Extraordinary Life - Elijah

When we feel hopeless, God gives us hope!

Welcome to our new series, This series will be a short study on the life of a man named Elijah.

We’ll share more about him and look at his story throughout the next several weeks.Extraordinary Life.  

Take a moment to think about your favorite story.

It could be anything from Romeo and Juliet to Stranger Things to Michael Jordan’s 1998 NBA Championship run.

Bring it to the forefront of your brain. 

MY FAV. STORY - Harry Potter

Have you ever stopped to wonder what makes certain stories more impactful than others?

These stories are everywhere, and they are replayed again and again in different ways…Why?

What makes a story great? What makes it impactful? What makes it worth retelling?

You can answer these questions in so many ways.

“Great stories are exciting,”

“Great stories keep you on the edge of your seat,”

“Great stories make you feel all kinds of emotions,”

“Great stories keep you guessing.”

But the answer that encapsulates all the others is this:

Great stories are stories that are human.

In other words, great stories are stories that human beings can relate to.

We love underdog stories because we all know what it feels like to be outmatched.

We love stories where the hero from nowhere defeats the big bad guy because we all know what it is like to feel insignificant.

We love stories about people meeting and falling in love because we know, or can imagine, how it feels to fall in love.

And maybe we don’t know what it is like to carry the Ring to Mordor or to stand face-to-face with Voldemort, but we know what it is like to feel scared in the face of a challenge or how difficult it is to have courage in the face of uncertainty.

We love stories we can find ourselves in, stories that can tell us more about who we are, why we are here, and how to live our lives. 

These stories inspire us, motivate us, encourage us, and teach us.

The Bible is filled with stories like this, and we are starting a series on one of those stories. We are going to talk about a guy named Elijah.

Elijah is a big deal in the Bible. He is kind of like the icon for the ideal prophet of God. His story has been one that has resonated with people for thousands of years…Why?

Because Throughout his life, he experiences incredible joy, despair, victory, defeat, hopelessness, passion, and more…All the things we experience as we live our normal lives.

Elijah was ordinary, like you and me, yet he lived an extraordinary life.

the story of Elijah is a story that is profoundly human.  

Over the next few weeks, we will learn from Elijah how to live an authentically faithful and human life. The kind of life where we don’t have to wear some weird religious mask but are true to ourselves and our experience while still being faithful to what God has called us to.

Let’s give a little context:

Elijah’s name means “my God is Yahweh.” Yahweh is the Hebrew name for God.

He was a prophet or messenger of God during a crucial time in the history of Israel. He was a passionate man who confronted those who stood against God or worshipped false gods. 

Elijah lived in Israel during a time when hope was hard to find. There were famines, wars, a corrupt king, and rampant injustice. 

The people who were affected the most by all these things were people who lived on the margins of society. People who were poor or crippled, single mothers and orphans, etc. 

They were abandoned, rejected, bullied, and ignored by those in power, the very people who were responsible for caring for them. 

These people, understandably, had no hope...

Maybe you know what it feels like to feel hopeless.

All sorts of things can make us feel hopeless.

It can be anything from

not making the basketball team

you wanted to get a test back and seeing it is a whole letter grade off what you hoped for

to not getting into your dream school,

to going through a hard breakup,

or having a family member who is sick and getting sicker. 

Optional Illustration: A story where you felt hopeless

NOTE: Share a story about a time when you felt hopeless. Maybe it made you feel not good enough, like a failure, or extremely sad. 

Everyone who has ever felt hopeless can agree that hopelessness is super painful.

It takes all the wind out of your sails, and it removes all motivation.

Food doesn’t taste as good, and things that were once fun become draining.

The worst part of it is that hopelessness makes us believe that there is no way out.

There is no light at the end of the tunnel. 

We can imagine how these hopeless people in ancient Israel felt because we know what it’s like to be hopeless.

We can put ourselves into the story because the story is human, with real emotions we have all felt.

We may not have been there, but we know that feeling.

That feeling of nothing left, constant sadness, worry, and fear. How?

Because we need hope.

The opposite of hopelessness is having hope.

We’ve also all felt that before. It feels like something good is going to happen, optimistic, and even a sense of excitement.

It has been scientifically proven again and again that we need hope.

Hope gives us agency and grit. It reduces anxiety, increases happiness, boosts the immune system (yes, that’s real), and improves our quality of life. 

Hope is not optional for a human being. We need it like we need water or food.

If we go without it for long periods of time, we wither away.

And that leads to our key takeaway today: When we feel hopeless, God gives us hope.

TRUTH

One of the first stories we have from Elijah’s life is about a single mother and her son who had lost all hope and were, quite literally, withering away, and God, through Elijah, brings hope into that hopelessness.

Lets look:

1 Kings 17:8–12 “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.””

This is where we get our first glimpse at the level of hopelessness these people were dealing with. 

When Elijah met the woman, she told him that she had practically no food. 

This lady was a widow.

At this time, widows were known for not having much and being poor, and God was sending Elijah to go and receive provisions from her.

So, yes, God is sending Elijah to an extremely poor woman’s home who has nothing and is expecting to receive food and housing.

When Elijah met her, she was gathering sticks and was going to use them to likely make a fire. She also had the last of their flour and oil.

Imagine the scene. Her husband has died, and she’s out with her son, starving.

This is rock bottom.

They’re barely surviving a famine.

Profound hopelessness, profound isolation, and profound desperation all wrapped into a horrific combination for this woman and her son. 

You can imagine what she must be experiencing in her life to drive her to that conclusion.

She must have thought that God had abandoned her and her son.

It’s easy to think that God has abandoned us when we feel hopeless.

But God never leaves or forsakes us, and God hadn’t abandoned this woman;

God wasn’t going to leave her there, and neither was Elijah.

She’s prepared to make the last meal for her and her son and then give themselves over to death. Elijah hears that and responds…

1 Kings 17:13 “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.”

Elijah’s response here is so interesting and a bit jarring at first. 

She says, “I’m about to make our last meal, eat it, and die.” Casual right?  

He responds, “Yeah, cool, you can do that in just a second, but first, can you make me some cake? Just a little bit? Yellow cake with chocolate frosting, please.” (Okay, I added that last bit.)

WHAT???

What an absurd response!

Doesn’t he know that there is no hope?

Doesn’t he realize she has nothing? Why would he ask for this?

I’m sure that the poor widow didn’t even hear Elijah say, “Do not fear.” 

But Elijah knew something the woman did not know: God was about to give them a reason to hope. 

1 Kings 17:14–16 “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.”

Now Elijah’s response makes more sense.

One of the major sources of the woman’s hopelessness was their lack of food, and when Elijah asked for a little food, he was asking her to share what little she had left, which in her world was almost everything.

But in the big picture, we can see how Elijah could make such a bold request.

He knew that God was about to perform a miracle for this woman and provide for them.

The little bit of flour and oil that she had left wouldn’t run out, so she would always have enough food.

Optional Interaction: Infinite Food

: I ask God to perform this miracle on my Chipotle Burrito Bowls every time, and God has never done it…But I digress.NOTE 

If you could have a never-ending supply of one type of food, what would it be?

When Elijah told the woman this, she trusted him and went and made him the cake.

She was transformed.

The same woman, who was about to use the last of her food, was now baking a cake for a stranger…

all because of the small amount of hope that she had been given.

This is what hope does. 

And, of course, God was faithful to fulfill that promise, and the woman never had to worry about food again.

This story may have a miracle in it, but the emotions and experiences that Elijah and this woman live through are incredibly human.

And through their experience, we learn much about how God gives hope when we feel hopeless.

A FEW THOUGHTS ON THIS…

Hope starts out small

Before Elijah told the woman that God would make her food last for as long as she needed it to, he first asked her something small,

“Make me a cake. You will have enough for that.” 

When we feel hopeless, often God gives us hope a little bit at a time.

Maybe it is a conversation with a friend where you are reminded that you’re not alone,

or a sunset that reminds you that there is still beauty in the world. 

When we feel hopeless, it is normal to think that the only thing that can lift us from that place is something huge, miraculous even,

it doesn’t always work that way.

What we learn from this story is that sometimes, the first signs of hope are small: “You will have enough to make a cake.”

Hope requires trust

This one is tricky.

The woman had to go bake the cake before she knew for sure that God would do what Elijah said God would do.

She had to trust that God would keep God’s promises.

If we want to experience the hope that God offers, we first must trust that God will be faithful.

This can be really hard, especially when everything around us is adding to our hopelessness.

But God has promised to be present with us, no matter how low we get. 

This doesn’t mean that everything will work out exactly as we hoped.

We may not magically make the team or get into our dream school. 

We may never get with the person we like, or the person we love who is sick may not get better. 

But what it does mean is that God promises to give us hope and beauty in the midst of those things.

Hope is transformative

When we first met this mother, she was so desperate, so hopeless, that she was ready to give up, and by the end of the story, she was providing for Elijah.

Her outlook on life had completely changed.

She believed that God was going to fulfill His promise to provide for her when she needed it, and that changed her life.

That is the power of hope.

When we experience the hope that God gives us, when we trust that God will provide for us, that God will be with us when things get hard, and that God will turn the broken things in our lives into something beautiful, then we are transformed. 

The way that we live our lives changes, and our hopelessness begins to slowly be replaced by hope, hope that God will be faithful to heal us and the world. 

When we feel hopeless, God gives us hope. 

Optional Illustration: Story of Hope

NOTE: Tell a story of a time when God gave you hope and how it transformed you. 

APPLY:

If you feel hopeless, lean into community. 

The woman was honest with Elijah about her hopelessness.

She was honest about her situation. And this allowed Elijah to bring her hope.

When we feel hopeless, we don’t have to be in that place alone.

We can confide in the people around us, the people who we know care deeply about us, our community.

They can share that burden with us so that it is no longer as heavy. 

If you feel hopeless, perform small acts of trust.

The woman went and baked a cake.

That is a small task (unless you’re bad at baking).

Even though nothing in her world gave her reason to hope except for this strange man with a sweet tooth, she trusted enough to do a small task: bake a cake.

When you feel hopeless, look for small ways God might be reminding you of hope.

Maybe that is by choosing to share with your siblings or sit with the kid at lunch who normally eats alone. 

These small acts, done in trust that God is going to redeem your hopelessness, pull us out of ourselves and help us notice how God is moving in the world around us.

Giving us hope that God will move in our lives, too. 

GOSPEL

The beauty of following a God of hope is that no matter how low or hopeless we feel, we have reason to trust that God will be present with us and lift us up.

We know this because we have seen God embrace the ultimate form of hopelessness and death and still come out on top.

When Jesus rose from the dead, He showed us that no matter how strong the hopelessness is, He is stronger.

No matter how low we are, He is capable of raising us up; no matter how broken, He is capable of healing.

The empty tomb is a constant reminder of the power of God’s hope.

Not even death could hold Jesus, and that is offered to you and me. If you want to experience or learn more about the hope that we have in Jesus, we’d love to talk to you more about that. 

CONCLUSION

This ancient story still has so much to teach us about our lives. Why?

Because it is a human story. It is a story about emotions and experiences that we still face today.

We still face isolation, depression, grief, loss, and all sorts of other things that drive us to hopelessness.

And just like how God and Elijah were able to give hope to this woman and her son.

God is able to do so for us now.

Through His Word, we’re reminded that when we feel hopeless, God gives us hope.