1 Kings 18

Good morning, Grace. It's good to be here again with you in this way. We are in now the middle of a series called The Time of Kings. We're going through the books of 1 and 2 Kings, which is probably worth saying. I don't think I've mentioned this yet. When the book was written, when the books of 1 and 2 Kings were written, they were one big long book. But for the sake of the length of scrolls back in the day, they just cut it in half and call it 1 and 2 Kings. But more accurately, we are together as a church going through some of the stories in the book of Kings. This week, we arrive at what is one of my favorite stories in the Bible. I would argue this is one of the greatest stories in the Old Testament. This story has everything. I love it so much. This is the story this week of Elijah and his showdown with the 450 prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. We see this story in 1 Kings chapter 18. So if you have a Bible there at home with you, please go ahead and open that up. I try to encourage you every week, open up your Bible, go through the story with me, interact with the text with me, look at the parts that I'm not able to cover or that I don't bring up, and get a more holistic view of the story than just the perspective that I'm giving you. In this story, we see, I think, one of the greatest figures in Scripture, the prophet Elijah. Elijah and Elisha are these tremendous prophets that we see in the book of Kings. They don't get their own book later in the Old Testament, so we don't often pay them as much attention, but they were remarkable figures. Elijah was so righteous that God didn't even want him to experience death. He sent down a chariot to pick him up and carry him to heaven before he could even die. Elijah is a remarkable figure, and this is kind of his big moment. In this moment, he's going to interact with a king named Ahab, and we need to understand who Ahab was and the background that they have at this showdown. So I hope that if you've never heard this story before, that you are delighted, that you love it, that it flings you further into Scripture and brings it to life for you. If you do know this story, I hope maybe today we'll see it in a different light than perhaps what we've looked at it in in the past. So Elijah comes on the scene in 1 Kings chapter 17. That's when we see him. He's interacting with a king named Ahab. Ahab shows up in Kings 16. And when Ahab shows up, the writer of Kings, the author of Kings, tells us a couple things about Ahab was more evil than all the kings that came before him. And that he, more than any other king, because of his faithlessness, provoked the Lord to anger. Ahab was the king of Israel, the northern tribes. We learned last week that Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, had so much pride that he refused to listen to wisdom. And because of this, the kingdom descended into civil war. And for the rest of the Old Testament, continues on that path with the northern kingdoms of Israel being led by one king and the southern kingdom of Judah being led by another. Ahab is a king of Israel, the northern kingdoms. Jeroboam, the guy that went to war with Rehoboam, built some temples to some false gods and made up his own religion for tax revenue, really, if you look at it, in the northern kingdom. And so Ahab is one of these kings in the northern kingdom. The southern kingdoms had a handful of good kings who obeyed God. We're going to learn about some of those in this series to come. The northern kingdom had no good kings. Every king was evil. Every king was apostate. They were all bad. Ahab was the worst. He provoked God to anger more than any other king because of his deeds. He married a lady named Jezebel who had her own religion of Asherah that she followed, and she had 400 prophets that she kept at her table. Ahab had 450 prophets of Baal that he kept at his table. So they are funding 850 prophets for these counterfeit religions. Because they're doing this, God speaks to his prophet Elijah, who goes to Ahab, and he tells Ahab, because of your sin, because of who you are, I'm going to bring a drought on this land, and it will not rain again until I give the word, Elijah says. Ahab, of course, is incensed. He's furious. He tries to kill Elijah. Elijah gets away, and he flees, and he wanders around in the wilderness for three years. From there, God says, Elijah, I want you to go to this place where there's a brook. So Elijah goes, and he drinks from the brook, and every day God sends ravens with bread and with meat to feed Elijah in the morning and in the evening. I think this is the first recorded place in history that we see Uber eats. So they bring him bread and meat every day, and then eventually the brook runs dry because of the drought, and he hides out with a widow and her son. The son dies. Elijah lays himself over the son and prays and brings the boy back to life. It's this remarkable, remarkable story. This whole time, Ahab is trying to hunt him down and kill him, but he can't find him. And so there's this drought happening. Everybody is mad at Ahab for allowing the drought to happen because it's happening under his rule. No one's growing any crops. The country is doing terribly. And in Ahab's view, it's Elijah's fault. Three years later, Elijah decides it's time to meet up with Ahab. So he meets up with an old prophet friend of his, a guy named Obadiah. Obadiah has a book at the end of the Old Testament in the Minor Prophets. And he tells Obadiah in this really interesting conversation, and honestly, you should go read it. It's before this. This conversation with Obadiah is in chapter 17 and then part of 18. You should read this conversation that Elijah has with Obadiah. I don't have time to jump into it this morning, but it really proves for us that when God asks us to do hard things, he's going to see us through in that difficult season. So he goes to Obadiah. He says, go tell Ahab that I want to come see him. And then eventually they meet up. And when they meet up, Ahab says, oh, you troubler of Israel, to Elijah. And Elijah says, that's not me, man. That's you. That's you. And as a matter of fact, we're going to settle this. I want you to go gather all 450 of your prophets of Baal. And I want you to gather the 400 prophets of Asherah. And I want you to meet me on Mount Carmel on this day. And we're going to assemble all of Israel. So that's the stage. They're on Mount Carmel. I had the opportunity when I went several years ago to Israel to go be on Mount Carmel and look around. In northern Israel, there is lush farmland that is a lot more green than you think it would be. And Mount Carmel, you're able to see all of that from there. And you can look across the way and see the Mount of Transfiguration for those that know your New Testament well. And it was kind of a surreal experience to be there knowing that all of these events that I'm about to tell you about took place on this small hill, really, in northern Israel. And so they assemble all of Israel. Everybody comes. The families come and they assemble on the mountain, around the mountain, at the top of the mountain. All the 450 prophets of Baal are there. Ahab is there. Elijah is there. And Elijah begins to address the crowd. And this is what Elijah says. I pick it up in verse 22. Then Elijah said to the people, I, even I only, am left a prophet of the Lord. So he says, I'm the only one left. I'm the only prophet standing. Now, it's important to note put no fire on it. They're in it. They are there. And he says, here's the deal. We're going to get two bulls. I'm going to give one. See how they've got 450 people and I've just got me? I'm going to give one to the 450, to the prophets of Baal, and I'm going to take one of the bulls. And then I want you guys, you go and you build an altar. You cut the bull into pieces and you put that bull on the altar. I'm going to go over here. I'm going to build my altar. I'm going to cut the bull into pieces and put it on my altar. And then here's what we're going to do. We're going to pray to our gods. I'm going to pray to God, the father of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of the people of Israel, the God of the people who are here. And you pray to your God. You pray to Baal. And whichever one sends fire down first to light these altars on fire and burn up these bulls, that's the God. All right, that's it. And then we're done. Everybody good? And everybody says, Ahab says, the prophets say, the people say, it is well spoken. Deal. We agree. They spit in their hands. They shook them. Back when you could do that. This is the showdown. So Elijah, kind of like the cat that swallowed the canary, he's like, listen, Baal, you guys, go ahead. Just go ahead, build your altar. I'm just going to chill out over here. You just, you go over there, you pick the bull you want, you'll cut it up, put it on the altar that you make, And then you get to praying. And I'll be over here, and I'm just going to chill out for a second. I picture Elijah getting one of those camping chairs and kind of folding it out and sitting it down. And then maybe cracking something open and sitting in the camping chair and just kind of chilling out watching. Going, good luck, suckers. And they get to it, man. Those prophets of Baal, they get to it. They start weeping and wailing, and the Bible says limping around the altar. They're doing this and that. And you've kind of seen probably some clips somewhere in your life, some pagan ceremonies where there's this weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth and crying out and dancing and chanting and whatever it is that they do. And they did this. Can you imagine the scene of 450 prophets crying out to their God who doesn't exist, trying to get him to bring fire from heaven, what they must have been doing, the show that they must have been putting on. Meanwhile, Elijah's just sitting over there watching them, right? It says they did this until noon. They did it all morning long for hours. They're just dancing and prancing and chanting and raving and ranting and weeping and wailing, and nothing is happening. And so Elijah decides to talk a little smack. I love this. I love this line in the Bible. I love that Elijah says this. The fact that this is included in Scripture tells me that there is space in God's kingdom for sarcastic jerks. And it just, man, it warms my heart. It makes me think there might be space in God's kingdom for people like me because this is what Elijah says to them. He says in verse 27, and at noon Elijah mocked them. Okay, so the Bible, I'm not making this up, the Bible's saying he is making fun of them. He said, cry aloud, for he is a God. Either he is musing or he is relieving himself, that's my favorite one. Surely he's there. Maybe he's musing. Maybe he's just messing with you. Maybe he's just up there just kind of waiting until you do something right. Maybe, now I don't know what's going on with Baal's constitution, but maybe he's got a little tummy ache. Maybe he's in the bathroom. I don't know how long it takes him in there, but he's a god, so it could be pretty serious. I'm not really sure. Maybe, I tell you what, maybe he's on a journey. Maybe he just went out of town. Maybe he ran to Asheville real quick. He's going to be right back. Just keep it up. He is making fun of them, man, and it is great. And after he makes fun of them, it says that they began to cut themselves with swords and lances until the blood gushed as was their custom. So now they're ranting and raving and prancing and dancing and chanting and now they're screaming out and they're cutting themselves and they're stabbing themselves with lances and the blood is flowing all to appeal to this God that does not exist. And there's this great sentence in the Bible after all this happens, it says, but there was no voice, no one answered, no one paid attention. Isn't that a sobering sentence for what happens when we cry out to gods that don't exist? Isn't that a sobering response for what happens when we place our hope in a thing that doesn't deserve it? When we do that, eventually we're met with the response that no one listened, no one pays attention, no one is hearing what we are saying. And no one heard the prophets of Baal. There's no God there to hear them. They were wasting their time. They looked foolish and Elijah pointed it out. After they had done their thing, Elijah goes back over to his altar. Now the first thing he does is, he says, people of Israel, gather around. Come here. Come here. I want you to see this. Get in real tight. And he grabs 12 stones, and he makes an altar with those 12 stones. And he does that very intentionally. Whenever people from Israel see 12 stones, they are reminded of the altar that their forefather Joshua built when God in his goodness brought them across the Jordan River out of Egyptian oppression. The very first thing he did is build an altar of 12 stones as a sign and a symbol and remembrance of a God who is righteous and keeps his promise. And so Elijah, by building this altar with 12 stones, is telling them, do you remember this God? This God that brought you here? This God that gave you this land? Each stone represents a tribe of Israel, represents God's goodness. So he's doing this to make a point. Look, gather around. And he builds an altar with 12 stones. Then he takes the wood and he puts it on top of the altar so that there's something to burn. Then he takes the bull, he cuts it up, and he places the bull on top of the wood. Then he looks at the people and he says, go fill these barrels with water and come back and dump it on the altar. And he makes them do that three times until water is running down the altar, everything on it is soaked, and then there's a trench dug around the altar, and that is filled with water too. And then it's time for Elijah to cry out to his God to see if his God won't send some flames, because Baal hasn't done it yet. And rather than ranting or raving or dancing or chanting or cutting himself or making this big, huge scene. This is what Elijah Lord. Answer me that this people may know that you, O Lord, are God and that you have turned their hearts back. I'm going to pause right there. Can you picture in your mind the juxtaposition of the two prophets, two sets of prophets, the prophets of Baal who were just carrying on and ranting and raving and causing this huge scene, 450 of them just messing around all day, just causing this huge stir and this huge scene all day, cutting themselves and being dramatic about it and just all this over-the-top flailing. And then for Elijah, when it comes time to appeal to his God, he simply gathers the people around and he prays quietly because he knows that his God can hear him. He knows his God doesn't have to shout out. He doesn't have to shout out in a certain way to get God to pay attention. He knows that he doesn't have to do a certain dance or a certain chant to get his God to pay attention. He knows that God hears all the minds of his head and his heart and his mouth. And so he starts to pray. And I don't even think he prayed to make sure that God could hear him. I think he prayed for the benefit of the people around him. And he prays that beautiful prayer. The Lord God of Israel. He appeals to him to send down fire. I love the juxtaposition of those two types of appeals. And when he finished, when he prayed God. The Lord, Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the great I am from the burning bush that rescued us from Egypt, that delivered us into Israel, that gave us the ground that we're standing on, that Lord, he is God, not Baal. That's the story of the showdown between the prophet of God, Elijah, and the prophets of Baal. And I love that story. I love so much about it. Many of you know it and love it too. And as I approached it this week, I knew I was going to be preaching about it. I thought, goodness, I was kind of excited to sit down and begin to study and just kind of say, God, what are you going to show me this week? What's going to leap off the page this week? What point is going to come out of this? How would you have us apply this to our life? And as I read, I saw this verse at the beginning of the story that I intentionally skipped as I began today that suddenly reframed the entire story for me. I've read this story a dozen times, but for some reason I've never noticed this verse before. But as I noticed it this time, it reshaped the whole story for me, and I hope that it will reshape it for you. What I see here is that this story of the showdown between the prophet of God and the prophets of Baal, the story is bracketed by these two verses that are absolutely incredible. The second one, the take home, is what we just discovered, is the people going, you are the Lord. He is God. Repeating it, the Lord, he is God. Which in that moment is a confession. It's an admission. It's a repentance and an apology. Yes, the Lord is God. Baal is not. But I want you to see this verse at the beginning of the story, verse 21, that when I read it, it reshaped for me the entire way I think about this story. Now, look at what Elijah says to them. I told you that he gathered them up on the mountain. I told you that he got everyone around him and he laid out the rules of the game. But before he laid out the rules of the game, look at what he says. This is amazing to me. Verse 21, and Elijah came near to all the people and said, You say, listen, listen Israel. And this is a depiction of what a prophet is supposed to do. When we think of a prophet, we tend to think of people who tell the future and mystical in some way. But this is what a prophet does. A prophet says hard things to a hardened people. And he looked at Israel and he says, how long are you going to keep straddling the fence between God and Baal? How long are you going to embrace Baal when that works for you and embrace God when that works for you? How much longer will you insist on doing this? And you get the idea that these people of Israel kind of worshipped whatever God was going to serve them best in the moment. That around some people they feared the Lord and around some people they honored Baal. And in some places they put on these masks and these clothes and other places they put on these masks and these clothes. Neither of their following was sincere. None of their faith was authentic and deep and meaningful. They were just putting on whichever God was good for them in the moment. They weren't committed to either. And Elijah says, enough of this. How long will you continue to straddle the fence? How long will you continue to limp along between two opinions? Let's settle this today. And if Baal brings fire from heaven, then great, we're going to worship Baal. But man, if God brings fire from heaven, then knock it off with the Baal stuff and let's follow God. Do you realize that that's the reason for the whole showdown? Do you realize that the whole reason that Elijah did this, that he comes out of hiding, that he goes to Ahab, that he says, assemble your prophets, do it on Mount Carmel, that all this fanfare, that he tells the people of Israel, come and be here, that he tells them, gather around me as I pray. Do you understand that the entire exercise was done not because Elijah had something with Ahab, not for Elijah to defeat Ahab, not for Elijah to overcome the prophets, but for the Lord to win back the hearts of his people. That was the goal. And he starts off the whole day by saying, how long are you going to straddle the fence, guys? How long are you going to pretend to follow God sometimes and pretend to follow Baal other times? Let's just settle this right now. And if God proves that he is God, then let's knock it off with the Baal stuff. And then the showdown happens. And at the end, we see their wonderful response. The Lord, Yahweh, He is God. And they worship Him alone. The whole point of the showdown was for God to win back the hearts of his people. And as I read this this week, it was an absolute punch in the gut to read that sentence, how long will you go limping between two opinions? Because how many of us can relate to that? How many of us listening do that? How many of you listening? Listen, it's just you in your living room, okay? And the people around you already know if this is true of you or not. So you're the only one you're trying to fool. How many of you in your living room have a face that you put on at church and a face that you put on at work? How many of us, me included, have a face that we put on around church people and a face that we put on around comfortable friends? How many of us straddle the line between these two opinions that in work and in our profession, we go out and we kill it and we crush it and we kill and we eat and that's great. And we act a certain way with certain morals and a certain moral compass there and then when we get around church people we have a different moral compass here. How many of us straddle the line between standards that we have for ourselves and then things that we accuse other people of? A lot of us, a lot of us, we're being honest, we're going to be super critical of what so and so over here does and not have any grace for them while we forgive the same sin in ourself over and over again. How many of us, listen, I'm sorry, this is so personal, how many of us teach our children things that we don't even do? How often in your life have you said what you believe with your mouth and then shown what you really believe with your actions? This kicked me right in the teeth this week. All of us, at some point, go limping along, straddling the line between two opinions, between two versions of ourselves. And I believe that this showdown wasn't just for the people of Israel, but that it's here in 1 Kings 18 to echo through the centuries for us today so that it would get our attention and that when Elijah looks at Israel and says, how long will you go limping between two opinions? He's looking dead at you, asking you the same question. How long are you going to straddle the fence, man? How much further is this hypocrisy going to go? Because I thought about this for myself this week. These two opinions that war within our hearts, they manifest themselves in different ways, right? The standards that we have for ourselves versus for other people, the face that we put on here versus there. They're going to manifest themselves in different ways, but at the heart of it, the difference of opinion that's happening is really this war between two ideas. And I think we claim one of these ideas every day. It's what we want to claim, what we know we should claim, what the people of Israel claim, which is the Lord, He is God. And then there's what happens in our heart, which is He may be God, but I'm the Lord. Those are the two opinions. The Lord, He is God. He is good. He is the Alpha and the omega. He is the Lord of my life. I will follow him. This is the fundamental confession of salvation, is that the Lord is God and that I will follow him. I am submitted to his leadership in my life. And then the idea that wars with that, which is the Lord may be God, or he may be God, but I'm the Lord. Yeah, he's God, and I believe in him, for sure. But today, I'm doing what Nate wants. Today, Nate's calling the shots. Today, Nate decides what's good and what's not. He's God. Absolutely, he's God. I believe he's God. But today, I call the shots. These are the opinions that war in each of our hearts. The Lord, he is God. He is good. I trust him. I will follow him. I will live according to him. I will submit to him. And then, yeah, the Lord, he's God. But today I'm the Lord. Today I'm doing what I think is right. And I think that this showdown happened not just to show us that God was superior to Baal, not just to wake up the hearts of his people in Israel and ask them, when are you going to draw the line? How long will you limp between these two opinions? But I think the reason this is here is to look at us thousands of years later and have us ask the question of ourselves, how long will I straddle the line between two opinions? How many more days will I get up and will I say, yeah, he's God, but today I'm Lord? How many more times are we going to do that? I think being a Christian is to make that claim that he is the Lord, he is God. God is the Lord of my life. And every day it's a battle to reclaim that and say, yeah, he's God, but I'm the Lord. And I wanted to preach this this morning and really be forceful with it so that we might ask, in all honesty and transparency, how long will I straddle the line between these two opinions? How many more days will I wake up and say, yeah, he's God, but I'm the Lord? And so I thought I would leave you with this simple question. What are you going to need in your life to make the confession that the Israelites made and make it every day? Will this showdown be enough? Will 1 Kings 18 be enough? Will what Elijah did thousands of years ago when once and for all God is the God of gods and it's settled and it's done, stop limping between two opinions, knock it off with the Baal stuff and follow God. It was enough for the people of Israel. Will it be enough for you? Or will you require your own showdown? I can only speak for me and say that I hope it's enough for me. I have no interest in a showdown with God. I hope that for many of us listening, we will quit straddling the line. We will quit confessing that he is God, but then believing that we are Lord. And that we will walk in such a way that with both our mouth and our heart and our actions, we will declare every day, the Lord, He is God. Let's pray. Father, Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. You are God. You are good. You sent your son so that we might call you Lord. You sent your son to invite us in. And yet so many of us in so many ways, seen and unseen, felt and unfelt, we often reclaim that lordship. I, more than anyone, limp along between two opinions. Father, would you help those of us who are limping? Those of us who are wandering, would you draw us back? God, would you let this showdown be enough so that we don't require our own? Lord, let us feel even this morning your warmth, your embrace, your love, your approval, your desire for us. Let us declare from this day forward that you are the Lord and that you are God. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. We've been moving through a series called Big Emotions. This is part six of the series. And within this series, as we kind of planned it, I realized that we needed to have a morning like this morning where we talk about some of the heavier, harder emotions that we can experience in life. In the past just few months, I had a lunch with a young man who was and is a recovering alcoholic, and actually today is his one-year sober anniversary, so we're excited for him today. Yeah, he's not here. That's okay. He didn't hear how much you didn't, how tepid that was. If he were here, I would have. But we're thrilled about that. And he shared with me as I talked with him about a story that part of what led him down that path is dealing with a depression. This creeping sense that he wasn't going to be who everyone expected him to be and who he was. And it was this feeling of not mattering anymore, of not living up to things that sent him into a depression that caused him to seek out some help for that from chemicals. In the past couple months, I've talked with two different dads in our community whose daughters are struggling mightily with depression. You could even call it a crippling depression. And one of them even shared with me that he's learned through her struggle that that's what he's always dealt with. He just never had the words to put around what he was feeling, or it's entirely possible because men are stupid, that he just didn't allow himself to admit that he was sad because we're too manly for that. I've sat with people in the wake of great loss. Sat with a family, and I won't detail the struggles, but they just kind of, life just keeps running them ashore, man. Life just keeps beating them up. I get texts from them, and I'm like, God, you've got to be kidding me with what they're having to walk through, and I'm certain. As a matter of fact, I know for a fact that some of them are staving off bouts of depression and anxiety and deep grief and deep sadness. In my own family, on both my side and Jen's side, Jen's my wife, on both my side and Jen's side, we have depression in our family. We're walking through it. Sometimes it's harder than other times. Sometimes it's more extreme than other cases, but it touches us and it touches our lives too. And I know that each of us deals with or loves someone who deals with depression, grief, melancholy, sadness from time to time, these seasons in life that just feel dark and heavy. And I also know that many more of us deal with feelings of insignificance, like we don't matter. I know firsthand that being, because of walking through it with my wife, that being a stay-at-home mom can make you feel very small. It can make your world feel very inconsequential, that all you are is the nursemaid for a toddler or a shuttle service for your kids or whatever it might be. Being a parent can sometimes make your world feel very small. As you age, sometimes your world can start to feel smaller and smaller and the things you do less and less significant. And some of us have gone from seasons of mattering a great deal to mattering not very much. Some of us have gone from having great identities that we are proud of to these small identities that we kind of wander in and aren't used to yet. And so I know that in our family of faith, in our congregation, in this room, and the people watching online, the people who will hear this later, all of us have dealt with personally or love someone dearly who struggles with bouts of depression, with grief, with sadness, with loss, or even insignificance. And so I thought it was absolutely appropriate to take a Sunday while we talk about big emotions and talk about these. And I thought it would be really helpful for us as we identify with that sadness, with that grief, with that inadequacy, to look at someone in the Bible who also dealt with that and to see how God meets him in this place. So we're going to look at just a part of the story of a prophet named Elijah. Now, many of you were not here years ago when I did a whole series in the summer on Elijah, or if you were here, you were probably at the beach and didn't hear it. So some of this stuff will be reviewed, but maybe not much. I'm not going to tell you the whole story of the life of the prophet of Elijah, but he is one of God's, as Aaron said in the announcements, one of God's great servants. Elijah was so great. In fact, I'm not sure I need to tell you anything else about his life, but at the end of his life, as he was aging and the end was near, he's walking with his disciple, Elisha, and on the west bank of the Jordan River and Elijah decides that he needs to go to the eastern bank of the Jordan River and so he just parts the waters and walks across it like this miracle of convenience. Like the ark stopped the Jordan River so that God himself could move into the promised land with his people and then Moses parted the waters so that God's people could escape from the Pharaoh. And Elijah parted the water so that his sandals wouldn't get wet. That's just okay. He just puts his cloak in the water, parts it, walks through, come on, Elisha, and then they go through. And when they get on the other side, a chariot descends down out of heaven. An angelic chariot comes down and scoops Elijah up and takes him to heaven. Dude was so righteous, he caught an Uber ride to the pearly gates because God didn't want him to experience death. We see Elijah again in the New Testament at the Mount of Transfiguration when he appears along with Moses to Jesus to strengthen him and encourage him. He's a major figure in the Old Testament and a hero of the faith. And when I say it's difficult for anyone to get closer to God than Elijah was, I mean it literally because all of us in here are very likely going to experience death. He did not have to. And yet, in his life, we see pretty convincing evidence that at least in this season, Elijah was low. He struggled mightily with depression and insignificance. And so I think it's worth looking at this part of his story and seeing how God responds there. The part of the story that I'm going to present to you is somewhere, I would guess, about 45 to 50 days of his life. So I'm not even sure you could call it a season. It was just a time of his life when he was low. We don't know if there were other times or not. One would assume that there were. But here we get just a snippet or a snapshot of Elijah's, what I believe to be, depression, at least in this season. We're going to be looking, and not yet, but if you have a Bible, you can turn there. 1 Kings chapter 19. If you don't have one, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Unless you're watching from home, I don't know what's in your seat backs. But in 1 Kings chapter 18 is the big showdown, the big thing that Elijah's famous for, the showdown with the prophets of Baal. And I don't have time to give the full treatment to the story. I wish I did because it's a fantastic story and you should really read it. But the predominant religion at this time was worshiping this God named Baal. The king was Ahab, the queen was Jezebel. They were evil and they supported this idol worship. The followers of God were pressed into the margins and the fringes. And Elijah was by all accounts, essentially the chief priest for God at the time and the head prophet. And so he goes to Mount Carmel and he has this showdown with the prophets of Baal. There's 450 prophets of Baal. And they make this deal that they're each going to build an altar. And whichever God from heaven itself lights the altars on fire first, that's the best God. And the other one has to take his ball and go home. And so they start this competition. And Elijah, I just have to point out, he says one of the best lines in the Bible. He is a sarcastic jerk, which breathed life into me from God himself. And Baal is not responding and lighting the altar on fire. And he's making fun of them. Maybe you should yell louder, yada, yada. And at. And at one point, he's like, maybe he can't hear you because he's in his heavenly bathroom taking a Tuesdays. Maybe that's what's going on, which is phenomenal. It's the kind of stuff you get here at Grace Riley. And after they give up, Elijah prays this humble prayer. God, it's time. God sends fire from heaven, lights the altar on fire, and Elijah has all 450 prophets arrested and put to death. After this, the beginning of chapter 19, Elijah's praying. There had been a drought for three years in Israel, and God told Elijah that the drought's going to be over. Get ready for rain. And then swept Elijah with the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God sweeps Elijah to Jerusalem. So he beats Ahab's chariot back to Jerusalem. When Ahab, the king, gets to Jerusalem, he goes to Jezebel, the queen, and he tells Jezebel all that Elijah has done. She responds by sending a messenger to Elijah that says, everything that you did to my prophets, I'm going to do to you, and it's going to be worse. I'm going to kill you. And this is interesting because a couple chapters later in 2 Kings chapter 1, she tries to send soldiers to kill Elijah. And Elijah says, I'm a man of God, and if you try to arrest me, then he's going to send fire and kill you. And then they do, and then he does. Three times. Dude has nothing to be scared of. He has the protection of God on his head. He has the hand of God on him. But when the messenger reaches Elijah this time and says, Jezebel's wants to kill him. And in fear, he flees a day into the wilderness. He gets done with that day and he sits down and he prays a prayer that I hope none of us have prayed, but I bet some of us have. God, it would be better if I were dead. Please take my life. I'm done. I'm no better than my father's. I have nothing left to give. I'm exhausted. I did this great miracle in your name, won a great victory, and it's like it doesn't matter. She's going to kill me. Do you understand that he was despaired to his point of death? He was despairing for his life. Do you understand that he went to sleep under that broom tree, that he closed his eyes praying, God, please don't let me wake up? You understand that when Elijah's eyes were opened that he was disappointed? I don't know if you have ever gone to sleep and before you went to sleep, you prayed, God, please don't let me wake up on this side of eternity. But I bet some of you have. I bet we know people who have felt what Elijah felt. God, I'm going to sleep and I don't want to wake up. This world has nothing left for me. I don't want to be here. No one cares about me. I don't matter. This needs to be over. It would be better off if I were in eternity than here any longer. Please don't let me wake up when I go to sleep, God. Elijah is despairing unto death. And is at, by all estimations, a very low point. But God wakes him up. He wakes him up with an angel who feeds him, gives him food. I love that that's God's response to the dark night of the soul. Like a loving divine grandma. Here, just eat a little something. You'll feel better after some cookies. Elijah goes back to sleep. The angel wakes him up again. Says, you're going to need this for your journey. You're going to Mount Horeb. So he eats and he travels 40 days to Mount Horeb. And God tells him when he gets there, go up into this cave. I'm going to talk to you there. And when he gets up to the cave, God speaks to him and he says, Elijah, what are you doing? And Elijah says, my part. I've served you well. I've done everything I'm supposed to do. And they've killed all my friends. They've killed all my companions. I, even I, only am left. There is no one left in Israel like me. I am totally alone, God. I have no friends. I have no family. I have no companions. I have no love. I have no camaraderie. I'm alone and I'm destitute and nobody cares about me anymore, God. This time when I go to sleep, can I please just not wake up? I'm done. This is an articulation of the lowest of lows in his life. I, even I only, am left. I have no friends. I have no family. I have no companions. It's just me, and I'm tired. And God says, I'm going to speak to you again. And it's this remarkable passage where Elijah is sitting in the cave on the side of this mountain. And the text tells us that there's this great earthquake and the ground shakes and the stones tremble and the trees shake. And you think surely that God's voice is in the earthquake, but he's not in the earthquake. And then God sends this fire by the mouth of the cave that consumes everything in its path, and you think, surely God is in the fire, and he's not in the fire. And he sends a mighty wind that shakes and vibrates and stirs and scares, and you think, surely God is in the wind, and he's not in the wind. And then scripture says there's a gentle whisper and God is in the whisper. And Elijah goes out to the mouth of the cave and God says, what are you doing, Elijah? And Elijah gives the exact same response in verses 14, in verse 14 that he did in verse 10. I've been very jealous for you. I've served you well. And I've put all my friends to the sword, and I, even I only, am left. And God hears him. And he says, I want you to go do something for me. I want you to go appoint this man and this man kings of their different areas. I've still got stuff for you to do. Go make them kings. And when you do, here's what's going to happen. Now go. And on his way to go do that, he comes across a man plowing in his field named Elisha. And he grabs Elisha and he says, I'm going to essentially make you my disciple. Come and follow me. I'm going to teach you to be a prophet like I'm a prophet. And Elisha goes and tells his parents that he's leaving and he leaves and he goes with Elijah. And he spends the rest of his life following Elijah. And when Elijah goes up into heaven on the chariot, his cloak wafts back down to Elisha, and Elisha receives a double portion of the Holy Spirit that Elijah had, and outperforms Elijah in miracles and in all the other things, has a greater ministry than Elijah did. And it can be argued that Elisha is probably the greater impact than defeating the prophets of Baal, that Elisha may have been Elijah's greatest work. But without question, in this 45 to 50 day period, we see one of the great servants of God at a low point in his life. We see him despair unto death. We see him go to sleep and not want to wake up. We see him express solitude and isolation, feeling completely alone and wanting to die. We see him despairing. What we see, I think, at least for this season, is a depression. And if you look at what he says, and if we think about what we've experienced when we've been low, then what we understand is that depression silently screams, you don't matter. Depression silently screams at you that you don't matter, that nothing you do matters. Look at what Elijah says the first time. I'm the only one left. I did everything you wanted me to do. Now they're going to kill me, and I'd rather just die I'm no better than my father's. I have nothing left to give God. My best days are behind me. I have no bigger miracles to work. I've done everything I can do. All that's left is waiting for death. Please just go ahead and take me. And it occurs to me as I reflect on Elijah voicing in that way that he felt like he no longer mattered. That one of the great strengths of grace is having a generationally diverse congregation. I love that about our church. And what I'm about to say is in no way a joke. This is not a time for stupid jokes. I'm not doing that. It occurs to me that a large portion of us, a large portion of you, you've reached the end of your career, the last portions of your career. You've ended your career and you're in retirement. You've raised your kids. Maybe you've even helped raise your grandkids. In your mind, you've shifted. I've seen the shift in men and women that I love. From wanting to build a name for yourself to thinking about what kind of name you're leaving behind. You've shifted from establishment to legacy. And you've accepted that you are in the twilight of your life. And I think it would be very easy to become convinced in that season that your best days are behind you, that you've done the great work that you're going to do. You've climbed the biggest mountain that you're going to climb. You've defeated more prophets then than you ever will in the future. I think it would be very difficult to have lived a life where in one setting you were important. Your voice mattered. People came to you for your opinion. They paid a fair amount of money for your time to a place where people don't come as much anymore and they don't ask as much anymore and your voice isn't as weighty as it used to be and you become convinced that my best days are behind me and if we're not careful, we can slip into, as Elijah did, just kind of waiting for the last day to get here because I have nothing left to give. And so I think in that way, even if we're not people who are depressed, we can hear that message of the world and that message of depression creeping into our hearts. Hey, you don't matter. Your best days are behind you. Or we can feel insignificant for other reasons. Our role in life right now reduces us. We have a thankless job and a somewhat thankless marriage with thankless kids, and we just feel small, and no one tells us that we're good enough, and no one tells us that they respect us, and no one tells us that they're grateful for us. We can move through seasons of life where we just feel like we're going through the motions, and we feel so insignificant and small. I know firsthand that when I preach sermons about God having a purpose for us, God having a use for us, when I quote one of my favorite verses, Ephesians 2.10, for we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, that we might walk in them. And I encourage you guys, identify your good works and walk in them. I know that there's a large portion of you that hear that and go, yes, that's good. I have no idea what my good works are. I have no idea how God gifted me. God's gifted other people to do other things, but he has not gifted me in any significant way. So the best thing I can do is just keep my head down and be nice because I don't really matter that much in God's kingdom. That's what Elijah was saying. I, even I only, am left. I don't matter. There's nothing around me that's important. And I talked with some friends of mine who deal with depression more than I do. Candidly, this is not something that I'm given to struggle with. I have other struggles, and I'm pretty transparent with you about those. For this one, I had to outsource a lot of it. So this idea that depression silently screams at us that we don't matter, that's not my idea. That came from someone who walks it. And then I called someone else who probably deals with depression in a little bit more profound way, and I said, hey, does this check out with you? If I say that depression insists that we don't matter, does that resonate? And he said, yeah, but it's worse than that. He says, my depression tells me that it doesn't matter, that nothing matters, let alone me. And so if you've ever sat in that place, or you've loved someone who sits in that place, when we start to listen to the voices that tell us that we don't matter, I think God's response to Elijah when he was giving into those voices should breathe some fresh air into our lungs. And here's what God does to Elijah. We go back through the story. Here's what we see him doing. God strengthens, whispers to, sends, and encourages Elijah. And I think all of those things are important. He strengthens Elijah. He whispers to Elijah. He sends Elijah. And then he finally encourages Elijah. He strengthens him. He literally wakes him up and gives him food. You're going to need this for your journey. He literally wakes him up again and gives him some food. You're going to need this for your journey. Eat up. He strengthens him. He gives him enough to get through the day. Whatever you need to get through today, God gives that to you to sustain you. That's the daily bread. That's the manna. That's the daily sustenance of God showing up and sustaining you for today. I shared with you a few weeks back that I was reading the Beth Moore biography, and she encountered her mother-in-law had walked through a tremendous trial, and she said, how do you do it? How did you giving me strength for that day. I'm reminded of this famous passage in Isaiah 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. God will sustain us if we trust him to do it. He will strengthen us in the darkest of days when it's so dark and so heavy and so cloudy that we can't see a glimmer of light or a glimmer of hope. God, if we have within us one ounce that is willing to reach out to God and ask him for that day, he will sustain you that day. He will whisper to you. I love that we have a God that speaks to us in the whisper. In the most unexpected places, in the most unexpected ways, God shows up with his presence. A few weeks ago in men's Bible study, one of the guys shared his story. He's a little bit older now, late 50s, early 60s, than he was when this happened. But at some point in his life, I'm not sure when, but he lost his wife. Lost his wife to breast cancer. I can't imagine the pain of losing a spouse or a child. Losing a parent is hard. But I bet losing a spouse or a child is harder. I used to work at a school years ago and there was this woman named Emmeline McKinnon who founded the school. Wonderful lady, everybody loved her. A few years ago, she passed away from cancer, and her husband, in his grief, took his own life too, a few days later. And to anyone with a heart, when they hear that story, I think they say, I get that. They loved each other for 60 years. How do you keep opening up your eyes after that? So understand it. I empathize with it. And I don't condemn it. And my friend was walking through that grief. Did not have kids. No one was relying on him. He was in the depths of sadness. And so he made the decision that he was going to go to heaven to be with her because he didn't want to be here. He went and acquired whatever it was he needed to acquire to put together a cocktail so that when he drank it, he would be in heaven with his wife. He went home, put it in the blender, started to mix it up. As the blender was going, the phone rang. So he stops it. He answers the phone. The person on the other end says, hey, is this so-and-so? He says, yeah, who's this? And he says, well, I'm Dr. So-and-so. I was your wife's optometrist. And my buddy said, I haven't heard from you in years. How you doing? And he said, I'm doing good. I just wanted to call you and tell you how special your wife was and how sorry I am for your loss. And my buddy said, well, thanks. I appreciate that. He said, how are you doing with it? And he lied, and he said, I'm doing fine. The way you're supposed to lie in polite society. And the doctor said, hey, I don't know if you're a religious man, but I am. And I feel like I need to tell you that God has been really pressing on me to call you. He's been doing it for a couple of weeks, and I'm sorry, I'm the worst. I've been putting it off. Every time he presses on me to call you, I kind of have something else pressing, and I think, yep, I need to do that, and I set it aside, and I mean to do it later. He said, but about five minutes ago, I felt the press again. And I was in the middle of doing paperwork, and I tried to put it off, but God would not let me put it off. He would not relent, and I just really felt like I needed to call you. So how are you doing? And my buddy really told him how he was doing and what he was up to that day. And they cried together and prayed together. And my buddy dumped it down the drain. Lived to remarry, to love nieces and nephews, and to sit in that circle and tell us that story. God whispered to him that day. So not only will God whisper to you, but sometimes he'll use you to whisper as well. When he's prompting you to do it. Do it. And then, God doesn't just whisper to Elijah. He sends him. And I love the matter-of-factness of God sending him. Because it's like, Elijah, listen, I can see that you're clearly bummed out, but I've got some things I need to do. There's some guys who need to be named king. They don't have kings right now. They need to be anointed. So I need you to get back to work. Go appoint these kings. He sends them. He says, I'm not done with you yet. I know you feel like you're done because you finished this thing with the prophets of Baal, and now there's nothing left to do. There's stuff to do, Elijah, and I need you to get to it. And I was actually talking with my dad this week. I wouldn't call it arguing. We weren't arguing. We were just kind of going back and forth, as we are wont to do, about what the greatest work was in Elijah's life. Was it the prophets of Baal? Or was it the training and developing of Elisha and leaving him behind as a legacy? Which one was bigger? And in the middle of the discussion, I said, Dad, this is really a stupid conversation. Which usually he's the one that gets to do that. So I was happy to be the one that got to do it this time. This is a really stupid conversation. And I just pointed out to him, the size of our works don't matter nearly as much as the faithfulness of our works. Who cares if the miracle with Baal was the bigger deal than anointing a king or naming a successor or raising someone's son from the dead? Who cares what the bigger miracle was, the size of the work, the grandeur of the work, the import of the work? Who cares if that's bigger than what's left? For those of us who maybe our best years are behind us, maybe the biggest thing we've done is behind us. Maybe the most important thing you think you'll do from a human perspective is already in your past and not as big of things are waiting on you in your future. I think that's silly. God could care less about the size of our work. Like God's impressed with the size of any work. What matters is our faithfulness within the works that he gives us for as many years as he gives us. Here's how I know it's true. I know that you guys would support me in this. Right now, there's probably about 200 people here this Sunday morning. If next week you snapped your fingers and you made grace 2,000 people? Would my work next week in preaching be any more impactful, any more great, any more important to God? Would I somehow be more spiritual next week preaching to 2,000 people than I am this week preaching to 200? Would I somehow be more faithful or more loved next week preaching to 2,000 people than I am faithful or loved in preaching to you today? No! It's stupid. The size of our work is irrelevant. It's our faithfulness within what he gives us. What lies ahead of you is not insignificant if God has placed it there. What's significant is your faithfulness as you are obedient to that. And after he sends Elijah, he encourages him. He peels back the curtain a little bit. And he says, hey, I know you think you're the last one here. There's 7,000 more just like you. I've kept them for myself. They have not been the need of bail. You're not alone. You have companions. You have friends. And I see you. And I'm not expecting you to carry all this weight. Now go do what I've asked you to do. What we see in the story of Elijah. If depression says, you don't matter, and if Elijah's expressing, God, I don't matter, and I am alone, then what God says in the strengthening and in the whispering and in the sending and the encouraging from a megaphone is, Elijah, you matter, you matter, you matter, you matter. I see you. I know you. I love you. What you're doing is important. And what he says to us and what he says to you and what I hope you hear is that you matter. Look, the love of God drowns out other voices and gently reminds you of how much you matter. The love of God and the strengthening and in the whispering and in the sending and the purposing and in the encouraging remind you in these subtle ways, I know life is hard. You matter. I know you feel insignificant. You matter. I know the world is trying to convince you that you don't matter, but I'm telling you that you do. Sorry, it's been an emotional week for me. One of the people I reached out to shared with me that he'll walk through really dark depression for months and sometimes a year at a time. And as I was walking through with him what I wanted to share, I admitted my own feelings of inadequacy to even address what it's like to actually be deeply depressed. Because I know that there's some depression that words don't touch. It just doesn't matter what I say. It doesn't matter what I pray. It doesn't matter how I encourage. There's just some depression that you walk through that's so dark and so difficult that words don't touch it and arrest you from it. And so I said, in your greatest times of trial, what helped you? And as I even admit the own inadequacy of my words to you, what can I say to help you? And he said, let me write you an email because I'm better with my thoughts like that. And he responded with some very helpful things, but one thing he said was so profound that I thought I wanted to share it with you this morning. He wrote me this. Solitude and isolation are freedom. They're the ability to define you as you wish because there's no consequence to any decision you can make. If you decide to surrender, there's no consequence. Your story ends and nobody else is there to see. Nobody else is there to care. Nobody else is there to respond. The profundity of that struck me as I read it in my office. That when you are deeply depressed and you are convinced that it doesn't matter and that you don't matter, that you are all alone and no one sees you. That you're isolated. In your solitude. But then that is freedom because you can do whatever you want and no one's going to care. And I thought, my gosh. That's a low place. But then he said, but it's because of, and this is a paraphrase, we have a conversation preceding this to help me understand that what he meant in our language is that because of the cross, because I know Jesus died for me, because I know God made promises to me. Because I know I matter enough to God for him to send his son. He said this, because it means, because of the cross, it means that there is no way not to be seen. There is no situation in which you are finally, truly, absolutely alone. You understand the cross stands eternally reminding you of how much you matter, that in the depths of not mattering, in the depths of despair, in the depths of I'm not important and I don't matter to anyone and no one sees me and no one cares about me and it might just be better if I weren't here, that even in the depths of that, that God sent his son to die for you, to claim you back to him. And before you say, no, he did that for other people. No, no, he did that for you. If you're the only person on this earth, he still would have sent his son to die for you, to reclaim you to the heaven that he created for you. And if we will cling to the cross, to the glimmer of light that shines through the millennia, we can take hope and solace in the fact that there's going to be a day where depression doesn't exist and where the darkness goes away and every day is bright and filled with joy. And I might not get to experience those here today, right now, but I will one day. And if I cling to that cross, God's promised that I matter, that there will be days where this will let up, where I will see joy, where I will live in the fullness of life, but even if it doesn't come, there's an eternity where I'll see that every day. We sang a few minutes ago that you're fighting a battle that I've already won. I'm fighting a battle that you've already won. This is the battle, and it was won on the cross. So let God strengthen you today. Let him whisper to you today. And hear me say that you matter to your God. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your son. Thank you for who he is. We thank you for loving us. Lord, I lift up those that feel sad or depressed or insignificant or unwanted or unwarranted. God, it is my fervent prayer that they would be strengthened today. That they would get enough from today to keep clinging to you. God, for those we love who live in a cloud of darkness from time to time, we pray that you would use us to help them brighten it. God, we pray for the days ahead that you promised through your son, that you won through his death on the cross. Where in your presence we finally at long last experience fullness of joy. God, I pray for my brothers and sisters who are sad and who are downtrodden and ask that you would pick them up, that they would know today that you love them, that you care for them, that more than anything, they matter deeply to you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. We've been moving through a series called Big Emotions. This is part six of the series. And within this series, as we kind of planned it, I realized that we needed to have a morning like this morning where we talk about some of the heavier, harder emotions that we can experience in life. In the past just few months, I had a lunch with a young man who was and is a recovering alcoholic, and actually today is his one-year sober anniversary, so we're excited for him today. Yeah, he's not here. That's okay. He didn't hear how much you didn't, how tepid that was. If he were here, I would have. But we're thrilled about that. And he shared with me as I talked with him about a story that part of what led him down that path is dealing with a depression. This creeping sense that he wasn't going to be who everyone expected him to be and who he was. And it was this feeling of not mattering anymore, of not living up to things that sent him into a depression that caused him to seek out some help for that from chemicals. In the past couple months, I've talked with two different dads in our community whose daughters are struggling mightily with depression. You could even call it a crippling depression. And one of them even shared with me that he's learned through her struggle that that's what he's always dealt with. He just never had the words to put around what he was feeling, or it's entirely possible because men are stupid, that he just didn't allow himself to admit that he was sad because we're too manly for that. I've sat with people in the wake of great loss. Sat with a family, and I won't detail the struggles, but they just kind of, life just keeps running them ashore, man. Life just keeps beating them up. I get texts from them, and I'm like, God, you've got to be kidding me with what they're having to walk through, and I'm certain. As a matter of fact, I know for a fact that some of them are staving off bouts of depression and anxiety and deep grief and deep sadness. In my own family, on both my side and Jen's side, Jen's my wife, on both my side and Jen's side, we have depression in our family. We're walking through it. Sometimes it's harder than other times. Sometimes it's more extreme than other cases, but it touches us and it touches our lives too. And I know that each of us deals with or loves someone who deals with depression, grief, melancholy, sadness from time to time, these seasons in life that just feel dark and heavy. And I also know that many more of us deal with feelings of insignificance, like we don't matter. I know firsthand that being, because of walking through it with my wife, that being a stay-at-home mom can make you feel very small. It can make your world feel very inconsequential, that all you are is the nursemaid for a toddler or a shuttle service for your kids or whatever it might be. Being a parent can sometimes make your world feel very small. As you age, sometimes your world can start to feel smaller and smaller and the things you do less and less significant. And some of us have gone from seasons of mattering a great deal to mattering not very much. Some of us have gone from having great identities that we are proud of to these small identities that we kind of wander in and aren't used to yet. And so I know that in our family of faith, in our congregation, in this room, and the people watching online, the people who will hear this later, all of us have dealt with personally or love someone dearly who struggles with bouts of depression, with grief, with sadness, with loss, or even insignificance. And so I thought it was absolutely appropriate to take a Sunday while we talk about big emotions and talk about these. And I thought it would be really helpful for us as we identify with that sadness, with that grief, with that inadequacy, to look at someone in the Bible who also dealt with that and to see how God meets him in this place. So we're going to look at just a part of the story of a prophet named Elijah. Now, many of you were not here years ago when I did a whole series in the summer on Elijah, or if you were here, you were probably at the beach and didn't hear it. So some of this stuff will be reviewed, but maybe not much. I'm not going to tell you the whole story of the life of the prophet of Elijah, but he is one of God's, as Aaron said in the announcements, one of God's great servants. Elijah was so great. In fact, I'm not sure I need to tell you anything else about his life, but at the end of his life, as he was aging and the end was near, he's walking with his disciple, Elisha, and on the west bank of the Jordan River and Elijah decides that he needs to go to the eastern bank of the Jordan River and so he just parts the waters and walks across it like this miracle of convenience. Like the ark stopped the Jordan River so that God himself could move into the promised land with his people and then Moses parted the waters so that God's people could escape from the Pharaoh. And Elijah parted the water so that his sandals wouldn't get wet. That's just okay. He just puts his cloak in the water, parts it, walks through, come on, Elisha, and then they go through. And when they get on the other side, a chariot descends down out of heaven. An angelic chariot comes down and scoops Elijah up and takes him to heaven. Dude was so righteous, he caught an Uber ride to the pearly gates because God didn't want him to experience death. We see Elijah again in the New Testament at the Mount of Transfiguration when he appears along with Moses to Jesus to strengthen him and encourage him. He's a major figure in the Old Testament and a hero of the faith. And when I say it's difficult for anyone to get closer to God than Elijah was, I mean it literally because all of us in here are very likely going to experience death. He did not have to. And yet, in his life, we see pretty convincing evidence that at least in this season, Elijah was low. He struggled mightily with depression and insignificance. And so I think it's worth looking at this part of his story and seeing how God responds there. The part of the story that I'm going to present to you is somewhere, I would guess, about 45 to 50 days of his life. So I'm not even sure you could call it a season. It was just a time of his life when he was low. We don't know if there were other times or not. One would assume that there were. But here we get just a snippet or a snapshot of Elijah's, what I believe to be, depression, at least in this season. We're going to be looking, and not yet, but if you have a Bible, you can turn there. 1 Kings chapter 19. If you don't have one, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Unless you're watching from home, I don't know what's in your seat backs. But in 1 Kings chapter 18 is the big showdown, the big thing that Elijah's famous for, the showdown with the prophets of Baal. And I don't have time to give the full treatment to the story. I wish I did because it's a fantastic story and you should really read it. But the predominant religion at this time was worshiping this God named Baal. The king was Ahab, the queen was Jezebel. They were evil and they supported this idol worship. The followers of God were pressed into the margins and the fringes. And Elijah was by all accounts, essentially the chief priest for God at the time and the head prophet. And so he goes to Mount Carmel and he has this showdown with the prophets of Baal. There's 450 prophets of Baal. And they make this deal that they're each going to build an altar. And whichever God from heaven itself lights the altars on fire first, that's the best God. And the other one has to take his ball and go home. And so they start this competition. And Elijah, I just have to point out, he says one of the best lines in the Bible. He is a sarcastic jerk, which breathed life into me from God himself. And Baal is not responding and lighting the altar on fire. And he's making fun of them. Maybe you should yell louder, yada, yada. And at. And at one point, he's like, maybe he can't hear you because he's in his heavenly bathroom taking a Tuesdays. Maybe that's what's going on, which is phenomenal. It's the kind of stuff you get here at Grace Riley. And after they give up, Elijah prays this humble prayer. God, it's time. God sends fire from heaven, lights the altar on fire, and Elijah has all 450 prophets arrested and put to death. After this, the beginning of chapter 19, Elijah's praying. There had been a drought for three years in Israel, and God told Elijah that the drought's going to be over. Get ready for rain. And then swept Elijah with the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God sweeps Elijah to Jerusalem. So he beats Ahab's chariot back to Jerusalem. When Ahab, the king, gets to Jerusalem, he goes to Jezebel, the queen, and he tells Jezebel all that Elijah has done. She responds by sending a messenger to Elijah that says, everything that you did to my prophets, I'm going to do to you, and it's going to be worse. I'm going to kill you. And this is interesting because a couple chapters later in 2 Kings chapter 1, she tries to send soldiers to kill Elijah. And Elijah says, I'm a man of God, and if you try to arrest me, then he's going to send fire and kill you. And then they do, and then he does. Three times. Dude has nothing to be scared of. He has the protection of God on his head. He has the hand of God on him. But when the messenger reaches Elijah this time and says, Jezebel's wants to kill him. And in fear, he flees a day into the wilderness. He gets done with that day and he sits down and he prays a prayer that I hope none of us have prayed, but I bet some of us have. God, it would be better if I were dead. Please take my life. I'm done. I'm no better than my father's. I have nothing left to give. I'm exhausted. I did this great miracle in your name, won a great victory, and it's like it doesn't matter. She's going to kill me. Do you understand that he was despaired to his point of death? He was despairing for his life. Do you understand that he went to sleep under that broom tree, that he closed his eyes praying, God, please don't let me wake up? You understand that when Elijah's eyes were opened that he was disappointed? I don't know if you have ever gone to sleep and before you went to sleep, you prayed, God, please don't let me wake up on this side of eternity. But I bet some of you have. I bet we know people who have felt what Elijah felt. God, I'm going to sleep and I don't want to wake up. This world has nothing left for me. I don't want to be here. No one cares about me. I don't matter. This needs to be over. It would be better off if I were in eternity than here any longer. Please don't let me wake up when I go to sleep, God. Elijah is despairing unto death. And is at, by all estimations, a very low point. But God wakes him up. He wakes him up with an angel who feeds him, gives him food. I love that that's God's response to the dark night of the soul. Like a loving divine grandma. Here, just eat a little something. You'll feel better after some cookies. Elijah goes back to sleep. The angel wakes him up again. Says, you're going to need this for your journey. You're going to Mount Horeb. So he eats and he travels 40 days to Mount Horeb. And God tells him when he gets there, go up into this cave. I'm going to talk to you there. And when he gets up to the cave, God speaks to him and he says, Elijah, what are you doing? And Elijah says, my part. I've served you well. I've done everything I'm supposed to do. And they've killed all my friends. They've killed all my companions. I, even I, only am left. There is no one left in Israel like me. I am totally alone, God. I have no friends. I have no family. I have no companions. I have no love. I have no camaraderie. I'm alone and I'm destitute and nobody cares about me anymore, God. This time when I go to sleep, can I please just not wake up? I'm done. This is an articulation of the lowest of lows in his life. I, even I only, am left. I have no friends. I have no family. I have no companions. It's just me, and I'm tired. And God says, I'm going to speak to you again. And it's this remarkable passage where Elijah is sitting in the cave on the side of this mountain. And the text tells us that there's this great earthquake and the ground shakes and the stones tremble and the trees shake. And you think surely that God's voice is in the earthquake, but he's not in the earthquake. And then God sends this fire by the mouth of the cave that consumes everything in its path, and you think, surely God is in the fire, and he's not in the fire. And he sends a mighty wind that shakes and vibrates and stirs and scares, and you think, surely God is in the wind, and he's not in the wind. And then scripture says there's a gentle whisper and God is in the whisper. And Elijah goes out to the mouth of the cave and God says, what are you doing, Elijah? And Elijah gives the exact same response in verses 14, in verse 14 that he did in verse 10. I've been very jealous for you. I've served you well. And I've put all my friends to the sword, and I, even I only, am left. And God hears him. And he says, I want you to go do something for me. I want you to go appoint this man and this man kings of their different areas. I've still got stuff for you to do. Go make them kings. And when you do, here's what's going to happen. Now go. And on his way to go do that, he comes across a man plowing in his field named Elisha. And he grabs Elisha and he says, I'm going to essentially make you my disciple. Come and follow me. I'm going to teach you to be a prophet like I'm a prophet. And Elisha goes and tells his parents that he's leaving and he leaves and he goes with Elijah. And he spends the rest of his life following Elijah. And when Elijah goes up into heaven on the chariot, his cloak wafts back down to Elisha, and Elisha receives a double portion of the Holy Spirit that Elijah had, and outperforms Elijah in miracles and in all the other things, has a greater ministry than Elijah did. And it can be argued that Elisha is probably the greater impact than defeating the prophets of Baal, that Elisha may have been Elijah's greatest work. But without question, in this 45 to 50 day period, we see one of the great servants of God at a low point in his life. We see him despair unto death. We see him go to sleep and not want to wake up. We see him express solitude and isolation, feeling completely alone and wanting to die. We see him despairing. What we see, I think, at least for this season, is a depression. And if you look at what he says, and if we think about what we've experienced when we've been low, then what we understand is that depression silently screams, you don't matter. Depression silently screams at you that you don't matter, that nothing you do matters. Look at what Elijah says the first time. I'm the only one left. I did everything you wanted me to do. Now they're going to kill me, and I'd rather just die I'm no better than my father's. I have nothing left to give God. My best days are behind me. I have no bigger miracles to work. I've done everything I can do. All that's left is waiting for death. Please just go ahead and take me. And it occurs to me as I reflect on Elijah voicing in that way that he felt like he no longer mattered. That one of the great strengths of grace is having a generationally diverse congregation. I love that about our church. And what I'm about to say is in no way a joke. This is not a time for stupid jokes. I'm not doing that. It occurs to me that a large portion of us, a large portion of you, you've reached the end of your career, the last portions of your career. You've ended your career and you're in retirement. You've raised your kids. Maybe you've even helped raise your grandkids. In your mind, you've shifted. I've seen the shift in men and women that I love. From wanting to build a name for yourself to thinking about what kind of name you're leaving behind. You've shifted from establishment to legacy. And you've accepted that you are in the twilight of your life. And I think it would be very easy to become convinced in that season that your best days are behind you, that you've done the great work that you're going to do. You've climbed the biggest mountain that you're going to climb. You've defeated more prophets then than you ever will in the future. I think it would be very difficult to have lived a life where in one setting you were important. Your voice mattered. People came to you for your opinion. They paid a fair amount of money for your time to a place where people don't come as much anymore and they don't ask as much anymore and your voice isn't as weighty as it used to be and you become convinced that my best days are behind me and if we're not careful, we can slip into, as Elijah did, just kind of waiting for the last day to get here because I have nothing left to give. And so I think in that way, even if we're not people who are depressed, we can hear that message of the world and that message of depression creeping into our hearts. Hey, you don't matter. Your best days are behind you. Or we can feel insignificant for other reasons. Our role in life right now reduces us. We have a thankless job and a somewhat thankless marriage with thankless kids, and we just feel small, and no one tells us that we're good enough, and no one tells us that they respect us, and no one tells us that they're grateful for us. We can move through seasons of life where we just feel like we're going through the motions, and we feel so insignificant and small. I know firsthand that when I preach sermons about God having a purpose for us, God having a use for us, when I quote one of my favorite verses, Ephesians 2.10, for we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, that we might walk in them. And I encourage you guys, identify your good works and walk in them. I know that there's a large portion of you that hear that and go, yes, that's good. I have no idea what my good works are. I have no idea how God gifted me. God's gifted other people to do other things, but he has not gifted me in any significant way. So the best thing I can do is just keep my head down and be nice because I don't really matter that much in God's kingdom. That's what Elijah was saying. I, even I only, am left. I don't matter. There's nothing around me that's important. And I talked with some friends of mine who deal with depression more than I do. Candidly, this is not something that I'm given to struggle with. I have other struggles, and I'm pretty transparent with you about those. For this one, I had to outsource a lot of it. So this idea that depression silently screams at us that we don't matter, that's not my idea. That came from someone who walks it. And then I called someone else who probably deals with depression in a little bit more profound way, and I said, hey, does this check out with you? If I say that depression insists that we don't matter, does that resonate? And he said, yeah, but it's worse than that. He says, my depression tells me that it doesn't matter, that nothing matters, let alone me. And so if you've ever sat in that place, or you've loved someone who sits in that place, when we start to listen to the voices that tell us that we don't matter, I think God's response to Elijah when he was giving into those voices should breathe some fresh air into our lungs. And here's what God does to Elijah. We go back through the story. Here's what we see him doing. God strengthens, whispers to, sends, and encourages Elijah. And I think all of those things are important. He strengthens Elijah. He whispers to Elijah. He sends Elijah. And then he finally encourages Elijah. He strengthens him. He literally wakes him up and gives him food. You're going to need this for your journey. He literally wakes him up again and gives him some food. You're going to need this for your journey. Eat up. He strengthens him. He gives him enough to get through the day. Whatever you need to get through today, God gives that to you to sustain you. That's the daily bread. That's the manna. That's the daily sustenance of God showing up and sustaining you for today. I shared with you a few weeks back that I was reading the Beth Moore biography, and she encountered her mother-in-law had walked through a tremendous trial, and she said, how do you do it? How did you giving me strength for that day. I'm reminded of this famous passage in Isaiah 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. God will sustain us if we trust him to do it. He will strengthen us in the darkest of days when it's so dark and so heavy and so cloudy that we can't see a glimmer of light or a glimmer of hope. God, if we have within us one ounce that is willing to reach out to God and ask him for that day, he will sustain you that day. He will whisper to you. I love that we have a God that speaks to us in the whisper. In the most unexpected places, in the most unexpected ways, God shows up with his presence. A few weeks ago in men's Bible study, one of the guys shared his story. He's a little bit older now, late 50s, early 60s, than he was when this happened. But at some point in his life, I'm not sure when, but he lost his wife. Lost his wife to breast cancer. I can't imagine the pain of losing a spouse or a child. Losing a parent is hard. But I bet losing a spouse or a child is harder. I used to work at a school years ago and there was this woman named Emmeline McKinnon who founded the school. Wonderful lady, everybody loved her. A few years ago, she passed away from cancer, and her husband, in his grief, took his own life too, a few days later. And to anyone with a heart, when they hear that story, I think they say, I get that. They loved each other for 60 years. How do you keep opening up your eyes after that? So understand it. I empathize with it. And I don't condemn it. And my friend was walking through that grief. Did not have kids. No one was relying on him. He was in the depths of sadness. And so he made the decision that he was going to go to heaven to be with her because he didn't want to be here. He went and acquired whatever it was he needed to acquire to put together a cocktail so that when he drank it, he would be in heaven with his wife. He went home, put it in the blender, started to mix it up. As the blender was going, the phone rang. So he stops it. He answers the phone. The person on the other end says, hey, is this so-and-so? He says, yeah, who's this? And he says, well, I'm Dr. So-and-so. I was your wife's optometrist. And my buddy said, I haven't heard from you in years. How you doing? And he said, I'm doing good. I just wanted to call you and tell you how special your wife was and how sorry I am for your loss. And my buddy said, well, thanks. I appreciate that. He said, how are you doing with it? And he lied, and he said, I'm doing fine. The way you're supposed to lie in polite society. And the doctor said, hey, I don't know if you're a religious man, but I am. And I feel like I need to tell you that God has been really pressing on me to call you. He's been doing it for a couple of weeks, and I'm sorry, I'm the worst. I've been putting it off. Every time he presses on me to call you, I kind of have something else pressing, and I think, yep, I need to do that, and I set it aside, and I mean to do it later. He said, but about five minutes ago, I felt the press again. And I was in the middle of doing paperwork, and I tried to put it off, but God would not let me put it off. He would not relent, and I just really felt like I needed to call you. So how are you doing? And my buddy really told him how he was doing and what he was up to that day. And they cried together and prayed together. And my buddy dumped it down the drain. Lived to remarry, to love nieces and nephews, and to sit in that circle and tell us that story. God whispered to him that day. So not only will God whisper to you, but sometimes he'll use you to whisper as well. When he's prompting you to do it. Do it. And then, God doesn't just whisper to Elijah. He sends him. And I love the matter-of-factness of God sending him. Because it's like, Elijah, listen, I can see that you're clearly bummed out, but I've got some things I need to do. There's some guys who need to be named king. They don't have kings right now. They need to be anointed. So I need you to get back to work. Go appoint these kings. He sends them. He says, I'm not done with you yet. I know you feel like you're done because you finished this thing with the prophets of Baal, and now there's nothing left to do. There's stuff to do, Elijah, and I need you to get to it. And I was actually talking with my dad this week. I wouldn't call it arguing. We weren't arguing. We were just kind of going back and forth, as we are wont to do, about what the greatest work was in Elijah's life. Was it the prophets of Baal? Or was it the training and developing of Elisha and leaving him behind as a legacy? Which one was bigger? And in the middle of the discussion, I said, Dad, this is really a stupid conversation. Which usually he's the one that gets to do that. So I was happy to be the one that got to do it this time. This is a really stupid conversation. And I just pointed out to him, the size of our works don't matter nearly as much as the faithfulness of our works. Who cares if the miracle with Baal was the bigger deal than anointing a king or naming a successor or raising someone's son from the dead? Who cares what the bigger miracle was, the size of the work, the grandeur of the work, the import of the work? Who cares if that's bigger than what's left? For those of us who maybe our best years are behind us, maybe the biggest thing we've done is behind us. Maybe the most important thing you think you'll do from a human perspective is already in your past and not as big of things are waiting on you in your future. I think that's silly. God could care less about the size of our work. Like God's impressed with the size of any work. What matters is our faithfulness within the works that he gives us for as many years as he gives us. Here's how I know it's true. I know that you guys would support me in this. Right now, there's probably about 200 people here this Sunday morning. If next week you snapped your fingers and you made grace 2,000 people? Would my work next week in preaching be any more impactful, any more great, any more important to God? Would I somehow be more spiritual next week preaching to 2,000 people than I am this week preaching to 200? Would I somehow be more faithful or more loved next week preaching to 2,000 people than I am faithful or loved in preaching to you today? No! It's stupid. The size of our work is irrelevant. It's our faithfulness within what he gives us. What lies ahead of you is not insignificant if God has placed it there. What's significant is your faithfulness as you are obedient to that. And after he sends Elijah, he encourages him. He peels back the curtain a little bit. And he says, hey, I know you think you're the last one here. There's 7,000 more just like you. I've kept them for myself. They have not been the need of bail. You're not alone. You have companions. You have friends. And I see you. And I'm not expecting you to carry all this weight. Now go do what I've asked you to do. What we see in the story of Elijah. If depression says, you don't matter, and if Elijah's expressing, God, I don't matter, and I am alone, then what God says in the strengthening and in the whispering and in the sending and the encouraging from a megaphone is, Elijah, you matter, you matter, you matter, you matter. I see you. I know you. I love you. What you're doing is important. And what he says to us and what he says to you and what I hope you hear is that you matter. Look, the love of God drowns out other voices and gently reminds you of how much you matter. The love of God and the strengthening and in the whispering and in the sending and the purposing and in the encouraging remind you in these subtle ways, I know life is hard. You matter. I know you feel insignificant. You matter. I know the world is trying to convince you that you don't matter, but I'm telling you that you do. Sorry, it's been an emotional week for me. One of the people I reached out to shared with me that he'll walk through really dark depression for months and sometimes a year at a time. And as I was walking through with him what I wanted to share, I admitted my own feelings of inadequacy to even address what it's like to actually be deeply depressed. Because I know that there's some depression that words don't touch. It just doesn't matter what I say. It doesn't matter what I pray. It doesn't matter how I encourage. There's just some depression that you walk through that's so dark and so difficult that words don't touch it and arrest you from it. And so I said, in your greatest times of trial, what helped you? And as I even admit the own inadequacy of my words to you, what can I say to help you? And he said, let me write you an email because I'm better with my thoughts like that. And he responded with some very helpful things, but one thing he said was so profound that I thought I wanted to share it with you this morning. He wrote me this. Solitude and isolation are freedom. They're the ability to define you as you wish because there's no consequence to any decision you can make. If you decide to surrender, there's no consequence. Your story ends and nobody else is there to see. Nobody else is there to care. Nobody else is there to respond. The profundity of that struck me as I read it in my office. That when you are deeply depressed and you are convinced that it doesn't matter and that you don't matter, that you are all alone and no one sees you. That you're isolated. In your solitude. But then that is freedom because you can do whatever you want and no one's going to care. And I thought, my gosh. That's a low place. But then he said, but it's because of, and this is a paraphrase, we have a conversation preceding this to help me understand that what he meant in our language is that because of the cross, because I know Jesus died for me, because I know God made promises to me. Because I know I matter enough to God for him to send his son. He said this, because it means, because of the cross, it means that there is no way not to be seen. There is no situation in which you are finally, truly, absolutely alone. You understand the cross stands eternally reminding you of how much you matter, that in the depths of not mattering, in the depths of despair, in the depths of I'm not important and I don't matter to anyone and no one sees me and no one cares about me and it might just be better if I weren't here, that even in the depths of that, that God sent his son to die for you, to claim you back to him. And before you say, no, he did that for other people. No, no, he did that for you. If you're the only person on this earth, he still would have sent his son to die for you, to reclaim you to the heaven that he created for you. And if we will cling to the cross, to the glimmer of light that shines through the millennia, we can take hope and solace in the fact that there's going to be a day where depression doesn't exist and where the darkness goes away and every day is bright and filled with joy. And I might not get to experience those here today, right now, but I will one day. And if I cling to that cross, God's promised that I matter, that there will be days where this will let up, where I will see joy, where I will live in the fullness of life, but even if it doesn't come, there's an eternity where I'll see that every day. We sang a few minutes ago that you're fighting a battle that I've already won. I'm fighting a battle that you've already won. This is the battle, and it was won on the cross. So let God strengthen you today. Let him whisper to you today. And hear me say that you matter to your God. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your son. Thank you for who he is. We thank you for loving us. Lord, I lift up those that feel sad or depressed or insignificant or unwanted or unwarranted. God, it is my fervent prayer that they would be strengthened today. That they would get enough from today to keep clinging to you. God, for those we love who live in a cloud of darkness from time to time, we pray that you would use us to help them brighten it. God, we pray for the days ahead that you promised through your son, that you won through his death on the cross. Where in your presence we finally at long last experience fullness of joy. God, I pray for my brothers and sisters who are sad and who are downtrodden and ask that you would pick them up, that they would know today that you love them, that you care for them, that more than anything, they matter deeply to you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. We've been moving through a series called Big Emotions. This is part six of the series. And within this series, as we kind of planned it, I realized that we needed to have a morning like this morning where we talk about some of the heavier, harder emotions that we can experience in life. In the past just few months, I had a lunch with a young man who was and is a recovering alcoholic, and actually today is his one-year sober anniversary, so we're excited for him today. Yeah, he's not here. That's okay. He didn't hear how much you didn't, how tepid that was. If he were here, I would have. But we're thrilled about that. And he shared with me as I talked with him about a story that part of what led him down that path is dealing with a depression. This creeping sense that he wasn't going to be who everyone expected him to be and who he was. And it was this feeling of not mattering anymore, of not living up to things that sent him into a depression that caused him to seek out some help for that from chemicals. In the past couple months, I've talked with two different dads in our community whose daughters are struggling mightily with depression. You could even call it a crippling depression. And one of them even shared with me that he's learned through her struggle that that's what he's always dealt with. He just never had the words to put around what he was feeling, or it's entirely possible because men are stupid, that he just didn't allow himself to admit that he was sad because we're too manly for that. I've sat with people in the wake of great loss. Sat with a family, and I won't detail the struggles, but they just kind of, life just keeps running them ashore, man. Life just keeps beating them up. I get texts from them, and I'm like, God, you've got to be kidding me with what they're having to walk through, and I'm certain. As a matter of fact, I know for a fact that some of them are staving off bouts of depression and anxiety and deep grief and deep sadness. In my own family, on both my side and Jen's side, Jen's my wife, on both my side and Jen's side, we have depression in our family. We're walking through it. Sometimes it's harder than other times. Sometimes it's more extreme than other cases, but it touches us and it touches our lives too. And I know that each of us deals with or loves someone who deals with depression, grief, melancholy, sadness from time to time, these seasons in life that just feel dark and heavy. And I also know that many more of us deal with feelings of insignificance, like we don't matter. I know firsthand that being, because of walking through it with my wife, that being a stay-at-home mom can make you feel very small. It can make your world feel very inconsequential, that all you are is the nursemaid for a toddler or a shuttle service for your kids or whatever it might be. Being a parent can sometimes make your world feel very small. As you age, sometimes your world can start to feel smaller and smaller and the things you do less and less significant. And some of us have gone from seasons of mattering a great deal to mattering not very much. Some of us have gone from having great identities that we are proud of to these small identities that we kind of wander in and aren't used to yet. And so I know that in our family of faith, in our congregation, in this room, and the people watching online, the people who will hear this later, all of us have dealt with personally or love someone dearly who struggles with bouts of depression, with grief, with sadness, with loss, or even insignificance. And so I thought it was absolutely appropriate to take a Sunday while we talk about big emotions and talk about these. And I thought it would be really helpful for us as we identify with that sadness, with that grief, with that inadequacy, to look at someone in the Bible who also dealt with that and to see how God meets him in this place. So we're going to look at just a part of the story of a prophet named Elijah. Now, many of you were not here years ago when I did a whole series in the summer on Elijah, or if you were here, you were probably at the beach and didn't hear it. So some of this stuff will be reviewed, but maybe not much. I'm not going to tell you the whole story of the life of the prophet of Elijah, but he is one of God's, as Aaron said in the announcements, one of God's great servants. Elijah was so great. In fact, I'm not sure I need to tell you anything else about his life, but at the end of his life, as he was aging and the end was near, he's walking with his disciple, Elisha, and on the west bank of the Jordan River and Elijah decides that he needs to go to the eastern bank of the Jordan River and so he just parts the waters and walks across it like this miracle of convenience. Like the ark stopped the Jordan River so that God himself could move into the promised land with his people and then Moses parted the waters so that God's people could escape from the Pharaoh. And Elijah parted the water so that his sandals wouldn't get wet. That's just okay. He just puts his cloak in the water, parts it, walks through, come on, Elisha, and then they go through. And when they get on the other side, a chariot descends down out of heaven. An angelic chariot comes down and scoops Elijah up and takes him to heaven. Dude was so righteous, he caught an Uber ride to the pearly gates because God didn't want him to experience death. We see Elijah again in the New Testament at the Mount of Transfiguration when he appears along with Moses to Jesus to strengthen him and encourage him. He's a major figure in the Old Testament and a hero of the faith. And when I say it's difficult for anyone to get closer to God than Elijah was, I mean it literally because all of us in here are very likely going to experience death. He did not have to. And yet, in his life, we see pretty convincing evidence that at least in this season, Elijah was low. He struggled mightily with depression and insignificance. And so I think it's worth looking at this part of his story and seeing how God responds there. The part of the story that I'm going to present to you is somewhere, I would guess, about 45 to 50 days of his life. So I'm not even sure you could call it a season. It was just a time of his life when he was low. We don't know if there were other times or not. One would assume that there were. But here we get just a snippet or a snapshot of Elijah's, what I believe to be, depression, at least in this season. We're going to be looking, and not yet, but if you have a Bible, you can turn there. 1 Kings chapter 19. If you don't have one, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Unless you're watching from home, I don't know what's in your seat backs. But in 1 Kings chapter 18 is the big showdown, the big thing that Elijah's famous for, the showdown with the prophets of Baal. And I don't have time to give the full treatment to the story. I wish I did because it's a fantastic story and you should really read it. But the predominant religion at this time was worshiping this God named Baal. The king was Ahab, the queen was Jezebel. They were evil and they supported this idol worship. The followers of God were pressed into the margins and the fringes. And Elijah was by all accounts, essentially the chief priest for God at the time and the head prophet. And so he goes to Mount Carmel and he has this showdown with the prophets of Baal. There's 450 prophets of Baal. And they make this deal that they're each going to build an altar. And whichever God from heaven itself lights the altars on fire first, that's the best God. And the other one has to take his ball and go home. And so they start this competition. And Elijah, I just have to point out, he says one of the best lines in the Bible. He is a sarcastic jerk, which breathed life into me from God himself. And Baal is not responding and lighting the altar on fire. And he's making fun of them. Maybe you should yell louder, yada, yada. And at. And at one point, he's like, maybe he can't hear you because he's in his heavenly bathroom taking a Tuesdays. Maybe that's what's going on, which is phenomenal. It's the kind of stuff you get here at Grace Riley. And after they give up, Elijah prays this humble prayer. God, it's time. God sends fire from heaven, lights the altar on fire, and Elijah has all 450 prophets arrested and put to death. After this, the beginning of chapter 19, Elijah's praying. There had been a drought for three years in Israel, and God told Elijah that the drought's going to be over. Get ready for rain. And then swept Elijah with the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God sweeps Elijah to Jerusalem. So he beats Ahab's chariot back to Jerusalem. When Ahab, the king, gets to Jerusalem, he goes to Jezebel, the queen, and he tells Jezebel all that Elijah has done. She responds by sending a messenger to Elijah that says, everything that you did to my prophets, I'm going to do to you, and it's going to be worse. I'm going to kill you. And this is interesting because a couple chapters later in 2 Kings chapter 1, she tries to send soldiers to kill Elijah. And Elijah says, I'm a man of God, and if you try to arrest me, then he's going to send fire and kill you. And then they do, and then he does. Three times. Dude has nothing to be scared of. He has the protection of God on his head. He has the hand of God on him. But when the messenger reaches Elijah this time and says, Jezebel's wants to kill him. And in fear, he flees a day into the wilderness. He gets done with that day and he sits down and he prays a prayer that I hope none of us have prayed, but I bet some of us have. God, it would be better if I were dead. Please take my life. I'm done. I'm no better than my father's. I have nothing left to give. I'm exhausted. I did this great miracle in your name, won a great victory, and it's like it doesn't matter. She's going to kill me. Do you understand that he was despaired to his point of death? He was despairing for his life. Do you understand that he went to sleep under that broom tree, that he closed his eyes praying, God, please don't let me wake up? You understand that when Elijah's eyes were opened that he was disappointed? I don't know if you have ever gone to sleep and before you went to sleep, you prayed, God, please don't let me wake up on this side of eternity. But I bet some of you have. I bet we know people who have felt what Elijah felt. God, I'm going to sleep and I don't want to wake up. This world has nothing left for me. I don't want to be here. No one cares about me. I don't matter. This needs to be over. It would be better off if I were in eternity than here any longer. Please don't let me wake up when I go to sleep, God. Elijah is despairing unto death. And is at, by all estimations, a very low point. But God wakes him up. He wakes him up with an angel who feeds him, gives him food. I love that that's God's response to the dark night of the soul. Like a loving divine grandma. Here, just eat a little something. You'll feel better after some cookies. Elijah goes back to sleep. The angel wakes him up again. Says, you're going to need this for your journey. You're going to Mount Horeb. So he eats and he travels 40 days to Mount Horeb. And God tells him when he gets there, go up into this cave. I'm going to talk to you there. And when he gets up to the cave, God speaks to him and he says, Elijah, what are you doing? And Elijah says, my part. I've served you well. I've done everything I'm supposed to do. And they've killed all my friends. They've killed all my companions. I, even I, only am left. There is no one left in Israel like me. I am totally alone, God. I have no friends. I have no family. I have no companions. I have no love. I have no camaraderie. I'm alone and I'm destitute and nobody cares about me anymore, God. This time when I go to sleep, can I please just not wake up? I'm done. This is an articulation of the lowest of lows in his life. I, even I only, am left. I have no friends. I have no family. I have no companions. It's just me, and I'm tired. And God says, I'm going to speak to you again. And it's this remarkable passage where Elijah is sitting in the cave on the side of this mountain. And the text tells us that there's this great earthquake and the ground shakes and the stones tremble and the trees shake. And you think surely that God's voice is in the earthquake, but he's not in the earthquake. And then God sends this fire by the mouth of the cave that consumes everything in its path, and you think, surely God is in the fire, and he's not in the fire. And he sends a mighty wind that shakes and vibrates and stirs and scares, and you think, surely God is in the wind, and he's not in the wind. And then scripture says there's a gentle whisper and God is in the whisper. And Elijah goes out to the mouth of the cave and God says, what are you doing, Elijah? And Elijah gives the exact same response in verses 14, in verse 14 that he did in verse 10. I've been very jealous for you. I've served you well. And I've put all my friends to the sword, and I, even I only, am left. And God hears him. And he says, I want you to go do something for me. I want you to go appoint this man and this man kings of their different areas. I've still got stuff for you to do. Go make them kings. And when you do, here's what's going to happen. Now go. And on his way to go do that, he comes across a man plowing in his field named Elisha. And he grabs Elisha and he says, I'm going to essentially make you my disciple. Come and follow me. I'm going to teach you to be a prophet like I'm a prophet. And Elisha goes and tells his parents that he's leaving and he leaves and he goes with Elijah. And he spends the rest of his life following Elijah. And when Elijah goes up into heaven on the chariot, his cloak wafts back down to Elisha, and Elisha receives a double portion of the Holy Spirit that Elijah had, and outperforms Elijah in miracles and in all the other things, has a greater ministry than Elijah did. And it can be argued that Elisha is probably the greater impact than defeating the prophets of Baal, that Elisha may have been Elijah's greatest work. But without question, in this 45 to 50 day period, we see one of the great servants of God at a low point in his life. We see him despair unto death. We see him go to sleep and not want to wake up. We see him express solitude and isolation, feeling completely alone and wanting to die. We see him despairing. What we see, I think, at least for this season, is a depression. And if you look at what he says, and if we think about what we've experienced when we've been low, then what we understand is that depression silently screams, you don't matter. Depression silently screams at you that you don't matter, that nothing you do matters. Look at what Elijah says the first time. I'm the only one left. I did everything you wanted me to do. Now they're going to kill me, and I'd rather just die I'm no better than my father's. I have nothing left to give God. My best days are behind me. I have no bigger miracles to work. I've done everything I can do. All that's left is waiting for death. Please just go ahead and take me. And it occurs to me as I reflect on Elijah voicing in that way that he felt like he no longer mattered. That one of the great strengths of grace is having a generationally diverse congregation. I love that about our church. And what I'm about to say is in no way a joke. This is not a time for stupid jokes. I'm not doing that. It occurs to me that a large portion of us, a large portion of you, you've reached the end of your career, the last portions of your career. You've ended your career and you're in retirement. You've raised your kids. Maybe you've even helped raise your grandkids. In your mind, you've shifted. I've seen the shift in men and women that I love. From wanting to build a name for yourself to thinking about what kind of name you're leaving behind. You've shifted from establishment to legacy. And you've accepted that you are in the twilight of your life. And I think it would be very easy to become convinced in that season that your best days are behind you, that you've done the great work that you're going to do. You've climbed the biggest mountain that you're going to climb. You've defeated more prophets then than you ever will in the future. I think it would be very difficult to have lived a life where in one setting you were important. Your voice mattered. People came to you for your opinion. They paid a fair amount of money for your time to a place where people don't come as much anymore and they don't ask as much anymore and your voice isn't as weighty as it used to be and you become convinced that my best days are behind me and if we're not careful, we can slip into, as Elijah did, just kind of waiting for the last day to get here because I have nothing left to give. And so I think in that way, even if we're not people who are depressed, we can hear that message of the world and that message of depression creeping into our hearts. Hey, you don't matter. Your best days are behind you. Or we can feel insignificant for other reasons. Our role in life right now reduces us. We have a thankless job and a somewhat thankless marriage with thankless kids, and we just feel small, and no one tells us that we're good enough, and no one tells us that they respect us, and no one tells us that they're grateful for us. We can move through seasons of life where we just feel like we're going through the motions, and we feel so insignificant and small. I know firsthand that when I preach sermons about God having a purpose for us, God having a use for us, when I quote one of my favorite verses, Ephesians 2.10, for we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, that we might walk in them. And I encourage you guys, identify your good works and walk in them. I know that there's a large portion of you that hear that and go, yes, that's good. I have no idea what my good works are. I have no idea how God gifted me. God's gifted other people to do other things, but he has not gifted me in any significant way. So the best thing I can do is just keep my head down and be nice because I don't really matter that much in God's kingdom. That's what Elijah was saying. I, even I only, am left. I don't matter. There's nothing around me that's important. And I talked with some friends of mine who deal with depression more than I do. Candidly, this is not something that I'm given to struggle with. I have other struggles, and I'm pretty transparent with you about those. For this one, I had to outsource a lot of it. So this idea that depression silently screams at us that we don't matter, that's not my idea. That came from someone who walks it. And then I called someone else who probably deals with depression in a little bit more profound way, and I said, hey, does this check out with you? If I say that depression insists that we don't matter, does that resonate? And he said, yeah, but it's worse than that. He says, my depression tells me that it doesn't matter, that nothing matters, let alone me. And so if you've ever sat in that place, or you've loved someone who sits in that place, when we start to listen to the voices that tell us that we don't matter, I think God's response to Elijah when he was giving into those voices should breathe some fresh air into our lungs. And here's what God does to Elijah. We go back through the story. Here's what we see him doing. God strengthens, whispers to, sends, and encourages Elijah. And I think all of those things are important. He strengthens Elijah. He whispers to Elijah. He sends Elijah. And then he finally encourages Elijah. He strengthens him. He literally wakes him up and gives him food. You're going to need this for your journey. He literally wakes him up again and gives him some food. You're going to need this for your journey. Eat up. He strengthens him. He gives him enough to get through the day. Whatever you need to get through today, God gives that to you to sustain you. That's the daily bread. That's the manna. That's the daily sustenance of God showing up and sustaining you for today. I shared with you a few weeks back that I was reading the Beth Moore biography, and she encountered her mother-in-law had walked through a tremendous trial, and she said, how do you do it? How did you giving me strength for that day. I'm reminded of this famous passage in Isaiah 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. God will sustain us if we trust him to do it. He will strengthen us in the darkest of days when it's so dark and so heavy and so cloudy that we can't see a glimmer of light or a glimmer of hope. God, if we have within us one ounce that is willing to reach out to God and ask him for that day, he will sustain you that day. He will whisper to you. I love that we have a God that speaks to us in the whisper. In the most unexpected places, in the most unexpected ways, God shows up with his presence. A few weeks ago in men's Bible study, one of the guys shared his story. He's a little bit older now, late 50s, early 60s, than he was when this happened. But at some point in his life, I'm not sure when, but he lost his wife. Lost his wife to breast cancer. I can't imagine the pain of losing a spouse or a child. Losing a parent is hard. But I bet losing a spouse or a child is harder. I used to work at a school years ago and there was this woman named Emmeline McKinnon who founded the school. Wonderful lady, everybody loved her. A few years ago, she passed away from cancer, and her husband, in his grief, took his own life too, a few days later. And to anyone with a heart, when they hear that story, I think they say, I get that. They loved each other for 60 years. How do you keep opening up your eyes after that? So understand it. I empathize with it. And I don't condemn it. And my friend was walking through that grief. Did not have kids. No one was relying on him. He was in the depths of sadness. And so he made the decision that he was going to go to heaven to be with her because he didn't want to be here. He went and acquired whatever it was he needed to acquire to put together a cocktail so that when he drank it, he would be in heaven with his wife. He went home, put it in the blender, started to mix it up. As the blender was going, the phone rang. So he stops it. He answers the phone. The person on the other end says, hey, is this so-and-so? He says, yeah, who's this? And he says, well, I'm Dr. So-and-so. I was your wife's optometrist. And my buddy said, I haven't heard from you in years. How you doing? And he said, I'm doing good. I just wanted to call you and tell you how special your wife was and how sorry I am for your loss. And my buddy said, well, thanks. I appreciate that. He said, how are you doing with it? And he lied, and he said, I'm doing fine. The way you're supposed to lie in polite society. And the doctor said, hey, I don't know if you're a religious man, but I am. And I feel like I need to tell you that God has been really pressing on me to call you. He's been doing it for a couple of weeks, and I'm sorry, I'm the worst. I've been putting it off. Every time he presses on me to call you, I kind of have something else pressing, and I think, yep, I need to do that, and I set it aside, and I mean to do it later. He said, but about five minutes ago, I felt the press again. And I was in the middle of doing paperwork, and I tried to put it off, but God would not let me put it off. He would not relent, and I just really felt like I needed to call you. So how are you doing? And my buddy really told him how he was doing and what he was up to that day. And they cried together and prayed together. And my buddy dumped it down the drain. Lived to remarry, to love nieces and nephews, and to sit in that circle and tell us that story. God whispered to him that day. So not only will God whisper to you, but sometimes he'll use you to whisper as well. When he's prompting you to do it. Do it. And then, God doesn't just whisper to Elijah. He sends him. And I love the matter-of-factness of God sending him. Because it's like, Elijah, listen, I can see that you're clearly bummed out, but I've got some things I need to do. There's some guys who need to be named king. They don't have kings right now. They need to be anointed. So I need you to get back to work. Go appoint these kings. He sends them. He says, I'm not done with you yet. I know you feel like you're done because you finished this thing with the prophets of Baal, and now there's nothing left to do. There's stuff to do, Elijah, and I need you to get to it. And I was actually talking with my dad this week. I wouldn't call it arguing. We weren't arguing. We were just kind of going back and forth, as we are wont to do, about what the greatest work was in Elijah's life. Was it the prophets of Baal? Or was it the training and developing of Elisha and leaving him behind as a legacy? Which one was bigger? And in the middle of the discussion, I said, Dad, this is really a stupid conversation. Which usually he's the one that gets to do that. So I was happy to be the one that got to do it this time. This is a really stupid conversation. And I just pointed out to him, the size of our works don't matter nearly as much as the faithfulness of our works. Who cares if the miracle with Baal was the bigger deal than anointing a king or naming a successor or raising someone's son from the dead? Who cares what the bigger miracle was, the size of the work, the grandeur of the work, the import of the work? Who cares if that's bigger than what's left? For those of us who maybe our best years are behind us, maybe the biggest thing we've done is behind us. Maybe the most important thing you think you'll do from a human perspective is already in your past and not as big of things are waiting on you in your future. I think that's silly. God could care less about the size of our work. Like God's impressed with the size of any work. What matters is our faithfulness within the works that he gives us for as many years as he gives us. Here's how I know it's true. I know that you guys would support me in this. Right now, there's probably about 200 people here this Sunday morning. If next week you snapped your fingers and you made grace 2,000 people? Would my work next week in preaching be any more impactful, any more great, any more important to God? Would I somehow be more spiritual next week preaching to 2,000 people than I am this week preaching to 200? Would I somehow be more faithful or more loved next week preaching to 2,000 people than I am faithful or loved in preaching to you today? No! It's stupid. The size of our work is irrelevant. It's our faithfulness within what he gives us. What lies ahead of you is not insignificant if God has placed it there. What's significant is your faithfulness as you are obedient to that. And after he sends Elijah, he encourages him. He peels back the curtain a little bit. And he says, hey, I know you think you're the last one here. There's 7,000 more just like you. I've kept them for myself. They have not been the need of bail. You're not alone. You have companions. You have friends. And I see you. And I'm not expecting you to carry all this weight. Now go do what I've asked you to do. What we see in the story of Elijah. If depression says, you don't matter, and if Elijah's expressing, God, I don't matter, and I am alone, then what God says in the strengthening and in the whispering and in the sending and the encouraging from a megaphone is, Elijah, you matter, you matter, you matter, you matter. I see you. I know you. I love you. What you're doing is important. And what he says to us and what he says to you and what I hope you hear is that you matter. Look, the love of God drowns out other voices and gently reminds you of how much you matter. The love of God and the strengthening and in the whispering and in the sending and the purposing and in the encouraging remind you in these subtle ways, I know life is hard. You matter. I know you feel insignificant. You matter. I know the world is trying to convince you that you don't matter, but I'm telling you that you do. Sorry, it's been an emotional week for me. One of the people I reached out to shared with me that he'll walk through really dark depression for months and sometimes a year at a time. And as I was walking through with him what I wanted to share, I admitted my own feelings of inadequacy to even address what it's like to actually be deeply depressed. Because I know that there's some depression that words don't touch. It just doesn't matter what I say. It doesn't matter what I pray. It doesn't matter how I encourage. There's just some depression that you walk through that's so dark and so difficult that words don't touch it and arrest you from it. And so I said, in your greatest times of trial, what helped you? And as I even admit the own inadequacy of my words to you, what can I say to help you? And he said, let me write you an email because I'm better with my thoughts like that. And he responded with some very helpful things, but one thing he said was so profound that I thought I wanted to share it with you this morning. He wrote me this. Solitude and isolation are freedom. They're the ability to define you as you wish because there's no consequence to any decision you can make. If you decide to surrender, there's no consequence. Your story ends and nobody else is there to see. Nobody else is there to care. Nobody else is there to respond. The profundity of that struck me as I read it in my office. That when you are deeply depressed and you are convinced that it doesn't matter and that you don't matter, that you are all alone and no one sees you. That you're isolated. In your solitude. But then that is freedom because you can do whatever you want and no one's going to care. And I thought, my gosh. That's a low place. But then he said, but it's because of, and this is a paraphrase, we have a conversation preceding this to help me understand that what he meant in our language is that because of the cross, because I know Jesus died for me, because I know God made promises to me. Because I know I matter enough to God for him to send his son. He said this, because it means, because of the cross, it means that there is no way not to be seen. There is no situation in which you are finally, truly, absolutely alone. You understand the cross stands eternally reminding you of how much you matter, that in the depths of not mattering, in the depths of despair, in the depths of I'm not important and I don't matter to anyone and no one sees me and no one cares about me and it might just be better if I weren't here, that even in the depths of that, that God sent his son to die for you, to claim you back to him. And before you say, no, he did that for other people. No, no, he did that for you. If you're the only person on this earth, he still would have sent his son to die for you, to reclaim you to the heaven that he created for you. And if we will cling to the cross, to the glimmer of light that shines through the millennia, we can take hope and solace in the fact that there's going to be a day where depression doesn't exist and where the darkness goes away and every day is bright and filled with joy. And I might not get to experience those here today, right now, but I will one day. And if I cling to that cross, God's promised that I matter, that there will be days where this will let up, where I will see joy, where I will live in the fullness of life, but even if it doesn't come, there's an eternity where I'll see that every day. We sang a few minutes ago that you're fighting a battle that I've already won. I'm fighting a battle that you've already won. This is the battle, and it was won on the cross. So let God strengthen you today. Let him whisper to you today. And hear me say that you matter to your God. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your son. Thank you for who he is. We thank you for loving us. Lord, I lift up those that feel sad or depressed or insignificant or unwanted or unwarranted. God, it is my fervent prayer that they would be strengthened today. That they would get enough from today to keep clinging to you. God, for those we love who live in a cloud of darkness from time to time, we pray that you would use us to help them brighten it. God, we pray for the days ahead that you promised through your son, that you won through his death on the cross. Where in your presence we finally at long last experience fullness of joy. God, I pray for my brothers and sisters who are sad and who are downtrodden and ask that you would pick them up, that they would know today that you love them, that you care for them, that more than anything, they matter deeply to you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. We've been moving through a series called Big Emotions. This is part six of the series. And within this series, as we kind of planned it, I realized that we needed to have a morning like this morning where we talk about some of the heavier, harder emotions that we can experience in life. In the past just few months, I had a lunch with a young man who was and is a recovering alcoholic, and actually today is his one-year sober anniversary, so we're excited for him today. Yeah, he's not here. That's okay. He didn't hear how much you didn't, how tepid that was. If he were here, I would have. But we're thrilled about that. And he shared with me as I talked with him about a story that part of what led him down that path is dealing with a depression. This creeping sense that he wasn't going to be who everyone expected him to be and who he was. And it was this feeling of not mattering anymore, of not living up to things that sent him into a depression that caused him to seek out some help for that from chemicals. In the past couple months, I've talked with two different dads in our community whose daughters are struggling mightily with depression. You could even call it a crippling depression. And one of them even shared with me that he's learned through her struggle that that's what he's always dealt with. He just never had the words to put around what he was feeling, or it's entirely possible because men are stupid, that he just didn't allow himself to admit that he was sad because we're too manly for that. I've sat with people in the wake of great loss. Sat with a family, and I won't detail the struggles, but they just kind of, life just keeps running them ashore, man. Life just keeps beating them up. I get texts from them, and I'm like, God, you've got to be kidding me with what they're having to walk through, and I'm certain. As a matter of fact, I know for a fact that some of them are staving off bouts of depression and anxiety and deep grief and deep sadness. In my own family, on both my side and Jen's side, Jen's my wife, on both my side and Jen's side, we have depression in our family. We're walking through it. Sometimes it's harder than other times. Sometimes it's more extreme than other cases, but it touches us and it touches our lives too. And I know that each of us deals with or loves someone who deals with depression, grief, melancholy, sadness from time to time, these seasons in life that just feel dark and heavy. And I also know that many more of us deal with feelings of insignificance, like we don't matter. I know firsthand that being, because of walking through it with my wife, that being a stay-at-home mom can make you feel very small. It can make your world feel very inconsequential, that all you are is the nursemaid for a toddler or a shuttle service for your kids or whatever it might be. Being a parent can sometimes make your world feel very small. As you age, sometimes your world can start to feel smaller and smaller and the things you do less and less significant. And some of us have gone from seasons of mattering a great deal to mattering not very much. Some of us have gone from having great identities that we are proud of to these small identities that we kind of wander in and aren't used to yet. And so I know that in our family of faith, in our congregation, in this room, and the people watching online, the people who will hear this later, all of us have dealt with personally or love someone dearly who struggles with bouts of depression, with grief, with sadness, with loss, or even insignificance. And so I thought it was absolutely appropriate to take a Sunday while we talk about big emotions and talk about these. And I thought it would be really helpful for us as we identify with that sadness, with that grief, with that inadequacy, to look at someone in the Bible who also dealt with that and to see how God meets him in this place. So we're going to look at just a part of the story of a prophet named Elijah. Now, many of you were not here years ago when I did a whole series in the summer on Elijah, or if you were here, you were probably at the beach and didn't hear it. So some of this stuff will be reviewed, but maybe not much. I'm not going to tell you the whole story of the life of the prophet of Elijah, but he is one of God's, as Aaron said in the announcements, one of God's great servants. Elijah was so great. In fact, I'm not sure I need to tell you anything else about his life, but at the end of his life, as he was aging and the end was near, he's walking with his disciple, Elisha, and on the west bank of the Jordan River and Elijah decides that he needs to go to the eastern bank of the Jordan River and so he just parts the waters and walks across it like this miracle of convenience. Like the ark stopped the Jordan River so that God himself could move into the promised land with his people and then Moses parted the waters so that God's people could escape from the Pharaoh. And Elijah parted the water so that his sandals wouldn't get wet. That's just okay. He just puts his cloak in the water, parts it, walks through, come on, Elisha, and then they go through. And when they get on the other side, a chariot descends down out of heaven. An angelic chariot comes down and scoops Elijah up and takes him to heaven. Dude was so righteous, he caught an Uber ride to the pearly gates because God didn't want him to experience death. We see Elijah again in the New Testament at the Mount of Transfiguration when he appears along with Moses to Jesus to strengthen him and encourage him. He's a major figure in the Old Testament and a hero of the faith. And when I say it's difficult for anyone to get closer to God than Elijah was, I mean it literally because all of us in here are very likely going to experience death. He did not have to. And yet, in his life, we see pretty convincing evidence that at least in this season, Elijah was low. He struggled mightily with depression and insignificance. And so I think it's worth looking at this part of his story and seeing how God responds there. The part of the story that I'm going to present to you is somewhere, I would guess, about 45 to 50 days of his life. So I'm not even sure you could call it a season. It was just a time of his life when he was low. We don't know if there were other times or not. One would assume that there were. But here we get just a snippet or a snapshot of Elijah's, what I believe to be, depression, at least in this season. We're going to be looking, and not yet, but if you have a Bible, you can turn there. 1 Kings chapter 19. If you don't have one, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Unless you're watching from home, I don't know what's in your seat backs. But in 1 Kings chapter 18 is the big showdown, the big thing that Elijah's famous for, the showdown with the prophets of Baal. And I don't have time to give the full treatment to the story. I wish I did because it's a fantastic story and you should really read it. But the predominant religion at this time was worshiping this God named Baal. The king was Ahab, the queen was Jezebel. They were evil and they supported this idol worship. The followers of God were pressed into the margins and the fringes. And Elijah was by all accounts, essentially the chief priest for God at the time and the head prophet. And so he goes to Mount Carmel and he has this showdown with the prophets of Baal. There's 450 prophets of Baal. And they make this deal that they're each going to build an altar. And whichever God from heaven itself lights the altars on fire first, that's the best God. And the other one has to take his ball and go home. And so they start this competition. And Elijah, I just have to point out, he says one of the best lines in the Bible. He is a sarcastic jerk, which breathed life into me from God himself. And Baal is not responding and lighting the altar on fire. And he's making fun of them. Maybe you should yell louder, yada, yada. And at. And at one point, he's like, maybe he can't hear you because he's in his heavenly bathroom taking a Tuesdays. Maybe that's what's going on, which is phenomenal. It's the kind of stuff you get here at Grace Riley. And after they give up, Elijah prays this humble prayer. God, it's time. God sends fire from heaven, lights the altar on fire, and Elijah has all 450 prophets arrested and put to death. After this, the beginning of chapter 19, Elijah's praying. There had been a drought for three years in Israel, and God told Elijah that the drought's going to be over. Get ready for rain. And then swept Elijah with the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God sweeps Elijah to Jerusalem. So he beats Ahab's chariot back to Jerusalem. When Ahab, the king, gets to Jerusalem, he goes to Jezebel, the queen, and he tells Jezebel all that Elijah has done. She responds by sending a messenger to Elijah that says, everything that you did to my prophets, I'm going to do to you, and it's going to be worse. I'm going to kill you. And this is interesting because a couple chapters later in 2 Kings chapter 1, she tries to send soldiers to kill Elijah. And Elijah says, I'm a man of God, and if you try to arrest me, then he's going to send fire and kill you. And then they do, and then he does. Three times. Dude has nothing to be scared of. He has the protection of God on his head. He has the hand of God on him. But when the messenger reaches Elijah this time and says, Jezebel's wants to kill him. And in fear, he flees a day into the wilderness. He gets done with that day and he sits down and he prays a prayer that I hope none of us have prayed, but I bet some of us have. God, it would be better if I were dead. Please take my life. I'm done. I'm no better than my father's. I have nothing left to give. I'm exhausted. I did this great miracle in your name, won a great victory, and it's like it doesn't matter. She's going to kill me. Do you understand that he was despaired to his point of death? He was despairing for his life. Do you understand that he went to sleep under that broom tree, that he closed his eyes praying, God, please don't let me wake up? You understand that when Elijah's eyes were opened that he was disappointed? I don't know if you have ever gone to sleep and before you went to sleep, you prayed, God, please don't let me wake up on this side of eternity. But I bet some of you have. I bet we know people who have felt what Elijah felt. God, I'm going to sleep and I don't want to wake up. This world has nothing left for me. I don't want to be here. No one cares about me. I don't matter. This needs to be over. It would be better off if I were in eternity than here any longer. Please don't let me wake up when I go to sleep, God. Elijah is despairing unto death. And is at, by all estimations, a very low point. But God wakes him up. He wakes him up with an angel who feeds him, gives him food. I love that that's God's response to the dark night of the soul. Like a loving divine grandma. Here, just eat a little something. You'll feel better after some cookies. Elijah goes back to sleep. The angel wakes him up again. Says, you're going to need this for your journey. You're going to Mount Horeb. So he eats and he travels 40 days to Mount Horeb. And God tells him when he gets there, go up into this cave. I'm going to talk to you there. And when he gets up to the cave, God speaks to him and he says, Elijah, what are you doing? And Elijah says, my part. I've served you well. I've done everything I'm supposed to do. And they've killed all my friends. They've killed all my companions. I, even I, only am left. There is no one left in Israel like me. I am totally alone, God. I have no friends. I have no family. I have no companions. I have no love. I have no camaraderie. I'm alone and I'm destitute and nobody cares about me anymore, God. This time when I go to sleep, can I please just not wake up? I'm done. This is an articulation of the lowest of lows in his life. I, even I only, am left. I have no friends. I have no family. I have no companions. It's just me, and I'm tired. And God says, I'm going to speak to you again. And it's this remarkable passage where Elijah is sitting in the cave on the side of this mountain. And the text tells us that there's this great earthquake and the ground shakes and the stones tremble and the trees shake. And you think surely that God's voice is in the earthquake, but he's not in the earthquake. And then God sends this fire by the mouth of the cave that consumes everything in its path, and you think, surely God is in the fire, and he's not in the fire. And he sends a mighty wind that shakes and vibrates and stirs and scares, and you think, surely God is in the wind, and he's not in the wind. And then scripture says there's a gentle whisper and God is in the whisper. And Elijah goes out to the mouth of the cave and God says, what are you doing, Elijah? And Elijah gives the exact same response in verses 14, in verse 14 that he did in verse 10. I've been very jealous for you. I've served you well. And I've put all my friends to the sword, and I, even I only, am left. And God hears him. And he says, I want you to go do something for me. I want you to go appoint this man and this man kings of their different areas. I've still got stuff for you to do. Go make them kings. And when you do, here's what's going to happen. Now go. And on his way to go do that, he comes across a man plowing in his field named Elisha. And he grabs Elisha and he says, I'm going to essentially make you my disciple. Come and follow me. I'm going to teach you to be a prophet like I'm a prophet. And Elisha goes and tells his parents that he's leaving and he leaves and he goes with Elijah. And he spends the rest of his life following Elijah. And when Elijah goes up into heaven on the chariot, his cloak wafts back down to Elisha, and Elisha receives a double portion of the Holy Spirit that Elijah had, and outperforms Elijah in miracles and in all the other things, has a greater ministry than Elijah did. And it can be argued that Elisha is probably the greater impact than defeating the prophets of Baal, that Elisha may have been Elijah's greatest work. But without question, in this 45 to 50 day period, we see one of the great servants of God at a low point in his life. We see him despair unto death. We see him go to sleep and not want to wake up. We see him express solitude and isolation, feeling completely alone and wanting to die. We see him despairing. What we see, I think, at least for this season, is a depression. And if you look at what he says, and if we think about what we've experienced when we've been low, then what we understand is that depression silently screams, you don't matter. Depression silently screams at you that you don't matter, that nothing you do matters. Look at what Elijah says the first time. I'm the only one left. I did everything you wanted me to do. Now they're going to kill me, and I'd rather just die I'm no better than my father's. I have nothing left to give God. My best days are behind me. I have no bigger miracles to work. I've done everything I can do. All that's left is waiting for death. Please just go ahead and take me. And it occurs to me as I reflect on Elijah voicing in that way that he felt like he no longer mattered. That one of the great strengths of grace is having a generationally diverse congregation. I love that about our church. And what I'm about to say is in no way a joke. This is not a time for stupid jokes. I'm not doing that. It occurs to me that a large portion of us, a large portion of you, you've reached the end of your career, the last portions of your career. You've ended your career and you're in retirement. You've raised your kids. Maybe you've even helped raise your grandkids. In your mind, you've shifted. I've seen the shift in men and women that I love. From wanting to build a name for yourself to thinking about what kind of name you're leaving behind. You've shifted from establishment to legacy. And you've accepted that you are in the twilight of your life. And I think it would be very easy to become convinced in that season that your best days are behind you, that you've done the great work that you're going to do. You've climbed the biggest mountain that you're going to climb. You've defeated more prophets then than you ever will in the future. I think it would be very difficult to have lived a life where in one setting you were important. Your voice mattered. People came to you for your opinion. They paid a fair amount of money for your time to a place where people don't come as much anymore and they don't ask as much anymore and your voice isn't as weighty as it used to be and you become convinced that my best days are behind me and if we're not careful, we can slip into, as Elijah did, just kind of waiting for the last day to get here because I have nothing left to give. And so I think in that way, even if we're not people who are depressed, we can hear that message of the world and that message of depression creeping into our hearts. Hey, you don't matter. Your best days are behind you. Or we can feel insignificant for other reasons. Our role in life right now reduces us. We have a thankless job and a somewhat thankless marriage with thankless kids, and we just feel small, and no one tells us that we're good enough, and no one tells us that they respect us, and no one tells us that they're grateful for us. We can move through seasons of life where we just feel like we're going through the motions, and we feel so insignificant and small. I know firsthand that when I preach sermons about God having a purpose for us, God having a use for us, when I quote one of my favorite verses, Ephesians 2.10, for we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, that we might walk in them. And I encourage you guys, identify your good works and walk in them. I know that there's a large portion of you that hear that and go, yes, that's good. I have no idea what my good works are. I have no idea how God gifted me. God's gifted other people to do other things, but he has not gifted me in any significant way. So the best thing I can do is just keep my head down and be nice because I don't really matter that much in God's kingdom. That's what Elijah was saying. I, even I only, am left. I don't matter. There's nothing around me that's important. And I talked with some friends of mine who deal with depression more than I do. Candidly, this is not something that I'm given to struggle with. I have other struggles, and I'm pretty transparent with you about those. For this one, I had to outsource a lot of it. So this idea that depression silently screams at us that we don't matter, that's not my idea. That came from someone who walks it. And then I called someone else who probably deals with depression in a little bit more profound way, and I said, hey, does this check out with you? If I say that depression insists that we don't matter, does that resonate? And he said, yeah, but it's worse than that. He says, my depression tells me that it doesn't matter, that nothing matters, let alone me. And so if you've ever sat in that place, or you've loved someone who sits in that place, when we start to listen to the voices that tell us that we don't matter, I think God's response to Elijah when he was giving into those voices should breathe some fresh air into our lungs. And here's what God does to Elijah. We go back through the story. Here's what we see him doing. God strengthens, whispers to, sends, and encourages Elijah. And I think all of those things are important. He strengthens Elijah. He whispers to Elijah. He sends Elijah. And then he finally encourages Elijah. He strengthens him. He literally wakes him up and gives him food. You're going to need this for your journey. He literally wakes him up again and gives him some food. You're going to need this for your journey. Eat up. He strengthens him. He gives him enough to get through the day. Whatever you need to get through today, God gives that to you to sustain you. That's the daily bread. That's the manna. That's the daily sustenance of God showing up and sustaining you for today. I shared with you a few weeks back that I was reading the Beth Moore biography, and she encountered her mother-in-law had walked through a tremendous trial, and she said, how do you do it? How did you giving me strength for that day. I'm reminded of this famous passage in Isaiah 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. God will sustain us if we trust him to do it. He will strengthen us in the darkest of days when it's so dark and so heavy and so cloudy that we can't see a glimmer of light or a glimmer of hope. God, if we have within us one ounce that is willing to reach out to God and ask him for that day, he will sustain you that day. He will whisper to you. I love that we have a God that speaks to us in the whisper. In the most unexpected places, in the most unexpected ways, God shows up with his presence. A few weeks ago in men's Bible study, one of the guys shared his story. He's a little bit older now, late 50s, early 60s, than he was when this happened. But at some point in his life, I'm not sure when, but he lost his wife. Lost his wife to breast cancer. I can't imagine the pain of losing a spouse or a child. Losing a parent is hard. But I bet losing a spouse or a child is harder. I used to work at a school years ago and there was this woman named Emmeline McKinnon who founded the school. Wonderful lady, everybody loved her. A few years ago, she passed away from cancer, and her husband, in his grief, took his own life too, a few days later. And to anyone with a heart, when they hear that story, I think they say, I get that. They loved each other for 60 years. How do you keep opening up your eyes after that? So understand it. I empathize with it. And I don't condemn it. And my friend was walking through that grief. Did not have kids. No one was relying on him. He was in the depths of sadness. And so he made the decision that he was going to go to heaven to be with her because he didn't want to be here. He went and acquired whatever it was he needed to acquire to put together a cocktail so that when he drank it, he would be in heaven with his wife. He went home, put it in the blender, started to mix it up. As the blender was going, the phone rang. So he stops it. He answers the phone. The person on the other end says, hey, is this so-and-so? He says, yeah, who's this? And he says, well, I'm Dr. So-and-so. I was your wife's optometrist. And my buddy said, I haven't heard from you in years. How you doing? And he said, I'm doing good. I just wanted to call you and tell you how special your wife was and how sorry I am for your loss. And my buddy said, well, thanks. I appreciate that. He said, how are you doing with it? And he lied, and he said, I'm doing fine. The way you're supposed to lie in polite society. And the doctor said, hey, I don't know if you're a religious man, but I am. And I feel like I need to tell you that God has been really pressing on me to call you. He's been doing it for a couple of weeks, and I'm sorry, I'm the worst. I've been putting it off. Every time he presses on me to call you, I kind of have something else pressing, and I think, yep, I need to do that, and I set it aside, and I mean to do it later. He said, but about five minutes ago, I felt the press again. And I was in the middle of doing paperwork, and I tried to put it off, but God would not let me put it off. He would not relent, and I just really felt like I needed to call you. So how are you doing? And my buddy really told him how he was doing and what he was up to that day. And they cried together and prayed together. And my buddy dumped it down the drain. Lived to remarry, to love nieces and nephews, and to sit in that circle and tell us that story. God whispered to him that day. So not only will God whisper to you, but sometimes he'll use you to whisper as well. When he's prompting you to do it. Do it. And then, God doesn't just whisper to Elijah. He sends him. And I love the matter-of-factness of God sending him. Because it's like, Elijah, listen, I can see that you're clearly bummed out, but I've got some things I need to do. There's some guys who need to be named king. They don't have kings right now. They need to be anointed. So I need you to get back to work. Go appoint these kings. He sends them. He says, I'm not done with you yet. I know you feel like you're done because you finished this thing with the prophets of Baal, and now there's nothing left to do. There's stuff to do, Elijah, and I need you to get to it. And I was actually talking with my dad this week. I wouldn't call it arguing. We weren't arguing. We were just kind of going back and forth, as we are wont to do, about what the greatest work was in Elijah's life. Was it the prophets of Baal? Or was it the training and developing of Elisha and leaving him behind as a legacy? Which one was bigger? And in the middle of the discussion, I said, Dad, this is really a stupid conversation. Which usually he's the one that gets to do that. So I was happy to be the one that got to do it this time. This is a really stupid conversation. And I just pointed out to him, the size of our works don't matter nearly as much as the faithfulness of our works. Who cares if the miracle with Baal was the bigger deal than anointing a king or naming a successor or raising someone's son from the dead? Who cares what the bigger miracle was, the size of the work, the grandeur of the work, the import of the work? Who cares if that's bigger than what's left? For those of us who maybe our best years are behind us, maybe the biggest thing we've done is behind us. Maybe the most important thing you think you'll do from a human perspective is already in your past and not as big of things are waiting on you in your future. I think that's silly. God could care less about the size of our work. Like God's impressed with the size of any work. What matters is our faithfulness within the works that he gives us for as many years as he gives us. Here's how I know it's true. I know that you guys would support me in this. Right now, there's probably about 200 people here this Sunday morning. If next week you snapped your fingers and you made grace 2,000 people? Would my work next week in preaching be any more impactful, any more great, any more important to God? Would I somehow be more spiritual next week preaching to 2,000 people than I am this week preaching to 200? Would I somehow be more faithful or more loved next week preaching to 2,000 people than I am faithful or loved in preaching to you today? No! It's stupid. The size of our work is irrelevant. It's our faithfulness within what he gives us. What lies ahead of you is not insignificant if God has placed it there. What's significant is your faithfulness as you are obedient to that. And after he sends Elijah, he encourages him. He peels back the curtain a little bit. And he says, hey, I know you think you're the last one here. There's 7,000 more just like you. I've kept them for myself. They have not been the need of bail. You're not alone. You have companions. You have friends. And I see you. And I'm not expecting you to carry all this weight. Now go do what I've asked you to do. What we see in the story of Elijah. If depression says, you don't matter, and if Elijah's expressing, God, I don't matter, and I am alone, then what God says in the strengthening and in the whispering and in the sending and the encouraging from a megaphone is, Elijah, you matter, you matter, you matter, you matter. I see you. I know you. I love you. What you're doing is important. And what he says to us and what he says to you and what I hope you hear is that you matter. Look, the love of God drowns out other voices and gently reminds you of how much you matter. The love of God and the strengthening and in the whispering and in the sending and the purposing and in the encouraging remind you in these subtle ways, I know life is hard. You matter. I know you feel insignificant. You matter. I know the world is trying to convince you that you don't matter, but I'm telling you that you do. Sorry, it's been an emotional week for me. One of the people I reached out to shared with me that he'll walk through really dark depression for months and sometimes a year at a time. And as I was walking through with him what I wanted to share, I admitted my own feelings of inadequacy to even address what it's like to actually be deeply depressed. Because I know that there's some depression that words don't touch. It just doesn't matter what I say. It doesn't matter what I pray. It doesn't matter how I encourage. There's just some depression that you walk through that's so dark and so difficult that words don't touch it and arrest you from it. And so I said, in your greatest times of trial, what helped you? And as I even admit the own inadequacy of my words to you, what can I say to help you? And he said, let me write you an email because I'm better with my thoughts like that. And he responded with some very helpful things, but one thing he said was so profound that I thought I wanted to share it with you this morning. He wrote me this. Solitude and isolation are freedom. They're the ability to define you as you wish because there's no consequence to any decision you can make. If you decide to surrender, there's no consequence. Your story ends and nobody else is there to see. Nobody else is there to care. Nobody else is there to respond. The profundity of that struck me as I read it in my office. That when you are deeply depressed and you are convinced that it doesn't matter and that you don't matter, that you are all alone and no one sees you. That you're isolated. In your solitude. But then that is freedom because you can do whatever you want and no one's going to care. And I thought, my gosh. That's a low place. But then he said, but it's because of, and this is a paraphrase, we have a conversation preceding this to help me understand that what he meant in our language is that because of the cross, because I know Jesus died for me, because I know God made promises to me. Because I know I matter enough to God for him to send his son. He said this, because it means, because of the cross, it means that there is no way not to be seen. There is no situation in which you are finally, truly, absolutely alone. You understand the cross stands eternally reminding you of how much you matter, that in the depths of not mattering, in the depths of despair, in the depths of I'm not important and I don't matter to anyone and no one sees me and no one cares about me and it might just be better if I weren't here, that even in the depths of that, that God sent his son to die for you, to claim you back to him. And before you say, no, he did that for other people. No, no, he did that for you. If you're the only person on this earth, he still would have sent his son to die for you, to reclaim you to the heaven that he created for you. And if we will cling to the cross, to the glimmer of light that shines through the millennia, we can take hope and solace in the fact that there's going to be a day where depression doesn't exist and where the darkness goes away and every day is bright and filled with joy. And I might not get to experience those here today, right now, but I will one day. And if I cling to that cross, God's promised that I matter, that there will be days where this will let up, where I will see joy, where I will live in the fullness of life, but even if it doesn't come, there's an eternity where I'll see that every day. We sang a few minutes ago that you're fighting a battle that I've already won. I'm fighting a battle that you've already won. This is the battle, and it was won on the cross. So let God strengthen you today. Let him whisper to you today. And hear me say that you matter to your God. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your son. Thank you for who he is. We thank you for loving us. Lord, I lift up those that feel sad or depressed or insignificant or unwanted or unwarranted. God, it is my fervent prayer that they would be strengthened today. That they would get enough from today to keep clinging to you. God, for those we love who live in a cloud of darkness from time to time, we pray that you would use us to help them brighten it. God, we pray for the days ahead that you promised through your son, that you won through his death on the cross. Where in your presence we finally at long last experience fullness of joy. God, I pray for my brothers and sisters who are sad and who are downtrodden and ask that you would pick them up, that they would know today that you love them, that you care for them, that more than anything, they matter deeply to you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. We've been moving through a series called Big Emotions. This is part six of the series. And within this series, as we kind of planned it, I realized that we needed to have a morning like this morning where we talk about some of the heavier, harder emotions that we can experience in life. In the past just few months, I had a lunch with a young man who was and is a recovering alcoholic, and actually today is his one-year sober anniversary, so we're excited for him today. Yeah, he's not here. That's okay. He didn't hear how much you didn't, how tepid that was. If he were here, I would have. But we're thrilled about that. And he shared with me as I talked with him about a story that part of what led him down that path is dealing with a depression. This creeping sense that he wasn't going to be who everyone expected him to be and who he was. And it was this feeling of not mattering anymore, of not living up to things that sent him into a depression that caused him to seek out some help for that from chemicals. In the past couple months, I've talked with two different dads in our community whose daughters are struggling mightily with depression. You could even call it a crippling depression. And one of them even shared with me that he's learned through her struggle that that's what he's always dealt with. He just never had the words to put around what he was feeling, or it's entirely possible because men are stupid, that he just didn't allow himself to admit that he was sad because we're too manly for that. I've sat with people in the wake of great loss. Sat with a family, and I won't detail the struggles, but they just kind of, life just keeps running them ashore, man. Life just keeps beating them up. I get texts from them, and I'm like, God, you've got to be kidding me with what they're having to walk through, and I'm certain. As a matter of fact, I know for a fact that some of them are staving off bouts of depression and anxiety and deep grief and deep sadness. In my own family, on both my side and Jen's side, Jen's my wife, on both my side and Jen's side, we have depression in our family. We're walking through it. Sometimes it's harder than other times. Sometimes it's more extreme than other cases, but it touches us and it touches our lives too. And I know that each of us deals with or loves someone who deals with depression, grief, melancholy, sadness from time to time, these seasons in life that just feel dark and heavy. And I also know that many more of us deal with feelings of insignificance, like we don't matter. I know firsthand that being, because of walking through it with my wife, that being a stay-at-home mom can make you feel very small. It can make your world feel very inconsequential, that all you are is the nursemaid for a toddler or a shuttle service for your kids or whatever it might be. Being a parent can sometimes make your world feel very small. As you age, sometimes your world can start to feel smaller and smaller and the things you do less and less significant. And some of us have gone from seasons of mattering a great deal to mattering not very much. Some of us have gone from having great identities that we are proud of to these small identities that we kind of wander in and aren't used to yet. And so I know that in our family of faith, in our congregation, in this room, and the people watching online, the people who will hear this later, all of us have dealt with personally or love someone dearly who struggles with bouts of depression, with grief, with sadness, with loss, or even insignificance. And so I thought it was absolutely appropriate to take a Sunday while we talk about big emotions and talk about these. And I thought it would be really helpful for us as we identify with that sadness, with that grief, with that inadequacy, to look at someone in the Bible who also dealt with that and to see how God meets him in this place. So we're going to look at just a part of the story of a prophet named Elijah. Now, many of you were not here years ago when I did a whole series in the summer on Elijah, or if you were here, you were probably at the beach and didn't hear it. So some of this stuff will be reviewed, but maybe not much. I'm not going to tell you the whole story of the life of the prophet of Elijah, but he is one of God's, as Aaron said in the announcements, one of God's great servants. Elijah was so great. In fact, I'm not sure I need to tell you anything else about his life, but at the end of his life, as he was aging and the end was near, he's walking with his disciple, Elisha, and on the west bank of the Jordan River and Elijah decides that he needs to go to the eastern bank of the Jordan River and so he just parts the waters and walks across it like this miracle of convenience. Like the ark stopped the Jordan River so that God himself could move into the promised land with his people and then Moses parted the waters so that God's people could escape from the Pharaoh. And Elijah parted the water so that his sandals wouldn't get wet. That's just okay. He just puts his cloak in the water, parts it, walks through, come on, Elisha, and then they go through. And when they get on the other side, a chariot descends down out of heaven. An angelic chariot comes down and scoops Elijah up and takes him to heaven. Dude was so righteous, he caught an Uber ride to the pearly gates because God didn't want him to experience death. We see Elijah again in the New Testament at the Mount of Transfiguration when he appears along with Moses to Jesus to strengthen him and encourage him. He's a major figure in the Old Testament and a hero of the faith. And when I say it's difficult for anyone to get closer to God than Elijah was, I mean it literally because all of us in here are very likely going to experience death. He did not have to. And yet, in his life, we see pretty convincing evidence that at least in this season, Elijah was low. He struggled mightily with depression and insignificance. And so I think it's worth looking at this part of his story and seeing how God responds there. The part of the story that I'm going to present to you is somewhere, I would guess, about 45 to 50 days of his life. So I'm not even sure you could call it a season. It was just a time of his life when he was low. We don't know if there were other times or not. One would assume that there were. But here we get just a snippet or a snapshot of Elijah's, what I believe to be, depression, at least in this season. We're going to be looking, and not yet, but if you have a Bible, you can turn there. 1 Kings chapter 19. If you don't have one, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Unless you're watching from home, I don't know what's in your seat backs. But in 1 Kings chapter 18 is the big showdown, the big thing that Elijah's famous for, the showdown with the prophets of Baal. And I don't have time to give the full treatment to the story. I wish I did because it's a fantastic story and you should really read it. But the predominant religion at this time was worshiping this God named Baal. The king was Ahab, the queen was Jezebel. They were evil and they supported this idol worship. The followers of God were pressed into the margins and the fringes. And Elijah was by all accounts, essentially the chief priest for God at the time and the head prophet. And so he goes to Mount Carmel and he has this showdown with the prophets of Baal. There's 450 prophets of Baal. And they make this deal that they're each going to build an altar. And whichever God from heaven itself lights the altars on fire first, that's the best God. And the other one has to take his ball and go home. And so they start this competition. And Elijah, I just have to point out, he says one of the best lines in the Bible. He is a sarcastic jerk, which breathed life into me from God himself. And Baal is not responding and lighting the altar on fire. And he's making fun of them. Maybe you should yell louder, yada, yada. And at. And at one point, he's like, maybe he can't hear you because he's in his heavenly bathroom taking a Tuesdays. Maybe that's what's going on, which is phenomenal. It's the kind of stuff you get here at Grace Riley. And after they give up, Elijah prays this humble prayer. God, it's time. God sends fire from heaven, lights the altar on fire, and Elijah has all 450 prophets arrested and put to death. After this, the beginning of chapter 19, Elijah's praying. There had been a drought for three years in Israel, and God told Elijah that the drought's going to be over. Get ready for rain. And then swept Elijah with the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God sweeps Elijah to Jerusalem. So he beats Ahab's chariot back to Jerusalem. When Ahab, the king, gets to Jerusalem, he goes to Jezebel, the queen, and he tells Jezebel all that Elijah has done. She responds by sending a messenger to Elijah that says, everything that you did to my prophets, I'm going to do to you, and it's going to be worse. I'm going to kill you. And this is interesting because a couple chapters later in 2 Kings chapter 1, she tries to send soldiers to kill Elijah. And Elijah says, I'm a man of God, and if you try to arrest me, then he's going to send fire and kill you. And then they do, and then he does. Three times. Dude has nothing to be scared of. He has the protection of God on his head. He has the hand of God on him. But when the messenger reaches Elijah this time and says, Jezebel's wants to kill him. And in fear, he flees a day into the wilderness. He gets done with that day and he sits down and he prays a prayer that I hope none of us have prayed, but I bet some of us have. God, it would be better if I were dead. Please take my life. I'm done. I'm no better than my father's. I have nothing left to give. I'm exhausted. I did this great miracle in your name, won a great victory, and it's like it doesn't matter. She's going to kill me. Do you understand that he was despaired to his point of death? He was despairing for his life. Do you understand that he went to sleep under that broom tree, that he closed his eyes praying, God, please don't let me wake up? You understand that when Elijah's eyes were opened that he was disappointed? I don't know if you have ever gone to sleep and before you went to sleep, you prayed, God, please don't let me wake up on this side of eternity. But I bet some of you have. I bet we know people who have felt what Elijah felt. God, I'm going to sleep and I don't want to wake up. This world has nothing left for me. I don't want to be here. No one cares about me. I don't matter. This needs to be over. It would be better off if I were in eternity than here any longer. Please don't let me wake up when I go to sleep, God. Elijah is despairing unto death. And is at, by all estimations, a very low point. But God wakes him up. He wakes him up with an angel who feeds him, gives him food. I love that that's God's response to the dark night of the soul. Like a loving divine grandma. Here, just eat a little something. You'll feel better after some cookies. Elijah goes back to sleep. The angel wakes him up again. Says, you're going to need this for your journey. You're going to Mount Horeb. So he eats and he travels 40 days to Mount Horeb. And God tells him when he gets there, go up into this cave. I'm going to talk to you there. And when he gets up to the cave, God speaks to him and he says, Elijah, what are you doing? And Elijah says, my part. I've served you well. I've done everything I'm supposed to do. And they've killed all my friends. They've killed all my companions. I, even I, only am left. There is no one left in Israel like me. I am totally alone, God. I have no friends. I have no family. I have no companions. I have no love. I have no camaraderie. I'm alone and I'm destitute and nobody cares about me anymore, God. This time when I go to sleep, can I please just not wake up? I'm done. This is an articulation of the lowest of lows in his life. I, even I only, am left. I have no friends. I have no family. I have no companions. It's just me, and I'm tired. And God says, I'm going to speak to you again. And it's this remarkable passage where Elijah is sitting in the cave on the side of this mountain. And the text tells us that there's this great earthquake and the ground shakes and the stones tremble and the trees shake. And you think surely that God's voice is in the earthquake, but he's not in the earthquake. And then God sends this fire by the mouth of the cave that consumes everything in its path, and you think, surely God is in the fire, and he's not in the fire. And he sends a mighty wind that shakes and vibrates and stirs and scares, and you think, surely God is in the wind, and he's not in the wind. And then scripture says there's a gentle whisper and God is in the whisper. And Elijah goes out to the mouth of the cave and God says, what are you doing, Elijah? And Elijah gives the exact same response in verses 14, in verse 14 that he did in verse 10. I've been very jealous for you. I've served you well. And I've put all my friends to the sword, and I, even I only, am left. And God hears him. And he says, I want you to go do something for me. I want you to go appoint this man and this man kings of their different areas. I've still got stuff for you to do. Go make them kings. And when you do, here's what's going to happen. Now go. And on his way to go do that, he comes across a man plowing in his field named Elisha. And he grabs Elisha and he says, I'm going to essentially make you my disciple. Come and follow me. I'm going to teach you to be a prophet like I'm a prophet. And Elisha goes and tells his parents that he's leaving and he leaves and he goes with Elijah. And he spends the rest of his life following Elijah. And when Elijah goes up into heaven on the chariot, his cloak wafts back down to Elisha, and Elisha receives a double portion of the Holy Spirit that Elijah had, and outperforms Elijah in miracles and in all the other things, has a greater ministry than Elijah did. And it can be argued that Elisha is probably the greater impact than defeating the prophets of Baal, that Elisha may have been Elijah's greatest work. But without question, in this 45 to 50 day period, we see one of the great servants of God at a low point in his life. We see him despair unto death. We see him go to sleep and not want to wake up. We see him express solitude and isolation, feeling completely alone and wanting to die. We see him despairing. What we see, I think, at least for this season, is a depression. And if you look at what he says, and if we think about what we've experienced when we've been low, then what we understand is that depression silently screams, you don't matter. Depression silently screams at you that you don't matter, that nothing you do matters. Look at what Elijah says the first time. I'm the only one left. I did everything you wanted me to do. Now they're going to kill me, and I'd rather just die I'm no better than my father's. I have nothing left to give God. My best days are behind me. I have no bigger miracles to work. I've done everything I can do. All that's left is waiting for death. Please just go ahead and take me. And it occurs to me as I reflect on Elijah voicing in that way that he felt like he no longer mattered. That one of the great strengths of grace is having a generationally diverse congregation. I love that about our church. And what I'm about to say is in no way a joke. This is not a time for stupid jokes. I'm not doing that. It occurs to me that a large portion of us, a large portion of you, you've reached the end of your career, the last portions of your career. You've ended your career and you're in retirement. You've raised your kids. Maybe you've even helped raise your grandkids. In your mind, you've shifted. I've seen the shift in men and women that I love. From wanting to build a name for yourself to thinking about what kind of name you're leaving behind. You've shifted from establishment to legacy. And you've accepted that you are in the twilight of your life. And I think it would be very easy to become convinced in that season that your best days are behind you, that you've done the great work that you're going to do. You've climbed the biggest mountain that you're going to climb. You've defeated more prophets then than you ever will in the future. I think it would be very difficult to have lived a life where in one setting you were important. Your voice mattered. People came to you for your opinion. They paid a fair amount of money for your time to a place where people don't come as much anymore and they don't ask as much anymore and your voice isn't as weighty as it used to be and you become convinced that my best days are behind me and if we're not careful, we can slip into, as Elijah did, just kind of waiting for the last day to get here because I have nothing left to give. And so I think in that way, even if we're not people who are depressed, we can hear that message of the world and that message of depression creeping into our hearts. Hey, you don't matter. Your best days are behind you. Or we can feel insignificant for other reasons. Our role in life right now reduces us. We have a thankless job and a somewhat thankless marriage with thankless kids, and we just feel small, and no one tells us that we're good enough, and no one tells us that they respect us, and no one tells us that they're grateful for us. We can move through seasons of life where we just feel like we're going through the motions, and we feel so insignificant and small. I know firsthand that when I preach sermons about God having a purpose for us, God having a use for us, when I quote one of my favorite verses, Ephesians 2.10, for we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, that we might walk in them. And I encourage you guys, identify your good works and walk in them. I know that there's a large portion of you that hear that and go, yes, that's good. I have no idea what my good works are. I have no idea how God gifted me. God's gifted other people to do other things, but he has not gifted me in any significant way. So the best thing I can do is just keep my head down and be nice because I don't really matter that much in God's kingdom. That's what Elijah was saying. I, even I only, am left. I don't matter. There's nothing around me that's important. And I talked with some friends of mine who deal with depression more than I do. Candidly, this is not something that I'm given to struggle with. I have other struggles, and I'm pretty transparent with you about those. For this one, I had to outsource a lot of it. So this idea that depression silently screams at us that we don't matter, that's not my idea. That came from someone who walks it. And then I called someone else who probably deals with depression in a little bit more profound way, and I said, hey, does this check out with you? If I say that depression insists that we don't matter, does that resonate? And he said, yeah, but it's worse than that. He says, my depression tells me that it doesn't matter, that nothing matters, let alone me. And so if you've ever sat in that place, or you've loved someone who sits in that place, when we start to listen to the voices that tell us that we don't matter, I think God's response to Elijah when he was giving into those voices should breathe some fresh air into our lungs. And here's what God does to Elijah. We go back through the story. Here's what we see him doing. God strengthens, whispers to, sends, and encourages Elijah. And I think all of those things are important. He strengthens Elijah. He whispers to Elijah. He sends Elijah. And then he finally encourages Elijah. He strengthens him. He literally wakes him up and gives him food. You're going to need this for your journey. He literally wakes him up again and gives him some food. You're going to need this for your journey. Eat up. He strengthens him. He gives him enough to get through the day. Whatever you need to get through today, God gives that to you to sustain you. That's the daily bread. That's the manna. That's the daily sustenance of God showing up and sustaining you for today. I shared with you a few weeks back that I was reading the Beth Moore biography, and she encountered her mother-in-law had walked through a tremendous trial, and she said, how do you do it? How did you giving me strength for that day. I'm reminded of this famous passage in Isaiah 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. God will sustain us if we trust him to do it. He will strengthen us in the darkest of days when it's so dark and so heavy and so cloudy that we can't see a glimmer of light or a glimmer of hope. God, if we have within us one ounce that is willing to reach out to God and ask him for that day, he will sustain you that day. He will whisper to you. I love that we have a God that speaks to us in the whisper. In the most unexpected places, in the most unexpected ways, God shows up with his presence. A few weeks ago in men's Bible study, one of the guys shared his story. He's a little bit older now, late 50s, early 60s, than he was when this happened. But at some point in his life, I'm not sure when, but he lost his wife. Lost his wife to breast cancer. I can't imagine the pain of losing a spouse or a child. Losing a parent is hard. But I bet losing a spouse or a child is harder. I used to work at a school years ago and there was this woman named Emmeline McKinnon who founded the school. Wonderful lady, everybody loved her. A few years ago, she passed away from cancer, and her husband, in his grief, took his own life too, a few days later. And to anyone with a heart, when they hear that story, I think they say, I get that. They loved each other for 60 years. How do you keep opening up your eyes after that? So understand it. I empathize with it. And I don't condemn it. And my friend was walking through that grief. Did not have kids. No one was relying on him. He was in the depths of sadness. And so he made the decision that he was going to go to heaven to be with her because he didn't want to be here. He went and acquired whatever it was he needed to acquire to put together a cocktail so that when he drank it, he would be in heaven with his wife. He went home, put it in the blender, started to mix it up. As the blender was going, the phone rang. So he stops it. He answers the phone. The person on the other end says, hey, is this so-and-so? He says, yeah, who's this? And he says, well, I'm Dr. So-and-so. I was your wife's optometrist. And my buddy said, I haven't heard from you in years. How you doing? And he said, I'm doing good. I just wanted to call you and tell you how special your wife was and how sorry I am for your loss. And my buddy said, well, thanks. I appreciate that. He said, how are you doing with it? And he lied, and he said, I'm doing fine. The way you're supposed to lie in polite society. And the doctor said, hey, I don't know if you're a religious man, but I am. And I feel like I need to tell you that God has been really pressing on me to call you. He's been doing it for a couple of weeks, and I'm sorry, I'm the worst. I've been putting it off. Every time he presses on me to call you, I kind of have something else pressing, and I think, yep, I need to do that, and I set it aside, and I mean to do it later. He said, but about five minutes ago, I felt the press again. And I was in the middle of doing paperwork, and I tried to put it off, but God would not let me put it off. He would not relent, and I just really felt like I needed to call you. So how are you doing? And my buddy really told him how he was doing and what he was up to that day. And they cried together and prayed together. And my buddy dumped it down the drain. Lived to remarry, to love nieces and nephews, and to sit in that circle and tell us that story. God whispered to him that day. So not only will God whisper to you, but sometimes he'll use you to whisper as well. When he's prompting you to do it. Do it. And then, God doesn't just whisper to Elijah. He sends him. And I love the matter-of-factness of God sending him. Because it's like, Elijah, listen, I can see that you're clearly bummed out, but I've got some things I need to do. There's some guys who need to be named king. They don't have kings right now. They need to be anointed. So I need you to get back to work. Go appoint these kings. He sends them. He says, I'm not done with you yet. I know you feel like you're done because you finished this thing with the prophets of Baal, and now there's nothing left to do. There's stuff to do, Elijah, and I need you to get to it. And I was actually talking with my dad this week. I wouldn't call it arguing. We weren't arguing. We were just kind of going back and forth, as we are wont to do, about what the greatest work was in Elijah's life. Was it the prophets of Baal? Or was it the training and developing of Elisha and leaving him behind as a legacy? Which one was bigger? And in the middle of the discussion, I said, Dad, this is really a stupid conversation. Which usually he's the one that gets to do that. So I was happy to be the one that got to do it this time. This is a really stupid conversation. And I just pointed out to him, the size of our works don't matter nearly as much as the faithfulness of our works. Who cares if the miracle with Baal was the bigger deal than anointing a king or naming a successor or raising someone's son from the dead? Who cares what the bigger miracle was, the size of the work, the grandeur of the work, the import of the work? Who cares if that's bigger than what's left? For those of us who maybe our best years are behind us, maybe the biggest thing we've done is behind us. Maybe the most important thing you think you'll do from a human perspective is already in your past and not as big of things are waiting on you in your future. I think that's silly. God could care less about the size of our work. Like God's impressed with the size of any work. What matters is our faithfulness within the works that he gives us for as many years as he gives us. Here's how I know it's true. I know that you guys would support me in this. Right now, there's probably about 200 people here this Sunday morning. If next week you snapped your fingers and you made grace 2,000 people? Would my work next week in preaching be any more impactful, any more great, any more important to God? Would I somehow be more spiritual next week preaching to 2,000 people than I am this week preaching to 200? Would I somehow be more faithful or more loved next week preaching to 2,000 people than I am faithful or loved in preaching to you today? No! It's stupid. The size of our work is irrelevant. It's our faithfulness within what he gives us. What lies ahead of you is not insignificant if God has placed it there. What's significant is your faithfulness as you are obedient to that. And after he sends Elijah, he encourages him. He peels back the curtain a little bit. And he says, hey, I know you think you're the last one here. There's 7,000 more just like you. I've kept them for myself. They have not been the need of bail. You're not alone. You have companions. You have friends. And I see you. And I'm not expecting you to carry all this weight. Now go do what I've asked you to do. What we see in the story of Elijah. If depression says, you don't matter, and if Elijah's expressing, God, I don't matter, and I am alone, then what God says in the strengthening and in the whispering and in the sending and the encouraging from a megaphone is, Elijah, you matter, you matter, you matter, you matter. I see you. I know you. I love you. What you're doing is important. And what he says to us and what he says to you and what I hope you hear is that you matter. Look, the love of God drowns out other voices and gently reminds you of how much you matter. The love of God and the strengthening and in the whispering and in the sending and the purposing and in the encouraging remind you in these subtle ways, I know life is hard. You matter. I know you feel insignificant. You matter. I know the world is trying to convince you that you don't matter, but I'm telling you that you do. Sorry, it's been an emotional week for me. One of the people I reached out to shared with me that he'll walk through really dark depression for months and sometimes a year at a time. And as I was walking through with him what I wanted to share, I admitted my own feelings of inadequacy to even address what it's like to actually be deeply depressed. Because I know that there's some depression that words don't touch. It just doesn't matter what I say. It doesn't matter what I pray. It doesn't matter how I encourage. There's just some depression that you walk through that's so dark and so difficult that words don't touch it and arrest you from it. And so I said, in your greatest times of trial, what helped you? And as I even admit the own inadequacy of my words to you, what can I say to help you? And he said, let me write you an email because I'm better with my thoughts like that. And he responded with some very helpful things, but one thing he said was so profound that I thought I wanted to share it with you this morning. He wrote me this. Solitude and isolation are freedom. They're the ability to define you as you wish because there's no consequence to any decision you can make. If you decide to surrender, there's no consequence. Your story ends and nobody else is there to see. Nobody else is there to care. Nobody else is there to respond. The profundity of that struck me as I read it in my office. That when you are deeply depressed and you are convinced that it doesn't matter and that you don't matter, that you are all alone and no one sees you. That you're isolated. In your solitude. But then that is freedom because you can do whatever you want and no one's going to care. And I thought, my gosh. That's a low place. But then he said, but it's because of, and this is a paraphrase, we have a conversation preceding this to help me understand that what he meant in our language is that because of the cross, because I know Jesus died for me, because I know God made promises to me. Because I know I matter enough to God for him to send his son. He said this, because it means, because of the cross, it means that there is no way not to be seen. There is no situation in which you are finally, truly, absolutely alone. You understand the cross stands eternally reminding you of how much you matter, that in the depths of not mattering, in the depths of despair, in the depths of I'm not important and I don't matter to anyone and no one sees me and no one cares about me and it might just be better if I weren't here, that even in the depths of that, that God sent his son to die for you, to claim you back to him. And before you say, no, he did that for other people. No, no, he did that for you. If you're the only person on this earth, he still would have sent his son to die for you, to reclaim you to the heaven that he created for you. And if we will cling to the cross, to the glimmer of light that shines through the millennia, we can take hope and solace in the fact that there's going to be a day where depression doesn't exist and where the darkness goes away and every day is bright and filled with joy. And I might not get to experience those here today, right now, but I will one day. And if I cling to that cross, God's promised that I matter, that there will be days where this will let up, where I will see joy, where I will live in the fullness of life, but even if it doesn't come, there's an eternity where I'll see that every day. We sang a few minutes ago that you're fighting a battle that I've already won. I'm fighting a battle that you've already won. This is the battle, and it was won on the cross. So let God strengthen you today. Let him whisper to you today. And hear me say that you matter to your God. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your son. Thank you for who he is. We thank you for loving us. Lord, I lift up those that feel sad or depressed or insignificant or unwanted or unwarranted. God, it is my fervent prayer that they would be strengthened today. That they would get enough from today to keep clinging to you. God, for those we love who live in a cloud of darkness from time to time, we pray that you would use us to help them brighten it. God, we pray for the days ahead that you promised through your son, that you won through his death on the cross. Where in your presence we finally at long last experience fullness of joy. God, I pray for my brothers and sisters who are sad and who are downtrodden and ask that you would pick them up, that they would know today that you love them, that you care for them, that more than anything, they matter deeply to you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Thank you, Steve and the band. I don't know if you guys realize this, but that's the first time we've had a full band since like March the 1st. So that was really great to get to have them. For those of you that I haven't gotten to meet, my name is Nate. I am the pastor here. Thank you for joining us online. Thank you for being here in person. Every week I get to see a few more new faces, folks brave enough to return, and it's always so, so good. And if you've been watching Faithfully Online, we are so, so grateful for you, and you're continuing to do that. This is the first Sunday of a new series called With. We're looking at a book called With, written by a pastor named Sky Jethani. I first encountered this book in 2013 and I have never read a book that caused me to pause, stop, put the book down, literally get on my knees and repent more than this book did. I identified with so much of it. So we've been encouraging you guys for a couple of weeks to pick it up. Normally, we'd buy a bunch of copies and we'd leave them here, but that's a lot of touching and handling of money and the whole deal, so we can't do that right now. So hopefully you've ordered your copy online. If you haven't done that, just Google With and Sky, S-K-Y-E. It'll come up. I've sent out email links. You can email me. I'll send you another link. I believe in you, okay? It's 2020. You can all find things online. Get the book. Read along with us. Speaking of reading along with us, we have a reading plan that will help pace you through the series. Kyle Tolbert, our great student pastor, comes up with reading plans for the church. If you don't know about those, they're on our live page, and we actually have new plans that are on the information table kind of spread out for you so you can grab them on the way out if you'd like to do that. Those give you a portion of the Bible to read every day. We talk about how important that is all the time, but in this particular reading plan, Kyle has paced out for you the chapters that you can read in with to keep up with and be ready for the upcoming sermon as we go through it together. This series, more than any other series I've ever done, is one that you really need to see all the Sundays. The first four weeks are going to be invested largely in talking about what we shouldn't do. And the last two weeks are going to be invested in talking about what we should do. So if today you leave and you feel beat up with no resolution, that's all right. Come back in four more weeks and we'll give you some resolution, okay? Because we're moving through the book together. So this is going to feel a little bit different. As we begin, I want to help you see why I believe you should be interested in the contents of this book. I'm going to take you through an exercise that I do with all the couples that I do premarital counseling with. When I do premarital counseling with a couple, I tell them that we're going to do three sessions of 60 to 90 minutes. They think I'm going to counsel them about their marriage. I'm not. I'm not a counselor. I don't know how to do that. I just disciple them for about three hours, talk to them about spiritual things, and try to get them prepared for marriage in that way. And so the first question I ask them is, granted, it's silly, okay? There's all kinds of theological issues with this question, but I just want to ask you to play along and play along there at home. Let me ask you this question, okay? On a scale of one to ten, one being completely apathetic or maybe even adversarial towards God, and ten being apex Christian, super spiritual, ten is Elijah on Mount Carmel calling down the fire to defeat the prophets of Baal, okay? One to 10, where are you spiritually? Spiritually speaking, in your walk with God, your walk, your relationship with Jesus, your spiritual health, however you phrase that, where are you on a scale of one to 10? Where would you place yourself right now on that scale, okay? You figure out your answer. Now, let me ask you this question. Where would you say you'd like to be five years from now? Five years from right now, today, you get to make decisions, you get to project forward, and hopefully you've progressed a little bit. Five years from now, what do you want your number to be? Now, with the couple that's going to get married, I usually at this point talk about, okay, well, what's the gap between where you are now? Most people will do four to six. No one's going to cop to a two or a three, and no one's going to claim or a seven or an eight. So most people's first answer is four to six, okay? So you're a five now. What do you want to be? And then most people say seven or eight. I've never had anybody say 10. I don't know why, nobody wants to be a 10. Nobody's like, I don't wanna be that spiritual. That's too much. Nobody wants that, I don't know why. I think that's an issue. It's another sermon that I need to do. It's probably a failing of their pastor to not paint a great enough picture of ultimate spiritual help. And I asked them, okay, how do we get from like a five to an eight? What are the gaps? What are the things in the way? And we kind of plot a course for spiritual growth for them. Really, it's an exercise to help them prioritize spiritual growth. But to you, I would ask this question. You have your answer now. Here's what I am now. I'm a five. What do you want to be in five? I wanna be an eight. Okay, great, you have your two numbers. Let me ask you this question. If I could have talked to you five years ago, how would you have answered that question? If I could right now go back to five years ago you, what are you now, what do you wanna be in five years? What would your answer have been? Probably the same as the answer you just gave, right? Yeah? To be a Christian is to know what it is to be stagnant. To be a Christian is to know what it is to see other people who seem like, they seem like they're flourishing. They seem like they know Jesus in a way that I don't. They seem like they respond to worship in ways that my soul doesn't. They are able to get up and read their Bible every day. I can't seem to do that. They pray all the time. I can't seem to pray. They have this spirituality that I'm not sure I'll ever understand. To be a Christian, I believe, is to be frustrated with our spiritual walk. It's to feel stagnant and discouraged, like we should be further along than we are. Now, some of you five years ago, you were a totally different human. You didn't know Jesus. You weren't saved. So maybe for you, the question is, where were you two years ago? But I think that to be a believer is to be very familiar with that feeling of inadequacy, with that feeling of I should be further along. Because if I asked you five years ago, what are you? And you said five, and the answer is eight, then today you should have said eight, and I want to be a 10. But I think that to be a Christian is to sometimes be discouraged about our spiritual lives. And this is directly what this book speaks to. This is why if you can relate to what I just said at all, if your answers were the same five years ago and now, then I think this book can help you tremendously. And I want to begin this series by simply making this statement for you to consider. And we're going to talk about what this means. Maybe your walk isn't what it could be because your posture isn't what it should be. Maybe your walk with God, your relationship with God, isn't what it could be because your posture before God isn't what it should be. We're going to talk about what postures are, but in this book with, Sky takes five postures before the Lord. He calls them postures. I kind of think about them as motivations. He takes five postures before the Lord. If you haven't figured this out yet, four of them are bad. One is good. If you haven't figured out what the good posture is yet, just stick around. You'll pick it up with context clues. I believe in you. So the next four weeks, we're going to go over these postures that we often assume without necessarily knowing it and try to understand why these aren't helpful. And in the last two weeks, we're going to look at what the right posture is before the Lord, and I hope help us find ways to begin walking in a depth that we've never experienced before, so that five years from now, you would answer that question totally differently. This morning, we're going to look at the first posture called life under God. Very simply, to understand this posture, life under God is this. Life under God says, I offer you obedience, and you offer me protection. Life under God says, I offer you obedience, and you offer me protection. I forgot there in your notes, there's a spot that says, what do you really want from your relationship with God? That's a good diagnostic question. If I ask myself this, what do I want from my relationship with God? That's a good way to figure out what our posture is as we go through these. But the life under God posture says, I offer you obedience and you offer me protection. This is a posture that's present in every religion ever because this is what this posture acknowledges. The world is big. The world's crazy. Sometimes there's pandemics. There's things outside of my control. There's school shootings and there's cancer and there's illness and there's difficult phone calls and there's loss and there's undue pain and there's all kinds of crazy things that happen in this world that are outside my control, that are beyond my control. This posture acknowledges that and it acknowledges and there's a God in heaven who's controlled none of these things are outside of. There's a God in heaven who's sovereign and he's in control of everything. So I'm going to figure out how to get that God on my side so that he will protect me. This is the life under God posture. I said this was every religion ever, right? This is, think about the ancient Mayans performing sacrifices to try to appease the gods to get them on their side for a good crop or for a good war or for a good rain or whatever it is. We know that things in this world are outside our control. We know that there is a sovereign God who can control them. And so we orchestrate our lives in such a way to please the God so that he will look out for us. The life under God posture assumes that if things are going well for you, if you're blessed, then you must have behaved. If you are going through difficult times, you must not be right with God. And though none of us would admit readily that this is our posture before the Father, this attitude and mindset shows up all the time in everything that we do. I hear it every time I golf. Every time I go golfing, on the tee box, someone hits a drive that is going very clearly into the woods. This is never me. I strike mine 275 down the middle every time. But if you're golfing with like Harris Winston or something like that, it's definitely going to go really far into the woods. And as it goes really far into the woods, it's clearly going to be lost. You'll hear the solid sound. It will have bounced off a tree miraculously and bounced back into the fairway. And someone will say, it's total luck. And someone will always quip. Someone's been living clean. That's clean living. Someone had their quiet time this morning. As if you have been following God's rules, so now on the golf course, he's going to throw you a bone and a squirrel's going to kick it out there for you. You're in a parking lot. It's crowded. It's Walmart. It's Sunday afternoon. In the middle of COVID, there's only one entrance and everything's so far away. And then this one spot opens up. God is looking out for me. You must be living right. That's life under God. Life under God is an exchange. It says, I'll follow your rules and you protect me. And we laugh about it, but it shows up in far more insidious ways than that. And see, there's issues with this posture, with this exchange, with this transactional relationship that we would engage in with God. And I want to point out to you three big ones this morning. The first real issue with this posture is it inevitably leads to disillusionment. It leads to disillusionment every time. If you adopt this posture and your posture before God is, I'm going to follow your rules and you're going to protect me. It's this transactional contract that we enter into with him. 100% of the times, it will make you feel like I felt standing in the middle of Papa Murphy's pizza. I went a couple years ago. A couple years ago, Jen and I decided that we wanted pizza. It was once a year that we eat pizza. We're very healthy people. We don't do this a lot. We went to Jets. There was a Jets close to our house. Love Jets pizza. Love their thick crust with pepperoni. It's so good. And so I went to Jets. I'm so excited. I was just all in on fat day. Let's just go. I'm going to have it. I'm going to eat it all. And I get to Jets and there's a sign that it's closed. They moved to Creedmoor. I like Jets. I don't like Jets that far away. I don't like it that much. So there's another place that opened up in that same shopping center called Papa Murphy's Pizza. And I'm like, all right, pizza's pizza. I'll go to Papa Murphy's. So I go over there and I'm looking at the menu and this is just like an old man, angry old man rant. It has nothing to do with the sermon. But I at the menu, and there's no like proper names. I want like, I need like Supreme and Meat Lovers and Pepperoni. Like I need just normal pizza names that we all agree on, and they're getting cute with it. It's like Papa's Favorite, Mama's Best, and I'm like, I don't want to read all the ingredients. I just want a Supreme, you know, like just name it Supreme. Anyways, I get up to the front. The girl says, what do you want? And I said, do you have just like a supreme pizza? I don't want to read all the things. And she goes, yeah, that's mama's best. I'm like, great, give me that. So she goes, okay. I said, take a large. And I said, I'm going to go get some groceries. I'll come back and pick it up. She said, that's great. So I go, here's Teeter, get my stuff, put it in the car, go back in, Papa Murphy's, I'm sitting down looking at Twitter or something like that and just messing around. And then they say, hey, your order's ready. So I get up and go, okay, I walk over to the girl and she hands me this thing. And it's cold. It's in like this foil pan with cellophane on the top. And I go, this isn't my order. And she goes, you're Nate, right? I said, yeah. She goes, mama's best? I'm like, yeah. She goes, yeah, that's it. And I go, what, do I have to cook it? What are you talking about? What? And everybody in the store turns and looks at me and starts giggling. The manager looks at me and just starts laughing. I go, I can cook this? And I'm about to say, here, you take it. Like, just give me my money back. I don't agree to this deal. You just take the chore that you just put in my hands. You take that back. And the girl, she was so sweet, she's laughing and she says, sir, I promise you it's really good. Just put it in the oven for like 12 minutes. It's gonna be great. Okay, fine. So I take it home. I'm so angry that they violated the pizza contract. I go home, I put it in the oven, I get it out. I don't have a way to remove the foil from this large pizza, so I've got like a knife and fork situation where I'm sweating now, I need a towel. And I'm trying to get this pizza out of the thing. And then I realized I don't have a pizza cutter and I don't have a stone big enough to cut this pizza. So I have to put it on the countertop with like paper underneath it with a butcher knife, like burning my knuckles as I try to cut this pizza. They handed me a chore, man. I was so angry because what they did is they violated the unwritten American pizza contract. The American pizza contract is simply, listen, I give you $12. You give me a hot pizza cut in a box. That's it. I'm going to take that pizza home. I'm going to put those pieces on paper plates, and I'm going to throw it all away, and I'm going to sit in my shame after I'm done. That's the deal. And you violated this. You gave me a chore. I don't want to cook. If I wanted to cook, I would have gone there and gotten the ingredients and cooked, but clearly that's not what I want to do. You broke the contract, man. I want my money back. When we adopt the life under God posture, we will have a moment just like that. Where we sit before God and we think, this isn't the deal. You broke the contract. I gave you my obedience. Now you give me protection. That's the deal. And God says, I never made that deal with you. I won't be reduced to that. If you've been a Christian for any amount of time and you've adopted this posture, and I believe we all have at different points, you've experienced that disillusionment. You know exactly what that is. That disillusionment almost always comes at unwarranted pain. When you experience a time in life where you feel like you are enduring unfair pain, unfair stress, you lose a loved one, someone gets sick, you get a difficult diagnosis, you face a tough loss, you watch a relationship in shambles, you don't have the job that you identified with anymore. When your life sits in shambles, that is usually when we have our moment of disillusionment and we look at God and we felt like I felt in the middle of that pizzeria that day, this isn't the deal, I want my money back. For some of you, that disillusionment wrecked your faith years ago and you're still recovering. If you haven't had this moment, you will. And the life under God posture sets us up to be disillusioned and frustrated. It sets us up to shipwreck our faith. There's no better example of someone who had this mindset and had to be set straight than Job in the Bible. Job is actually, he perfectly illustrates not only this first problem, but the second problem as well. The second problem with this life under God posture is it reduces and seeks to control God. It looks like we're following the rules. It looks like we're submitted. It looks like we're being obedient, doing everything that we're supposed to do. But in our hearts is this motivation, this murkiness that's pushing us to seek to control God. I can't control the universe, so I'm going to appease the God that can, and then you owe me. I've behaved well, now you owe me protection. It seeks to control God. And we see this posture all over the story of Job. Job is the first wisdom book in the Bible. It was the first book of the Bible ever written. The Monday Night Men's group is actually going over the book of Job this semester. So if I say something in here that interests you or that sparks you, I would encourage you to sign up for that. But some of you are familiar with the story of Job. Others may have forgotten and some may not have heard it yet. So just as a primer, I'll tell you what's happening. Job is the most righteous man that's alive at the time. And God allows Satan to torment him. And he torments him in devastating ways. Job is a very wealthy man. He loses all of his wealth. He loses all of his real estate holdings. He loses all of his servants and employees. He even loses his children. He has boils on his skin. His wife's advice to him is curse God and die. You want to talk about someone that experienced unwarranted and unfair pain? Job. And the first 36 chapters of the book are his friends giving him advice in three different cycles. And this advice is riddled with the life under God posture. They come to him and they say, Job, what have you done? What have you done to deserve this kind of punishment from God? You've lost your real estate. You've lost all your buildings. What did you do? Certainly you are hiding some secret sin, Job. And Job says, no, I'm not. Like, I'm not doing that. I promise I'm not. And then they come back a second time. They're like, no, no, no, Job, you're not listening to us. What is it that you're doing? What have you done? Because clearly you have sinned against the Lord, and that's why you're being punished in this way. Clearly you violated your side of the contract, and that's why God's not keeping up his end of the deal. It's this life under God posture. And after three cycles of this, where they become really pointed with him, Job still refuses and says, no, that's not what I'm doing. I don't have some secret unrepented sin. So he demands an audience with God. And he goes to God to shake his fist at him and to say, hey, this isn't fair, man. This isn't part of the deal. I've always honored you. I've always worshiped you. I raised my kids to follow you and love you. I offer you everything and you're letting this happen to me. This isn't fair, God. And any of us that have ever experienced that moment of disillusion where we would look at God and we would go, this isn't fair. I've shared with you before, mine and Jen's struggle to have kids. With every new young couple that would so easily have two and three and five children, I would look at God and go, what gives, man? This isn't fair. This isn't the deal. I think we've all said that to God at one point or another in our own ways. God's response to Job is profound. And it is not at all what you would expect. Job asks for an audience with God to say, hey God, what's the deal? This isn't fair. And God's response is one of anger and frustration. Look at what God says to Job. This is amazing to me. It's one of the most profound things in the Bible. Chapter 38, then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said, who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? Dress for action like a man. I will question you and you will make it known to me. Does that sound like a God who's about to go, yeah, my bad, I didn't keep up my end of the deal. Here's why I broke contract. Sounds like God is angry. I had a professor one time say, Job wanted a man-to-man conversation with God. The problem was he was one man short. God says, who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? You want to talk to me like a man? Okay, dress yourself like a man. It angers God. And then God, for two chapters, proceeds to ask him questions. He says, where were you, Job, when I laid the foundations of the world? Surely you know. Surely you understand, Job, the inner workings of the universe. If you're asking me this question, you want to understand how I orchestrate everything, how I run the universe, you're questioning my leadership, then maybe you can explain to me how the Leviathan and the behemoth came into being. Maybe you can explain to me how the world works. Surely you were there when I told the oceans that they can go this far and no further. When I drew the boundaries of the continents, surely you know Job. And God's response is very clear to Job. Job, most righteous man to ever live, who in the season of his life adopted the life under God posture. God says, hey man, you've forgotten your place. I'm the creator. You're the creation. I won't be reduced to your contracts. I will not be reduced to your control. You don't get to follow the rules like I'm some pagan God and then hold my feet to the fire about the contract that I didn't enter into. That's not the deal. I'm God. You're not going to understand me. And I think one of the most difficult things about the Christian life is to understand there are going to be parts of God that we can't understand. God's point here with Job is, even if I explained it to you, even if I set you down and told me everything that I was thinking with what's going on in your life, even if I told you everything that I could, it would be like you trying to explain yourself to a six-month-old. It's just not going to work. We don't have the capacity to understand. And when we adopt this life under God posture, it seeks to reduce God to our level and it seeks to control him and it angers God because he's not gonna enter into our contracts with us. The last problem is highlighted by Jesus himself. The last problem with this posture that we wanna look at this morning is that it turns us into legalistic hypocrites. If we adopt this life under God posture, I'm going to obey you and you protect me, it turns us into legalistic hypocrites. Because in this posture, what we assume is those who are blessed are obedient and those who are struggling are disobedient. This attitude was around when Jesus walked the earth. They came upon a blind man one day and the disciples, his disciples looked at him and they said, what did he do or his parents do that made him blind? What's their sin? That's life under God posture. And what this does is it reduces relationship to a set of rules. It takes the relationship that Jesus wants with us, that he created us for, to be in relation with him, and it reduces it to a set of rules. And it makes it, this posture makes it entirely possible to appear outwardly spiritual because you follow the rules and your life seems blessed when inside you're rotting away because there's no relationship at all. It robs the relationship of all emotions and the actual relationship that it should be. It's kind of like church over the summer. The thing that broke my heart about church during COVID is that church is a fundamentally communal institution. And I had to get up in this room and preach. And it felt like a performance to an empty room. And hope that you guys would watch it three days later. And I don't know about you. But church got to feeling pretty empty for me over the summer. Because there was no community in the church. And that's what makes the church the church. From a human standpoint. And we do the same thing with our relationship with Jesus. If we reduce it to a set of rules, things I have to do to be right with God, we remove the relationship from it and it becomes empty. There's no better example of this than the Pharisees. The religious leaders in Jesus's day were experts at this. Outwardly, they looked great. They were living the blessed life. They were good. Everyone looked to them and tried to get on their level. If I asked the Pharisees, where's your relationship with God and where do you want it to be? They'd be like, I'm currently at a 10. I would like it to remain at a 10. That's the Pharisees because they have it all together on the outside. But here's what Jesus says to this group of people in Matthew 23. In Matthew 23, verse 27, he says, you're like a dirty cup that's been cleaned on the outside, but inside you're filthy. He looks at the religious leaders of the day, the ones who are supposed to know better. And he says, you're hypocrites. You're whitewashed tombs. It's a pretty tombstone with a rotting carcass underneath it. When we adopt this life under God posture and we reduce our relationship to a set of rules, it turns us into legalistic hypocrites who on the outside can look like they have their life together and on the inside are rotting away. This incidentally is how someone can know more Bible than anyone you've ever known in your life and be a jerk. So I would ask you as we finish, and I warned you, I'm not giving you a resolution here. I'm not saying, so this is the right way to do it. I'm just saying that's bad. And I would end this week by asking you this question, and this is what caused me repentance. And if this resonated with you, I would really encourage you to read the chapter and follow along with it. But I would ask you this week, as you're introspective and look at yourself, how much of this posture do you see in you? How much of this do you see in you? How much over the years have you followed God because somehow by following him, I'm going to appease him and win favor? Have you ever had something big in your life coming up and so all of a sudden you get real spiritual? You ever had something super bad happen and then you get really spiritual? I don't want this to happen again. That's a life under God posture. And when we adopt this posture, it will lead to disillusionment. We reduce God and we try to control him. And ultimately, we end up legalistic hypocrites who have removed the relational part from the relationship with Jesus and replaced it with rules. And we become whitewashed tombs. So how much of this exists in you? Let's pray and then Steve's going to come and introduce to us a new song for the series. Father, we love you. We're grateful for you. Lord, I know that within us, those of us who know you, is a desire to know you more. I know that within us is a desire to grow. Within us is a holy dissatisfaction with where we are and a divine yearning to know you better. God, I pray that you would make a path for us. Would you give us the honesty in our hearts and in our minds to be honest with you and with ourselves about where we stand and how we've approached you? God, if we have come to you simply because we want you to protect us, simply because we want you to bless us, and not because we want you, would you convict us of that? And would you show us a better way? It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Thank you, Steve and the band. I don't know if you guys realize this, but that's the first time we've had a full band since like March the 1st. So that was really great to get to have them. For those of you that I haven't gotten to meet, my name is Nate. I am the pastor here. Thank you for joining us online. Thank you for being here in person. Every week I get to see a few more new faces, folks brave enough to return, and it's always so, so good. And if you've been watching Faithfully Online, we are so, so grateful for you, and you're continuing to do that. This is the first Sunday of a new series called With. We're looking at a book called With, written by a pastor named Sky Jethani. I first encountered this book in 2013 and I have never read a book that caused me to pause, stop, put the book down, literally get on my knees and repent more than this book did. I identified with so much of it. So we've been encouraging you guys for a couple of weeks to pick it up. Normally, we'd buy a bunch of copies and we'd leave them here, but that's a lot of touching and handling of money and the whole deal, so we can't do that right now. So hopefully you've ordered your copy online. If you haven't done that, just Google With and Sky, S-K-Y-E. It'll come up. I've sent out email links. You can email me. I'll send you another link. I believe in you, okay? It's 2020. You can all find things online. Get the book. Read along with us. Speaking of reading along with us, we have a reading plan that will help pace you through the series. Kyle Tolbert, our great student pastor, comes up with reading plans for the church. If you don't know about those, they're on our live page, and we actually have new plans that are on the information table kind of spread out for you so you can grab them on the way out if you'd like to do that. Those give you a portion of the Bible to read every day. We talk about how important that is all the time, but in this particular reading plan, Kyle has paced out for you the chapters that you can read in with to keep up with and be ready for the upcoming sermon as we go through it together. This series, more than any other series I've ever done, is one that you really need to see all the Sundays. The first four weeks are going to be invested largely in talking about what we shouldn't do. And the last two weeks are going to be invested in talking about what we should do. So if today you leave and you feel beat up with no resolution, that's all right. Come back in four more weeks and we'll give you some resolution, okay? Because we're moving through the book together. So this is going to feel a little bit different. As we begin, I want to help you see why I believe you should be interested in the contents of this book. I'm going to take you through an exercise that I do with all the couples that I do premarital counseling with. When I do premarital counseling with a couple, I tell them that we're going to do three sessions of 60 to 90 minutes. They think I'm going to counsel them about their marriage. I'm not. I'm not a counselor. I don't know how to do that. I just disciple them for about three hours, talk to them about spiritual things, and try to get them prepared for marriage in that way. And so the first question I ask them is, granted, it's silly, okay? There's all kinds of theological issues with this question, but I just want to ask you to play along and play along there at home. Let me ask you this question, okay? On a scale of one to ten, one being completely apathetic or maybe even adversarial towards God, and ten being apex Christian, super spiritual, ten is Elijah on Mount Carmel calling down the fire to defeat the prophets of Baal, okay? One to 10, where are you spiritually? Spiritually speaking, in your walk with God, your walk, your relationship with Jesus, your spiritual health, however you phrase that, where are you on a scale of one to 10? Where would you place yourself right now on that scale, okay? You figure out your answer. Now, let me ask you this question. Where would you say you'd like to be five years from now? Five years from right now, today, you get to make decisions, you get to project forward, and hopefully you've progressed a little bit. Five years from now, what do you want your number to be? Now, with the couple that's going to get married, I usually at this point talk about, okay, well, what's the gap between where you are now? Most people will do four to six. No one's going to cop to a two or a three, and no one's going to claim or a seven or an eight. So most people's first answer is four to six, okay? So you're a five now. What do you want to be? And then most people say seven or eight. I've never had anybody say 10. I don't know why, nobody wants to be a 10. Nobody's like, I don't wanna be that spiritual. That's too much. Nobody wants that, I don't know why. I think that's an issue. It's another sermon that I need to do. It's probably a failing of their pastor to not paint a great enough picture of ultimate spiritual help. And I asked them, okay, how do we get from like a five to an eight? What are the gaps? What are the things in the way? And we kind of plot a course for spiritual growth for them. Really, it's an exercise to help them prioritize spiritual growth. But to you, I would ask this question. You have your answer now. Here's what I am now. I'm a five. What do you want to be in five? I wanna be an eight. Okay, great, you have your two numbers. Let me ask you this question. If I could have talked to you five years ago, how would you have answered that question? If I could right now go back to five years ago you, what are you now, what do you wanna be in five years? What would your answer have been? Probably the same as the answer you just gave, right? Yeah? To be a Christian is to know what it is to be stagnant. To be a Christian is to know what it is to see other people who seem like, they seem like they're flourishing. They seem like they know Jesus in a way that I don't. They seem like they respond to worship in ways that my soul doesn't. They are able to get up and read their Bible every day. I can't seem to do that. They pray all the time. I can't seem to pray. They have this spirituality that I'm not sure I'll ever understand. To be a Christian, I believe, is to be frustrated with our spiritual walk. It's to feel stagnant and discouraged, like we should be further along than we are. Now, some of you five years ago, you were a totally different human. You didn't know Jesus. You weren't saved. So maybe for you, the question is, where were you two years ago? But I think that to be a believer is to be very familiar with that feeling of inadequacy, with that feeling of I should be further along. Because if I asked you five years ago, what are you? And you said five, and the answer is eight, then today you should have said eight, and I want to be a 10. But I think that to be a Christian is to sometimes be discouraged about our spiritual lives. And this is directly what this book speaks to. This is why if you can relate to what I just said at all, if your answers were the same five years ago and now, then I think this book can help you tremendously. And I want to begin this series by simply making this statement for you to consider. And we're going to talk about what this means. Maybe your walk isn't what it could be because your posture isn't what it should be. Maybe your walk with God, your relationship with God, isn't what it could be because your posture before God isn't what it should be. We're going to talk about what postures are, but in this book with, Sky takes five postures before the Lord. He calls them postures. I kind of think about them as motivations. He takes five postures before the Lord. If you haven't figured this out yet, four of them are bad. One is good. If you haven't figured out what the good posture is yet, just stick around. You'll pick it up with context clues. I believe in you. So the next four weeks, we're going to go over these postures that we often assume without necessarily knowing it and try to understand why these aren't helpful. And in the last two weeks, we're going to look at what the right posture is before the Lord, and I hope help us find ways to begin walking in a depth that we've never experienced before, so that five years from now, you would answer that question totally differently. This morning, we're going to look at the first posture called life under God. Very simply, to understand this posture, life under God is this. Life under God says, I offer you obedience, and you offer me protection. Life under God says, I offer you obedience, and you offer me protection. I forgot there in your notes, there's a spot that says, what do you really want from your relationship with God? That's a good diagnostic question. If I ask myself this, what do I want from my relationship with God? That's a good way to figure out what our posture is as we go through these. But the life under God posture says, I offer you obedience and you offer me protection. This is a posture that's present in every religion ever because this is what this posture acknowledges. The world is big. The world's crazy. Sometimes there's pandemics. There's things outside of my control. There's school shootings and there's cancer and there's illness and there's difficult phone calls and there's loss and there's undue pain and there's all kinds of crazy things that happen in this world that are outside my control, that are beyond my control. This posture acknowledges that and it acknowledges and there's a God in heaven who's controlled none of these things are outside of. There's a God in heaven who's sovereign and he's in control of everything. So I'm going to figure out how to get that God on my side so that he will protect me. This is the life under God posture. I said this was every religion ever, right? This is, think about the ancient Mayans performing sacrifices to try to appease the gods to get them on their side for a good crop or for a good war or for a good rain or whatever it is. We know that things in this world are outside our control. We know that there is a sovereign God who can control them. And so we orchestrate our lives in such a way to please the God so that he will look out for us. The life under God posture assumes that if things are going well for you, if you're blessed, then you must have behaved. If you are going through difficult times, you must not be right with God. And though none of us would admit readily that this is our posture before the Father, this attitude and mindset shows up all the time in everything that we do. I hear it every time I golf. Every time I go golfing, on the tee box, someone hits a drive that is going very clearly into the woods. This is never me. I strike mine 275 down the middle every time. But if you're golfing with like Harris Winston or something like that, it's definitely going to go really far into the woods. And as it goes really far into the woods, it's clearly going to be lost. You'll hear the solid sound. It will have bounced off a tree miraculously and bounced back into the fairway. And someone will say, it's total luck. And someone will always quip. Someone's been living clean. That's clean living. Someone had their quiet time this morning. As if you have been following God's rules, so now on the golf course, he's going to throw you a bone and a squirrel's going to kick it out there for you. You're in a parking lot. It's crowded. It's Walmart. It's Sunday afternoon. In the middle of COVID, there's only one entrance and everything's so far away. And then this one spot opens up. God is looking out for me. You must be living right. That's life under God. Life under God is an exchange. It says, I'll follow your rules and you protect me. And we laugh about it, but it shows up in far more insidious ways than that. And see, there's issues with this posture, with this exchange, with this transactional relationship that we would engage in with God. And I want to point out to you three big ones this morning. The first real issue with this posture is it inevitably leads to disillusionment. It leads to disillusionment every time. If you adopt this posture and your posture before God is, I'm going to follow your rules and you're going to protect me. It's this transactional contract that we enter into with him. 100% of the times, it will make you feel like I felt standing in the middle of Papa Murphy's pizza. I went a couple years ago. A couple years ago, Jen and I decided that we wanted pizza. It was once a year that we eat pizza. We're very healthy people. We don't do this a lot. We went to Jets. There was a Jets close to our house. Love Jets pizza. Love their thick crust with pepperoni. It's so good. And so I went to Jets. I'm so excited. I was just all in on fat day. Let's just go. I'm going to have it. I'm going to eat it all. And I get to Jets and there's a sign that it's closed. They moved to Creedmoor. I like Jets. I don't like Jets that far away. I don't like it that much. So there's another place that opened up in that same shopping center called Papa Murphy's Pizza. And I'm like, all right, pizza's pizza. I'll go to Papa Murphy's. So I go over there and I'm looking at the menu and this is just like an old man, angry old man rant. It has nothing to do with the sermon. But I at the menu, and there's no like proper names. I want like, I need like Supreme and Meat Lovers and Pepperoni. Like I need just normal pizza names that we all agree on, and they're getting cute with it. It's like Papa's Favorite, Mama's Best, and I'm like, I don't want to read all the ingredients. I just want a Supreme, you know, like just name it Supreme. Anyways, I get up to the front. The girl says, what do you want? And I said, do you have just like a supreme pizza? I don't want to read all the things. And she goes, yeah, that's mama's best. I'm like, great, give me that. So she goes, okay. I said, take a large. And I said, I'm going to go get some groceries. I'll come back and pick it up. She said, that's great. So I go, here's Teeter, get my stuff, put it in the car, go back in, Papa Murphy's, I'm sitting down looking at Twitter or something like that and just messing around. And then they say, hey, your order's ready. So I get up and go, okay, I walk over to the girl and she hands me this thing. And it's cold. It's in like this foil pan with cellophane on the top. And I go, this isn't my order. And she goes, you're Nate, right? I said, yeah. She goes, mama's best? I'm like, yeah. She goes, yeah, that's it. And I go, what, do I have to cook it? What are you talking about? What? And everybody in the store turns and looks at me and starts giggling. The manager looks at me and just starts laughing. I go, I can cook this? And I'm about to say, here, you take it. Like, just give me my money back. I don't agree to this deal. You just take the chore that you just put in my hands. You take that back. And the girl, she was so sweet, she's laughing and she says, sir, I promise you it's really good. Just put it in the oven for like 12 minutes. It's gonna be great. Okay, fine. So I take it home. I'm so angry that they violated the pizza contract. I go home, I put it in the oven, I get it out. I don't have a way to remove the foil from this large pizza, so I've got like a knife and fork situation where I'm sweating now, I need a towel. And I'm trying to get this pizza out of the thing. And then I realized I don't have a pizza cutter and I don't have a stone big enough to cut this pizza. So I have to put it on the countertop with like paper underneath it with a butcher knife, like burning my knuckles as I try to cut this pizza. They handed me a chore, man. I was so angry because what they did is they violated the unwritten American pizza contract. The American pizza contract is simply, listen, I give you $12. You give me a hot pizza cut in a box. That's it. I'm going to take that pizza home. I'm going to put those pieces on paper plates, and I'm going to throw it all away, and I'm going to sit in my shame after I'm done. That's the deal. And you violated this. You gave me a chore. I don't want to cook. If I wanted to cook, I would have gone there and gotten the ingredients and cooked, but clearly that's not what I want to do. You broke the contract, man. I want my money back. When we adopt the life under God posture, we will have a moment just like that. Where we sit before God and we think, this isn't the deal. You broke the contract. I gave you my obedience. Now you give me protection. That's the deal. And God says, I never made that deal with you. I won't be reduced to that. If you've been a Christian for any amount of time and you've adopted this posture, and I believe we all have at different points, you've experienced that disillusionment. You know exactly what that is. That disillusionment almost always comes at unwarranted pain. When you experience a time in life where you feel like you are enduring unfair pain, unfair stress, you lose a loved one, someone gets sick, you get a difficult diagnosis, you face a tough loss, you watch a relationship in shambles, you don't have the job that you identified with anymore. When your life sits in shambles, that is usually when we have our moment of disillusionment and we look at God and we felt like I felt in the middle of that pizzeria that day, this isn't the deal, I want my money back. For some of you, that disillusionment wrecked your faith years ago and you're still recovering. If you haven't had this moment, you will. And the life under God posture sets us up to be disillusioned and frustrated. It sets us up to shipwreck our faith. There's no better example of someone who had this mindset and had to be set straight than Job in the Bible. Job is actually, he perfectly illustrates not only this first problem, but the second problem as well. The second problem with this life under God posture is it reduces and seeks to control God. It looks like we're following the rules. It looks like we're submitted. It looks like we're being obedient, doing everything that we're supposed to do. But in our hearts is this motivation, this murkiness that's pushing us to seek to control God. I can't control the universe, so I'm going to appease the God that can, and then you owe me. I've behaved well, now you owe me protection. It seeks to control God. And we see this posture all over the story of Job. Job is the first wisdom book in the Bible. It was the first book of the Bible ever written. The Monday Night Men's group is actually going over the book of Job this semester. So if I say something in here that interests you or that sparks you, I would encourage you to sign up for that. But some of you are familiar with the story of Job. Others may have forgotten and some may not have heard it yet. So just as a primer, I'll tell you what's happening. Job is the most righteous man that's alive at the time. And God allows Satan to torment him. And he torments him in devastating ways. Job is a very wealthy man. He loses all of his wealth. He loses all of his real estate holdings. He loses all of his servants and employees. He even loses his children. He has boils on his skin. His wife's advice to him is curse God and die. You want to talk about someone that experienced unwarranted and unfair pain? Job. And the first 36 chapters of the book are his friends giving him advice in three different cycles. And this advice is riddled with the life under God posture. They come to him and they say, Job, what have you done? What have you done to deserve this kind of punishment from God? You've lost your real estate. You've lost all your buildings. What did you do? Certainly you are hiding some secret sin, Job. And Job says, no, I'm not. Like, I'm not doing that. I promise I'm not. And then they come back a second time. They're like, no, no, no, Job, you're not listening to us. What is it that you're doing? What have you done? Because clearly you have sinned against the Lord, and that's why you're being punished in this way. Clearly you violated your side of the contract, and that's why God's not keeping up his end of the deal. It's this life under God posture. And after three cycles of this, where they become really pointed with him, Job still refuses and says, no, that's not what I'm doing. I don't have some secret unrepented sin. So he demands an audience with God. And he goes to God to shake his fist at him and to say, hey, this isn't fair, man. This isn't part of the deal. I've always honored you. I've always worshiped you. I raised my kids to follow you and love you. I offer you everything and you're letting this happen to me. This isn't fair, God. And any of us that have ever experienced that moment of disillusion where we would look at God and we would go, this isn't fair. I've shared with you before, mine and Jen's struggle to have kids. With every new young couple that would so easily have two and three and five children, I would look at God and go, what gives, man? This isn't fair. This isn't the deal. I think we've all said that to God at one point or another in our own ways. God's response to Job is profound. And it is not at all what you would expect. Job asks for an audience with God to say, hey God, what's the deal? This isn't fair. And God's response is one of anger and frustration. Look at what God says to Job. This is amazing to me. It's one of the most profound things in the Bible. Chapter 38, then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said, who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? Dress for action like a man. I will question you and you will make it known to me. Does that sound like a God who's about to go, yeah, my bad, I didn't keep up my end of the deal. Here's why I broke contract. Sounds like God is angry. I had a professor one time say, Job wanted a man-to-man conversation with God. The problem was he was one man short. God says, who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? You want to talk to me like a man? Okay, dress yourself like a man. It angers God. And then God, for two chapters, proceeds to ask him questions. He says, where were you, Job, when I laid the foundations of the world? Surely you know. Surely you understand, Job, the inner workings of the universe. If you're asking me this question, you want to understand how I orchestrate everything, how I run the universe, you're questioning my leadership, then maybe you can explain to me how the Leviathan and the behemoth came into being. Maybe you can explain to me how the world works. Surely you were there when I told the oceans that they can go this far and no further. When I drew the boundaries of the continents, surely you know Job. And God's response is very clear to Job. Job, most righteous man to ever live, who in the season of his life adopted the life under God posture. God says, hey man, you've forgotten your place. I'm the creator. You're the creation. I won't be reduced to your contracts. I will not be reduced to your control. You don't get to follow the rules like I'm some pagan God and then hold my feet to the fire about the contract that I didn't enter into. That's not the deal. I'm God. You're not going to understand me. And I think one of the most difficult things about the Christian life is to understand there are going to be parts of God that we can't understand. God's point here with Job is, even if I explained it to you, even if I set you down and told me everything that I was thinking with what's going on in your life, even if I told you everything that I could, it would be like you trying to explain yourself to a six-month-old. It's just not going to work. We don't have the capacity to understand. And when we adopt this life under God posture, it seeks to reduce God to our level and it seeks to control him and it angers God because he's not gonna enter into our contracts with us. The last problem is highlighted by Jesus himself. The last problem with this posture that we wanna look at this morning is that it turns us into legalistic hypocrites. If we adopt this life under God posture, I'm going to obey you and you protect me, it turns us into legalistic hypocrites. Because in this posture, what we assume is those who are blessed are obedient and those who are struggling are disobedient. This attitude was around when Jesus walked the earth. They came upon a blind man one day and the disciples, his disciples looked at him and they said, what did he do or his parents do that made him blind? What's their sin? That's life under God posture. And what this does is it reduces relationship to a set of rules. It takes the relationship that Jesus wants with us, that he created us for, to be in relation with him, and it reduces it to a set of rules. And it makes it, this posture makes it entirely possible to appear outwardly spiritual because you follow the rules and your life seems blessed when inside you're rotting away because there's no relationship at all. It robs the relationship of all emotions and the actual relationship that it should be. It's kind of like church over the summer. The thing that broke my heart about church during COVID is that church is a fundamentally communal institution. And I had to get up in this room and preach. And it felt like a performance to an empty room. And hope that you guys would watch it three days later. And I don't know about you. But church got to feeling pretty empty for me over the summer. Because there was no community in the church. And that's what makes the church the church. From a human standpoint. And we do the same thing with our relationship with Jesus. If we reduce it to a set of rules, things I have to do to be right with God, we remove the relationship from it and it becomes empty. There's no better example of this than the Pharisees. The religious leaders in Jesus's day were experts at this. Outwardly, they looked great. They were living the blessed life. They were good. Everyone looked to them and tried to get on their level. If I asked the Pharisees, where's your relationship with God and where do you want it to be? They'd be like, I'm currently at a 10. I would like it to remain at a 10. That's the Pharisees because they have it all together on the outside. But here's what Jesus says to this group of people in Matthew 23. In Matthew 23, verse 27, he says, you're like a dirty cup that's been cleaned on the outside, but inside you're filthy. He looks at the religious leaders of the day, the ones who are supposed to know better. And he says, you're hypocrites. You're whitewashed tombs. It's a pretty tombstone with a rotting carcass underneath it. When we adopt this life under God posture and we reduce our relationship to a set of rules, it turns us into legalistic hypocrites who on the outside can look like they have their life together and on the inside are rotting away. This incidentally is how someone can know more Bible than anyone you've ever known in your life and be a jerk. So I would ask you as we finish, and I warned you, I'm not giving you a resolution here. I'm not saying, so this is the right way to do it. I'm just saying that's bad. And I would end this week by asking you this question, and this is what caused me repentance. And if this resonated with you, I would really encourage you to read the chapter and follow along with it. But I would ask you this week, as you're introspective and look at yourself, how much of this posture do you see in you? How much of this do you see in you? How much over the years have you followed God because somehow by following him, I'm going to appease him and win favor? Have you ever had something big in your life coming up and so all of a sudden you get real spiritual? You ever had something super bad happen and then you get really spiritual? I don't want this to happen again. That's a life under God posture. And when we adopt this posture, it will lead to disillusionment. We reduce God and we try to control him. And ultimately, we end up legalistic hypocrites who have removed the relational part from the relationship with Jesus and replaced it with rules. And we become whitewashed tombs. So how much of this exists in you? Let's pray and then Steve's going to come and introduce to us a new song for the series. Father, we love you. We're grateful for you. Lord, I know that within us, those of us who know you, is a desire to know you more. I know that within us is a desire to grow. Within us is a holy dissatisfaction with where we are and a divine yearning to know you better. God, I pray that you would make a path for us. Would you give us the honesty in our hearts and in our minds to be honest with you and with ourselves about where we stand and how we've approached you? God, if we have come to you simply because we want you to protect us, simply because we want you to bless us, and not because we want you, would you convict us of that? And would you show us a better way? It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Thank you, Steve and the band. I don't know if you guys realize this, but that's the first time we've had a full band since like March the 1st. So that was really great to get to have them. For those of you that I haven't gotten to meet, my name is Nate. I am the pastor here. Thank you for joining us online. Thank you for being here in person. Every week I get to see a few more new faces, folks brave enough to return, and it's always so, so good. And if you've been watching Faithfully Online, we are so, so grateful for you, and you're continuing to do that. This is the first Sunday of a new series called With. We're looking at a book called With, written by a pastor named Sky Jethani. I first encountered this book in 2013 and I have never read a book that caused me to pause, stop, put the book down, literally get on my knees and repent more than this book did. I identified with so much of it. So we've been encouraging you guys for a couple of weeks to pick it up. Normally, we'd buy a bunch of copies and we'd leave them here, but that's a lot of touching and handling of money and the whole deal, so we can't do that right now. So hopefully you've ordered your copy online. If you haven't done that, just Google With and Sky, S-K-Y-E. It'll come up. I've sent out email links. You can email me. I'll send you another link. I believe in you, okay? It's 2020. You can all find things online. Get the book. Read along with us. Speaking of reading along with us, we have a reading plan that will help pace you through the series. Kyle Tolbert, our great student pastor, comes up with reading plans for the church. If you don't know about those, they're on our live page, and we actually have new plans that are on the information table kind of spread out for you so you can grab them on the way out if you'd like to do that. Those give you a portion of the Bible to read every day. We talk about how important that is all the time, but in this particular reading plan, Kyle has paced out for you the chapters that you can read in with to keep up with and be ready for the upcoming sermon as we go through it together. This series, more than any other series I've ever done, is one that you really need to see all the Sundays. The first four weeks are going to be invested largely in talking about what we shouldn't do. And the last two weeks are going to be invested in talking about what we should do. So if today you leave and you feel beat up with no resolution, that's all right. Come back in four more weeks and we'll give you some resolution, okay? Because we're moving through the book together. So this is going to feel a little bit different. As we begin, I want to help you see why I believe you should be interested in the contents of this book. I'm going to take you through an exercise that I do with all the couples that I do premarital counseling with. When I do premarital counseling with a couple, I tell them that we're going to do three sessions of 60 to 90 minutes. They think I'm going to counsel them about their marriage. I'm not. I'm not a counselor. I don't know how to do that. I just disciple them for about three hours, talk to them about spiritual things, and try to get them prepared for marriage in that way. And so the first question I ask them is, granted, it's silly, okay? There's all kinds of theological issues with this question, but I just want to ask you to play along and play along there at home. Let me ask you this question, okay? On a scale of one to ten, one being completely apathetic or maybe even adversarial towards God, and ten being apex Christian, super spiritual, ten is Elijah on Mount Carmel calling down the fire to defeat the prophets of Baal, okay? One to 10, where are you spiritually? Spiritually speaking, in your walk with God, your walk, your relationship with Jesus, your spiritual health, however you phrase that, where are you on a scale of one to 10? Where would you place yourself right now on that scale, okay? You figure out your answer. Now, let me ask you this question. Where would you say you'd like to be five years from now? Five years from right now, today, you get to make decisions, you get to project forward, and hopefully you've progressed a little bit. Five years from now, what do you want your number to be? Now, with the couple that's going to get married, I usually at this point talk about, okay, well, what's the gap between where you are now? Most people will do four to six. No one's going to cop to a two or a three, and no one's going to claim or a seven or an eight. So most people's first answer is four to six, okay? So you're a five now. What do you want to be? And then most people say seven or eight. I've never had anybody say 10. I don't know why, nobody wants to be a 10. Nobody's like, I don't wanna be that spiritual. That's too much. Nobody wants that, I don't know why. I think that's an issue. It's another sermon that I need to do. It's probably a failing of their pastor to not paint a great enough picture of ultimate spiritual help. And I asked them, okay, how do we get from like a five to an eight? What are the gaps? What are the things in the way? And we kind of plot a course for spiritual growth for them. Really, it's an exercise to help them prioritize spiritual growth. But to you, I would ask this question. You have your answer now. Here's what I am now. I'm a five. What do you want to be in five? I wanna be an eight. Okay, great, you have your two numbers. Let me ask you this question. If I could have talked to you five years ago, how would you have answered that question? If I could right now go back to five years ago you, what are you now, what do you wanna be in five years? What would your answer have been? Probably the same as the answer you just gave, right? Yeah? To be a Christian is to know what it is to be stagnant. To be a Christian is to know what it is to see other people who seem like, they seem like they're flourishing. They seem like they know Jesus in a way that I don't. They seem like they respond to worship in ways that my soul doesn't. They are able to get up and read their Bible every day. I can't seem to do that. They pray all the time. I can't seem to pray. They have this spirituality that I'm not sure I'll ever understand. To be a Christian, I believe, is to be frustrated with our spiritual walk. It's to feel stagnant and discouraged, like we should be further along than we are. Now, some of you five years ago, you were a totally different human. You didn't know Jesus. You weren't saved. So maybe for you, the question is, where were you two years ago? But I think that to be a believer is to be very familiar with that feeling of inadequacy, with that feeling of I should be further along. Because if I asked you five years ago, what are you? And you said five, and the answer is eight, then today you should have said eight, and I want to be a 10. But I think that to be a Christian is to sometimes be discouraged about our spiritual lives. And this is directly what this book speaks to. This is why if you can relate to what I just said at all, if your answers were the same five years ago and now, then I think this book can help you tremendously. And I want to begin this series by simply making this statement for you to consider. And we're going to talk about what this means. Maybe your walk isn't what it could be because your posture isn't what it should be. Maybe your walk with God, your relationship with God, isn't what it could be because your posture before God isn't what it should be. We're going to talk about what postures are, but in this book with, Sky takes five postures before the Lord. He calls them postures. I kind of think about them as motivations. He takes five postures before the Lord. If you haven't figured this out yet, four of them are bad. One is good. If you haven't figured out what the good posture is yet, just stick around. You'll pick it up with context clues. I believe in you. So the next four weeks, we're going to go over these postures that we often assume without necessarily knowing it and try to understand why these aren't helpful. And in the last two weeks, we're going to look at what the right posture is before the Lord, and I hope help us find ways to begin walking in a depth that we've never experienced before, so that five years from now, you would answer that question totally differently. This morning, we're going to look at the first posture called life under God. Very simply, to understand this posture, life under God is this. Life under God says, I offer you obedience, and you offer me protection. Life under God says, I offer you obedience, and you offer me protection. I forgot there in your notes, there's a spot that says, what do you really want from your relationship with God? That's a good diagnostic question. If I ask myself this, what do I want from my relationship with God? That's a good way to figure out what our posture is as we go through these. But the life under God posture says, I offer you obedience and you offer me protection. This is a posture that's present in every religion ever because this is what this posture acknowledges. The world is big. The world's crazy. Sometimes there's pandemics. There's things outside of my control. There's school shootings and there's cancer and there's illness and there's difficult phone calls and there's loss and there's undue pain and there's all kinds of crazy things that happen in this world that are outside my control, that are beyond my control. This posture acknowledges that and it acknowledges and there's a God in heaven who's controlled none of these things are outside of. There's a God in heaven who's sovereign and he's in control of everything. So I'm going to figure out how to get that God on my side so that he will protect me. This is the life under God posture. I said this was every religion ever, right? This is, think about the ancient Mayans performing sacrifices to try to appease the gods to get them on their side for a good crop or for a good war or for a good rain or whatever it is. We know that things in this world are outside our control. We know that there is a sovereign God who can control them. And so we orchestrate our lives in such a way to please the God so that he will look out for us. The life under God posture assumes that if things are going well for you, if you're blessed, then you must have behaved. If you are going through difficult times, you must not be right with God. And though none of us would admit readily that this is our posture before the Father, this attitude and mindset shows up all the time in everything that we do. I hear it every time I golf. Every time I go golfing, on the tee box, someone hits a drive that is going very clearly into the woods. This is never me. I strike mine 275 down the middle every time. But if you're golfing with like Harris Winston or something like that, it's definitely going to go really far into the woods. And as it goes really far into the woods, it's clearly going to be lost. You'll hear the solid sound. It will have bounced off a tree miraculously and bounced back into the fairway. And someone will say, it's total luck. And someone will always quip. Someone's been living clean. That's clean living. Someone had their quiet time this morning. As if you have been following God's rules, so now on the golf course, he's going to throw you a bone and a squirrel's going to kick it out there for you. You're in a parking lot. It's crowded. It's Walmart. It's Sunday afternoon. In the middle of COVID, there's only one entrance and everything's so far away. And then this one spot opens up. God is looking out for me. You must be living right. That's life under God. Life under God is an exchange. It says, I'll follow your rules and you protect me. And we laugh about it, but it shows up in far more insidious ways than that. And see, there's issues with this posture, with this exchange, with this transactional relationship that we would engage in with God. And I want to point out to you three big ones this morning. The first real issue with this posture is it inevitably leads to disillusionment. It leads to disillusionment every time. If you adopt this posture and your posture before God is, I'm going to follow your rules and you're going to protect me. It's this transactional contract that we enter into with him. 100% of the times, it will make you feel like I felt standing in the middle of Papa Murphy's pizza. I went a couple years ago. A couple years ago, Jen and I decided that we wanted pizza. It was once a year that we eat pizza. We're very healthy people. We don't do this a lot. We went to Jets. There was a Jets close to our house. Love Jets pizza. Love their thick crust with pepperoni. It's so good. And so I went to Jets. I'm so excited. I was just all in on fat day. Let's just go. I'm going to have it. I'm going to eat it all. And I get to Jets and there's a sign that it's closed. They moved to Creedmoor. I like Jets. I don't like Jets that far away. I don't like it that much. So there's another place that opened up in that same shopping center called Papa Murphy's Pizza. And I'm like, all right, pizza's pizza. I'll go to Papa Murphy's. So I go over there and I'm looking at the menu and this is just like an old man, angry old man rant. It has nothing to do with the sermon. But I at the menu, and there's no like proper names. I want like, I need like Supreme and Meat Lovers and Pepperoni. Like I need just normal pizza names that we all agree on, and they're getting cute with it. It's like Papa's Favorite, Mama's Best, and I'm like, I don't want to read all the ingredients. I just want a Supreme, you know, like just name it Supreme. Anyways, I get up to the front. The girl says, what do you want? And I said, do you have just like a supreme pizza? I don't want to read all the things. And she goes, yeah, that's mama's best. I'm like, great, give me that. So she goes, okay. I said, take a large. And I said, I'm going to go get some groceries. I'll come back and pick it up. She said, that's great. So I go, here's Teeter, get my stuff, put it in the car, go back in, Papa Murphy's, I'm sitting down looking at Twitter or something like that and just messing around. And then they say, hey, your order's ready. So I get up and go, okay, I walk over to the girl and she hands me this thing. And it's cold. It's in like this foil pan with cellophane on the top. And I go, this isn't my order. And she goes, you're Nate, right? I said, yeah. She goes, mama's best? I'm like, yeah. She goes, yeah, that's it. And I go, what, do I have to cook it? What are you talking about? What? And everybody in the store turns and looks at me and starts giggling. The manager looks at me and just starts laughing. I go, I can cook this? And I'm about to say, here, you take it. Like, just give me my money back. I don't agree to this deal. You just take the chore that you just put in my hands. You take that back. And the girl, she was so sweet, she's laughing and she says, sir, I promise you it's really good. Just put it in the oven for like 12 minutes. It's gonna be great. Okay, fine. So I take it home. I'm so angry that they violated the pizza contract. I go home, I put it in the oven, I get it out. I don't have a way to remove the foil from this large pizza, so I've got like a knife and fork situation where I'm sweating now, I need a towel. And I'm trying to get this pizza out of the thing. And then I realized I don't have a pizza cutter and I don't have a stone big enough to cut this pizza. So I have to put it on the countertop with like paper underneath it with a butcher knife, like burning my knuckles as I try to cut this pizza. They handed me a chore, man. I was so angry because what they did is they violated the unwritten American pizza contract. The American pizza contract is simply, listen, I give you $12. You give me a hot pizza cut in a box. That's it. I'm going to take that pizza home. I'm going to put those pieces on paper plates, and I'm going to throw it all away, and I'm going to sit in my shame after I'm done. That's the deal. And you violated this. You gave me a chore. I don't want to cook. If I wanted to cook, I would have gone there and gotten the ingredients and cooked, but clearly that's not what I want to do. You broke the contract, man. I want my money back. When we adopt the life under God posture, we will have a moment just like that. Where we sit before God and we think, this isn't the deal. You broke the contract. I gave you my obedience. Now you give me protection. That's the deal. And God says, I never made that deal with you. I won't be reduced to that. If you've been a Christian for any amount of time and you've adopted this posture, and I believe we all have at different points, you've experienced that disillusionment. You know exactly what that is. That disillusionment almost always comes at unwarranted pain. When you experience a time in life where you feel like you are enduring unfair pain, unfair stress, you lose a loved one, someone gets sick, you get a difficult diagnosis, you face a tough loss, you watch a relationship in shambles, you don't have the job that you identified with anymore. When your life sits in shambles, that is usually when we have our moment of disillusionment and we look at God and we felt like I felt in the middle of that pizzeria that day, this isn't the deal, I want my money back. For some of you, that disillusionment wrecked your faith years ago and you're still recovering. If you haven't had this moment, you will. And the life under God posture sets us up to be disillusioned and frustrated. It sets us up to shipwreck our faith. There's no better example of someone who had this mindset and had to be set straight than Job in the Bible. Job is actually, he perfectly illustrates not only this first problem, but the second problem as well. The second problem with this life under God posture is it reduces and seeks to control God. It looks like we're following the rules. It looks like we're submitted. It looks like we're being obedient, doing everything that we're supposed to do. But in our hearts is this motivation, this murkiness that's pushing us to seek to control God. I can't control the universe, so I'm going to appease the God that can, and then you owe me. I've behaved well, now you owe me protection. It seeks to control God. And we see this posture all over the story of Job. Job is the first wisdom book in the Bible. It was the first book of the Bible ever written. The Monday Night Men's group is actually going over the book of Job this semester. So if I say something in here that interests you or that sparks you, I would encourage you to sign up for that. But some of you are familiar with the story of Job. Others may have forgotten and some may not have heard it yet. So just as a primer, I'll tell you what's happening. Job is the most righteous man that's alive at the time. And God allows Satan to torment him. And he torments him in devastating ways. Job is a very wealthy man. He loses all of his wealth. He loses all of his real estate holdings. He loses all of his servants and employees. He even loses his children. He has boils on his skin. His wife's advice to him is curse God and die. You want to talk about someone that experienced unwarranted and unfair pain? Job. And the first 36 chapters of the book are his friends giving him advice in three different cycles. And this advice is riddled with the life under God posture. They come to him and they say, Job, what have you done? What have you done to deserve this kind of punishment from God? You've lost your real estate. You've lost all your buildings. What did you do? Certainly you are hiding some secret sin, Job. And Job says, no, I'm not. Like, I'm not doing that. I promise I'm not. And then they come back a second time. They're like, no, no, no, Job, you're not listening to us. What is it that you're doing? What have you done? Because clearly you have sinned against the Lord, and that's why you're being punished in this way. Clearly you violated your side of the contract, and that's why God's not keeping up his end of the deal. It's this life under God posture. And after three cycles of this, where they become really pointed with him, Job still refuses and says, no, that's not what I'm doing. I don't have some secret unrepented sin. So he demands an audience with God. And he goes to God to shake his fist at him and to say, hey, this isn't fair, man. This isn't part of the deal. I've always honored you. I've always worshiped you. I raised my kids to follow you and love you. I offer you everything and you're letting this happen to me. This isn't fair, God. And any of us that have ever experienced that moment of disillusion where we would look at God and we would go, this isn't fair. I've shared with you before, mine and Jen's struggle to have kids. With every new young couple that would so easily have two and three and five children, I would look at God and go, what gives, man? This isn't fair. This isn't the deal. I think we've all said that to God at one point or another in our own ways. God's response to Job is profound. And it is not at all what you would expect. Job asks for an audience with God to say, hey God, what's the deal? This isn't fair. And God's response is one of anger and frustration. Look at what God says to Job. This is amazing to me. It's one of the most profound things in the Bible. Chapter 38, then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said, who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? Dress for action like a man. I will question you and you will make it known to me. Does that sound like a God who's about to go, yeah, my bad, I didn't keep up my end of the deal. Here's why I broke contract. Sounds like God is angry. I had a professor one time say, Job wanted a man-to-man conversation with God. The problem was he was one man short. God says, who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? You want to talk to me like a man? Okay, dress yourself like a man. It angers God. And then God, for two chapters, proceeds to ask him questions. He says, where were you, Job, when I laid the foundations of the world? Surely you know. Surely you understand, Job, the inner workings of the universe. If you're asking me this question, you want to understand how I orchestrate everything, how I run the universe, you're questioning my leadership, then maybe you can explain to me how the Leviathan and the behemoth came into being. Maybe you can explain to me how the world works. Surely you were there when I told the oceans that they can go this far and no further. When I drew the boundaries of the continents, surely you know Job. And God's response is very clear to Job. Job, most righteous man to ever live, who in the season of his life adopted the life under God posture. God says, hey man, you've forgotten your place. I'm the creator. You're the creation. I won't be reduced to your contracts. I will not be reduced to your control. You don't get to follow the rules like I'm some pagan God and then hold my feet to the fire about the contract that I didn't enter into. That's not the deal. I'm God. You're not going to understand me. And I think one of the most difficult things about the Christian life is to understand there are going to be parts of God that we can't understand. God's point here with Job is, even if I explained it to you, even if I set you down and told me everything that I was thinking with what's going on in your life, even if I told you everything that I could, it would be like you trying to explain yourself to a six-month-old. It's just not going to work. We don't have the capacity to understand. And when we adopt this life under God posture, it seeks to reduce God to our level and it seeks to control him and it angers God because he's not gonna enter into our contracts with us. The last problem is highlighted by Jesus himself. The last problem with this posture that we wanna look at this morning is that it turns us into legalistic hypocrites. If we adopt this life under God posture, I'm going to obey you and you protect me, it turns us into legalistic hypocrites. Because in this posture, what we assume is those who are blessed are obedient and those who are struggling are disobedient. This attitude was around when Jesus walked the earth. They came upon a blind man one day and the disciples, his disciples looked at him and they said, what did he do or his parents do that made him blind? What's their sin? That's life under God posture. And what this does is it reduces relationship to a set of rules. It takes the relationship that Jesus wants with us, that he created us for, to be in relation with him, and it reduces it to a set of rules. And it makes it, this posture makes it entirely possible to appear outwardly spiritual because you follow the rules and your life seems blessed when inside you're rotting away because there's no relationship at all. It robs the relationship of all emotions and the actual relationship that it should be. It's kind of like church over the summer. The thing that broke my heart about church during COVID is that church is a fundamentally communal institution. And I had to get up in this room and preach. And it felt like a performance to an empty room. And hope that you guys would watch it three days later. And I don't know about you. But church got to feeling pretty empty for me over the summer. Because there was no community in the church. And that's what makes the church the church. From a human standpoint. And we do the same thing with our relationship with Jesus. If we reduce it to a set of rules, things I have to do to be right with God, we remove the relationship from it and it becomes empty. There's no better example of this than the Pharisees. The religious leaders in Jesus's day were experts at this. Outwardly, they looked great. They were living the blessed life. They were good. Everyone looked to them and tried to get on their level. If I asked the Pharisees, where's your relationship with God and where do you want it to be? They'd be like, I'm currently at a 10. I would like it to remain at a 10. That's the Pharisees because they have it all together on the outside. But here's what Jesus says to this group of people in Matthew 23. In Matthew 23, verse 27, he says, you're like a dirty cup that's been cleaned on the outside, but inside you're filthy. He looks at the religious leaders of the day, the ones who are supposed to know better. And he says, you're hypocrites. You're whitewashed tombs. It's a pretty tombstone with a rotting carcass underneath it. When we adopt this life under God posture and we reduce our relationship to a set of rules, it turns us into legalistic hypocrites who on the outside can look like they have their life together and on the inside are rotting away. This incidentally is how someone can know more Bible than anyone you've ever known in your life and be a jerk. So I would ask you as we finish, and I warned you, I'm not giving you a resolution here. I'm not saying, so this is the right way to do it. I'm just saying that's bad. And I would end this week by asking you this question, and this is what caused me repentance. And if this resonated with you, I would really encourage you to read the chapter and follow along with it. But I would ask you this week, as you're introspective and look at yourself, how much of this posture do you see in you? How much of this do you see in you? How much over the years have you followed God because somehow by following him, I'm going to appease him and win favor? Have you ever had something big in your life coming up and so all of a sudden you get real spiritual? You ever had something super bad happen and then you get really spiritual? I don't want this to happen again. That's a life under God posture. And when we adopt this posture, it will lead to disillusionment. We reduce God and we try to control him. And ultimately, we end up legalistic hypocrites who have removed the relational part from the relationship with Jesus and replaced it with rules. And we become whitewashed tombs. So how much of this exists in you? Let's pray and then Steve's going to come and introduce to us a new song for the series. Father, we love you. We're grateful for you. Lord, I know that within us, those of us who know you, is a desire to know you more. I know that within us is a desire to grow. Within us is a holy dissatisfaction with where we are and a divine yearning to know you better. God, I pray that you would make a path for us. Would you give us the honesty in our hearts and in our minds to be honest with you and with ourselves about where we stand and how we've approached you? God, if we have come to you simply because we want you to protect us, simply because we want you to bless us, and not because we want you, would you convict us of that? And would you show us a better way? It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.