We all know what it’s like when we are faithfully serving God, keen to stay in His will, but we reach a season of silence, or a plateau or things seem to stop working. What do we do then? How are we suppose to exercise our faith in these seasons and be sure that we’re in the will of God? These are exactly some of the situations Elijah faced in His walk with God, so let’s see if we can glean anything from a look at his situation.
1 Kings 17 – The context of this time in Elijah’s life is that Ahab is the reigning King of Israel who had done more evil in the eyes of the Lord than any of the kings before him, and even considered it trivial to commit the sins of Jeroboam. What were the sins of Jeroboam? He diverted the people of Israel from going to worship the One True God in Jerusalem, and instead purposefully led them into worship of idols and false gods. These things were evil in the eyes of God. Now fast forward to Elijah’s time and King Ahab is ruler of Israel and quite shockingly he regarded all of Jeroboam’s disdain and contempt of God as trivial. Not only this but Ahab went and married Jezebel. Now we all know that Jezebel is a name that no woman wants to be associated with (even the loosest woman on the planet). Yet Jezebel came from a linage of evildoers. Her father Ethbaal was a priest of the evil, brutal, selfish and sensuous false god Baal. This man, Jezebel’s father was a priest-king in Tyre who murdered his own brother to take over the throne, and this is the man that Jezebel had as a role model and she followed in her father’s footsteps. Jezebel was an aggressive and power-hungry murderess who stopped at nothing to get what she wanted. This was the woman that Ahab took to be his wife. Safe to say that nothing good and honorable in the sight of God would come from this union and they only served to encourage each other to become more deeply entrenched in the things that God abhors. So when the bible says that Ahab was more wicked than any king that had come before him, it is no minor matter. Ahab clearly influenced by Jezebel began to serve Baal and worship him. He set up an altar for Baal in the temple of Baal that he built in Samaria and also made an Asherah pole in honour of the false mother-goddess Asherah. He really did do more to arouse the anger of the Lord, the God of Israel, than all the kings of Israel before him. So it is in the context of this epoch that Elijah comes on the biblical scene.
Elijah is a man of God whom God sends with His Word to King Ahab to inform him that there will be neither dew nor rain for the next few years except at God’s Word. This is serious because it means there would be a major drought and no food. Without getting into the story too much, you can imagine that to put it mildly this really served to annoy Ahab and Jezebel who sent out orders to kill off the Lord’s Prophets (what a wicked woman!) and of course Ahab was complicit in all of this evildoing.
After Elijah delivers this news to Ahab, God tells him in verse 3:
“Leave here, turn eastward and hide in the Kerith Ravine, east of the Jordan. You will drink from the brook, and I have directed the ravens to supply you with food there.”
This scripture pretty much sums up the part of Elijah’s walk with God that forms the basis of this blog post. This scripture is the foundation of all the lessons that Elijah goes through in a series of situations in order to be prepared season by season to be used to fulfill God’s purposes and will for his life. This is what we all want: to be used by God and for our lives to have meaning and purpose. And whilst we are going about our daily lives sometimes we can get so overwhelmed and caught up in what’s happening right in front of us that we fail to see the bigger picture of what God is doing to fulfill His purposes through our lives. All we know at that time of crisis is that (i). we have had enough (ii). we want answers (iii). we want change/help!
Let’s look at Elijah’s life and what God said:
LEAVE & HIDE – God told Elijah to give Ahab this bad news and then told him afterward to go and hide. God’s Word often takes us out of our comfort zones to test our obedience in order to stretch our faith because it is our obedience that is the demonstration of our faith and trust in God. There are many times in our lives where obeying God’s Word presents us with difficult challenges that we’d rather not have to confront, but like Elijah we have to fully obey God to stay in His will and see the power of His supernatural hand manifest.
PROVIDE – Where God guides He most definitely provides according to our needs – our needs not our desires. Contrary to some sensationalist preaching there are no guarantees that obeying God will give us the outcomes that we desire unless of course our desires are in perfect alignment with His desires and will for our lives. God gave Elijah His Word that He would provide his nutritional needs and even told him how he would do it. That’s a bonus as oftentimes God doesn’t tell us how He will provide as He expects us to walk by faith – by obeying and trusting His Word to support our life journey. Just like God gave Elijah His Word, so too has He given us His Word:
We have God’s Word that if we step out of our comfort zones in obedience to His Word by the power of faith, we can be confident that our needs will be taken care of.
DIRECTED – God has good plans for our lives. He has gone before us to prepare the way that He has told us to take.
Lover of Comfort Zones
God knows that we love our comfort zones but once we have outgrown them, God will send us His Word so that we leave and at that point in God’s plan our comfort zones become part of our past. God’s will is not for us to live in our past, but to move forward in His will.
God is letting us know that our comfort zones will become a wilderness experience and when it is time to leave that wilderness place, it will not necessarily be in a way that will make any sense to us using our natural commonsense rationale, which is why He says ‘do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness’.
PROVIDE/SUPPLY – This means that the way out of our comfort zone is likely:
- Not going to make sense to us.
- Make us feel fear, but God has told us not to give way to fear, but to defeat it by being courageous. Sometimes even in our wilderness seasons we can get comfortable because we like the security of routine and predictability. It makes us feel safe. However wilderness seasons are often season of preparation and transition into something else that God has prepared for us. We must not get too comfortable in such seasons. Even the Children of Israel got comfortable in their wilderness journey and rather sought to stay in the wilderness and longed to go back to the bondage of Egypt rather than trust God at His Word that they could go in and possess the Promised Land of Canaan. Instead of looking with eyes of faith to believe God would show up on their behalf (like He had done countless times in their wilderness journey) they looked with their natural eyes and said that they could not conquer the decendants of Anak – they brought back an evil report. We have to be careful when we are in these trying situations where fear is real not to profess with our words things that do not align with what God is trying to do in our lives. God wants to experience and show the world His supernatural divine hand at work, and we will ONLY experience that when we step out in faith in obedience to His Word.
- To look like an impossible situation. God says that He is making a way in the wilderness and streams in wasteland, but as we know with God nothing, NO THING is impossible! He will make a way to enable us to travel the path that He has prepared for us.
A word about obedience – The thing with obedience is that it is 100 percent unconditional. That means when we submit to God’s Word we have to accept that what happens thereafter as what God had intended. Yes, the situation is totally out of our control! God requires our obedience and almost all of the time we cannot work out the situations He is trying to take us into. That is how we walk by faith and not by sight. We therefore need to get used to obeying God with the sole reliance of His Word as our comfort without any further evidence. Yes that’s a tough one I know. In the spirit of keeping it real I confess that there have been many a times that I try and draw a bargain with God that I will move when He moves, but that is just not how God works. We cannot manipulate Him. If He gives us a Word we must be quick to obey as delayed obedience is disobedience.
Gideon situations: There are times however when just like Gideon we have received God’s Word and we want to be sure that we really are hearing from God correctly, and we may ask God to confirm His Word in a way that we will surely understand. Sometimes God will indulge us this request like He did for Gideon and the fleeces in Judges 6:36.
PATH OF OBEDIENCE – When we step out in faith in obedience to God’s Word we will experience His provision. However as we know, God works in seasons and things do not remain the same forever. In verse 5 Elijah did exactly what God told him and went to hide at the brook. Elijah probably got used to his regular supply of food from the ravens and found some security with this routine as it meant that he would not starve. However the path of obedience in the wilderness turned itself into a wilderness season. Wilderness seasons are those when we can’t hear God, can’t trace His hand and we feel all alone. The brook dried up! Sometimes God allows situations to happen in the natural to be the catalyst to move us into the next season of His will for our lives. This is what the dried brook meant for Elijah… Get ready to move on!
WAITING – Sometimes there is not a seamless transition of events from one season into another and this didn’t happen for Elijah. He had suddenly found himself in a wilderness situation for real, even in the actual wilderness. The brook had dried up. Imagine this: it is highly unlikely that the brook dried up suddenly. No it probably took a while as the water began to evaporate and become sparse, it is a slow process. As Elijah sat there watching the provision that God had provided drying up he could have had some seriously wild fearful thoughts! All the while the brook was taking its sweet time to dry up Elijah hadn’t heard from God about what next. That is what we want to know when things are looking dry in our lives…NEXT LORD!?! Then the inevitable happened the brook actually dried up. Elijah was sat there on his lonesome not sure what to do. Verse 8 says then as in after the brook dried upthe Word of the Lord came to Elijah. If Elijah had been a man in his feelings or had control issues, believe me I am sure he would have upped and left and tried to take matters into his own hands. However no, Elijah was a man of God and he waited until he heard God give him a word of guidance before he moved. Many times in our lives we fail at this hurdle because we just cannot endure the wait. The problem is that if we grow impatient we end up setting ourselves back to the beginning of that season because God cannot trust us to master the next season in our lives when we haven’t learned the lessons of our current seasons. Nobody wants to go round that proverbial mountain for 40 years when it should have only taken 11-days. Let’s wait it out until God guides us!
God’s Word To Elijah:
“Go at once to Zarephath…. and stay there. I have directed a widow there to supply you with food.” 1 Kings 17:9
Finally God has spoken and his timing was immaculate. The brook had dried up and God had given Elijah the green light to get on up out of there at once! However this is really not a hand-clapping moment as we will see. Our walk of faith with God is a persistent journey of of going from strength to new strength. Once you have conquered faith at one level, you qualify for greater levels of tests to your faith and thereby develop a stronger and more intimate relationship with God.
God told Elijah to go to Zarephath. Zarephath means ambush of the mouth. God has sent Elijah to Zarephath by His Word and Elijah is now in for an almighty surprise attack on his faith by following God’s Word. When Elijah got to Zarephath he saw the widow that God spoke of and called out to ask her to bring him some water. The lady obliged and just as she was heading to go fetch the water he added “and bring me a piece of bread”. This is the moment of shock – The widow turns around to Elijah and tells him that she doesn’t have any bread, only flour and just a handful at that! Hold up wait a minute! God said the widow would supply Elijah with food… God’s Word had squarely put Elijah in an ambush! As if the scene needed any more dramatic effect, the widow went on to explain to Elijah that she was just using it to prepare her last meal for her and her son to eat and then die!
Wow. This is a shock. At this point Elijah could well have decided to given in to circumstance and leave the widow and her little flour and look for his own provision because in the natural common sense way that would have been the gracious thing to do rather than stay and insist to use up her last piece of ingredients. However that’s not what God said. He specifically instructed Elijah to stay there. Whoa that takes some faith! Stay in a place where God said he’d provide but in the natural the resources are negligible and the widow is professing using it and dying! But Elijah stayed and in the midst of all that he must have prayerfully sought God because Elijah got a Word from God which he relayed to the widow –
LOOK. AT. GOD. AMAZING!
WHEN IT LOOKS LIKE YOU’VE REACHED A DEAD-END, SEEK GOD IN PRAYER AND DO NOT CAVE IN TO THE CIRCUMSTANCES. God says that you will seek him and find him when you seek him with all your heart. Jeremiah 29:13
NOT QUITE THE END OF THE DRAMA… Imagine after all of that drama, some time later the woman’s only son died whilst Elijah was staying with them. She called on Elijah as a man of God to help. Elijah went up to the boy’s bedroom, stretched out on the boy and cried out to God three times.
ELIJAH BEING USED BY GOD– Could it be that God used the series of all these events in Elijah’s life to grow his faith and character so that He could be used by God in these dramatic events in the widow’s life so that she and her household would come to know God for herself? Sometimes the only evidence of God that people see is what we show them with our lives and what a powerful way to be used by God to evangelize and show people that God is real!
YOU HAVE ONE JOB.
God has given us one job; To go int the world and preach the gospel to all creation. Mark 16:15. Preach doesn’t just mean speaking it also means demonstrating, manifesting, testifying and revealing and the manifestation of God and the Word of Jesus Christ.
Just like the whole of creation testifies to God’s presence and craftsmanship (Psalm 19:1) we also have to show the world through our lives, how we behave, how we speak, how we make decisions, how we deal with difficulties that God is real. The world is watching us! Just like Elijah, we will go through a series of tests and trials of faith in our lives to build us up in faith and character to become the vessel that God wants to use for His glory….why? So that the world may know that He is God and He is real and Jesus Christ is alive. Our situations and trials, as hard as they may be are rarely if ever just about us. God has a much bigger picture and we have to be willing to surrender our lives to God, trust His Word, trust His ways, trust His timing and do His will. This is ultimately laying down our lives (our selfish will for our lives) to obey God so that through our actions our neighbour may know God. That is love. That is the job that we have been given. We have been given one job: Love our neighbour as ourselves, it sums up all the law and prophets.
Kingdom Minds 