I want to talk to you about restoring
the altar of the Lord here on Mount
Carmel where we live.
We've literally restored an altar of the Lord
up on the top of Mount Carmel where
our worship center is and where I'm speaking
to you from, Mount Carmel in northern Israel.
And an altar is a place of sacrifice.
The word in Hebrew, Mizbeach, comes from a
word to cut or to sacrifice and usually
referred to an animal that was being sacrificed
as an atonement, as a substitutionary atonement for
sin.
And so Elijah restored the altar of the
Lord on Mount Carmel.
There were false altars all over Israel.
There are today.
There are false altars all over the western
world, all over the world to false gods,
whatever they may happen to be.
Maybe they're even to television or idols on
television or whatever people may be worshiping.
But there is an altar of the Lord
that he wants to restore in these last
days.
And the word in Hebrew for restore means
to heal, to bring from ruin and devastation
back into health and wholeness.
So Elijah put these twelve stones around and
they represent the twelve tribes of Israel.
And for us, it's a prophetic picture that
God is bringing the children of Israel back
to the land, the twelve tribes, and there
they will have an encounter with him on
the mountains of Israel.
The scriptures say, for instance, in Ezekiel 36,
which is so dear to our hearts because
we live on a mountain of Israel, I'll
bring them back to the mountains of Israel,
I'll pour clean water on them, I'll put
my spirit in them, I'll cause them to
walk in my ways, and then the nations
round about shall know that I am the
Lord.
And we see this happening daily, on a
daily occurrence, in the last few years here
on Mount Carmel.
Jews and Arabs turning to the Lord.
But as he restored the altar of the
Lord, the altar is a place of sacrifice,
it's a place of people returning to God
and repenting and receiving relief from their guilt
and being revived and renewed and going on
in newness of life.
So as Elijah called the fire down on
the altar, with the sacrifice there, the animal,
the blood, the water, the wood, and the
ditch that he dug around it, the fire
came down and fell on it, that burned
everything up, the people fell on their faces
and said, the Lord, he is God, the
Lord, he is God.
Now as new covenant believers, what does restoring
the altar of the Lord mean to us
today?
When you look at the picture of what
happened on Mount Carmel, everything that he did
points to the cross of the Messiah, Yeshua,
Jesus.
The animal was innocent, the blood, the water
that came out of Yeshua's side when the
Romans stuck a spear in it, the fire
that came down, God's hatred of sin, his
fire of holiness, his all-consuming fire of
love came down and burned up everything.
So the altar represents a place of prayer,
a place of sacrifice, a place of connection,
a place of encounter with the Lord, a
place of praise, a place where the covenant
relationship can be restored.
Elijah was restoring the covenant that had been
broken because the people had walked away from
the covenant.
And so he was restoring the covenant, and
as we as new covenant believers look at
this, it all points to Jesus.
Everything that Elijah did, the time he spent
at the brook, he was alone with the
Lord.
When he went to the widow, when he
raised her son from the dead, he's a
Jew, she's not a Jew.
It's a picture of the one new man,
of Jew and Gentile in one body.
Everything was about the cross.
Elijah didn't understand this, but we do.
You know, centuries later, Elijah and Moses appeared
with Jesus up on a mountain not far
from here in Galilee.
Peter, James, and John were there.
And Jesus started talking about the departure that
he would make, the exodus that he would
make in Jerusalem.
You can read about it in Luke's gospel,
chapter 9.
And he talked about the departure he was
about to make in Jerusalem.
He was talking about the cross.
And I've often wondered if those two great
prophets, Moses and Elijah, was it then that
Elijah realized what happened on Mount Carmel was
all about the Son of God coming in
flesh and dying on a cross and fulfilling
all the prophetic significance and picture of what
happened that day on Mount Carmel centuries before.
It's the cross.
We need to come to the cross.
Now Yeshua has done his part, but what
about us?
The sacrifices of God, David the king would
say, are a broken spirit, a broken and
a contrite heart.
And these God does not despise.
So the sacrifice, the fire that fell on
Mount Carmel is about the cross, about redemption,
about newness of life, about being transformed, and
an altar is a place of transformation.
And Elijah was a broken man.
God uses broken vessels because David the king
knew, as I just quoted from Psalm 51,
17, the sacrifices of God are people with
a broken heart, with a broken spirit, with
a contrite repentant heart.
These God will not despise.
Elijah had been through three years of persecution
with the king and his army trying to
find him in Jezebel, living alone.
There must have been anguish and loneliness, living
alone at a little brook and drinking from
the brook and a bird feeding him every
day and every morning.
And then going to heathen people and living
with this widow and raising her son from
the dead with a little bit of, he
was a broken, broken vessel.
God uses broken people.
You can see it all through the scriptures
from Abraham, leave everything and go somewhere and
I'll show you as you go along.
And that broken man went and he hung
on to the promises of God.
The great revival under Gideon here in Galilee
on northern Israel where we live.
Gideon found 300 men, they had vessels, they
put a torch inside it, they had a
shofar to blow and when they surrounded the
enemy and everyone stood in their place, they
broke the vessels, they broke the clay pots
and the torch, the fire of the presence
of God shined out once they were broken
and the enemy ran away as shofars were
blown.
God always uses broken people.
We need to come to the altar of
the Lord which is being restored, it's the
cross.
We need to say break me Lord, Lord
change me, transform me.
You can look through all the scriptures, Paul
was a broken man, he got knocked down
on the road to Damascus and he would
say over and over again, when I am
weak then he's strong, the more less of
me, less of me, less of me.
Each one of the great heroes of the
Bible, you can look at them and they
are broken.
Even Jesus himself was broken, his body broken
for us that we might be broken bread
and poured out wine for another generation.
You know God in his mercy and grace,
he wants to break my inner life, my
ego, my pride, your ego, your pride, your
selfish ambition, your competition, your lust, my lust.
He wants to break it and shatter it
and bring it to nothing and grind it
to powder so that he can use me
and use you.
We see this happen over and over here
on Mount Carmel.
In our rehabilitation center, drug addicts come in
and they are filled with anger and self
contempt and little by little they get broken
and broken and young people then come to
the Lord, Jews learn to love the Father,
are reconciled to God, then they are reconciled
to each other.
It's not easy for a Jew to be
reconciled to an Arab or an Arab to
be reconciled to a Jew.
They live together at House of Victory here
on Mount Carmel.
Not only that, the Lord has spoken to
us about being a good Samaritan.
Don't just leave people on the streets but
bring them in.
That takes brokenness.
I know, I've stayed up all night praying
with drug addicts, alcoholics and in recent years
Rita Sukahira, the wife of Pastor Peter Sukahira,
is leading our women's shelter and now we
have refugees from all over Darfur and Eritrea,
mothers, widows, single moms, children, some of them
are Muslims, coming and living on Mount Carmel
as we minister to them.
It takes broken people to do that.
The Lord is looking for a people who
will be broken, who will go to the
restored altar of the Lord.
Do you have a prayer altar every morning?
Do you go to Him and repent?
Do you go to Him and cry out
to Him?
Do you go to Him and ask the
Holy Spirit to speak through you and pray
through you to reach the lost sheep of
the house of Israel for us or for
you, the lost sheep of the house of
whatever nation you're in.
So the Lord is looking for, He always
uses broken things.
That lady broke her alabaster box and out
of it came that beautiful fragrance of Yeshua,
that Yeshua was anointed by and was so
ministered to.
Be a broken person.
Ask the Lord to help you be broken
before Him so that He might use you
to reach your generation even as He's doing
this on Mount Carmel in Israel with Arabs
and Jews in these last days.