The Brook Dried Up, Part 3; 1 Kings 17:4-7

The most common spiritual test that we all face is the temptation to think low thoughts of God.

Truth that Transforms is the daily podcast of Disciples Fellowship Church.
Pastor Jason Wilkerson

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Transcript

The dust in the bottom of that creek bed is God's love, not God's displeasure. A drying brook is sometimes– I could have said ‘often’– a drying brook is often a sign of God's approval and not His disapproval. A drying brook is often a sign of God's pleasure, not of His displeasure. A drying brook is often a sign of God's favor, not His disfavor. Because the temptation is going to come to Elijah like a freight train. What have you done to displease God? God does not let His servants thirst to death. You must have done something. You must have sinned in some way. Think of Job. You must have sinned in some way for God to let this happen. And you can't make sense of it. Think of how ambiguous this is to Elijah. The ravens are still coming, but the water is not coming. What sort of sign from God is that? You ever been there? Where you're trying to see signs and what God is doing to let you know what His Will is. And the signs that you see don't agree with each other? How ambiguous is this? How transcendent of human reasoning is this? Which is another reason for us to remind ourselves God doesn't want sign seekers. God doesn't want people who are trained at seeing signs and reading His signs. He wants people of faith. That's why it's not called the test of human reasoning. It's called the test of faith. Because God doesn't want trained sign seekers. He wants people who believe and who trust. Not like the DMV– you go to the DMV and you look in that box and you see all the little signs except there's no words on them and you got to tell what the sign means without the words, because the DMV wants people that are trained to understand signs. Thank God that God is not like the DMV. He doesn't want sign readers. He wants men and women of faith who believe and who trust when human reasoning fails them, when the signs do not make sense, who will look to this and know in their heart this is not happening because God disapproves of me. In fact, this is happening because God approves of me. Because God is pleased with me. Because Hebrews Chapter 12 tells us, “Do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord nor be weary when reproved by him, for the Lord disciplines the one He is displeased with? The Lord disciplines the one He loves. Every son is chastised. If you're not chastised, you're not a son. I think back to when I was a little kid. My mother, still to this day is the same, but when I was a little kid, my mother, of course, love flowers and she had tons of flowers. One of my tasks was to water my mother's flowers. Okay, and it was a lot of them. First two or three times I did it, it was sort of exciting. After that it was like eating manna for 40 years, that kind of thing. So water the flowers, water the flowers. One thing I figured out, after about five minutes, you can't tell if a flower has been watered or not. So, I don't know, maybe there was 50 flowers to water. Maybe 30 of them got water. Why would I do that? Because I didn't love the flowers. I could care less about the flowers. They weren't mine. I wasn't into flowers. But you know what? My mother liked the flowers. And if she watered her flowers, every single one would get water. It’s the same thing with God's people. If He loves you, you will get watered. But do you see how God waters Elijah? Ironically, he waters Elijah by taking the water away. Because by taking the water away, Elijah is going to receive far, far greater blessings than had the water still been there. God is showing Elijah great favor, not disfavor. The dust in the bottom of that creek bed is God's love, not God's displeasure. The temptation that Elijah is going to now face is once again, one of the most remarkable temptations, one of the most remarkable trials of faith, and we all undergo this same trial. This is the temptation to think hard thoughts of God. Because that dusty dry creek bed?  Elijah’s going to look at that and he's going to not even be able to open his mouth without his cracked lips bleeding, and he's going to want to say, “God, how could you do this? How could you bring me here and do this to me?” He will be encouraged by the tempter to think hard thoughts of God, low thoughts of God, mean thoughts of God, because it is Satan's greatest work to cause his– God's people, the apple of God's eye, to think lowly of Him. Him who died for us. It is Satan's greatest victory to cause you to think mean thoughts of the One who gave His life for you. And that's Elijah’s temptation right now. It's ours. Through every test of faith your enemy and the sin within you wants you, seeks so hard for you to think low thoughts of God. To think disparaging thoughts of God. God, did you not know that I need water? Thank you for the food, but I'd like to have something to wash it down with. What a remarkable test of faith for Elijah. But we said that this is showing God's approval, not His disapproval. Let's look to the last point, we'll see this fleshed out. The drying brook— the last point— the drying brook was a place of great blessing for Elijah. The drying brook is a place of great blessing for Elijah. How is this true? In 2 Corinthians Chapter 4, Verse 17-18, you know the passage. It's not in your notes, you're gonna have to turn there, but you know the passage. Paul says this. He says, “Our bodies are wasting away, but our inner man is being renewed day by day.” How? “Because we look not to the things that are seen” – earthly things – “we look not to the things that are seen, we look to the things that are unseen. For God is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.” In other words, Paul is specifically saying that suffering and trials and temptations in this life directly feed into your eternal glory and pleasure and satisfaction and bliss. God has a home prepared for all of his children, and that home will be will be perfectly blissful, yet, at the same time, His Word clearly says to us that in some way your tests of faith here in this life can increase your eternal glory, will increase your eternal pleasure, and the Lord will increase your eternal joy. And so what is happening to Elijah here in this test of faith is he's being given incredible opportunity to accumulate for himself treasures that don't rust and are eaten by moths and stolen by thieves. He's given incredible opportunity to add to eternal joy and eternal glory. Right now, Elijah is experiencing a kind of first fruits of the joy that he set aside for himself beside this dry brook. Isn't that amazing? Because this dry brook was a place of great blessing, great blessing for Elijah. The faith, this test of faith, we're reminded of this: How his faith strengthened? There is only one way that faith is strengthened. One way and one way only, and that is by testing. No child of God has ever had their faith strengthened by praying, ‘God strengthen my faith.’ ‘Okay, here you go. Here's some strong faith.’ No child of God has ever had their faith strengthened on mountaintops. Those glorious times in your life when God just abundantly blesses you, and you just look at your life and you say, ‘God, it couldn't get any better than this.’ That doesn't strengthen faith. Faith is only strengthened by testing. In the same way that muscles are strengthened because faith is like a spiritual muscle. And in the same way muscles are only strengthened by testing. You see those scams? How do you— I get so tired of these scams. How gullible do people think we really are? You know, you take this pill and overnight you lose weight. You take this supplement and without exercising you get stronger and more fit. Really? No. We're not that gullible. So don't be that spiritually gullible either. Your faith is strengthened one way only and that is by testing, by stretching, by exercising it, by looking down at the dry, dusty creek bed and believing that the same God that you've always known to be compassionate, good, wise, and merciful, he's that same way now too. And, yeah, this may look like a dead end for me, but I believe in Him who I've trusted and I know what He has placed inside me. I know what He has done for me. His greatest measure of love for me is not the brook that's flowing with water. God's greatest measure of love for me is the cross. That will always be. Whenever you need to be reminded of God's love for you, do not look to your life situations. Look to the cross. That is God's measurement of love for you. Nothing will ever exceed that display of love. And so when you look to your life and you see the drying, dwindling brooks, those brooks of blessing that for so many years have just been such a great thing from the Lord and you thank the Lord for them, but you see them drying and dwindling and you're tempted to say, ‘God, how can you still love me when this has been taken away?’ That is not God's measurement of love for you. The cross is always His measurement of love for you. So this is the greatest opportunity for Elijah here. Think about this. Here's what God says. Look again at verse seven. ‘And after a while the brook dried up because there was no rain in the land.’ So the brook is drying up. Sort of a primary cause for that is the drought, but then ultimately we know that the cause is God. So this drought is coming, the brook is dried up. Now what about the rest of the people in the land? In fact, not just— the whole region, because now Elijah’s going to cross all the way over Israel, over to Zarephath on the other side, a journey of 200 miles outside the land of Palestine on the other side, and the drought is still over there, too. So all these people are experiencing the same drought and the same famine. But think about what it's doing to each group of people. The Baal worshippers in the midst of this drought. How is the drought affecting them? They're becoming more hardened in their unbelief. They're becoming more resolute in their hatred of God. But yet the very same drought for Elijah is preparing for him a storehouse of faith that he is going to need to draw upon. It is increasing for him. The same drought for some people brings hardness of heart and for others grant brings eternal blessing, and it brings a strength to do things that he never would have known he could have done. When Elijah speaks to Ahab, back in verse one and two, he is not ready to do what's coming next. Because this same man is going to have to look at an offering that's placed on an altar that's been soaked with barrels and buckets of water. And that same man is going to have to say to God, ‘God, spontaneously combust this’ while hundreds of people are watching. All of them waiting for Elijah to fail so they can kill him. And he's gonna have to say, ‘God set this on fire.’ He's going to need faith. That's going to come no other way. But beside a dry brook that's utterly confusing where there is miraculous feeding, but no water. Where he apparently has the power to end this trial anytime he wants. He's had to swallow his pride to even be here. And now, the thirst. You know, thirst of that type, you're not able to not think about it. When your body gets that dehydrated and that thirsty, you're literally unable to stop thinking about water. And yet the test is there. That is the only place where Elijah is going to have the faith to speak to that offering and say, ‘God, set this on fire.’ And before that's going to come a greater test, because God—I mean, Elijah is going to lay his head on the corpse, on the dead, unbreathing corpse of the widow’s son, and he's gonna say, ‘God, put life back in this boy.’ Something that's never happened before. There's never been a resurrection from the dead before. There is no precedent for God raising people back from the dead. And Elijah is going to have to have the faith to lay his head on that boy's chest and say, ‘God, put breath back in this boy.’ That doesn't come from nowhere. Abraham doesn't raise the knife above his son, with faith that just came out of nowhere. God grew it. And he grew it in the hard places in the dry brooks of his life. What a test. The tears that Elijah is going to shed, the angst, the hard place, the anxiety, the struggle, the weeping, that Elijah is going to do beside this brook is going to bring him to that place where, in the words of Job, he's going to say, ‘Though he slay me, though he slay me, this is where He put me. And I will not, upon penalty of death, leave the place where God has put me though I thirst to death with a full belly of bread and meat. This is, by God, where God has put me. This is the place of greatest blessing in my life. This is the place in which God is preparing in me a heart that will be able to do what He has for me to do.’ So what are the dry brooks in your life? What are the drying up brooks? Those trials of faith that make no sense that when you look at them and say, ‘What are the signs? What's God trying to tell me? And the more you look at it, the more confusing it gets. Because God seems to on the one hand, say one thing, on the other hand, say another thing. And so there's no help from human reasoning. And then these avenues, these brooks of blessing that you have thanked God for, for so many years are drying. And in the midst of this, this whole trial, you're not even sure why you're here. You're not even sure what God is doing. Those drying brooks in your life. Have you come to the place where you can say with James, ‘Thank you’? For the last probably four years of my life, it’s been drying brooks. God is slowly bringing me to a point where I can sometimes look at those drying brooks and say, ‘Thank you. Thank you for that brook.’ Because, you know what, that is the meaning of Romans 8:28. ‘For those who love God are called according to His purpose, He works all things together for good.’ That doesn't mean that God just has this supernatural wand that he waves over all the bad things in your life and says ‘Presto,’ and boom, everything that's bad is all of a sudden good. That’s not what that means. It means that every test of faith in your life, every struggle, every suffering, every trial, every temptation is a test of faith in which you have the opportunity to have your faith strengthened, thereby increasing your eternal reward, putting your God on display. Just think of the display that Elijah has put on for us of his God. For thousands of years now, believers have looked at this and gained encouragement and teaching and instruction in the Lord because Elijah put his God on display. So what are the drying brooks in our lives? And are you trusting God to bring you to a point that from your heart, you can thank him for that drying brook?