Faith that Risks Everything
Welcome
Call to Worship
Lift up your heads in the sanctuary, and bless the Lord.
The Lord that made heaven and earth bless thee out of Zion. (Ps. 134:2–3 KJV).
*Praise # 296 “I Will Sing the Wondrous Story”
*Invocation (Lord’s Prayer) Kind Father, who keeps no good thing from your children, and in your wisdom draws us to this day of worship, we give you thanks for the world that you made and prepared as our dwelling place. We ask that your steadfast love will forever hold us close and allow no evil thing ever to gain mastery in our lives. Give us peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name, Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen
*Gloria Patri (Sung together) #575
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. Amen.
Psalm for Today unison Psalm 15
O Lord, who may abide in your tent? Who may dwell on your holy hill?
Those who walk blamelessly, and do what is right, and speak the truth from their heart; who do not slander with their tongue, and do no evil to their friends, nor take up a reproach against their neighbors; in whose eyes the wicked are despised, but who honor those who fear the Lord; who stand by their oath even to their hurt; who do not lend money at interest, and do not take a bribe against the innocent. Those who do these things shall never be moved.
Our Offering to God “Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers” (Gal. 6:10 NIV).
*Doxology
*Prayer of Dedication Lord, as we dedicate these gifts to you, we pray that we will ever seek to discover your way and will for our lives. Let us never be satisfied to give you our second best in return for your gift of love.
*Hymn of Prayer insert “O Breath of Life”
Pastoral Prayer Our gracious and loving Heavenly Father, we come to you in Jesus’ name—the name that’s above every name in heaven and on earth. How comforting it is to know that you’re in control of the world and even the whole universe, however vast and big it is! Help us to trust you, even when we can’t see, because with our hand in yours, we’ll make it through. We’re thinking especially today about those that have lost loved ones recently.
We pray for the comfort of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, and may they find in you their source of strength and the courage to go on. We pray, too, for those with sicknesses and physical problems. We pray for our president and his cabinet. We pray for the men and women of Congress and those of the courts of our land. We pray for your influence in the affairs of our nation.
Thank you for your presence in this service. We sense that you are here. We want to be drawn closer to you. We want to be encouraged and uplifted and challenged in our personal lives. We pray in the name of Jesus our Savior.—Paul Meeks
Scripture Reading Luke 4: 16-30 NRSV
16 When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, 17 and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
20 And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. 21 Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” 22 All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” 23 He said to them, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’ ” 24 And he said, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown. 25 But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; 26 yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. 27 There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.” 28 When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. 29 They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. 30 But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
*Hymn of Praise # 481
“So Send I You”
Scripture Text 1 Kings 17: 7-16 TM
Eventually the brook dried up because of the drought. Then God spoke to him: “Get up and go to Zarephath in Sidon and live there. I’ve instructed a woman who lives there, a widow, to feed you.”
So he got up and went to Zarephath. As he came to the entrance of the village he met a woman, a widow, gathering firewood. He asked her, “Please, would you bring me a little water in a jug? I need a drink.” As she went to get it, he called out, “And while you’re at it, would you bring me something to eat?”
She said, “I swear, as surely as your God lives, I don’t have so much as a biscuit. I have a handful of flour in a jar and a little oil in a bottle; you found me scratching together just enough firewood to make a last meal for my son and me. After we eat it, we’ll die.”
Elijah said to her, “Don’t worry about a thing. Go ahead and do what you’ve said. But first make a small biscuit for me and bring it back here. Then go ahead and make a meal from what’s left for you and your son. This is the word of the God of Israel: ‘The jar of flour will not run out and the bottle of oil will not become empty before God sends rain on the land and ends this drought.’ ”
And she went right off and did it, did just as Elijah asked. And it turned out as he said—daily food for her and her family. The jar of meal didn’t run out and the bottle of oil didn’t become empty: God’s promise fulfilled to the letter, exactly as Elijah had delivered it!
Message “Faith that Risks Everything”
During uncertain times, they simply trusted God. On the days when he was tempted to doubt God’s calling to build a church, he trusted God. On the days when he did not know whether they could pay their bills or not, he trusted God. On the days when he did not know whether they would have any members or not, he trusted God.
Something Youssef’s mother had taught him years earlier came to his mind frequently: Do not despise “the day of small things” (Zech. 4:10). Noza Youssef believed that God could take whatever little things we had and multiply them into big things. She imparted that belief, and as a result, he risked everything in faith when he heard God’s voice.
He believed that any man or woman with Elijah’s faith—the kind of faith that is willing to put everything on the line for what God wants to see happen among His people—can make a difference today.
Meeting a Crisis with Faith
Elijah was one solitary man who obeyed God and confronted Israel’s immoral and corrupt king. After this experience of prophetic ministry, of declaring God’s judgment to the royal palace, Elijah went into hiding at God’s command. As we pick up Elijah’s story, we now see him confronted by a new crisis: The brook that had sustained him in God’s hiding place had dried up. So God directed him to leave at once and go to Zarephath of Sidon. “I have commanded a widow in that place to supply you with food” (1 Kings 17:9).
I wonder how Elijah reacted to this strange word from the Lord. “Are You sure, Lord? Did I really hear You right?” “Zarephath is over seventy miles across the desert, Lord. It’s in Sidon, the land of the Phoenicians. It’s where the worship of Baal is at its worst!”
God had a purpose, of course, for sending His prophet to Zarephath. He was positioning Elijah for the greatest moment of his life—in fact, one of the greatest moments in biblical history. Elijah did not know that at the time, of course. He simply trusted God to direct him, even if he did not fully understand God’s leading.
When you are in a crisis situation, God’s word to you may not seem rational or logical at first. God does not always ask you to go to places or do things that seem obvious. Elijah must have thought that a seventy-mile hike across the desert was illogical and irrational, but Zarephath was both logical and rational from God’s perspective.
Elijah was on King Ahab’s most-wanted list. The king was furious with Elijah because Elijah came to the court, announced a drought, and then left. When the drought happened exactly as Elijah had predicted, Ahab wanted to seize God’s prophet and kill him
Where would Ahab’s men have looked for Elijah? In all the logical places. They would never have thought to look in Zarephath, a Phoenician city—a city only miles away from Sidon, where Jezebel’s father was king.
So Zarephath was another hiding place for God’s prophet. It was also another place of preparation. The man who would later confront a multitude of Baal’s prophets on Mount Carmel was first sent to Jezebel’s hometown. God sent him to the very heart of paganism to confront Baal worshipers one-on-one.
God Works on Many Levels
God works out His purposes on so many levels at the same time that we cannot begin to fathom it.
Take Elijah’s journey to Zarephath. First, there was the obvious purpose of moving Elijah from Kerith to Zarephath simply because the brook had dried up and God wanted to save His servant from starvation. God was also hiding Elijah from his enemies. But God was working in Elijah’s life in other ways that Elijah could never have expected.
On one level, God was showing Elijah that He had a larger purpose for the world than Elijah imagined. He was giving His prophet a glimpse of the big picture, showing that He is the sovereign God of the Universe. God is always working on a larger purpose than we initially realize.
So when God told Elijah to go seventy miles across the desert to a pagan city, He was working everything out in “conformity with the purpose of his will” (Eph. 1:11). The New Testament gives proof of God’s purpose in this event. Elijah’s seemingly illogical and irrational trip to Zarephath served as the text for Jesus’ first public sermon. Luke 4 recounts the first instance when Jesus began declaring His Messiahship.
In His hometown of Nazareth, Jesus went to synagogue one Sabbath. He opened the Scripture to Isaiah and started reading a passage about the coming Messiah. Then Jesus said, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21). The people understood what Jesus meant: “I am the expected Messiah.”
Notice what Jesus told them next. “I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon” (Luke 4:25—26).
The people reacted violently to His words. They picked up stones and wanted to kill Jesus. In their narrow-minded self-sufficiency they failed to realize that God loved the whole world, not just the people of Israel. They did not see that God had a purpose for all of mankind, Jew and Gentile alike.
Christians tend to become navel gazers, as if God is our God alone and He does not care for anybody else. Do you believe that God loves the Hindu? That God loves the Buddhist? That God loves the Muslim? Of course He does. As you are obeying God and working for His kingdom, remember that God may be working on several fronts at once to further His eternal plan. He may have a larger purpose for your life than you can determine at the moment.
God was working on yet another front in Zarephath. He was showing Elijah that He loves Baal worshipers even though He detests Baal. Two years after this episode, Elijah would have a great showdown with the priests of Baal, and he would exterminate nearly one thousand of them. But here God was saying “Elijah, I love these people, and that is why I
am sending you to this widow.” God wanted to save the widow from starvation as well as Elijah.
Because God is working on these different levels at once, we see only a partial picture. God does not reveal to us His full purpose all at once. But just as His purpose extended beyond Israel when He sent Elijah to Zarephath, we can be sure His purpose extends beyond us. We must look beyond the obvious and the superficial to determine God’s larger purpose, because our first impressions of a situation can be misleading.
First-Impression Blues
When you are fully obeying the will of God in your life, one of the greatest temptations you will face is what Youssef calls the first-impression blues. Things are not always what they appear to be, and almost never what we expect them to be, when we first encounter a situation.
Elijah experienced the first-impression blues when he arrived in Zarephath after traveling over seventy miles across the desert. He was cotton-mouthed with thirst and starving to death when he reached this smelly, polluted town known for its metalworks. If there had been any truth-in-advertising laws back then, the sign at the city limits would have read: “Welcome to Zarephath, population two- and because of the recent drought, they’ll both be dead tomorrow.” Elijah must have thought God was playing a practical joke on him.
He saw a woman collecting sticks and asked her for some water and food. She replied, “You don’t understand the situation here. All I have left is a little meal and a little oil. I’m going to mix them together, make a fire with these sticks, and bake a cake. After my son and I eat it, we’re both going to die.”
There was no welcoming committee, no key to the city. And the very person God had sent him to was not receptive initially.
He was suffering from the first-impression blues. The situation seemed impossible. God had told him there was a widow in Zarephath who would feed him. But when he found the woman, her cupboard was bare. She had exhausted her resources; how could she provide for him?
Youssef had to confess that every time he had obeyed God and stepped out in faith at His direction, he had been through the same process. Fulfilling God’s plan for his life, he had moved from nation to nation – first escaping from his home country alone, like Jacob, and later with an ever-increasing number of his household. He faced the first-impression blues in every new location.
When he first landed in Beirut, Lebanon, knowing he might never return home to Egypt again, the blues hit hard. He knew very few people in the city, and none of them very well. God’s sovereign plan had been so clear and his departure from Egypt so dramatic – but now what?
Succumbing to the first-impression blues is often the result of unbelief, a lack of faith. If you are striving to obey God’s will for your life, you will experience the first-impression blues. It may be in a new job, a new school, a new ministry, or a new relationship. Whatever the situation, put your trust in God. He will always provide widows in your Zarephath.
Beyond the Blues
Elijah did not stay in the first-impression blues. He went beyond the blues, beyond what seemed impossible, and he staked his faith on God’s word alone.
When the widow of Zarephath informed him that she was about to use the last of her resources and then face death, Elijah recognized the real problem—her lack of faith—and used it as an opportunity to introduce the woman to God.
Perhaps he said, “No, ma’am, you don’t understand the situation. You’ve been worshiping Baal for too long. I want to tell you about Jehovah.” He challenged her to put her faith in God, and then to put her newfound faith to the test.
Until you are willing to risk everything in trust of God’s provision, you have not learned to live by faith. If everything in your life is calculated, comfortable, and safe, you have not learned what it is to live by faith. By prior experience Elijah had learned to trust totally in God’s provision.
Listen to what Elijah told this Baal-worshiping widow. “Before you bake that last cake for you and your son, bake one for me.” What was Elijah saying? Was he being selfish? No, he was saying, “Bake God a cake first. Risk your all for the God of heaven. Trust in Jehovah God.”
This widow had probably trusted Baal, calling upon Baal and seeking him with all of her heart. But Baal had failed her. Because Baal had let her down, she was now ready to believe in the God of Israel.
Often it is not until people have trusted the god of mammon and become disappointed, not until they have trusted in materialism and ended up in misery that they are willing to trust in the one and only Savior Jesus Christ. Many people believe the lie that money and prestige and possessions will make them happy; instead, these things eventually make them emotional wrecks. But some people must get to that point before they will listen to the gospel message.
Most likely that was this woman’s condition. She was just desperate enough to listen when God’s prophet arrived on her doorstep.
Elijah had already experienced God’s supernatural provision at Kerith, when the ravens brought him food every day. But now he was asking a woman he didn’t even know, a woman who didn’t even believe in God, to risk everything in faith.
It is one thing for you to risk everything in faith; it is another thing to challenge someone else to do it.
*‘When it comes to spiritual risks, however, there are very few takers. That is why the example of Elijah is so important. He was a “man just like us”, yet when he prayed, God moved in dramatic ways.
Why did God answer his prayers? Elijah was willing to risk everything on God’s promises. He was willing to stand on the word of God alone. And he was willing to tell a starving, Baal-worshipping widow to risk everything on his God, fully believing that God would not let him down.
God works at Both Ends
Do you know why Elijah was able to do that? He trusted that God was already at work on both ends of the situation. He believed that when God told him to leave Kerith and go to Zarephath, God had already begun to work in the heart of this pagan woman who would provide for him.
The only way you can risk everything in faith is to believe that God has already been working on both ends of your situation.
Unfortunately, few believers ever understand this. Too many think the Christian faith consists of “give me,” “feed me”, or “entertain me.” But faith in not a matter of stuffing the suggestion boxes with ideas we like and pet peeves we don’t like. The world desperately wants to see God’s people act with absolute faith in the living God.
What kind of faith risks have you taken that the rest of the world is waiting to see? Elijah met a Baal-worshiping widow and challenged her to give God the last of her food, promising her that God would multiply her resources.
The widow met Elijah’s challenge. She, too, risked in faith. And the result of her risking everything in faith was that there was food every day for Elijah, the woman, and her son.
Faith that Risks Everything
How did God do it? How did the flour and the oil continue to multiply? I don’t know. The Bible does not tell us.
God has promised to meet our needs, too, God has not guaranteed that He will give us everything we desire or want. Paul did not tell the Philippians God will supply everything that you name and claim. No, he said, “My God will meet all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus” (4:19)
Faith does not consist of saying the right words in the right way, and God does not respond to formulaic prayers. God responds to faith that is willing to be tested.
While our little faith formulas are futile, there is a formula we can learn from Elijah’s faith venture in Zarephath. This formula describes a fundamental principle of God’s economy.
Little + God = Much
God can take whatever little things you have - your flour and your oil—and multiply them beyond your wildest expectations. For when God is in it, little becomes much.
How do we develop Elijah’s kind of faith. The faith that is willing to risk everything comes from an intimate relationship with God. It comes from knowing God’s word and knowing how He works. It comes from putting our faith into practice at every opportunity.
Developing an intimate relationship with God, therefore, should be our highest priority. When we enjoy this kind of close relationship, we learn to trust God as our Father- and when our Father promises us something, we take Him at His word.
**We should be like the little boy who was standing on a busy downtown sidewalk, right in the middle of the block. He was obviously waiting for something or someone. An older man approached him and asked him what he was doing.
“I’m waiting for the bus,” the little boy confidently replied.
The man laughed and said, “Son, the bus stop is in the next block.”
“I know. But it will stop for me right here.”
The older man tried reasoning with the youngster, who politely continued to insist that the bus would pick him up in the middle of the block.
Finally, the man became annoyed at what he thought was insolence. He raised his voice and said, “You had better start walking if you hope to catch that bus.” ///
As the man started walking off, he heard the screeching of brakes. A bus stopped and the door opened. The youngster started to board the bus, then turned toward the man who had tried to point him to the bus stop.
“My dad is the bus driver,” he yelled to the astonished man.///
Those who have risking faith are those who know that their heavenly Father will come through for them in ways that seem impossible to the rest of the world.
Do you have risking faith? Or are you comfortable with your calculators and your logic, living only in the realm of the possible? Has God been asking you to walk in faith, while you keep digging in your heels? If God is calling you to take risking faith, respond to Him. Let Him teach you that Little + God = Much.
Elijah put his faith in God to the test, with extraordinary results. But the very next episode in the biblical account shows Elijah’s faith put to an even greater test, with an even greater miracle waiting.
*Hymn of Response # 90 “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing”
*Sending forth
*Postlude