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Hendersonville Seventh-day Adventist Church, NC

Elijah

David Wright

01 Standing Alone in the Gap

02 When the Brook Dries Up

03 Willing to Give Up Everything

04 The Power of the Truth Lived Out

05 Unashamed and Unterrified

06 When Depression Seized a Prophet

Most heroes in the world unfortunately look better from a distance than they do up close.

As when you often get closer, they tend to disappoint.

I'm talking about that person that's full of quiet, spoken wisdom.

They always seem to bring a new perspective, an added depth to whatever decision you are making.

Perhaps it's their integrity or their generosity or their determination.

Perhaps it's because they never trumpet their own achievements but leave them unannounced for others to discover.

God first, family second, everything else third.

I'm not sure who might come to mind for you, but for me I already spoiled it, didn't I?

Here's some of the earlier pictures I could find.

I probably could have scrounged around, but most of them were at my parents' house.

These were a few that were on my computer.

On the side there is when I was in Pohnpei and they flew 9, 000 miles to come see me and I got a haircut from dad that I desperately needed.

Then in these pictures, let's see, we have the birth of Lauren, our first child.

We have a Tainted GC session together, doing a quartet with a few people you may recognize there.

The top picture there is, or top left picture, is at my ordination some time ago.

Dad also taught me to enjoy and love travel and the outdoors and hiking and backpacking.

Here they are with my family not too long ago and this is when I was younger.

The smaller 1 there is my little brother Stephen.

I remember going with dad at that age but I didn't have that picture to share.

Snow skiing and many other adventures with dad.

I can also say my dad is a Renaissance man.

There's very little, if anything, that he cannot do or that he doesn't take on.

He can rebuild wrecked cars, make his own clothes, woodworking, house remodeling, he's a theologian.

It really doesn't matter what question you have, you are remiss if you don't check with Dad first because even if you've thought of seemingly everything, he might add in 1 little thing or 1 question that you say, oh yeah, maybe I should do a little more research.

Sadly, humble heroes are getting dangerously thin anymore.

Is his love and connection with Jesus and the impact that has had on everything else.

Exit my dad, oh here we are working on couple porches on 2 different houses.

I'm actually wearing my dad's gown when I graduated with my doctorate.

And then he even helped me some with James's pine box.

A man with humble beginnings, as we will see, who seems to emerge out of nowhere but makes a significant contribution to God's plan for his people and becomes 1 of Israel's most famous heroes.

And again where was his greatness rooted?

But in the love of his God, his jealousy for the glory of God.

But before we look at the life of Elijah, and that says part 1 there, we're gonna be looking at his life for many sermons.

I thought I might just cram it all in to 1 and have you here till 5.30, but I've decided to make it a series.

So this is the first part of this series.

But before we look at the life of Elijah, I think we need to look at the context of Elijah, which is significant.

I'm gonna leave this on the screen for a while.

I know that's very small on the right hand side.

But for well over 100 years, the Israelites lived under the reign of 3 kings, and we know them well.

We have Saul, we have David, and we have Solomon.

And that was the beginning of the monarchy.

So we have that anchored in our minds pretty well, don't we?

But if you read your Bible beyond that, if you're like me, you can get rather confused.

Well, at the end of Solomon's life, There was a civil war that broke out.

And then you had what there is on the map.

You had the kingdom of Israel or the northern kingdom in the blue.

And you'll see on the left side of the chart is Israel and all of those kings and monarchs and so on.

And then you have the kingdom of Judah or the southern kingdom which is in orange or on the right side of the chart here.

And it's in the southern kingdom that we find the city of Jerusalem.

The part that's confusing to me when I read the passages is that they are co-ruling at the same time and sometimes they're even telling you this 1 reigned during that one's reign and that 1 reigned during this one's reign and I just can get very confused.

And so I put them up on the chart and where we're going to land for this series is right there in the middle, Ahab and Jezebel.

And so that can maybe give you a little bit of an anchor point, if you will, in all of this.

Israel, or the northern kingdom, had 19 monarchs.

And that's the part of where we'll find our story of Ahab and Jezebel in the middle.

Judah, the southern kingdom, had 17 monarchs.

8 of these followed the Lord to some degree, 9 however were wicked.

As far as the timeline, Israel ended with the Assyrian invasion in 722 BC and Judah ended with the Babylonian invasion in 586 BC.

And I realize that's kind of small there on the screen, but at least perhaps that will give us some kind of a context, some kind of a framework, what happened?

Well, we had the Exodus, and God delivered his people, and he brought them out of bondage and he worked and he labored and he labored and he worked.

And through various prophets and through various men, he brought them into the promised land.

And now we've come to the point where there's been civil war where everybody has been broken up in these 2 camps, if you will.

And we see major backsliding of God's people.

And again and again, God sent many prophets to both Israel and Judah in an attempt to bring his people back, to bring them to repentance.

I can only imagine the heart of God after all he's invested and this is what he now has to show for his remnant people.

You're welcome to follow along in your Bible.

Eventually we're gonna land in chapter 17.

But in 1 Kings 13 verse 33 it says, Jeroboam, the first ruler of Israel, and we're just going to stick to that side for this morning.

Jeroboam made priests of the high places from among all the people.

Any who would he ordained to be priests of the high places.

So you may be asking, what are the high places?

And other places, it talks about the high places and the Asherah poles.

Well, the high places, it comes from the root word of the ridge of the back of an animal, it'd be the back or ridge of a mountain, it was a high place.

We like to hike on Saturday afternoons to high places, something with a view, with an overlook, and it's a spiritual setting for maybe you and I, and it was for them too, except they twisted it and it became a place of idol worship.

And you might sit there and think, well, idol worship, well, what was the attraction to idol worship?

Well, when you start to intermarry with people that are not part of God's people, it can happen this same way today.

They say, we like to do things this way, or I always remember that in our culture we did it that way, and they start to draw the hearts of their men or their spouse away from the Lord and they start introducing more and more of this idolatry and let me tell you, it wasn't just bowing down to stone or wood or something else, but they got a little more creative than that.

We could say the devil got a little more creative than that.

Oftentimes, this worship involved sexual experiences that were part of the worship service.

And these would take place at these high places.

To appease the gods, they had to go through different rituals and practices.

And this was alluring, this was exciting, this was new, this was different.

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Series

Elijah

01 Standing Alone in the Gap

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

A Living Sacrifice

The Altar of Abraham’s Sacrifice

58m

Storming the Capitol and the Call of Elijah

46m

Elijah

06 When Depression Seized a Prophet

42m

A Living Sacrifice

In the Spirit and Power of Elijah

1h 10m

The Third Elijah

1h

The Elijah Dilemma

40m

Elijah

05 Unashamed and Unterrified

48m

Revival Plan-The Elijah Solution

The Elijah Solution - Part 2

55m

Prophecy Made Simple

11. The Prophecy Which Proves the Bible True

1h 23m

Elijah

04 The Power of the Truth Lived Out

47m

That Woman Jezebel

51m

Sound Doctrine