Alone, against the Crowd

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Transcript:

We’re going to be in 1 Kings chapter 18 this morning. 1 Kings chapter 18. While you’re turning there, one of the things that I enjoy about living in a place like we do, here in a small town in Oklahoma, is that we seem to be a little bit insulated from some of the insanity that’s going on around us in our country.

Not all of it. There’s still trouble. There’s still conflict.

All of that here. But we seem to be a little more insulated here, a little more isolated from it than we would be if we lived in some of the bigger cities. But I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that it seems to be creeping in on us a little bit.

It seems to be getting closer to home. It seems to be getting way too close for comfort. Thursday night, after I got the kids to bed, I say I, after we got the kids to bed, it wasn’t just me, after we got the kids to bed, I looked at Facebook, and I saw a lot of mamas that I knew really worried about their children.

And there’s a youth conference that I’ve attended many times, and that my parents have attended many times, both of us as adult sponsors for youth from our church and more. And they were at this youth conference in Dallas on Thursday, about two miles from what I later found out was going on. And I see all these worried mamas that I knew desperately trying to get a hold of their children, who I also knew, or one of the adult sponsors who were with them.

And I see people posting, yes, we’re here, we’re all accounted for, it’s two miles away. And I’m thinking, what’s going on? So I go and look and see that insanity has broken loose in Dallas.

And throughout the night, I saw on Facebook, there were people from about a dozen churches that I knew in Oklahoma and Arkansas and Texas. pastors and parents of people that I knew who were talking to people back home or communicating with people back home about what was going on with them. And then watching some of the videos and thinking, I’ve been, and probably most of us in here have been in the area where all of that shooting and all of that ugliness took place Thursday night.

It’s one thing to see rioting in Missouri, in a part of Missouri I’ve never been to. It’s one thing to see flashing lights outside of a dance club that I would never set foot in in Orlando, but to see the shooting in just an area of downtown Dallas where we were just probably six months ago in that very street. And seeing people you know, not involved in it, but pretty close by, too close by for comfort, you start to realize how unhinged it seems like our country is becoming.

And it’s heartbreaking, really. Folks, there’s a desperate need in our country. And it’s not for the right people to get in office.

It’s not for people to just start acting right. It’s not for let’s round up all of this group. Folks, the desperate need in our country is for peace and reconciliation with one another, yes, but more importantly with God.

Reconciliation that comes only through Jesus Christ. See, when we have Jesus Christ, the wall of separation between us and God is torn down. It’s gone. And when we have Jesus Christ, the wall of separation between us and our fellow man can be torn down.

There’s always going to be hatred. There’s always going to be anger in the world. But when you have Jesus Christ, when you have been saved, when your sins have been forgiven and that slate has been wiped clean because of Jesus Christ, he has this remarkable way.

He has this remarkable way of changing our hearts. He has this remarkable way of softening us. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been angry with someone.

And then I hear that still quiet voice in my spirit. It’s like God taps me on the shoulder. It reminds me of the grace that he’s given me.

And more often than not, that anger melts away. Folks, it’s heartbreaking that we live in a world, it’s heartbreaking that we live in a country that is so alienated from God, where the people are so alienated from God, and act out because of it in these destructive ways, when we also live in a country where, probably more than any other place on earth, they had access to the message that could change all of it. And it’s heartbreaking to me that these five officers on Thursday went off to work to protect the city of Dallas and didn’t know that they wouldn’t be coming home to their families that day.

As wrong as he was, it’s heartbreaking to me that a man felt so beaten down by society. Whether or not he was right to feel that way is another debate entirely, but felt so beaten down by society that he thought he had no other option than to take somebody’s life. The answer is not found.

The answer is not found in violence. The answer is not found in anger. It’s not even found in anger from us watching the news and seeing these things going on and looking at one group or the other and saying the cops are horrible or Black Lives Matter are horrible, but the answer is not found in mourning.

The answer is found in Jesus Christ. And tonight, I’ve already shared in our prayer meeting this morning, tonight there are going to be rallies in Oklahoma City, Black Lives Matter protests in Oklahoma City, one, I believe, at 530 in Bricktown, and one around 9 o’clock at Lake Hefner. We need to be in prayer not only for our nation, but for our community. We need to be in prayer that peace would reign.

We need to be in prayer that calm would be present. We need to be in prayer that God would give people rational sensibilities about them. Actually, God has gifted each of us with the ability to reason.

We need to pray that he would let us make use of it. We need to pray for our community. Not just for peace, folks.

But we need to pray that the gospel of Jesus Christ would penetrate hearts and change minds and change hearts and change lives. Would you join me in prayer this morning as we prepare to start our message? Our gracious Heavenly Father, Lord, we lift up to you this morning our community, God, not just Seminole, but the whole Oklahoma City area, and God, even the rest of our nation outside of here.

Lord, we live a fairly quiet life, and it’s easy to ignore the greater problems that go on around us, but it is getting harder. And God, we just want to lift up those in our community who feel oppressed, those who feel on edge, those who feel threatened. Lord, we lift up our police and our law enforcement.

And God, we pray that you would protect them. We pray that you’d watch over them. We pray that you’d keep them safe and send them back safely to homes and families who love them.

We also pray for peace for the families who sit at home and wait while they’re on their shifts, not knowing whether they’re going to come back or not. God, we pray that you’d keep them safe, and we pray that you’d give them the wisdom and the discernment to do the job that you placed them there to do, to protect us and to serve us. And God, we pray for those who will be out protesting.

Lord, we pray that they would be peaceful. We pray that you would keep them safe as well. God, we pray that there would be no outbreaks of violence in our state today.

God, as Christians, we believe that everybody’s created in your image. For that reason, we believe that all lives matter. And God, we just pray that your spirit would hold back any ill will that anybody has to try to start any chaos.

And God, we pray that ultimately all these problems would find their answer, would find their solution in the gospel of Jesus Christ. In the realization that things won’t always be fair or just here in this world, God. That all of our problems won’t be fixed. That everything won’t just be magically better for us, God.

But that you’ve taken care of our greatest problem. You’ve torn down the wall of separation between us and you that exist because of sin. And you can tear down the wall of separation between men and make them brothers in Christ. And Lord, I pray that our church and the churches across this country would stand strong, not give in to anger, not give in to fear, but stand as a bold witness of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Lord, that all people might be reconciled to you through his shed blood.

God, we ask for a movement of the gospel in our country. And Lord, let it begin here among your people. We love you and we ask all these things in Christ’s name.

Amen. now you may wonder what does that have to do with the message this morning and the answer would be everything everything I started talking to you last week about this idea of standing against the darkness that that we sort of feel and I think rightly so that something has changed in our country that we’re not the country we used to be we don’t seem to be a christian nation anymore and maybe we haven’t been for quite some time. And so the response of some is, well, we just need to shout louder and we need to be mad and why won’t they listen and they just act right and try to force people into acting right and get louder and get angrier.

And the response of some is to say, well, let’s all just huddle here in our little holy huddle until the end comes. We’ll stay here and be safe until the end. I think both of those approaches are misguided.

The one that says, let’s get angry at the culture and shout them down, and the other one that says, well, let’s just withdraw from the culture. We don’t see that in Scripture. We don’t see either of those responses being the one that is proposed in Scripture.

As a matter of fact, what we see is that when the world gets darkest, the glory of God shines its brightest in bold contrast to the darkness around it. We see a man like Elijah, who we started looking at last week, who saw the darkness of the world around him, who saw the darkness of his country, and said, this is not right. God sent him to stand against the darkness, and he did so boldly.

If you remember the story that I, I guess it’s a story that I read you last week, where I started talking about a country that was founded on the worship of the one true God, and it was blessed by him. And in that country, it spent the last 70 years just exploring any kind of depravity it could find. And we talked about the rules of marriage and intimacy being thrown out.

We talked about the violence that took place. We talked about parents murdering their children. We talked about nature being treated better than mankind.

We talked about all sorts of evil. And then I asked you how many of you thought I was talking about America. It was a trick question.

I figured you would think I was talking about America, but all of it was written after looking at what was going on in King Ahab’s court. In the 860s BC, all of this evil was going on. And the idea behind it is, we tend to think that our world today is the darkest it’s ever been.

Oh, God’s people have never faced evil like this. We’ve never been so outnumbered. We’ve never been so surrounded.

And the fact is, that’s just not true. Our world is following the same pattern that it’s been following for thousands of years. And into this, God called a single solitary man.

He called Elijah the Tishbite, it says. We know nothing about his parentage. We know nothing about his lineage.

We just know that he was from sort of a backwater of the Israeli state. He was from over across the river. He was from on the wrong side of the river, back in nowhere.

And God calls this man and sends him, not just to complain in his community, but sends him to the king and says, God’s had enough. And so you’re not going to have rain anymore until I say so. And that wasn’t a demonstration of Elijah’s power.

That was a demonstration of God’s power. Elijah didn’t have any more power to withhold the rain than I do. And it was because God gave him that authority and said, you speak for me on this.

you tell Ahab there’s not going to be any more rain. Okay, what’s the big deal? They were an agricultural society.

They didn’t have the grocery store or the Walmart to run to. If it didn’t rain, they didn’t eat. And on top of that, the big problem for them is that they were worshiping Baal. That’s what led to all of this wickedness.

They had abandoned God in favor of a God of their own choosing. And so they were worshiping Baal. And who was Baal? He was the storm God.

So it’s a two-foot here. Where God’s not only saying, I’m going to hit you right where it hurts most, as a reminder. Not to be mean, but as a reminder of how much they needed God.

But also it was demonstrating from Elijah’s standpoint, my God is bigger than your God. The God of Israel is bigger than this storm God. And he can withhold the rain if he wants to.

And so Elijah went and stood against the darkness. What we’re going to look at today, we see that he was standing alone. He was standing alone against the darkness.

It says in chapter 18, starting in verse 1, And it came to pass after many days that the word of the Lord came to Elijah in the third year, saying, Go, show thyself unto Ahab, and I will send rain upon the earth. It has been three years since the passage that we talked about last week. Three years they haven’t had rain.

Now, sometimes you can go through a drought for a year and be okay. I mean, you’ve got stockpiles that we don’t as much anymore. We can get food from, we can get it shipped in from elsewhere, but they might have had stockpiles.

They might have had a little leftover. If nothing else, they could eat seed grain from the previous year. You go a second year, things start to get a little desperate, a little more desperate, I should say.

Third year without rain, you’re looking at a catastrophe. What was it here? We went through about three years of drought here recently.

I don’t remember exactly how long it lasted because I moved to Arkansas. which had nothing to do with the drought. But I remember hearing stories from back home where people were having to sell off their cattle.

That may have affected some of you here as well. There wasn’t rain, there wasn’t hay, and you either had to buy hay at premium prices or you had to sell off the cattle. Well, they were facing that very thing.

And so three years into this very desperate circumstance, God tells Elijah again, and remember God told Elijah the first time, go in there with my message that there’s not going to be any more rain and then get out. Don’t stick around and argue and justify yourself and explain why you’re not crazy. Get in there, get the message, and get out.

So after three years of this, God sends Elijah back to Ahab, and I would imagine that would be even more frightening than the first time, because at this point, Elijah’s really not going to be Ahab’s favorite person. And Elijah went to show himself unto Ahab, and there was a sore famine in Samaria. I bet there was, after three years of no reign.

He goes to show himself to Ahab, and Ahab called Obadiah, which was the governor of his house. Now Obadiah feared the Lord greatly, for it was so when Jezebel cut off the prophets of the Lord, that Obadiah took a hundred prophets and hid them by fifty in a cave and fed them with bread and water. And Ahab said unto Obadiah, Go into the land, unto all the fountains of water, and unto all the brooks, peradventure we may find grass to save the horses and mules, so that we lose not the beasts.

They’re at a point now where they’re either going to have to find some hidden, wonderful patch of grass somewhere where they can graze their cattle and their horses, or they’re going to have to sell them off, or they’re going to have to slaughter them, they’re going to have to do something. But it’s getting to a desperate situation when the king, who gathers up all the food, gathers up whatever he wants from the people. We know that Ahab has no problem taking what he wants from the people.

When even the king has run out of food and supplies for the cattle, and he’s having to send out Obadiah, who, by the way, is a God-fearing man, it says. He’s having to send out Obadiah to find food for the cattle. And they divided the land between them to pass throughout it.

Ahab went one way by himself, and Obadiah went another way by himself. And as Obadiah was in the way, behold, Elijah met him and knew him, and fell on his face and said, Art thou my lord, Elijah? So Obadiah, thankfully, and it was not a lucky coincidence, God orchestrates these things the way he sees fit.

Luckily, I shouldn’t use the word luckily, happily, Elijah met Obadiah instead of Ahab. Obadiah being the one who secretly, excuse me, I’m not usually big on the idea of secret believers, but Obadiah did it for a reason, and he feared God, probably didn’t make a big production of it, in Ahab and Jezebel’s corner. He could have lost his head.

But when Jezebel was going through killing all the prophets of God, Obadiah took as many as he could. He took a hundred of them and put them in two caves by fifties. And he somewhere found the stuff to take care of them for those three years, food and water.

So Obadiah runs into Elijah and falls on his face and says, aren’t you Elijah? He recognizes it. And he answered him, verse 8, I am, go tell thy Lord, behold, Elijah is here.

So he says, get up and go tell Ahab that Elijah is here to see him. And he said, what have I sinned that thou wouldst deliver thy servant into the hand of Ahab to slay me? So he says, go tell Ahab that Elijah is here to see me.

And Obadiah stands up and says, what have I ever done to you? What wrong have I done that you’re going to send me to Ahab with this message? And he’s going to off with my head.

As the Lord thy God liveth, there is no nation or kingdom whether my Lord hath not sent to seek thee. And when they say he is not there, he took an oath of the kingdom and nation that they found thee not. He said, I’m telling you, there is no country around here that Ahab has not sent somebody there to hunt you down.

And when they get there and the country says, no, we don’t have him, he makes them swear an oath. He makes them promise that they have not seen you. And now thou sayest, verse 11, Go tell thy Lord, Behold, Elijah is here.

And now, just like it’s this, nothing matter, like it’s the easiest thing in the world, you’re telling me, go tell him I found you? And it shall come to pass, as soon as I am gone from thee, that the Spirit of the Lord shall carry thee wither I know not. And so when I come and tell Ahab, and he cannot find thee, he shall slay me.

But I thy servant fear the Lord from my youth. He said, As soon as you’re out of my sight, God’s going to take you somewhere else. I won’t know where to find you.

And when Elijah can’t track you down where I said you, when Ahab can’t track you down where you said you would be, where I said you would be, he’s going to kill me. After all, he says in verse 13, was it not told my Lord what I did when Jezebel slew the prophets of the Lord? How I hid a hundred men of the Lord’s prophets by fifty in a cave, and fed them with bread and water, and now thou sayest, go tell thy Lord, behold, Elijah is here and he shall slay me.

So he’s gone on from, what did I ever do to you but come on Elijah I’m a good man I’m the good guy here I’m taking care of the Lord’s prophets don’t put me in this position and Elijah said verse 15 as the Lord of hosts liveth before whom I stand I will surely show myself to him today today he will see me I promise you as God is my witness he will see me today so Obadiah went to meet Ahab and told him and Ahab went to meet Elijah. And here we have the preparation for the dramatic showdown that we’ll talk about in the coming weeks. He said in verse 17, And it came to pass when Ahab saw Elijah that Elijah said unto him, Art thou he that troubleth Israel?

And that makes it sound a lot more like a question than it really is. I do like what some of the other translations say about it that I’ve looked at this week, where if we were to word this today, Ahab would would look at Elijah and say, well, well, well, if it’s not the one who’s destroying the country. This is not really a question.

Oh, Elijah, are you the one who’s causing all the trouble in Israel? It’s an accusation. You.

You are the one destroying the country. You’re the one who’s caused all this trouble. You’re the one who’s caused this famine.

And I love Elijah’s response. verse 18, he answered, I have not troubled Israel, but thou. I didn’t do this.

You did. You did. I have this conversation with my children all the time.

They don’t like the consequences of something. And they’ll get mad at me. Those of you who have been parents, understand this.

They disobey and know the consequences. They get those consequences and suddenly you’re the bad guy. So even at Benjamin’s age, Well, even at Madeline’s age, too, I remind them, did I choose this or did you?

You’re mad at me because you got a spanking, or you’re mad at me because you didn’t get a snow cone, or you’re mad at me because you had to go clean something up in the backyard that you spilled. Okay, whatever the consequence is, did you choose this or did I? I always thought my parents were lying to me when they said the spanking hurt them worse than it hurt me.

We’re talking about two different kinds of hurt now. It definitely physically hurt me worse than it hurt them. But now as a parent, I understand it hurts my heart to have to spank my kids.

And I use it as a last resort. Try other things that I can. But still, you know, sometimes it has to be done.

Anytime I discipline them, it hurts my heart. I think, why won’t you just choose obedience over these consequences? But when they start to get mad at me, and one of them is worse at it than the other, when they start to get mad at me over the consequence, whether it’s a spanking or I’m going to cry hysterically because I’m sitting in time out, whatever it is, I go and ask them, did I choose this or did you?

Am I the one who made the decision that led to this consequence or was it you? And Elijah, ladies and gentlemen, is having the same conversation with King Ahab and with the nation as a whole. Did I choose this or did you?

Elijah is being blamed for the consequences that have been following the country. But he tells Ahab, I have not troubled Israel. You have.

I didn’t cause this problem. You did. And your father’s house.

So it didn’t just start with Ahab. He wasn’t the one who introduced idolatry to Israel. He was just the one who raised it to an art form.

And so he says, and thy father’s house, in that ye have forsaken the commandments of the Lord, and has followed Balaam. That word Balaam is a plural word. You haven’t just followed a false god.

You’ve followed all the false gods. You’ve rejected God and followed any idol you possibly could. You’ve just done whatever you wanted, and you’ve led the country astray.

You did this, not me. He says, now therefore send and gather to me all Israel unto Mount Carmel, and the prophets of Baal, 450, and the prophets of the groves, 400, which eat at Jezebel’s table. And that’s where we’re going to stop in the passage this morning.

But the example we have here of Elijah is one of a man who’s willing to stand against the darkness of his nation not once, Which would have been impressive enough if Elijah had gone the first time God said, and had gone into King Ahab’s court and said, you don’t get any more rain until I say so. That would be impressive enough. But we see the example of a man who’s willing to stand against the darkness of his society, not once, but every time God calls him to.

Every time God calls him to. Now we know, we know from some stories, or I know, and you know if you’ve heard the stories, if you don’t, we’re going to talk about them in the coming weeks. We know from how this plays out that he’s not one of those that says, yeah, let me go get them.

One of those, he’s just ready to lay it out there in black and white and mow everybody down. Elijah was a very reluctant man. Elijah didn’t have a lot of confidence.

And yet it was God who gave him confidence to go and stand against the darkness. And he was willing to do it even if he stood alone. Now as I’ve talked about standing against the darkness in our society, Now that certainly includes all the things that we tend to think of.

We’ve got same-sex marriage, which is something that the Bible speaks of as not only a sin, but a counterfeit of God’s design for marriage. We’ve got abortion, which is the taking of an innocent human life. We’ve got sex outside of marriage.

We’ve got drugs. We’ve got all these things that are plagues on our society. We’ve got the fact you can’t even turn on the TV and watch anything with your children anymore.

We’re just bombarded by perversion and ungodly things all around us all the time. And so we think about this when we talk about standing against the darkness of our society. We think about these things that are socially conservative standards.

And those are dark things that we need to stand against. We need to stand not just against things, but we need to stand for the righteousness of God. That God said this and that’s the way it is, not because it’s my opinion and not because I’m backward and bigoted, but just because this is what God said. But folks, there are other things like the anger and violence that are destroying our country, that are eating it alive from the inside out.

I would say that’s an ungodly darkness that we need to stand against. Am I wrong in that? I mean, shouldn’t we be against the fact that people are gunning each other down in the streets? Shouldn’t the church speak out against that?

See, the darkness is not just these things that the world looks at and says, these are political issues. First of all, I think they’re wrong in that. Abortion and the definition of marriage, these are not political issues, these are biblical issues.

And it’s more than just what the world looks at and says these political issues. There is darkness all around us. The darkness is anything that rejects the light of God’s righteousness.

Anything that falls short of his standards. And it’s within each of us. I saw an article this week.

It was a satirical article. It wasn’t serious. But the headline was something along the lines of a doting mother finally accepts the doctrine of depravity now that her child is two.

I got in trouble. And those who’ve parented somebody through the terrible twos and the lie that that is because it stretches on and I’ll let you know when it’s over. But you understand what that means.

I got in trouble from some of the ladies in the congregation, not here, when Benjamin was a baby for preaching about the sin nature and saying it was present in each of us. And even Benjamin, who was sitting in a baby carrier in the auditorium, even Benjamin back there, two months old, is a sinner. And I had ladies, you shouldn’t say that.

Well, it’s true. I know, but you shouldn’t say that. He’s so sweet and innocent.

and then they grow up and they start walking and they start talking and they start reaching for things and they start talking and talking and you realize that the sin nature is real. It’s alive and it’s within each of us. We didn’t have to go and teach that. It’s there.

There’s darkness in humanity and it’s there because we’ve rejected God and the further we go from Him the greater the darkness is. Folks, we need to be willing like Elijah to stand against darkness even if we stand alone. With these shootings in the last week, the natural implication is we’ve got to blame somebody and we’ve got to be mad at somebody.

I think we can blame and be mad at the guy who decided to go shoot other people. I think that’s usually where the blame should go. Not at this group or that group.

But some people want to be mad. And we’ve got to blame and lash out against the Black Lives Matter people. And we’ve got to blame and lash out against the police.

We’ve got to blame and lash out against the media. And I’ve seen where Christians have said, what about love? What about forgiveness?

What about the gospel? And people get mad at them for that. And apparently, apparently what would Jesus do or what did Jesus do has become, once again, an unpopular stand to take.

We should be willing to stand for God’s righteousness even if we stand alone. Elijah basically stood alone. He was not completely alone in the country, as we’ll see in coming weeks.

But as far as he was concerned, he was alone. God sent him. God didn’t send a committee to Ahab.

God sent Elijah to stand against the darkness. The other prophets were dead, most of them. The other men who spoke on God’s behalf and who proclaimed God’s word had been murdered at the hands of the government and at the hands of society.

They’d been killed. And those who hadn’t been killed were in hiding. We look all through here and we see there’s nobody.

There’s nobody on Elijah’s side except for Obadiah and he’s undercover. Elijah was on his own except for God. God himself is the majority.

Elijah’s alone. He’s willing to stand against the darkness alone. The good news is that as a church we don’t stand alone against the darkness.

But we’ve got to be willing to even if we did. We’ve got to be willing to stand even if we did stand alone. And folks, as I said last week and as I’ll say throughout all this, this idea about standing against the darkness is not one of saying, just get everybody to act better.

We need to call out society until they act better. I want everybody to act better. I want people to do nice things and stop shooting each other and hold the door open for one another.

all the things that we would expect out of polite society. But if we just come with a superficial message of be nice and act right, then we produce superficial changes. And we send people who act right to an eternity separated from God in hell.

Folks, our message of rolling back the darkness is not one of just act right. It’s one of telling a world that is mired in darkness that they need to be reconciled to God. It’s not enough to act right.

We have to be right with God. We have to be reconciled to Him because of the darkness, because of the sin that lives within each of us. And there’s only one way to be reconciled to God.

I realize that in and of itself is not a popular message in the world today. But there is only one way to be reconciled to God. My good works won’t do it.

I know me. And it seems like, it feels like, for every nice thing I do, there’s ten mean thoughts. Anybody else ever feel that way?

I know me and there’s not enough good I can do to undo the wron

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