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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Alistair Huong

Wait On The Lord

This morning our message is entitled, Wait on the Lord.

Now there are certain messages that blanket experiences of everyone that hear it.

And I believe this is 1 of those messages, but it is 1 of those messages that perhaps does not apply to our lives at this particular moment.

But perhaps nonetheless, we can leave this place with some blessing, with some inspiration, and with some message from the Lord.

Father in heaven, this morning as we open your word, I ask that you may grant us your spirit, that he may be our instructor, that he may be the preacher.

Well, you know that we are feeble human beings prone to be impatient.

So today we ask that you may teach us what it means to have endurance and patience So that may be said of us at last, here is the patience of the saints.

So Lord, speak to us, speak to our hearts.

If you have your Bibles, please turn them with me to 1 Kings chapter 17.

You know the story well, and we're not going to go through all of it, But perhaps in this familiar story that we've heard so many times, there can be inspiration for us this day in 2007.

1 Kings chapter 17 and we'll begin reading in verse 1.

And Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the inhabitants of Gilead, said unto Ahab, As the Lord God of Israel liveth before whom I stand, There shall not be dune or rain these years, but according to my word.

And the word of the Lord came unto him, saying, Get thee hence, and turn thee eastward, and hide thyself by the brook Carith, that is before Jordan.

And it shall be that thou shall drink of the brook and I have commanded the ravens to feed thee there.

So he went and did according unto the word of the Lord for he went and dwelt by the brook careth that is before Jordan.

Verse 6, and the ravens brought him bread and flesh in the morning and bread and flesh in the evening and he drank of the brook.

Elijah is a familiar character to all of us and particularly to the Adventist church because of the prophecy we read in Malachi, we'll flip there real quick, the last few verses of the Old Testament, Malachi chapter 4, Malachi chapter 4 verses 5 and 6.

The prophet Malachi writes here, Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord.

And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse." We understand that Elijah is a type.

He is an example, an illustration, a picture of the group of people that God has at the end of time to do his work.

And so as we read the story of Elijah in the Old Testament, we must have the gears moving so that we can make the application to our lives today.

So what about this experience of Elijah that we just read about?

Often when we think of him, We think of a man on a mission with a clear mandate from heaven's throne room to go say this, go there, do that.

And of course, his story Climaxes on the showdown on Mount Carmel with all of the false prophets of Jezebel and Baal But before he gets there God says I want you to go to the brook Kerith and it's not just any brook Notice that the Bible explains the brook Kareth that is before Jordan Don't go to the River Jordan go to that little brook that is right next to the Jordan called Kareth and by the way Do you know what the word Kareth means?

God said, go tell Ahab this, and he said it.

God said, go eastward, hide thyself by the brook that is right next to, before Jordan, and Elijah went.

But then, we read the story that there he stayed day by day.

The ravens coming to bring bread and flesh in the morning and bread and flesh in the evening and day by day by day by day as as the the checkmark starts scratching off those dates on Elijah's calendar no word from the Lord until verse 7 And it came to pass after a while I Don't know how long this was but it was a while That's what the Bible says after he has been there all by himself with no companions with no word from the Lord after a while, the brook dried up because there had been no rain in the land.

Sometimes we get sent on a direct mission by the Word of the Lord.

He says, go there, do this, say this, make this decision.

It's clear and when, often when we are in those moments of life, we can be thrilled with this exciting ecstasy of living in the will of God.

My Christian life is flourishing because I know exactly what the Lord wants me to do.

I knew the Lord wanted me to go on that mission trip.

I know the Lord asked me to come to Loma Linda and join Advent Hope and go on these mission projects and outreaches.

I know it and I am so thrilled with the assurance that I am doing the will of God but yet sometimes Sometimes it is for a while we sit by drying brooks and We begin to wonder Lord What would you have me to do?

And we hear nothing We have hopes we have aspirations we want to do something great for God but yet it seems heaven is silent.

Elijah could have said, Lord I need to survive.

You've been good to me thus far, but look, enough is enough.

Jordan, the Jordan is still full of river.

Trying to take matters in our own hands when God says no wait just stay right where you are I know what I'm doing wait the Lord says wait Even when the brooks of our lives dry up How come you haven't come back for so long Lord Ellen White has died for over a hundred years almost a hundred years and she's the prophet of the remnant church.

We've been preaching Matthew 24, all of the signs at the end time for over a hundred and 50 years, and you're still not here.

Perhaps we may feel as though the vigors, the freshness, the fountain of youth within us is drying up.

God says, wait, my marriage is having problems.

I've lived with this jerk for over 10 years and he's still being that nasty, unconverted self.

Even though your Brooks are drying up, He says wait, because God is in control.

We may want to run to Jordan and try to fix our problems ourselves, but God says, no.

I know what I'm doing wait on the Lord Why Because God sent us to the drying Brooks so that we may have our characters cut at Kareth.

I find it interesting that today the lesson was about Jacob and Rachel.

7 years he gets tricked by his father-in-law and another 7 years.

Elijah, sitting there by the drying brook, begging it for another droplet of water to quench his thirst, he might have thought back, oh, those weeks, those months ago, when he was standing before Ahab.

He himself said the words, there will be no rain except by my word.

Maybe I was being a little too religious.

Maybe I was taking God a little too seriously.

I have more problems now because I followed the Lord.

Maybe because I was so adamant about following the Bible that my children don't listen to me anymore.

Maybe because I was so strict about keeping the Sabbath from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown that I failed those tests I could have studied during that time.

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Wait On The Lord

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