Good morning Edge Church. It is so good to be back with you this morning as we continue in our series called Faith Over Fear. Now, I want to make sure that when you hear that title, Faith Over Fear, that you aren't thinking about the wrong things. You're not thinking that you're getting nervous or tempted to think that if you have fear, that means you don't have faith. Maybe you're thinking that we think that you're weak. If you're fearful, maybe this whole quarantine has made you fearful because it's scary to be isolated for so long. Maybe you're fearful because you're worried about loved ones getting COVID or you're scared that life is never going to get back to a normal rhythm. I just want to say this, we have all had moments like that during this quarantine. We've all had moments where we've wondered if our loved ones or maybe even if we have COVID. Don't allow shame to shape how you hear this message.
Don't misinterpret it here. What we're suggesting today and throughout this series is that faith and fear can coexist. What we're suggesting is that faith is the better way, but fear is a normal part of the human condition and we're on this journey of discovery with you. It’s not that we figured it all out, but let's respond to life, the hard times in life, in a way that is honoring to God and what we do when we're afraid. It wouldn't take faith at all if things were clear and simple throughout our lives, would it? It takes faith to choose the way of God when things are foggy and uncertain, and even so, he stands here and he invites us into a better way. In the midst of it all, if you're a follower of Jesus, you have this promise. It's in scripture several times, but in Deuteronomy 31:6 it says
Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the Lord your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you.
and then it's echoed in Hebrews 13:5
Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said,
“Never will I leave you;
never will I forsake you.”
It says, “Be strong and courageous.”
Do not be afraid or terrified because of them. For the Lord your God goes with you. He will never leave you nor forsake you. That's a message that's so good for us during a pandemic, right? The whole world would benefit from this message and to me, it just shows us what a gracious God that we have. We're going to pray today and then we're going to jump right into a passage that addresses this. It addresses what it looks like to have faith when it makes no sense at all, so let's pray.
God, we ask you to speak to us today. Lord, we invite you into the places in our hearts and in our minds that are racked with fear to the places where we lay in beds at night and are kept up because of worry. God, we pray that you would increase our faith, give us a fresh measure of faith so that we can do the things that you've asked us to do, even in moments when they make no sense at all, even while we're afraid and it's in Jesus' name that we pray.
Amen.
The story that we're going to get into today is from 1 Kings 17:8-24 it says,
Then the word of the Lord came to him: “Go at once to Zarephath in the region of Sidon and stay there. I have directed a widow there to supply you with food.” So he went to Zarephath. When he came to the town gate, a widow was there gathering sticks. He called to her and asked, “Would you bring me a little water in a jar so I may have a drink?” As she was going to get it, he called, “And bring me, please, a piece of bread.”
“As surely as the Lord your God lives,” she replied, “I don’t have any bread—only a handful of flour in a jar and a little olive oil in a jug. I am gathering a few sticks to take home and make a meal for myself and my son, that we may eat it—and die.”
Elijah said to her, “Don’t be afraid. Go home and do as you have said. But first make a small loaf of bread for me from what you have and bring it to me, and then make something for yourself and your son. For this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘The jar of flour will not be used up and the jug of oil will not run dry until the day the Lord sends rain on the land.’”
She went away and did as Elijah had told her. So there was food every day for Elijah and for the woman and her family. For the jar of flour was not used up and the jug of oil did not run dry, in keeping with the word of the Lord spoken by Elijah.
Some time later the son of the woman who owned the house became ill. He grew worse and worse, and finally stopped breathing. She said to Elijah, “What do you have against me, man of God? Did you come to remind me of my sin and kill my son?”
“Give me your son,” Elijah replied. He took him from her arms, carried him to the upper room where he was staying, and laid him on his bed. Then he cried out to the Lord, “Lord my God, have you brought tragedy even on this widow I am staying with, by causing her son to die?” Then he stretched himself out on the boy three times and cried out to the Lord, “Lord my God, let this boy’s life return to him!”
The Lord heard Elijah’s cry, and the boy’s life returned to him, and he lived. Elijah picked up the child and carried him down from the room into the house. He gave him to his mother and said, “Look, your son is alive!”
Then the woman said to Elijah, “Now I know that you are a man of God and that the word of the Lord from your mouth is the truth.”
Here's a little background on this story. God was displeased with King Ahab and Queen Jezebel because they worshiped the pagan gods of the region. The specific god that was worshiped in the region of Sidon was called Baal. And what's interesting is I did a little study on the name Baal and Baal means god of the storm. So people worshiped Baal as if he had the ability to cause it to rain on the land to bring storms for the crops. I think it's interesting that Elijah through God's power sent a drought as punishment to people for believing in a false god who they thought created storms.
God's desire is always for people to turn back to him. So he will do anything that it takes for you to reconsider what you've done. God used Elijah as his spokesperson, and I think it's interesting that in the middle of this drought that hit Israel, it also hit outside of Israel. And God didn't send Elijah to Israel, to his chosen people, but to an area by the name of Zarephath that existed in the region called Sidon. And not only was Elijah to go to Sidon, which was enemy territory, but he had to go to a widow. A widow in this time and this place had less than anyone today could experience. She lost her husband already, so she lost her provision. She had nothing and she lived in this region that was known almost as an enemy of God and he had to ask this widow for food and water.
I believe there's a reason that we're told in the New Testament book of James that religious belief is worthless if we don't care for orphans and widows because in Bible times, widows had it the worst of almost anybody on earth. God sent Elijah to a widow in the most extreme of bad circumstances. This story is incredibly extreme, but we'd be missing out on the best things of the faith experience that God wants us to have if we didn't take time to unpack what we're supposed to learn from this passage as we are going through some of the weirdest times that we've ever experienced as people. I know that in my lifetime I've never experienced anything like this pandemic. We battle the fear of lack of everything, social deprivation. It's scary what happens to our minds when we're not around other people to check us. It's scary what happens when job losses come. It's scary when we're worried about the leadership in North Korea and then, I don't know if you guys saw this, but in the last couple of days, people have been posting about something actually known as murder hornets. They're a real thing. Don't take much time looking it up on the internet if you'd like to sleep tonight.
So what do we do when faith in God means doing something that doesn't make sense?
What do we do today when God asks us to do something that is literally outside of what we think we have the ability to do? So here's my very first thought from this story, that faith will often require more trust and less of your instincts. Faith will often require more trust and less of your instincts. The apostle Paul famously told the church at Corinth that as Christians, we walk by faith and not by sight. That's in 2 Corinthians 5 and let's be real guys, when you read that, that's really easy to read and to believe in your mind when you're not going through a pandemic. When there's not a lot of things to be afraid of that makes for a great Christian postcard. But so often we walk by sight, don't we? It's far easier for us to walk by sight because if the sight makes a lot of sense to us because we take in things on a regular basis and our daily experiences and we act on those, and that's a normal thing. But faith requires quiet moments to listen and then daring times to act.
I think sometimes our vision is actually too good. You see people have to get glasses and contacts for lack of vision, but I think that's actually created vision that's too good because we are able to rely on consistent input from our eyes and from our walks on this earth to make decisions. We build up worldly wisdom and experience and we sort of think we figured out this whole Christian thing, right? To the degree that our lives don't often have to require much faith at all. The pastor Craig Groeschel calls living like this, living as a practical atheist, it means that you say that you believe in God and you really do as much as you can, but you live as though God doesn't really exist. All last year we talked about what God requires from us as people like what are the things that he wants us to get in this life and his two top priorities are one, to love him and two, to love people. It's not just the people that we love to love. It's not just the people that are good to you, it's people that are harder to love. It's people that are actually unlovable and even those people that we perceive to be our enemies.
Elijah was sent on a mission from God that he didn't understand, but he said yes to show God's love to a pagan worshiping widow who was resigned to her death and to the death of her son because they didn't have enough. This story also makes me wonder how often God has wanted to use me to reach someone with his love, but I used my eyesight instead of the insight that God gives me from the word. I wonder how many times I've ignored promptings from God because I have just trusted the input that I naturally have. I want to learn to obey his promptings more. Here's our second thought for today.
Overcoming faith is never just for you.
We live in a culture that is honestly all about asserting our rights and our privileges and Jesus was busy laying his rights and his privileges down and that is the way of the cross for every single person who claims to follow Jesus. If you are submitting your life to the Lord of Lords and the King of Kings, then you don't have any position and I don't have any position in just asserting my rights as if my rights are more important than someone else's. Jesus showed us a better way. In Matthew 16, Jesus was explaining to his followers that there is a human way to do things and a human way to think of things, and he said, there is also a God way of doing things and a God way of thinking of things and the human way can be really good and it can appear to be right at first glance, but sometimes it isn't. Peter told Jesus in this passage that he would never allow Jesus to be crucified, which sounds great. It sounds great to want to protect people from death and from persecution, but Jesus had the way and the plan of God firmly in front of him and he rebuked Peter. He actually said, get behind me, Satan. Peter thought he was doing a good thing because he was trusting his eyes. He was trusting his physical sight, but Jesus had his eyes focused only on the Father and His will for Him.
Peter didn't recognize that God had a different way, and Jesus continued right here in Matthew 16:24-25
Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life[a] will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.
Really what this means is there's a way that looks good to us naturally. It looks like the right path, but the way that seeks to gather things for ourselves and make life more about us than about others. It may feel like the right way and look like the right way in a moment, but it's not the way that is. The way of God looks sacrificial and it looks hard if we're honest, but it leads us to an overflowing and satisfying kind of life and this satisfying kind of life that Jesus came to bring us never exists in a vacuum.
Even though we're socially distant, God is still calling us as followers of him to live lives that are intricately connected and with a great love for each other. Even when we're at a distance, and I want to say this to these moments that we have apart are also a way for us to show sacrificial love to each other. It's hard, but if you knew that you were carrying something that can be passed on to other people, one of the most loving things that you can do is to stay physically apart from people. So even that shows a concern for others. So what does this have to do with faith? What does it mean that overcoming faith is never just about us, but it's about others. Well, here's what it has to do with.
Notice that Elijah had to take a step of faith. He had to step outside of what he saw. What he saw was a region that was against God. What he saw was a widow who had nothing to offer. What he saw was a woman who didn't have the same belief in God that he did. What he had to do was let go of the idea that God could be pursuing people outside of the chosen people of Israel. On the flip side, the widow had to take a step of faith too. A huge one that would be really hard for us, one that, let's be honest, as Americans, I remember looking back about six or eight weeks at the start of this pandemic and you heard the phrase “panic buying.” People went to grocery stores and completely took everything off the shelves and some people put them on eBay to sell, to make money for themselves.
We are the epitome, people. We are the epitome of taking things for ourselves without thinking of others. This widow had to step outside of herself and share food that she believed would be part of the very last meal that she and her son would have. Both of them had to take a large step of faith. This shows us that God's focus is never just on one person. His desire is to show us that we are all connected, that what you do affects me and that what I do can change your life for good or for bad, but God can show up in these moments when we dare to believe that he has a plan that is better than what we see even when it doesn't make any sense. Overcoming faith is never just about us, but it's about what God wants to do in someone else's life too. Here's our final point.
Today, faith is less about the result and more about the person.
I loved what Brandi shared last week when she preached about how there were 10 lepers who were all healed by Jesus, but there was only one who went back to thank him and she pointed out that it was only one person who made Jesus the head of his life even though all of them were healed. That means something very, very important to us today. I think that it's a warning to all of us that we can receive the benefits of God. We can receive healing and provision and even vacation homes and great families, and we can assume that we've lived our best lives. But the reality is that if we make results the object of our faith, then we've simply just bowed down to sacred cows of the 21st century and we remain as lost as we did when we were our most self-centered selves.
I think it's worth noting in this story that the woman known as the widow of Zarephath did not believe in the God of Elijah until after her son died and was brought back from the dead. The miraculous provision of food was not enough for her. So here's what I want to challenge you to believe for in faith. Don't settle for miracles. Keep reaching until you see Jesus, because Jesus is the point of every single miracle. Don't miss that. Any good thing that God does for you is a good thing. But if that thing does not point you to Jesus, then that good thing will become more of a curse to you than any sort of a blessing that had ever could have been in your life. I read a commentary this week. It said it so succinctly. It said both miracles were used to save a widow. The first was from a famine, and the second was from unbelief.
How can we exercise faith when it doesn't make any sense by trusting Jesus more and more with our lives and our things, and how do we do that today in 2020? How can you do that in the midst of this pandemic and all this uncertainty? I just want to encourage you to pray. Prayer is not just words. Prayer is you acknowledging that you don't have everything to make it in life and you're reaching out to the one who does. So pray to the Lord and read the Bible. The Bible is the living word of God. Every time you read it, He will be right there with you to help you understand it. You can also recognize and act on the reality that your faith is not just about you in the middle of this pandemic. It's easy to isolate and to keep away from people and to just build into yourself.
Know this: it's also for other people. Look for ways that you can bless other people during this time. And your faith should never be made so small that it's placed in a result. Do not place your faith in a result. Only place your faith in the person of Jesus Christ who gave his life up for you so that you could come home to the Father. Maybe you're hearing this and you know that you've never made that decision before. If you've never made that decision before, I want to invite you personally to place your faith in Jesus right now. The Bible tells us how to do that in Acts 2:38. It sounds, and I want to try to not use a religious-sounding language to explain this, but basically Acts 2:38 says this,
Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Turn from your old ways. Turn from your self-reliance, turn from your selfishness.
Turn from your desire to just look out for number one and turn to Jesus. He is the most perfect example of self-sacrifice that's ever lived and he lives today because he rose again. So turn from your old ways. Turn to Jesus. One way that you do that to signify that you have let go of your old ways and that you have turned to Jesus is by being baptized into the name of Jesus for the forgiveness of your sins. What you're saying is you're making a public declaration. Maybe you can't do that right now or maybe you do this in your bathtub with your family around. It's not about where you do it or exactly the form of how you do it. It's about making this choice. The Bible says that when you do this, when you make this decision, God sends his Holy Spirit to live with you forever, to guide you into all truth every day from now until the day that you breathe your last breath and you see Jesus face to face the day that you don't have to have faith anymore because your faith has become sight.
Let's pray and then we're going to continue to worship.
Father, I thank you for every single person in our church and every single person who has joined us over these last weeks. God, Lord, you are the giver of faith and Lord you say that it just takes a little bit of faith, just a little bit of faith for you to move mountains and our lives. God, I pray that you would increase my faith and increase the of every person watching here today. Father, help us to honor you with our lives, honor you with our choices, and love people well in times that it doesn't make any sense. We worship you Lord. You're the one who gave us all that you had in exchange for all that. We are so that we can be Holy. You took on our sin so that we could be made righteous because of you. We give you thanks for that God, and it's in the name of Jesus that we pray.
Amen.