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Elijah on fire for God - Breakdown
you can hear a MP3 recording of sermon here
1 Kings 19
Sunday, 2nd December, 2012

 READ 1 Kings 19

 

 This is the hero of Carmel! He has just been the prophet as God demonstrated his awesome power. Three years without rain because God says so, a God who ignites an offering on an altar, an intense fire, the overthrow and death  of the prophets of Baal and Asherah,  seeing God bring rain, outrunning Ahab to Jezreel.

 

 But he is still a man, physically and emotionally exhausted.

 

He is afraid: It may seem strange to us, but a warrant for Elijah, dead, definitively not alive, was a real threat. He was in Jezreel, among the supporters of Ahab and the ‘trying to be in Jezebel’s good books’ people. But he is forgetting that God has kept him safe for three years, in spite of Ahab and the Interpol of the day. When you are depressed, it is difficult to know who is on your side. Tolkien comments that a retreating army counts its dead twice and its enemy three times.  Every passerby in Jezreel became a potential assassin. So he ran for a hiding place.

 

 He is tired: In the last few days he has crossed Israel from Sidon to Jezreel, Jezreel to Carmel and run from Carmel. Even a marathon man would find that demanding! Tiredness saps more than our physical energy, it saps our very spirit. A tired man has more to fear, the future looks hopeless. Get this: We make much of those that wait upon the Lord renew their strength, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint. And as we have seen in Elijah’s case that was true to this very point of time. But he needed to wait on the Lord. And he could not do that in Jezreel. He needed a quiet place, without distraction, and the deserts around Israel were quiet place. However, he ran south rather than East or North which doubled the journey!

 

He is lonely.  Now if you stopped Elijah and said to him, actually you are not alone, there’s your friend Obadiah to start with. Then he has hidden a hundred prophets of Yahweh and  you have a good friend or two in Sidon, he would say “ But I am lonely”. It is very hard when we are depressed to see the good things that we have. Our minds concentrate on the bad. And friends reminding us of what we have merely annoy us! We don’t actually want encouragement, we want, well that is the problem, we don’s actually know what we want or how to get it.

He is hungry: He has not eaten for some time. Your Tennis players need a banana every other game or so, cyclists have support cars and pockets full of goodies, marathon runners have special drink to fortify them. Elijah is travelling light and dare not stop in a village in case he is murdered for the bounty on his life! He is hungry!

He has lost the plot:  It may seem odd but Carmel disappears from his thinking. The three years he was watchman of God’s promise not to bring rain are forgotten, the Ravens and the widow of Zarepheth do not add up, the victory of Carmel seems to lead nowhere. He has lost hope and he cannot see God is working.

So he is depressed! We all struggle from time to time with depression, some more than others. And we react to it quite differently too. Some bury themselves is self-pity, others bury themselves in activity.  Elijah does both! It is not wrong to be depressed. But what we need is to wait on the Lord, we need, like Elijah to follow the steps God provides to release us from being overwhelmed.

 

 God deals with each aspect of his depression in order of urgency. A hungry man is depressed by the lack of sugar in his blood stream. But Elijah is hungry and tired.  Exhausted God lets him sleep, then wakes him and  feeds him and then lets him sleep again! Then he wakes and feeds him again. This may not sound particularly a spiritual activity but God is holistic and cares for Elijah as a person. Which is why the next step is not to deal with the depression but to give him real distance from the threat of Jezebel.  God deals with his fear, not by dismissing it but by helping him get to a place of safety. To Horeb or Sinai, the mountain of God.

Then Elijah has a nights rest.

 

God has tackled the hunger, the tiredness and the fear. Now he ready to talk to Elijah because Elijah is ready to talk to God.

 

Deal with the physical symptoms. Eat some good wholesome food, get some sleep, sometimes your doctor will proscribe a sleeping pill or too just to get you over the exhaustion. Get some exercise. Getting your blood flowing through your body is good for the body and the brain and so it is good for your soul. That means forcing yourself to go for a walk, because you still feel tired. But start small, a walk round the block,  and build up the exercise day by day. Exercise is good for you! You don’t have to run a marathon or cross Israel, but get that heart pumping!

 

God is ready to talk to Elijah because Elijah is ready to talk to God.

First he asks Elijah to tell what he is doing there.

  Talking is good because it allows us to marshal our thoughts and rationalize what we are thinking. That is not to say, what Elijah says is correct. But he now is facing up to his situation. He has already moved from ‘take my life’ to ‘the situation is hopeless’

 

I want you to notice that God never argues with Elijah. The whole of the demonstration of himself does not change Elijah’s summary one bit. What changes is that Elijah sees that God is in all this.

 

The summary

10 He replied, “I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, broken down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too.”

 

The response of God

 

Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. 12After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. 13When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.

 

To often we imagine that God is going to ride in on the clouds in spectacular Hollywood style. Elijah had just witnessed God like that at Carmel. But he does not often deal with us that way. It is not in the dramatic events that God speaks.  But in a gentle whisper. And if I drop my voice, what do you say” Speak up , I can’t hear you!” We treat God the same way. We want him to shout out loud because them we feel we would be persuaded to change. But God speaks in a gentle whisper. Wycliffe translates this as

And after the fire is an hissing of thin wind, or breathing softly; there is the Lord.

 

The AV : a still small voice.

The Message:  a gentle and quiet whisper

The Living Bible: there was the sound of a gentle whisper.

Are you listening? Or are you expecting God to shout, and do spectacular things? God wants you to listen to the quiet voice, your friend telling you that you need to turn from your sin and receive his love and forgiveness. Perhaps he is saying to you that you need to obey him in publicly identifying yourself as his child by being baptised. Perhaps he wants you to change your life-style and follow him. In the Bible Jesus is described in these words.

Isaiah 42:1-4

 “Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen one in whom I delight;
I will put my Spirit on him,
and he will bring justice to the nations.
2 He will not shout or cry out,
or raise his voice in the streets.
3 A bruised reed he will not break,
and a smouldering wick he will not snuff out.
In faithfulness he will bring forth justice;
4 he will not falter or be discouraged
till he establishes justice on earth.
In his teaching the islands will put their hope.”

 

These are repeated in Matthew 12:18-21, which we discussed the other week under the heading “the Lord of the Sabbath.”

 

After this great demonstration God repeats his question:

 

“What are you doing here, Elijah?”

Elijah repeats his answer. The circumstances have not changed,

The summary repeated

 

14 He replied, “I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, broken down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too.”

 

But Elijah has got his head round what God is and is ready to go on, regardless of the risks of following God – he was still a wanted man and will be more so when he carries out his instructions, but Jezebel is no longer able to assert power over him. He has confidence in God. God who listens to him and speaks back quietly rather than blasting him. God who will triumph over Benhadad and Ahab, the ruling evil powers of the day.

 

The next steps.

 

The loneliness is met with two things.  One go and anoint Elisha which directly affects Elijah, he will have a companion. This is the gentle touch. The one man against the crowds of Baal and Asherah followers is given an assistant and a successor. God is not disappeared off  screen, he is fully in the picture, planning his next moves. God counters Elijah’s cry

I am the only one left

with Elisha, The second, less significant but also there to encourage Elijah, is that there are 7000 who have not bowed to Baal. You notice that now, Elijah can accept this, whereas before he would not have. God’s revelation as a quiet whisper has transformed Elijah for good.

 

 Secondly God tasks Elijah. He is not left inactive on the side-lines. Far from it, his next step is even more subversive than all he had done before.

 

15 The Lord said to him, “Go back the way you came, and go to the Desert of Damascus. When you get there, anoint Hazael king over Aram. 16 Also, anoint Jehu son of Nimshi king over Israel, and anoint Elisha son of Shaphat from Abel Meholah to succeed you as prophet.

 

Samuel before him had a similar task, to anoint the next king while the current king is still in power. Both Hazeal of Aram and Jehu od Israel as Benhadad was king of Aram and Ahab of Isreal. Hold on , Aram’s not even part of the children of Israel! God appoints all leaders, David Cameron needs to remember that, so does all those who have ambitions for power. The normal rules of succession and democracy only apply as a nation seeks to appoint godly people. You always get the government you deserve. That is quite frightening in this day and age but God, I believe, works through the democratic process just as he did and does through succession and violent overthrow.

But Jehu, king of Israel is no son of Ahab.  The monarchy of  Jeroboam, son of Nebat, his son Nadab, stopped when Baasha annihilated Jeroboam’s family. Baasha’s line was Elah, Zimri, Omri, Ahab, Ahaziah, and was brought to an end by Jehu. That did not happen until after Elijah had been taken up into heaven by the original chariots of fire and Elisha had been involved in rescuing Samaria from Ben Hadad, who was eliminated by guess who Hazeal, of course. Elijah was commanded to go and anoint for the future. This passage puts Elisha, the man of God, the prophet, on the level of significance as the appointment of a king. Your calling is no less a calling than the Prime Minister or even the new Archbishop of Canterbury. Your witness is as significant in God’s eyes because he is a God who is known as a gentle whisper, not an all-singing, all dancing, nuclear armed leader.

 

This is real history but it is also an important guide to depression and how to overcome it. Listen to the steps, but most of all, listen for God. Not the explosive violent raw power but for the gentle whisper . IT may take some time before we get in tune with the voice because we are too busy complaining and demanding our way, but we need to calm down before God and give time for us to hear. God is speaking, are you listening?

 

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