The Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse

The Bible is filled with stories.
Oh, I know it’s just one story, but it’s one story made up of many stories.
And a large portion of the word of god is communicated to us wrapped in the human flesh of bible characters.
It’s almost to the point where if you started in Genesis and went all the way to the revelations, you could tell the whole story of the Bible by just going from one person to the next.
People dominate the landscape of the word of god.
And isn’t it interesting that when god wanted to communicate his love to us, he did it through a person.
He chose a person his only begotten son to come into this world to say to us in the way we could grasp it I love you.
It was through a person that we learned of god’s love.
So over the years, I have pre many series on the people of the Bible, but one of the people whose life seems to have been neglected perhaps by me and by others as well, is really one of the most important people in the whole scripture, and his name is Elijah.
The story of Elijah’s recorded in First Kings chapter seventeen, and it goes through Second Kings chapter two.
To understand Elijah as a person, you have to understand the time in which he lived.
So I wanna set the stage and put up the backdrop for his life today and tell you what it was like when Elijah was a prophet upon this earth, the nation of Israel was in its heyday, both spiritually and politically.
Her beloved king was David, a military genius who had extended the borders of his land all the way to the south and all the way to the north.
For a period of time under David’s leadership, Israel was the most powerful and influential nation in all of the world.
After David came Solomon, David’s son, He took over the leadership of Israel.
After his father, he built his magnificent temple He established a strong navy on behalf of his nation and controlled all the trade routes to India and Africa devoting himself throughout his life to worldwide projects.
But after Solomon, things fell apart.
Ten of the twelve tribes of Israel seceded from the union.
Their leader was a man by the name of Geraboham.
He served as king over the northern kingdom for twenty two years.
From nine thirty one BC to nine ten.
And he was a wicked man, and he did wickedness, great wickedness in the land of Israel.
He installed idolatrous calf worship as the official religion of the northern kingdom, He wasn’t mad at Jehovah, but he knew that Jehovah was represented in the southern kingdom and that all of the Jewish people would want to go there to celebrate their many feast days.
So he put his politics ahead of his religion and the dark days of Israel’s decline began.
During the half century that followed the death of Solomon, seven kings served on the throne of the northern kingdom of Israel.
To say that they were all evil is an understatement.
They led Israel into a free fall of spiritual rebellion against god And as a nation, she backslid so far, you could hardly recognize that she’d ever been a part of god’s plan.
I’ve told you about the evil of the first king who established idol worship.
He was followed to the throne by a man named Nadab, who was his own son.
The short record of his reign simply states that he did evil in the sight of the lord.
Native was followed by Basha, Basha came to power by murdering Nadab, and not only that, all of his relatives, and all of his friend’s relatives, Basha was a wicked, murderous man, and he ruled Israel for twenty four years.
Then came Eli, Elah, who was Beisha’s son.
One day, Ellah was getting drunk at a friend’s house when one of his commanders, a man named Zimrai, walked in and struck him dead and killed him.
Guess what, Zimri is now the king, but Zimri reigned only seven days.
Before he killed himself.
His enemies came after him when he knew he would not be able to prevail.
He went into the Palace of the king’s house, set it on fire and stayed in the midst of the fire and died.
Then came Omre, the next king.
It is simply said that he did what was evil in the lord’s sight even more than any of the kings before him.
And finally, we come to the record of the king who was in power when Elijah came on the scene.
His name best known of all, his name was Ahab.
Each of the six kings that I have briefly told you about, applied the things that were wicked in the lives of the kings who went before them.
But if you think the first six kings were wicked, I wanna tell you that the king who was in power when Elijah walked on the scene was the most wicked of all the kings.
Here is what the scripture says about him.
Now, Ahab, the son of Omre, did evil in the sight of the lord, more than all who were for him, and it came to pass as though it had been a trivial thing for him to walk in the sins of Jarabollum, the son of NEba, that he took as wife, Jezebel, the daughter of Ethbel, king of the Sidonians, and he went, and he served bail and worshiped him.
And he set up an altar for bail in the temple of bail, which he had built in some area And Ahab made a wooden image, and Ahab, now watch this, did more to provoke the lord god of Israel to anger than all of the other kings of Israel who were before him.
His greatest sin was his marriage to Jezebel In that marriage, he violated every principle that god had given him.
For you, see, Jezebel was a pagan woman, and she brought all of her wicked religion with her when she came to Israel to be Ahab’s wife.
She personally supported eight fifty prophet of her moral cult, and she systematically went through Israel as the queen, trying to kill all of the prophets of Jehovah that she could find.
Ahab didn’t have the moral courage or fortitude to do anything about his wife and her dereliction So he simply joined her and followed her and together, they committed great evil.
And that’s the way it was. When Elijah came on the scene.
And we read in the verse that starts First Kings chapter seventeen, these words, and Elijah, the Tishbite of the inhabitants of Gilead, said to Ahab, as the lord god of hosts lives before whom I stand, there shall not be dew or rain these years, except at my word.
Get this picture. Here is the most ruthless, wicked man who has ever served in leadership in Israel.
And this man named Elijah walks into his presence and pronounces the judgment of a drought upon his land for three years.
And part of us in our minds are asking, who is Elijah? Where did he come from?
We have no record of his parents, though we know he had some.
We have no record of his adolescence, though obviously he grew up like everybody else, out of nowhere, out of obscurity, off of the page that we have not read comes Elijah, and he walks into the presence of Ahab.
With his message of judgment upon the nation. Elijah is incredible
character in the Bible.
And I want to tell you, first of all, a little bit about his legacy.
Give you some sense of who he was and what he was like.
I began with talking to you about his peculiar appearance.
Elijah was known for his peculiar style and his appearance. He was an eccentric person.
A strange looking man.
On one occasion, he was met by a group who came back to report to their king and they described him this way in Second Kings one eight.
He is a hairy man wearing a leather belt around his waist.
And the king heard it and immediately said, it’s Elijah, the Tishbite.
In other words, there’s nobody else it could be. It’s gotta be Elijah.
In the new testament, we discover that John the Baptist was like Elijah.
In fact, John the Baptist was so like Elijah that when people saw John the Baptist, they often thought he was Elijah.
So what did John the Baptist look like? Here is Matthew’s description.
John himself was clothed in camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist and his food was locusts and wild honey.
It’s interesting that some people, you and I probably know, have used passages like this to justify the way they present themselves.
I heard a story of a young man whose father told him that if he went to college and got straight a’s, when he got home, he would give him a car.
So this young man went away to a secular college. He came home with his report card.
He had straight a’s, a four point two average.
But unfortunately, when he returned home, he returned home with his hair down below his waist and a full grown beard.
And his father said to him, I’m proud of your grades, but I will never give a car to anyone who looks like you do.
And the young man said, dad, this is the way Jesus looked. This is the way Elijah looked.
This is the way John the Baptist looked. They had a big argument about it and went to bed.
The next morning, the young man woke up and looked out in his driveway.
There was a donkey tied out there in the driveway.
And he heard his father say, you wanna look like Jesus?
You can ride like Jesus. Right?
Over my lifetime as a pastor, I’ve seen more than a few people who look like the Bible describes John the Baptist.
And Elijah, eccentric, quaint, not like anybody you’ve ever seen.
I’d also like to tell you a little bit about Elijah’s place among the prophets.
He’s called a prophet but interestingly enough, when you open the Old Testament, there’s no book called the book of Elijah.
There is no prophecy of Elijah in the Old Testament.
In fact, there isn’t anything on paper that Elijah ever wrote.
And yet the Bible speaks of him as a prophet because He wasn’t a written prophet.
He was an oral prophet. And there is more information about this oral prophet in the Bible about his life than anybody else except for Moses, and, of course, the lord Jesus.
Elijah is unique among all the prophets He was the first one to raise somebody back from the dead.
He left this world without dying.
He left an immediate successor behind him in a man whose name sounds similar to his, Elijah, and he had a moral successor in John the Baptist.
He was sent back to Earth a thousand years after his life to join the lord Jesus on the mount of transfiguration, and his voice will be heard again in the land of Israel according to Malachi chapter four verse five.
He was a mighty man among the prophets.
The Bible also tells us that he performed many miracles.
I cannot wait to take you through this series and tell you the stories of what Elijah did.
The things that are told about this man and his power over nature and how god used him to make the point that needed to be made.
Oftentimes, people when they hear that somebody in the Old Testament did a miracle will say, well, why don’t we have miracles like that now?
Except for a few incidental things that we know about.
Why do all the major miracles, like bringing somebody back from the dead, which has never happened?
Outside of the ones that we’ve talked about. Why doesn’t god do those miracles now?
Well, the first reason that miracles are not normal experiences is if they were normal experiences, they wouldn’t be called miracles, they’d be called normal experiences.
Meracles are miracles because they are rare.
And if you want to get a picture of how miracles fit into the plan of god in the plan of the scripture, wanna ask you to imagine that you’re outside on a beautiful night here in Southern California, and you look up at the skies, and as you look at the skies, you see three distinct clusters of stars across the heavens.
That is kind of a of the miracles of the Bible, because you see, the miracles of the Bible were performed, first of all, by Moses and Joshua.
During that time, as you know, Moses performed the plagues upon Israel.
This cluster of miracles that took place under Moses and Joshua, like the dividing of the red sea and the water from the rock.
When those were all done, the law had been given, the season for the introduction of the law into the world, all the miracles stopped.
After Moses and Joshua, there’s a period of about seventeen, eighteen hundred years where no miracles are performed at all.
And then Elijah and Elijah show up.
The first cluster of miracles under Josh and Moses, and now the second cluster of miracles under Elijah and Elijah.
Moses was the giver of the law, but Elijah was the reformer of the law.
And Elijah and Elijah needed the miracles of god to validate their standing before god because as you have heard today, This was enormously wicked time.
Sin was rampant, and rebellion was so deeply sated in the hearts of these people that if god didn’t bring his miracle power to play, there would have been no change at all.
Great miracles happened under Elijah. He did some amazing things.
He multiplied a bowl of flour.
He multiplied a jar of oil He breathed new life into the widow’s dead son.
He called down fire and rain from heaven.
And when Elijah came along after him, he prayed for a double portion of what Elijah got.
Do you know what god did through Elijah exactly twice as many miracles as he did through Elijah, between the two of them was a great miracle working period in the world.
After Elijah and Elijah comes another long period of silence.
Justice in the heavens, there’s great space between the clusters. There was no prophet.
There was no writing. There was nothing.
We call the years before the new testament, the four hundred silent years because There’s no book of the canonical Bible that was written in.
There’s no evidence of any word from god.
It’s almost as if the heavens went silent Some have said that god allow that to happen to protect the absolute uniqueness of the next chapter that would happen in redemption.
And then one night, the stars shone over a stable in the village of Bethlehem, and the fullness of time had come pay close attention to this amazing fact.
For the first thirty years that Jesus walked on this earth, he didn’t perform any miracles at all.
His first miracle recorded in John chapter two was the changing of the water into wine, a miracle which he performed as an adult.
He was the sinless son of god, and his life wasn’t miraculous in the early days of his walk upon this earth.
But during the three years of his ministry, he performed many miracles, proving that he was indeed Jesus the Christ And then when he went back to heaven in his ascension, the apostles continued for a short period of time, replicating some of the miracles of Jesus in the afterglow of Jesus presence on this earth.
And then once again, those kinds of miracles went away.
I know you hear about people getting a miracle, and I hear about miracles all the time, but most of the miracles I hear about today would not qualify under the definition of a new testament or old testament miracle.
God does some miraculous things for which we are grateful, and it is my intention to discourage you from believing in any of that, but biblical miracles, as we study the scripture, happened, in three different periods of time.
There is yet another time in the future when they will return during the tribulation, but looking at the world historically, There’s Moses in Joshua, there’s Elijah and Elijah, and there’s Jesus Christ
and the apostles. And did
you know that one day those miracle workers had a conference together on the mount of transfiguration.
Moses was there as the lawgiver.
Elijah was there as the great reformer, and Jesus was there as the ultimate miracle worker.
They all came back when you like to have heard the discussion on that day between the three miracle workers of all the major miracles in biblical history.
Then let me tell you a little bit about Elijah’s physical rapture to heaven.
It says in second Kings chapter two and verse eleven, then it happened as Elijah and Elijah continued on and talked, that suddenly a chariot of fire appeared with horses of fire and separated the two of them, and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.
I’m signing up for that trip. Man, oh, man. Isn’t that something to think about?
All of a sudden, The fiery church comes by, gets picked up, and then he’s gone, and he goes to heaven.
He’s one of two people in the Bible who went to heaven without dying, The other one was a man by the name of enoch.
And you know what the Bible says about enoch, enoch walked with god, and he was not.
What do you mean he was not? He was not anywhere anymore. He went to heaven.
Where did Enoch go? He is not. But he is, he’s in heaven.
Enoch and Elijah are prototypes of what happens to believers who are still on this earth when Jesus comes back.
The Bible says that one day, there are going to be a lot of people who go to heaven just like Elijah did without the chariot, a lot of people who go to heaven just like enoch did without dying.
The Bible says it this way that in that day, those of us who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the lord in the air.
Elijah and Inick are prototypes of the resurrection and rapture of the believer.
So Elijah has a peculiar appearance. He has an incredible place among the prophets.
He is a performer of miracles He’s going to heaven in a special way, and his prominence in the new testament is amazing.
Even though Elijah from the old testament, he shows up in the last half of this book more than any other prophet in biblical history.
Elijah’s mentioned thirty times in the new testament, believe it or not.
That’s more than Daniel and Jeremiah, and I isaiah, he wasn’t a written prophet.
He was an oral prophet, but elijah’s mentioned thirty times in the new testament.
And there are two incidents in the new testament that kind of highlight how much the people of that day were aware of Elijah as a personality.
Remember when he stood on the mount of transfiguration with the lord, the people who were there with him didn’t seem surprised at all.
You see the Jewish people believe and the Bible teaches they believe this, that before their Messiah comes back, which we know he’s already come back, but they believe their Messiah is still coming in that before he comes, Elijah will appear.
And so when Elijah shows up on the mountain of transfiguration, He didn’t surprise anybody.
They were expecting him. And do you remember when Jesus was on the cross, and in one of his last words from the cross, he cried out Eli eli, Lamma Sabakthani, that is my god, my god, why have you forsaken me, and the scripture says that when those around the cross heard these words, they said, this man is calling for Elijah.
Let us see if Elijah will come and save him.
You see, this is so interesting to us because Elijah is not in our mainstream thinking process all.
We don’t ever you didn’t think about Elijah this week. Did you?
I didn’t need until I started studying this again, Elijah’s kind of on the back shelf, oh, I know about Elijah.
But the Jewish people never forgot about Elijah.
He’s a very present personality, both in the new testament, and his place in Judaism today is still very important.
Each time the passover is celebrated in a Jewish home, A cup of wine called Elijah’s Cup is placed on the table during the meal.
It is left untouched in honor of Elijah who, according to their belief, will arrive one day as an unknown guest to herald the advent of their Messiah.
During the Passover dinner, biblical verses are read, while the door to the house is briefly open to welcome Elijah should he show up that day.
It is further said when he comes, he will resolve all of the controversy over the law.
So your friends in Judaism know about every time they celebrate the passover, whether they ever stop to think about what is behind it, they put elijah’s cup on their table.
As a testimony to the fact they believe Elijah coming back before their Messiah shows up.
And then there’s another tradition among Judaism called Elijah chair.
That is a very interesting thing, because as you know, the Jewish people function under the covenant of circumcision, And at every circumcision of a Jewish male in Judaism today, Elijah is supposed to be there seated at the right hand of the one who is being circumcised, and he’s supposed to be seated in a richly carved chair.
It’s called Elijah’s chair. An salutation to the child, and an invitation to Elijah are a part of the ceremony.
And when the chair of Elijah is made ready, the words This is the chair of Elijah blessed be his memory.
They have to be said in a loud voice.
This seems strange that this character that we know a little bit about, who we’ve tucked away in the old testament, we look at it once in a while when we’re reading through the Bible.
Is a person of such great prominence, both in historic Judaism and even into the practice of Judaism today.
That’s sort of the legacy of his life.
But now in these last few moments, I wanna give you some of the lessons we can extrapolate from the life of elijah.
I have to do this quickly. First of all, Elijah encourages us to believe in the promise of revival.
Everywhere where I go these days, people say, you know, Doctor.
Jeremiah, we we’re praying for a in America doesn’t seem like there’s anything else gonna work.
One thing we do know, the political thing ain’t working all that great.
And if our hope for a change in our cultures wrapped up totally in the politics of our country, we’re gonna be very disappointed.
We do know that in history, there have been many great revivals that have happened in America five, actually.
People keep saying uh, we’re praying for a revival, but I don’t know about you.
Sometimes when I hear that I think you guys, you’re wasting your time.
We’ve crossed the Rubicon We’ve gone past the point of no return.
There’s not gonna be a revival, and this nation is wicked as we have become.
Then I read the words
of First Kings, and
the awfulness of that day. Which is way worse than it is here today.
And in the midst of that darkness, the Bible says one man by the name of Elijah Walk into the presence of the
king and pronounced judgment on him, and what happened because of that was a revival in Israel.
When I think about that, I have hope, I I find myself thinking, god, you did it once.
You can do
it again. Do it in my time.
Do it now. I’m tired of reading about all the great revivals. I wanna be a part of one.
I want to experience one.
Also, we learn from Elijah to be encouraged in the potential of one person.
Elijah was the change agent in Israel.
He didn’t walk into the presence of Ahab with his cabinet and with his military advisors He wasn’t surrounded by an army that was sent to protect him in front of this powerful man.
He walked into the presence of that king in his strange getup and said, Ahab, I’m telling you, it’s not gonna rain for three years, or until the word of god says it’s gonna rain, Get yourself straightened out, sir.
You say, where in the world did he come from? I don’t know.
He just walked on the scene. He came from god. God sent him. God said, Elijah, you’re the man.
Go tell this wicked king. His number is up.
Let me tell you what that means to me. You may be a young person listening.
You probably think there’s not anything you can do to change the situation in the school that you attend.
You’re so outnumbered. You think the whole world’s going this way, and here you are.
You’re trying to walk to the beat of different drummer and it’s almost impossible to get really discouraging to be the only one.
And you wonder what can I do, and I’m here to tell you, don’t you estimate the power of one person who will stay in faith toward god?
Mr. You walk out into your job every day.
You’re the only one says the name of Jesus Christ except in a swear word where you work.
And you’re almost afraid for people to know who you are and what you believe because you are not just in the minority.
You are the minority. I wanna tell you something today, sir, If you will walk with god and be god’s person, there is no limit to what god can do through one.
Elijah was just one, one somebody, one.
And god used him, and that gives me hope, and it should give you hope.
It helps us to believe that maybe god can raise up an Elijah in our schools or an Elijah in our workplaces and Elijah in our culture, in our city, and even in every government.
God works through one. Maybe you’re that one. Maybe you’ve sensed him.
And here’s what I’m gonna ask you to do. Don’t let it rain in Israel for three years.
Lord god, I’m asking you, don’t let it rain in Israel for three years, and then he went right to the to the king and told him, it’s not gonna rain in Israel for three years.
You’re praying to try to get through next week.
Elijah’s praying that it won’t rain for three years.
And if you go back to the first words that are said by Elijah in this narrative, they go something like this.
He says to King Ahab, as the lord god of Israel lives before whom I stand.
Do you know why Elijah wasn’t afraid to confront Ahab and stand before that king.
Every day, he stood before the King Kings and the lord of lords.
He lived in the presence of almighty God. To me, that’s the best definition of prayer you can find.
What is prayer? It’s not just saying a prayer.
Prairie is a condition of heart The Bible says pray earnestly. It says pray constantly.
It says pray always, and we say, how does anybody do that?
Well, it means you live your life in the presence of god.
You could have these brief conversations throughout the day. That’s what it means to pray earnestly.
Elijah was living in the presence of god. And he was a courageous man.
Let me give you another one quickly.
Elijah encourages us to see the purpose of god’s word I don’t have time to take you through all of this, so I’m gonna give you an assignment, and it’ll be a good one.
Not too many chapters between first kings seventeen and second kings, too.
You can read the whole story of Elijah sometime this week, and here’s what I want you to look for.
I want you to look for the phrases that sound like this.
And the word of the lord came to Elijah.
And the word of the lord told Elijah, and the word of god told him to do this all throughout this whole narrative, those phrases are stashed.
In other words, Elijah lived every day by the word of the lord.
And sometimes you see that these people did things, and they did it because the word of the lord came to them through Elijah.
Let me tell you something.
You can do great things when you’re a person of prayer and your GPS system is the word of the lord.
He didn’t do anything in his life without an acknowledgement from the word of the lord except one thing.
And that’s the day he ran from Jezebel.
There’s no record in the Bible that says, and the word of the lord came unto Elijah. Get out
of here, that woman’s after you. Nope. He did that on his
own, and he got him in all kinds of trouble.
So he encourages us to believe in the promise of revival to see the potential one person of faith to see the power of prayer and the purpose of god’s word, and then let me add He also encourages us to believe in our possibilities with god.
I know that one of the great problems that you have, if you preach bible characters is that all the people sitting out there kinda glaze over, and they say, oh, well, that’s nice to know about Moses and nice to know about Paul, but,
I mean, they they they were different, man. They’re bible people.
I think some people think these cats were born in heaven. And drop down on earth.
It’s not true. All of the people of the Bible, all of the personalities, where personalities who are just like us.
In fact, listen to these words again from James chapter five. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours.
I looked it up in many translations and paraphrases, and they all say the same thing.
Elijah was like you. He was like me. He wasn’t somebody with special stuff.
He was a person like you and like me. He wasn’t a super duper saint.
He wasn’t hatched in heaven. He was a man who was born of parents, even though we don’t know who they were, He grew up as a child.
He had an adolescence and somewhere in the process of time, god got ahold of this average man and used him in a dynamic way, and he changed his world.
We go through periods of time in our life when we think I could never be like him, or look at her, what a great Christian she is, I could never be like her, or he preaches a sermon.
I could never be like him, or look at her, she teaches, uh, bible study fellowship.
I could never do that. And you will never do that, unless you believe that god can help you do that.
The difference in Elijah was not in his family.
The difference in Elijah was in his faith.
He was an average ordinary person like us who just happened to open his life up
to what god wanted to do through him.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but I’ve looked around as I’ve lived in this Christian world for a lot of years.
And I’ve met a lot of people who’ve been, if you walked up to them and you didn’t know their story, you would never guess they could even be in the story.
People who’ve led great ministries, people who’ve had great impact on their culture. They aren’t something special.
Some of them are not attractive.
Some of them don’t look like they know how to lead, but god in them uses their abilities and empowers them to do great things.
Elijah, more than anything else that I hope you will retain from today is a man like us.
Don’t put him off in some separate category and say, well, I’m not gonna listen to that because I don’t get anything from Elijah.
I don’t relate to him. Well, if you don’t relate to him, you listening.
Elijah was a man of like nature, such as us.
And in all of his strangeness, his hairiness, his leather belt, his strange ways, his miracles.
The Bible says, he’s just like us.
You may be sitting here thinking, you know, I’d like to serve God, but Pastor, you don’t know, man.
I’m I’m really different. Everybody tells me I’m different. God ain’t gonna use me.
Well, he won’t use you if you don’t let him.
But it seems to me god likes to take different people and fill them with his spirit and allow them to do great things so he alone gets the credit.
I’ve seen that happen over and over again.
Years ago, after I’d been the pastor of this church for just a few years, I invited a friend of mine to come here and preach.
Nobody here had ever seen him preach or heard of him.
Most people didn’t know him in circles, I grew up, and he was quite well known.
He was an evangelist, and his name was Jaydon Jennings.
Jenon Jennings came to this church to preach one to Sunday, and I reminded the people before he came of his situation.
He had a terrible thyroid problem that he’d had almost all of his adult life, and his thyroid problem caused him to twitch and shake.
If you’ve ever been with him, he
just twitches like that. He’d be talking to you in his in his arm and just go like that and twitch.
It was an amazing thing to me.
He was a tremendous preacher when he would get in the pulp, but he managed to incorporate his twitches into his gestures.
If you didn’t know it ahead of time, you might even know.
Maybe you kinda got some jerky gestures, but he’s a great preacher, and you didn’t know it.
Unfortunately, though, you don’t wanna ride with him in a car when he’s driving.
I know that wasn’t something I wanted to do.
He was a hero of mine.
He was a he had red hair, a really good looking dude, and he dressed to kill.
Long before Hankis, he had Hanki, man.
When he stood in the pulpit, he looked like he had he’d come out of some fashion review and then you realize this man was serving the lord
with this problem. I talked to him about it a lot, and one day he told me this.
He said, one day, Doctor.
Jay, somebody gave me a sheet of paper, and this is what said, he said, this is old time southern wisdom.
Here here’s what was written on the paper. God can hit a straight lick with a crooked stick.
He said, that’s when I knew I was gonna be okay.
Because if ever there was anybody who was
a crooked stick, I was it.
If you ever heard him preach, he preaches with such power, you don’t even notice him.
God has used him as an instrument for the salvation of many, many people first of all, as a pastor, then as the president of
a college, and now in his retirement, even preaching.
I tell you something today if god couldn’t hit us. Straight liquid or crooked stick.
I’m not in the equation and neither are you.
Because all of us qualify under the category, don’t we? Were imperfect people.
We’re crooked sticks, but Elijah was willing to commit himself and all of his foibles to god, and god used him.
And it’s my prayer that during this time, when we walk through his life and the serial of his stories, that during these stories, god will get ahold of your heart, and you will say over and over again, if god can use that man, god can use me.
I wanna be used if god.
You don’t wanna come to the end of your life and look back over your shoulder at all the things that you might have done that you never did.
We had a big event in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and that’s,
of course, as you know, where I started out in the ministry.
And they had a huge reception afterwards, and all the people that were still living who’d been a part of that church came fifty couples showed up for this reception.
And it caused me as I was thinking about this message to remember times when I would sit in my little study and in the mobile homes that we use to start that church and thinking, god, what am I doing here?
Why? Why am I here? I would say, Lord, God, I spent four years in college and four years in seminary.
And now I’m sitting in a trailer in the middle of an empty field, and this is what you’ve called me to do.
But god built that church.
And Donna and I stood there for almost two hours and heard these people tell us not so much about what happened while we were
there, but what happened after we left and how god used the testimony of his word and the training and evangelism for them to win their friends and their lead an impact in his life because he trusted god.
Let me leave these final thoughts with you.
The name Elijah is made up of two words, Eli and Yah.
And his name actually means Eli, Elohim, yeah, yahovah, is my god.
Can you imagine all these prophets of bail who didn’t believe in
the Jehovah God Who’s coming to see the king today? I don’t know his name’s Jehovah is god.
And he lied that Jehovah is god walks in among the prophets of baal.
There’s another possible translation of his name that
would be translated. Jehovah is my strength. It doesn’t matter.
If Jehovah is your god, he’s your strength.
Whatever it is that god speaks to you about, here’s what you do.
You say, God, you are my strength, you are
my god. I can do anything if you will help me. Donna wanted to
go see all the houses we lived in. We lived in three houses in Fort Wayne.
We went to visit every one of them. Believe it or not, they’re all still standing.
We pulled into the first house on Trier Road, sat in the driveway and talked for a few moments, and then remembered that the day we pulled into that place pulling all of our belongings in a U Halllet trailer behind us.
I told her I’m gonna go in first and unlock this place, and then we’ll go in and start putting our stuff together.
And I remember walking into the kitchen, I’m walking over to the cabinets, and somebody had gotten there ahead of us and there was a big sign on the cabinet doors, and this is what the sign said.
God’s commandments are god’s enablements.
I didn’t get it at first, but then I realized someone had put that sign up there
to tell me if god has called you here, he will enable you to do what he’s called you to do.
He will help you. And I’m here to tell you that’s true.
It’s true for me and has been true for us, you know, it’ll be true for you.
You just have to say yes to him.
You have to putting him off and marginalizing and him trivializing him and say, Lord, God, I want your blessing on my life.
And no matter what it takes, no matter what you ask me to do, I’m here I’m in the game.
I’m ready to go, and you will be surprised what god begins to do in your life.