First Kings 17 entire chapter responsibly, and Elijah
the Tishbite, who was of the inhabitants of
Gilead, said unto Ahab, As the Lord God
of Israel liveth before whom I stand, there
shall not be dune or rain these years,
but according to my word.
Get thee hence, and turn thee eastward, and
hide thyself by the brook Kirith, that is
before Jordan.
So he went and did according unto the
word of the Lord.
For he went and dwelt by the brook
Kirith, that is before Jordan.
And it came to pass, after a while,
that the brook dried up, because there had
been no rain in the land.
Arise, get thee to Zarephath, which belongeth to
Zidon, and dwell there.
Behold, I have commanded a widow woman there
to sustain thee.
And as she was going to fetch it,
he called to her and said, Bring me,
I pray thee, a morsel of bread in
thine hand.
And Elijah said unto her, Fear not, go
and do as thou hast said, but make
me thereof a little cake first, and bring
it unto me, and after make for thee
and for thy son.
And she went and did according to the
saying of Elijah.
And she and he and her house did
eat many days.
And it came to pass, after these things,
that the son of the woman, the mistress
of the house, fell sick, and his sickness
was so sore that there was no breath
left in him.
And he said unto her, Give me thy
son.
And he took him out of her bosom,
and carried him up into a loft where
he abode, and laid him upon his own
bed.
And he stretched himself upon the child three
times, and cried unto the Lord, and said,
O Lord, my God, I pray thee, let
this child's soul come into him again.
And Elijah took the child and brought him
down out of the chamber into the house,
and delivered him unto his mother.
And Elijah said, See, thy son liveth.
Now, we have just read a little out
of the life of one of the great
Old Testament saints.
I do not hesitate to call him a
saint, though he was a man that liked
passion.
He was still a man after God's heart
and a saint.
And yet this man, though among the very
greatest of the Old Testament, or indeed the
greatest of Bible heroes, yet was a man
who had almost nothing to recommend him.
If Elijah were to appear here tonight, if
we didn't know who he was, we wouldn't
let him in the church, or if we
did, we certainly wouldn't let him in the
pulpit.
And yet, though this man lacked so many
desirable qualities that he, of course, didn't have,
and he had so many undesirable qualities that
he shouldn't have had, there was something about
him, nevertheless, that God honored and blessed.
And the most wonderful thing of all is
that God has let him stand as a
beacon light on the top of the hill
for all the ages that follow, have followed,
to get light from and encouragement.
Now, I want to inquire tonight a bit,
what was the secret of this man?
What was it?
What did he have, or what didn't he
have, or what position did he take, or
what attitude, what was there about him?
You say it was all of the grace
of God, and I would run to underscore
that, because that's so.
But why does the grace of God operate
toward some people and not toward others?
For he is no respecter of persons.
Well, let's look now and see whether we
can discover what it was.
I think that the foundation of everything that
made Elijah, Elijah, is found in his opening
testimony to the old king.
He said, The Lord God liveth.
Now, that wasn't anything for a Jew to
say to another Jew.
The Lord God liveth.
Of course the Lord God lives.
But he added another three or four words,
and these were the words added to the
first four that probe somewhat deeply into the
life of the man.
He said, The Lord God liveth before whom
I stand.
Now, Elijah was a countryman from up in
the land of Gilead, the land of Tishbe,
he was a Tishbite, and he had no
education, at least if he had, I wouldn't
know where he got it.
He had no culture at all.
We preached about Moses here, and Moses was
a cultured man.
He had been brought up in the court
of Pharaoh and educated in all the wisdom
of the Egyptians.
But here stands a man without any education
at all, except what he might have gotten
out for himself, and a man with no
culture, a man dressed in the rough garments
of the Gileadites, girded around with a girdle
of plain leather, and yet this man doesn't
hesitate to walk into the presence of the
great King Ahab.
Now, a king is always great.
He's always great, even if he isn't great,
he's great.
He's great because he has the power to
do things that the average man doesn't have.
He has the power, at least he had
in those days, in the time of limited
monarchies, such as we know now, the power
of a king is not so unlimited.
But in those days, a king only had
to say casually over his shoulder as he
went off to have dinner, have his head
off, and he came back, the fellow had
no head.
He was just that way, you know, he
had all sorts of power.
If he didn't like a fellow, he just
said, have his head off.
So heads came off, and because they did,
they took him off.
Those were kings, so this was a great
king in spite of the fact that he
wasn't a great king.
And yet Elijah didn't hesitate to walk straight
into his presence.
He didn't have anybody to introduce him, he
didn't have any pool, he didn't have an
appointment, he didn't have an office boy or
secretary or gentleman-in-waiting or anybody.
He just walked in, barged in is the
word I think now.
And when he got in there, the king
looked up and here this great fellow stood,
smelling of the mountain, where he had come
from.
And the king didn't get a word out
of his mouth.
He started to say something royal, but it
didn't come out, he didn't have time.
Elijah told him what he had come for.
He said, as the Lord God of Israel
liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not
be dew nor rain these years, but according
to my word.
He never even said goodbye.
He turned on his heel and walked out
of the king's presence, and left the king
standing there breathless, angry, frustrated, and confused.
That was Elijah.
Now how was it that Elijah had a
courage like this?
Well, Elijah had found the ultimate reality.
Ultimate reality.
If you were a philosopher, you'd want to
plow into those two words, the ultimate and
reality.
What are those two words?
Mostly we don't see ultimate reality roundabout.
We don't see ultimate reality.
Somebody today driving out here took us around
the way and threw an old section.
Well, now that old section won't be there
in another ten years.
They'll tear that all down out of there.
The word permanent is practically gone from the
vocabulary.
Nothing's permanent anymore.
Years ago, five, ten years ago, I got
a definition of the word permanent from a
bulletin, from a dodger they threw around the
houses.
It said it was announcing a beauty shop,
and it said, permanent ways guaranteed to last
three months.
And thus I got a definition of the
word permanent, it lasts three months.
And God Almighty made us with eternity in
our hearts, and then we call permanent three
months.
We don't even build expecting anything to stand
anymore.
Things crumble down.
You build automobiles, they don't expect them to
last.
They sell you things they don't expect them
to last.
I've been told, though I don't know whether
this is true or whether it is just
somebody out to get the manufacturers, but they
tell me that they deliberately build automobiles less
substantial than they could because they don't want
them to last too long.
That's down in the States.
I don't know what they do up here,
where they make these cars, but I would
guess that that's the way it's done.
Nobody has found reality.
Nothing lasts, you see.
But here is a man who found something
that lasted.
He found reality.
We miss it constantly because of sin, and
yet man's always striving after it.
What is it that stirs people up to
do the weird things that do?
Why, when a fella can walk down the
street, why does he get in a big
go-devil and pull the throttle open and
roar down the street?
It's because something in him is big and
wonderful and grand, and something else in him
is little and mean and devilish.
It's that which is of God in him
fighting with that which is of sin in
him, and we don't act natural.
We haven't found the blissful center, as the
poem, the hymn has it, fixed on this
blissful center rest.
With some of our old hymns, now this
isn't part of the sermon, if I never
get back to the sermon it'll be worth
saying this anyhow, but some of our old
hymns are just wonderful, but we sing them
without knowing what they mean.
We say, now rest my long divided heart,
fixed on this blissful center rest.
I don't know that anybody knows what that
means.
I asked a congregation one time what it
meant when it said, I dare not trust
the sweetest frame, but wholly lean on Jesus'
name.
And it was an intelligent congregation with a
fair average of education, and not one person
knew what I dare not trust the sweetest
frame meant.
I won't embarrass you by asking you, because
I wouldn't do that.
I did them, but I wouldn't do that
with you.
But, I dare not trust the sweetest frame.
Now what did the man mean?
Was he just finding a rhyme for name
that came later, but wholly lean on Jesus'
name?
No.
In those days when the man wrote that,
a frame was a frame of mind.
And so he said, I came up to
you and to Brother Newell and said, Brother
Newell, how's your frame?
I wouldn't be asking about his body, I'd
be asking about what frame of mind he
was in.
I dare not trust the sweetest, happiest frame
of mind.
That was what we sing when we, it's
what we sing.
I dare not trust how good I feel,
but wholly lean on Jesus' name.
But of course, feel doesn't rhyme with name.
So he said, I dare not trust the
sweetest frame.
And that's when it says, I fixed on
this blissful center of rest.
We just skip that, and we don't claim
to know what it means, but it was
talking about God, the center of our being,
the center.
I was talking with friends today about the
German writer, Meister Eckert, and his use of
the word, I think in German it's, I
don't know very much about German.
But what does it mean?
It means the ground, the deep center of
the soul.
And he talked, and others talked about the
ground of the soul.
The average person doesn't know his soul has
an anchor.
There's something deep down in there, hidden and
real.
Elijah had found that reality.
He had found the absolute beyond and in
the midst of the relative.
Relativity, that cursed word that ruins things now,
relativity.
Nothing is fixed, but everything is relative to
everything else.
But there is one who isn't relative to
anything, except whom he sovereignly desires to be.
And that is God, and that is the
absolute.
Well, I had a son.
He's very much changed now, and he's happily
associated in one of the Presbyterian churches in
the city, Chicago.
But when he first came back from the
university, where he got his basic degree, the
Bachelor of Science, the old man didn't know
anything at all.
How he could manage to find his way
home after 6 o'clock, that boy couldn't
understand, you know.
Because he hadn't been to the university there,
at least not recently.
And this boy came back filled with relativity.
He was very nice about it, and teased
me always.
Our family's always been great teasers, and of
course, because I'm the worst one, I get
the worst.
And he called me an absolutist.
He said, that's what you are.
You're an absolutist.
You know, they bite that word off and
spit it at you, as though they were
cursing you.
You're an absolutist.
Of course we're absolutists, ladies and gentlemen.
Don't get scared, because they call you an
absolutist.
You're a lot of things you didn't know
you were.
You're a biped prince, did you know that?
Sure you are.
So don't, and a vertebrae biped prince.
Don't let that bother you.
Of course you are.
Down in the southern part of the U
.S. one time, an educated fellow was running
against another fellow in office for office.
And he wanted, of course, to defeat his
opponent, but he didn't know how to do
it.
So he was in the section where they
don't have too much education down there.
Tell it not in gas, but there are
some sections where they're not too well-educated
and a little bit prejudiced.
And so he started a report, got to
whispering it around.
He said, did you know that my opponent,
who seeks a high office, was a celibate
before he was married?
And you know, they started the report that
he'd been a celibate before he was married,
and he never got to first base.
You know, they weren't going to let a
fellow like that into office because he'd been
single before he was married, you know.
Well, words.
Don't let words bother you, ladies and gentlemen.
Don't let words bother you.
Sticks and stones can break your bones, but
words can never hurt you.
And the word absolute doesn't bother me.
Of course we believe in something absolute.
Of course we believe in something fixed.
In other words, we believe in God.
And that fixed absolute said, when you pray,
say, Our Father which art in heaven.
So that fixed absolute is a being, a
person, one who calls us his children and
who says, call me Father, and ye shall
be my sons and daughters.
Well, Elijah had found the absolute, and he'd
found the holy in the midst of the
impure, and he'd found the infinite beyond the
limited.
There's nothing but what has limits, you know.
But God is unlimited.
He's the infinite, and Elijah had found the
infinite, and he'd found the perfect in the
midst of the imperfect.
Don't ask me how he found him.
I don't know.
He'd found the eternal within the temporal.
They say, who was it, said it, one
old man, might have been Eckhart, who said
that if you can find the eternal in
the eternal, you're all right.
But if you can find the eternal in
the temporal, you're still better.
Meaning by that, that if you can find
God in the midst of a shifting, changing
world, it's better than if you try to
rise beyond it and try to find God
in the monastery or chapel.
Find God as you travel.
Find God in the midst of the relative,
midst of the flowing.
Well, Elijah had found all this, and what
he had found, remember, wasn't a philosophy.
A lot of religious people are just religious
philosophers, not very good ones, but religious philosophers.
And they get wild and spend a lifetime
promulgating their religious philosophy.
Elijah hadn't found a religious philosophy.
Elijah had found God.
Elijah hadn't found a religion.
Elijah hadn't found a key of life.
You know, there are keys of life lying
around everywhere.
Mrs. Mary Baker, much married, Eddie, had one,
has one, and made a few million out
of it, I guess, before she died, selling
it.
But they call it the key of life.
Everybody's looking for that key.
People send me books, you know.
They devil all editors by sending them books.
Some of them are worth a while, but
most of them are not.
We get them by the carload down in
New York, and used to get them in
Chicago, and we'd pile them up there, and
a few of them we'd review, and the
rest we'd either throw away or pile in
a corner, until the corner got filled up
and we didn't know what to do with
the books.
Books are being written, and to the making
of many books there is no end, and
a lot of them are keys.
Keys to this and keys to that.
I wrote a little thing and somebody named
it Keys.
I didn't name it that, because I don't
believe in keys.
Elijah hadn't found a key of life.
He had found God, and there's an awful
lot of difference, brothers and sisters.
You can go and be baptized and take
communion and yield to and formulate your lives
after all of the ways of a church,
this church or some other church, and yet
be empty and miserable, because God made us
for himself, and our hearts are dissatisfied until
we find satisfaction in God.
It is God that we need, my brethren.
It is God that we lost when we
sinned, and it's God that we get back
when we're redeemed, and it's God that we
miss and it's God that we need.
Elijah had found God.
He had found, as his ancestor Abraham had
found, that only God matters, and so he
said to the great King, I stand before
God.
This man's spiritual encounter was tested in the
fire of living.
There's a great breakdown in modern Christianity.
We take things at second hand, and we
either never have a true encounter with God,
or we can't relate our religion to our
lives.
Some people's religion go east while they're going
west.
They go one direction and their religion another,
and they never can quite relate it.
I want to ask you a question now,
and may the Holy Ghost burn it into
your heart.
What did you do last week differently, except
go to prayer meeting and to church?
What did you do differently than you would
have done if you had not been a
Christian?
Tell me that.
How did you live that was different?
We talk about love, but how much did
you spend on yourself, and how much did
you give away?
We talk about sacrifice, but did you sacrifice
riding in a big car, sleeping on a
beauty rest mattress and eating three times a
day?
Any sacrifice?
What are we doing that we wouldn't be
doing if we were not Christians?
What's the difference anyway?
I'd like to know there's a difference.
Is Jesus Christ simply a foot mare to
put on a human lapel and carry around
something nice, something pretty?
Is Christianity simply a decoration, or is there
a reality back of it?
Elijah said there's reality there.
He found it, and his spiritual light was
tested in the fire of living.
He related his faith to his works, his
beliefs to his light.
A lot of Christians in our time, it's
just a lovely symbol, but no living reality
back of it.
If you press a fellow, he blows up
in your face.
He's supposed to be a Christian, but push
him enough and he goes to pieces.
A fellow said to Moody one time that
he was holy sanctified and couldn't sin.
Moody took a pail of water and threw
on him, and he got red-hot angry
and wanted to whip Moody.
Moody just said, I knew he didn't have
it.
There was no relation between what he claimed
to have and what he actually had.
I wonder how far could you be tested?
If you scratch a businessman dressed in a
$15 shirt and a $115 suit that just
got out of a $3,500 car, scratch
him and the caveman will shout out through
his angry mouth.
He's the same old fellow.
Sister, you can fix yourself up, but you're
just a daughter of Eve.
That's all.
Sometime I'd like to see a Canadian or
an American congregation before they got time to
have Project R done on them.
Before they got painted up, I really liked
to see it.
I heard of the woman who could sing
beautifully, but she wasn't kind of homely.
A fellow married her for her voice, and
the first morning that he saw her, he
broke down and cried and said, Honey, please
sing!
He couldn't stand that thing.
Well, I'd like to see us before we
get fixed up and all dolled up.
My brother, what you are when you're under
pressure, that's what you are.
Always remember that.
And a lot of us live Christian lives.
We're born again, we carry a Schofield Bible,
we attend conferences, and we're part of the
religious life of our day.
But when the pressure is on, religion goes
one way and we go another.
How utterly terrible!
Elijah wasn't guilty of that.
Elijah was not a visionary.
Elijah had seen God and been with God,
but he was not a visionary.
How unsubstantial the average person's Christian life is!
How unsubstantial!
Because there's no reality there.
Elijah's religious notions didn't vanish under pressure.
They stood up because he had been with
God.
I am Elijah, I stand before God.
Everything he believed had been tested in the
fire of experience.
And so we see him there.
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
And it is the work of God to
make the Word flesh over and over again.
Now, there is a sense in which incarnation
can never be repeated.
One time, the second person of the Trinity
was born of the womb of the Virgin
Mary, and that's never repeated, never needs to
be, and there's nothing like it in the
universe.
So that stands in lonely grandeur as the
mightiest act God ever wrought in the ages.
But there is another limited and relative sense
in which the Word becomes flesh whenever a
man is born again.
And I believe the Word would become flesh.
The man of faith was Abraham, and the
Word became flesh in Abraham.
The man of courage was Elijah, and became
incarnated in Elijah.
The man of deep thought became incarnated in
Paul, and the man of mighty love became
incarnated in John.
And I believe that God wants to incarnate
the Word again in human life.
We need that more than we need anything
else.
And I believe if the hundreds of people,
the few hundred that are here tonight, were
to become incarnated to the Word, walking around,
enfleshing the doctrines they believe, we would have
on our hands such an upsurge of Christian
work and testimony as we've never known in
this generation.
Now, God gave us Elijah that we might
see a man that was the incarnation of
what he believed.
You couldn't separate him from what he believed.
It's easy to separate some people.
They say in all the country that some
fellow comes home Sunday night, takes his religion
off and hangs it in the closet and
doesn't put it on until Sunday morning again.
But you couldn't separate Elijah from his religion.
You could saw him any direction, and you
were always running into faith, always running into
faith, because the man was petted all the
way through.
He stood there against this wicked, weak, infecting
Ahab and an iniquitous and idolatrous Queen Jezebel
and a timid, time-serving bunch of preachers.
I pity these preachers.
I can get awful sarcastic when I come
to weak preachers, preachers that won't pay the
price for the ministry they are called to
give.
I confess I have to pray to keep
sweet about the reverends that are never found
anywhere except in somebody's house eating chicken or
cake, patting their baby's head.
You know, they just don't have it, the
time-serving.
There were 7,000 people that hadn't bowed
to Jezebel, but where were they?
And there were a couple of hundred preachers,
but where were they?
Scripture says they were hiding in a cave.
Can you tell me what those 200 reverends
were doing in caves?
When the world was going to pieces and
Israel needed help and Jezebel was ruling the
roost, that wicked Zadonian with her gods, where
were these 200 men?
Better come out, stick their neck out and
get their heads cut off, and the blood
of their martyr would have been the seed
of the church.
They could have saved the day, but they
were hidden away, and one lonely man had
to stand there all by himself, and so
here was one man against the world.
One time, Athanasius, I told you this, he
already mentioned it in passing, that Athanasius was
fighting against Arias again about the deity of
Jesus.
Arias said he's a good man, the best
man that ever lived, but he's not God,
and Athanasius said he is God, indeed he
is God, and there was an argument on
great controversy throughout the Roman Empire about it,
and somebody said to Athanasius, Athanasius, the world
is against you.
Instead of his running for a cave, he
said, all right then, Athanasius is against the
world.
That's the type of man I like to
see.
Man isn't afraid to get out there.
The reason some preachers don't get anywhere is
because they're never willing to enlarge the area
of their vulnerability.
They're always going to keep protected.
Even a mud turtle can't go anywhere unless
he sticks his neck out.
As long as he keeps his neck in,
he just lies there and looks dumb.
But as soon as he sticks his neck
out, then come the legs and then usually
the tail, but he gets going.
Well, this man was a man who wasn't
afraid to stick his neck out.
I don't claim to be anything, but I'd
love to meet Elijah, and I hope to
sometimes.
He won't be as rough there, and I'm
sure he won't have those garments.
He'll have different garments on.
He'll be more approachable than he was in
that day.
Prophets are notoriously hard to live with, you
know.
You hear the pastors, the soft, gentle fellows,
the cool and purr.
You can live with them if you can
stand it.
But the prophets are hard to live with
because they're with God and they walk with
God, and sometimes they're all out of accord
with their generation, and Elijah was.
Here was a man who let his faith
in God cost him something, you see.
He didn't go to church once a week
and give an occasional donation, but his was
a deep and serious dissent from the popular
world of his day, the world of Jezebel
and Ahab and Baal and the rest of
them, the scared creatures.
His was a deep dissent, a radical, grave,
treasonable dissent, treasonable because he stood against the
king, a wicked king.
He had a commission from God to stand
against, and the word alone occurs, I only,
God, I only.
He said in an hour of weakness, I
only, I only.
Now there was the loneliness of serving God.
The rest were silent, and he didn't know
they were there.
That was the terrible part of it.
He would have probably felt better if he'd
known he had a few half-converted people
around, but he didn't even know that.
He said, I only, Lord, I only.
Well, there lay the power of this great
man, a man who had been with God
and stood in his presence, a man whose
faith was tested in the fire of living,
a man who had the courage to stand
against corruption.
That was what made the man great, and
to know God cost this man painful discipline.
I want you to notice here, oh, how
we fix it up.
My grandmother, my German grandmother, talked about a
band box.
Now, I don't know what a band box
is.
I have sort of visualized it as an
upholstered hat box.
I don't know whether I am right or
not.
But she talked about people wanting to live
in band boxes.
If a woman got more than one dress
a year, you know, my grandmother would say,
ah, she lives in a band box.
I suppose that meant in the height of
luxury.
I suppose so.
We have fixed up Christianity now so that
we've got everybody in a band box, and
we go around telling them how easy it
is, and we gather people together and say,
now, you've got it all wrong.
Jesus isn't going to lay any burdens on
you.
He's going to take them all.
He isn't going to get you in trouble.
He's going to get you out of trouble.
Serving the Lord is the easiest, smoothest, slickest
thing in the world, and you can have
a wonderful time and just be happy, happy,
happy, and go to heaven.
So now, won't you just take Jesus?
And so poor little, carnal, self-loving, sin
-loving kids will bow their head and sniffle
and say, I take him.
And after that, they think they're Christians.
No, we ought not to lie to them
like that.
We ought to tell them if you follow
Jesus, you'll have his enemies.
If you follow Jesus, you'll have his troubles.
If you follow Jesus, you'll have his rejection.
If you follow Jesus, they'll think the same
of you as they did of him, and
what they thought of him can be seen
on a hill outside Jerusalem.
They took him out there and nailed him
on a cross.
But these soft, pussycats, soft, well-beferred Christians
that smile and smile and smile, but they
don't know God.
Poor kids don't know God.
This man knew God, and it cost him
discipline.
First, he had to accept personal humiliation.
He said, get thee to the brook Tirith,
and I'll feed you there.
And in a big old buzzard, or I
don't know what a buzzard was, they called
him a raven, he was a flesh-eater
and somewhat of a scavenger.
He came croaking down every morning.
He delivered the milk and the bread and
the food for the man he led.
What a humiliating thing that was for a
man who was a great, hairy fellow that
had been his own boss all his life
and had come down a great rough countryman
from the highlands of Gilead.
Now he sits there and watches the raven
bringing bread.
And the Lord said, now Elijah, you'll drink
of the brook.
And Elijah drank of the brook, but he
had said to Ahab, there'll be no rain.
And pretty soon his prophecy started coming true,
and there wasn't any rain, and very shortly
there wasn't any brook.
And God said, Elijah, you're going to have
to drink of the brook.
But Elijah said, Ahab, there'll be no rain.
And here he was, caught and hoisted by
his own petard.
And there he was.
Well, now how humiliating can you get?
A fellow goes into a church, and these
churches were the, well, almost any church.
A fellow goes into a church and starts
preaching the truth, and people stop giving.
The economic strangulation is on, and they strangle
the preacher to death.
And his Reverend Nibs pretty soon has to
go to work selling insurance to make a
living, keep his wife and family.
They choke him up, choke him up, preach
the truth, and the brook dries up.
Oh God, now that shouldn't have been the
way.
You know, if you and I had been
doing it, we'd have given a degree to
Elijah, and we'd call him Dr. Elijah.
He'd have given him a doctorate, and a
big car, and the best of everything.
And when he came down the street, we'd
have said, Good morning, Father.
But God said, Go out and sit down,
a poor fellow by a little brook, and
let your own preaching dry up your source
of income.
And that's exactly what happened.
He preached.
I preached one time at council years ago,
and I've never lived it down.
I said, John the Baptist preached his own
head off.
But I told the truth about it, he
did.
Elijah didn't preach his head off, but he
did preach the brook dry.
And the brook dried up, and it looked
like a blunder and a failure.
And I suppose the devil came, and if
it had been deacons, they'd have probably come,
and said, Pastor, this is all bad here.
You mean well, no question about it, but
you're reading the wrong version, and your brook
has dried up on you.
Now, if you're just a little broader-minded,
if I could just persuade you to be
a little broader-minded, why be old fashioned?
And Elijah pulled that girdle around him a
little tighter, you know, and said, I stand
before God.
He was willing to take whatever came.
Well, then when there was no brook, there
was no rain, and there was Elijah hungry
and thirsty, and then the Lord came around
to Elijah and said, Elijah, get thee up
and go into the town of Zarephath, and
there a widow woman will feed thee.
Widow woman.
Notice that?
If an article came in with the words
widow woman in it, we'd edit it out
in the Alliance Witness, because widow woman is
topological.
Of course, she's a widow if she's a
woman.
She's a widow if she's a woman.
But anyhow, it says there was a widow
woman there, and she will feed thee.
Now imagine, there is compounded humiliation.
Bad enough to have a raven feed you
and then see your source of income dry
up because of your faithfulness to God.
And now he has to go and have
a widow woman, and the whole thing was
given for the humiliation, or at least the
humbling, of the man Elijah.
He went to this woman, and she saw
him come, and he said to her, fetch
me, I pray thee, a little water in
a vessel.
He was just a beggar, and she said,
all right.
And he said, as she started after the
water, and there was a little of that
left, he said, bring me some bread, too.
And she said, I tell you, as the
Lord liveth, there isn't any bread.
She said, the last little bit of meal
now I'm going to make into cakes and
give to my family, and that's the last
and after that we'll have to die.
And Elijah said, you give it to me
first.
What does Emily Post think of that?
You give it to me first!
She gave it to him first, but thank
God the cruise of oil did not fail,
nor the meal fail.
They lived on miracles for a long, long
time, because the man was willing to be
humbled into the dust.
She was repaid a thousandfold, and Elijah repaid
her by raising her son from the dead.
The man that could raise my son from
the dead, I'd consider I'd work a thousand
years and still be in debt to him.
So Elijah wasn't in debt to her after
all, but it looked for a while as
if he was, and the whole thing was
for the humbling, I don't like the word
humiliation, but the humbling of the man Elijah.
Well, there he stands, this man of God,
and he's standing there in history saying to
you in this soft, overstuffed, well-fed age,
he's saying to you, where have you been
all this time, man?
Where have you been, woman?
Here I put a man there and set
him like a burning cross on a hillside
for all the world to see.
There's my man Elijah, and he was so
great that when I wanted him up with
me, I just sent whirlwind and fire down
and took him.
What about you?
This man has been strength to millions, the
very fact that Elijah lived.
I'm a better man because Elijah lived.
Are you?
I'm better.
I used to lie face down and read
about Elijah.
I've always been cowardly, more or less timid.
You wouldn't think it, I suppose, to hear
me yelling around, but I've always been cowardly,
and I needed a lot of help.
You know, if you're not courageous, the next
best thing is to live a while with
courageous people.
It kind of seeps in by osmosis, so
I lay stretched out, and it seeped into
my spirit, so that the least worry I
have in the world is what some big
shot thinks about me.
I don't worry about him.
I've always had an awful time.
I live with the brethren, you know, and
get along with them and do what I'm
supposed to do if I think about it.
But as for the bosses, the fellows over
me, there's just one wee boss over me,
and he doesn't assert himself.
He just stands there and says, if you
will, I will, that's all.
His name is Jesus, the Lord.
But these little bosses, God bless them.
There isn't anything that's quite so disgusting as
a country policeman, the only one in the
town, and he runs the undertaking shop evenings.
But he's the cop, you know.
He's got a badge there, twice as big
as it would need to be, because there's
nobody to shoot at him, so they don't
need a target.
And there he stands, and the littler the
town, the bigger the authority.
It's the same with churches.
Here was a man who stood before God.
He didn't try to push people around, but
he did stand for what he stood for.
God says, there, I put him up there
for you to look at.
Look at him and be a better woman.
Look at him and be a better man.
Look at him and be a humbler person.
Look at him and glorify God.
For Elijah's God still lives today.
Now it says here, and I close, the
Lord heard the voice of Elijah.
Why does it say the Lord heard the
voice of Elijah?
Because Elijah had been willing to hear the
voice of God.
If you want God to hear your voice,
you're going to have to hear God's voice.
You won't hear God's voice and you go
on like that and you get in a
jam and then you scream to high heaven
and want God to hear your voice.
Well, God isn't going to put himself in
your hands like that.
If you're going to be heard of God,
God will have to be heard of you.
God heard Elijah because Elijah heard God.
And God did what Elijah asked because Elijah
had done what God asked.
God and Elijah were friends, you see.
The great friend and the little friend.
The great God and the little prophet.
Now what about you?
Souls of the righteous are in the hands
of God and no evil can befall them.
And not all the world's charm could pull
Elijah away.
Now I want to ask you friends, let's
get a little intimate here as we talk
it over.
You've been coming to hear me preach and
I guess it's my American accent and I
don't know why, but you've been coming.
All right, very good.
Very good.
Are we going to do anything about it
or are we going to fool our time
away?
I'd better be somewhere else.
Are we going to be fooling this away
or are we going to take it and
get a hold of it?
This was not written here as a theme
for discourse.
This was written here to give faith and
courage to men in an evil and adulterous
generation.
Who will bid for Elijah's mantle?
Who will bid for Elijah's power?
Who will apply for the place of standing
before God as Elijah did?
Well, rule the coward out, he can't have
that job.
Rule the self-lover out, rule the sin
-lover out, rule the world-lover out, they
can't have that job.
Only the fearless need apply.
Only the faithful need apply.
But through Jesus Christ, our Lord, you can
apply.
Always remember, all this was done under the
shadow of the cross.
Elijah looked forward to the cross and we
look back to the cross, but it's the
same cross.
Elijah lived in the power of Christ to
come and we live in the power of
Christ who came, but it's the same Christ.
Don't say that was Old Testament, this is
New Testament, dispensation lies yourself into your skin
and bone.
Of course it was the Old Testament dispensation
and of course this is the New.
But the God is the God of both
and all dispensation.
And the God, the spiritual laws and principles
revealed here are still holding true.
The man who will hear God, God will
hear.
The man who will allow his spiritual experiences
to be tested in the fire of living,
who will dare if he need be to
stand against, God will bless that man.
God will hold that man close and watch
over him and love him and keep him
and bless him.
All by grace, all by grace through mercy,
but also the conditions of obedience and faith.
We write the lives of the saints.
I've written some lives, I'm never going to
write another one, and it's blessed me just
searching around after the way they lived.
It was good to learn from them.
If we can, we can write their lives.
Jesus said you build the sepulchres of the
prophets, but you don't live the way they
lived.
The only way to write a biography as
a saint is to be a saint.
I'm not sure I qualified, particularly when I
wrote my Wingspray.
I don't know that I do now.
I'm not going to investigate, I'm just going
to trust God.
But you've got to have something of the
man had if you're going to understand the
man.
Can we understand Elijah at all?
Are we softened and weakened and initiated to
a place where we don't even understand these
men?
Anything God did for Elijah, he'll do for
you.
Anything he did, he'll do for you by
way of spiritual power and blessing and warmth
and fruitfulness and intimacy and grace and all
the rest.
He'll do it for you too.
So now, you've listened and you've listened.
I don't bring this series to a conclusion,
yet I want to talk about Isaiah and
I want to talk about Ezekiel, these great
souls who lived with God.
But what good is it doing us, if
any?
Let us pray.