Well, good morning everyone. It's great to be back with you
today. Take your Bibles, turn to the
Book of First Kings chapter 18. First Kings chapter 18.
That's page 310. If you're using one of the
Bibles in the seat around you. A couple of quick things before
we get into the message today. First of all, we will be
celebrating Communion a little bit later on in the service.
If you did not receive your Communion cups when you came in
today, would you just raise your hand and we're going to make
sure that some of our team gets a Communion cup into your hand
right now. We got some down here at the
front, if we can just make sure and some back here in the back
corner, that would be great. Thank you very much.
And then second, want to welcome some new members to our church
family, people who've been part of our church for a little bit,
but they are now members of the church family.
So would you join me in welcoming Greg and Margaret,
Ronald and Micah so Farley for joining membership here at
Forward? I just want to say I just
appreciate all three of them and the gifts that they bring, how
God is using them in our church family.
And if you call Forward your church home and you are not yet
a member, I want to encourage you to consider taking that step
and make that covenant to each other as a church family as we
serve the Lord together. All right, I want to ask you a
Captain Obvious question when we start the message today.
Have you ever looked at the world around you and thought to
yourself, something just isn't right here, right?
It's just literally the most obvious thing.
You look all around you and you see things that are just wrong,
that are broken. You see things that need to be
fixed. You see injustices that are
happening. You just know something isn't
right. And one of the things that you
will learn as you follow Jesus is this, that the more you learn
to see life through God's eyes, the more you are going to see
just how broken the world is and how far away from God we can
get. For example, have you ever
looked at the political world and felt like man?
There is a big disconnect between what is honoring to God
and what is happening or or maybe in the culture that you
find ourselves, that we find ourselves living in.
I I think we could spend hours and hours and hours talking
about things in our culture where we go that just somehow
doesn't line up with what God says is right and good.
At worst or at best, there's a disconnect, and at worst there's
outright rebellion against God. Even on a more personal level,
like when you move it down into your own life, so many of us
have friends or family who don't follow Jesus.
Many of you in this room, you've got children, you've got
grandchildren, you've got people who are important to you in your
life and they are not following Jesus and your heart aches.
So when you think about all those situations, what's your
normal reaction like? When you think about broader
culture and all the things that are wrong in the broader
culture, what's your normal reactor?
Do you just get angry all the time at everything that's going
on? Are you frustrated?
Are you feeling it like you just want to shake somebody?
Maybe you just want to fight a culture war and set everything
right. Or maybe you're way over on the
opposite end and you just don't care anymore because you've just
gotten so used to it being this way.
You think this is just normal in the way things should be.
Maybe in your own personal life, if it's someone you know and
love who wants nothing to do with God, maybe you've got fears
or worries. Maybe you're stressed out about
it. Or maybe you're on the opposite
end and you just go, there's nothing I can do about it.
Let them make their own personal decisions.
Well, today I want to present this idea to you.
When other people don't live like God is God, your best
response is to pray. Today we're going to look at
what is a familiar story to many of us if we've been around
church for any length of time. But for some of you, it might be
brand new. So I want to give us a bit of
context that's going to help us better understand the prayer
that we're going to look at this morning.
Ahab has just become king of Israel.
Now history tells us that Ahab was actually an amazing king.
Israel is living in incredible economic prosperity.
They are a regional superpower there.
There are all kinds of reasons to look at Ahab and go man, he
is doing an amazing job as leader.
But what looks good on the surface is not always good in
the eyes of God. God's view of Ahab was very
different than what everybody else would have been
experiencing. On the surface.
The Bible says that Ahab did what was evil in the Lord's
sight. Listen to this more than all who
were before him. Like, you have to work really
hard to be worse than everybody else who's ever lived.
But that's what Ahab is described as in this passage.
Ahab continues the practice of a previous king named Jeroboam who
created idols that were worshipped other than God.
But Ahab added to it he he marries a woman by the name of
Jezebel. Jezebel worships a God named
Bale. Now Bale was a God who was said
to control the rain and the wind and the clouds and all those
things are essential elements for an Agricultural Society.
They would have felt there is important value in worshipping
Bale, and Jezebel wants to use her influence to make Baal
worship the primary religion of Israel.
So she works to squash anyone who's loyal to God.
She orders the killing of prophets of God.
Anything she can do to diminish people who want to worship God
and raise up the worship of Baal, she's all for it.
But that's not where it ended. Ahab also brings in Asherapols,
not sure is the goddess of fertility.
She was also associated with sexuality.
So in short, what Ahab has done, he has brought polytheism to
Israel. Now if you don't know what
polytheism is, it just means the worship of many gods.
The idea that there was one true God alone was being replaced by
the idea that all of these gods are worth being worshipped and
followed to varying degrees, that we should find the gods who
are going to suit the needs of the people.
And, and this idea and this reality kind of seeped into the
culture all the way to the point where in chapter 18, verse 21,
we discover that the people are wavering between two opinions.
Should I worship Baal or should I worship God?
There are some people who are kind of even in between both
opinions. They're they're landing in the
space of maybe do I worship both of them?
Do I worship Baal and I worship God?
Any of us sound familiar to you? It, it, it is not a whole lot
different than the world we actually live in today.
We, we've just accepted it as normal.
But we, we live in a time where whatever path you take to God,
it doesn't really matter what path you take as long as you're
just spiritual. We, we've got all kinds of idols
that we turn to today. Some of us even in this room or
watching online, we can become functional polytheists.
You, you could have just had an incredible time of worshipping
God, celebrating who he is and, and just enjoying the singing
together. But then this afternoon you're
going to go home and you're going to start to count on your
bank account or your job or your family or whoever else to give
you meaning and direction and purpose in life.
That's functional polytheism. You are worshipping multiple
gods to give you meaning and direction for your life.
We put our faith in things like our sex life, our identity,
whatever it is, whatever is in our heart, to guide us through
life. To some degree.
We've turned ourselves into idols as well, hundreds of
millions of people. We all have our own little
platform where we just want people to pay attention to us,
or we just do life however we want to do life.
We live how we want to live. We have a motto in our culture
that says you do you. We've turned ourselves into
idols, and at its core, our culture, our moment in time is
not any different than other cultures through human history.
And then along comes a guy named Elijah.
Elijah is a prophet of God who announces that there's a famine
coming to the land because of the decisions that Ahab has
made. After three years of famine in
the land, Elijah calls for a showdown between himself and the
prophets of Bail and Asherah. 450 prophets of Bail, 400
prophets of Asherah are in the land, 850 to one.
Those are not good odds. And he says, OK, we're going to
make 2 sacrifices, but no fire. Nobody gets to start a fire.
Instead, each would call on the name of their God to start the
fire. And the God who answers is the
one true God. But Elijah takes it to another
level. He puts 12 Stones around the
sacrifice. He builds A trench around it
that's big enough to hold 15 liters of water.
He pours water all over the sacrifice, all over the wood,
all over the stones, three times.
Everything is completely drenched.
The prophets of Baal get up and they start praying.
They pray all afternoon. They're shouting loudly and
they're cutting themselves and they're doing everything they
can to get his attention that he would respond and start the fire
of their sacrifice a lot to even let them go 1st.
And they get no response. Elijah prays.
And this is the best part of the whole story.
Fire comes down from heaven and consumes the entire sacrifice
that is drenched in water. Now, how cool would it be to
pray a prayer and fire comes down from heaven?
Like, who doesn't want that to happen sometime?
I was trying to get our tech team to rig something that I
could pray and like, something would come down on the stage
today. Like sometimes, isn't that just
what you want to do? Be be honest.
Don't you sometimes just feel like you would like to call down
fire from heaven on certain people?
When you experience those moments when there is something
uneasy inside of you about people or culture around you, I
want you to pay attention. That is the Holy Spirit calling
you to action. And while there's a whole lot
that's gone on in this story, the most important action you
can take is pray, because nothing changes in this story
until Elijah prays. And that's where we pick up in
verse 36 of chapter 18. At the time for offering the
evening sacrifice, the prophet Elijah approached the altar and
said, Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel.
Today let it be known that you are God in Israel and I am your
servant, and that at your word I have done all of these things.
Answer me Lord, answer me so that this people will know that
you, the Lord are God and that you have turned their hearts
back. Elijah's prayer begins by
teaching us this that when you pray you should be confident
that you are talking to the one faithful, all powerful and
living God. There are times if we are
honest, when we are really agitated, frustrated, concerned
about something in culture or in other people's lives that we
think prayer is the weak thing to do.
We do everything possible to go and fix the solution or be a
part of the solution and fix the problem.
But we don't pray. We we think we just need to take
a stand and fix the wrong ourselves.
But when you start to act to fix something that is wrong without
praying, then you are making yourself the all powerful person
in the equation. Sometimes we pray just to check
a box and say, Oh yeah, I prayed about that.
I said my prayers before bed. I said my prayers before eating.
But I want you to understand every single time you pray, it
is not just a spiritual exercise to go through for the sake of
checking a box. You are coming into the presence
of the one true, faithful, all powerful and living God.
That's what Elijah is declaring at the beginning of his prayer
here when he says, Lord the God of Abraham and Isaac and Israel,
he's going back to generations worth of covenants and promises
that God has made to the Jewish people.
He's highlighting the faithfulness that God has shown
over and over again. And by doing this, he's saying,
God, you are the God who has kept your promises in the past
and shown yourself powerful and faithful and loving in the past.
And I have every confidence you are going to continue to do that
going into the future. You know, I, I forget where I
read this, but one of the most transformational things that I
ever learned about prayer early in my adult life came in a book.
And again, forgive me, I forget where the what the book was, but
the author of this book said when you pray, you need to pause
long enough to get your heart and mind centered on the reality
of who exactly it is you're talking to.
That that you don't just come in flippantly into prayer and you
don't just come in like I'm just doing this because I have to do
this. But you center your heart and
mind you, you take a breath even if you have to and remind
yourself, I'm not just talking for the sake of talking.
I am talking to the one true living God.
Is there anybody better to talk to?
Like God is not in your imagination.
He's real. God is here right now, whether
you feel him or you don't feel him.
We live in a culture that talks all the time.
I don't feel God. Your feeling of God does not
influence whether or not God is here.
The Bible tells us God is omnipresent.
You cannot run from the presence of God.
He is everywhere. He is all powerful.
You are talking to someone who has no limitations on their
resources and he's faithful. He's a God who has kept his
promises in the past and he's going to continue to keep those
promises in the future, which means you can completely depend
on him. And there is no other God.
He is the only true God. He is not like anyone else you
might trust in or talk to. You know Webster's Dictionary
even recognizes this. Webster's Dictionary defines God
this way. The supreme or ultimate reality,
the very definition of God, does not allow anything else to be
God. There is no room.
There can only ultimately be one God.
I say this with the utmost of respect.
Allah is not God. There is only one God.
The God of the Bible claims himself to be the one true God,
and that's who you're talking to when you pray.
Now, when you think of it that way, it's really easy to get
inside your own head. Like if you've ever had a
conversation with someone who is smarter than you, more powerful
than you, more influential than you, who knows everything, you
can get nervous and wonder, what is it I need to do to impress
this person that I'm coming to talk to.
We, we live in a culture where we constantly feel the need to
impress other people. Like when you are in a dating
relationship, you are trying to impress other people.
You're trying to impress that person.
I tried to impress my wife on our very first date.
I picked up a dozen long stand roses.
I'm like, I'm going to make a good first impression.
Why? Because you never get a second
chance to make a good first impression.
It was all great until I was 45 minutes late for the date
because I got lost in the thriving metropolis of Paris ON
This is way back before Google Maps.
Everybody OK, so like it. It is wild the things that we
will do to try to impress other people.
We try to impress our boss at work, we try to impress our
friends. We we post on social media.
Every time you post on social media, whether you say it or
not, you're trying to impress other people.
Why? Because you love it when someone
likes your post and you get depressed when they don't like
your post. You're trying to impress all the
time. And we can get the same way with
God. If I'm going to pray, what do I
need to say and do that's going to impress Him?
And the truth is, nothing, nothing.
You don't need to try and impress God with your prayers.
I've heard people who use incredibly eloquent words in
their prayers. One of the very first services
we ever attended here at Forward many years, even before we
started attending regularly, there was a man that many of you
will know. His name is Gordon Phillips.
Gordon Phillips was praying during the service that Sunday.
And I listened to Gordon pray and I thought, Oh my goodness, I
have just touched heaven. And then I thought, Oh my
goodness, I can never pray again because he's the only one who
can pray like that. I've never met anybody that
could pray like him. It was incredible.
Now on the opposite end, my posture before I, we started
attending forward, my posture. Early on in his Christian life,
he had a huge stuttering problem.
Like he could not talk without stuttering.
It was just automatic. He was a brand new Christian.
He's sitting at church one Sunday and his pastor says
during communion, Hey, Ray, I want you to pray for communion
today. Now imagine being poor Ray, who
is just stuttering and mumbling and bumbling his way through a
prayer. And I want you to know
something. God is equally honored by both
prayers. It's not about the eloquence of
words. It's not about the abundance of
words in your prayer that makes your prayer powerful.
Both types of prayers can be equally honoring to God.
The prophets of Baal, they spent half a day trying to get Bale's
attention to respond to their prayers.
Elijah prays in about two sentences, and God sends down
fire from heaven. Church, Jesus died on a cross to
reconcile you to God and give you access at any moment to come
boldly into the presence of your heavenly Father who loves you.
And he wants to hear from you, not because you've got all the
right words to say, but because you're his child.
Don't overthink your prayers. Just pray.
Now, that doesn't mean you can't grow in learning different ways
to pray and helping you to connect with Him, but it doesn't
mean we don't need to overthink it.
One of the ways we can all grow in prayers to understand that
prayer is a place to check your attitudes and actions.
In the very first part of Elijah's prayer in verse 36,
before we ever get to the part of fire coming down from heaven,
Elijah asks God for something else.
He says let it be known that you are God and that I am your
servant and that at your word I have done all these things.
Here's what Elijah's praying. Hey, God, would you just please
have my back and show these people that I'm not a crazy man?
That's what he's praying, basically.
I've called for this, this day, this moment of this challenge,
and it looks ridiculous. What I've called for here, The
odds are against me. I've drenched this this thing in
water. It doesn't make any sense.
Would you come and just have my back and show me, Show everybody
else I'm not crazy? And the reason he prays that is
because Elijah says I've just simply done what you've told me
to do. God, I've done all these things
that don't make any sense to anybody else, but I'm doing them
because you've told me to call for this challenge.
You've told me to put water on the sacrifice like this.
You cannot expect God to show up in a powerful way if you're not
living in obedience to God yourself.
Like Elijah makes this incredibly bold prayer, but it's
a prayer that's based on an assumption that he's living in
obedience to God. You know what obedience is?
Obedience just means faith in action means I trust God so much
I'm going to do what God says. I have faith in God and I'm
living it out in the everyday of my life, whatever He says to do.
Now I want to be clear because some of us may not totally
understand the difference between these two meanings of
the word faith. So there's a difference between
saving faith and living faith. Saving faith is the idea of
this. The Bible says that every single
human is a Sinner, and every single one of us is in danger of
the judgement of God for our sins.
And the Bible says that none of us can be rescued or saved from
that judgement by our obedience, by our own good works.
Doing good things will not make you right with God.
We are saved. We are made right with God,
first by his grace, his unmerited favor towards us, and
second, by our faith in Jesus and the reality that Jesus took
our place on a cross to pay the penalty for our sins.
That's saving faith. And saving faith leads us to
living faith. Living faith is where we
continue to choose to have faith that there is only one God and
that one God rules over everything.
Living faith manifests itself by living in obedience to God.
Here's how the preacher chapter Spurgeon described it.
Because we have faith in God as Lord of all, we gladly pay him
our homage and desire in all things.
To say Thy will be done in earth as it is done in heaven.
You must have a priority faith in God or else the will of God
will not be a priority rule to you.
Obedience means just doing what God says to do, even when it
doesn't make sense. And before you ever start to
pray for God to change the way that other people are living or
to change the environment around you, ask God to search you and
show show you if you're honoring God yourself.
Like let me give you a couple of quick examples from the Bible.
Men, let's say you're in a marriage relationship.
You're frustrated with your wife for whatever reason.
So you're asking God, God, would you please just change her?
Would you just work in her life? And maybe sometimes you get so
frustrated with her, you're getting angry, you're talking
down to her, you're ignoring her.
Here's what the Bible says in first Peter chapter 3.
Husbands, show your wife honor as Co heirs of the grace of life
so that your prayers will not be hindered.
Your obedience to God men in honoring your wife is directly
connected to God hearing your prayers.
Let me give you another example. I I know this never happens in
our culture, but let's just say you're frustrated, maybe even
angry with leaders. You just want them to be better
and do better. The Bible has a lot to say about
honouring, respecting, and praying for those who are in
authority. What would make you think God's
going to respond favorably to you if you aren't saying yes to
what He wants from you? Sometimes we pray and nothing
happens. And part of the reason nothing
happens is because we're praying with the wrong motives.
That's what James chapter 4, verse 3 tells us.
And so here's what I want to do. I want to take a minute.
We're going to have a silent prayer.
And I want to ask you just to think about this, everybody
close your eyes. I want you to come before God,
Say God in the places of life that concern me or frustrate me.
Please show me if I'm honoring you with my actions and
attitudes. It's important to keep coming
back to that over and over again, asking God to show you
your own heart and the way you're living in obedience to
God yourself. That's just the first part of
Elijah's prayer. The second part goes further.
Let me ask you this. What's your greatest desire?
When you pray for other people, especially people who want
nothing to do with God, when you look at the culture around us,
when you look at all the things that frustrate you, what's your
greatest desire? Here's what Elijah's prayer
teaches us. Prayers that honor God are
primarily concerned with the state of people's souls.
Look at verse 37 for a minute. I want you to notice something
that never once shows up in Elijah's prayer.
Elijah never actually prays for fire from heaven, never shows
up. Elijah doesn't say, God, would
you send down fire from heaven? The fire that comes down is
simply God doing what God was always going to do in response
to Elijah's obedience. Elijah's prayer, his greatest
desire is for people to see God for who he is.
That people would know God and all of his glory and all of his
power, and that their hearts would be turned back to him.
That people would want to love God and honor him with their
life. You know, so many times we go
looking for the fire to fall from heaven, when what matters
most is that all of humanity has a clear vision of who God really
is. In this culture where people
denied God, where there were servants of God who were being
killed, where Ahab himself could, where Elijah himself
could possibly be killed, his primary concern are the souls of
people who are angry with God or who are confused about which God
they should trust. Let's be honest, that's not
always what we're most concerned about.
There's just something inside of us that always gets caught up in
the morality of the situation. We want everything that we're
seeing on the surface to be fixed and changed.
That's the kind of stuff we usually pray for.
Like when someone else's actions make your life more difficult.
What do you pray for? Hey God, just get me through
this. Help me not to kill this person,
right? Those are OK prayers but not
ultimate When when the culture around you seems like it's just
going crazy sometimes celebrating things that just are
so obviously against what God says.
If you even pray about it, what do you pray for?
Like God, would you just stop this madness when when someone
you love is getting in some kind of trouble?
What? What do you pray for?
Hey God, would you just help them to stop gambling or
drinking or taking drugs? Again, not bad things to pray
for, but but not ultimate things for for those of you who have
children or grandchildren or friends who are caught up in a
world where they ignore God or where maybe God is just one of
many other gods that they're kind of serving and worshiping
in their life. The single greatest prayer that
you can give is that those people you love will see God for
who He is and we'll have their hearts turn back to Him.
You see, the truth is nothing changes unless hearts change.
Nothing changes in the culture once the hearts of our culture
change. Nothing changes in our marriages
and in our families unless hearts change.
Nothing changes in the priorities of people until
something changes in our hearts. That that is exactly what Jesus
teaches us, that what we most often pay attention to are the
things that are at the surface, the things that we can touch and
see. But everything that is broken in
this world and in this culture, everything that is broken in our
lives, everything that is wrong and living in rebellion against
God, everything that tries to make God one of many gods that
we serve, it's all because of what is in our hearts.
And what we need to see is the majesty and the glory of God and
to have our hearts turn to Him. So I want to give you a minute
to pray. close your eyes again. I want you to think about all
those people that frustrate you, those people that you're
concerned with, the culture around you.
I want you to pray for them to see God and to have their hearts
turned to Him. You know, the the reason I know
that this prayer is so important is because this is what God's
heart is for you. If you're here today and this
whole idea of Christianity is foreign to you, or you're just
checking it out, here's what I want you to know.
There is only one God. There can only be one God by
very nature of the definition of God.
And that God is greater than your mind can possibly fathom.
And for whatever reason, amongst all the billions of people on
this planet who have ever lived, that God loves you, no matter
how much brokenness you have in your life, no matter how many
times you have failed or done something wrong, That God says
the sin in your life is not primarily a behavior problem,
it's a heart problem. Ezekiel chapter 36 says this.
I will cleanse you from all of your impurities.
That God stands ready to forgive you of your sin if you just call
out to Him. But there's more.
He also says, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit
in you. That that God is alive and ready
to radically alter the course of your life by giving you a heart
transplant so that you could know Him and know His love for
you and that you could love Him in return.
And he's just inviting you to pray and call out to Jesus and
say, forgive me of my sin and come and give me a new heart.
God, I surrender my life to you. For those of us who do follow
Jesus, you know, it's so easy for us to get worried or
frustrated or even stop caring about the actions and decisions
of people who don't follow God. And what we need to remember is
we were just once like them. We needed to see God in all of
his glory. We needed to experience the
grace and the forgiveness of God in our own lives.
That's what God has done for us at the cross.
The sacrifice of Elijah in First Kings 18, the sacrifice that he
makes is just a temporary sacrifice.
But at the cross, Jesus dies and he is the sacrifice once and for
all time that says your sins can be totally forgiven.
You can be made new. You can see God in all of his
glory, the sacrifice of Jesus and the life and the death and
the resurrection of Jesus. We see the glory and the majesty
and the love that God has for you.
But sometimes in the chaos of the world we live in, we lose
sight of that. We lose sight of what God's done
for us. And so that's one of the reasons
why we need to take Communion together on a regular basis.
So I want to invite you to pull your Communion Cup out right
now. See, what Communion does is
Communion brings us back. It pulls us out of all the
things in the world that are distracting us and annoying us
and frustrating us and pulls us back into what ultimately
matters most, that there is one God who is great and he who
loves me so much that he would send his Son to die on a cross
for my sins. When we take communion, we're
reminding each other, reminding ourselves of how Jesus points us
to the glory of God. So I want to invite you to pull
the wafer out of the top of your communion cup.
This represents the reality that God became flesh, He came to
dwell amongst us. His name is Jesus, the Son of
God. That instead of us as humans
having to pay the price, the judgement of God, the Son of
God, God in the flesh. What a merciful, gracious God.
He would go and die on a cross so that we would not have to.
And we take this, this wafer and remembrance of the body of Jesus
that took our place on the cross.
Eat all of it. If you
open up the juice, the juice represents the blood of Jesus
that was shed on the cross for us.
And that blood that was shed, the Bible tells us, was shed so
that you and I could be forgiven, fully reconciled to
God. Able to enjoy fellowship,
relationship with him, the ability to be called a child of
God because you are forgiven. So we take this juice and we
drink it in remembrance of the blood of Jesus that was shed,
not only for you, but for every person in this world who needs
to still see that God loves them.
Let's take this in remembrance of him.
And the story with Elijah verse 39, after he had prayed and the
fire came down, it says when all the people saw it, they fell
face down and said the Lord he is God, the Lord he is God.
I want to invite you just take a moment, close your eyes.
For those of us who are God's children, I want you just to
take a moment and center your heart and reflect on just how
awesome God is. Church, let's stand together.
Let's celebrate our awesome God.