Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] So I'm finishing up our series that we've been doing on devoted to prayer. We've looked at kind of the early church over the last few weeks and particularly about their commitment and their focus to living lives that were filled with prayer and how that these prayers came before great miracles and great moments within the early church. And we're going to be carrying on with this theme of prayer, specifically looking at the story of Elijah and just kind of some of the practical ways that we can improve our prayer lives. I am going to look at my notes quite a bit today. My brain fog is a little bit here, there and everywhere. So if I try and do it off the cuff, it probably won't go as smoothly as I'd like. So if I'm not looking at you, I'm not ignoring you, just making sure I'm where I feel like I want to be. So looking at the story of Elijah, if you have your Bible with you, if you want to go to one kings, chapter 17, and the story kind of takes place between chapters 17 and chapters 19. And then there's a little bit in like two kings. Two. But we're going to focus on chapter 17 a little bit, but just for a little bit of context as to where Elijah is in the Bible. So the story of Elijah is slap bang in the middle of the book of kings. The Book of Kings is written as part of the historical accounts of the kingdom of Israel, and it tells the story of the kings that follow king David and how none of these kings would live up to this promise that God gave to Israel, that there would be a messianic king that would come to the nation and kind of bring save them from all their enemies. But we know that that messianic king today is Jesus. So it makes sense that none of these other kings were going to measure up to it.
[00:01:47] So Elijah comes onto the scene where all these kings, they're not meeting the character description that's been laid out by God in deuteronomy 17 about how the kings should behave. They're described as evil. They're described as doing evil in the eyes of the Lord. And so what happens is the kingdom of Israel kind of gets split into two kingdoms. So you've got the northern kingdom, which is where kind of the line of David is no longer on the throne. And then you've got the southern kingdom where you still have the kings that are coming from the line of David on the throne, but there's still kind of evil in the land. And Elijah is sent to this northern kingdom to confront Ahab, the king there, and his wife Jezebel. And these two are really bad news.
[00:02:31] Chapter 16, in one, kings 30 to 33 says this about Ahab. He says that he did more evil in the eyes of the Lord than any of those before him. He married Jezebel, the daughter of a canaanite king, and he began to serve Bal and worship him. He did more to arouse the anger of the lord than all the kings of Israel before him. That's a pretty nasty kind of description of someone who's meant to lead God's holy people. And so this is where we find ourselves in the story, is that Elijah is sent to Ahab, and he says to him, he says there's going to be no more rain in the land until the Lord says the word. And so Ahab is a little bit peeved. Elijah's essentially just cursed the land and said, hey, there's not going to be any rain. And so Elijah has to go into hiding. And this is kind of where we're going to read from. So we've got one kings, chapter 17, verse seven. If you want to follow along in your bibles, there's a little. We'll come back to this timeline. It's quite a big story, so if you can see it, that's great. If not, I'll see if I can get the slides sent out at a later date to you all. So, one king, 17, from verse seven. It says, sometime later, the brook dried up because there was no rain in the land. Then the word of the lord came to him. Go at once to Zarafeth in the region of Sidon and stay there. I've instructed a widow there to supply you with food. So he went to Zarafeth. When he came to the town's gate, a widow was there gathering sticks, and he called to her and asked, would you bring me a little water in a jar so I may have a drink? As she was going to get it, he called, oh, and please, piece of bread as well. As surely as the Lord your God lives. She replied, I don't have any bread. I've only got a handful of flour in a jar and a little olive oil in a jug. I'm gathering a few sticks to take home and make a meal for myself and my son, that we may eat it and die. And Elijah said to her, don't be afraid. Go home and do as you've said. But first, make me a small loaf of bread for me from what you have and bring it to me and then make something for yourself and your son. For this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says. The jar of flour will not be used up, and the jug of oil will not run dry until the day the Lord sends rain on the land. So she went away and did as Elijah had told her. And so there was food every day for Elijah and for the woman in her family. For the jar of flour was not used up and the jug of oil did not run dry. In keeping with the word of the Lord spoken by Elijah.
[00:04:54] Last little bit on this bit says sometime later, the son of the woman who owned the house became ill, and he grew worse and worse and finally stopped breathing.
[00:05:03] And she said to Elijah, what do you have against me, man of God? Did you come to remind me of my sin and kill my son? Elijah replied, give me your son. And he took him from her arms, carried him to this upper room where he was staying and laid him on his bed. Then he cried out to the Lord, Lord, my God, have you brought tragedy even on this widow I am staying with by causing her son to die? Then he stretched himself out on the boy three times and cried out to the Lord, Lord, my God, let this boy's life return to him.
[00:05:35] The Lord heard Elijah's cry, and the boy's life returned to him and he lived. Elijah picked up the child and carried him down from the room into the house. And he gave him to his mother and said, look, your son is alive. And then 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. Lord, we just pray that as we explore this story of Elijah, we pray that you would reveal to us secrets of your heart on how we can connect with you afresh. Lord, we pray that we would be stirred to enter into a secret place with you in our day to day lives. And we pray that your holy spirit would speak to us and through us, Lord, in the next few minutes, in Jesus'name we pray. Amen.
[00:06:18] Cool. So the place that Elijah is sent to is this place called Zarephath, which in the eastern Bible dictionary, it's defined as a workshop for refining metals. And in this place of refinement, the purpose of it is to get rid of anything impure and to prepare and forge himself into this place where he's ready to be the mouthpiece of God. And the passage we just read, this story of Elijah going to Zarephath. Preludes this powerful moment on Mount Carmel. If we just pop to the timeline, if that's okay, Gordon.
[00:06:49] And on Mount Carmel, there's this big challenge that Elijah does towards Ahab and the priests of Baal. And he basically says, the God that answers by fire is the one true God. So you've got all the priests of Baal kind of prancing around their altar praying, and Elijah's kind of taunting and being like, oh, maybe you should pray louder. Your God can't hear you. And they pray and they pray and they pray, and nothing's happening. And so Elijah gets a little bit cocky, and he goes, okay, I know there's not been water in the land for three years, but we're going to waste your water and pour it on my altar and make it really damp and sodden and unable to burn. So they pour about four jugs of water onto his altar, and then he goes to God. And he goes, lord, reveal yourself to your people and answer by fire.
[00:07:39] And his altar is struck by fire. It bursts into flame. And everyone's going, oh, my goodness, God of Israel, it's the one true God.
[00:07:50] And it's in this moment that this Zarephath, this secret place, is where Elijah has to go before that miracle, before that moment of revealment. And it's this secret place before he goes to war, essentially, with Ahab. But it's not a physical war. It's a spiritual war for Elijah. He's not a king after glory, but he wants to put the king of Israel, the one true king of kings, back on the throne.
[00:08:16] And so Elijah understood that although there are physical conflicts and trials in our world, that as God's holy people, our battle is not one of the physical realm, but it's one of the spiritual realm. When we pray, we are going to war against the spiritual forces of evil. And we know that our God will come out victorious in the end. He's already beaten death once and for all. He's already got the victory. But when we pray, we are still in this place of being saved and the saving still continuing. And there's this tension in our world as we're undergoing this kind of battle against the spiritual forces. And Ephesians six, verse twelve to 13 amplifies this. It says, our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore, put on the full armor of God so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, but only after you have done everything to stand the way that we get to a place where we are able to stand in those dark places is by having time in the secret place in our Zarephath, in our place of kind of being restored, in our place of preparing ourselves. And so the question is, what should our secret place look like? What should our Zarephath look like? And the first thing that it should be is that we should be well fed.
[00:09:41] And the purpose of Elijah being in Zarephath is that God has sent him there to be fed. He's been sent to the widow to be fed. And I don't think that it's a coincidence that when Elijah gets there, he asks for bread and water. And then a few hundred years later, we have Jesus describing himself as the bread of life and that the Holy Spirit will be like living water that you will never have to thirst for. When we come into this secret place, God wants to not just come in with a big list of our requests, but he wants to take the time to be in dialogue with him.
[00:10:12] And my friends who know me well will know that I am a real introvert at heart. I really enjoy going to parties and big gatherings, but I often feel really tired afterwards. It's not where I find my energy. My energy, I find, is when my favorite times is sat in a coffee shop, gingerbread, hot chocolate in hand, chatting for hours, just about life, the universe and everything. And when I come away, I feel so energized, my spirit feels so full.
[00:10:38] And I notice when I don't have that time with friends. I notice when I don't have that one to one time with friends or with my husband. And I feel that disconnect, that unrest within my soul because I haven't had that quiet time with those closest to me. And I believe that I notice the same thing when I don't have that time with God. I feel that disconnect. And my soul has that similar feeling of unrest. But I also believe that God feels the same when we don't have that time with him. He craves our undivided attention, our undivided devotion to him, that one on one time. And he wants us to come in quietness with our hearts and our ears open to what he has to say, to come with no agenda other than to just rest in his presence and build that intimacy with him.
[00:11:23] Psalm 91, verse one, says this. It says, he who dwells in the secret place of the most high shall abide under the shadow of the almighty. When we go into that secret place with God, our whole lives fall under his mighty shadow. When we spend that time dwelling, just being with God, every trial, anxiety and situation is covered by his shadow. We find contentedness and fulfillment in the ordinary parts of our day because we have spent time in his presence, getting to know his character and breathing in the deep love that he has for us.
[00:11:59] And so when we create this space to hear his voice, we've got this bit in Matthew four, verse four, where it says, man shall not live by bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. When we're praying, we should be thinking about whether our prayers are aligned with God's will, whether it's aligned with his character. And the only way that we're going to know if our prayers are aligned with the will of God, with the word of God, is by being in the word.
[00:12:25] We need to be reading it, meditating on it, breathing these scriptures into our prayers in order to make sure that what we are praying is in line with the will and what God is wanting to do.
[00:12:37] If we're unsure about what, if what God is saying to you is from God, or if it's just a random thought about the Easter bunny in your head, go to scripture, pray about it. Read the scriptures. Does it align with what the word of God is saying? And reading the word and prayer, they're not two separate entities. They go hand in hand. We can't neglect one for the sake of the other. Because if we truly believe that this book is the word of God and that in order to know what God is saying to us when we pray, we have to know what's in it. We have to have to read it. St. Augustine says this. He says, whether we realize it or not, prayer is the encounter of God's first with ours. God firsts that we may thirst for him.
[00:13:19] And I guess the question to put to you is, how great is your thirst for God right now?
[00:13:24] How hungry are you for him to be in your life?
[00:13:27] The reality is that if we are hungry enough for God, we will make the time and space in our schedules to be in that secret place to dwell, to have that one on one time with him. If we come to God hungry, he promises that he will feed us. The Lord continuously made sure that Elijah, the widow and the Son were all fed each day. So when we enter into the secret place with God, there is a filling of ourselves that brings the kind of fulfillment and wholeness that only the spirit can give us. As we let God restore and refill us in the secret place. All the other aspects of our lives also begin to be saturated with clarity and the presence of God.
[00:14:08] The second thing that needs to happen in the secret place is that we should be really real with God. Whilst Elijah is staying with the widow, we read that her son gets sick. And in fact, the son gets so sick that he dies. And we know the woman has already experienced deep loss. She's lost her husband. And in those days particularly, we can see she was struggling financially to provide for her family. And her hope for the future, to be financially secure, to be looked after, to be safe, is for her son to grow up and to provide for her in the future. And so when her son dies, she's not just experiencing this deep loss of relationship with her son, but she's experiencing that livelihood, that whole security.
[00:14:48] And so she goes to Elijah and she asks the question of, what do you have against me? Are you here just to remind me of my sin? Is your God here to kill my son? And Elijah carries the son up to the other room and has these same questions. He's like, why on earth have you brought tragedy on this widow I'm staying with by causing her son to die? And that even though Elijah and the widow have seen the miracles of God through the provision of the flour and the oil, they still have questions about the character and nature of God. Even though Elijah is in the secret place, he still has questions about the dynamics of our humanity and about the goodness of God.
[00:15:26] And I think we all share in these questions. I think one of the biggest boundaries to people coming to believe in Jesus is there's this hook on this question of why is there suffering in the world if God's all loving them? Why is there suffering? And it's not an easy question to answer, and I don't have time to unpack that right now. But what I will say with confidence is that I have seen God's faithfulness and mercy in my life time and time again. That even when there are deep traumas and sadnesses that are in my life, I will still proclaim that God is good. Not because I've created a nice idea of God in my head to bring me comfort every now and again, but because in the reality is that when I've held these questions of suffering, these anxieties, that God has brought a comfort and peace and clarity to my life like nothing I could have experienced elsewhere. That when I've cried out to God in pain and frustration, there's this reality of my humanity and the sovereignty of God that collide. And there's a new, unexplainable peace that restores my uncertainty and heals my pain.
[00:16:23] A few years ago, I was living with my mum and my brothers and we were told we were going to be evicted from our home. We had about a month to find somewhere new, we were told, and it had been the longest we'd ever lived somewhere, so it was really home. It was about five years we'd been there and we were told we had this month to move out. And I remember getting out. I've probably told this story before. We got this risk board out and started praying for provision, praying for a new home. And one came up. It was beautiful farmhouse, it was perfect. The price had been reduced on the same day that we'd been told we were going to be evicted. There was a lion on the door. My bedroom had teal walls and it was going to match all my decor. There was a toilet for my brothers and if you live with boys, you know. You know, there were aspects of this house that just met all the needs of our family and we put in the application and it got accepted and we were so excited and we all started making plans about decorations, how it was going to look and be. And then they contacted us a few days later and the landlord said that they'd actually changed their mind and the house wasn't going to be ours. And I remember waiting the day after we'd found out for my brothers and my mum to go to work and my little brother to go off to college and I remember just crying in my room for an hour but, like, really ugly cry, you know, like the. On the floor snot howling, like, God, why on earth would you dangle such a beautiful house in front of us that is perfect and seemed so you, and then take it away. And in my bible today, I've got a prayer that I wrote and I wrote it on the 25 April. I stuck it in job because I thought, job probably gets it.
[00:18:00] And when I was kind of preparing, I was just prompted to go back and look at it. And the date's really important. The date on that prayer is the 25 April 2018. And the question, some of the things I wrote in it, I'll be really honest about, is that it says it felt cruel, but I know you're not a cruel God. Did we do something wrong?
[00:18:22] I'm frightened again. It was really rubbish, what happened. And I don't understand.
[00:18:27] At the end, there's this wrestling with the knowledge of who God is and the real fears and emotions that we felt in that moment and right at the end, I just put, I don't understand now, but I know that one day I will. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. So the 25 April 2018. I wrote that letter to God exactly a month after that, on the 25 May, we were moving into our new home that God had provided for us. And not only that, but a very nice looking man from church took the day off work to come and help us move. Three days later, we started dating, and he's now my husband, which is very, very, you know, God knew exactly what he was doing in that moment. But there was snotty crying Ellie on the floor going, God, I don't get it. I don't know why you are this way, but I still trust and I still know that you are good. We have to get real with God in the secret place. He understands our suffering better than anyone. He himself, he came down. We've just celebrated it at Christmas. He came down as a child, and he went through the whole process of humanity. He had childhood. He faced temptations and joys and fears and unimaginable physical pain. And he's experienced that same pain and suffering as us to a greater degree. And so he understands so much of what it is just to be human, to have these feelings and emotions.
[00:19:51] In the psalms, it says that he keeps track of all our sorrows and that he's collected each of our tears in a jar.
[00:19:59] Later on in Elijah's story, if we could just bring the timeline back up again, we see that Elijah has this incredible moment on Mount Carmel and this credible reveal of God's might. And then Ahab's wife, Jezebel kind of goes, yeah, we need to get rid of this Elijah guy. We're going to kill him off. So Elijah has to go into hiding again. And when he's in this place of hiding, he experiences these very real deep feelings of depression, so much so that he begins to pray to the Lord to take his life in chapter 19, verse four. And he cries out to God, and he just goes, God, take my life. I'm the last faithful one left to you. I can't do it anymore. Just take it. I'm done with it. And the Lord tells him to go to the top of the mountain, because the Lord is about to pass him by. There's a large wind, there's an earthquake, there's fire. But the text is really specific and says that God was not in the wind, the fire, the earthquake, but that he was in a gentle whisper.
[00:20:58] The Lord is waiting for us in the quiet places of our lives. And what I also love about this moment with Elijah is that Elijah's going, hey, take my life. I'm so alone. And God doesn't answer that prayer. Instead, he notices Elijah's need for loneliness or the need that needs to be fulfilled, that he's feeling lonely and needs that fulfilled. And he says, go and find this guy, Elisha. He's going to succeed you as prophet and he's going to do life with you. And so where there's loneliness, God gives friendship.
[00:21:30] He may not answer our prayers in the way that we expect, but romans eight tells us that he is always working for the good of those who loves him.
[00:21:39] And so finally, the last thing we should do in the secret place is we should pray and then pray again.
[00:21:46] We see that Elijah has carried the body of the widow's son to the upper room and he cries out to the Lord three times. And there's two things I want to pull from this. Firstly, there's a surrendering that Elijah does in this moment. He is physically laying himself down before the Lord. When we come to God in prayer, there are likely to be some things that we may need to lay down. There's some uncomfortable and hard conversations that we might need to have with God. There might be sin that we need to let go of. There might be our own plans and agendas that aren't God's that might need to be set aside.
[00:22:19] We might need to physically lay down some things in our schedules in order to make space for God in that secret place.
[00:22:25] Matthew 16. Jesus says this to us. He says, whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves, take up their cross and follow me. We have to be willing to give up the parts of ourselves that are not holy and are not aligned with Christ in order to be available for God to move in our lives and the lives of those around us. We've got this naughty.
