In the Wilderness

God with Us In the Wilderness 1 Kings 19:1-18 Pastor Pat Damiani December 1, 2019 NOTE: This is a manuscript, and not a transcript of this message. The actual presentation of the message differed from the manuscript through the leading of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, it is possible, and even likely that there is material in this manuscript that was not included in the live presentation and that there was additional material in the live presentation that is not included in this manuscript. For this sermon series, I am also indebted to Life Church and Pastor Craig Groeschel, who have provided some of the ideas that shaped this message and who have also provided graphics and other supporting materials at no charge. [Video] Good morning and welcome to week two of our current series – God with Us. For those of you who weren’t with us last week, this series is built on a familiar passage from Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus. Would you read that passage out loud with me? All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel” (which means, God with us). (Matthew 1:22–23 ESV) During this series, we’re looking at different seasons of life and how God is with us during those times. Last week, we discovered that God is with us in the valleys and we developed this main idea: We may enjoy God on the mountaintops, but we get to know Him intimately in the valleys If you missed that message, I want to encourage you to go to the website and watch or listen to it. This week, we’re going to look at another metaphor – that of the wilderness. While our times in the wilderness are not completely distinct from our times in the valley, I think there is a difference. Wilderness experiences tend to be longer than our valleys. And the wilderness is a dry, barren, desolate place where we experience intense loneliness. Like valleys, wilderness experiences often follow on the heels of a mountaintop experience. That was certainly true for Jesus, wasn’t it? He has a mountaintop experience when He is baptized by John the Baptist and the Spirit of God descends on Him like a dove and He hears His Father say that He is proud of His Son. And then immediately He is driven into the wilderness for 40 days. Maybe some of you have experienced something similar. Maybe, like me, you had a high paying job that you really loved, and then the company you worked for went bankrupt and suddenly you had no job at all. Perhaps you’ve worked really hard to dig yourself out of a financial hole by applying Biblical principles. You’ve made some significant cuts in your expenses and paid off some debt and established an emergency fund. But then your car breaks down or you incur some significant medical expenses and you’re worse off than you were before you started. Maybe your marriage has been really great and then one day you find out your spouse has been unfaithful. Maybe your wilderness experience is something completely different. But whatever it is you feel desperate, lonely, and spiritually dry. Well the good news is that God can use those wilderness experiences to draw you closer to Him. So the main idea we want to take away this morning is this: Your deepest need becomes a gift when it drives you to depend on God We’re going to see that this morning in another Old Testament account that is not normally associated with Christmas. So go ahead and turn to 1 Kings 19. You’ll find that book after the books of 1 and 2 Samuel and before 1 and 2 Chronicles. And as always feel free to use the table of contents in your Bible, That’s why it’s there. While you’re finding that chapter, let me provide a bit of context. Ahab is the king of Israel, the northern 10 tribes. He is a wicked king who is married to an even more wicked woman by the name of Jezebel. She is a worshiper of pagan gods, including Baal. In 1 Kings 18, we find the account of Elijah’s mountaintop experience. It was literally a mountaintop experience as Elijah confronted the prophets of Baal on Mt. Carmel and basically challenged them to a duel. Elijah calls down fire to consume the offering he had made to God and the people acknowledge that the Lord is God and the prophets of Baal are all slaughtered. Let’s pick up the account at the beginning of chapter 19. [Read 1 Kings 19:1-18] Elijah had just witnessed the power of God, but when Jezebel threatens to come after him and kill him, he is afraid and runs to the wilderness. And he doesn’t just run a little way. He turns into Forrest Gump and runs 100 miles from Jezreel to Beersheba [Show map]. But he’s still not sure he has gone far enough, so he leaves his servant there in Beersheba and travels even further into the wilderness and sits down under a broom tree. And we see here just how much a wilderness experience can impact our thinking. He pleads for God to take his life. Think about that for a moment. All he had to do if he really wanted to die was to let Jezebel capture him. He could have saved all that running. He falls asleep and then an angel provides him with food – an angel food cake - and water. Just as a quick aside, in verse 7 this angel is identified as “the angel of the Lord”, which is often the phrase that is used to describe a pre-incarnate appearance of Jesus. Elijah lies down again, and once again the angel provides him with food and drink and encourages him to eat and drink to prepare for another journey. Elijah then makes another 40 day trip to Mount Horeb, which is another name for Mount Sinai, the same mountain where Moses had received the law from God. Interestingly that journey would have only taken about 10 days if Elijah had gone there directly, but for some reason that we don’t really know it appears he wasn’t in any hurry to arrive there. This time Elijah takes refuge in a cave. And God asks him why he is there. Remember that any time God asks a question, He is not seeking information. He asks the question for Elijah’s benefit. And Elijah answers God by claiming that everyone else has forsaken God and that he alone was left and now he was going to die. As we see later in the story that just wasn’t true. This is the second time we see that the wilderness has a tendency to cloud our thinking. This time we see that it tends to lead us to believe things that just aren’t true. God then tells Elijah to go outside and stand on the mountain and listen for Him to speak. First a strong wind came along, one that was strong enough to break the rocks into pieces, but God was not in the wind. Then an earthquake come, but God was not in the earthquake. Then came fire, like the same fire that Elijah had seen only a short time earlier on Mount Carmel, but God was not in the fire. Just as an aside, this is the first known performance by Earth, Wind and Fire. Then came the sound of a low whisper. The underlying Hebrew literally means “the gentle voice of stillness”. And out of that silence, God speaks to Elijah and asks him the same question He had asked before – “What are you doing here Elijah?” and Elijah gives the same answer he had previously given. Nobody could have really blamed God if had gotten really frustrated with Elijah at this point and just left him to fend for Himself. But God shows great compassion and grace to Elijah. He reveals that Elijah is far from the only one who still serves God. In fact, there are 7,000 faithful followers still left in Israel. And then God gives Elijah a new assignment. He is to anoint a new king over Syria and a new king over Israel. And he is also to anoint his successor, Elisha. Interestingly, Elijah is only able to carry out one of those assignments. He anoints Elisha and Elisha ends up being the one who anoints the two kings. Although it takes a while, we see here that for Elijah and for us… Your deepest need becomes a gift when it drives you to depend on God But once again, just like we saw last week when we talked about valleys, we find that when we’re in the wilderness, we don’t get out of that wilderness by just sitting there and waiting for God to remove us. There are some things that we need to do in order to demonstrate our dependence on God. So I want to close the message by identifying five practical steps we can take in order to depend on God when we find ourselves in the wilderness. HOW TO DEPEND ON GOD IN THE WILDERNESS In this account we find that while Elijah is in the wilderness that God ministers to his physical, emotional and spiritual needs – and in that order. This is an important example for us when we are in the wilderness. We need to take the appropriate steps to care for our whole person – body, mind and spirit. 1. Take care of my body After running 100 miles, I sure know I would be hungry and tired. Or as Mary would say, I would be “hangry”. And when we are physically tired like that, it is easy, as we have already discussed, to be really irrational – like Elijah asking for God to take his life when the reason he was running was to save it. But God doesn’t immediately point out how ridiculous it is for Elijah to think like that because He knows that until he takes care of his physical needs for food and rest, he just isn’t going to be very receptive to hearing that from God. So God lets him sleep for a while and then He feeds him. We can be a lot like Elijah when we’re in the wilderness. We can get so caught up in trying to extricate ourselves from the wilderness that we neglect the care of our bodies. Sometimes, like Elijah, we fail to eat, but probably most of us go to the other extreme and we eat too much. Some people try to kill the pain of the wilderness with drugs or alcohol. Often we don’t get enough rest and we give up our exercise routines. I’ve often observed this in the lives of those who are in the midst of financial problems. It seems logical that the way to get out of that wilderness is to work more hours, even take on a second job. But our bodies are not designed to work long hours six or seven days a week without getting the proper rest. In fact, proper rest – physical, emotional and spiritual – is such an important idea that we’re going to spend some time focusing on that after the first of the year. Long hours are usually accompanied by poor eating habits since we don’t have the time or energy to prepare nutritional meals. And it also likely means that we don’t get the proper exercise that our bodies need, too. So, because we don’t take care of our bodies, we often end up in this vicious cycle that keeps us in the wilderness even longer than we would otherwise be there. Next God meets Elijah’s emotional needs, which is the reason for taking our second step. 2. Remember the past, but don’t live there We’ll talk about this more in a moment, but there is a sense in which Elijah was “spoiled” by the way he had seen God work in his life in the past. He had witnessed God use ravens to bring him bread and meat while he lived in the wilderness. He had seen God cause a widow’s limited supply of flour and oil to continue to feed her and her son. He had seen God bring that widow’s son back to life. And, as we have already talked about, he had seen God bring down fire from heaven. And it appears that He expected God to continue to work in those spectacular ways. I really think he thought that after what happened at Mount Carmel, King Ahab would turn back to God and set his wife straight and that the people of Israel would also return to God. But instead Jezebel threatened his life. So when God didn’t act in the way he expected, he got scared and he ran. It’s not clear from this account whether God specifically commanded Elijah to go to Mount Horeb, but to me the text certainly seems to imply that was the case. Elijah knew that mountain stood as a reminder of God’s power and His grace. As Elijah arrived there, he would have been reminded of how Moses stood before the rock that gushed forth water. He would have thought back to how God caused that mountain to shake and tremble as the Israelites gathered there. And no doubt he would have known that was the place where God gave Moses the law for His people. So it was good for Elijah to look back and be reminded of God’s faithfulness, power and grace and use that memory to help Him trust in the character of God while he was in the wilderness. What was not good is that Elijah was trying to live in the past and counting on God to operate the same exact way He had done previously. The same is true for us. It is good to remember those mountaintop experiences in our lives and to look back on them to be reminded of who God is and how He has worked in our lives in the past. But there is also a danger in trying to live in the past and expect God to work that same way in our lives right now. In June 1995, I was blessed to be one of the nearly 70,000 men who took part in the Promise Keepers event at Mile High Stadium in Denver, Colorado. That was certainly one of those mountaintop experiences in my life. And I’m thankful for the way God used those two days to help make me a better man, husband and father. The following year, 1.1 million men attended Promise Keeper rallies in large outdoor stadiums all over the US. And in 1997 well over a half million men joined together in the Stand in the Gap event in Washington DC. But four months later the organization had to cut its entire office staff due to financial problems and attendance at its events began to decline rapidly. Today the organization is in the process of remaking itself under new leadership. So while it is helpful for me to remember how God worked in my life back in 1995, what would not be helpful is to try to relive that experience again today. God took care of Elijah’s physical needs and his body by giving him rest and feeding him. He took care of his emotional needs and his mind by encouraging him to remember how God had shown his power and grace in the past. He is now ready to meet Elijah’s spiritual needs. The last three steps we will discuss all focus on our spiritual needs when we are in the wilderness. 3. Spend time in God’s Word There is an important pattern that we see in the life of Elijah. Hopefully you still have your Bibles open and you can follow along as I show you that pattern. • The first mention of Elijah is in 1 Kings 17:1. Then look at verse 2: And the word of the Lord came to him. • Go down to verse 8: Then the word of the Lord came to him. • Now go to chapter 18, verse 1: After many days, the word of the Lord came to Elijah. • What’s missing at the beginning of chapter 19? That’s right – Elijah ends up in the wilderness, at least in part, because he acts without first hearing from the Lord. • It is not until Elijah ends up at Mount Horeb that the word of the Lord comes to Elijah again in verse 9: …the word of the Lord came to him… I’m convinced that sometimes, like Elijah, we end up in the wilderness because we act without first hearing from God. But I also know that it is possible to end up in the wilderness through no fault of our own. Sometimes God leads us there to help us learn to depend on Him better. And sometimes we end up there just because we live in a world that is messed up because of sin. But regardless of how we get there, the one thing we must do once we are there is to make sure we listen for the word of the Lord. And today, God primarily speaks to us through His Word, the Bible. As I was working on the message this week, I was thinking about how many of the messages that I’ve preached over the years end up pointing us to the importance of spending time in God’s Word. If you’re not spending time reading the Bible in a systematic manner on a regular basis, there is just no way you’re going to thrive on the mountaintops, alone grow in the valleys and in the wilderness. 4. Look for God in the ordinary When I preached on this same passage about 2-1/2 years ago, the main idea of that message was: God’s grace is spectacular…even when it isn’t That is still an important concept for us to grasp. Like Elijah, we notice when God works in the spectacular – like calling fire down from heaven. But when God instructed Elijah to leave the cave and stand before God on the mountain, He demonstrated that God doesn’t always work in the spectacular. That is why God wasn’t in the wind or the earthquake or the fire, but rather in the gentle whisper. Why is it that when we seem to need Him the most that God speaks to us in a whisper and not a shout? I think there are a couple reasons for that. First, I think that God wants us to understand that even when it seems like nothing is going on, God is still at work. And while He is certainly capable of working in the spectacular, most of the time He is just working through the ordinary. The second reason God whispers is that when we are in the wilderness, just like when we go through valleys, we are not alone. God is there with us. In fact, he is so close that He doesn’t need to shout. He only has to whisper. We just need to learn to listen for that whisper. We’ve already talked about how we do that by spending time in God’s Word. But I think we also do that when we develop the practice of looking for God in the ordinary. It’s seeing God in the beautiful sunset or in the new life that is created when a baby is born. It’s looking at the sky at night and thinking about a God that is big enough to have created stars and planets and galaxies by just speaking them into existence. It’s watching a bee pollinate a flower or a hawk soaring on the wind currents. It’s watching someone’s life be transformed because of their faith in Jesus. 5. Get back to work I’m convinced that self-pity is one of the biggest barriers to spiritual growth. As long as I feel sorry for myself, I’ll wallow in the wilderness and never do what it takes to get out of the wilderness. So that’s why it’s so important for us to see how God dealt with Elijah’s self-pity. Notice first what God didn’t do. He didn’t put Elijah down or ridicule him or even rebuke him. Instead he calls Elijah out of the cave and speaks to him in a gentle whisper. And then he gives Elijah a new assignment – actually three new assignments. God will take him up to heaven before he is able to carry out two of the three, but in carrying out the first assignment of anointing Elisha to replace him, Elijah lays the groundwork for Elisha to eventually anoint the two kings. In order to carry out that assignment, Elijah has to return to his home in Israel, where Jezebel is still waiting to kill him. But after his encounter with God, he is no longer afraid of her because he understands that God still has a place of service for him. He once again trusts in God’s power and sovereignty. I have observed that both in my own life and in the life of others that one of the best ways to get out of the wilderness is to get my eyes off my own circumstances and focus on what God wants me to do and on meeting the needs of others. There is something about serving others that tends to put my own problems in their proper perspective. Your deepest need becomes a gift when it drives you to depend on God Probably all of us have been in the wilderness at some point in our lives. And in a group of this size there are undoubtedly some of you who are there right now. And we all know that being in the wilderness is never fun or easy. But my prayer for you this morning is that you’ll be encouraged by the idea that those times, as difficult as they are, are often God’s gift to us. When we’re on the mountaintops and things are going well, it’s pretty easy to forget God and start relying on ourselves. So the wilderness is often needed in our lives to remind us to draw close to God so we can hear that gentle whisper and trust in Him rather than in ourselves. [Prayer] Each week, we end our worship with a time for you to respond to the message. And I know for some of us it’s tempting to use that time to think about where we’re going for lunch today, or some task that we have to do this afternoon or even just to daydream. But in many ways that is one of the most important parts of our time together today. As we often point out, genuine worship requires both revelation and response. So if all you do is leave here today with some more information and nothing in your life changes as a result of being here, it’s very possible that you really didn’t worship today. In just a few moments we’re going to have a time for you to prayerfully consider how God wants you to respond to Him today. On the back of your sermon outline you’ll find a list of some possible ways that you could respond. But obviously that is not an exhaustive list and there are many other possible actions that God could be leading you to take. Our response time will begin with a time to give of our financial resources as we take our offering. And I just want to thank all of you who continue to give generously and cheerfully to invest in the kingdom of God. I know that many of you give regularly using our online giving platform and if you’re one of those people when the plate comes to you, I want to encourage you to pause for a moment and give thanks to God for the material resources He has entrusted to your stewardship and commit your offering to Him. Once the plate is passed, I want to ask that everyone would keep their heads bowed in prayer for the remainder of the response time. Discussion Questions for Bible Roundtable 1. Why do you think we are so prone to going into the wilderness right after a mountaintop experience? 2. What are some ways that we can be guilty of expecting God to work in the spectacular rather than just in the ordinary? 3. Why are we so prone to neglect the care of our bodies when we’re in the wilderness? What are some practical things we can do to get out of that “rut”? 4. What are some practical things we can do so that we remember the past without trying to live there? 5. One commentator I read this week wrote “It’s easier to do your way into feeling, than to feel your way into doing.” What do you think about that?