1) "The fire that burns in us by the Holy Spirit of God convinces us and compels us to confess that the Lord He is God and Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father." [31:33]

2) "Elijah would say take a stand. Stand with the people of God though the world may seek to intimidate you to turn you away. Don't waver between two opinions; there is one God, and that is our God." [32:18]

3) "Perhaps you would say today I'm not going to let those godly people stand alone. I've been wavering about whether or not to become a part of this Fellowship of Faith. Perhaps today is the day to make your decision to say I'm going to stand with them for the Lord who is God." [33:09]

4) "If the Lord is God then serve him. This was the challenge that Elijah put before the people of Israel. But the people said nothing; they didn't know which to choose." [14:42]

5) "Elijah plus God is a majority. The numbers favored Baal, the government favored Baal... but Elijah was taken care of by the Lord who could feed him with ravens if necessary." [15:27]

6) "It is the trustworthiness of God in the past that reassures us that God will be trustworthy in the present and that God will be trustworthy in the future." [24:17]

7) "God doesn't try to trick us or deceive us. God doesn't play parlor games. Elijah wanted the people to see that he had nothing to hide; he wasn't playing tricks." [21:16]

8) "If we believe that the cold dead body of Jesus stood up and walked out of an empty tomb on the third day, then believing that God can send fire on an altar is Child's Play." [27:54]

9) "God acts when it is clear that God Alone is the one who is acting. So Elijah prays, 'Answer me, God, answer,' is the theme of the passage. The one who answered would be God." [25:48]

10) "We don't look back to Mount Carmel as the source of our faith... we have Mount Calvary, that mountain on which God sent His Son to live and die among us for our sins." [30:52]

**Choir didn't even have to practice.**

In the lore of the American West is the story of the gunfight at the OK Corral, wherein the Earps and the Clantons, along with a little help from their friends, had a shootout in Tombstone, Arizona, in the later years of the 19th century.

Well, today we're going to look at another showdown that took place many centuries before, not in a corral in Arizona, but on a mountain in Israel—a contest on Mount Carmel. It's the centerpiece of the Prophet Elijah's prophetic ministry.

If you boil all of this down to one salient statement, it would be: God expects us to choose for Him on the basis of His decisive intervention in history and in your life.

I want us to read 1 Kings 18:16-39. As David mentioned earlier, it's a rather long text, but if you are up to it and willing, I invite you to stand with me for the reading of the scripture this morning.

Last we saw Elijah, he was hiding out with the widow and her son in Zarephath. He had prophesied a drought to come on the land, and now it's in the third year. God speaks to Elijah again and tells him to go and talk to King Ahab. Through an intermediary, Obadiah, Elijah and Ahab meet.

Picking up in verse 16, it says:

"So Obadiah went to meet Ahab and told him, and Ahab went to meet Elijah. When he saw Elijah, he said to him, 'Is that you, you troubler of Israel?'

'I have not made trouble for Israel,' Elijah replied, 'but you and your father's family have. You have abandoned the Lord's commands and have followed the Baals. Now summon the people from all over Israel to meet me on Mount Carmel and bring the 450 prophets of Baal and the 400 prophets of Asherah who eat at Jezebel's table.'

So Ahab sent word throughout all Israel and assembled the prophets on Mount Carmel.

Elijah went before the people and said, 'How long will you waver between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow Him; but if Baal is God, follow Him.'

But the people said nothing.

Then Elijah said to them, 'I am the only one of the Lord's prophets left, but Baal has 450 prophets. Get two bulls for us. Let them choose one for themselves and let them cut it into pieces and put it on the wood but not set fire to it. I will prepare the other bull and put it on the wood but not set fire to it.

Then you call on the name of your God, and I will call on the name of the Lord. The God who answers by fire, He is God.'

Then all the people said, 'What you say is good.'

Elijah said to the prophets of Baal, 'Choose one of the bulls and prepare it first, since there are so many of you. Call on the name of your God, but do not light the fire.'

So they took the bull given them and prepared it. Then they called on the name of Baal from morning till noon. 'O Baal, answer us!' they shouted, but there was no response; no one answered. And they danced around the altar they had made.

At noon, Elijah began to taunt them. 'Shout louder!' he said. 'Surely he is a god. Perhaps he is deep in thought or busy or traveling. Maybe he is sleeping and must be awakened.'

So they shouted louder and slashed themselves with swords and spears, as was their custom, until their blood flowed.

Midday passed, and they continued their frantic prophesying until the time for the evening sacrifice, but there was no response; no one answered, no one paid attention.

Then Elijah said to all the people, 'Come here to me.' They came to him, and he repaired the altar of the Lord, which was in ruins.

Elijah took twelve stones, one for each of the tribes descended from Jacob, to whom the word of the Lord had come, saying, 'Your name shall be Israel.'

With the stones, he built an altar in the name of the Lord, and he dug a trench around it large enough to hold two seas of seed. He arranged the wood, cut the bull into pieces, and laid it on the wood.

Then he said to them, 'Fill four large jars with water and pour it on the offering and on the wood.'

'Do it again,' he said, and they did it again. 'Do it a third time,' he ordered, and they did it the third time. The water ran down around the altar and even filled the trench.

At the time of sacrifice, the prophet Elijah stepped forward and prayed, 'O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known today that you are God in Israel and that I am your servant and have done all these things at your command. Answer me, O Lord, answer me, so these people will know that you, O Lord, are God and that you are turning their hearts back again.'

Then the fire of the Lord fell and burned up the sacrifice, the wood, the stones, and the soil, and also licked up the water in the trench.

When all the people saw this, they fell prostrate and cried, 'The Lord, He is God! The Lord, He is God!'

Thank you, you may be seated.

This is a dramatic experience in the history of the people of Israel, and as we come to it, I like how my former pastor and preaching mentor, Joel Gregory, divides it. He sees in this a drama in three acts: a confrontation, a contest, and a confirmation that the Lord, He is God.

I want to look at it under that structure as well, sharing with you some of the insights that I got from Dr. Gregory.

We see here in this text the people of the confrontation. There is a godless king, there is a godly prophet, and in the middle, there are confused people.

The godless king, of course, is Ahab. We talked about him a bit last week. He was an evil king, spurred to do evil in large part by his wife, Jezebel—a famous name of wickedness from the scripture.

In chapter 16 of 1 Kings, it says that Ahab did more evil in the eyes of the Lord than any of those before him, that he did more to provoke the Lord, the God of Israel, to anger than did all the kings of Israel before him.

He is the godless king, and he sees Elijah coming as they are to meet, and he says, 'Is that you, you troubler of Israel?'

Elijah, the godly prophet, responds. He says, 'I'm not troubling Israel.' Elijah was accused of that because he had prophesied the drought—the drought that had put Israel in distress, that was withering the vines, the fruit on the vines, the trees, the countryside.

The trouble of Israel was related to the drought that Elijah had prophesied, but he said, 'I'm not the one who is troubling Israel; rather, it is you and your fathers who have turned away from the worship of the true and only God by following Baal—a fertility god, a god of sensuality and indulgence.'

The people and the prophets were summoned to Mount Carmel at Elijah's request to set up what was to follow. These people are the ones who are confused because they wavered between two opinions: the worship of Yahweh and the worship of Baal.

They were trying to do both. When they needed fertility in their crops, they would worship Baal. When they felt the guilt of their sins and needed some kind of sacrifice and forgiveness, they would worship Yahweh, the God of Israel.

They were wavering between the two, and so the people were summoned, and so were 450 prophets of Baal. But those weren't all; there were also 400 prophets of Asherah. Asherah was Baal's female consort. A god of fertility would need a female consort counterpart, if you will, and that was Asherah.

So there may have been as many as 850 false prophets of these false gods who were on the scene, but Elijah was praying. He was praying for God's direction. He never would have done any of this without God's explicit direction to do so.

When he prays later for God to answer, he says so that they may know I have done all of this at your direction and at your command.

So the people gathered, as we are gathered here today. Some were confirmed in unbelief, like Ahab; others were confused, not knowing what the truth truly is; and some were possibly like Elijah, faithful to Yahweh, faithful to the Lord, faithful to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel.

The place where they gathered was Mount Carmel, the 1,500-foot-high, six-mile-long mountain chain in Israel, near the Mediterranean Sea. The view from the top is magnificent. You look to the west, you see the Mediterranean Sea; you can look out this direction, you can see Caesarea by the Sea, where the Apostle Paul spent two years in captivity before being sent to Rome; the plain of Jezreel, where so much of Israel's history had taken place.

It's an amazing view. I had the privilege of standing there back in the summer of 2006, and one of the things you notice is a prominent statue of the Prophet Elijah on top of Mount Carmel, largely because of what takes place in this text.

The point of all of it, of drawing all of these people together, is Elijah's challenge to the people in verse 21. He says, 'How long will you waver between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow Him; if Baal is God, follow Him.'

Don't waver between the two. The word means to wobble. "To waffle" might be a word we would use today—to limp between two opinions, handicapped by the fact that you're not fully devoted to either one.

How long were they to waver? Now, the people just wanted to bet on a winner. They were trying to hedge their bets, if you will, to stand ultimately on the side of the winner. But there is no middle ground; there is no hedging of bets.

You remember the words of Jesus to the church in Laodicea in the Book of Revelation. He said, 'You're not hot and you're not cold; you're lukewarm, and because of that, I'm going to spit you out of my mouth. It would be better for you to be one or the other than to be stuck in the middle, lukewarm.'

There is more honesty in being one or the other than in wavering between the two. There is a fable of Aesop about a war between the birds and the animals, and the bat never knew which one he was. When the animals were winning, he wanted to be an animal; when the birds were winning, he wanted to be a bird.

When the animals and the birds finally caught on to what he was doing, they banished the bat to a cave because there is no middle ground. The Bible says a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.

So the question you must ask yourself today is: Am I wobbling? Am I wavering between two opinions? Am I wavering between the world and the church, between the devil and the Lord?

Some people, many people as a matter of fact, have just enough of the world in them that they're miserable in church and just enough of the church in them that they're miserable in the world, convicted by their conscience.

If that describes you, then stop wavering today. If the Lord is God, then serve Him. This was the challenge that Elijah put before the people of Israel, but the people said nothing. They didn't know which to choose.

And so there is this contest that Elijah sets up. It's something that's unique in scripture; there's nothing else like it in all of the Bible. The terms of the contest are set forth. Elijah gives every advantage to the prophets of Baal. The numbers favored Baal; there were hundreds of those prophets and only one of Elijah.

Intimidation had to have been strong as this great multitude stood in opposition to the prophet of God. But Elijah plus God is a majority, isn't it?

The numbers favored Baal; the government favored Baal. They were on the government payroll. It says that the prophets of Asherah ate at Jezebel's table. They were supported; they were taken care of by the government.

But Elijah was taken care of by the Lord, who could feed him with ravens if necessary, as we saw last week. Time favored Baal. The prophets of Baal had all day to get Baal to answer them, to call on Baal from the morning till noon and then from noon till the evening sacrifice.

They had all of this time and left just a bit of time to Elijah at the end of the day. But Elijah served the God who created time—the God who is sovereign over time—and he knew it.

Not only that, but the central criterion of this test was fire. The one who could call down fire would be the God who had answered—the God who was God.

Now, not only was Baal the fertility god, he was also the god of fire. If he was able to do anything, he should have been able to start a fire, but no, he could not.

Elijah's altar, by contrast, was saturated with water. In every way, the Lord was handicapped in this contest. Every advantage was given to the prophets of Baal, and verse 24 says, 'The God who answers by fire, He is God.'

This is what Elijah proposed to the people, and the people said, 'That's cool; we'll go with that.'

So the contest begins, and there is tragedy in having a god who cannot answer. Verse 26 is their invocation to Baal. They call on Baal; they beg of Baal to answer them.

So they took the bull given them, prepared it, then they called on the name of Baal from morning till noon. 'O Baal, answer us!' they shouted, but there was no response; no one answered. They danced around the altar that they had made.

They called out for Baal to answer them, but there was none. You see, they really did believe that Baal would answer. They actually did believe that Baal was a god. They were deceived—deceivers, if you will.

There are many of their tribe even today who genuinely believe in their false gods that they serve. They believe they have the power when, in fact, they have none. Like these prophets of Baal, they discover it too late.

Next comes a rather humorous passage in verse 27. Elijah begins to taunt the prophets of Baal. 'Where is your God? Can't you get a hold of him? Can't you find him? What's he doing? What's he up to?'

Now, if Baal had truly been a god, these words of Elijah would have been blasphemous. It says that he began to taunt them. 'Shout louder!' he said. 'Surely he's a god. Maybe he's deep in thought or busy or traveling or sleeping.'

Now, if you are very familiar with this text, you know that that word translated 'busy' is a Hebrew word that means he has stepped aside.

Now, the Jewish scholars for centuries have interpreted that as meaning, 'Has he stepped aside for a bathroom break?' If you will, that's the extent to which Elijah was taunting the prophets of Baal.

'Maybe he's in the bathroom. Maybe he's out there in the house. Shout louder; he can't hear you!'

Whatever the case, the prophets danced with fervor, with swords and knives. They were cutting themselves, but there's no answer.

At the end of verse 29 are the tragic words: 'But there was no response; no one answered; no one paid attention.'

Can your God answer when you call? Does your God respond? If you worship materialistic things, if you bow down at the altar of materialism, you're going to be disappointed someday when you have to call on them, as we all sometimes have to, when life gets difficult and we're at our wit's end, at the end of our rope, and we have to call on our God.

When you call on them, their silence will mock you. You will be disappointed. If you worship sensuality and pleasure, you're going to be disappointed as you age, as your senses become more dull, as your passion begins to fade.

How will your sensuality answer in your time of need when you cry out? Can your God answer? And Baal could not. That was the tragedy.

But there is a God who can answer. Elijah knew Him. This is the triumph of the passage. In verse 30, Elijah says, 'Come to me.'

Elijah wanted them to see what was going on. Whenever God acts, there are no hidden agendas. It will always bear the light of day. If it does not, it is not the act of God. God does not try to trick us or deceive us. God doesn't play parlor games.

Elijah wanted the people to see that he had nothing to hide. He wasn't playing tricks. With a very deliberate pace, Elijah took twelve stones and built an altar to remind the people of their history, of the twelve tribes from which they had come.

Elijah does it at a deliberate pace. In the prophecy of Isaiah, there is a verse in the King James that reads, 'He that believeth shall not make haste.'

Elijah was moving at God's pace. It was dramatized in that choir selection earlier from Elijah. You heard how the choir was beseeching, 'Baal, answer us! Answer us!' and there was silence.

Then the soloist steps up as Elijah calmly beseeches that God respond and God answer. This is how Elijah is approaching this. He has the altar saturated with water, ensuring the miraculous nature of what was about to happen.

Now, some doubters may say, 'Saturated with water? This was a drought. Where did they get all of this water to pour over the altar?'

Well, don't forget the Mediterranean Sea was right there. It's not water you can drink in a drought, but it's water that will put out a fire, won't it? It's water that will keep a fire from igniting. There was plenty of water, and Elijah has the altar saturated with that water.

Why? To make absolutely clear that the action about to take place was the action of God and God alone, that it couldn't have happened any other way.

And so in verses 36 and 37, the Bible says that Elijah began to pray at the time of the evening sacrifice. It was a time of daily interaction with God—a time when Elijah was accustomed to speaking with God, I'm sure.

He calls on the God who had acted in the past. He references the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, and he expects God to act in the present.

You see, it is the trustworthiness of God in the past that reassures us that God will be trustworthy in the present and that God will be trustworthy in the future—not just today, but tomorrow as well.

We can trust Him because He is God. And then at just the right time, God acts. God intervenes. It's reminiscent of the 46th Psalm, the inspiration for "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," that was our prelude earlier.

When Sennacherib and his armies were encamped, besieging Jerusalem, the psalmist says that God will come to her rescue at the break of dawn, in the 11th hour, at just the right time.

Some of you may need divine intervention today. You may be wondering when it's going to come. I can tell you when it will come: it will come when it is absolutely obvious that it can only be divine intervention that has rescued you in your life.

That's how God likes to intervene—when it is clear that God alone is the one who is acting.

So Elijah prays, 'Answer me, God!' Answer is the theme of the passage. The one who answered would be God. Baal couldn't answer; God can answer.

And so after Elijah beseeches God in prayer, there is this brief statement in verse 38: the fire fell. It says, 'Then the fire of the Lord fell.'

It's almost anticlimactic, isn't it? It's almost a letdown of sorts. Now, some people might say, 'Well, this is just a story; it's made up; it didn't really happen.'

Well, if that were the case, they would have elaborated on this fire falling. They would have talked about the blazing temperature of the fire and how the fire came and how it looked and all of these sorts of things, as people do when they try to persuade you of something that isn't really accurate or true.

But no, the Bible simply says the fire fell. One unbelieving commentator even suggested that Elijah might have hidden a combustible substance in the altar, and then when it came time, he would pull out some sort of magnifying glass and try to focus the rays of the sun on that combustible substance so that the fire might start and begin and deceive the people into believing that God had answered.

No, that's not the case at all. There is no Disney magic here. In fact, if that had been the case, the fire would have started first by smoldering. You'd see a little smoke and then maybe a tongue or two of flame before it began to grow and ultimately consume the altar.

But that's not how it's described. It says the fire fell from heaven like a bolt of lightning, and it consumed everything—the altar itself, the stones, the water in the trench around the altar—simply described as fire falling.

Do you struggle to believe that? If we believe that the cold, dead body of Jesus stood up and walked out of an empty tomb on the third day, then believing that God can send fire on an altar is child's play, isn't it?

If we can believe that, we can believe this. This is nothing compared to that. God can make the fire fall, and fall it did, consuming the altar itself.

Now, you may wonder, why doesn't God do that again? Why doesn't God do that today? Why don't we go out here in the parking lot and set up some kind of similar demonstration so that the people of Johnson City can know that the Lord, He is God?

Well, this was a significant and critical moment in Old Testament salvation history. It prevented Israel's demise in a very real way. They were on the precipice, on the brink of following the idolatry of Baal and disappearing from the history books.

It was necessitated by the circumstance they were in. It's why God spoke to Elijah; it's why God told Elijah what to do. It turned them around for a time. In fact, it was probably the beginning of the end and the repudiation of idolatry in the people of Israel that ultimately came to pass.

When they saw it, they fell on their faces and proclaimed, 'The Lord, He is God!' It is confirmation of who is truly God. They no longer wobbled because they saw the God who acted.

And after they confirmed, 'The Lord, He is God,' then the rains came; then the drought ended. When necessary, God does act this way miraculously, in fact, but only when necessary.

This is a tremendous story, a tremendous faith-building experience in the lives of the people of Israel. But we don't look back to Mount Carmel as the source of our faith.

We could, because this was a decisive demonstration of God's supremacy over any other so-called gods that might compete for our allegiance. But we don't look back to Mount Carmel for our faith; we have something better.

We have Mount Calvary—that mountain on which God sent His Son to live and die among us for our sins, to redeem us, to pay the penalty for our sins so that we might live forever.

This is the greatest miracle in all of history: the crucifixion and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ and what it means for us.

We have eyewitness testimony of something far more decisive than Elijah's contest on Mount Carmel, and we have a fire as well—a fire that burns in us by the Holy Spirit of God that convinces us and convicts us and compels us to confess that the Lord, He is God, and Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

That's the fire God wants our world to see today—not some demonstration in the parking lot, but the steady daily experience of God's people living under God's lordship day by day, that the world might see that the Lord, He is God, at least in our lives, in our experience.

That's the fire God wants us to demonstrate—the fire He wants to use to bring faith on the earth. Has that fire ever been ignited in your heart? Does it burn there by God's Holy Spirit because of the experience you've had with Him?

Does the world see it there, or are you wavering today? Elijah would say, 'Take a stand. Stand with the people of God.' Though the world may seek to intimidate you to turn you away, don't waver between two opinions.

There is one God, and that is our God—the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who sacrificed on the cross for us to save us, the God who loves us beyond all imagining, the God who has plans for us, the God who has given us eternal life. He is God.

Stand with Him. Proclaim Him. There are godly people in this place. Perhaps you would say today, 'I'm not going to let those godly people stand alone. I've been wavering about whether or not to become a part of this fellowship of faith.'

Perhaps today is the day to make your decision to say, 'I'm going to stand with them for the Lord who is God.' If so, we invite you to make that decision today.

Whatever you do, listen to the voice of God, and when you're sure you've heard it, obey it.

Pray with me.

Father God, we thank You for this magnificent passage of scripture that we have read today. It's a dramatic demonstration of Your sovereignty, of Your lordship, of Your power.

God, it persuaded the Israelites of Elijah's day that You indeed are God. You are the God who answers in our times of distress, at just the right time, when we know it's You. You come into our lives and intervene on our behalf, as You did on the cross.

Lord, I pray we might see that today. I pray we might have our faith strengthened by these things we've talked about.

God, may Your fire in our hearts shine forth in this world around us, that they may see our good works and glorify You, our Father in heaven.

We pray it in Jesus' name. Amen.

We're going to...