When Triumph and Tragedy are Partners

Welcome

Call to Worship

“Sing unto the Lord, sing psalms, unto him. Glory ye in his holy name:

let the heart of them rejoice that seek the Lord” (Ps. 105:2–3 KJV).

*Praise                         # 81          “Blessed be the Name”

*Invocation (Lord’s Prayer)        Lord Jesus, you are the truth incarnate and the teacher of the faithful. May now your spirit hover over us as we meditate on your Word and seek to learn more of you. May our lives forever be rooted in you, may we forever grow closer to you, and may we live with you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—ever one God, world without end.  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. 

*Gloria Patri (Sung together)     

Psalm for Today                   Unison                              Psalm 138 NRSV

I give you thanks, O Lord, with my whole heart; before the gods I sing your praise;

I bow down toward your holy temple and give thanks to your name for your steadfast love and your faithfulness; for you have exalted your name and your word above everything.

On the day I called, you answered me, you increased my strength of soul.

All the kings of the earth shall praise you, O Lord, for they have heard the words of your mouth.

They shall sing of the ways of the Lord, for great is the glory of the Lord.

For though the Lord is high, he regards the lowly; but the haughty he perceives from far away.

Though I walk in the midst of trouble, you preserve me against the wrath of my enemies; you stretch out your hand, and your right hand delivers me.

The Lord will fulfill his purpose for me; your steadfast love, O Lord, endures forever.   Do not forsake the work of your hands.

Our Offering to God     “Offer unto God thanksgiving; and pay thy vows unto the most High” (Ps. 50:14 KJV).

*Doxology                                            

*Prayer of Dedication            Dearest Father, help us to be cheerful givers of our time, talents, and financial resources—and of our own selves—that we may be useful in the building of your Kingdom. Bless these gifts for your own glory.

*Hymn of Prayer                   # 7           “Praise Ye the Father”           

Pastoral Prayer             Father, we are your people, chosen by you. As we meet together in this place, help us to listen, to understand, and to remember. Make us aware that we are meeting not simply with one another but with you. Let your presence be real to each of us. As we pray, may it be just like speaking with you. As we listen, help us to concentrate so that we really hear your Word, and help us to take in and retain all that we hear, see, and experience this

morning. Hear our confessions of those things we have done [silence is kept]. Hear our confessions of those things we ought not to have done [silence is kept]. Now hear our confessions of what we could or should have done in a different way to better reflect who you are in us [silence is kept]. Hear now our praise and thanksgivings for your blessings and unearned grace that you give to us [silence is kept]. It is in the name of Jesus, your beloved Son, that we pray.—Larry Ellis

*Hymn of Praise            insert      “Here I Am, Lord”

Scripture Text                                                               I Kings 17: 17-24 TM

Later on the woman’s son became sick. The sickness took a turn for the worse—and then he stopped breathing.

     18           The woman said to Elijah, “Why did you ever show up here in the first place—a holy man barging in, exposing my sins, and killing my son?”

     19–20        Elijah said, “Hand me your son.”             He then took him from her bosom, carried him up to the loft where he was staying, and laid him on his bed. Then he prayed, “O God, my God, why have you brought this terrible thing on this widow who has opened her home to me? Why have you killed her son?”

     21–23        Three times he stretched himself out full-length on the boy, praying with all his might, “God, my God, put breath back into this boy’s body!” God listened to Elijah’s prayer and put breath back into his body—he was alive! Elijah picked the boy up, carried him downstairs from the loft, and gave him to his mother. “Here’s your son,” said Elijah, “alive!”

     24            The woman said to Elijah, “I see it all now—you are a holy man. When you speak, God speaks—a true word!”

Message                                                    “When Triumph and Tragedy are Partners”

In desperation Mother laid her hand on my head and began praying. “Lord, if Michael is not going to be the one to serve You as I have believed all these years, then take him now.”

He was shocked. His own mother; who had risked her life to give birth to him, was asking God to take his life if he did not straighten up. For the first time he began to grasp how deeply his disobedience had wounded his parents. The incident did not immediately cause Michael to change his ways, yet he could not forget his mother’s words.

He had often heard from the lips of his parents that he would grow up to serve God. Even his name—Michael, “mes­senger of God”—pointed to his destiny as a minister. He admits that “Perhaps part of my rebellion was that I did not like having my future planned for me”.

In the months after his mother’s desperate prayer, he began to come around slowly. He was a undistinguished student and especially had trouble with math. Brother Samir, who eventually rose to a cabinet-level position in finance in Egypt, tutored him whenever he ran to him for help. Michael was willing to promise anything to get his help; then he usu­ally turned around and broke his promise.

On one occasion he said, “Michael, I will make a bargain with you. I will help you with your math. In return, you will go with me to an evangelistic meeting tonight”

“ whatever you want.”

Actually, he had no intention of following through with his agreement, but this time he could not renege as he had done before, Samir made it clear that if he did not go, he would never help him again. Michael decided it was worth sitting through a boring church service in order to have continued access to help.

He decided to bring some of his rowdy friends along. we would laugh during the sermon and make the preacher mad—we had pulled similar stunts before.

He never got around to laughing. The evangelist preached from the Old Testament book of Hosea. He spoke about God’s patience with wayward children. “One day God’s patience will run out! A day of judg­ment is coming, and in that day God’s door will be shut. You have a door open today; enter through it.”

He was the first one to respond to the evan­gelist’s invitation at the end of his sermon. God had called me from my mother’s womb, but he was sixteen years old when he finally surrendered his life to Jesus Christ.

Four months later his mother was dead.

For a long time after her death, he secretly wondered if his rebellion had caused his mother to get worse and die prematurely. in her final bout with illness, God’s infinite mercy and grace had sustained her, keeping her alive to witness the conversion of the son for whom she had sacrificed so much and prayed so earnestly.

God‘s hallmark is imprinted on all these events— from preventing Michael’s being aborted to keeping his mother alive to witness his surrender to God’s call on his life. God was working everything out in confor­mity with the purpose of His will. And He can use such seemingly insignificant things as math home­work to bring about His divine purpose for your life.

Notice the timing of the two events: Michael’s con­version and his mother’s death. An occasion of great rejoicing and blessing for his family segued straight into calamity and sorrow. This quick succession of God’s blessing and life’s blasting is not unusual. The highs and lows of life are often close companions. Tragedy and tri­umph frequently work together as partners.

But ultimately, as we patiently trust God, we experi­ence restoration and resurrection. God can restore order to chaos. He can bring a dying dream back to life. He can heal broken bodies and mend shattered lives.

In a beautiful cathedral in Europe, a magnificent stained glass window towered above the altar. One day a violent storm shattered the magnificent window into a thousand pieces. The church’s custodian hesitated to discard the multicolored fragments of glass. Instead, he carefully put them in boxes and stored them in the church basement.

A well-known artist petitioned the trustees of the cathedral for the stained glass fragments. They gave the boxes to him, not knowing his purpose. Two years later the artist invited the church trustees to his studio, where he unveiled his work. To their astonishment, he had re-created the stained glass window, and the restored window looked even more beautiful than the original.

Most of us at some point have experienced the blasting of a storm in the midst of a blessing. If you have been there, or if you are there now, and you have not yet experienced God’s restoration work, you will. God specializes in restoring fragments of life into something more beautiful and more meaningful. God brings forth beauty from ashes.

As we turn back to the story of Elijah, this is pre­cisely what we find happening.

From Miracle to Calamity

Remember that we first saw God hiding Elijah at Kerith. God hides us to protect us, to prepare us, and to provide for us. We may resent God’s hiding places, but those hiding places are where God works out His purposes in us.

Then we saw how God led Elijah to the Phoenician city of Zarephath, into the heart of Baal worship. The name Zarephath comes from a word meaning “to melt”; the city was known for its metalworking arts. In Zarephath God was purifying His servant by melting away all the dross of the flesh, just as gold is heated in order to burn away all the impurities.

Now we find Elijah still in Zarephath, where God is about to move him from the daily miracle of flour and oil to the testing of calamity and death.

Elijah, the widow, and her son were all experiencing this daily miracle, a blessing of supernatural provision. No matter how much flour and oil they used, their supply of flour and oil remained constant. The Phoenician woman had risked everything in faith at the challenge of the man of God, and God had come through for her, just as Elijah had promised.

But during this time of miraculous provision, her son became ill and died. The original Hebrew text says, “his soul left him,” which lets us know for certain that the boy had truly died and not just lapsed into a coma.

The woman said to Elijah, “What do you have against me, man of God? Did you come to remind me of my sin and kill my son?” (1 Kings 17:18). Her cry is understandable. Questioning God is a natural response when your life suddenly moves from a miracle to calamity.

“Why did this happen?”

Why is a natural question. The greatest heroes of the Bible questioned God.

When the Midianites were about to decimate Israel, Gideon asked, “Why has all this happened to us?” (Judges. 6:13). Job lost his family, his fortune, and ended up on a heap of rubble. He asked, “Why did I not perish at birth, / and die as I came from the womb? (Job 3).

Recall the words of the Lord Jesus on the cross. He cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). God’s own Son asked questions. So do not feel guilty when you ask God, “Why did this happen?”

There are times in life when the highest of dreams get crushed and the best of hopes are dashed. Some­times you feel like you’re hanging upside down, and your natural question, like this widow of Zarephath, is why.

This question must be pound­ing the doors of heaven from brokenhearted people everywhere. It rises from hospital wards. It rises from lonely bedrooms. It rises from gravesides. It rises from every personal Gethsemane where a troubled soul pleads in private agony.

Understand that I am not talking about the pain that flows from disobedience. I am not talking about the grief that is the natural consequence of sin and rebellion, I am not talking about the normal results of departing from biblical principles. I am talking about being in the middle of God’s will, doing God’s work the best you know how, when suddenly life’s blasting blows you away.

Many Christians understand the paradox of this Phoenician woman, who was experiencing God’s bless­ings in one area, while knowing life’s blasting in another.

From Resignation to Anger and Guilt

Emotions are like barometric pressure; they are unpre­dictable. You cannot trust your emotions.

The widow of Zarephath had been prepared to accept death in the middle of the drought and famine. When Elijah initially came on the scene, she informed him she was about to cook their last meal and then they would die. She was calm and resigned to the com­ing calamity. But when her son became ill and died, she lashed out in anger, accusing Elijah of coming to Zarephath just to kill her son.

Notice that her anger was directed toward God, but the man of God got the brunt of it. Often when people are angry with God, they take it out on the preacher. When family members or friends get mad at God, they may take it out on the godly person who is nearest to them. Why? Because, like this woman, their anger often is accompanied by guilt.

“Did you come to remind me of my sin and kill my son?” the widow asked Elijah.

Death often brings guilt to the surface. At funerals I have seen people grieve not only for their loved ones, but also for their own sense of guilt and failure in the face of death.

This Baal-worshiping woman did mistakenly equated Yahweh with Baal. Because Baal was a vindictive god, a god of tit for tat, she thought that Elijah’s God was vindictive too. So she assumed that God had killed her son because of her sin.

The young man, however, did not die because of her sin.  We often make rash judgments and imagine a con­nection between sin and calamity. Instead, we should watch and see how God can use all these things for His glory.

God allowed the widow’s son to die in order that He might be glorified. He had been preparing Elijah for this very instance. He had been working out everything in conformity with the purpose of His will, and His intention was to use Elijah to perform the first resur­rection recorded in Scripture. The actors in this simple domestic drama were unaware of God’s larger purpose behind the events in Zarephath. It was here—not in Jerusalem, or Galilee, or Judea, or Samaria, but in smelly, polluted, pagan Zarephath—that God demon­strated His absolute power over life and death by res­urrecting a dead boy.

A Righteous Reaction to Calamity

Elijah, of course, did not know God was about to resurrect the boy. He simply knew that he had per­suaded this widow to risk everything in faith, that they had witnessed a tremendous miracle, and that suddenly tragedy struck and he was receiving the blame.

How did God’s prophet react to this calamity? What did Elijah do to cause God to perform the very first resurrection recorded in Scripture? We can dis­cover several principles from the biblical account.

1.Do not defend yourself. Elijah did not try to defend himself when the woman accused him of killing her son. He did not try to give her a theology lesson or condemn her false view of God. Instead, he said four words, “Give me your son.”

He had just been attacked, assaulted, and reviled. Yet he knew that this was her pain and guilt talking. When people are hurting they often lash out at those who are innocent, sometimes those who are nearest and dearest.

If this happens to you, do not respond emotionally. Do not try to defend yourself. Hold your tongue and take the situation to God.

2. Question God privately. Elijah saved his ques­tioning of God until he was alone with Him. The Bible says that Elijah carried the boy upstairs to the room where he was staying. Then he cried out, “Oh, Lord God, why?” Here is that question again! But don’t miss this point: Elijah did not ask that question down­stairs, where the nonbeliever was struggling with the situation.

God is an awesomely good God. And because He is so merciful, He allows us to say some sorry prayers, especially when we are confused and perplexed. When you get frustrated and pray the wrong way, God is not going to get dizzy and fall off His throne. He does not look down from heaven and say, “I’m not going to take any more of these bad prayers.” No, God is an infinitely merciful and patient God. If He overlooked Elijah’s questions and accusations, He will overlook yours.

3.     Persistent prayer makes a difference. The third principle we discover in this biblical account is that intense and persistent prayer according to the will of God makes a difference. I do not mean to imply that you may be able to pull off a resurrection. God’s power has never diminished, and He is just as able to resurrect the dead today as He was in Elijah’s day. But we simply do not see Him working in that way now; evidently it is not part of His sovereign plan for this time in history.

What I want you to see is this: When you have nothing left but God, when you have stripped yourself of everything except God, when you have persisted in prayer, your prayers will make a difference.

4.Set aside a place to meet with God. When tragedy struck, Elijah went to the place where he had met God on a daily basis. He went upstairs to the prophet’s chamber, the place that had already been sanctified by hours spent in prayer. So when calamity came, he took the calamity to that place.

Do you have a place where you meet God on a reg­ular basis? Do you have a place set aside so that when calamity strikes, when life’s blasting blows you away, you know where to retreat?

Notice the intensity with which this man of God prayed in the upper chamber. The Bible says he stretched himself out on the boy three times. Why would he do that? I haven’t the foggiest idea. This is the first resur­rection recorded in the Word of God. Elijah could not consult a ministry manual and turn to page 197, section B, subparagraph (4): Resurrection of Gentile Boys.

I think he simply did the only thing that occurred to him. The old man was weeping and so brokenhearted that he didn’t know what else to do, and he was ready to do whatever it took; if he could somehow pass his own vitality into the boy by stretching out on top of him, then that’s what he would do.

There in that room where he had prayed so often, he found the faith to believe God for a resurrection.  Scripture says Elijah “cried to the LORD, ‘0 LORD my God, let this boy’s life return to him!” (1 Kings 17:21). And in this humble home of a Phoenician widow, a Baal-worshiping Gentile, God performed the first recorded resurrection.

God’s Response

Notice God’s response to Elijah’s prayer. “The LORD heard Elijah’s cry, and the boy’s life returned to him, and he lived” (1 Kings 17:22).

If moviemakers were dramatizing this moment on film, they would probably include thousands of extras. A chorus of angels would sing and trumpets would blow. But that is not the way Scripture presents it to us. There is no showmanship. There are no movie cameras. There are no fund-raising gimmicks. The boy did not write a best-seller about what he saw on the other side of death.

All these things represent man’s way. God’s way is very simple. “Just do it.” That’s the way God works. He just does it. Without fanfare or ceremony God comes on the scene and acts. Similarly, the Word of God records it without elaboration or explanation. It simply says, authoritatively, “God did it.”

The Widow’s Response

When God answered Elijah’s prayer, the Bible says, he “picked up the child and carried him down from the room into the house. He gave him to his mother and said, ‘Look, your son is alive!” (1 Kings 17:23).

How did the unbeliever respond when she received back her son? ‘Now I know that you are a man of God and that the word of the LORD from your mouth is the truth” (1 Kings 17:24).

She recognized that Elijah was a man of God. She understood that God had done this miracle. She testi­fied to the truth of the word of God. Why? She saw the reality, the intensity, and the integrity of faith under fire.

This woman was honored in the New Testament by being listed in the faith hail of fame with such super-saints as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses. Hebrews 11:35 says, “Women received back their dead, raised to life again.” This widow, whose name we do not even know, made the roll call of faith for all time when she responded in faith to the living God.

Once Elijah had experienced both tragedy and tri­umph in Zarephath, after he had loved and confronted Baal worshipers one-on-one, he was ready for his next assignment: the showdown on Mount Carmel with Jezebel and her pagan priests.

*Hymn of Response                    insert          “He is Exalted”

*Sending forth  

*Postlude