Elijah & the Making of a Person of God

In his best-selling book, Outliers, referring to those who are exceptional in their fields, those who accomplish the extraordinary, malcolm Gladwell contends that for those who are the best of the best, the outliers, there has nearly always been at least 10,000 hours of work behind the scenes.

As we heard a few weeks ago, there has been work done in the Secret Place.

Today, we're going to study our last character from the Old Testament.

I hope you've enjoyed this series.

This is our seventh week looking at kings and characters.

Today, we look at a man by the name of Elijah, a man of God, a prophet who was forged in the Secret Place.

And I hope as we look at this one vignette of his life, there's so much we could look at, but we're just looking at one little part.

I hope we can be encouraged about a process that we probably will have to engage in to become the woman of God or the man of God we long to be.

So I'm going to suggest from Elijah, becoming a person of God will require typically a season of isolated pain, total dependence, and unconditional obedience.

We're in 1 Kings chapter 17.

Serene has read for us a little bit further on in the chapter.

It's 870 BC, 50 years since King Solomon was reigning, 230 years before King Josiah, who we looked at last week.

Israel is split into two.

There are 10 tribes in the north, two in the south.

And in the Northern Kingdom, the lead up to Elijah's time, where he spoke to the people of the north, there was a consecutive 19 evil king reign.

So it wasn't a good time.

Approximately 200 years of evil kings in the north.

Then came King Ahab, who married a woman, who many have said was the most evil woman, probably whoever lived.

Her name was Jezebel.

And so Ahab and Jezebel did more evil, we're told, in the sight of the Lord than anyone who had come before them.

Ahab established all this horrible idolatrous worship in the temple and in the north, and children sacrificed to the demonic gods, awful stuff.

It was a time of darkness.

It was a time of darkness.

And God said, enough is enough.

My cup of my wrath has reached a tipping point, and it's going to be poured out on evil.

So what does God do?

Well, he does different things throughout the scriptures when he unleashes his wrath.

But in this case, he doesn't raise up an army.

He wants to lead people out of darkness.

And so he raises up a person.

One person whose name is Elijah, one man who God has asked and called to make a stand.

I wonder if you've realised in God's economy, or this is a question, would you agree that often God uses a small group to do his will, or even one insignificant, seemingly insignificant person?

Would you agree?

It's just often the way he works.

I had coffee with one of our missionaries, Mark Hughes, this week.

It was a lovely time to catch up.

And we got chatting about all sorts of things.

And he was telling me about the story of the beginnings of GRN.

Mark works in Sydney, but he works for Global recordings Network.

And it started back in 1938, but in 1937, a woman by the name, here she is here, by the name of Joy Ridderhoff, was a missionary in Honduras.

And she got very ill and was forced to leave the mission field, which was so depressing for her.

She had seen many people come to know the Lord in Honduras, and she was back home in the States, and she was just so really depressed about losing the ministry that she had trained to be part of.

Then she had this thought, if only there was a way to record in Spanish messages to help people in their faith.

And the first such recording was accomplished in 1938, and thanks to some generosity from a bunch of friends, this started a trickle of Spanish training materials that could go back to Honduras.

This actually turned into a flood of requests across other Spanish-speaking countries, certainly in Central and South America.

And today, the Gospel recordings, or Global recordings Network, as it's called, is in over 30 countries.

It started because a woman got sick and couldn't do the job that she was feeling called to do.

But God took that and took her through a time of darkness and opened up a ministry that now produces materials for the Gospel in over 7,000 dialects, Global recordings Networks.

God says enough so he raises up a person to start a movement.

He loves small beginnings.

Let's read from 1 Kings 17, verse 1.

Now Elijah, the Tishbite from Tishbi in Gilead.

Notice that Elijah is identified by where he is from.

Tishbi in Gilead.

Later his identity will change.

Elijah, the Tishbite from Tishbi in Gilead, said to Ahab, the wicked king of the north, as the Lord, the God of Israel lives, whom I serve, there will be neither dew nor rain in the next few years, except at my word.

Elijah goes to the most evil king of them all and pronounces an incredibly strategic prophetic judgment from the Lord against the land.

For the next months and years, there will be no rain or dew.

Now for us, we don't mind a few months of little rain.

Let's just have some nice outings.

But in an agricultural society, as we've experienced here when we've been through terribly challenging droughts, certainly in the agricultural areas of our country, you take away the water and everything shuts down.

For us in the city, it would be like there's no petrol, there's no money in the banks, there's no electricity.

People start to starve to death.

Unemployment goes through the roof.

This is a terrible time.

Elijah comes up against an evil king and says, God is going to shut you down, no more rain.

And then, God takes Elijah into hiding.

It's something that happens a few times in his life.

If you remember after the 450 prophets of Baal, where he came up against them on Mount Carmel, he then sort of was taken off to spend some time by himself.

After this powerful moment of ministry, he is taken away by God into hiding because God wants to do a work in his heart.

Verse two, then the word of the Lord came to Elijah, leave here, turn eastward and hide in the Keirith ravine, east of the Jordan, east of the Jordan.

God wants to form something in Elijah so that he can do more work through Elijah.

Have you ever heard that before?

That's the truth of the kingdom, don't you think?

That God so often wants to do a work in us, so that he can do a work through us.

Private victory, as Ben was preaching about a few weeks ago, precedes public success.

God has a work to do in Elijah on his backstage, in the secret place.

Firstly, God takes Elijah through a season of isolated pain, or what might call pain, be called pain in isolation.

It's a time when Elijah has no one to call out to, but God, a season of hiding, and it fittingly is in a place called the Kiereth Ravine.

The Kiereth means cut off.

It means to cut down, to be cut off from the source of blessings as you know them, to be cut down like you're cutting down a tree.

When God sends you and I to the Kiereth Ravine, it's a little ominous.

Names have meaning, and it pretty much means he's going to humble us.

He's going to bring us downward to teach us to be totally dependent on him.

He's saying to Elijah, I'm going to humble you privately so that I can use you publicly.

There was once a bird who was a bit absent-minded.

You don't get many little funny stories from me, so enjoy this, like from a sermon illustration book.

It's all very serious normally.

Not that I'm suggesting you'll laugh at the end of this, but probably hope you will.

There's a bird who was absent-minded, so he missed the flight south.

So, they'd all flown off south, and so he's flying on his way south by himself, and a storm comes in, and it gets really cold, and so it's so cold that his wings freeze over, and he has a crash landing in a field.

And he's standing there in the field with frozen wings, shaking, feeling like this is the worst day of his life, and then a shadow comes over him.

Do you know this story, Trotty?

He's already laughing.

There's a shadow that comes over him, and then all of a sudden, the cow dumps manure all over this poor little bird.

And the bird, of course, he's just thinking, how bad can you day get?

I'm freezing, I'm alone, I've just had manure dumped on me.

And in his frustration, he's just, ooh, this is nice and warm.

Starts to warm up.

And he starts to feel the warmth of the manure, and he starts to thaw out, and he starts to flap his wings, and he starts to make all sorts of tweeting and chirping noise in his delight.

And then all of a sudden, with all this noise, along came a cat sneaking up behind him in the field, and snuck up and jumped on him and ate him.

It's a sad story, isn't it?

Now, three lessons from the story of the little bird.

Everyone who drops manure on you is not your enemy.

Amen?

Everyone who digs you out is not necessarily your friend.

And when you're in manure, keep your mouth shut.

The point is that some of us are in this Kierith ravine as a metaphor for life.

And maybe God has put you there.

Maybe God has you there to thaw you out as it were.

Maybe there's a point behind this challenging place that you're in.

And sometimes our friends want to get us out real quick.

Just come and fix us.

Have you ever experienced this?

You're going through a really hard time, and what you don't need is, it's all going to be okay.

It's okay, just get out of that place, because sometimes God has us in a challenging place that is a lot like this place of cutting, the Kiereth Ravine.

And I think it's okay to a point, because God is in control, and God is often doing a private work in us that involves His sovereign work of humbling us, so that He can do a public work through us.

Elijah, it would seem, was in the Kiereth Ravine for a month with no one to talk to, a season of isolated pain.

But a man of God is being forged in the secret place.

God then took Elijah through a season of total dependence.

Verse 4, You will drink from the brook, and I have directed the ravens to supply you with food there.

An interesting occurrence, an interesting experience for this guy who's trying to do the right thing and obey God.

So he did what the Lord had told him.

He went to the Kiereth Ravine east of the Jordan and stayed there.

The ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning and bread and meat in the evening, and he drank from the brook.

So there's a full miracle going on.

Birds that often would come and steal your food, they're actually bringing him food.

God is teaching Elijah about his faithfulness.

There's no one else around.

No one else is seeing this happen, but Elijah is learning something about who God is.

Amen?

God is faithful.

And isn't that the case that we often need to lose things before we learn that God is faithful?

It's so often what we find in hindsight when we look back and see that God was working in us privately so that we would have faith to share publicly.

What's very interesting in this, like the manner of the people wandering in the desert, the people of God, God didn't provide two days worth of food for Elijah.

In fact, he provided it morning and night.

Isn't that profound?

It wasn't to be like weekly stored in some sort of miraculously provided fridge.

No, he actually had to wait morning and night.

God was saying, I will be your comfort for today.

Keep trusting me.

I'll be here this morning and trust me tonight.

I will be your provision for today.

Trust me for tomorrow.

I'll be your strength for today.

Trust me for tomorrow.

I'll be your friend for today.

Trust me for tomorrow.

Who's found that that's not always easy to walk that journey?

But it is the journey of becoming the woman of God we're called to be, the man of God that we want to be.

God may not bring more than we need, but he promises to provide what we need.

He's learning total dependence, isolated pain and total dependence.

And thirdly, God is teaching Elijah unconditional obedience.

This is what we heard from Serene, verse 7, Sometime later the brook dried up because there had been no rain in the land.

Then the word of the Lord came to Elijah.

God wants to Zarephath in the region of Sidon and stay there.

I have directed a widow there to supply you with food.

One of the really predictable things in life is change, isn't it?

Just when he gets used to walking the journey of faith in the Kirith ravine, being provided food and whatever he needs by ravens, God changes it and asks him to take an even bigger step.

God intervenes and says it's time to move on.

When I reflect on my life, it's so the way God works.

Brooks dry up, don't they?

They just dry up and you're suddenly struck with this non-negotiable need to move on from where you were comfortable.

I'm sure many of us have used, have learned to trust in our friends in a particular place, our job, our family, our relationship with God, and then different parts of that dry up.

And we're forced to trust God again.

It's often said that God guides by what he provides, but it's also true that God guides by what he does not provide.

Sometimes God allows the brook to dry up, to give us the courage to take a step of total obedience.

And it's at this stage, at this point, at this very point that God has been preparing us for that we realize I'm about to step in to the task that he's given me maybe for my whole life.

There's something very significant that I didn't know I had to do, but I'm the person for it because God has been preparing me for this task.

God takes Elijah to Zarephath and he finds a woman there who tells him that they are going to die because of this fearsome famine that's in the land.

And Elijah, because of the preparation that he's been taken through, he looks at that hopeless situation and speaks faith into it.

He speaks faith into hopelessness.

He sees beyond the darkness to a deeper work that God might want to do in their midst.

And then Elijah, quite cheekily, I think, yet filled with faith, asks this destitute woman to go back and make him some bread with a glass of water.

It's just an odd thing, isn't it?

It's so, she's like, I'm about to die.

I've got nothing.

Could you make me some bread with water?

And she goes and she does what she's asked to do because the Lord has told Elijah to tell her that your oil and your flour will not run out until God sends you more rain.

The woman of Baez and the oil and flour keep replenishing.

It's a legitimate miracle.

It's a miracle.

And the story, the scripture goes on to say that, as we heard read before, the woman's son gets very ill and actually dies.

And Elijah does something that has not been done in the past in scripture.

You might not have picked that up, but this has not ever happened before that someone would raise a boy back to life.

In 1 Corinthians chapter 10, Paul writes that the Old Testament stories were written as examples, as warnings, as inspiration, so that we could walk in obedience and faith.

Why do we have the story, which I'm not going into now, but we heard it read, of Elijah going upstairs and lying on top with the warmth of his body, lying on top of this boy and then seeing him raised from the dead?

Why do we have that in our Bibles?

Because this whole story is about God, who God is and what he does in the lives of his people.

God took willing and available Elijah to the Kieroth ravine to do a work of preparation in him.

He took him through a season of total dependence in God alone and then God dried up the brook so that Elijah would go to the place where God ultimately wanted him to go to so that a boy could be brought back to life, so that the first hint of death's defeat could be announced to the world.

Hallelujah.

This is the first inkling of the resurrection to come.

That's what it's all about.

All the time in the ravine, in the Kieroth ravine, all the time struggling, God, what are you doing?

It's for this purpose and this matters to be a signal, a sign, someone's going to come back from the dead.

And I'm sure that's got something to do with why he asked and lays on the person three times, three days in the grave, but Christ will rise from the dead.

God used many painful and confusing events to shape Elijah into a true man of God.

A bit later on, as I said before, he stands in front of 450 prophets and calls down fire.

You know, what's interesting is he seems to suffer with depression, doesn't he?

And as I reflect on these thoughts here, we still want to ask people, are you okay?

Don't we?

We don't want to say, oh, you're just in a season of isolated pain.

Good for you.

It's a funny mix, isn't it?

Because we want to be there for people in life.

And we must, we need each other.

But if you look back at the stories from the Bible in the last 2,000 years, it's so frequently the case that God, even in the midst of us needing friends, He takes us on a journey of isolated pain, where we learn total dependence, and that He wants complete obedience.

God wants to do a work in us so that a Hindu, the work He wants to do through us.

Private victory precedes public power, in the name of Jesus.

So verse 1, Elijah was described as Elijah the Tishbite.

He was known from where he was from.

Verse 24, the woman said to Elijah, now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord from your mouth is the truth.

He's not known where he's from, he's known who he's from.

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