- I have no idea what day it is. I think it's Saturday, but I am so excited for Highlands Fellowship this weekend. We're gonna continue Summer at Highlands, amen, there's some great messages that we've just had. I haven't showered in like 70, 90 a lot of hours, so fragrance of the Lord is upon me but man, I'm so excited to be here for for Sunday when it comes. Oh my gosh, it's Sunday right now. It's time to go, let's go. Woo, good morning Highlands, good morning, good morning, so glad to be here today. Oh, man, got the fire going this morning, oh man, I am excited to be with you today. Today we are extending into the Summer at Highlands and man, what the conversations that we've dove into over these past two weeks and then today, I hope that there is something that you truly can get excited for, something that has impressed upon your heart for maybe you to get better today, for you to be encouraged today, for you to keep on going. And the question that we are going to be talking into wherever you're at whether you're Fireside or whether you're at the house, whether you're at one of our locations today, the question for us to dive into is is it worth it to have hope? Is it worth it to have hope? Let's pray, Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for this day. Thank you, God, for all that you have given us, Lord, thank you for the great outdoors and the great indoors. Lord, we're so thankful for this church and let's all be excited that we get to be a part of what you are doing in this place and amongst these people. Lord, we love you and we thank you, in Jesus name and everybody said, amen, amen. So this question that I have comes from a story that I've read it, maybe you've heard it, maybe you haven't. And so I'm going to read the story, not giving all the details behind it but I do wanna give some context into the moment that we are in. See, this moment that we have set up behind me is one that many of us have seen, the campfire where all of our friends gather around and we spend maybe a day maybe a couple days out in the woods trying to figure out if it's somebody behind the bush or if it's a bear behind the bush, we don't really know why we go camping but we know that we love it because it leads to just incredible moments, moments without our cell phones, moments without distractions, moments that lead us into a friendship and deeper relationships with the people around us. This moment that we are going to be talking about is not quite like that. We catch this up in 1 Kings, which is this story over and over again about how God set His kingdom up for his nation, Israel, to rule and reign on the earth and be a light to the whole world and be the chosen people of God. Over time, they constantly moved away from what God had called them to do, and who He called them to be. And so where we pick it up, the king of the time is named Ahab and Ahab is the 19th king after David, so there's 19 generations between when God made a covenant to David of making Israel one nation, not 12 tribes, but one nation. And Ahab it says is the worst of the worst until that point. He did everything wrong and when he tried to get it right, he still did it wrong. He led the nation away from God and into immorality and sacrifices and the thing that he did was that he married a woman named Jezebel and Jezebel worshiped a god named Baal. This moment that we lead up into is of Elijah, a prophet of the Most High God, Elijah, a prophet of the God of Israel whose job was to speak into the situation, speak into on the account of God for the people of Israel as to what is going wrong and what is going right. There's been three years of drought, simply because Ahab has led the people in such a way and the nation of Israel has turned away from God so much that God said, there will not be rain for three and a half years and he used Elijah to tell all the people that. So this moment that we're coming into is Elijah coming out of exile to present him Before Ahab, present him before Ahab, who does not like him at all, at all. And what Elijah says to him is simply, hey, I think I know what we ought to do. Let's have a big old bonfire and barbecue. Let's have a big old bonfire and barbecue, that's what we're gonna do today. If you're looking for that in your Bible, that's Robbie's translation of it, it's not gonna be there. But we have this moment where Ahab and Elijah meet each other and Elijah says, get every prophet of Baal that you have. Get every single one of them and meet me at the top of Mount Carmel and we're gonna have some fun up there. Elijah walks by himself and is greeted with 450 other people who do not like him at all to the point where they want to kill him, but they wanna make a mockery of him before they do so. Then there's also 450 other prophets of Asherah, which is kind of like Baal's wife, I don't know how all of that works necessarily, but there's a bunch of people against Elijah, and he's standing by himself. In verse 20 through 21, So Ahab sent word throughout all Israel and assembled the prophets on Mount Carmel, just as they said that they would. Elijah went before the people and he said this, How long will you waver between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow Him, but if Baal is God, follow him. The question that Elijah has before all the people and especially Ahab, is if God who is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God that has been spoken over, over and over as the God of Israel who has made us, created us, the God of everything, if He is God, then let him be God, but if you're God Baal who you think is God, let's follow him. So let's have basically a contest to see which God shows up. Elijah says, I will set up an altar over here and I will set up a space for us to create this bonfire experience. You set up yours, and I'll let you go first. There's a couple of things before we continue here. First off, the god of Baal, the god Baal, his title of sorts was the lighter of clouds. Baal is the God of lightning and thunder and rain and the fertility of the land. So these three and a half years of drought have not looked good upon Baal, because he's the one that's supposed to be providing for those things. And you might ask, well, why would God, the real God, not allow for rain to happen? Is because the people have chosen to think that the blessing that they were given was coming from Baal rather from God. So we have this moment where Elijah is stepping into somebody else's territory, into somebody else's house on their rules. And so the people of Baal, they start going around, doing this dance around the campfire, similar to the scene that would have happened in Morgantown a couple years ago when they were burning couches after winning a basketball game, right? Just people going crazy over this fire. They're trying to create it, they're trying to make fire, trying to make fire, and Elijah standing on the side waiting for it to happen. It gets so intense over such a long period that the prophets of bale start slashing themselves with swords, cutting themselves open in desperation for their god to bring down fire and to light this bonfire. Elijah has had enough and he begins to taunt them in a way and he begins to ask them if their god is asleep. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of Israel certainly isn't. And Elijah alone by himself he says, nope, this fire that we have or this setup for it, it's not good enough. You know, I'm going to take it an extra level. I'm gonna take, matter of fact, give four big jars of water, fill them up, fill them up with as much as you can, and dump it right on top of the wood. Once you finish that, do it again and once you finish that, do it again. There's so much water that they dig a trench around the fire pit to create a moat around it, he wants every bit of it. He sets up 12 stones as of the nations or of the tribes of Israel, he sets it around this fire and he says, this is going to be the altar where the Lord shows up. We pick it up in verse 36, "At the time of sacrifice, "the prophet Elijah stepped forward and prayed, "Lord, the 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," and hear this, "Answer me, Lord, answer me. "So these people will know that you Lord our God," and hear this, "And that you are turning "their hearts back again." Elijah, the word that we're giving is that he steps forward and prays but a more accurate depiction of what he did is he stepped forward and cried out. A man standing really on his death sentence before a bunch of people that wanted to kill him with a wet wood and he's trying to get fired to start up and he has not a single match. God surely hears him from heaven and sends down fire from heaven and this thing just blows up, we're talking about the biggest bonfire that you could possibly have. A miracle happens in that moment, so much so that it licks up all the water, all the stone and all the ground that was right there. In this moment, all of the people stand in silence but can't help but express that surely this is the God of all creation, the God of Israel is surely God. And we return back to Elijah's question, which God will you serve? Because if this is the real God, are you going to serve him or are you going to serve other things? This moment that we have is truly a spectacle in Scripture. It's truly something that I'm marvel at, and I don't know exactly how that fire came down but I know that it did. For many of us, we have some speculation about miracles that happen in our day or that we've heard before, maybe even the miracles that happen in Scripture. We have thoughts and ideas that prove to us that this surely can't be. I wanna look at this miracle of fire falling down, not only the spectacle that happened, but more the heart behind what created it, what happened in the heart of Elijah, in the heart of people, for him to call down fire from heaven. The first thing that I see, it actually comes in reference from 1 Thessalonians 5:17, where Paul says that we are people who should pray without ceasing, pray without ceasing. We see in 1 Kings this one prayer that Elijah preaches and that he speaks and cries out for everybody to hear. This is the only moment that we have recorded, but there is no doubt in my mind that there were many prayers before this where Elijah was calling out to God, crying out to God, asking for Him to answer him. When we pray without ceasing, it is praying without stopping. When we pray without ceasing, it is a continual thinking upon the Lord, talking to Him, speaking to Him. It is a continuous thought that we are here on behalf of the Lord, that we are sent here by the Lord. There's two things about praying without ceasing that I want you to see today, especially in the story of Elijah. The first thing is that we can pray at any time and we can pray at any place. We can pray at any time and any place. When Elijah says, Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, he is talking about the God who was there at the very beginning, the God who set that whole nation up to be chosen people, the God who is the God of the stories that were told, the God before. And then he says, Let it be known today that you are still God in Israel, any time and any place. Yes, even in the darkest places. The power that Elijah has to speak out before all these people, he is in a place that he should not be. He has no right to be there, he has every right to be somewhere else, he should be somewhere else. This is a place of utter darkness and he steps right into the midst of it. When I think about this, I think of our church, I think of the things that we've tried to do as a church serving in our communities. And it is great that we serve so many meals and serve so many people, you know, the hands and feet of Jesus and I hope we never get weary of doing those good works. But darkness enters in where light exits. Darkness is always going to enter in into the places where light has stepped to the side. For many of us, this may look like in our marriages, we feel like everything's okay and we stop dating our spouse. And then we turn back around and you don't even recognize the person that's sitting next to you anymore. For our communities, it looks like all the confusion and chaos that surrounds us in our nation and everything that we see on TV and on Facebook, and all these things, darkness enters in, not because it has overcome, it is because the light has exited out. But darkness flees when light enters. Darkness flees no matter how dark it is, no matter how bad it may seem, darkness always flees when light enters in. The reason why we have campfires is because it's this beautiful majesty of one light happening amongst other darkness. And we can see clearly into the night sky and it creates the sense of wonder and awe. For me, I have a wonder and awe about how much God is leading me towards people in my community, people in our church, people who aren't in our church, who need Jesus so desperately that I can't help but take whatever light that I have to reach them. And maybe for you today, you can think about that one person who is in such darkness, that prodigal child he's ran away so long, that person that there is no hope for them, and maybe just for one second, rather than thinking about how bad off they are and how bad off it is for them and all the darkness that is in our world, maybe for one second like Elijah, you would have the boldness to step into it and bring the light of Christ into that situation. You might be thinking, I don't know how to start. I don't know how to start to make a difference in my communities. I don't know how to start with that. Maybe you start by learning the name of somebody else, because you can't love what you don't know. But darkness always flees when light enters in. So we always pray without ceasing. The second thing that I see in Elijah is that you pray what you've got, you pray what you've got. I heard this quote from John Tyson, that you pray what you've got and really all this means is I don't have to present myself before a holy God and have the most spelled out perfect explanation for my situation or how good he is or how good he isn't. I know that I'm uniquely created and I also have unique situations and circumstances that lead me to the place that I am now. There are days where I don't have it. There are days where I don't want it from anybody, there are days where I don't wanna talk to a single person because every single person that I talk to makes me frustrated, upset, I'm done with it, right? But why don't we pray what we've gotten those moments, instead of just hollowing into our emotions and going down this road of depression, anxiety and hatred and spite and all these things, what if we simply in those moments said God, I am bitter right now. I may know why, I may not, but I'm gonna pray what I've got and I am upset right now, could you help me with that? Maybe you are joyful in your prayer is God, thank you for today, may I be a vessel of your joy to other people in my community and around me. Maybe what you've got is confusion. God, I am confused out of my mind right now. Would you bring clarity to this situation? If I'm going to learn how to pray in any situation, in any circumstance without ceasing just like Elijah stepped boldly before everyone who was his enemy, if I'm going to do that, I've got to learn to pray what I've got, not pray what I think I ought to pray. I can assure you of one thing, that if you try to tell God what you think He wants you to say, you will surely not hear from Him. Because we try so hard to play God in our own mind, we try to manipulate Him as if we could. God wants to hear your heart, He already knows it but he wants you to exclaim it so that you get out of your own head and allow Him to step in and speak into it. When we pray, we pray out of the sense of thankfulness and sometimes gratitude, other times it's out of tradition and just obedience, just continuing to grind along. And there's something else that makes us pray and this is everybody, whether you're religious, whether you're Christian, whether you're Catholic, whether you're Buddhist, whatever it is, whatever it is, we all come back to this place of prayer in situations of vulnerability. This prayer, this comes from a deep rootedness of grief and anxiety, and uncertainty. And prayer itself, the word that we get comes from a Latin root of precarious. Precarious in the dictionary means dangerously likely to fall or collapse. So prayer itself, in essence could mean in situations that you are dangerously likely to fall or collapse and you need some help, that is prayer. Philip Yancey says, "we pray because we are vulnerable "and we can't help it." My question then is like what Elijah asked the people, who are you praying to? Who is the God that you are praying to? Are you trying to pray to yourself? Are you trying to pray for good vibes? Are you trying to pray to a God who loves you, a God who is not only in heaven and rules and reigns over it all, but a God who is very present in this very moment with us right now. Just as much as He was with Elijah on Mount Carmel, He is here today in Southwest Virginia or wherever you are watching us. If I know that God is here and I know I ought to be praying to Him, what happens if what I've got isn't enough? What happens if what I've got isn't enough? I look at Elijah and I think of the boldness that He had to step before all of his enemies, after he predicted that there wouldn't be water for three and a half years and that happened, and they all blame him, even though he knows it's their own fault. He knows that he is stepping into their lines, and he knows that he is stepping into a place where he may not see it the next day. He knows it. We think of Elijah as somebody who has a posture, a swagger, somebody who just has it going on, he's got the Spirit of the Lord upon him, the favor of the Lord upon him. He can walk into any restaurant and say, I'll have the steak and walk out, right? This is the guy. We see later on that that is not who Elijah was for most of his life. Elijah was actually somebody who struggled with depression, anxiety, he even contemplated suicide. Elijah is not a man of God who is consistently confident in himself, but rather a broken man who is so desperate for God to move on his behalf and on the behalf of the nation that he loved, and on behalf of the Lord Himself. Elijah's confidence did not just come because that's just who he was. For me, and it's something that I'm very thankful for, that I don't always have to have it. As a pastor, I always wanna be ministering to people, I always wanna be able to present the best self, but there's days where I just can't do it. There's days where I struggle, just like everybody else. But praise God, just like Elijah, God is able to give, God is able to help us, God is able to breed confidence in us. God is able to speak into us if we are listening. And so what if what I've got is not enough? My simple answer is that faith is a gift. Faith is a gift. We see in Galatians 5:22 where it says, amongst the other gifts of the Spirit, the fruit of the Spirit, we see that faith is a gift of God. We see in Ephesians 2 where explains how we have salvation through Christ, which is by grace through faith and this is a gift from God. Faith is a gift. It is not something that I conjure up in myself, it's not something that I just speak into existence, but it is a gift that is given to me. Elijah didn't know what was going to happen. Elijah didn't know, hey, I'm gonna walk up on Mount Carmel, I'm gonna make all the wood wet and now I'm gonna make it into a fire, and then I'm gonna walk out of there without a scratch on my body. He didn't know any of that. All he knew was that God told him to go and he was going to do everything that he could to trust in the Lord to provide for that very next moment. Faith is a gift. But also, faith is meant to grow. Our faith is not just given to us in one time and used up for a portion of time, and then it's done. But it is something that is made to grow. So as God gives me faith, gives me faith to step into the next day, to face my fears, to face my anxiety, to face the darkness that is all around me, even if I just have a small spark, I know that God can grow it just as He grows the seeds in the ground. Just as He grows the trees that scatter the earth, just as everything that gets wiped out from our Earth, God can continue to grow things back in the soil, buried deep even when we don't see it. I think of this faith as a gift and faith that grows and I can't help but think of a story from Luke where it talks about a persistent widow. It talks about the kingdom of God belonging to and he's telling these stories over and over again. And I can't help but think of this particular woman in Luke 18, where Jesus is teaching His disciples how to pray. And He says this story of a woman who has been done unjustly, things have gone wrong in her life in the unruly judge continues to say the wrong thing to her. She continues to not get justice that is due to her. And all it says is that she keeps returning back and back and back again and continuing to knock on the door, continuing to be persistent to the point where the unruly judge says, just give her what she wants so she can leave me alone and she doesn't attack me. Just give her what she wants because she is so persistent. Now, for a God who is good, for a God who is a good judge, how much so will He listen to the cry of a persistent broken widow? How much will he listened to our brokenness? How much will he listened to our praying without ceasing, even what we've got is not enough? Sometimes the prayers that we have to pray for the miracle that we need is just a simple. God, are you listening to me today? God, answer me, Lord, answer me. Again, Elijah steps before these people knocking. And this faith that is meant to grow and the faith that is meant to be a gift. We see in Mark 9 where God, God does an amazing miracle and He heals this boy from a sickness of demon possession, and he's had it his whole life. God steps in and Jesus heals him and the father before that has this moment of just complete honesty. And he gives to God what he has, and he says, if you can hear my son, would you heal him? And Jesus says, if I can? Of course, I can. He says, anything is possible for those who believe. The father doesn't just leave it at that but he says the most beautiful prayer. He says, I do believe but help me overcome my unbelief. Lately, I've had, man, I feel like I've been on Mount Carmel trying to call down heaven. My wife and I, we just recently announced that we're pregnant, and we're gonna have our second kid and I am so overwhelmed with excitement for it. But as any journey, there have been roadblocks and from the very beginning, we knew that our son was going to be born with spina bifida and we knew that that was going to lead to complications for him to walk, maybe different things. We knew that there was gonna be a struggle with it but praise God, we are gonna have a kid. We're gonna have a kid that we're gonna love and praise God that He chose us to be this baby's parent. Over time, it has led to multiple doctor's visits over and over again and instead of us praying for God to heal our son so that he may be able to walk, we were in the doctor's office when they told us, we don't think he's going to make it. He's had too many other things that have led to him possibly not being able to make it. My son is still in the womb, my son is four weeks beyond what they thought he was going to live, and in this present moment, as a desperate father who is saying, help me with my unbelief, as a desperate widow cries out God, can you hear me? God are you here? I continue to think back on the gift that I have in faith, that it is given to me when I do not have by myself. I think of my son who is unborn that is not yet. I think of my son who is going to be and I pray that he is. And I return to this question that I asked you at the very beginning, is it worth it to have hope? Because if this doesn't work out, it is going to hurt me so bad. It is going to hurt my family so bad, and I don't know if I'm gonna be able to lead them through it. That is all I've got. That's what I've got. So I think through this, I'm given a faith that is not of my own, but from Christ is made to grow and I return to my question, is it worth it to hope and I think of what faith is. Hebrews 11:1 says that, now faith is confidence in what we hope for, there's your hope. And it is the assurance about what we do not see. Faith is, I know it can be, I know it should be, but I don't see it yet. I know it ought to be and God, I know you can. Even if you don't, I know that you can, I know that you will. Faith is a father who stands before the doctors and hears the different things that they tell him about why this isn't going to work out. But a father who walks out with his bride, with his wife, with the mother of his children and says, I don't know what's gonna happen but I trust that God is going to work on our behalf. My honest prayers during these times, what I've got is God, I don't know what I'm doing. Matter of fact, God, I don't know what you're doing. But I will trust you and not trust my fear. I will be like Elijah who will step outside of my own depression, my own anxiety, my own fear, so that I can proclaim that God is the God who is with us today, and let everybody around me know, hear and see that this is not my doing but this is the Lord working on our behalf, that this is a miracle of God. And the last thing that Elijah says to the people that were around them, is not a cunning punishment towards them but rather a prayer for them to turn their hearts back again, turn your heart back again. Today, I want you to hear my brokenness and my vulnerability as I speak to you because that's what prayer is, right? The vulnerability, it's an openness. And when I'm asking for prayer that you'll pray alongside me and my wife, not in pity, but that you would pray and boldness with us. Now, I wanna pray with you 'cause I feel pretty close to Jesus right now in my vulnerability, because I know that He is near to the broken heart. I know that He is close to those who cry out to Him because they have no other option but to see Him move on their behalf. I don't know what miracle you need today, wherever you're at, but I would pray that you wouldn't be like Elijah and step into this by yourself, but you would recognize that the church is made for a moment such as this, to walk through with you and whatever miracle you need, whatever you need God to do for you more importantly, what God is calling you to walk through. If it's a child who has walked away and hasn't come back, if it's that family member that you just haven't worked it out, if it's that addiction that you just can't get over, if it's that sickness that you need healing from, if it's just a prayer in your heart that you just can't get over, I pray that you would find people around you who will give you strength when you don't have it in yourself. I'm thankful for this story of Elijah. I'm thankful for what happens but the power was not the spectacle of fire happening, the power was the turning back of God's people to humble themselves and pray to God who loves them. Because if I look at the story of all Scripture, the whole Bible, I see very clearly that God wants to be present with His people. God wants to be with you even in the brokenness, even in the darkness. Let's pray. Lord, I know right now my heart is so heavy, not for myself forward, it is for the brokenness that I see in so many lives around me. Even if I don't know what their situation is, God, I know there's a burden. And so Lord, right now I pray for whatever that burden is, not for it to just be gone, not for it to just poof, it's out of there, but Lord, I pray that we would learn how to pray without ceasing and learning the difference of praying for people and learn how to pray through things with people. Lord, there are people who need prayer through a great trial. I know I am. And Lord, I pray that you would move on their behalf. God, that you would show them your power, that you would show them your strength, and you would show them that you are a good God who loves them? Is it worth it to hope? With all my heart, with everything that I have, yes. Even when what I have is not enough, it is worth it to hope. Lord, somebody hearing me right now, they need that because they're not sure if it's worth it. So Lord speak through me to whoever it is that needs it. It is worth it to hope, it is worth it to hope. Elijah wasn't perfect, he wasn't perfect before, he wasn't perfect after, he didn't have boldness through it all, God, you gave it to him. So in the same way, would you give that to us? Would you give that to the church, so that we could go into the darkness and be the light that you called us to be. And, Lord, we can't do any of this without you. And so if there's anybody here that needs hope, not in themselves, but in a true God, in Jesus Christ, I pray that they would confess with their mouth and believe in their heart that Jesus is Lord. May they be granted the gift of salvation for their sins and their brokenness, and be able to walk in the freedom of life that we find only in Christ. Lord, you are so good and I'm so thankful to be a part of a church that loves you and wants to join you and be a part of the work that you're doing in our communities and around the world. God, may you bless the heart of the desperate cry of the church, and may the church be willing to stand in the gap for those who are broken and hurting. And in our own brokenness, recognize that you are the God of it all. Lord, we love you so much, and we thank you. And it's in Jesus name that we pray, amen.