An Unsilenceable Minority

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Well, if your week has been anything like mine, there’s been no shortage of conversations about the crazy world in which we find ourselves and how all the unexpected things now seem to be things we should expect. And we began talking last week about how to navigate through a world gone mad, how to go forward when things have gone crazy. And one of the things that I take a little bit of solace in is history, and just knowing that things have been crazy before.

Even in our country, things have been crazy before. Actually, it’s rare to find a time when things have not been crazy. And so there are plenty of examples of people that have had to navigate crazy times.

And there are plenty of examples of people who’ve had to have the courage to do it by themselves if necessary. I thought of a few stories this week. Martin Luther.

Some of you will be familiar with Martin Luther. And how he challenged the teachings of the Catholic Church at that time that was selling indulgences, pieces of paper that said, if you buy this, your sins will be forgiven. he looked at the scriptures and said, that’s not true.

And said, justification is by faith. Well, he was challenged on this and had to stand before an imperial court as he was challenged by both the church and the imperial government and had to stand there by himself and say, look, you want me to recant? You want me to change my story?

Unless I’m convinced by scripture, I can’t recant. Here I stand. There’s nothing else I can do.

I’m paraphrasing. But that was his stand. I stand here with Scripture even if I stand alone.

And he spent most of the rest of his life on the run as he was hunted down by the church and the government. Then there’s William Tyndale, who was one of the men most responsible for the translation of the Bible into English. And for that crime, he too was hunted down by the established church and by the government.

And in 1536, he was burned at the stake in Belgium under the orders of the King of England. And he was given opportunities all along the way to stop his work on translating and printing the Bible. But he refused because he recognized the power of having access to the Word of God in your own language.

And he insisted that was something that needed to happen. He knew what would happen if God’s truth was unleashed for the English-speaking world. And so he refused.

He stood up to the emperor. He stood up to the king of England. He stood up to the church of England and to the Roman Catholic church.

He stood up to all of them and ended up being burned at the stake. And while he was there dying, he prayed to God, open the king of England’s eyes. Just a few years later, the King of England authorized a translation of the Bible into English that was largely based on Tyndale’s work.

A few more modern examples. Boris Yeltsin was the president of Russia. At the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union before Russia was an independent country, him being the president of Russia meant that he was something like a state governor.

And at this time, Gorbachev was bringing in reforms that some of the old guard communists didn’t like. And so they put Gorbachev under house arrest and rolled tanks into Moscow to try to reassert a kind of Stalinist, communist, hardline government. They were going to take away the freedoms that had recently been introduced.

And they were about to succeed. They were pointing tanks at the parliament building. They were about to succeed until Boris Yeltsin climbed up on one of the tanks and began to address the crowd.

And it changed the direction of that country, at least for a little while. And then one of my favorite historical examples, we still don’t know for sure who this man is or what happened to him, but in 1989 there were pro-democracy protesters, college students in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. And the government was moving in to crack down on them, moving in to slaughter their own citizens.

They were, imagine being so threatened by college students that you’re coming at them with tanks. That’s what they were doing. And the people of China were watching this on TV, and some of them realized, we’ve got to do something about this.

And this one man, apparently coming back from doing some shopping, because he had his grocery bags in hand, stood there in front of a column of tanks, hoping that they wouldn’t run him down. And they didn’t. I don’t think the soldiers really wanted to go in and massacre these people who could be their younger sibling.

or their children. And so they stopped and then they tried to go around him and he stood in front of the column of tanks again. They tried to go around him again and he’d move and finally he wasn’t able to stop them but he delayed the tanks.

And it was an incredible act of courage that others had to run in and grab him and drag him away before the government realized who he was and I believe tried to protect him. And it leads me to the realization that some of the most heroic acts in all of history have come from an unsilensible minority of people who have been committed to doing the right thing, no matter what the cost is. And the reason I hit on that phrase this week as I was studying, hit on that phrase, an unsilensible minority, is because we have somewhere along the way gotten the idea that we can’t accomplish much of anything.

We can’t do anything. We have no power unless we have a big group standing with us. We need a million people to march on Washington.

We need a group of 50 to stand with us in prayer. We think we can’t do things by ourselves. As a matter of fact, it’s discussed about every four years in this country, the power of the silent majority.

Well, it doesn’t require a silent majority to do the right thing. It requires an unsilensible minority. In some cases, it requires one.

And this morning, I want us to look at, as we continue our study, into the life of Elijah and how it can provide us an example for how to move forward today. I want to look at his example as it shows us what it looks like when one person is willing, even if they have to stand by themselves, is willing to stand for what God says and is willing to be obedient to God and the change that it can make. We don’t have to have 70% of the country behind us.

We don’t have to have millions of people march with us. We just are called to be obedient to God. And so if you haven’t already, I’m going to ask you to turn with me to 1 Kings chapter 18.

And once you’re there, if you would stand with me. For the sake of time this morning, we’re going to pick up the story in verse 7. It says, Now as Obadiah was on his way, suddenly Elijah met him, and he recognized him and fell on his face and said, Is that you, my Lord, Elijah?

And he answered him, it is I, go tell your master. Elijah is here. Now his master is King Ahab.

So he said, how have I sinned that you are delivering your servant into the hand of Ahab to kill me? As the Lord your God lives, there is no nation or kingdom where my master has not sent someone to hunt for you. And when they said, he is not here, he took an oath from the kingdom or nation that they could not find you.

He made them swear that they really couldn’t find you. and now you say go tell your master Elijah is here and it shall come to pass as soon as I’m gone from you that the spirit of the Lord will carry you to a place that I do not know so when I go and tell Ahab and he cannot find you he will kill me but I your servant have feared the Lord from my youth was it not reported to my Lord what I did when Jezebel killed the prophets of the Lord how I hid 100 men of the Lord’s prophets 50 to a cave and fed them with bread and water and now you say go Tell your master Elijah is here. He will kill me.

Then Elijah said, As the Lord of hosts lives before whom I stand, I will surely present myself to him today. So Obadiah went to meet Ahab and told him, and Ahab went to meet Elijah. Then it happened when Ahab saw Elijah, that Ahab said to him, Is that you, O troubler of Israel?

And he answered, I have not troubled Israel, but you and your father’s house have, in that you have forsaken the commandments of the Lord and have followed the Baals. Now therefore send and gather all Israel to me on Mount Carmel, the 450 prophets of Baal and the 400 prophets of Asherah, who eat at Jezebel’s table. And you may be seated.

Last week, we looked at the story about how God sent Elijah to go and challenge Ahab, and then told him to go and run for his life. Basically, God said, there’s not going to be rain here for as long as I say, And Elijah will be the messenger who will tell you when there’s going to be rain again. But Elijah, I want you to go stand alone in front of Ahab.

And I want you to give him this message. I want you to challenge his idolatry. I want you to challenge his sin.

If you remember through the story I told you last week, as every king came along in Israel, it seems like they had to one-up the previous king on their wickedness. And Ahab just took it to a whole different level. And all of the sin, all of the evil that took place in Israel under Ahab’s leadership.

And God sent Elijah in to challenge that. Well, three years later now, God finally says, Okay, Elijah, we’re going to move toward rain happening again, and I want you to go talk to Ahab. And so Elijah goes to talk to Ahab.

And we see in the verses before we read that Ahab and Obadiah are out looking for grazing space for Ahab’s animals, the ones that he would use for his charioteers and his army. They’re out looking for grazing space because three years of drought and three years of famine have really played a toll or have really taken a toll on Israel. And so now it’s when Ahab is just probably not in the mood for it that God sends Elijah and says, go talk to Ahab, go tell him what I said.

God was going to show Israel some mercy by ending the drought soon. And we need to understand ending the drought was God’s mercy because at this point Ahab had not repented and neither had Israel. But God was going to be merciful to his people just because he was merciful.

He was going to send the rain back, but Ahab’s wickedness still had to be dealt with. So my first takeaway from all of this when looking at the life of Elijah as he deals with Ahab, as he’s obedient to God, is that obedience sometimes puts us in difficult situations. Would you agree that what Elijah was being called to do was a difficult situation?

To go to this wicked king and have to tell him he’s wrong again? To have to go challenge him? Most people don’t like to be told they’re wrong, right?

Now imagine somebody who’s really, really, really wrong and really, really doesn’t want to hear it and really, really has the ability to kill you if he wants to. Elijah was in a difficult situation. And I looked this week at, you know, what made it so difficult?

Because if we go through here piece by piece, we get acquainted really fast with how difficult this was going to be and why it was so difficult. Ahab’s country was falling apart because of drought and famine. We see that in verse 2 of this chapter.

The country had been through three years of drought and famine. Have any of you ever been on a really strict diet for a while? Do you get more pleasant to be around or less pleasant to be around?

We call it hangry in our house. We didn’t invent that, but we say it all the time. Combination of hungry and angry.

The whole country was hungry, and Ahab was having to deal with this. His country was falling apart because nobody had enough to eat, and so he’s already going to be in a bad mood having to deal with this. He was on edge because even his military was collapsing.

In those previous verses, we see that he can’t even feed the animals that he uses in his military. He can’t feed the horses for his chariots. And we see in later chapters that he gets into some trouble because of some military weakness directly related to this.

So not only is he dealing with trouble in his country, potentially unrest, but he’s also dealing with the fact that his military is not running at peak strength to deal with the problems that he’s facing. So everything is just kind of compounding on him. And we know that Ahab was not somebody Elijah would have wanted to hang out with anyway because servants of the Lord are being massacred as they’re found.

Ahab was so angry at this point toward God, so bitter toward God. He’s not blaming himself for the trouble in Israel. He’s blaming God.

And so he’s angry at the servants of God. Anybody found worshiping the God of Israel instead of the Baals is being massacred. Anybody who speaks out, anybody who proclaims God’s word is being massacred.

The few survivors that there are are in hiding. That’s what Obadiah says. I took the last 100 and I hid them in caves, 50 to a cave.

And I’m out there on top of everything else trying to find food enough and water enough to support these 100 prophets. And in verse 10, we saw that Ahab was hunting for Elijah. He was a determined man.

See, he blamed God and he also blamed Elijah for being God’s chief spokesman at this point. He was hunting for him nation by nation. He was going out to the other countries around and when they were saying, we haven’t seen Elijah, he was making them swear.

He was threatening them, swear to it. You better pinky promise that you haven’t seen Elijah. He was determined to find this man to track him down because he blamed Elijah for his troubles.

We see in verse 17 that when he came face to face with Elijah, he said, is that you, troubler of Israel? Oh, is that you, Elijah, the one who’s responsible for this mess that I find myself in? And now, a king that was this unhinged, this angry, this violent, Elijah had to risk his life to tell Ahab that it was not his stand for God.

It was not Elijah’s stand for God that was causing the trouble in Israel. it was Ahab’s sin. You’re at fault.

You’re the one who did it. Elijah didn’t do this because it sounded like the cool fun idea to do that day. Elijah did this because God told him in verse 1 get up and go deal with Ahab.

I think if I’m praying and I hear that in my prayer time I’m saying Lord did I hear that right? Maybe our wires got crossed. You want me to go where and say what to who?

And possibly the scariest part of all of it is he had to do it alone. He had to do it alone everybody else that served God, everybody else who would take a stand, everybody else who would speak out for the things that God said were right and true, everybody else was either dead or in hiding. Elijah at this point is the only one in any kind of, and he’d been in hiding himself, but he was the only one in any semblance of public ministry who was not dead.

I don’t think very many of us would be eager for an assignment like this. We’d be eager for a way out. And if Elijah was looking for an excuse not to go.

You know, we sometimes do that, don’t we? We decide I don’t want to do this, and then we look for the excuse. If he was looking for an excuse, there were plenty.

Well, God, if I do something so foolish and get my head chopped off, who’s going to be left to speak up for you? God can speak up for himself. He was calling Elijah to go and do this.

Most of us would be eager for a way out of that assignment, but God calls us to obey him even if we have to obey him alone. Do you know that? If God calls you to do something, saying, but Lord, nobody else is doing is not an excuse.

And I don’t like that because I’d rather not have to stand alone at times. But if he calls us to do something, to say I have to do this alone, I have to go this route alone, is not an excuse that gets us out of it. God calls us to obey him even if we have to do it alone.

Elijah was alone in a human sense. Now in the other sense, he’s never alone because God was with him. He was walking with God.

And you and I are never alone in that sense either. But as a pastor friend mind says sometimes you just want somebody with skin on them. You don’t want to say you want somebody real. We know God is real, but sometimes you want somebody there with some skin on.

I don’t know why that is, but we feel that way. That God calls us to obey Him, even if we have to obey Him all alone. Now, for the most part, we don’t have to obey Him alone.

It’s part of the beauty of the church. And I know there are still people who say, well, what’s the point in going to church? Why do you need that?

You can worship God at home. And certainly now with things online, you can do that at home like never before. But even before that, I can read the Bible at home.

I can pray to God on a golf course on a Sunday morning. You can absolutely do all of those things. All of that is true.

I don’t dispute that. But God put us together to encourage each other, to strengthen each other, to hold each other up, to challenge each other when necessary. So as Christians, if we are functioning as part of the church, it should be a very rare thing for us to have to stand alone.

But our obedience ought to be such that we’re willing to stand alone if necessary. Because even though you’re part of a church, there will be circumstances where you’re not alone in life. You’re not alone to the extent that Elijah was, where everybody else is gone and you can’t go back at the end of the day and call your friends from church and say, hey, I need you to pray with me about this.

He was all alone. But there are still going to be circumstances in your life when you walk out of this place where you may be at the moment alone. I remember very well what it’s like working in some of the secular workplaces I worked in before God called me into ministry or before God called me into full-time ministry.

And being the only believer or the only open believer at the county courthouse or being the only open believer at the grocery store, And some of the stuff that went on and some of the challenges that I faced there, some of you face these things, and I remember what that’s like. And I sympathize with you. It’s difficult at times to stand alone.

It’s difficult sometimes to be left out. It’s difficult sometimes to put up with the mockery. It’s difficult sometimes to have to be the one to say, I can’t go along with this.

I remember what it’s like to be the only one willing to admit that I’m a Christian in a class at college. sometimes we’re going to be called on to stand alone for that moment. But it doesn’t give us the option of saying, no, God, I’m not going to do what you called me to do because I’m not going to do it by myself.

We have example after example after example through Scripture that God calls us to obey Him even if we have to obey alone. That means we worship Him. We are fully devoted to Him.

We serve Him with our whole lives every day even if we have to do it alone. What if nobody else in my house worships him? Worship him anyway.

What if nobody else in my workplace or in my class is serving him? Do it anyway. It means we love others as he called us to do, even if we are loving others alone.

One of the things that makes me so nervous about our country today is that it seems like we have forgotten how to love other people. As a matter of fact, it seems like in many cases, if we disagree with them, we’ve forgotten how to even see them as people. We were sitting in the doctor’s office on Friday and overheard a couple sitting at the far corner of the waiting room.

And he’s on his phone and he’s reading the news, I guess, and he’s grumbling. And then I hear him start talking about how such and such politician just needs to be assassinated and how he would do it if he had the opportunity, how he would go about it. And I’m just looking at Charlie going, are you hearing this?

And she wasn’t until I brought it up. I kind of zeroed in on that. It’s just crazy.

I’m like, do we tell somebody? I mean, I don’t know. I feel like I’m back in elementary school.

Do I tell teacher? Do I warn somebody up in the way, in the nurse’s desk, call the FBI. I don’t know what to do here.

And I was thinking, how did we get to this point? I was talking about a politician that I have never agreed with in my life. If this person said good morning to me, I would probably say what’s so mourning about it.

You know, I don’t believe you. I don’t agree with you on anything. But to say let’s murder somebody, what has happened to us?

And I’m telling you, because tensions run so high right now, it is easy for us as Christians to get swept up in the anger and the bitterness going on in our country. But we have been called to love our enemies. And it doesn’t matter if they hate us back.

It doesn’t matter if the rest of the world is doing this. God has called us to do one thing It doesn’t matter if we’re the only ones listening and we have to do it alone. We serve Him even if we serve Him alone.

We love others even if we love others alone. We share the gospel even if we share the gospel alone. I’ve seen in churches sometimes where one person will get really on fire for evangelism.

And the others will be like, well, that’s nice. That’s good for you. You get into a situation where God’s led you to share the gospel, but you see nobody else doing it.

Do it anyway. Be obedient even if you have to be alone. As Christians, it means we call sin, sin, even if we call it sin alone.

And we’re getting to the point. We’re getting to the point in this country where definitions have become so fluid. And we may be at times alone in saying this is what God says is right and this is what God says is wrong.

And it used to be that that was the case about things where people said, well, it’s not hurting anybody else. Now we’re getting to the point where even hurting others, doing sinful things that hurt others, the world says, no, I’m justified in what I want to do. Folks, it means we serve Him with everything we have, even if we do it alone.

Now, ideally, we don’t go it alone. We have our brothers and sisters in the church. We have our family in Christ. But we need to be committed to the Lord to the point where it doesn’t matter if nobody else in our household is willing to go along, we serve Him anyway.

Even if the rest of the church is being disobedient, we serve Him anyway. Even if nobody in our office, if nobody on our job site, if nobody in our class, if nobody else is doing it, we serve Him anyway. Even if we have to do it alone.

I used to tell my students in history class this, that history is rarely made by crowds. Usually, it’s God using individuals. Even in crowds, it’s individuals making decisions.

I was thinking about this again this morning. Some of our greatest historical moments, like the war effort here during World War II, when America ramped up from its sleep and in just a few years created one of the greatest fighting forces in the world and one of the greatest production feats of mankind here on the home front to defeat Nazism. That came about because of the decisions of individuals to go and serve their country.

Individuals to leave home and go halfway across the world to fight. Decisions of individuals to go and work in particular factories. Decisions of individuals to sacrifice their needs here so that the war could be won.

History is made by individuals and God often uses individuals. In these terms, God uses individuals as they’re obedient to Him. When it comes to advancing His kingdom, God uses individuals.

God uses the one who’s willing to say, I’ll be obedient, even if it costs me, even if I have to do it alone. And as great an example as Elijah gives us, the ultimate example of how this ought to be, is Jesus. When it comes to anything good we see in Scripture, Jesus is the ultimate example.

But Jesus was obedient to his Father. He wasn’t less than his Father. But when he came to earth, he was obedient to his Father.

He knew that he would be rejected. He knew that he was going to be rejected by his own people. He knew that he would be abandoned by his followers.

He knew that he would be killed. But still he was obedient to the plans of the Father all the way to the cross. He knew that’s where it was leading.

He knew before he ever stepped out of heaven to become a tiny baby that that’s where this road would lead was to the cross. And yet he was obedient to the Father’s plans anyway. And it was through his obedience, through his going to the cross and obedience to the Father that the Father’s plan to save you and me was completed.

And so I’d say even more than looking at the example of Elijah I’d say as followers of Jesus Christ we should be willing to do what he did Following him means doing the things that he did Now that doesn’t mean we go and get crucified But it means we follow his example of obedience to the Father We obey even when it’s difficult Don’t think that just because Jesus was God it wasn’t difficult for him to go to the cross As a man he was so distraught about it that the night before, as he was praying about it, he sweat blood. That is not a fairy tale. That is not something manufactured by the gospel writers.

That is a genuine medical condition called hematohydrosis, where the capillaries of the blood system break under extreme stress and leak into the sweat glands. Something science didn’t know existed until the modern age. But Jesus was so concerned about what he was about to do that he sweat drops of blood as the Bible records.

Don’t think that it was easy. He knew how difficult it was going to be. He knew what he was going to suffer, but he did it for us out of obedience to the Father, even though it was difficult, even though he was going to be alone.

And you and I as his followers have a calling to follow his example and obey what God calls us to do, even when it’s difficult, even when we have to stand alone. And so this morning, to those of you who are believers, there’s something God’s calling you to do. I’m not the Holy Spirit.

I’m not going to try to tell you what it is. But I just now he calls all of us to do things. There are some general things in Scripture that he calls us to do.

He calls us to pray. He calls us be thankful. He calls us to be more like Jesus.

There are some general things he calls us to do. There are also some particular things that he calls us to do that differ from person to person. He called me to do this, for example.

And I’m sure many of you are glad that he didn’t call all of us to have to do this because more people are afraid of public speaking than of death, according to the polls. But he calls each of us to do something in particular. So my challenge to you is to discern from God’s Word.

Study God’s Word. Pray about it. Figure out if He’s not already screaming in your ear, hey, I’m talking to you.

This is what I’ve been telling you to do. If you don’t know what it is, seek out God’s will. Discover what it is that He’s calling you to do, and then be obedient, even if it’s difficult, even if you have to do it alone.

Serve Him with everything you’ve got, even if you have to do it alone. Obey Him and leave the consequences to Him. And then if you’ve never trusted Christ as your Savior, I mentioned that Jesus’ obedience at the cross paid for our disobedience, paid for our sin, because we’ve all sinned against a holy God.

We’ve all disobeyed Him in a way that distances us from Him. It separates us from Him. And you and I can never do enough good to change the wrong that we’ve done.

We can never undo it. We can never make up for it. And so we could have remained separated from God for eternity, or God could devise a way to pay for it himself.

And that’s exactly what he did. He sent Jesus Christ to live on earth, to live a sinless life, so he wasn’t paying for any sin of his own. But God the Son became a man so that he could live a perfect sinless life, so that He could go to the cross, be nailed to that cross, shed His blood, and die to bear all the punishment we deserve, to pay all the penalty that we owed because of our sin.

Now because of His obedience to the point of the cross, our slate can be wiped clean.