5 October 2007
' Elijah came near to all the people and said, how long will you halt and limp between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow Him! But if Baal, then follow him. And the people did not anwer him a word' 1 Kings 18:20
Sometimes in our walk with God we find that we are spiritually limping. Our prayer life dries up. Our fear exceeds our faith; our guilt exceeds our joy. These limps occur when we don't put all our weight on God's grace.
Today's Scripture calls us to take our place with the people of Israel on Mt. Carmel. There we stand in the presence of two imposing altars. The first altar is not in good shape, because it has not been used often. It is the altar where we worship before the Lord God. Standing beside it is the lone prophet Elijah. The second altar is in very good shape, because it's popular and used often. Around it stand the 450 prophets of the idol Baal.
As we stare at these two altars, we realize that a contest is about to begin. It is a contest between the Lord God and Baal that we have forced, because these gods are competing for our hearts.
Suddenly the air is pierced by the voice of Elijah, who screams at us, "How long will you go limping between two opinions? If the Lord is God, then follow him, but if Baal then follow him." A choice. You have to make a choice about who or what is your god. That is how spiritual renewal always begins in a person's life -- by confessing you have been limping between two opinions about God.
At the Sunday morning altar we claim to believe God is our Creator, but all week long we worship before the altars that tell us we can create our own lives. So we bow before the Baals called hard work, achievement, and money. With these idols we think we can recreate life to fit our dreams.
At the Sunday morning altar we claim to believe that God is our Deliverer, but all week long we worship before the altars that tell us we are on our own. Some of you have suffered for years through the long drought of broken bodies and broken hearts, loneliness, bad relationships, devastating hurts between parent and child, and guilt.
On Mt. Carmel, in front of all of us, Elijah set the rules for this great contest. First, the prophets of Baal will prepare a sacrifice on their altar, then he will prepare a sacrifice on the altar of the Lord God. They will call upon the name of their god, and he will call upon the name of the Lord God. And the god who answers by fire ... he is God.
From morning to noon, the prophets of Baal danced in front of their altar, crying out, "O Baal, answer us!" With a hint of irony the text says, "they began to limp about the altar they had made." By noon, Elijah is feeling pretty good about the way this thing is going. He starts to tease the prophets of Baal. "Cry louder. Maybe he has wandered away. Maybe he is on a journey. Oh, I know, maybe he fell asleep. You'd better wake him up." So they cry louder, and cut themselves, and bleed for their god. And the text says, "But there was no voice, no answer, no response." That is the problem with Baal. It doesn't matter how frantically you worship, when you need salvation, there will be no response from any god you have made for yourself.
By 3:00 in the afternoon, Elijah figures that enough is enough. It's his turn. He begins by repairing the altar of the Lord God that has been neglected. The building drama of the text suddenly slows down as it contrasts the crazed activity of the prophets of Baal with Elijah's very deliberate activity of repairing the Lord's altar, one stone at a time. True spirituality can't be rushed. It has nothing to do with how hard you try at life and everything to do with your faithfulness in daily prayer and reading of the Bible. One stone at a time, you build a spiritual life.
After repairing the Lord's altar, Elijah places wood on it, and lays a bull on the wood. Then he douses the sacrifice with 12 great jars of water, which in a drought was a greater sacrifice than the bull. After this he prays, "O Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, answer me. Answer me that this people may know that you are God and that you have turned their hearts back."
Then he steps back and throws his arms up to heaven. Suddenly a bolt of fire shot down from the sky and the altar exploded into flames! The fire consumed the bull, the wood, the stones, and licked up all the water. "When all of the people saw it, they fell on their faces and said, 'The Lord indeed is God. The Lord indeed is God.'" Revival had just broken out on Mt. Carmel.
Keep us moving, O God, in good times and through the long droughts, keep us moving with all our devotion focused on you who are so devoted to us. Amen.
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His Kingdom Come, His Will Be Done
The main principle to career success is one that many of us will have to learn the hard way. In fact, initially upon reading the title you may have wondered why you would want to run from your purpose. That is a good question. The truth is that we all have dreams and goals. I like to think that God places dreams in our hearts as a path to serve Him and others. However, some of us will never realize those dreams until we realize a very important truth: God’s ways of fulfilling those dreams may be very different from how we would fulfill our dreams if everything were left solely up to us.
Many times, as our dreams grow dimmer over the years, we, too, may begin to wonder how our current circumstances - our present job, our current boss, our career, our employer - are remotely connected with what we might have thought we were supposed to be doing in life. We look around us and say, “This can’t be right, my purpose isn’t this, I’m supposed to be doing ________.”
However we may fill in the blank, the result is the same. We come to a crossroad that is a test of faith when the dream we believe God placed in our hearts doesn’t line up with our current situation. For many of us, that is when we begin to run from our purpose and sabotage our career success.
The subtle truth is that we are often unaware that we are actually running from our purpose. We may even talk ourselves into believing that we are actually running toward it. This is how it works: We have an idea of what our dream job or dream career is supposed to be, and we then proceed to do everything that is humanly possible to achieve it. Of course, some glitch always gets in the way, and we work hard to either remove the glitch or to get around it.
But then, some other barrier pops up, and we do our best to beat it down or push it aside, all the while using up years of energy, emotion, knowledge and power to get this dream to work out our way. But when it doesn’t, we become frustrated, and we wonder what else we need to do to move our career along. We toil and toil and may have a few successes, but even those aren’t what we thought they would be. How does this fit in with career success? When we begin to see our present circumstances as divinely planned by God, we approach those circumstances differently.
You may be in a position today that isn’t the exact job that you want to spend your life doing. That’s OK. However, don¹t make everyone around you suffer by being bitter or having a negative attitude simply because you believe that you are supposed to be doing something else. Instead, accept the fact that there are aspects to your job that may prove in the years ahead to have been very valuable to you. Are you learning to be more detailed? Is it a chance to become better at building relationships? Or maybe you have a need to learn patience to wait on God¹s timing. No matter what the situation may be, it’s all for your good. Stop running from what can be used by God to prepare you for His purpose for your life.
Jesus did not enter into full-time ministry until He was 30 years old. However, from the very beginning, He knew what God’s purpose was for His life. While on a trip with his parents when He was only 12 years old, He was unknowingly left behind because he had been busy teaching and discussing deep spiritual matters with the leaders of His time. I’m sure that part of Him was anxious to get started with the purpose for His life. However, when His mother questioned Him about why He had remained behind to talk when it was time to return home, He dutifully returned with His family and began learning the skills of a carpenter. It would have been easy for Him to ask, “What on earth am I going to need to know how to do this for?” But instead, He became an expert carpenter and worked diligently serving His customers until it was time for His ministry to begin.
What about you? Are you viewing your current position as a part of God¹s plan for your life at this time? Or are you still debating whether it could possibly be something that escaped God’s attention? One of the best truths every written is found in Romans 8:28, “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”
This tells us that when we are in a relationship with God, He calls us to something specific that is meeting a specific purpose. It also tells us that everything will work together for good. This doesn’t mean that each single event will look good to us. Each job that we have may not in and of itself seem good to us. But what we are assured of is the fact that at the end of the day, when it¹s all said and done, everything will work out for good. Not only will it work out for our good but also for the good of anyone else whom God chooses to involve who are also called according to His purpose.
What this also points out is that it’s not all about us. Instead, it’s all about God. How He wants to use our lives and our jobs or careers will be a blessing to us, but it will also be a blessing to others, as well. Think as if you were viewing a really great classic film and in the middle of it the main character began to go through some difficulties; you wouldn’t jump up, leave the movie, and say, “I have seen enough, this movie isn’t going the way I think it should.” No, it’s more likely that you would stay glued to your seat, wondering how on earth the character was going to get through that plot twist, and remain until you saw how it all worked out.
Well the truth of the matter is that we don’t have a choice when it comes to the purpose God has planned for us. We may try to run from it, and we may think we have even succeeded for a while, but all we will have really done is taken the scenic route to the place God wants us to be. And it will be the place we will want to be once we get a grip and realize that it’s all good
Our Glorious Position with the King
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About Me
- word2u
- Born again christian for 30 yrs. Currently working in a foreign bank. It is my responsibility to ensure that christians are equipped with the Word to live and walk daily with Jesus, our Lord and Saviour. I am married with two children. One is completing his PhD in the field of BioMedical Engineering devices in Australia while the other is doing her final year in Melbourne University. My wife is a homemaker and an intercessor at home. Main interest is to develop and motivate people with the Word of God. It is my prayer to see lives being transformed and to be part of the purpose driven generation who seek God and call upon His Name.
If you want career success - Stop Running from your purpose
The main principle to career success is one that many of us will have to learn the hard way. In fact, initially upon reading the title you may have wondered why you would want to run from your purpose. That is a good question. The truth is that we all have dreams and goals. I like to think that God places dreams in our hearts as a path to serve Him and others. However, some of us will never realize those dreams until we realize a very important truth: God’s ways of fulfilling those dreams may be very different from how we would fulfill our dreams if everything were left solely up to us.
Many times, as our dreams grow dimmer over the years, we, too, may begin to wonder how our current circumstances - our present job, our current boss, our career, our employer - are remotely connected with what we might have thought we were supposed to be doing in life. We look around us and say, “This can’t be right, my purpose isn’t this, I’m supposed to be doing ________.”
However we may fill in the blank, the result is the same. We come to a crossroad that is a test of faith when the dream we believe God placed in our hearts doesn’t line up with our current situation. For many of us, that is when we begin to run from our purpose and sabotage our career success.
The subtle truth is that we are often unaware that we are actually running from our purpose. We may even talk ourselves into believing that we are actually running toward it. This is how it works: We have an idea of what our dream job or dream career is supposed to be, and we then proceed to do everything that is humanly possible to achieve it. Of course, some glitch always gets in the way, and we work hard to either remove the glitch or to get around it.
But then, some other barrier pops up, and we do our best to beat it down or push it aside, all the while using up years of energy, emotion, knowledge and power to get this dream to work out our way. But when it doesn’t, we become frustrated, and we wonder what else we need to do to move our career along. We toil and toil and may have a few successes, but even those aren’t what we thought they would be. How does this fit in with career success? When we begin to see our present circumstances as divinely planned by God, we approach those circumstances differently.
You may be in a position today that isn’t the exact job that you want to spend your life doing. That’s OK. However, don¹t make everyone around you suffer by being bitter or having a negative attitude simply because you believe that you are supposed to be doing something else. Instead, accept the fact that there are aspects to your job that may prove in the years ahead to have been very valuable to you. Are you learning to be more detailed? Is it a chance to become better at building relationships? Or maybe you have a need to learn patience to wait on God¹s timing. No matter what the situation may be, it’s all for your good. Stop running from what can be used by God to prepare you for His purpose for your life.
Jesus did not enter into full-time ministry until He was 30 years old. However, from the very beginning, He knew what God’s purpose was for His life. While on a trip with his parents when He was only 12 years old, He was unknowingly left behind because he had been busy teaching and discussing deep spiritual matters with the leaders of His time. I’m sure that part of Him was anxious to get started with the purpose for His life. However, when His mother questioned Him about why He had remained behind to talk when it was time to return home, He dutifully returned with His family and began learning the skills of a carpenter. It would have been easy for Him to ask, “What on earth am I going to need to know how to do this for?” But instead, He became an expert carpenter and worked diligently serving His customers until it was time for His ministry to begin.
What about you? Are you viewing your current position as a part of God¹s plan for your life at this time? Or are you still debating whether it could possibly be something that escaped God’s attention? One of the best truths every written is found in Romans 8:28, “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”
This tells us that when we are in a relationship with God, He calls us to something specific that is meeting a specific purpose. It also tells us that everything will work together for good. This doesn’t mean that each single event will look good to us. Each job that we have may not in and of itself seem good to us. But what we are assured of is the fact that at the end of the day, when it¹s all said and done, everything will work out for good. Not only will it work out for our good but also for the good of anyone else whom God chooses to involve who are also called according to His purpose.
What this also points out is that it’s not all about us. Instead, it’s all about God. How He wants to use our lives and our jobs or careers will be a blessing to us, but it will also be a blessing to others, as well. Think as if you were viewing a really great classic film and in the middle of it the main character began to go through some difficulties; you wouldn’t jump up, leave the movie, and say, “I have seen enough, this movie isn’t going the way I think it should.” No, it’s more likely that you would stay glued to your seat, wondering how on earth the character was going to get through that plot twist, and remain until you saw how it all worked out.
Well the truth of the matter is that we don’t have a choice when it comes to the purpose God has planned for us. We may try to run from it, and we may think we have even succeeded for a while, but all we will have really done is taken the scenic route to the place God wants us to be. And it will be the place we will want to be once we get a grip and realize that it’s all good
Realising Your Dreams
No matter where you are in your life... The life of a dream is no different than the life of a Christian. A dream is born, it grows, it matures, but ultimately it must die, be buried, and return to its creator before it can truly realize its full glory and potential. There is always a time in my life when my dream was in the stages of death, burial, and submission to God. I took great comfort in knowing that when I submit my dream to God, when I truly let it go and return it to my creator, it will bloom forth like a flower in the desert. If you have a dream, but it seems that your dream cannot be fully realized -- if you are frustrated or discouraged and feel that your dream is withering -- You will discover what Jesus said, “unless a corn of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it abides alone -- but if it dies and is buried, it will bring forth much fruit.” Give your dream to God. Return your dream to its source. Let it die and be buried in the rich soil of God's fertile field. You will find that by giving your dream to God, it will exceed your wildest dreams. Whatever preconceptions you have about your dream, give them to God. Whatever hopes and ambitions you have for your dream, give them to God. Whatever selfish attachments and aspirations you have for your dream, give them to God. You will discover that your dream cannot flourish by your will or by your efforts. But in the hands of Almighty God, your dream will grow into a mighty and powerful force, greater than you could have ever thought or imagined.
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Our Glorious Position with the King
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