“The answer to this painfully large prayer is massively small: bread, water, and a bed. Elijah wants a snap answer, a quick fix, and God grants the start of a slow process – bread, water, bed. As if recovering hope can never be a matter of great leaps, but always involves small steps.”
“When God feels distant and you’re losing your religion, something else is going on. He’s like the sun. When it gets dark, that’s because the earth turns, not because anything happened with the sun, and it’s the same with God. We lose our religion when we turn, not when he does, and when we turn, our hands get busy making our own gods. The same gods who invariably, inevitably disappoint…”
“I was headed in the wrong direction, even though the church was headed in the right direction.”
Because of a stand he took and a truth he spoke, Elijah is suddenly cut off from his family. From his hometown. From his kosher diet. From everything and everyone. And this is at a time in human history when there was no “you” apart from your group. In his exile the loss of relationships for Elijah was all-encompassing – a moment of courage, followed by season of loss.
And a lot of you know what that’s like…
We modern people think of miracles as the intervention or suspension of the natural order, but Jesus meant miracles to be the restoration of the natural order. The Bible tells us that God did not originally make the world to have disease, hunger, and death in it. Jesus came to redeem where the world is wrong and heal the world where it is broken. His miracles are not just proofs of his power but also wonderful foretastes of what he is going to do with that power. In the end, miracles are the restoration of order by Jesus’ interruption of the broken order or the way things work.
Fasting is more than denying ourselves food. It is choosing to act out, by temporarily denying ourselves food, that we do not live by bread alone. We are completely dependent upon God, and we deliberately choose voluntary weakness. We become identifiably humble in the face of the problems with which we are dealing. We admit to each other, and primarily to God: only you can get us through this “mess.”
This is the power of resurrection. Isaiah says, “see, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland.”
This is the heart of God for his people. Jesus wants to make a river run through the wasteland of your life, because when the Spirit flows people get raised and get filled and get healed and get sober and their wastelands get soaked. A new thing!
We’ve seen a spiritual resurrection in Paul and a “fresh start” resurrection in Aeneas and now we’re about to see the full power of God come to rest over death…In Acts 9:37-38 we read, “about that time Tabitha became sick and died, and her body was washed and placed in an upstairs room. When the disciples heard that Peter was in Lydda, they sent two men to him and urged him, ‘Please come at once!’…
I have known for several years that on some level behavior precedes doubt.
In other words, we don’t arrive at our shadow of doubt by objective analysis of relevant facts; instead, most of us begin to act a certain way and then circle back around and develop some doubts to substantiate that behavior.
We don’t think our way into doubting. We (mis)behave our way into it.
In short, we need more Arminians with an edge. These are Arminians who understand that the claims of Calvinism and Arminianism are mutually exclusive, and they cannot both be right. They understand that there are important issues at stake and that there are large practical implications. Not the least of these is the very character and love of God. Does God truly love all persons, and do we have a gospel of good news for all persons?
The Lord is commissioning us, through the power of the Holy Spirit, to go out into the lost and broken world whereby we will surely incur hurtful wounds and subsequent scars. In those places, we will be able to share the sufferings (Phil 3:10-11) and forgiveness of the Crucified One, and with Paul say, “ I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20). Through time and faithfulness to the Lord, you may also be able to share Paul’s words, potentially to those who look down their noses at your age, and say “From now on let no one cause trouble for me, for I bear on my body the scars of Jesus” (Gal 6:17; cf. 2 Cor 6:4–6; 11:23–30).
I agree we need to prioritize and shouldn’t allow for the cares of the world to distract us from God’s work in the world. Still, here is my humble submission for how a pet might help us learn more about God.
He is saying that those who get it will be the ones who realize we’re nothing by ourselves that what we want most from life won’t happen if we think we have to do it ourselves. It will happen when we let the One Who Is Enough serve us as Lord, and Messiah, and Friend.
