Elijah: Triumphs, Trials, and God's Unchanging Love

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Scripture, however, makes no attempt to conceal or to excuse the blemishes or the faults or the failures of its Heroes. That in itself is one of the pointers to the very infallibility and inherency of scripture, the Divine record which God has left to us. [00:01:43]

In 18, he manifests his bravery before hundreds of prophets who were in allegiance to Baal and who were antagonistic to the servant of God. From the bravery before hundreds, we find him panicking before one and indeed panicking before this woman Jezebel. In 18, he is on the Mountaintop; in 19, he's down in the valley. [00:03:09]

In the same way as we walk the Christian pathway, we recognize if we're prepared to be honest at all that we do not always experience the highs of spiritual encouragement, but we also encounter the lows of discouragement, and sometimes it can happen to us almost simultaneously, almost from great victory to a moment of defeat. [00:04:15]

God's servants at all levels of ministry, I don't believe, are immune to this. When I was invited for the first time to the pastor's conference at Moody Bible Institute, they invited me, I think, 18 or 24 months before I appeared. In the letter of invitation, they said that I had to give them the title for two seminars. [00:05:34]

If God be for you, who can be against you? And I told her afterwards, I said, you know, did you do that on the spur of the moment? She said, no, I've been thinking about you all through the day, and I felt that I should give you that verse. [00:09:06]

It's not difficult to believe that God loves us, says one of the commentators, when we're on the heights of Carmel, but it's not so easy when, like Elijah in the desert, we lie stranded or as dismantled and rudderless vessels, we roll in the trough of the waves. [00:10:33]

Elijah represents the failure of a hero, and the failures of the heroes of the Bible are there for us not to hide behind but as warnings to deliver us from expecting too much of others and indeed from expecting too much of ourselves. [00:17:20]

Robert Murray McCheyne said, although he died at the age of 29, he said, I have found that the seeds of every sin known to man dwell within my heart. A reminder too is that the individual who thinks he stands better take heed lest he falls. [00:18:17]

For many of us, two of the darts that come with greatest frequency is the dart of complacency, thereby neutralizing us, or the dart of despondency, thereby rendering our ministry also somewhat obsolete. [00:19:00]

He started, as it were, to look at God through his circumstances rather than to look at his circumstances through God. There is a reason that the King James version translates verse three, and Elijah saw and ran for his life. He looked at things but looked at them differently now. [00:21:36]

When you're really tired, don't write important letters, okay? When you're really tired, don't quit your job or get a new one. When you're really tired, don't try and assess your spiritual condition, and when you're really tired, definitely don't trust try and assess the spiritual condition of anybody else. [00:22:58]

The fact is the only reason that we've never known any faithfulness in our lives is because we have been kept by God's power, as Peter tells us in 1 Peter 1 verse 5. It is because through faith we have been able to stand. [00:25:47]

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