiological That the foundation, that the first need that must be met if you’re ultimately gonna become the person that you could be, it starts with the physiological, the food, the water, the warmth, the rest, the sleep, all of that. That’s where it begins.
This is a chart that came out in the 20th century. I saw a modernized version of this recently that came out here and compared the 20th century to the 21st century. It looked like this. The 21st century, we’ve got Google, and then physiological, and then Facebook, and then caffeine and Ray-Bans.
I thought, boy, that really gets at it, doesn’t it? But the point is this, is that perhaps the most spiritual thing that you can do after you have been through a challenging time in your life, the most spiritual thing that you can do after a tough season in work, a tough season in school, a tough season in parenting, and maybe even vacation, because some of us go on vacation and don’t come back rested, that the most spiritual thing that you could do is sleep and eat and drink. We’re talking about water here, okay? So sleep and drink and eat. Now, you may be doing that right now.
Let me look around here real carefully and see if anybody’s sleeping, and if you are, I’m not gonna say anything or point you out or anything like that, ’cause God doesn’t point Elijah out at this point. He just recognizes his need and he makes it possible. What we have here are 3 replenishers that we need when we are physically exhausted that probably we all together could take more serious than we do. The first one is sleep. Elijah needed sleep, so he laid down under the tree, he fell asleep.
Evidently God knew that he was gonna need some food if he was gonna sleep good, so he gave him some food and then he laid down again and went back to sleep. You familiar with Psalm 127:1-2? This is what it says: Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchmen stand guard in vain. In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat.
And then he says this: For he grants sleep to those he loves. There are 3 vain things here, he says. Vain is the word for foolish. We would translate it stupid. Or dumb.
It’s dumb or stupid or vain or foolish for you to try and build a house without God. Don’t do that. It’s dumb to try to guard a city without God. Don’t go down that road either. And it’s vain, he says, to overwork and to undersleep.
To overwork and to undersleep. Now why would God say that? Because He put us together. He put us together with a need for sleep.
And so if we’re not sleeping, we’re, you know, working against his design. This is just part of his design. It’s foolish to try to burn the candle on both ends. You probably heard somebody said it this way: if you burn the candle on both ends, you’re not as bright as you think you are.
God gives to his beloved in their sleep. And certainly that’s the case with Elijah here. He needs sleep, so God allows him and orchestrates the possibilities for him to sleep. As I was preparing this talk, I read a Harvard Business Review article that was titled Sleep Is More Important Than Food. And here’s how the article began.
Let’s cut to the chase. Say you decide to go on a fast, and so you effectively starve yourself for a week. At the end of 7 days, how would you be feeling? Well, you’d probably be hungry, perhaps a little weak, and almost certainly somewhat thinner, but basically you would be fine. Now say you deprive yourself of sleep for a week.
Not so good. After several days, you’d be almost completely unable to function. That’s why Amnesty International lists sleep deprivation as a form of torture. Anyone who has experienced this knows that not even hunger and thirst are comparable with it. So why is sleep one of the first things we’re willing to sacrifice as the demands in our lives keep rising?
We continue to live by a remarkable, durable myth: sleeping 1 hour less will give us 1 more hour of productivity. In reality, the research suggests that even small amounts of sleep deprivation take a significant toll on our health, our mood, and our cognitive capacity, and our productivity. Tony Schwartz wrote this. He said, while I was working on this project, I became convinced that I needed to give higher priority to sleep in my life. And so he said, with sufficient sleep, I feel better, I work with more focus, I manage my emotions better, which is good for everyone around me.
Some of you wanna say amen to that out loud. Yeah, if you would just get a little bit more sleep, we could probably have a better environment around here. Dr. Wayne Scott Andersen, a medical doctor, said this: Sleep is one of the most underappreciated facets of health. The consequences of sacrificing it can ripple through various areas of your life. Exhaustion has been linked to issues with appetite regulation, heart disease, and increased inflammation, and a 50% increase in your risk of viral infection.
What’s the point? I mean, you’re exhausted, Elijah was exhausted. What Elijah needed first before anything else was he just needed sleep, and that may be the same for you right now. Maybe that’s exactly where you are. Get sufficient sleep.
You say, what’s sufficient sleep? Interesting, they’ve done studies on this. One research team did put some people in an environment without any clocks and without any windows, and they just said to them, now you guys sleep whenever you feel tired. And they found that 95% of them slept for 7 to 8 hours in a 24-hour period of time, that 2.5% slept over 8 hours, and 2.5% slept 7 hours or less. That means 1 out of every 40 people they found sleep 7 hours or less and were fine.
And you say, yeah, that’s me.
Ask somebody else if you’re fine. See, what this is saying is, is that probably most of us at least need 7 to 8 hours of sleep a night, which may mean We got to change our schedules. We got to go to bed earlier. Say, I can’t do that. Yeah, you can.
You got to work with it. Start winding down 45 minutes before it needs to happen. You know, start dimming the lights around there and creating a ritual. A little bit of, you know, herbal tea, hot herbal tea or something, chamomile or something like that. And, you know, don’t be listening to music that’s going to pump you up.
You listen to music that’s going to take it down for you and drop your RPM level.
Levels, and if necessary, read a dull book. Find the worst book, you know, the dictionary, whatever it is, but just find something that’ll put you to sleep. That’s the point. Elijah needed sleep. He also needed food.
It says that he laid down under the tree, verse 5, fell asleep, and all at once an angel touched him and said, get up and eat. So he got up and he ate, and it’s interesting because it says he looked around and thereby His head was a cake of bread baked over hot coals and a jar of water. We’re talking about somebody that, you know, this is a miracle. This is out there in the desert. I mean, this stuff doesn’t, you know, Safeway, please bring me some.
No, that’s not happening here. He ate and drank and lay down again, and the angel of the Lord came back a second time, touched him, and said, get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you. So he got up and he ate and he drank. God gave him food. Why did God give him food?
Because he needed food. He needed food to get his strength back, to start all over again. And God gave him— I love this, don’t you? He gave him fresh-baked bread cooked by an angel. Fresh-baked bread cooked by an angel.
If you ask me, anybody who cooks fresh-baked bread is an angel. I love it, don’t you? Kinda makes you wonder, was this like whole grain bread or something? I don’t know. Point is, is that he needed to be fueled with food.
His body needed that, and that may be something that we need to consider after having gone through this depleting time, this exhausting time where maybe we’ve been so busy we’ve been skipping meals. That’s not a good idea. Research tells us skipping meals, even one meal, results in a drop of blood sugar levels that can impact your body and your mind and your emotions. You’ll feel tired and you’ll feel foggy. Sarah Dreifke said it this way, without a steady supply of nutrients, your intellectual and emotional functioning can change, resulting in irritability, mood swings, and brain fog.
And we certainly don’t need you to walk around with brain fog, okay? So think about this food thing. And then he also needed water. See that, verse 6? God provided a jar of water.
And he ate and he drank and he lay down again. And verse 7 goes on and talks again how the angel comes back and gets him up again for some more food after he slept. So he got up and he drank. Why water? Because water, you gotta have water to survive, right?
We’re told you need 8 8-ounce glasses of water a day. That equals about 2 liters or about half a gallon of water. This is called the 8 times 8 rule. It actually goes back to some research that was done in 1945, but they actually have done some other research since then, a lot of different research. The Institute of Medicine comes out and says now we know that women need 2.7 liters of water a day and that men need 3.7 liters of water a day.
This is about 3.7 liters. It’s about a gallon. So if you’re a man, the research is saying you really gotta hydrate, gotta get more water into your body, about a gallon. And a woman then is somewhere between half a gallon and all the way to the top here. The point is, is that we need water, and without water, we’re not gonna survive.
You gotta have water to survive. And of course, you’ve seen studies done on this. You can get by without water for maybe a week. You can get by without food for over a month. This water thing though, you can’t, you can’t like skip on this one.
Your body is 60% water. Your brain is 70% water. We’d say some more, some less, whatever. Your lungs are 90% water, and every day you’ve got to replace 2.4 liters or about 2.5 quarts of water. That’s gonna burn off.
What is the point of all of this? You see, the point is, and this is why I wanna start here because this is where God starts, is that we come through these really difficult periods in our life, and some of you have been in a difficult period or you’re coming through it or maybe you’re right there in the middle of it right now, and one of the things that we could do is we could really hurt ourselves by not paying attention to the importance of physical replenishment. And so right off the top, God, in helping Elijah get back to a good state, deals with the physical replenishment deal, the need for sleep, the need for food, and the need for water. I will never forget a close friend of ours who died at a very young age. She died of pancreatic cancer.
She said to me, we had gone to their home over in the Baltimore area, We had gone to her home and spent a couple of days there as she ended up dying about 2 months after that. But I’ll never forget the few days that we had there together just to have conversations, but one particular conversation where she said to me, Dave, you know what? I didn’t take care of my body, especially when it came to sleeping. I didn’t sleep enough even though I thought it was enough at the time. I still remember her being up most of the night.
She would sleep 4 or 5 hours.
That was a wake-up call. This is a wake-up call. This is a call to take care of yourself. Make whatever changes you— maybe you don’t need to make any changes, and so this is just an affirmation call for you, and that’d be fantastic. But this is a wake-up call for me.
It really is. I don’t drink enough water. I mean, Dan and Ellen, Dan our young adult pastor and Ellen who’s one of our young adults, these guys are convicting me. I watch, they constantly got water bottles. They’re constantly drinking water.
I gotta do better on the water thing. And the food thing, what about the food thing? Could I do better on food? Absolutely I could do better on food. I could eat better food.
What about the sleep thing? Oh yeah, I’ve been trying to pay attention to that the last couple of weeks that I’ve been working on this. You probably could look at this and say, yeah, I’ve got some things I could work on too. See, this is incentive to us individually to take care of these bodies that God has given us. And if that’s not enough incentive, why don’t you pull out some pictures?
That’s what I’d suggest, pull out some pictures. Pull out a picture of your family. Pull out a picture, in my case, of us with our grandkids. Pull it out and just look at it and just say to yourself, am I doing with my body what I should be doing with my body so that I can have the best experience with the kids that God has put into my life? Or pull out, if you’re a parent, pull out a picture of your daughter or your son or your sons or whatever number of children you have and look at it and say, you know, am I gonna be there someday if they get married?
I had the privilege of performing Katie’s wedding, my daughter.
Pull the picture out and just say, am I doing with my body the best that I can do with my body? Or pull out a picture of your friends and the times that you guys have been out hanging out together and just having fun and remember again how much of an experience that can be for you, but you wanna be there, you wanna be a part of all that. And if those kinds of pictures don’t help, then why don’t you pull out a picture of an emergency room? An emergency room over at the hospital and say, you know, I really don’t need to end up over there.
Or maybe pull a picture up of a person who was in a race and they had to pull up, or they were just out running and they had to pull up. You see, life is, it’s a journey, right? It’s a race, and God has us in the race, and he is deeply interested that we take care of these bodies. In fact, if it’s not enough incentive in a personal way and it’s not enough incentive in a relational way, then let me give you one more incentive for taking care of your body. It’s found in 1 Corinthians chapter 6 and verses 19 and 20 where it says this: Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you received from God?
You are not your own. You were bought at a price.
Therefore, honor God with your body. See, God cares about this body. He bought it. He bought it at the price of Jesus’ life. And when we came into this relationship with God through Jesus Christ, God placed within us the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit’s now living in this body, and we’re to care for this body and to honor honor God by honoring our bodies, that we might be refreshed, that we might be in a better place to do the work that God has for us to do. Well, we’re going to continue to talk about this over the next few weeks. Next week we’re going to take a trip with Elijah to Horeb because God continues to work on him in these other areas where he’s depleted, and we’ll see what we can learn as we go on down that road. Well, let’s pray. Lord, thanks for this time this morning just to look at this story that though it’s so old, it still has relevance and application to us today.
And so we would ask that you would help us glean from this what would be most helpful in our lives, that Father, we might be in the best place to experience your best. We know that even taking care of our bodies doesn’t guarantee there will never be sickness or pain or disease, deadly disease. But Lord, for as much as we can do, we want to honor you with our bodies. And certainly in this physical realm, that means Getting the sleep that we need and realizing that that’s a gift from you, eating well, and also getting the liquids that we need, the water that we need into our, our systems. So help us even as we reflect on our lives this week, this day, not leave what we’ve talked about here but take it with us and be changed by this.
And may I just say before we close this prayer with an amen, that if you’ve never come into a relationship with God through Jesus Christ, the beautiful picture here is that the Lord wants to save you, and he has made that possible through the death of Jesus Christ. He has purchased you on the cross, and he longs to be your Savior. And we ask that if you’re at a place where you understand that and, and God’s working in your heart, you just say yes to him. Lord, save me. I wanna be one of your children.
I wanna be a member of your family. I want you to live in me. I wanna honor you with my life and my body. You tell God a prayer like that, you pray to him in that personal way, he’ll hear that prayer. He’ll save you, he’ll adopt you into his family.
You’ll become one of his children. Lord, thank you that you hear our prayers. We love you today in Jesus’ name. And everybody said amen.
