Fresh Perspective in the Wilderness

The sermon text today is on page 504 in your Pew Bible, if you'd like to follow along.

The message today is from 1 Kings chapter 19, verses 1 through 13.

1 Kings 19:1–13

Now Ahab told Jezebel everything Elijah had done and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword.

So Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah to say, May the gods deal with me, be it ever so severely, if by this time tomorrow I do not make your life like that of one of them.

Elijah was afraid and ran for his life.

When he came to Beersheba in Judah, he left his servant there, while he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness.

He came to a broom bush, sat down under it, and prayed that he might die.

I have had enough, Lord.

He said, Take my life.

I am no better than my ancestors.

Then he lay down under the bush and fell asleep.

All at once an angel touched him and said, Get up and eat.

He looked around, and there by his head was some bread baked over hot coals and a jar of water.

He ate and drank and then lay down again.

The angel of the Lord came back a second time and touched him and said, Get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you.

So he got up and ate and drank.

Strengthened by that food, he travelled forty days and forty nights until he reached Horeb, the mountain of God.

There he went into a cave and spent the night.

And the word of the Lord came to him.

What are you doing here, Elijah?

He replied, I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty.

The Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to death with a sword.

I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too.

The Lord said, Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.

Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind.

After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake.

After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire.

And after the fire came a gentle whisper.

When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.

Here ends the reading.

If you look around and see there's a bunch of people missing, it's because it's MEA weekend and uh students are off school, and uh so there's a bunch of people traveling this weekend.

But we are grateful to be together with you uh here today.

If I've not had the chance to meet you yet, my name is John.

I get to serve as the lead pastor here at Elmwood, and if I haven't connected with you yet, would love to do so after the service.

I'll be right out in the main foyer and would love to meet you and connect with you then.

As we come to this passage this morning, let me invite you to a word of prayer.

God, thank you for being the kind of God who meets us in our lowest moments.

Thank you, God, for this account that is preserved for us.

Thank you, God, that this passage that's so full of raw emotions and despondency is here for us to see and learn from.

God, we ask that as we look into this passage today, that you would, by your spirit, that you'd help us see what is here, that you would help us to see Jesus clearly.

And as we pray each week, God, and pray that you would change us.

We don't want to just sit here in this room and hear things and learn things intellectually.

We want to be changed.

And so we ask, Holy Spirit, that you would do the work inside of each one of us that you need to do.

God, you know those people here today who maybe can identify with Elijah's experience and need a word of encouragement and hope.

God, we pray that you would bring hope and encouragement to those of us who find ourselves in a similar place to Him.

God, be with us now as we look at these verses.

We ask this all in Jesus' name.

Amen.

It is common in our culture to hear people talk openly about things like depression.

This may not have been the case uh in generations past or uh just in seasons past, but it certainly is the case today.

And uh, because of that, we know that it's not only people in really bad circumstances or people who have uh below average circumstances or just uh average people in general who struggle with things like depression.

It's actually the people who on the surface seem like they should have a great life.

It's the people who on the surface it looks like they have everything they need to live a life of comfort and continual happiness.

Even those people find themselves wrestling with and struggling with depression.

Some well-known people that you may or may not have known have wrestled with this, or people like U.S.

President Abraham Lincoln, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, author J.K.

Rowling, actor Robin Williams, musician Chester Bennington or Lady Gaga, 19th century pastor Charles Spurgeon, who was known and is known as the Prince of Preachers, had long and extended, sometimes debilitating seasons of spiritual depression in his life.

And I can tell you that when I have dealt with my own seasons of discouragement or depression, I find comfort in looking to people like Charles Spurgeon.

I find comfort in looking to them and knowing that in those seasons I am not alone.

There's other people who experience these kinds of things as well.

We've been in a series of messages this fall called Finding God in the Wilderness.

And what we're doing is we are looking at these various accounts throughout the Bible of God's people, sometimes individuals, sometimes God's people collectively, as they find themselves in the wilderness.

And the main sort of theme that we've been thinking about and sort of looking at and turning over and massaging from different angles is that the wilderness is one of the unexpected places where God loves to meet his people.

It's one of the places where God loves to meet his people and do his good, affirmative work in them.

So God desires to meet us in our seasons of being in the wilderness, when life feels dry, when we feel despondent, when we feel discouraged, those are the places where God desires and delights to meet with us, his people.

As we look at the story of Elijah in the wilderness, we find a man of great faith who is in this moment at probably the lowest point of his entire life.

In 1 Kings 19, we read that Elijah has sunk deep into a spiritual depression, and there's no other way of saying it except for that he is utterly despondent.

In our time today, what I want to do is explore the causes we see in this passage for his deep spiritual depression and despondency, and then look at the solutions that God provides to them.

And I want to say just really clearly on the front end, I'm not trying to speak comprehensively to the subject of spiritual depression or any other kind of depression.

I'm just saying let's look at these verses and see what's in here for us.

So I'm not trying to speak comprehensively to something that is so uh big and so complex and needs so much nuancing and care as we talk about it.

I'm just trying to focus in on what's here in these verses.

So let's look at the text, and as we do, we see the first cause of Elijah's despondency is a depleted body.

His body is depleted.

So let's take a moment here and orient ourselves to where we are in the story we see in the book of 1 Kings.

So at this point in their history, the nation of Israel has separated, they've split into the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah.

And the king in the north in Israel is a man named Ahab, who we are told in chapter 16, verse 30, is literally the worst of the worst.

We read this about Ahab.

It says, Ahab did more evil in the eyes of the Lord than any of those before him.

He not only considered it trivial to commit the sins of Jeroboam, son of Nabat, those are really bad, by the way.

He not only considered that trivial, he also married Jezebel, daughter of Ethale, king of the Sidonians, and began to serve Baal and worship him.

So Ahab is king over Israel, and he's not leading the people in a good direction.

He's a terrible king.

And during Ahab's reign, God told Elijah that he's going to send a years-long drought into the land, and that drought would only come to an end when God told Elijah to pray for rain to come.

So it's at the end of this third year of this drought that God told him, I want you to go present yourself to Ahab, the king, and then I want you to pray for rain, and it will finally once again rain.

Now, when Elijah presented himself to Ahab, what came out of that, the result of that, was there was a spiritual showdown that took place on top of Mount Carmel.

I encourage you to go back and read 1 Kings chapter 18 sometime and read the story for yourself.

1 Kings 18 · chapter mention

But the Cliff Notes version of it is that the prophet Elijah, the prophet of God, was to set up an altar with a sacrifice on it, and the prophets of Baal would also set up an altar with sacrifices on it, and they would all call out to their gods, and the God that sent fire to consume the sacrifice would be recognized as the true God.

And throughout the entire day, the prophets of Baal are crying out to their God over and over, and they're cutting themselves and they're, you know, flagellating themselves to try and get the attention of Baal, and nothing happens.

Elijah prays to Yahweh, and fire rains down from heaven and consumes not just the sacrifice, not just the altar, but the entire area around the altar as well.

And after this, 850 of the prophets of both Baal and Asherah were put to death on top of Mount Carmel.

Now, when Jezebel found out about this, Jezebel was furious, as we might expect, because remember, Baal was one of her gods.

And so she's very upset that Elijah did this, not just to her God, but also to the prophets of her God.

And so she sent word to Elijah saying, By tomorrow, you are as good as dead.

I'm coming for you.

And so Elijah fled from Mount Carmel all the way down to Beersheba.

So Mount Carmel is up here in the north.

Beersheba is down here in the south on the border of Judah.

And he went all the way down through the hill country, which is a journey of 100 miles.

So he went this journey of a hundred miles.

Once he got to Beersheba, he left his attendant behind and went another full day's journey into the wilderness where he collapsed under a bush and he prayed to die.

This is how lo Elijah has sunk into the realm of despair.

He's in such a place of despair that he literally lays down under a broom tree like this one and he prays for God to kill him.

Now, I don't think that Elijah is being presented to us here as a faithless or selfish man.

I think that Elijah's being presented to us here, as one of my pastor friends put it, Elijah is being presented to us as a faithful man who loves God and has reached the end of himself.

And so he's in this place of utter despondency.

I have been where Elijah is, sitting under this tree.

For very different reasons.

I know what it's like to love God and to be in utter despair.

And my guess is that some of you sitting here today know exactly what it's like to maybe pray these words to God.

Or if you haven't prayed those words, you at least know what Elijah is feeling here.

You've had a time in your life where you feel like you're in utter despair and despondency and you're afraid and you're tired and you're scared.

And maybe you just haven't had the courage to say to God what Elijah says to him here, but you know exactly what he feels like.

Under a bush, praying to die, we find a man who has served God well, who loves God, and he's physically depleted.

Remember, he has just come off of this spiritual high.

He's come off of literally a mountaintop experience where he's experienced and seen the power of God.

And then after that, he ran an ultra marathon.

And so he's tired.

Part of the reason why he is so despondent here is because physically he's run out of gas.

And so the Lord, when he meets Elijah here, notice how when Elijah collapses under the bush and prays to die, God doesn't say, You need to repent.

He doesn't turn his the physical depletion he's experiencing into a spiritual thing.

When Elijah prayed to die, God gave him food and told him to take a nap because he's tired.

And at least in part, I'm not saying that's the entire reason, we'll see more later, but in part the reason why he's so despondent is because his body is tired.

And so I think the application for us in this is uh pretty simple.

Pay attention to your physical inputs and outputs, especially in seasons where you're in the wilderness, because I think we all know that those seasons provide us unique temptations.

We're uniquely vulnerable in those seasons of the wilderness when we are physically tired, and so we have to pay attention to our physical inputs and outputs.

Friends, God has designed us as both physical and spiritual beings.

We are physically and emotionally and spiritually interconnected, which means we cannot separate those things from one another and pretend as though they don't have an influence or an impact on those other parts of us.

In fact, any of you who are here today who have truly suffered physically in your body, maybe chronic pain or some sort of illness or some medical condition or chronic fatigue or something like that, you know how much the condition of your physical body affects your emotional state of mind.

And it can screw with you.

You know how those things you experience physically in your body can affect your spirit.

They can affect you spiritually.

And so we are interconnected people and we should pay attention to our physical bodies.

Friends, very simply, don't underestimate the spiritual value of eating good food, moving your body, and getting enough sleep.

Not very often you hear this come up as an application in a sermon, right?

Because this doesn't feel spiritual enough oftentimes.

And yet, you know what I know to be true?

That when I am in places of discouragement or despair, what I want to do is I want to go eat salty and sugary and highly processed things.

Okay?

Some of you are giving me thumbs up.

Not saying it's bad to eat those things, but when I eat a bunch of highly processed, salty, sugary food, so I feel bad, so I eat bad food.

And then because I eat bad food, it actually doesn't make me feel better.

It might in the moment, but it doesn't in the long run make me feel better.

And so what do I do?

I go back and eat more of the things that made me feel bad in the first place.

And you know exactly what I'm talking about.

I can see the looks on your faces where you're like, I don't know what he's not talking about me.

I am talking about you.

Yes, you know what this is like.

Okay, when I'm physically depleted and tired and not moving my body, whether it's going for a walk or going to the gym, all I want to do is loaf and scroll.

And when I just loaf and scroll, my body feels worse, and all I want to do then in response is do more loafing and scrolling.

When I'm doing those things like loafing and scrolling, and I'm not moving my body, and I'm not eating well, I don't sleep well either.

And when I'm tired, I'm more vulnerable, and so I make bad food choices and then don't move my body, right?

And so you know exactly what I'm talking about, and there is a downward spiral where these things all affect one another.

And so, in those seasons of the wilderness, don't underestimate the spiritual value of taking care of your physical body.

I take a nap every single day.

Amen.

I take a nap every single day, and sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is shut it down and be unconscious for a while.

Seriously, don't underestimate the spiritual impact of taking a nap.

That's what God told Elijah to do here.

Gave him food, told him to take a nap.

So, especially in the wilderness, pay attention to your physical inputs and outputs.

So, first cause of his despondency is a depleted body.

He's tired, he's physically exhausted.

And so God meets him in that moment and provides a resolution by giving him food and sleep.

There's a physical cause and there's a physical provision for him.

The second cause of his despondency is a distorted perspective.

So, number one, he's got a depleted body.

Number two, he's got a distorted perspective.

So after taking care of his body by eating and sleeping, Elijah then set out on another very long journey to Mount Horeb, which we most commonly know as Mount Sinai.

So Mount Carmel's all the way up here in the north, Beersheba's down here, he traveled from here to here, and that's a hundred miles, and then he travels all the way down here to Mount Sinai, which is at least another hundred miles.

So lots of walking, ends up making it to Mount Sinai, and he finds a cave where he can hunker down for the night, and he sleeps, and he wakes up the next day, and the first thing that happens is God speaks to him.

And on Mount Sinai, God said to him in verse 9, he says, Why are you here, Elijah?

He's inviting him into a conversation.

He's inviting Elijah into a kind of self-disclosure to sort of get him to get out of his head what he's thinking.

Elijah's response shows us that his despondency is not just the result of a depleted body, although that's part of it.

He also has a radically distorted perspective of what's true, about God, himself, and God's work in the world.

Elijah responds when God asks him, What are you doing here?

He says, I've been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty.

The Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword.

I am the only one left, and now they're trying to kill me too.

So notice notice the four parts of this.

I've been very zealous.

Twice in this passage, we didn't read the all this all the way to the end, but twice in this passage, God asks the same question, Elijah, what are you doing here?

And both times he responds virtually the same way.

Now, of course, two of these things that he says here are actually true.

He has been very zealous for the Lord, hasn't he?

It's also true that they are trying to kill him.

So two of those things actually are true, but the two in the middle, everyone has rejected your covenant, and I'm the only one left.

That is a radically distorted perspective on what is actually true.

Pastor Brian Croft put it like this: he said, self-pity has taken hold of Elijah's heart.

And he's lost all sense of perspective, which is what self-pity has a tendency to do to us.

He lists all the things he's done for God and comes to the conclusion that he's the only man left on earth who is faithful.

Now, if you're just reading the book of 1 Kings, you know this is not true, because in chapter 18, Elijah actually interacted with a man named Obadiah who is introduced to us as a devout believer in the Lord.

So Elijah has had interactions just in days previous with someone who is like a legit follower of God.

Okay?

Not only this, at the end of the passage, in the end of chapter 19, God says to Elijah, there are 7,000 people in Israel who have not yet bowed the knee to Baal.

So you're saying, you're not the only one that's left.

Not everyone has turned away from the covenant and has rebelled against me.

He has a distorted perspective, and on Mount Sinai, God is lovingly reorienting it for him.

He's recalibrating what Elijah believes to be true about himself, that is Elijah, and about God, and about God's work in the world.

In verse 11, we're told that Elijah heard from the Lord to go stand on the mountain, for the Lord is about to pass by.

Now that's a word, if you're familiar with it, you know that's a word that uh is a word for divine revelation.

This is the same word that in Exodus chapter 33, where Moses was on top of Mount Sinai, God told him to go inside of a cleft of a rock.

Exodus 33 · chapter mention

He put him inside of a cave, and then his presence would pass by, and God revealed himself to Moses on Mount Sinai.

And so this word for pass by is a word that means that God is going to reveal himself to you.

So God tells this to Elijah, and Elijah then goes out on the mountain, and he's anticipating something spectacular because that's how God showed up to Moses.

But look what happens next.

It says, Then a great and powerful wind tore through the mountain, tore the mountains apart, and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind.

After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake.

After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire.

And after the fire came a gentle whisper.

A more literal translation of that would be the sound of sheer silence.

So God revealed Himself, God sent these elements, rather, a storm with the wind and an earthquake and a fire.

And if you go back and look at Moses on Mount Sinai in Exodus chapter 19, you see that Moses encountered God in every single one of those elements.

Exodus 19 · chapter mention

The storm and the fire and the earthquake.

That's how Moses encountered God.

And I think actually the reason Elijah is here in the first place is because Elijah knows he's not okay.

He knows that he's not okay.

And he's thinking to himself, what I need is an encounter with God.

I need a powerful encounter with God.

And where do God's people powerfully encounter him?

And in the story of the Bible, that is at Mount Sinai.

That's what happened with Moses.

And so Elijah came here expecting to encounter God like Moses did, expecting to encounter God in all these big and spectacular ways.

But God knew that is not what Elijah needed.

So he appeared to Elijah in the sound of sheer silence.

It was in the quiet that God lovingly reoriented his perspective.

It was in the quiet that God said to him, I will not answer your prayers to die.

I'm not done with you yet.

I'm not done with my people yet.

Not everyone has rebelled against me.

I'm not done yet.

Get over yourself and get back to work.

That's what God says to him on Mount Sinai in that gentle whisper, in the sound of sheer silence.

Part of the reason for Elijah's despondency is because his perspective is so skewed.

From God's perspective.

And in the wilderness, God is lovingly reorienting him.

Elijah thought, you know, this thing happens on top of Mount Carmel, what's gonna happen?

What he hoped, national revival.

It never happened.

And so he's questioning Am I the only one left?

Am I the only one who's faithful to God?

God, what are you doing?

God, what are you doing in the world?

Has your plans come to you know, ground to a halt?

He's got a distorted perspective on who God is, and himself is the only one who's left, and God's work in the world thinks it's done, it's over with.

And it's here that God is reorienting him to what's true.

He thought that what he needed was some big, loud, spectacular encounter with God.

What he truly needed was to receive the quiet compassion of God.

To experience a God who met him in the midst of his lowest moment.

In the wilderness, God met Elijah.

He nourished him physically, he reoriented his perspective, he gave him a sense of hope for what God was going to do in the future.

He gave him a sense of purpose and saying, I have a plan still for you.

This is what God did.

Elijah's perspective is so distorted, and God brought him into the wilderness.

God met him in that wilderness and lovingly reoriented his distorted perspective.

As we look at Elijah's life here in 1 Kings 19, let me suggest this as a sort of a big idea, main application to take home with you today.

God sees you and loves you at your lowest.

Exodus, 1 Kings 19 in our Bibles.

I'm glad that the Spirit of God preserved this text for us to read because if we didn't have this text, we would know Elijah as a great prophet of God who was fed by ravens in the wilderness.

You're like, wow, that's pretty cool.

We would know him as the one who raised from the dead a widow's son who had died.

That's pretty cool.

We would know him as the prophet who exposed the other prophets of Baal and Asherah on top of Mount Carmel in this spectacular display of God's power.

We would know Elijah as one of two people in the entire Bible who was taken directly into the presence of God and whose physical body never had to die.

That's pretty cool.

We would know him as the one who stood next to Moses on the Mount of Transfiguration when Jesus is on top of the mountain with his disciples, and his the curtains are pulled back and his divine glory is revealed.

Who's standing there?

It's Moses and Elijah.

What an incredible resume this guy has, right?

I'm so glad that God preserved this text for us so that we could see that for all the amazing things he experienced, Elijah's life was not one series of high points after the next.

Even someone like Elijah, who experienced those incredible things, found himself also at times in the depths of despair and spiritual depression.

And it's so encouraging for me.

What this shows us is that when he was depressed, when he was despondent, when he couldn't see straight, even then, God loved him and was near to him.

At his lowest moment, God loved him and was near to him.

God did not look at Elijah in this moment of his life when he's discouraged and he can't see straight.

God did not look at him in this moment and turn away in disgust from him.

He was not ashamed of Elijah.

Elijah's despondency caused the Lord to draw near to him.

What Elijah's story shows us is that he is the kind of God who draws near to us in our lowest moments.

And so when you find yourself physically depleted, when you find yourself praying raw, honest prayers, sometimes that may be, maybe, may cross the line, when you find yourself with a perspective that's really distorted and off base, God does not turn away from you in disgust.

He is not ashamed of you in those moments.

Elijah's story proves that and shows us he's the kind of God who draws near to us in our lowest moments.

Friends, he sees you and he loves you at your lowest.

And so often the way that he draws near to us in those lowest moments is in the quiet, isn't it?

It's not always with loud and spectacular displays of power, although sometimes he does that, and praise God for that.

So often he meets us in those darkest, lowest places.

He meets us in the wilderness with quietness and tenderness and compassion.

God came to Elijah in the quiet and in ways that were unexpected.

And the way he came to Elijah shows us, it foreshadows the way that Jesus came.

Jesus came humbly.

He came in the quiet, he came without fanfare, without great displays of power.

He came not in a way that people expected the deliverer in God's Messiah to come.

He was born to a teenage girl in a nowhere town.

His announcement of his birth was not proclaimed to important and powerful and wealthy people in the palace, but it was proclaimed to shepherds, the lowest of the low, socially speaking, who were out in the fields watching over their flocks.

That's how God came.

Not only this, he came to us, he rescued us in unexpected ways.

God came to us, he drew near to us, humanity, in our lowest moment, right?

He drew near to us in our lowest moment when we were dead in our sins, when we were without God and without hope in the world, and he came in a way that was quiet and unexpected.

And the way that he rescued us and saved us is also quiet and unexpected.

It's a reversal of what we would think would happen.

He went to the cross and he suffered and he died and he laid down his life so that through faith, through trust in Jesus, we could be made spiritually alive and forgiven of our sins and brought back into relationship with God.

He did that in a way that nobody expected.

And the cross is the ultimate example of God's drawing near to us in our lowest moments.

The cross proves that.

And the cross is the ultimate example of God's drawing near to us in our lowest moment.

And the communion table is a way that we get to physically participate in an act of belief and trust in what God has done for us.

If you're here today and you don't yet know him, if you've not yet made a personal decision to trust Jesus and to come into relationship with him, or if you're here today and you find yourself maybe having wandered away from God in a season of your life, you can leave here today knowing the one who sees you and loves you at your lowest.

And so the invitation for all of us is to receive Jesus, is to trust him.

And if you trust him today for the first time, uh the communion table is also now open to you.

As we come to the communion table, let me leave just a few moments for silence and confession, and then we will come and receive Christ together.