Kirkcaldy Free Church

Sermon: Sunday, 30th July, 2023
Speaker: Geoff Murray
Scripture: 1 Kings 18:41-46

There are certain moments in life where you’re not really sure what to expect and then there are times where you know exactly what to expect. In our passage today, we see the Lord sends rain on Israel which had experienced drought, yet before the rain comes, Elijah is expecting it. He didn’t have a smart phone to tell him what the weather was going to be. So how did he know to expect it? What was it that made him expect rain to come after such a long period of drought?

Well, ultimately because promises God had made to his people in the book of Deuteronomy. God is in many senses unpredictable, there are so many strange and challenging things that happen which catch us off guard, but in another sense God is totally predictable. We know what to expect with God. If God has promised something, we know that he will be true to his word and that we can expect him to follow through on his promise.

1. Expectant Elijah

There had been drought in Israel because Israel turned their backs on the Lord to follow a false god called Baal. And last week, we saw that many turned back to the Lord. So we’re really in the immediate aftermath of that in this passage. In 1 Kings 17 Elijah predicts a drought and I don’t think it’s because of our mystical notion of prophets being able to magically tell the future, I think its deeply rooted in the Old Testament law. There was a drought and the law of God tells us why.

In Deuteronomy 28, after God has given his law to his people, he gives two long lists. The first list is: here are the blessings you will enjoy if you obey my law and the second list is: here are the challenges you will face if you disobey my law.

Deuteronomy 28:22-24 – if you will not obey the Lord, no rain, drought.
Deuteronomy 28:12 – If you obey, rain, fruitfulness.

The people of Israel, as I said last week, turned from the Lord to follow Baal and so the consequence is drought. But in the last episode at Carmel they turned back to the Lord therefore they can expect rain to fall and fruitfulness in the land to follow.

So for me it makes perfect sense that what Elijah is doing here when he sends his servant up 7 times to the same spot is he is expecting that God will send rain like he promises when Israel turn back to him. In many ways, you see him sending up his servant 6 times and nothing happens and you think, ‘That’s totally bizarre!’ Elijah is pleading with God in prayer for rain, whats going on?

He is pleading the promises of God. We read Deuteronomy 28 and part of this covenant, this promise of God committing himself to his people and his people committing themselves to him is what is written in Deuteronomy 28, this is what happens when the covenant is going well, and this is what happens when you break covenant with me.

This is not God saying, ‘If you obey me, I accept you. If you disobey I reject you.’ It could never be because Israel were never accepted based on what they did in the first place. But God is saying that there are consequences in life when you don’t walk in his ways because his ways are for your good and flourishing, walking away from me is the opposite!

So Elijah prayed for rain to stop because of Israel’s disobedience, and he prayed for rain when Israel obeyed. He isn’t doing anything weird or strange but he is pleading God’s promises.

God pledged himself to this, he said there would be no rain if Israel turned away and there would be rain if Israel turned back. And so, by faith, Elijah is saying, ‘God you promised this, act according to your word.’ And both times he did, and every time he does. There’s the old saying ‘God can do anything’, he can, but one thing he can’t is go against his character and his character is to be true to his word. If God makes a promise, he will keep it. If God says he will do it, he will do it.

So what do we see here? Verse 44, the servant at the seventh time of trying goes up and sees a cloud which looks like a man’s hand rising from the sea. This is followed in verse 45 by the description of great black clouds filling the sky and then a great outpouring of rain.

Israel disobeyed and the turned from the Lord and the rain stopped. Israel returned and rain falls. This is no coincidence, this didn’t happen simply and only because Elijah was expecting it, it happened because those were the terms of God’s covenant commitment to his people and God, being true, followed through.

2. Expectant Prayer

Sometimes God’s answers to our prayers are ‘Yes’ and sometimes ‘No’. But we can guarantee, we can be certain, we can expect that when we pray in line with God’s promises, he will answer, ‘Yes”. God has promised it! It might be quite a quick and sudden ‘Yes’ like at Mount Carmel, it might be a persistent and patient time of praying before the ‘Yes’ comes like we have in our passage today, but ‘Yes’ will come.

You can pray:
• If you’re feeling weighed down by life – ‘Cast your cares on the Lord and he will sustain you.’ (Psalm 55:22)
• When you are repenting of sin – ‘For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.’ (Jeremiah 31:34)
• When we’re feeling discouraged at our lack of progress in the faith – ‘He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.’ (Philippians 1:6)
• If we are not a Christian but want to trust in Jesus – ‘All those the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away.’ (John 6:37)

These are a number of promises from the Bible we can pray and we can pray with utter expectancy that God will come through with. It’s not like a prayer to feel better which might be answered or not, but its praying things that God has specifically promised.

God has promised, he will fulfil it. Therefore we can be down on our knees like Elijah, praying, trusting, pleading with God to be true to his word and he will do as he has promised. He can be trusted, God is true, he does not lie. If he says he will do something, he does it. If he promises to sustain, he will sustain. If he promises to forgive the repentant, he will forgive. If he promises to complete the good work that he started in you, he will complete. With God and his promises, there are no ‘ifs, buts or maybes’. But rather, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 1, ‘For no matter how many promises God has made, they are ‘Yes’ in Christ.’ (2 Corinthians 1:20) Therefore pray to God, call out to him in prayer with his promises that he might fulfil them to the glory of his name.

3. Expectant Living

Now how do we make sense of this passage in light of the cross of Jesus and the words of the New Testament? How do we understand God doing good and blessing when his people are faithful and doing harm when his people are unfaithful? As I said, it’s not the case that God is saying, ‘If you obey me, I’ll accept you, if you disobey, I’ll reject you.’

Christ became the curse of the law by dying on a cross. He took on the punishment, the guilt that our wrongdoing and our sin incurred. He took it all. Meaning that the curses are not endured by us because Christ endured them on the cross. However, it’s not to say there isn’t some overlap.

And the overlap as I understand it is that there are still consequences for sin.

In our relationship with the Lord
What I mean by this is that when we sin against the Lord, our relationship with the Lord, the fellowship we enjoy with him can be hurt. Just like in any relationship where we hurt the other person or do wrong to them it can harm the relationship.

It doesn’t mean that wrong isn’t forgiven, it doesn’t mean that the person holds it against you, but it has marred and scarred the relationship. It can be the same with God that when we sin, even confessed sin, even forgiven sin can mean difficulties in our relationship with the Lord. It doesn’t mean the Lord gives up on us, leaves us behind, doesn’t forgive us, he does. But it’s to say that this can create difficulties in us connecting with the Lord.

If you’re not following on the path of obedience, you can’t expect to enjoy the fulness of God. Of course when we live in obedience, however imperfectly, there is that joy of fellowship with him. So, when we walk in a path of disobedience it does damage and bring harm to our relationship with the Lord.

Externally
What about externally? When hard times come. What is that? Well, sometimes the Lord brings hard things to our lives to discipline us because we have gone astray.

Hebrews says, ‘My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son.’ (Hebrews 12:5-6)

When life is going easy and well, when life is all as it should be, its easy to forget God, its easy to put him aside, but when hard times come, that’s when we know we need to rely on the Lord! So looking at this in its entirety, though we may fall on hard times and it may be because the Lord is bringing us discipline for our disobedience, though not necessarily. The bottom line is that the curse ultimately fell on Christ on the cross.

But what does Deuteronomy 28 and this story of a three year drought followed by rain have to say to us? It says we can live expecting God to be true to his word in regard to today and the future.

He will judge those who do not turn to him
when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might,
This is God’s commitment, for all who do not know him, who do not trust in Jesus Christ’s sacrifice for acceptance with God, they will experience eternal judgement and damnation. (See 2 Thessalonians 1:7–9)

He will save us when we put our trust in Christ

‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.’ (John 3:16)

If we believe in Jesus Christ as our saviour who took the punishment for our wrongdoing and sin, we know, we can be certain that we will be saved from perishing from judgement. And so if you’re here and you aren’t a believer in the Lord Jesus, those are your options lying before you. Ignore Jesus, reject Jesus and you will experience eternal judgement for your sins. Accept Jesus, embrace Jesus and you will be saved.

You know exactly what to expect on this matter whatever way you go, let your way be towards Jesus and not away from him. Amen.

Sermon: Sunday, 23rd July, 2023
Speaker: Geoff Murray
Scripture: 1 Kings 18:16-40

What is real thing and what is fake? What is genuine and what is false? We have that same thing here, who is the true God?

1. The Conflict

‌We have in our passage what will settle the dispute John addressed last week. Let’s see whose god is the true God. He instructs Ahab to call all 450 prophets of Baal and the 400 prophets of Asherah and meet on top of Mount Carmel. And here they gathered. Elijah challenged the people. ‘How long will you waver between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him, if Baal is God, follow him!’ (1 Kings 18:21)

(‌A brief aside; Elijah isn’t encouraging them to follow Baal as we’ll see.)
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Now this kind of to-ing and fro-ing from Israel on whether to follow the Lord or not, or to follow the Lord and Baal together, is really significant. In our age of pick’n’mix religion it doesn’t really have the same impact, but for Israel in Old Testament times and for the church today, it’s serious business to have any other god beside the Lord or have someone in place of the Lord.
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Yahweh is the only true God and as such he wants to be the only one to be worshipped. The first of the 10 commandments is, ‘You shall have no other god before me.’ (Exodus 20:3)
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Years before, Joshua posed a similar question to the people of Israel. ‘Choose. Are you going to serve the Lord or are you going to serve the gods of the Amorites?’ (See Joshua 24:15)
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And Jesus makes it clear in Matthew’s gospel. ‘You can’t serve two masters, choose.’ (See Matthew 6:24)
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We have that choice always before us, we have that choice before us right this very second. Will we follow the Lord, or will we give our lives to another? We can’t do both. We can’t serve two masters; God will not share his glory with another or give his glory to another. So, this is the conflict: who will you serve? We’ll come back to that at the end of the sermon.

2. The Contest

It paints this picture of the animation of the Baal followers and getting themselves hyped up and in a frenzy trying to whip up religious favour with their god and what are they met with? Silence. No response, no answer, no one paid attention. What a commotion all for nothing. Silence. For all the devotion and lively worship given to Baal, Baal was silent.
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And of course Baal wasn’t silent because Baal exists but for whatever reason didn’t do anything, Baal was silent because Baal was made up, not real. Gods, whether religious or irreligious, whenever the God of Scripture is out of the picture, when the rubber hits the road, they will let you down. When it really counts, like Baal, they’ll be utterly silent.

Everything that happens is very significant. It’s more than just Elijah’s personal beef with Baal worship; Elijah is leading the nation in a moment of restoration. Restoring the altar of the Lord as it should be. But Elijah proceeds with his less than flammable sacrifice and calls on God in prayer and simply asks, ‘Let it be known that you are God!'(1 Kings 18:36-37)
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Elijah’s prayer is not, ‘Come on God so I’m not shown up here.’ but rather ‘May they know that you are God.’

3. The Conclusion

‌So what happens? Fire falls from Heaven, the Lord answers and burns up the sacrifice and all the water which drenched the sacrifice. Elijah’s prayer is, ‘That they may know that you, O Lord, are God’ twice and how do the Baal worshippers respond? By saying twice ‘The Lord, He is God!’
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Now you think, ‘Of course they responded that way, what’s so special?’ Let’s not forget the many miracles that Jesus performed, and they crucified him! It wasn’t a given that they would turn back to the Lord! But the Lord turned their hearts, He led them to confess him as God. And whilst Baal is silent, it shows God as powerful! Whilst Baal is inactive, it shows God as being at work in his world and among his people.

Again, the things that we think are important and bank our lives on are powerless to save us, powerless to do very much of any significance, whereas God, God can save you, he can transform your life and give you knew life.

4. The Crux

‌What does this have to do with you and me? Is God calling us to challenge those of other religions to some kind of bizarre religious fight with those of other faiths? No. I think he is saying to us that we can be as devoted as we like to anyone or anything but anyone or anything other than the God of the Bible will ultimately fail us.
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In Elijah’s day, people turned to false gods, idols like Baal or Asherah and whilst we don’t worship false gods like Baal or Asherah today, we worship other things. We put other things first in our life, we put things in the place of God by giving them the status of ‘ultimate’; ‘This is the thing that will make me happy’ or ‘This is the thing that will give life meaning.’ or to flip it, ‘If I didn’t have this, my world would fall apart.”’
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Whether it’s ourselves and our own identity that we give pride of place; our family, our possessions or our experiences. We turn to these things all the time, inside and outside of the church, Christian or non-Christian. But, when these things take the place of God, they will ultimately fail us. Knowing who you are is important, your family is vital, possessions are important, it’s good to have good experiences. But when we make these things the source of all meaning, fulfilment, joy, we will ultimately be failed by them. We will ultimately be failed by them in this life and in the life to come.
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(a) In this life : The problem in trying to fill the void left by God is that we can’t fill that void with anything else because there isn’t anything or anyone apart from God who is supposed to be God. We could be sincere and devout like these Baal worshippers in whatever it is we use as a god substitute, but it will ultimately come short.
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(b) In the life to come : Some of the most chilling words in the Bible come from the mouth of Jesus where he says, ‘What will it profit someone if they gain the whole world but forfeit their soul?’ (Matthew 16:26)
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All this money and wealth, all these experiences gained, your children performing highly in school and growing up to go to university and get a brilliant job, have all the identity security we can dream of, being secure in who you are and being affirmed by others. Have all that, you can have it all right, you can have the world, Jesus says, but it is possible to gain the entire world yet forfeit your soul.
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We see this in our passage, the worship of Baal, or this that we have just talked about in our lives where we put the ultimate emphasis on things other than Jesus, the Bible calls that idolatry and we’re all those who have been guilty of idolatry and are guilty of idolatry by putting things in the place of God. And idolatry really is the pinnacle of sin, it’s saying, ‘God I don’t want you, I want this instead.’ and that attitude and mindset is what separates us from God, in sending us to Hell and not to Heaven, God is essentially giving us what we want, an existence free from him forever. And that’s not a good thing as you might be imagining, it’ll be painful and sad, that we’ll know we had our chance and we blew it forever and instead of eternal bliss and joy, we have instead eternal judgement.
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You may well have this, that and the next thing in this life, but it is time limited. When you die, that’s it. What you’re living for won’t last.

(a) To the unbeliever : However, what you’re living for now needn’t be what you live for forever. What Elijah prays for these Baal worshippers in front of him can be true in your life too. That you would know that the LORD is the one true God. The proof lies in this encounter here in 1 Kings 18, the LORD is the one true God, and the proof ultimately lies in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Baal could not defeat God and neither could death. Though Jesus died on the cross, paying for our wrong doing, death couldn’t keep Jesus in its grip, the grave could not hold him, but Jesus rose again from the grave so that we could have forgiveness with God and life eternal, so that we could have hope for this life and the life to come.
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So, if you haven’t yet, put your trust in Jesus for acceptance with God where we find true meaning, purpose, and life. Know that he paid for your sins on the cross and rose again from the grave defeating death. He is the one true God, follow him. Whilst things that we put in the place of God promise so much, they will ultimately deliver little. Baal couldn’t defeat God and neither can the things you put your trust in instead of him.

(b) to the backslidden : Maybe you are a Christian this morning, but you realise you have been living like OT Israel, swithering between the God and whatever god-substitute you have made. You love the Lord, but you realise you’ve also been trusting in family or finances or possessions to give your life meaning or significance. You already have it in the LORD. You have one who sees your sin and failings, yet is willing to forgive your wrongs and call you his child, who loves you with an everlasting love, and isn’t wavering. You might be wavering today, but he isn’t. He’s as committed to you today as he’s ever been, he loves you today as much as he’s ever loved you.
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The words of Elijah are so fitting, stop wavering between two opinions, return to the Lord. These things won’t last, but the Lord will, these things won’t satisfy, but the Lord will, these things won’t give you significance, but the Lord will.
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Come back to him and receive the welcome of Jesus today. That is just how merciful our mighty God is. You may have turned away, but there’s always a route back when we come back to God through Jesus.
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(c) To the weary Christian : Maybe you’re a weary Christian this morning. You hear this story of Elijah in 1 Kings 18 today and you think ‘Where was God when this happened?’ ‘Why doesn’t he seem to act in such decisive ways today?’ It’s true, God may not act in the ways we’d like, as quickly as we’d like or in clear demonstrable ways like fire from heaven like this, but we have in the resurrection of Jesus a clear decisive action on the part of God which shows in the hardships and the sorrows of life you can still bank on God.
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Sometimes God takes away the hard situation, sometimes he doesn’t, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t worth it. The empty tomb of Jesus shows us that we can trust him in the hard times, we can still bank on him. God was not defeated by Baal and God is not defeated by death, but for the Christian, death gives way to eternal life in Jesus Christ, it gives way to an eternity free from pain, sorrow, grief, death, sin. There will be one day where Jesus will wipe away every tear from every eye. Every loss, every hurt, every heartache gone.
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Persevere, keep going, keep trusting in Jesus and following him because just as Jesus rose from the dead, so he will lead us to a future resurrection where there will be no more tears, sorrow, or pain, no more suffering or sickness, no more sin.

Sermon: Sunday, 9th July, 2023
Speaker: John Johnstone
Scripture: 1 Kings 17:7-24

Do you want to know what true and life-changing faith looks like? Has God ever brought circumstances into your life which you find really difficult and perplexing? How did you respond? Would you like to be certain about a place in Heaven after you die? Believe it or not, these wide-ranging important questions are all answered in this ancient piece of history. There’s so much we can learn this morning from the prophet Elijah’s time with the widow of Zarephath.

Let’s briefly remind ourselves of what life is like in Israel in Elijah’s day. Israel’s wicked king Ahab has married Jezebel who is a queen taking wickedness to new levels. She is intent on wiping out the worship of the LORD in Israel, replacing it with false Baal worship. Baal worship involves sexual religious rites with shrine prostitutes and has become a massive snare to the Israelites. And so, God punishes Israel for forsaking the one living and true God and turning aside to idol worship. He brings a time of drought and famine, something which he had said he would do were the Israelites ever to forsake him. Physical rain has stopped in Israel, as has spiritual rain, as the Lord’s prophet Elijah has been taken out of Israel, to a stream in the Kerith Ravine. Here, God miraculously provides for his prophet, sending ravens to feed him twice a day.

But God has other plans for Elijah and does not leave him by the stream. The stream dries up, begging the question, how is the Lord going to provide for Elijah now? What’s going to happen to Elijah? He receives an unusual command from the Lord (verse 9): ‘Go at once to Zarephath in the region of Sidon and stay there. I have instructed a widow there to supply you with food.’

1. God often supplies our needs in unexpected ways

Now, God’s command for Elijah to go to Zarephath might seem like no big deal to us. But it is. Zarephath is in Sidonia, where Jezebel’s father rules as king, making it a dangerous place to go to. It is also the heartland of Baal-worship. And Elijah must have been scratching his head to be told that of all people a pagan widow would look after him. It’s also fascinating to note what the name Zarephath means – it means ‘crucible’. The Lord seems to be taking Elijah into a crucible, a fiery furnace, in order to test him and refine him in his faith.

This in itself is a really important thing for us to understand. God never promises Christians an easy or untroubled life. In fact, God tells us the Christian life is a battle, full of persecution, testing circumstances, and frustrations. That’s what makes the false teaching of ‘prosperity gospel’ so dangerous. What is the ‘prosperity gospel?’ It’s a false teaching that if Christians are faithful to the Lord he will reward us with good health and great wealth. This is nonsense. Jesus plainly tells us what the Christian life will look life: ‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.’ (Luke 9:23) God calls us to a life of self-denial, and often uses suffering to make us more like Jesus.

‘In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith – of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire — may result in praise, glory and honour when Jesus Christ is revealed.’ (1 Peter 1:6-7)

Let’s take a step back and look at chapter 17 as a whole. Who does the Lord use to provide for Elijah? He uses unclean scavenger birds – ravens – and he uses a poor, vulnerable, hopeless pagan widow in a foreign country. God’s ways are not our ways. His channels of grace are unexpected.

Those of us who are already Christians should be able to relate to Elijah here. We can testify that God has brought us into the crucible of life in order to refine us. It’s not an easy place to be, but again and again God supplies our needs, and at times from unexpected people or things. In my own life, I can testify to the fact that the crucible truly is the place where I’ve learned the most, and have been stripped of pride, self-reliance and selfishness. God has used times of adversity to draw me closer to himself, and along the way has used people I would never have otherwise encountered.

Have I always responded in the right way during these times? Absolutely not! Sometimes I have doubted God’s provision and at other times tried to sort my life out in my own strength. But how should we respond in times of testing? Look at Elijah’s example. He is asked to go to this dangerous place. He doesn’t complain. He trusts God has a reason for sending him to Zarephath and he obeys the command of God. He doesn’t become anxious, but is faithful to God, trusting that if the Lord has promised to supply his needs through a widow, then that’s exactly what the Lord will do. Elijah rests in the promise of God, and obeys God. This is how we need to respond when we are tested.

2. A clear picture of faith

Faith is very thing which God wants from each one of us. He wants us to trust him. So, this widow’s faith should be precious to us. Elijah sees the widow at the town gate gathering sticks and asks her for a drink of water, and a little bread. At first, this might seem like a reasonable request. But then we come to understand the poignant truth – this woman has only a tiny amount of food left, enough for just one last meal with her son. After that, she expects to die of starvation. She is a vulnerable, poor, hopeless widow, in a desperate situation. Her own resources had come to an end.

Elijah said to her, ‘Don’t be afraid. Go home and do as you have said. But first make 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.’ (1 Kings 17:13-14)

The widow now has a decision to make. Will she keep the flour and oil for herself, or will she believe the promise of the Lord and give away the last of her food? We know what happens. She trusts in God’s promise, given through his prophet Elijah. Verse 15: ‘She went away and did as Elijah had told her.’

And what does she find? Verse 16: ‘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.’

Friends, this is what faith truly means: we stake everything on God’s promises, even when it seems risky to do so. We realise that we cannot provide for ourselves and trust in God’s Word. For the widow, God’s promise comes through the prophet Elijah. For us in Fife in 2023, God’s promises are contained in the Bible. We need to read them and know them. Then we too, like her, have decisions to make. Will we continue trusting in our own resources, or rest the whole of our lives on his perfect and trustworthy promises?

Listen to God’s promise in Romans chapter 10: ‘If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.’ (Romans 10:9)
And again in Acts chapter 4: ‘Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.’ (Acts 4:12)
Will you trust in Jesus and his death of the cross to save you? Or will you trust in your own efforts, which will lead to spiritual starvation?

For those of us already Christians, will we continue in the life of faith, trusting the promises of Jesus in the Bible for all our needs. When we are struggling on in life’s journey and we hear Jesus’ promise: ‘Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest (Matthew 11:28), will we trust that he can indeed give us rest and come to him in prayer? When he promises to be with us when we go and make disciples of all nations, will we share our faith, resting on his promise to be with us as we do so?

The miracle of the jar and the jug went on day after day. Each day was a fresh reminder of the goodness and trustworthiness of God. We might be tempted to think: ‘God doesn’t provide for me like that’. In a way, I think that we have something better than the widow had – we have in Jesus everything we could possibly need for both this life and the life to come. We have forgiveness for our sins, and a place prepared for us in Heaven, and we have the promise that our Father will give us our daily bread, until it is time for us to leave this world.

3. Responding to the life’s traumatic experiences

I can imagine the widow going into the kitchen each morning with a smile on her face. The Lord is so good to me, she must have thought. But then something shocking happens. Her son becomes seriously unwell and then dies. We cannot imagine what it must have been like going from the high place of daily miraculous provision down to the depths of death and despair. :

“The Lord both provides and perplexes. He seems to be both faithful and fitful. He sustains life and then takes it away. What is one to make of him?” (Dale Ralph Davis)

The widow reminds us of the widow Naomi in the book of Ruth, who also loses more of her loved ones. How does this widow respond? At first, she takes it out on Elijah: ‘What do you have against me, man of God?’ She also has an understanding of her own sin and wonders if that is why her boy has died. In other words, she lashes out against Elijah and against herself. You can understand that. Elijah doesn’t respond with trite words, pretending to understand the deeply mysterious ways of God. He responds with prayer, knowing only the power of God can change this situation.

Perhaps the way Elijah stretches himself over the dead boy is a powerful image of what Jesus does to each one of us. Contact with a dead body would make Elijah unclean, but his Christ-like intervention brings life back to the boy. In the same way, Jesus takes away the uncleanness of our sin, and imparts new spiritual life to us.

As the widow was an example of faith for us earlier, here, Elijah is an example of how to respond to the God who both gives and takes away. Prayer must be our response too. And the Lord listens to and answers Elijah’s prayer in a quite wonderful way, bringing the boy back to life again.

Do you believe this really happened? Remember Paul’s words to Agrippa: Why should any of you consider it incredible that God raises the dead? (Acts 26:8) We shouldn’t disbelieve such things. If God is the Creator who made this world out of nothing, then of course, he’s able to bring life to the dead. Only the Christian faith has meaningful hope in the face of death. When we go to funerals, we can remember our loved ones who have left this world, but apart from Jesus, there is no hope at a funeral. However, if the person who died trusted in Jesus for the forgiveness of their sins, then we know that person will live eternally in Heaven, even though they die. Only God has an answer for death. Do you have that hope yourself. Have you entrusted your life and death to Jesus? Baal couldn’t help the widow’s son. Science cannot help us. ‘I am the Living One; I was dead, and now look, I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades.’ (Revelation 1:18)

4. A preview of God’s widening grace

What do I mean by that? Well, the LORD doesn’t send Elijah to an Israelite widow to be cared for, but a foreign one. This was actually a sign of God’s judgment on Israel for her idolatry. Remember that this is Jesus’ commentary of this event: ‘I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon.’ (Luke 4:25-26)

But as well as being a sign of judgment, it is also a preview of what would happen on the day of Pentecost, when the gospel message would be sent around the world. We have these Old Testament clues in the conversions of ‘outsiders’ such as Ruth, Naaman and the widow here in this story. God grace extends far beyond the boundaries of Israel, at this would become so clear on the Day of Pentecost. The church of Jesus is an international church.

Sermon: Sunday, 2nd July, 2023
Speaker: John Johnstone
Scripture: 1 Kings 16:29 – 17:6

The prophet Elijah is a huge figure in the Bible. Think about the transfiguration of Jesus in Luke chapter 9. Jesus’ face begins to shine like the sun, his usually-hidden glory comes bursting out. And two men from the Old Testament appear to speak with him about his imminent death – Moses and Elijah. Elijah is one of only two men in the Scriptures not to taste death; he is taken directly to Heaven in a whirlwind. It’s also one of the few times in the Bible when there are clusters of miracles. We have such clusters during the time of Moses, in the time of Christ, of course, but also during the lives of Elijah and Elisha, his successor. When Elijah is first mentioned in 1 Kings chapter 17, he makes a sudden and dramatic appearance, pronouncing a curse on the land before the powerful king of Israel, Ahab. We don’t know anything about Elijah’s background. We just know he’s from Tishbe, an obscure place in Transjordan.

Scotland has been dry this June. It doesn’t take much for the grass to start to turn yellow. Think about how devastating it would be to have no rainfall for over three years. In that kind of agrarian culture, it would mean famine and the risk of people dying. It was a disaster. Picture Elijah appearing before King Ahab with this pronouncement from the Lord.

What’s going on here? Why is the Lord bringing drought upon his own people. It’s because of the great evil of idolatry which has gripped God’s people in Israel. Israel might have been prosperous during Ahab’s reign, with access to sea trading due to the king’s marriage with Jezebel, a Phoenician. This marriage alliance might have seemed wise from an economic point of view, but it was a spiritual disaster. Jezebel didn’t want to just practice her own false religion in Israel; she wanted to wipe out the worship of the Lord and spread Baal-worship throughout the land. Baal-worship involved all kinds of immoral religious rites with cultic prostitutes, which proved to be a snare to the Israelites. It’s hard to overstate the spiritual darkness during this time. Listen to the summary about Ahab’s life: ‘Ahab son of Omri 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 Nebat, but he also married Jezebel daughter of Ethbaal king of the Sidonians, and began to serve Baal and worship him.’ (1 Kings 16:30-31)

Before Ahab became king, he predecessor King Omri is described like this: ‘But Omri did evil in the eyes of the Lord and sinned more than all those before him.’ (1 Kings 16:25) Now King Ahab has the unenviable prize of being Israel’s most evil King.

1. God always keeps his promises

God had made many covenant promises with his people. If his people remained faithful to him, then he would bless them, but if they turned away and followed false gods, he would punish them. In other words, whether we worship the true God or false gods matters a great deal to the Lord. Listen to what God promises in Deuteronomy: ‘So if you faithfully obey the commands I am giving you today – to love the Lord your God and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul — then I will send rain on your land in its season, both autumn and spring rains, so that you may gather in your grain, new wine and olive oil. I will provide grass in the fields for your cattle, and you will eat and be satisfied. Be careful, or you will be enticed to turn away and worship other gods and bow down to them. Then the Lord’s anger will burn against you, and he will shut up the heavens so that it will not rain and the ground will yield no produce, and you will soon perish from the good land the Lord is giving you.’ (Deuteronomy 11:13-17)

God could not have been clearer. Trusting him and following him is the path of blessing whilst idolatry will lead to punishment. The King failed to take God’s word seriously and so did the people. Now they face God’s judgement and a time of serious drought. God has been true to his word as he always is. This is both an encouragement and a warning to us today. It’s wonderful that we always know where we stand with God. If we place our trust in Jesus and his death on the cross, we know that we will be blessed both in this life and in the life to come, even though we don’t deserve it. Listen to the promise in John’s gospel: ‘For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.’ (John 6:40) We can be sure than God will keep this promise!

But we must also heed the warning here. God cannot be domesticated; He is in charge of how things work, and not us. He’s the Creator of all and deserves our worship. If we worship the idols of Scotland today, such as money, family, career, travel and entertainment, and these things become more important to us than God, and if we ignore God and reject Jesus as Saviour and King, then we too will face God’s judgment. Psalm 2 reminds us how eternity hinges on our attitude to Jesus, the Son of God: ‘Kiss his son, or he will be angry and your way will lead to your destruction, for his wrath can flare up in a moment. Blessed are all who take refuge in him.’ (Psalm 2:12) What are you going to do with Jesus’ offer of forgiveness to those who submit to his rule in their hearts? Will you shelter in his love, or reject him, and then face the eternal consequences of God’s just judgment?

Will you be like Ahab, and follow your own feelings and desires, even though they are feelings and desires which are evil in the eyes of the LORD, OR will you be like Elijah, and live to please the Lord, living a different life, even when almost everyone else is going in a different direction?

2. God always keeps a people for himself

Imagine you were a God-fearing Israelite back in the days of King Ahab. You see Jezebel building more and more shrines to Baal. You see many of your neighbours joining in the false worship. Hundreds of the Lord’s priests are murdered by Jezebel. It must have been so hard to keep on trusting in God. It would have been all too easy to begin to doubt God or even resent him. Perhaps you’d be tempted to give up going to worship and give up praying. What was the point? Let’s be honest, it seems as if Baal is in control in Israel, not the Lord. But we must stay encouraged, because God is always one step ahead of evil. Also, stopping the rain was huge challenge to the so-called power of Baal “the god of the rain”. It is as if Elijah is saying,’So you’ve decided to trust in Baal for rain? I’m sealing the heavens.’ This will underline the impotence of Baal and show what kind of god he is; he is a ‘No god’.

“We need not despair when we see great movements of evil achieving spectacular success on this earth, for we may be sure that God, in unexpected places, has already secretly prepared his counter-movement. God always has his way of working underground to undermine the stability of evil. God can raise men for his service from nowhere. Therefore, the situation is never hopeless where God is concerned. Whenever evil flourishes it is always a superficial flourish. For at the height of the triumph of evil God will be there, ready with his man and his movement and his plans, to ensure that his own cause will never fail.” (Ronald Wallace)

What a wonderful truth! It is just as true today as it was back then. There are countries where the spirit of Jezebel seems alive and well. Uganda: D.R. Congo/Uganda: ‘At least 41 people have been killed in a 16 June attack on a boarding school campus in Uganda, close to the DRC border. According to news sources, ADF rebels entered the school and set fire to dormitories before attacking students and staff. Of the 41 killed, 38 are reported to be pupils, many of whom died in the fire.’

This seems to be evil out of control. But God has his people in Uganda, and will raise up new believers in his time. And remember too, everyone will be brought to justice at the end of time. We must all stand before God and give an account of our lives. We need not despair.

In Scotland, it would be easy for us to become discouraged. Church attendance has been shrinking year after year for decades. It’s getting harder and harder to share the Christian faith in public spaces such as schools or at work. We live in an age where evil is called good and good evil, with abortion, attack on family life, and great moral confusion. The belief is that if you have desires then it’s fine to follow those desires as long as we don’t harm anyone. But what if those desires are outwith the will of God. Surely, we all have wrong desires we need to fight against. Few seem to be questioning this DIY morality, which ignores the revealed will of God in the Bible. Those who believe that the Lord is God are thought of as narrow-minded bigots.

However, God has his own ‘counter-movement’ in Scotland, even though we don’t know the details of what that might entail. He continues to build his church in Scotland. New churches are being planted. It appears that evil is dominating in Scotland, but God is able to turn this on its head. In the meantime, our job is to be faithful to the Lord, and not to be influenced by the dominant culture. ‘Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is — his good, pleasing and perfect will.’ (Romans 12:2)

Do you want to be part of God’s counter-movement against evil? What can you do? Be like Elijah and dare to be different to those around you. And pray! The Bible stresses that Elijah was just an ordinary bloke like us. ‘For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.’   (Jeremiah 31:34) In other words, God chooses to forget our sin. He chooses to forget it. Perhaps you are still carrying around sins from your past, even though you have turned from them and asked for forgiveness. You might say to God: ‘But I remember the dreadful way deliberately went my own way Lord’. He might say back to us: ‘What time?’ He chooses to remember our sins no more.

Friends, should this not encourage us to come to our forgiving God crying for mercy? And when the forgiveness comes, does it make us casual about sin, because God just forgives us anyway? Not at all. ‘But with you there is forgiveness, so that we can, with reverence, serve you.’   (Psalm 130:4) The more we appreciate God’s grace, the more we want to live for him.

3. Waiting

I’m not always good at waiting. We have instant communication when we text, instant banking on our smartphones and instant food from the microwave. In such a culture, I’m guessing that we aren’t all good at ‘waiting on the Lord’. What does ‘waiting on the Lord’ mean? Sometimes, when we are in the depths, and we cry out to God for mercy and forgiveness, we don’t instantaneously snap back into a place of restoration. It can take time. We need to wait. We have been forgiven, but it might take time for the light to come. In verses 5-6, the Psalmist speaks of a watchman waiting for the dawn. Imagine being a soldier, guarding the city walls during the night, and it seems like the night will last forever. But the soldier has a hope that will not fail, because the dawn always breaks. The morning always comes. And that means that we ought to wait with a sense of real hope and expectation.

What does this mean for us? It means that when we’ve experienced conviction of our sin, and then confessed it before God, we should be quietly confident that our waiting will not be in vain, and that God will not disappoint us. He is worth waiting for! When we are waiting, we shouldn’t be idle. We must wait with open Bibles: ‘…my hope is in his Word.’ &nbsp: (Psalm 130:5)

Why does God make us wait? He might be testing our faith, or growing our patience or teaching us lessons which can only be learned through adversity. But know this: the light will come. God will restore our strength. Listen to God’s promise to us about waiting: ‘Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.’ &nbsp (Isaiah 40 vs 30-31). We must believe that God’s promises are trustworthy. That is what the Psalmist means when he says in v5: ‘I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits, and in his word I put my hope.’ God promises that when we are waiting on his blessing, the darkness will not last forever.

4. Confidence in God’s redemption

The Psalmist has come through these stages: convicted by his own sin, confessing his sin to God, waiting for God’s restoration, and now he is bursting for others to experience what he has experienced. He doesn’t want the Lord’s people staying in the depths. There is no need to! Becasue the Lord is the God of unfailing love and redemption.

What if you are not a Christian yet? You too need to go through these exact stages. You need to pray that God’s Spirit would show you your own heart as it really is, so you will see your sin. Then, you need to confess that sin, crying out to God for mercy, based on Jesus’ death on the cross. We are in the New Testamant age, and this promise of forgiveness has spilled far beyond the borders of Israel. Whatever country you are from, whatever catalogue of sin you have, you can be assured that God forgives us our sins when we turn from them and place our trust in Jesus.

Let’s end with the words of verse 8 in our hearts and minds: ‘He himself will redeem Israel from their sins.’ He himself. When did God himself deal with the problem of human sin. This looks forward to the time, 1000 years from when Psalm 130 was written, when Jesus left Heaven and came to earth, and it was his precious blood which would buy back and set free the guilty. Because that’s what it means to redeem someone – it means to set a slave free by paying a price. And Jesus sets us free, paying the price of our freedom with his own blood. How extraordinary. ‘Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good.’   (Titus 2:14)

Are you ashamed of things you have done in your life? Are you ashamed of squeezing God out of your life and living apart from him? There is hope for you. You too can experience what the Psalmist experiences here. The question is, will God’s unfailing love and provision of forgiveness encourage you to come to Jesus in prayer and confess? Or will you stubbornly carry your sin on your own shoulders, eventually paying for it through eternal separation from God? God’s grace is greater than all our sins. Why not come to him in prayer right now, in the quietness of your own hearts, and confess your sin, and wait for the dawn to break, which it surely will.