[00:00:00] Speaker A: You.
[00:00:01] Speaker B: Hey, thanks so much for listening to this message. My name is Jason and I'm one of the ministers here at the Madison Church of Christ. It's our hope and prayer that the teaching from God's words you hear today will bless your life and draw you closer to him. If you're ever in the Madison, Alabama area, we'd love for you to worship with us on Sundays at 830 or 10:30 a.m. If you have any other questions about the Bible or want to know more about the Madison church, find
[email protected] be sure to also check out our Bible study podcast, Madison Church of Christ Bible studies. Thanks again for stopping by.
[00:00:37] Speaker A: I so am thankful to see all of you here today. It's such a great time to be at Madison. It's so exciting, the things that are going on. We had some very intimate prayer times last week, and I look forward to tonight when our shepherds will lead us in prayer and remind us that we can come to God with the things that we're going through in our life. And we're talking about this new series. And I'm excited to get into this, but I want to talk a little bit about, know, we've had already some comments about it, and it reminds me that there are all kinds of different ways to look at this. In fact, this weekend I was talking to Juan Yates and he and I, it's od. But the two of us shared the same instructor when we were in college, he was at fried Hardeman and he had Leonard Johnson. Leonard Johnson was the founder of Faultner University. So I had Leonard Johnson in the late or in mid 90s teaching me Bible. And Juan in the 1940s had him teaching him.
I told you this guy was really old. But one of the things that he would do is when people would come in for a test, he reminded me of this, that sometimes he would say things like, now I know you're all people of prayer, but if you haven't studied for this test, don't bother praying right now. That was kind of his thing. But by the time it got to me, he took it a step further and he said, God doesn't even hear those prayers. So that was funny. When I was in college and you came to a test and you were desperate to get that good grade, it was important that you have that. And while that may be a funny illustration, I want to remind you that there are people that are going through all kinds of things right now that bring them to a level of desperation. There are people who are struggling with illness. There are people who have lost loved ones. There are people who are in the middle of a crisis within their family and they don't really know what to do. And what I find that's really important is that in those moments of desperation, we began to peel back some layers and we really get down to the core of things, because ultimately you get to the point where all of the things that you have and all the limits that are given to you as an individual, they're met. You go to the end and there's nothing else for you to give and so you can't help. But in those moments, pour those things out to God and it's because we trust in him to help us through those things. And it's the reason that we go to him and we pour those things out.
But I was reading an article this past week by a guy named Bob Hosteler. He's written several books and I'm sure you're aware of some of them. And he wrote this article about the idea of prayer and about struggling and about going through the challenges of prayer life and how sometimes the things that you really want in life, they're not there, they can't happen. And so he talked a little bit about some of his grandchildren and some of the things that he's praying for to take away. They've got some illnesses and sicknesses and some long term things that they're dealing with. And he says, I pray fervently and earnestly. And he said, I don't always get exactly what I want in those circumstances, but I continue to pray to God because there's something that happens in this desperation that challenges who we are, makes us a little bit more vulnerable, a little bit more transparent. And then we are able to go to God with that true raw need and surrender to him. And so he says it this way in that article. He says, sometimes I have been desperate to pray and I describe that as going and needing to pray but not having a clue where to begin. And you come before God and you just sit in tears and you pray. And you know that the Holy Spirit is taking those groanings, those struggles that you're going through, and he presents them to God and all of its clarity. And then God ministers to your soul through that. But then there are moments where you are desperate in prayer, and that just means that you go to God with very clear purposes and you know exactly what you're going to pray about. You're very direct, you're very specific because, you know the hurt you've identified the problem. But he says, always, however, desperation has been the soil and the seed that bears the fruit of answered prayer. And I think what he means by that is simply this, that when we come to God in that spirit of desperation, where it reveals to him our need for him, it's in those moments that God answers our prayer. And again, not always exactly like we want them to be answered, but he answers our prayers. He hears those things, and he loves us, and he responds. And there's lots of people who are going through different things. And so, as I was thinking about this and our last series, culture of prayer, Andrew and I talked about, we really didn't want that one to end. Like, we wanted to keep talking about it because it's been so rich and it's been so challenging to all of us. But I think this is awesome because the message we're going to be talking about today is a great bridge builder from that particular sermon series to this one. And we're calling it a rise to life. But I want you to go in your bibles to first kings, chapter 17. We're going to be talking about Elijah here in just a few moments, but I want to set up a little bit of the background so we understand what's going on. We're at the divided kingdom. Okay. God has been upset with Israel because they've left him. They've gone into idolatry. If you remember, Solomon brought all of those wives in who were wrapped up in idolatrous behaviors, and he began to give his heart to those things and turned away from God. And that's such a terrible thing. And so his sons after him started following those same methods. And so you look up, and the kingdom has been divided. God has divided them. And you've got the ten tribes up in north called Israel, and you got the two tribes in the south of Judah. And the kings in Israel are wicked one right after the other. And we get seven kings later, and you get the king Ahab. And the Bible refers to him as a person who was more wicked than all of the other kings before him combined. So this is a bad dude. He's wrapped up into idolatry. And to make matters worse, if that wasn't bad enough for just who he was, he also created an allegiance, or at least an agreement with another nation in a phoenician area. And it was the father of who we know as Jezebel. Well, Jezebel was all wrapped up into idolatry and really and truly worshiped those idols and brought that into the kingdom to make it something that they all did. So they had abandoned God altogether. And that's the situation we find ourselves in with King Ahab. So here in first kings, chapter 17, the situation is this, says Elijah the Tishbite. The Tishbite of Tishba in Gilead said to Ahab, go straight up to him and says, as the lord, the God of Israel lives before whom I stand, there shall be neither do nor rain these years except by my word. So, you know, he's filled with this idolatrous way of thinking, this paganism. And so Elijah comes before the king. And, you know, kings can be kind of full of themselves. And he walks up to him and he gets very direct with him and he introduces himself as Elijah. Now, before, we don't know much about Elijah. He's just like, he shows up onto the scene. It's almost like Melchizedek in the Bible. He just is there. But when he comes, we don't know this, but we can draw from the text that God had already informed him of. This is what you're going to be doing. You're going to go to the king of Israel and you're going to tell him something that he's not going to like. And it's simply this, there's going to be a drought. So the first thing that Elijah does, introducing himself, when he says Elijah, his name actually means Yahweh, is God. So right out of the gate he comes with this introduction. And that introduction is the reality that there is a God and he's greater than anything you ever have known.
So not only that, but he has his first marching orders, and they are this a drought? Now, it's interesting that he doesn't come as a warning to Ahab. And oftentimes we see the prophets, they'll go into a place and they'll say, hey, the Lord has sent me to remind you that if you don't turn back to him, if you don't turn and go back to God, if you don't return to him and worship him, then you're going to suffer these consequences. And by the way, that's going to be a drought. No, in this situation, it wasn't that he was coming to declare that the drought begins right away. So it says here in one king 17 one, he says, there shall be neither do nor rain these years except by my word. God has given him this special authority. Somehow, some way has empowered him through his prayer life to cause this drought. And so, just to be reminded, Elijah was not merely the prophet of the drought, but he was the one who made it happen. He was the very cause that that drought came because he prayed and it happened. Well, where else can we get that? Well, in James chapter five, there's a passage that talks about the effectual, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much. But then just after that, it says, for Elijah was as human as we are. In other words, he's just one of us. He's nothing special about him. It's not like he is empowered with anything except for what he's been given by God. He's just a regular guy. But it says when he prayed, and again, it's in the context of righteous people, when he prayed earnestly that no rain would fall, none fell for three and a half years. And when he prayed again, the sky set down rain and the earth began to yield its crops. Wow, that's a powerful thing to think about, what God was doing through him and what God had required of him. Isn't it interesting that God uses us to the extent that we're willing to act out in know Elijah? We don't know all the background and everything that took place, but we do know he had some boldness and something had to give him that boldness and that something was God. So he goes to him and he acts out in faith.
But then the next thing it says is, the word came to him from the Lord saying, depart from here and turn eastward to hide yourself at the Brook carth, which is east of the Jordan. You shall drink from the brook, and I have commanded the ravens to feed you there. So he went and did according to the word of the Lord. Okay? So first of know, as a reward for going and doing my will and going to talk to this king, I'm going to give you this great setup. I'm going to take care of you. I'm going to give you overflowing blessings. Not so much. Here's what I need you to do. I need you to go hide somewhere. In fact, I'm going to take you to this brook called Carith, which if you know this situation, and here's a picture of it, but in this area, the judean wilderness, there are these big, huge, steep mountain ranges. Okay? There's big gorges, and at the bottom of those gorges where the water would run off, it would create these brooks that were freshwater sources for them. But in the middle of it, you can see it's desolate everywhere. But when you get closer down to that water basin, what happens? Is things will grow all over the place. So he tells them, I want you to go hide at that place. There's plenty of places for you to disguise yourself and get back and be protected and those kinds of things. But the other thing that jumps out to me, that seems weird, right?
But the thing that bothers me the most, I think, is the know these are unclean animals. So isn't it interesting that in a season of fear and drought, Elijah would have to trust in water from a hidden brook and food from unclean birds? As an israelite, he was not supposed to be around these unclean animals. And so yet God is showing him something in some weird way that this unclean animal is going to come and do that. So what it says is he went there. He lived by that brook at Carroth. It was just east of the Jordan. It says, the ravens. And I hope you're imagining this in your mind. The ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning.
Is that weird to anybody else? And then bread and meat in the evening. And he drank from the brook. Now, can I just say, drinking from the brook, no big deal. I drank from a water hose growing up. Can't be worse than that, right?
This is probably like the biblical mandate for doordash, I guess. I don't know. But what it says here is that they brought bread and meat. Well, have you ever stopped and thought about or researched what ravens eat? We don't have, I guess, a ton of them in this area. Maybe they're up here. I know they're in different places in the United States, but, you know, what we witness in them is they hang around landfills, and they pick up protein and meat wherever they can. It doesn't matter if it's a fresh kill. It doesn't matter if it's dead meat for a long time. Decomposed, it doesn't matter. They just pick up that stuff. And the way they transfer that is they eat it. Are you all with me?
They digest it, and they have these little storage pockets that they put in their neck, and then when they bring their food to their kids, they regurgitate that into their mouth. Well, I can't get this image out of my mind as God is asking these ravens to bring them. Not only are they unclean, but what in the world would that have been like? I mean, was there prime rib out there somewhere? Was there filet mignon? I don't know. All I'm saying is if they did something other than what they normally do, it's because the hand of God was with them, right? If they did anything beyond that pattern, that is in their nature, God was with them. But you know what? Elijah took that. And what might God be doing in us in the midst of a drought and in the midst of fear? I think there may be some in this audience. In fact, I know there are because I know some of you and what you're going through.
It may seem like you just don't have anything right now. It may seem that you're just not getting the blessings. It may feel like you're in the midst of a struggle and you're going through a drought of sorts. And it may be because of that drought that you have some fear that maybe you have anxiety about the future. Maybe you're a planner. Maybe you're a person who likes to work ahead. Maybe you're a person who likes to be in control of the details. You like to map out your life. And it's in those kinds of situations that we can find ourselves in that desperation, that need to know what's next.
And yet here it seems that Elijah just has to stay there and remain and wait for those daily know. I'm reminded of Matthew, chapter six, when Jesus said to pray, give us this day our daily bread. It's not like he's overflowing with him, but it is that he is, little by little, giving him his daily provisions. What is he doing with Elijah?
I think we can probably say safely that he's trying to develop this sense of trust and urgency to give himself fully to God. And so you think to yourself in this circumstance, because it ultimately says that the brook dries up, you think, well, it can't get any worse. Well, think again. Then the word of the Lord came to him. Arise. Go to Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon, and dwell there. Behold, I have commanded a widow to feed you. Okay, first of all, this is a gentile nation. So, again, from clean to unclean would be what this is. But also, as we heard earlier, widows had nothing. They were not given anything. The only thing they had was what their family could provide for them. So in this situation, this widow would be without a husband. She would have no ability to take care of herself. And so he says, go to Zarephath. And I want you to know where Zarephath is. Zarephath is in that phoenician area. It's between Tyre and Sidon. In fact, it's in the backyard of Jezebel's father.
So not only is God saying, I need you to go to this particular woman in unclean, so to speak, a gentile person. But also I need you to go to an area where all of this idolatry is kind of the hub of it. God is sending him there in not just a bad situation, but maybe even a worse situation.
Sometimes God gives us his provisions in ways that we never imagined or maybe that we wouldn't have even chosen, and yet he's still providing for him. He just says, go to this widow, but let's see what he finds when he gets there.
She was going to bring, because he had told her, I want you to bring me something to eat. And she was going to bring it. He called to her and he said, bring me a morsel of bread in your hand. And she said, as the Lord your God lives, I have nothing baked, only a handful of flour in a jar and a little oil in a jug. And now I'm gathering a couple of sticks, just whatever I can grab that I may go in and see this in your mind, prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat and die.
You understand?
He's not going to a better place.
He's actually going to a place that has greater desperation. I mean, I don't know how you see this woman, but as I'm reading the scriptures, try to envision what you see here. Widows in this time would have actually been kind of marked by their clothing. You would have known that they were a widow. I'm imagining if she's this hungry, if she has very little, and if she has been saving every little portion to make sure that she has something to feed her family on, that she's literally eating as little as possible every day, providing for her and her son little by little. She has nothing to give.
And yet, know, Elijah was told, this woman has been told that she's going to feed you here. He shows up on the scene and she's, you know, this is it. I was going to go feed us for the last time, and then that's it. We've hit this moment of desperation, and we don't have any hope of anything else.
It reminds me of this story that is in every youth ministry illustration book I ever had.
It's an illustration about this man, apparently in the 30s, who came across a. Or not in the 30s, but he came across a pump in the desert, and he was looking for water, and he found this well, and it had a pump, and he went over to it and he started cranking it, and dust went flying everywhere. He's like, oh, man. And he was about to die of thirst. He was dehydrated and just struggling. But he noticed that there was a rock and a little note under it. And he picked it up and there was. In that note was a little hole that buried in it was a bottle that had water in it that was enclosed. And the note said this.
This well is deep and the water is constant and it has more than enough for what you may need.
But the pump itself gets dried out. So this bottle is here so you can prime the pump. And if you'll pour all the contents of this bottle into the pump, it will help bring the water to the surface. You can drink fully. But just remember that if you do this to fill that bottle back up, bury it with the note so other people along the way can be blessed by that. So you have a choice. Do you, in that desperation, in that moment of need when you need the water, do you do what the note says or do you just drink up?
What? That's kind of the situation that this woman finds herself in. She's been told to feed this man. She's been told by God, and now she's been told by the man of God to feed him. And she has a choice. Do I feed him in knowing that God is going to bless me or do I turn back and feed myself?
So Elijah said to her, don't fear and do as you have said.
First make me a little cake of it and bring it to me. And I love this. And then when you're done with that, make a little something for yourself. Right? That's kind of how it sounds, right? But he says, thus says the Lord God of Israel, the jar of flour shall not be spent and the jug of oil shall not be empty until the day that the Lord sends rain upon the earth.
You know, here's a situation where maybe all of that time with the ravens and by that brook waiting for those daily provisions has taught him something. And so when God says, I'm going to take care of you, that fire will never run out, that oil will never run out, you can trust in that. Go and do what he said. And so I want us to see God's hand in the middle of these things. Okay? Idolatry is prevalent. God has issued condemnation on the land. He sends Elijah to Ahab to confront him and to let him know that this judgment is here, the drought is here upon you. It's going to be for a long time until I decide to pray for relief.
But in this moment, in that fear, in the scare of the moment, God sends him into hiding. And while he's in that isolation, he doesn't just pour it on top of him and give him abundance. No, he just gives him what he needs in that moment. And Elijah has to sit there and wait and learn trust.
And so in that moment, you think everything's great, right? So while he's doing that, Elijah is sent to a desperate widow. So gets to that situation and it's maybe even worse. But in that process, a tested Elijah then turns to him and says, hey, we can trust in the word of God. If God says that flower is never going to leave, it's going to be there. If God says, you'll never run out of that oil, then certainly God is going to fulfill that promise. That's what that isolation, that's what that surrender, that's what that peeling back of all the things we have. And that desperation brings us to a confidence in knowing that even in the midst of this struggle, God is going to be with me. And so she went and did what Elijah said, and it says she and her household. And Elijah ate for many days. How long, I don't know. But from the moment he talked to Ahab until the drought was over was three and a half years. So how many days did he remain there? And guess what? The jar of flour wasn't spent. The oil didn't become empty. Everything that the Lord spoke, those things happened.
I want you to see, there's a lesson here. And that lesson is about grace and works.
The reality is God didn't just send him to a random place.
God sent him to a place so some learning could take place, not just for Elijah, but for maybe this widow as well. It says God chose a specific widow to bless. Now how do I know that? Well, in Luke, chapter four, as Jesus is in Nazareth and he's beginning to preach a little bit, and he comes into Nazareth and he begins reading from the scroll of Isaiah and he's talking about the coming messiah. And he basically proclaims that his time is here, that this is him. And everybody in the room is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's like Joseph's son, right? Like that's the carpenter's kid over there talking like that. I mean, that is crazy. So Jesus says, well, hey, a prophet is not accepted even in his own country. And then he launches into. And let me give you some evidence of this, Elijah. See, in his time, in the midst of famine, trust me, there were widows in Israel all over the place. And yet God did not send Elijah to the widows of this area, no, he sent them into a gentile land to take care of them. And then he talks about how Elisha was sent to the gentile people to take care of them, like all of this unclean thing. And basically all of them get upset and they start to come after him to kill him. And he escapes through the crowd, the Bible says, but do you understand the hostility here? God chose on purpose to remind us of something that the gospel is going to be for everybody.
And way long ago, before even the gospel was a thing, God was setting all of this up. I hope you're seeing his hand in the middle of this. But also the grace aspect of it.
God sent Elijah to the widow and one would think, well, he was just there to bless her, to take care of her.
But actually Elijah was sent so the woman could serve him. See that? Here's the grace. But now there's a service aspect of this, right? And through her obedience, doing exactly what Elijah asked her to do, it demonstrated a strong and robust faith. She began to grow in her trust in God as well. And through that service that she did, God continued to bring the provisions. Do you see this at work? And I think this is something to remind all of us of, is that God is good to us, but he also expects us to do what we can to serve other people. We're not given all these blessings for us to sit on those things and hold them to ourselves. No, we're expected to do something. God expects his people to be active and alight in the world and a salt of the earth. So all of this is such a powerful lesson.
And you would think everything is great now, right?
Not only has he been provided for with the ravens and those kinds of things, not only has he been provided for here with this widow, but tragedy strikes.
Says after this, the son of the woman, the mistress of the house, became ill.
His illness was so severe that there was no breath left in him. And she said to Elijah, what have you against me, o man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance and to cause the death of my son.
Here's where maybe, and this is probably an example for all of us, is we trust in God. But there are moments of weakness, right? Where we revert back to things that maybe we did in the past or the way we thought about things in the past. And her paganism begins to bring itself here. Because in their culture, if things were not going well for you in your life, it meant that the gods were judging you harshly and so here she sees that her son has died and her heart is broken. And we know that heartbreak, right? We know people in our midst who have gone through that, losing a child, and it's unbearable. And here in that grief, she reaches out and actually she's accusing God or attacking God, but she uses the man of God as that representative of God to express these.
And here it is. And the thing she brings up is, you're bringing my sin back up together.
It just makes me stop and think that sometimes our sin and guilt paralyzes us, does it not?
The things that we have done in our life that we're upset about, that we're hurt about, that we know are wrong and we harbor those things and we hold on to them.
It causes us to anticipate the consequences in that paralysis. We're not doing anything with it. We're not bringing it before God. We're not working on things. We're just recognizing we messed up and we don't forgive ourselves and we don't think we're worth anything. So we don't bring those things to God. And what I'm telling you is the God that we serve is one who says, please bring it to me.
Please bring your sorrow, bring your hurt, bring your disappointments. Bring your guilt and sin. Bring it and lay it at my feet and I'll take care of it. That's the God we serve. He wants so badly for us to put those things out there. We hold that guilt on and say, oh, I don't want anybody to know, but our God is saying, give it to me and I'll wipe it clean.
And this woman in her sin, in this moment when things are not going well, can't help but just see. It's my sin that has brought the song. We don't know what that sin was, but it's interesting that she would think that that was the cause of this sorrow. Well, Elijah says, give me your son. He took him from her arms. And the picture here is that she has him clutched, holding on to him.
And I've seen this in the lives of some of our people, what that's like, to hold on to a child that you've lost and to not want to let them go.
But he snatches the child from and he runs up to this upper room and it says, he carried that to the upper chamber where he lodged. And he laid him on his bed and he cried out to the Lord, O Lord, my God, have you brought calamity even upon this widow in whom I sojourn by killing her son, he comes to God. And I imagine this was a very passionate and hard prayer and a very bold prayer. And we talked about this several weeks ago about how it's uncomfortable for us to do this. But here is Elijah with a close relationship to God. And he throws himself at God and says, why is this happening? And so I found this commentary that had this remark, and I thought it was so great. It says, there was a prayer full of powerful arguments here. For example, he says, thou art God. In fact, he recognizes that God is the only one who can bring this child back to life. And so it's interesting that she points to him, and then he goes straight to God and says, what is going on here? And he says, you're my God. Meaning we have a relationship. Please don't deny me this thing. And so he's handled all the other stuff. It's interesting that nowhere in this time has Elijah said, hey, can you give me a little sprinkle? Can you give me just a little bit of rain, just a little bit of something to give us? No. He's going the route that God wants him to go. And he's saying, in the midst of this, please give me this thing. He says, don't deprive her of the support. We talked about this, how this was this woman's everything. It was her future, and she was going to miss out on it. And he said, I'm a prophet of God. Don't let anyone accuse this God, you, God, to be one that doesn't provide for this woman. And so he goes and he appeals to God. It's a very passionate prayer, and he's asking for God to revive the child. Sometimes we have to carry one another's sorrow to an upper room in prayer.
Last week, we had our prayer groups, and those prayer groups were intimate.
And I've heard from some of you how powerful they were, how it lasted for a long time. And once we started talking and everybody began to share in their woes together, we did exactly what the Bible says. We rejoiced with each other, and then we wept with each other, and it was hard, and we felt like we were walking alongside each other. That's the extent that we need to take people's concerns and their sorrow and their struggles to the Lord. We need to take it to the upper room of God. We need to take it to the throne room of God and be a part of that process.
So he stretched himself on the child three times and cried to the Lord, oh, Lord, my God, let this child's life come into him again.
And the Lord listened to the voice of Elijah, and the life of the child came into him again, and he revived.
Like I said, sometimes it's the desperation that brings clarity in what we need.
And so here Elijah demonstrates that in that desperation comes an expectation.
Now, I want to say this because I know we struggle with this, right? It's hard to preach a sermon about this, about God bringing someone back to life when we've all had people in our lives that we've struggled over in prayer, prayed that God would spare someone, pray that God would turn someone's heart around, pray that God would put people in proximity to someone to lead them closer to him. We've prayed for all these different things, and it doesn't always work out for us. But I don't want us to miss the point that in the middle of all this, God is at work setting up things for later and in our life, we have to understand God's providence is there all the time. So Elijah took the child and brought him down from the upper room. And he said to his mother, see, your son lives.
And the woman said to Elijah, now, I know that you are a man of God and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth.
Through this, it was further evidence that her trust in God did not go unrewarded.
I got to thinking about this.
Only a morsel.
Isn't it interesting that Elijah had to wait for just a morsel of food from the ravens in the mornings and in the evenings?
And that was enough to make him desperate and have to learn trust in God. Then God takes it another step and shows him to a place where all they have is just a morsel of food. And it's that morsel, day by day, that he keeps eating, they keep receiving, and God keeps replenishing and keeps providing for them, that it was the bread for the day that kept them going and kept them trusting and kept them obeying.
And so that bread was enough faith for the day.
And what a powerful thing for us to recognize that it just takes a little bit sometimes for God to work in powerful and beautiful ways. What's the Bible say about the faith? As small as a mustard seed, it'll grow into a big tree. That if we have faith as a mustard seed, that we can say, this mountain moved from here to there and it'll be done.
Do you understand what God is doing here?
First of all, he's telling us that everybody deserves this. And because some people won't receive it, I'll go other places. That's important for us to be reminded of as well. It's easy for us to teach each other. It's another thing for us to move beyond these walls and teach people outside of them what God has in store for them.
So here's a few takeaways. First of all, God is the power behind our prayer. Elijah was nothing. The Bible even says he was just a man like you and I are.
But it was his trust in God and the power of those prayers that brought forth the drought and brought forth a closeness to God, even though it was a self inflicted drought. Isn't that interesting?
Second of all, God is the spring of all provision.
Never did he let them go hungry.
Somehow, even in the smallest of ways, God provided. Maybe it's something for us to be reminded of that even in the smallness of the things that we receive, there's plenty of gratitude to be shared and blessings to enjoy.
The third thing is God is the focus of our obedience.
It's real easy for us in times of desperation to turn to other things.
But when we stay the course, God is there to help us along the way. And then finally, God is the source of life and resurrection. And we're going to hear that story after story after story that God is the one who provides life. He's the one that secures it. He's the one that sustains it. He's the one that brings it. And then finally, this. You may have caught this in the song that we sang just before I got up. My living hope.
What does it say? In desperation, I turned to heaven.
I don't want you to grow weary because every day that the sun rises, you arise to life.
It's the life that God provides for you. And the way you handle the life that you have here on earth has everything to do with that moment where you will rise to life in eternity.
So let's not grow weary. Let's battle through the desperate times and let's give our heart fully to God and know that he's going to provide for us day by day. This morning there may be some who are fighting this desperation, going through discouragement and literally, day by day, you put trust in God. Maybe you need strength from your brothers and sisters to encourage you. Maybe you just need to come and say, hey, I'm falling every day and I don't know where else to look.
Let us surround you with support and love and encouragement. And if you're not a Christian and you want to give your heart to Christ today, I pray that you will do that. And we'll sing a song here in just a moment. And when we sing that, it's not to bring shame to people. It's to bring them to a relationship with Jesus. And we stand up. So it makes it that much easier for you to come. Because when we stand up, we are standing up with you to support you and love you and be right there with you when you give your life to Jesus in baptism.
If you're ready for either of those things today, I hope you'll come while we stand and while we sing.
