Welcome to Walk in the Truth podcast.
This season of messages takes us through some of the great comeback stories in the Bible.
Pastor John Metter of Cross City Church will show us how God can take any situation in
any life and bring hope and victory out of hardship.
These messages will inspire you to trust God in your own challenging seasons.
So glad you're with us this morning and today if you have your Bibles, turn to 1 Kings chapter
19 verse 1, 1 Kings chapter 19.
The title of the message today is Out of Darkness, Light.
And today we want to walk with you through what it means to come out of a time of darkness,
a time of depression, discouragement, whatever it might be that constitutes the darkness
in your life to the light that God has for you no matter how difficult your challenge
has been or how difficult your struggle has been, God has light for you.
Today is a very serious moment as we talk about a very serious subject in 1 Kings chapter
19.
Now, when we read this passage in just a few moments, we'll be reading about the character
named Elijah, a great prophet of God in the Old Testament who actually had an incredible
experience that brought him from darkness to light.
We'll talk about how he got there and how he got out and how God rescued him.
But it's a very personal message for me because seven years into my marriage, my wife and
I, Kim, experienced what we would call the dark night of the soul.
That's a phrase that we later learned.
We didn't really know what to call it at the time, but by any other definition, it would
have been great discouragement, great depression was happening in her life.
And of course, I share all this with Kim's permission because she wants this story to
be told.
It's not just a story of darkness and difficulty, but it's a story of victory as well because
this story really, really ends well, just like Elijah's story ends well.
But we were in our 20s.
This was some 35 plus years ago.
We were in our 20s and I was pastoring a church in Oklahoma.
We had two children and one more on the way.
And I can remember coming back from work in the afternoon and opening the front door.
There was a stairway as you opened the front door immediately on the inside.
And I can remember coming home and seeing her seated on those stairs, crying, weeping,
and not really being able to tell me why she was crying, not really being able to say this
is what caused it or that's what caused it.
But as we began to talk during that period of time, she expressed that she had feelings
of isolation and worthlessness.
She felt like she was a failure in so many different ways.
She even felt a mental impulse that told her to run away and even at times a suicidal thought
would come into her mind that was compelling in so many different ways.
And we knew of no counselors.
I didn't really have any training in knowing exactly how to deal with that.
We were young.
We had no one we knew that could help us with this.
We were unprepared in almost every way a person can be unprepared to deal with that kind of
emotional trauma.
And it was perplexing.
It was perplexing because we had a great relationship with each other.
We were young in marriage.
We had already made it through the first seven years of our marriage, which we call the seven
years of tribulation in another story.
We're on the other side of that.
We were doing pretty well.
Tim comes from an incredible family background.
She's the most vibrant young woman I've ever met in my life.
In college I saw her in her spiritual walk and thought, wow, how did you know so much
about the Lord at such a young age in life?
And she's still that way.
So we had stable family.
We had friends all around us.
Nothing was going on at church that was wrong.
Nothing was going on in home necessarily that was wrong.
And yet we were grappling with that depression and we had no idea how our story would end.
We didn't know what the future held.
So often it's true when we tell stories about moving from darkness to light, there's a two-word
phrase we use often because it's true and it's the word, but God.
And I love that phrase.
And the reason I identify so well with a phrase like that is because there have been a lot
of moments in my life that I had to say, but God.
But God had a word, but God had a plan, but God had a way.
And this was one of those stories where we saw God come in amazing ways.
I still remember us without knowing really any other thing that we could do, getting
down on our knees in front of this old family couch that we had in that first home we had
in Oklahoma and just pouring our heart out to God.
And as we poured our heart out to Him, He began to bring us slowly encouragement, isolated
incidences that we could only say God spoke through them, and characters in the scripture
that God would speak to us through.
And Elijah is one of those characters that over that period of time began to intersect
with our life in such a big way.
And that's why I associate so much about what we've gone through with the life of Elijah.
So we're gonna pick up the story of Elijah's life in chapter 19.
That chapter 18 is really the pinnacle of his ministry.
Many of you have heard about Mount Carmel where Elijah called down fire from heaven in this
huge confrontation with all these false prophets of veil, and he the one man representing the
God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
So there he is on Mount Carmel and he gets this incredible victory that we'll talk about
in just a few moments.
And after that great mountaintop victory, chapter 19 is the next day and the next few
hours of his life, and we would call that the valley period of his life.
First Kings chapter 19, we'll stand together as I read just four verses here and then we'll
cover many other verses in chapter 19 in just a few moments.
Now Ahab told Jezebel, Ahab's the king, all that Elijah had done and how he had killed
all the prophets with the sword.
Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah saying, so may the gods do to me and even more if
I do not make your life as the life of one of them by tomorrow at this time.
In other words, it's a death threat from a woman, a queen who can carry this out.
And he was afraid and arose and ran for his life and came to Beersheba, which belongs
to Judah and left his servant there.
But he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness and came down and sat under a juniper
tree and he requested for himself that he might die.
And he said, it is enough now, O Lord, take my life for I am not better than my father's.
We'll stop there.
Father, we want to thank you for amazing crystal clear examples in the scripture like this
man Elijah that show us what it means to walk through darkness and yet show us what it means
to see light on the other side of that.
And Lord, we desperately need the encouragement of knowing that there is light on the other
side of difficult times.
And I pray today that you will speak in a supernatural way for each of us in this room,
especially those walking through darkness.
We ask all this in Jesus name we pray and all God's people said, amen.
Please be seated if you would.
Elijah is one of my sequel heroes in the Bible.
I mean, this guy was incredible in so many different ways.
Obviously a prophet from God, he was a man that spoke for God.
In fact, the phrase most often associated with the man Elijah is at the word of the
Lord, quote unquote.
In other words, just about everything Elijah did, he proceeded by saying at the word of
the Lord.
He would prophesy and then afterwards he would sometimes say at the word of the Lord.
Now that was the job of a prophet obviously, but Elijah was known for that phrase over
and over throughout all his earthly ministry.
He was a biblical hero because he was a compassionate prophet too.
Not all the prophets in the Bible seem to be very compassionate at all, but Elijah performed
many miracles including raising the little girl from the dead.
Many of those miracles like that show a compassionate side from this giant prophet of God in the
Old Testament.
He's also this heroic, bold confronter on Mount Carmel.
If you've ever been to Mount Carmel, it is a mountaintop looking off into the valley
that extends all the way to Megiddo.
Really it's the first part of the valley of Armageddon and where the great battle someday
will be fought.
But it's a massive, massive scale mountain, massive valley and you feel very small up
on that mountaintop and I can just imagine Elijah confronting 850 prophets of Baal.
They did their best to make their gods try to show up, but of course they never did.
Elijah took the altar and the wood on the altar, made it wet, called down fire from
the God of heaven and of course fire came down and consumed the altar.
It was an amazing moment, but it wasn't just that.
He also took all 850 prophets and took them down to the Brook Kishon, probably hundreds
of yards down from the mountainside and slew them at the Brook Kishon.
Now that is the picture of a pretty remarkable, supernaturally enabled prophet.
You can think through any of the ethical complications of him slaying those false prophets, but that's
exactly what he did.
And it angered Ahab and Jezebel.
He's this great prophet, compassionate, bold, and he's also a great prophet in that he heard
from God and spoke for God.
In fact, the Bible says in James chapter 5 that he was a man of like nature as we are
and yet when he prayed for it not to rain for three and a half years on the earth, it
did not rain for three and a half years and then at the word of the Lord he was told to
pray for rain again and the rain came after three and a half years.
That's a pretty strong prayer life if you haven't thought through that.
Pretty strong prayer life.
Everything he did was at the word of the Lord.
A man of God.
He's a man on the mountaintop.
He's a man that knew the Lord.
And you have to ask the question, he's got it all together, right?
And the answer would be no, he doesn't have it all together because he moves from that
mountaintop experience into that valley.
Nobody's bulletproof.
Nobody can live through life without being hurt and harmed and nobody can live through
life without going through some dark times and some difficult times, some discouraging
times and yet often some times that are absolutely filled with depression.
That's just what life is.
And we all have emotions and we usually have emotions in a really healthy range and sometimes
they get blown way out of proportion and we're in that same kind of spot where he is.
And when you look at the life of Elijah you can learn a great deal about how to handle
those exhilarating times and how to handle those difficult times.
In fact, his life will inform us about how he got in the valley and then what he did
in the valley and how God brought him out of the valley.
Now that's how I want to break this message down today to you as we walk through the first
four verses and then later on the rest of chapter 19.
But first of all I want you to see that Elijah's experience teaches us to, number one, understand
the battle of darkness.
And I'll spend a good bit of time on this.
As you read those first four verses you can see where he's going and as you detail through
the story you can see he's running a gauntlet, what I call a gauntlet.
Anybody know what the word gauntlet means?
Raise your hand if you know what a gauntlet is.
Not a lot of us in the room know that.
My high school football coach told me what a gauntlet was.
He had this football drill called the gauntlet.
If you didn't do well in your football game on Friday night he would put certain players
on the gauntlet.
That means that you're at the goal line and you have to run to the other goal line but
he would also place at 10 yard intervals the strongest tacklers on the team, usually one,
maybe two tacklers on each 10 yard line sequence.
And you would have to run all through those guys in order to get to the other end of the
goal as punishment, this was punitive, punishment for not doing really well at the previous
football game.
You only wanted to have to do that once in your lifetime.
And I had to do it several times that season.
So you'd run 10 yards and make a little progress and then two guys would tackle you and knock
you to the ground and you had to get up and do it again.
When you do that 10 times you are worn out.
Now the word gauntlet is not a phrase that usually is used for something that easy.
It's usually something far more difficult.
A gauntlet literally means a brutal punishment or a trial.
It's severe, it's painful.
It's nearly unsurvivable.
And I call what Elijah went through a gauntlet in life.
He was hit in at least six different areas, in areas that nearly took him out.
This great man of God beaten back and forth by these six things that are pointed out very
clearly in scripture and let me give them to you today.
Number one, emptiness in his life, emptiness in his life.
Verse one of chapter 19 tells us that he's just come off the mountain top experiences
and having given all he's now on the downside of the mountain.
Even the conversation between Ahab and Jezebel focus on all Elijah had done.
That's in verse one.
And if you begin to look at all Elijah had done it's really incredible, really amazing
how he had such incredible strength to do what he did, such incredible faith to call
out to God the way he did and to trust God for that great victory, that fire coming down
from heaven.
And now he's the talk of the nation because of that, but he doesn't know what's next.
He's completed this huge victory, this huge task that God gave him and he's had a pause
in his life and it's really a time to be wary.
Most of us would say who have been through dark times, the most interesting thing and
probably the most frightening thing about dark times is they often come after high times,
bright times, times where you have great victory.
Man, when you've had great victory you need to be wary of what the next day holds.
You just never know.
Because if you're still in that celebrating mode you may not be ready for the opposition
that you face the very next day.
And this is a time where he's experiencing a variety of emotions.
He's thrilled that God worked in a supernatural way, but he's very aware that Ahab and Jezebel
are still there.
As we read later on, he's very aware also that he's one man and there are so many, so
many people against him.
There is a man that's facing some emptiness.
He doesn't know what's next.
If this doesn't do it, what will?
I mean, if you call down fire from heaven and God sends it and 850 prophets of Baal
are slaughtered at the brook by your hand and that's not enough, well, what is enough?
So he's in that place of emptiness.
Now I'm going to make a kind of a transition to our lives.
We are given purpose, called to purpose, and when we don't have purpose darkness is the
only destination we're moving for.
And yet we have incredible purpose that God has for us.
He calls us.
He saves us.
He's got a mission for us to be on and we have to know those things to stay on track.
So first of all, there's emptiness in his life.
Number two, opposition.
We've already alluded to that.
The Bible says that Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah.
Now you would think that this great victory of Mount Carmel will silence Jezebel, but
she's a raging bulldog of a woman.
Anybody that knows anything about Jezebel knows that she's used to getting her way and
that she's going to try to do it again.
She's wicked, wicked, wicked in every way.
That's why none of you name your daughters Jezebel.
There's a reason for that.
And if anybody did, see me after the service.
Spiritual war is happening too.
Not only is this physical confrontation taking place, but spiritual war is happening.
The forces of darkness are not glad about Elijah's prophetic victory on Mount Carmel,
which has really begun to turn the hearts of Israel back to God.
After all, how can the typical Israelite not want to worship God when God sends down fire
from heaven through his prophet and accomplishes all that was accomplished on Mount Carmel?
Now the people are ready for revival.
Now they want to come back to God because God has showed up in a big way.
So spiritual war is going on, those that would hold back the people from worshiping God have
now been activated.
So Elijah has been obedient, the enemy is defeated, Satan is angry, there's opposition.
That's true of any walk, spiritually speaking, in the Christian life as well.
You obey God, you follow God, you do what God wants you to do.
There's going to be spiritual opposition as sure as you're on this planet and Satan is
still alive.
There's going to be opposition.
Thirdly, there was fearfulness.
The Bible says in verse 3, and he was afraid and arose and ran for his life.
Literally, the distance between where he started and where he ended was 100 miles.
Now today that's called an ultra marathoner.
So Elijah, which did not train for the ultra marathon, ran for 100 miles, doing his best
to get away from Jezebel.
I want you to just imagine what's going on for just a moment.
In fact, my first thought when I first read this passage years ago was, what?
Why would a man that was not afraid of 850 false prophets of Baal on the mountain, not
afraid to take the sword against all those gods, why would he be afraid to run from one
woman?
And I confess I don't have the answer to that.
It's perplexing that he would do what he was doing, but maybe he forgot who was on his
side and he was only seeing he was not on his side.
After all, the God who gives us victory on the mountaintop is the same God that gives
us victory in the valley, right?
He's the same God.
He wasn't thinking along those lines.
As a matter of fact, fear got the best of Elijah at that moment, and I can't imagine
anything else that would make him run 100 miles, and fear gets the best of us, and we
do unimaginable things because we're afraid.
And we're worried, we're filled with anxiety, we're paralyzed in our thinking.
And this man is frozen into one thought, Jezebel is coming and I am running, and nobody's even
there yet.
He's just running even though the threat's been made.
She's not there.
He is fearful, fearful.
Number four, there's loneliness.
The Bible says in verse three, and he left his servant there.
Bad move.
All Elijah has left is the echo chamber of his fearful mind.
There's no encouragement, there's no counsel, there's no other perspective, there's no objective
opinion.
Let me just say, as we talk about this gauntlet that leads us down to darkness, at times like
this, we need people to correct our way of thinking.
We need somebody else to speak into our mind and speaking to our life and our thought life.
Don't create loneliness for yourself when you really need somebody else around you.
The Bible says it's not good for man to be alone, and that's not just a marital context.
It's not good for any of us to be totally alone, especially when we're in darkness.
We need our people.
I love the Old Testament because it marks for us all that God did in the sense of the
children of Israel.
And if you were a follower of God in the Old Testament era, Old Testament time, you were
in Israelite, you were part of the Hebrew people, you were part of the children of God,
and He was your Father and you were His child.
And if you come to faith in Jesus Christ in this New Testament era, God is your Father
and we are your people.
The Church of Jesus is your people.
We are part of the family of God, we're part of the army of God, we're part of the body
of Christ.
We're your people.
And yet so often today, those who descend into darkness do it by themselves without
their people speaking into their lives and the godly counsel that others can give you
and the encouragement and the objective viewpoint that other people can give you.
Look for your people.
And also as a God follower, look for the people that need you to be in their lives.
Look around for those that are withdrawing.
Find out why they're running into the wilderness.
Are they hiding?
Are they hurting?
Are they running?
Find out by running after them.
Call them.
Shoot them a text.
Run into them conveniently.
And have a conversation with them and say, are you doing all right?
How is your life?
How is your heart?
How is your thinking?
He was filled with loneliness.
The next thing we see is that He is weary.
He is feeling the weariness of His whole exertion.
The Bible says He went another day's journey into the wilderness, so He's run 100 miles
one day and then He runs another distance into the wilderness, a day's journey.
He doesn't have benefit of any animals that we know about.
Uber has not been invented yet.
He's just running.
He's exhausted.
He's got no way to replenish His energy.
He's hungry.
He's angry.
And I would just say to you today, these five things that I've already named are serving
as a warning for us if you are descending into darkness, if you struggle with depression,
if you see things around you in a dark way and you struggle with thinking clearly, don't
go to these places by yourself.
Don't do it.
These are the downward steps that He took into darkness.
And we have this life lived out in just four verses to help us know this is how He got
to the bottom because verse four says, I'm ready to give up God.
Well, how did He get there?
Well, we've just seen those four or five ways already.
All the things He did so far lead to hopelessness, which is number six.
He says in verse four, it is enough now, oh Lord, take my life.
That's a very spiritual way of saying I give up.
I give up.
And I can tell you that when you walk into darkness, at some point you have to confess,
I'm empty, I'm fearful, I'm lonely, I don't know what the answers are, but I need you,
God.
Now, Elijah is physically incapacitated, but he's also mentally and spiritually wasted.
He's thinking his life is over.
He's comparing himself to his father's and he's thinking radical and permanent thoughts
about a very temporary problem.
My wife and I were talking about this the other day and she was reading a book and in
the book there's a line that says, your life is not negative, but your thinking is.
And I apply that to Elijah.
His life was not negative, but his thinking was.
In fact, when we look back at the life of Elijah, man, it's mountaintop all the way.
I mean, you don't raise people from the dead.
You don't speak a word from God so powerfully.
You don't have victory on Mount Carmel without getting a really big reputation.
Elijah here, except for this one moment, it's not that his life is negative, it's his thinking
that's negative at this moment and it brings him almost to the end.
So here he is and he's talking to God.
Now to his credit, he is speaking these words to God, not himself.
It is enough now, oh Lord, take my life.
It's different from saying, I will take my life.
When you feel that dark, that far away from God, and you're saying words like that, you
say them to God.
Lord, if you want me to be gone, you take my life.
But don't say, I will take my life.
He's speaking to God, but he's in great pain.
See, as Lewis said this, mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it's more
common and it's harder to bear.
And that's absolutely true.
Nobody knows on the outside that you're going through mental pain the way they might if
you're going through physical pain.
It's private, but it's prevalent.
It's there.
You know what it looks like.
You know what it feels like.
And it happens at every strata of the Christian life or life in general.
A few years ago, Jared Wilson was very prominent on social media because of his outstanding
ministry to people that were walking through darkness.
He was a pastor of Harvest Fellowship in Tennessee.
He was an author.
He was only 30 years old.
He was married, had two kids, and he had dealt with depression for so long that he had begun
to figure it out just a bit.
And he had a podcast called Anchor of Hope, which was a chat line and a podcast for those
that struggled.
And in some of the last words that he ever uttered, he said this on social media, loving
Jesus doesn't always cure suicidal thoughts.
It doesn't always cure depression.
Loving Jesus doesn't always cure PTSD.
Loving Jesus does not always cure anxiety, but that doesn't mean that Jesus doesn't
offer us companionship and comfort.
Doesn't mean that he's not there.
He always provides what we need.
And he knew this in his mind.
And yet still, he ended his life.
And many people would call him a spiritual champion.
Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in America, and it's declining.
The top five reasons for suicide are given to be number one, relational problems.
Number two, a crisis that surrounds us.
Number three, substance abuse.
Number four, physical health.
And number five, job financial problems are looming.
Now that's an old study.
Recently I did some updating of my statistics with depression and found some pretty amazing
stats I'm gonna share with you.
When it comes to depression and social media and the pandemic, in recent studies, all studies
show a dramatic increase in depressive symptoms due to social media.
Listen to this, suicide rates of the ages 10 to 24 year olds increased by 57% from 2007
to 2017, which was the predominant years of social media growth, particularly social media
that was in video form like TikTok videos and so forth.
Adult depressive symptoms increased from 8.5% in 2018 to 32% in more recent years after
the pandemic.
So you've got two big things going on in people's lives today.
Number one, social media.
Number two, the pandemic.
Both of them contribute to isolation.
We don't have people speaking into our lives, at least not healthy voices.
We're not around people who can see that we're hurting.
We don't have anything sometimes to pull us out of those dark moments.
One of the most recent surveys I read said that in 2023, the number of people reporting
anxiety or repressive disorders are continuing to skyrocket.
32% of all adults report some anxiety or depressive disorder.
It's highest among the 18 to 24 year old age group.
Those that are most immersed in social media, it's 49.9%.
Between 25 and 49, it's 38%.
Between 50 and 64, it's 29%.
65 and plus 20%.
The COVID pandemic affected 50% of the population and they said it was the worst pandemic ever.
And yet those are the same rates that anxiety and depressive disorders are happening in
people between 18 and 24 years of age today by latest studies.
Wow.
We live in a messed up world.
We live in a world that is increasingly isolated and increasingly doesn't know how to corrupt
thinking that was put in their minds by who knows what.
It's a problem.
And yet we have this Old Testament biblical character that walked through some of the
same kinds of things that people are going through today.
Now this message is not a campaign against social media necessarily, although I hope
it opens eyes to some of these things.
But this is a message that deals with how God works in our lives when things get dark.
So the first thing is be aware of the darkness.
Number two, look for messengers of hope and light.
The Bible says he laid down and slept under a juniper tree and behold there was an angel
touching him and he said to him, arise and eat.
Messengers of hope and light.
Now he was a day's journey into the wilderness.
He left his servant a day's journey away.
He's all by himself and yet God sends somebody to be with him and that somebody is an angel.
And all of a sudden there's food and water and the Bible says he eats and he drinks and
then he rests and then he gets up and eats and drinks again.
I mean there's some significant things happening here in this interaction.
And I want you just to think about it with me for just a moment.
The presence of an angel is simple but profound.
And intervention is happening that helps Elijah get physically ready to move from hopelessness
to God.
It doesn't solve all of his problems but it starts to solve some of them and it's instructional
for us.
And here's what the instruction is.
There is something we can do in the darkness that will help us out of the darkness.
The detailed instructions in verses five and six are pretty clear as you read through that.
Here's what the angel gave them in verse six.
He looked and behold there was at his head a bread cake baked on hot stones and a jar
of water.
He drank and lay down again, touched him a second time, arise eat because the journey
is too great for you.
He rose and ate and drank and went on the strength of that food for 40 days and 40 nights
to herb the mountain of God.
He's got incredible things happening but among them are taking care of him physically.
He needed to rest.
He needed to be with someone.
He needed to eat.
And I don't want to oversimplify this message or this problem.
There is some supernatural things happening here.
If this is an angel God sent him, Elijah is found in the wilderness.
He does run for 40 days on that food and God is unwilling to leave him alone.
Even if no person comes, God sends this angel there and that's significant.
I noticed several things in the scripture and several people who have been in the wilderness
that God sent an angel to be with them.
God can send to us anyone he wants to but we can also seek rest and seek out others
and eat and drink.
And we also need to be wary when we're in that place of desperation.
A wise mentor told me one time there are things that I should do when I am hungry or tired
or worried or lonely but they shouldn't be decision making and I shouldn't make significant
statements about my future when I'm in that place.
He actually used the word hot as an acrostic and I share it with you today.
When you are hungry, when you are angry, when you are lonely, when you are tired, halt,
stop and rest.
Seek counsel.
Sometimes I just need to do that.
Jordan Peterson he was and has been a great psychologist and counselor but has since come
to Christ it's been quite amazing to watch him talk about the gospels these days.
He shares of counseling a brilliant young woman who was struggling with psychotic behavior,
anxiety disorders and so forth.
She sought him out as a counselor and he began to analyze her life and then he said this,
he said that you should establish a routine and stick with it.
Go to bed and get up at regular times every day.
Eat something when you wake up otherwise you dysregulate your circadian or your 24 hour
rhythms and they regulate your moods.
She took his advice in doing that.
Her anxious thoughts were cured and she moved on in life simply from some things that she
could do.
I'm not saying all you have to do is rest and eat and drink but you need to do that
to take care of your body.
You need to get in a routine where you can have margins in your life.
Seek rest, seek refreshment, seek community.
But above all these things the most important thing that happened to Elijah was he met with
God.
Seek to meet with God.
Now most all the significant encounters in the Bible have three different parts to them.
First of all the personal part that's our dilemma.
Secondly, what everybody else is doing in the picture and thirdly what God says and
having a God moment in your life.
All the other things I've said today are very important but this is the most important one.
Because it's when Elijah meets with God that everything else changes.
Now I know what you're thinking, you're thinking, but that's Elijah.
Now that's thousands of years ago.
God doesn't still meet with people today and you'd be wrong.
It's that wrong kind of thinking you need to correct.
God meets with people today who seek him.
Otherwise he's not a promise keeping God.
Because all through the Bible God makes these promises that he's there when you call out
for him.
Let me just remind you, Psalm 14-2, the Lord has looked down from heaven upon the sons
of men to see if there are any who understand who seek after God.
He's waiting, he's watching.
Pretending to wisdom in the book of Proverbs, I love those who love me and those who seek
me find me.
Hebrews chapter 11 verse 6, and without faith it's impossible, please God, for he who comes
to God must believe that he is and that he is a rewarder of those who seek him.
Come in faith, come asking.
God is there if you're seeking him.
That's why salvation is such an important thing in our life.
We come to God by faith knowing we can do nothing about our future eternity, knowing
that we have to trust him for that.
And when we put our trust and faith in Jesus Christ, he forgives us, promises us eternal
life, comes to dwell inside of our lives by faith and we have something we could never
get on our own.
And we realize man, he really does love me, if he's willing to wipe out all my sins, he's
willing to make for me a place in heaven, he's willing to love me like God the Father loves
and only God the Father can love, he must be trustworthy and we learn that and then
we're called to walk by that same kind of faith in our Christian life.
Just as you've received Christ Jesus the Lord, so also walk in him.
So God is there if you're seeking him.
I'll tell you the one right thing that I know Kim and I did those 37 years ago is to seek
God.
Get on our knees, on that couch and pray and ask God to meet us and ask God to speak to
us.
Seek to meet with God.
Now when you meet with God there are some things that you need to know.
First of all, God ask hard questions.
I love the fact that in this conversation with God, God ask hard questions.
In verse 9 God says, what are you doing here Elijah?
God ask hard questions.
Now this question that God is asking Elijah reminds me of when my dad found me where I
shouldn't be and he said, what are you doing here?
I mean he loved me but he was making the point, you're in the wrong place at the wrong time.
What are you doing here?
I mean you just got off the mountain top right?
Didn't we just have a big victory together?
Didn't I help you with that?
What are you doing here?
All the way in this wilderness, what are you doing here?
You know God ask a lot of questions of a lot of people.
In the Garden of Eden he said to Adam and Eve, where are you?
Or what have you done?
I said, Job, he asked him 60 questions.
Sixty questions.
How would you like to be interrogated by God like that?
Sixty questions.
And one of them was, where were you when I was created?
You're trying to tell me how to do my job.
I'm the one that spoke and the waves come this far and no further because I tell them
to come that far.
God asks questions that make us think and those questions make us stop panicking and
stop evaluating from our perspective.
It takes us off sometimes the emotional mood swings we're on and forces us to look for
logical factual answers to God's questions.
What are you doing here?
And Elijah begins to answer him with this perspective of, you know, there's nobody else
out there.
I'm the only one.
You know, I'm the only one that serves you.
I'm not as good as my father's and you know, Jezebel is going to hurt me, man.
And then God adjusts our perspectives.
Look at verse 11.
He said, Go forth and stand on the mountain before the Lord and behold the Lord was passing
by and a great and strong wind was rending the mountains and breaking in pieces the rocks
before the Lord but the Lord was not in the wind and after the wind and earthquake but
the Lord was not in the earthquake after the earthquake of fire but the Lord was not in
the fire and after the fire the sound of a gentle blowing.
It just kind of helps remind us that God is not always where we think he is but he will
at some point speak.
When Elijah heard this gentle blowing, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out
and stood into the entrance of the cave and behold a voice came to him and said again,
what are you doing there Elijah?
He said, I've been very zealous for the Lord the God of hosts for the sons of Israel have
forsaken your covenant torn down your authors killed your prophets with a sword and I alone
am left and they seek my life to take it away.
He's got self pity.
He's got self piety.
He's the only spiritual one on the planet.
He thinks the whole world is against him.
And what God does is array God's power in front of him array God's glorious power and
remind him that he has a word for him.
It's a profound display of perspective.
Again I'm not trying to minimize all this but the situation that Elijah is in is not
as bad as he thought it was.
God has not deserted him.
Jezebel is not as powerful as he thinks.
The God who is on the mountain is the same God who's in the valley.
We don't have to view our circumstances as circumstances that we have to fix by our own
ability and it's actually a key to changing our thought life instead of our present thoughts
we should say well maybe God has a solution and a plan that I haven't considered yet.
What if he sees something that I can't see?
Maybe we should think like that instead of I'm the only one who's going to kill me God
you can't do anything about it.
It's a change of perspective.
His ways really are higher than ours.
And then finally God gives us next steps.
God gives us next steps.
You know if you're really sensitive then this might be a little brutal.
God does not say to Elijah there now Elijah I know it's hard.
I know it's tough.
I know she's a mean woman.
I know.
He doesn't say that.
He says go return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus and when you have arrived you
shall anoint Haziel king over Aram.
He says the same thing in verse 16 and Jehu the son of Nimshi anoint as king over Israel
and Elijah the son of Shaphat you shall anoint as prophet in your place.
As shall come about the one who escaped from the sword of Haziel Jehu shall put to death
and the one who escaped from the sword of Jehu Elijah shall put to death.
I remember we had a lot of questions when we were walking through the time of darkness
but one of those questions was why?
Why do I feel this way?
Why is it like this?
Or will anything ever change?
But the best question we ask is what are we supposed to do?
God doesn't always answer the why questions.
I've learned that in life.
It's taken a while to learn that.
I've asked why an awful lot and don't get that answer very much from God but God always
answers questions that sound like what now?
You tell me what to do.
Now I'll do that because I want to obey.
And I know Elijah had questions but God literally just says get up and go back to work.
Nothing's changed.
You're just afraid and now you're worn out.
Everything you've done, you've done to yourself.
I have a purpose for you.
Let's go.
And often that means the simplicity of just obeying God from something in the scripture
that he's told you to do.
Sometimes that just means to get up and fulfill your responsibilities which in this case was
Elijah's role as a prophet.
But in any case, God did not necessarily remove Elijah's mental confusion but told him to
act in faith.
Because actions, doing the right thing can sometimes move us out of a languishing, troublesome
moments and move us into a place where we're actually doing what God told us to do and
it's a much better place to be no matter what.
Act your way into obedience.
Don't feel your way into obedience because if you try to feel your way into obedience
you'll never arrive there.
Never arrive there.
As you get to the end of the chapter you'll notice that as Elijah moved forward God did
everything Elijah had hoped for.
Everything he wanted to happen, God did.
There was victory, there was revival, there was a host of faithful worshipers and God
delivered him from his most paralyzing fear.
I have to say this before I get to the end of this.
That is usually the thing we're afraid of the most never happens to us.
That's very often the case.
Now think with me, what was Elijah's greatest fear?
Dying at the hands of Jezebel.
Do you remember how Elijah died?
I preach this message so often you have to know the answer to this.
Elijah didn't die.
Elijah never died.
He was caught up in a whirlwind into heaven.
And on the Mount of Transfiguration he was identified as Elijah and Moses standing next
to the glorified Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration.
In fact he shows up in the book of Revelation as one of the two witnesses walking in the
streets during the tribulation period.
Elijah didn't have anything to worry about at all.
It was Jezebel that needed to be worried.
Sometimes we're just so afraid of so many things.
The picture is so different from what we really think it is.
And to circle back around to the story of Kim and I.
Kim and I experienced a great comeback over depression in the months following those big
battles.
And it doesn't mean the battle is over.
The war is over.
It simply means that things began to make more sense.
And the battle began to be managed at the thought level.
Where we learned to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.
As long as you're on this planet the war is not going to be over.
It's only over when Christ comes back and takes us home.
You're going to be in battle all the days that you're on the planet.
Some of us will battle this.
Some of us will battle that.
But the bottom line is we have to take every thought captive and walk by the truth and
not by any other thing.
We always have to be on guard.
But we're on the winning side of those battles every single day.
Kim and I are and you can be on the winning side of those battles every single day.
And I'm grateful to God.
We're grateful.
There's a verse I want to end with today.
It's in Psalm 23.
And most of us know the 23rd Psalm but there's a verse in there, verse 4.
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil.
For you are with me.
A lot of us walking through the valley today, it might be the valley of the shadow of death,
it might be the valley of discouragement and depression.
God promises to be with us as we walk through that valley and he will be.
Just a moment, we're going to close.
I'll close with a prayer.
We have decision stations that are available for people that want to stop by and talk and
visit and we're happy to pray with you.
We would love to pray with you today.
It might be that you've never taken the step of putting your faith and trust in Jesus as
Lord and Savior.
That's your first walk of faith, your first step of faith.
It's really difficult for you to trust God through dark times if you haven't trusted
him for your eternal security, for your salvation.
So the very first step you take is taking the step to put your faith and trust in Christ
who loves you so much that he died on the cross to pay for our sins.
And he gives you this gift of eternal life.
He comes to dwell inside of your life.
Make that your first decision.
If you haven't made that decision, go quickly to the decision station and say, I need to
make that decision today and we'll help you do that.
You may want to stop by there and say, you know, I've already made that decision, but
I need prayer and we'll pray with you.
That's invitation number one.
Number two, I would love to invite you if you're a guest to our guest reception center
right outside the center exit door across the hallway.
I'll be there, love to visit with you.
Just tell you a little bit about our church and invite you back, of course.
And thirdly, I invite you to invite others to come.
Next week we're looking at the life of David and how he came back from immorality.
You remember the famous David Bathsheba story.
And next week we're going to look at that and how God brought David back from immorality.
Let's stand together in prayer.
Father, thank you so much that you give us your words, which apply so clearly to our
lives in so many different ways.
Today I thank you that Elijah lives out his life in such a way that helps us out of darkness.
Father, my prayer today is that we would find some things to hold onto today, either by
warning as to how he got into that dark period or in way of instruction about how he got
out.
But Lord, in all that, that you would meet with us in our moment of greatest need.
Today in this room there are those who need to trust you for salvation, others who need
to trust you with their everyday life.
But Father, thank you that you're always faithful and that in the end our testimony will be
God walked with me all the way through this.
Thank you Father.
We ask this in Jesus' name.
Amen.