The neighbor was also moving.
And so Aaron was able to get his 83-year-old father-in-law, that's the father there, father-in-law,
and they flagged down the neighbor and the neighbor gave them a ride.
So they got into the car with the neighbor.
And almost as soon as they got out onto the road, evacuating from their home in Pacific
Palisades, well guess what?
Everybody else was on the road too.
And so now they're suddenly stuck in traffic as these fires get closer and closer.
And they said they could even feel the heat and the police officers came by and said,
you're going to have to walk.
You're going to have to get out.
This traffic jam is not going to clear up.
So you need to get out and walk.
And so here's Aaron with his 83-year-old father-in-law, Ron, with a walker making their
way down these steep roads out of Pacific Palisades.
And pretty soon the rest of the crowd had gone on.
And it was just these two.
And Ron, the 83-year-old said, if the fire comes, just leave me.
Go and save yourself.
Just leave me.
And Aaron wasn't sure what to do.
And about that time, a car that they didn't recognize pulls up.
And the door opens or the window comes down, and Andrew Lin, driving this car, he was headed
back to his house on the other side of town to go and rescue some pets, two cats and a
dog.
But he said, you know what?
These people are more important.
So he opened the door and said, get in the car, almost like a come with me if you want
to live moment.
And they got into the car, and they proceeded to drive to a place of safety, an incredible
story in an incredibly tragic situation.
Would you get into a car?
Would you trust a stranger in that moment?
Now, I've always been taught since I was little, don't trust strangers.
Don't trust a stranger.
But in that moment, I think I would have gotten in the car with a stranger.
And the fact is, you may not want to tell your mama, but you trust strangers every single
day.
You trusted strangers on your way here this morning.
You trusted that somebody you don't know was going to stop at a red light so that you could
drive through the intersection.
But we know sometimes they don't, and there's accidents.
Anytime you go out to eat at a restaurant, you trust somebody that you don't know, that
you don't even see back in the kitchen, that they're going to cook your food in such a
way that it's not going to make you sick.
You're trusting a stranger.
Just coming in here, I don't know who built this structure.
And yet we trust that these beams, this roof, it's not going to fall in, even when there's
a pipe that freezes up like happened a week ago or so.
We trust strangers.
We trust other people.
And so we have to ask ourselves the question, do we trust God?
If we trust people we don't know, are we willing, are we able to trust God?
With that in mind, let's turn to 1 Kings chapter 17.
We're beginning a brand new sermon series on the weeks that I'm here.
We're going to be looking at several stories from the life of the prophet Elijah.
Now you may remember there's two prophets that come back to back.
One is Elijah, he's the first, and what's his friend, Elisha?
We sometimes get those mixed up, but we're going to be talking about the prophet Elijah.
And so we're going to start in 1 Kings verse 17.
So we'll have some of these scriptures on the screen, but I hope you'll look them up
for yourself as well.
And it says, out of nowhere, we don't have any background for this gentleman.
It says Elijah the Tishbite of the inhabitants of Gilead.
That's all we know.
He lives in the land of Gilead, which is on the east side of the Jordan River, probably
about where the modern nation of Jordan is.
That's all we know about him.
We don't know his background, we don't know his lineage, we don't know what career he
had before he was a prophet.
All we know is that God came to him and gave him a mission.
And it says Elijah the Tishbite of the inhabitants of Gilead said to Ahab, Ahab, King Ahab.
Now since we're going to be spending a couple of weeks talking about this story, we've got
to set some context here.
King Ahab, who was the very first king that the nation of Israel had?
King Saul.
And then after him, probably the most well-known was King David, and David's son was the wisest
man, King Solomon.
So after King Solomon, that nation divided up into a northern kingdom and a southern
kingdom.
Solomon's son and another gentleman kind of had a dispute and you can see the yellow
down here is the kingdom of Judah.
That's where Jerusalem is.
That became the southern kingdom where the descendants of David and Solomon continued
to reign there.
Sometimes they were bringing people back to God, other times they were taking their people
away from God and they forgot the things that God told them.
The northern kingdom became the kingdom of Israel.
And so this was the offshoot, you could say.
And some of the tribes were with that northern kingdom of Israel.
Now they set up their own capital city in the city of Samaria, the city of Samaria,
and they actually created their own place of worship in Samaria and one other place.
And it says they even created golden calves, just like Aaron back in the Exodus, and they
use the exact same phrase, these are the gods that brought you up out of Egypt.
And the reason they did that, they didn't want their citizens traveling back to Jerusalem,
because if I go worship in Jerusalem, maybe I'll respect the king of Jerusalem and want
to be one of his subjects again.
And so that's kind of this situation that we're in.
Now King Ahab, was he in the northern or the southern kingdom?
He was in the kingdom of Israel, so his capital was in Samaria.
And these were the kings who most often were taking people away from God.
In fact, if we go back just a few verses to chapter 16 and verse 30, notice what it says
about Ahab.
It says, now Ahab, the son of Omri, did evil in the sight of the Lord, more, more evil
than all those who were before him.
He did more evil than all the other kings.
And he continued with this false place of worship.
And in fact, we don't have it on the screen, but a verse or two later, it says that he
married, he took as a wife Jezebel, the daughter of the king of Sidon.
And that was a pagan country where they were steeped in, you know, false gods and worshiping
Baal and other false gods.
And they were encouraging the people of that northern kingdom to not worship the true God
anymore, but to worship these Baals.
And so because of that, God sent a message to this king in Samaria and he sent it through
this prophet Elijah.
So back to chapter 17 and verse 1, Elijah the Tishbite of the inhabitants of Gilead
said to Ahab, this is the message, as the Lord God of Israel lives, I believe God lives,
says Elijah, before whom I stand, I'm serving this God of heaven.
And then here's the message, there shall not be due nor rain these years except at my word.
So here comes this before now unknown prophet, and he shows up in the king's throne room
and he says, God says, it's not going to rain, there's not even going to be due because of
this way that you are leading people away from God.
Now this was a strong message here because Jezebel and their northern kingdom were worshiping
the god Baal, or the gods of Baal, which is the god of fertility, the god of growing your
crops.
What do crops usually need to grow?
They need some water, they need some rain.
And so these Baals are the god of the rain and the god of thunder.
And so Elijah is proclaiming that this power of Baal is being wiped out, is being negated
by the true God.
The dominion of Baal is being overtaken by the power of the true God.
And then just as rapidly as Elijah shows up, notice the next verse, then the word of the
Lord came to him saying, God sent him another message, go and tell the king this message.
And then here's part two, the word of the Lord came to him, here's the second part,
get away from here and turn eastward and hide by the brook Cherith, which flows into the
Jordan.
And it will be that you shall drink from the brook and I have commanded the ravens to feed
you there.
I don't know exactly where that is, but again, many people that line down the middle is the
Jordan River and people think it's one of these valleys, one of these wadis they're
called, a creek bed that sometimes have water and sometimes don't, that flows into the Jordan
River.
And perhaps this is one of the places that people think it may have been.
It's not too bad when the rain is falling, looks like a place that you could hide, it
looks like a place that you could be.
And yet what happened?
Notice it says Elijah went and did according to the word of the Lord.
You know, I think that's good advice that we should all live our life according to,
to do according to the word of the Lord.
So he went and did according to the word of the Lord for he went and stayed by the brook
Cherith which flows into the Jordan.
Elijah did what God said and then God did what Elijah said.
It says the ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning and bread and meat in the evening
and he drank from the brook.
This is a fascinating thing.
I need to pause on this picture for just a moment because there's a young lady in our
church that if you ever see her, she often has a little notebook and she's drawing pictures.
And I asked Miss Bethany if she could draw a picture for this sermon about Elijah being
fed by the ravens.
So Bethany, thank you so much for drawing this picture.
But think about this concept.
God said that the ravens were going to feed this prophet.
The ravens were going to bring bread.
What would a bird usually do if it had some bread?
It would eat it itself.
It's not going to carry the bread to some random guy down in a river valley.
The birds would usually eat it themselves and ravens, if you look at scripture, they're
listed in those unclean birds and so God is using these unclean birds to feed this holy
prophet, to feed this prophet of Israel who's hiding out, who's resting.
And so where Elijah is, God is taking care of him.
He's giving him water from the brook, just as he said.
He's feeding him through these ravens, just as he said.
And yet a fascinating thing is happening here because Elijah, up to this point, he seems
to have been a man of action.
God said, go to the king's palace.
All right, king, it's not going to rain.
Go to the brook.
Elijah goes to the brook.
But now he's called to sit and to wait.
He's out of the fight, you could say.
There's this king and wicked queen who are leading people away from God and Elijah was
called just to stay and just to sit.
We often don't like to wait.
How many of us like to wait?
If we're driving down the road and we see those lights ahead of us, oh, traffic.
Oh no, and maybe we start looking for alternate routes or I just missed the exit of the shorter
route, whatever it is.
We don't like to wait for traffic.
We don't like to wait at the grocery store.
There's so many options of food and you can fill up your cart, but then you get to the
checkout line, oh, got to wait.
If you're like me, often we're doing it ourselves, but sometimes there's two or three lines and
you get in the line and I always pay attention.
Okay, I would have been behind that guy in the blue coat.
Which line is moving faster?
Oh, you got there first.
I should have gotten in that line.
Oh, okay.
I chose the right line because we don't like to wait.
We think about technology.
We think about the internet.
We have access to almost any bit of human information that has ever been invented and
we can find it in just a few moments on our phone or whatever else, but if it takes more
than 30 seconds to come up, oh, got to wait so long to find this ancient information.
I see some people here that I'm pretty sure remember dial-up internet.
Does that ring a bell, those sounds of your computer trying to connect, ba-dong, ba-dong,
ba-dong?
It took like five minutes just to connect to the internet, let alone trying to download
a page.
We don't like to wait.
And throughout, oh, encyclopedia, you got to look it up and hope that that entry is
in there.
But throughout scripture, God's people are often called to wait.
Think of Abraham.
God told him that his descendants were going to be like the number of the stars.
That didn't happen right away.
It took a long, long time just for Abraham to have a child, let alone a nation of children.
And then those descendants, those people of God were in bondage in Egypt and they cried
out for a redeemer, for someone to free them, and they were promised that it was coming.
And then even when Moses was born, when he was placed into that basket and he was lifted
out by Pharaoh's daughter, it was still like 80 years before that deliverance finally came.
We don't like to wait.
And then those people of Israel, as they were given throughout the Old Testament, these
sacrifices which were pointing forward to a coming Messiah.
And yet it was centuries and centuries before John the Baptist could say, behold, the Lamb
of God who takes away the sins of the world.
And it's the same thing in the New Testament.
Jesus told a parable about a wedding that was going to take place symbolizing this return
of Christ.
And there's these young ladies, these ten virgins that are waiting for the bridegroom
to come.
They're waiting.
And how many of them fall asleep?
They all fall asleep, all ten of them.
Now there's five of them that had some extra oil, had spent time preparing for that, but
all of them fell asleep.
And then as we live in our world today, we often talk and preach and share and believe
that Jesus is coming again, that Jesus is coming soon, we say.
And yet Jesus is coming soon, and yet we still are here and we still wait.
So the question is, how will we wait?
Will we still trust God as we're waiting?
Because that's what Elijah had to do.
He's waiting there by that brook, but that immediate action of no rain begun to yield
the obvious results.
Now here in Georgia, we anticipate, you know, when the heat of summer comes and it doesn't
rain and the weatherman will get on TV and say, we are in a, we're in a drought.
And that's exactly what happened in verse seven.
Verse six, the ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning and bread and meat in
the evening and he drank from the brook, just as God had said.
But then verse seven, and it happened after a while, we don't know how long that was,
after a while the brook dried up because there had been no rain in the land.
We anticipate a drought.
I like to go hiking.
Sometimes we'll hike to a waterfall, Foster Falls or Keone Falls or different places.
But in that end of summertime, those waterfalls are just a trickle.
And you can imagine Elijah there by the brook, he's getting bread from the ravens, he's drinking
all he wants, but after a month, maybe he can tell that that brook's a little lower
than it was.
And after three months, you can see the watermark and you can see how much less water there
is.
And after six months or nine months, that flowing brook is now just a little trickle
and those deep pools are now starting to grow stagnant because this drought is taking place.
So think about this for Elijah.
Elijah was exactly where God had told him to be.
He followed God's plan exactly.
God said, I'm going to feed you, I'm going to give you water to drink.
Elijah was exactly where God had told him to be.
And yet still, the brook dried up.
In fact, it's in essence, it's partially Elijah's fault from the New Testament, from James chapter
five, it says Elijah was a man with a nature like ours and he prayed earnestly that it
would not rain and it did not rain on the land for three years and six months.
So it's his very prayers that in essence caused that brook to dried up.
The promised blessing went away.
Now God had provided for him longer than others, but his own prayers had led to this situation
and now the brook had dried up.
Have there ever been times in your life when you are absolutely certain that you're doing
exactly what God calls you to do?
You're following his every leading and yet still bad things happen to you.
You get that report from the doctor of the disease or the illness, whatever it might
be, that relationship with friend or family or spouse, whatever it is, it's just not healing.
It's not getting any better.
That job that you thought you had, it didn't pan out the way that you hoped it would.
You move to a new place and all the hopes and the dreams that you thought you had, it
doesn't seem to be coming to fruition because the brook is drying up.
That's what happened to Elijah.
He was right where God sent him and the brook dried up.
That sometimes happens to us, but notice what happens in the very next verse, verse 8.
Verse King 17 and verse 8.
It says, then the word of the Lord came to him.
It's not going right.
The brook is drying up.
There's nothing to drink even though he's exactly where God said.
So he's in this tough situation, but he begins to see that God had not abandoned him.
God had not forsaken him.
Even in a dry and dusty desert, the word of the Lord again came to Elijah.
We see that in verse 8.
We see verse 5, he did according to the word of the Lord.
Verse 2, the word of the Lord came to him.
When he's in the man of action, God's word is coming to him.
When he's in this place of waiting, things are drying up.
God is still with him.
We recognize that God remains with us.
Let's turn over to Isaiah.
Keep your finger on Kings.
We're going to come back to it.
We're going to look at two passages in Isaiah that are very close together.
Isaiah 44 and verse 3 is where we'll go first.
Isaiah 44 and verse 3.
Notice God says, I will pour water on him who is thirsty and floods on the dry ground.
And then it says, I will pour my spirit on your descendants and my blessing on your offspring.
So God's not just talking about physical water, a brook flowing, the faucet that we turn on,
the H2O that we need to live.
Yes, he's going to pour that out, but it also says, I'm going to pour spiritual blessings.
I'm going to pour my spirit.
When you're hungering and thirsting for righteousness, God has promised to pour his spirit upon each
one of us.
When we think we're in a dry and dusty place, God is going to pour his spirit upon us.
Now look back, just one chapter, Isaiah 43 and verse 1 and following.
It says, but now, thus says the Lord who created you, O Jacob, and he who has formed you, O
Israel, fear not, fear not, for I have redeemed you.
I have called you by your name.
You are mine.
Notice the next verse.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you and through the rivers, they shall
not overflow you.
And when you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned, nor shall the flame scorch
you for I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.
God has promised that he is going to be with us even when it seems as if we are in a desert,
even when it seems as if our brook is dry drying up.
If there's a flood, if there's a fire, God is with you.
When we're in action, God is with you.
When we are in a time of waiting, God is with you.
God is going to be the protection, the shade over us to protect us and to keep us safe.
There's a gentleman named Rudy Bouvet and he owns a restaurant in California and it's
a restaurant called Le Great Outdoors.
Yes, it's actually L.E., Le Great Outdoors.
And when these fires begin to blaze, he began to wonder, what can I do to help?
So he called in all of his cooks and they began cooking breakfast burritos, sandwiches,
rice and chicken, whatever they could make.
And they said, we've got to get this food to people that need it.
People in the community realized what they were doing and began to donate money to help
provide this.
Okay, we've got the food, now what?
So these employees, they put these foods in containers into their backpacks and they jumped
onto mountain bikes and they began to ride to where the firefighters were stationed,
where they had their camps, where they were taking care of fighting the fires.
And so Rudy and his team began to provide this food to those who were helping, those
who were in need.
The next day, they're like, bikes aren't getting us far enough, so people brought their motorcycles
and they put the food on their backs and drove it to where these first responders were helping.
And then in his restaurant, as money began to come in, he continues to provide free food
to first responders and to the thousands who have had to evacuate from the fires.
Even in a tragic situation, there can be blessings of hope and pictures of God at work.
And that's exactly what happened in the story of Elijah.
As the ground is drying up, as the brook dries up, as we go back to first Kings, we see what
the word of God told Elijah to do.
And we're not going to get into this whole story, but verse nine, then the word of the
Lord came to him saying, verse nine, arise and go to Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon
and dwell there.
See I have commanded a widow there to provide for you.
So he sends Elijah to this pagan nation, the nation of Sidon.
Who did we say was from Sidon, the daughter of the King of Sidon?
Queen Jezebel, wicked Queen Jezebel, who's leading God's people away from the God of
truth.
And yet God sends Elijah to a widow, to an old lady in, I don't know if she's old because
she's got a younger child, but a widow in Sidon in that same land, in that same region
to provide for him.
And if you want a little reading assignment for this afternoon, read that story because
that woman says, yeah, I'll give you some food.
It's the very last food that we have before we're about to starve.
She provides for Elijah, but God provides for that widow and they're able to survive
the rest of that drought and other miracles take place as well.
But you can read that story.
God sends his word to Elijah and provides for him through providing for this widow.
Wherever you are, remember that God is there.
God will provide.
If you're in a season of life where you are in action serving God, God's with you.
But maybe you're in a season of life where you're waiting and you don't like it and
you're tired of it and you're getting bad news.
You can recognize that God is with you even in that circumstance.
Now I got to come back to this story that we started with because Pacific Palisades
were on fire.
Aaron and his 83 year old father-in-law, Ron, were evacuating.
The car door came where Andrew was and said, get in the car.
He took them to safety.
But there's one other aspect of this story because Aaron, the young man and the driver
of the car, Andrew, they exchanged contact information.
They texted a few days later and they realized that both of those homes had been destroyed
by the fires.
Both of them had been burned.
But Andrew, along with his text, he sent a picture.
I'm not sure if you can see that clearly, but there's two cats and behind the bed there's
a dog.
He sent that picture.
He said, yes, my home burned down, but the cats are safe.
The dog is alive.
And then he said this, it's a glimmer of hope among the ashes.
Neighbors had come and saved these pets at the same time he was saving the life of someone
else.
Neighbors had come and made a difference and given a glimmer of hope among the ashes.
And we may think that our world isn't ashes, but we can remember those verses that say,
fear not, for I am with you.
And if you're in a season of drought, God is with you.
And if you're in a season of action, God is with you.
And we can remember and recognize that no matter what is going on, God is with us and
he takes care of us.
Let's bow our heads for a prayer.
Dear God, an opening story here about an incredible person who stood up for you, even as the nation
around him was moving in a different direction, moving away from God.
That one man, Elijah, was willing to speak truth into the world around him.
And you were with him when things were going good and you were with him when for a moment
things were going bad.
And we recognize that you are active in each one of our life as well.
Be with us, guide us, help us to live for you.
In your name we pray.