Order, Words, & Voices 11.03.24

Order, Words, & Voices – 11.03.24, I Kings 17, ‘The Audacity of God’

Pre/Post Worship Music – Spotify – Open and Close

Lighting of Christ Candle Rick

Songs Here I Am To Worship CCLI Song # 3266032 Billy/Linda

Passage/Prayer I Kings 17:8-16 Isaiah

Song Living Hope CCLI Song #7106807 Billy/Linda

Impact/Message The Audacity of God Rick

Song 10,000 Reasons 6016351 Billy/Linda

Community/Closing Peace/Introduce November song Rick

Closing Music Glorify Thy Name CCLI Song # 1383 Billy/Linda

Record message on memory card. – leave Room above Speaker’s head

Christ Candle (Slides) (Lynn playing/team ready) Rick

You, Lord, are my shepherd; I shall not want.

You, Lord, make me lie down in green pastures; You lead me beside still waters; You restore my soul.

You lead me in right paths for Your name sake.

Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil, for You, God, are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.

You, Lord, prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;

You, Lord, anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in Your house, O Lord, my whole life long.

Amen.

Music (Slides) Billy/Linda

Here I Am To Worship CCLI Song # 3266032

Verse 1

Light of the world

You stepped down into darkness

Opened my eyes let me see

Beauty that made

This heart adore You

Hope of a life spent with You

Chorus

So here I am to worship

Here I am to bow down

Here I am to say that You’re my God

And You’re altogether lovely

Altogether worthy

Altogether wonderful to me

Verse 2

King of all days

Oh so highly exalted

Glorious in heaven above

Humbly You came

To the earth You created

All for love’s sake became poor

Bridge

And I’ll never know how much it cost

To see my sin upon that cross

And I’ll never know how much it cost

To see my sin upon that cross

Chorus

So here I am to worship

Here I am to bow down

Here I am to say that You’re my God

And You’re altogether lovely

Altogether worthy

Altogether wonderful to me

Passage (Slides) I Kings 17:8-16 Isaiah

Then the word of the Lord came to Elijah, saying, “Go now to Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon, and live there, for I have commanded a widow there to feed you.”

So he set out and went to Zarephath. When he came to the gate of the town, a widow was there gathering sticks; he called to her and said, “Bring me a little water in a vessel, so that I may drink.”

As she was going to bring it, he called to her and said, “Bring me a morsel of bread in your hand.”

But she said, “As the Lord your God lives, I have nothing baked, only a handful of meal in a jar and a little oil in a jug; I am now gathering a couple of sticks so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it and die.”

Elijah said to her, “Do not be afraid; go and do as you have said, but first make me a little cake of it and bring it to me, and afterward make something for yourself and your son.

For thus says the Lord the God of Israel: The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the Lord sends rain on the earth.”

She went and did as Elijah said, so that she as well as he and her household ate for many days. The jar of meal was not emptied, neither did the jug of oil fail, according to the word of the Lord that he spoke by Elijah.

Join me in the prayer of Jesus,

Our Father who art in Heaven hallowed be your name.

Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

Forgive us our trespasses, while we forgive those who trespass against us.

And, lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.

For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen

Music (Slides) Billy/Linda

Living Hope CCLI Song #7106807

Verse 1

How great the chasm that lay between us

How high the mountain I could not climb

In desperation I turned to heaven

And spoke Your name into the night

Then through the darkness Your loving-kindness

Tore through the shadows of my soul

The work is finished the end is written

Jesus Christ my living hope

Verse 2

Who could imagine so great a mercy

What heart could fathom such boundless grace

The God of ages stepped down from glory

To wear my sin and bear my shame

The cross has spoken I am forgiven

The King of kings calls me His own

Beautiful Savior I’m Yours forever

Jesus Christ my living hope

Chorus

Hallelujah praise the One who set me free

Hallelujah death has lost its grip on me

You have broken every chain

There’s salvation in Your name

Jesus Christ my living hope

Verse 3

Then came the morning that sealed the promise

Your buried body began to breathe

Out of the silence the Roaring Lion

Declared the grave has no claim on me

Chorus

Hallelujah praise the One who set me free

Hallelujah death has lost its grip on me

You have broken every chain

There’s salvation in Your name

Jesus Christ my living hope

Message Rick (Leave Title Slideup for entire message)

[Title slide for entire message]

Our passage today acquaints us with an array of characters, emotions, places, and problems. A wicked king and an even more wicked queen, a loved son, a coming drought accompanied by a sense of doom and hopelessness, a desperate and suicidal widow, and a prophet living a nightmare version of the Bill Murray’s ‘Groundhog Day’ scenario minus any redemption.

Today, we focus on the widow and the prophet.

A widow whose inner mental state is filled with darkness and a hopelessness that goes to bed with her every night and waits for her to wake up every morning. Her only real light is her son, but even his existence serves as a constant reminder of her inability to provide for him or to rescue him from inheriting her darkness. The widow is not a Jew, she is a gentile living just outside of the northern kingdom of Israel, in a city of Zarephath. A city which leans into the practices, cultural mindsets, and even religion, of the Israelites. She is a widow, poor, and female, add to that the adopted judgments and condemnation of the Jews, makes her an outcast even among her own people. None of her peers will be coming to her rescue.

This widow is in desperate need of a rescue, or a rescuer. We are first meeting the widow as she enters the town square where she is gathering sticks to go home to make a fire in order to use the sparse remaining bit of oil and the final serving of flour she has to make a meal before she and her son will die by starvation. A story similar to that of Hagar we heard last Sunday.

The widow collects enough sticks for her fire as the Prophet named Elijah enters the city square.

While the job of a prophet often focuses on the future, the most difficult aspect of his work is addressing the present. For hundreds of years prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah would preach of an oncoming devastation but they would do so by addressing the present manner of the society, a populous that is rejecting God through their selfish actions and hollow hearts, acting out a pretentious holiness that was anything but holy.

For a prophet, speaking to the present was a dangerous job. Evil leaders, political and religious, did not like to have prophets like Elijah confronting their evil agendas. Evil kings had come one after another, each worse than the last all pretending to be faithful followers of God, reinforced by their chosen false prophets. Elijah, however, saw that none were faithful or holy. Ahab, the latest King, is the worst so far.

While God does permit, or appoint, certain individuals to be in leadership positions, both political and religious, many or most those chosen are not endorsed, blessed, or faithful. Instead, they are allowed to lead because God intends to use them to correct and then redeem the people. Many leaders that are heralded to be ‘godly’ and seldom following God’s calling. They are only using the pretense of Godliness to wins the affirmation of the people in order to stay in power..

Currently, Elijah had just given the new King Ahab the bad news that a drought of correction was headed their way. This was not news the King would like to hear, it was even more unwelcome to the King’s wife Jezebel – who would push her husband, King Ahab to be an even worse King than ever before.

Let’s take a moment to settle into the lives of the widow and the prophet. Each hopeless, each filled with anxiety, seeing no sign of hope, at a point of ‘giving up’. Can you identify or empathize? Does the current state of our world, our nation, our lives cause us to feel the same as these two?

As the story unfolds we find out that God has already audaciously instructed the widow to take the prophet in and to feed him – even though at this point this audacious God had not provided the essentials for her to obey God’s instruction. God had also led Elijah, the prophet, to venture out of his land and live in the house of this widow audaciously expecting to be given food and water by her.

First, before we continue, we must recognize the first and original calling to all of God’s created, an expectation under which all of later given law falls under. It is a calling on all humans regardless of religious belief.

Genesis 2:7, “then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”

God breathed life, life can only come from God. Even if we reject God we cannot reject His breath. Satan cannot breathe life into humans. God is the creator of life, it is His breath that inhabits each of us. It is his breath that encompasses our very being, everything about us. It is the presence of God in all of us, it is the constant among all peoples. Some people may harden themselves to the impact of that breath, they may constantly deny that the breath exists, but, the breath, and all the elements of the breath come from God.

Why can we not escape the presence of God? Because we carry God within our very being.

That breath lays out the way we exist, the way we interact. That breath calls us to a life of recognizing that breath in others, all others. All others that, just as in our lives, we live because we were given life that could only be from the breath of God.

Look throughout the history of the Old Testament, when there was a devastation, a full on destruction of a people, or a city, or a nation, or a temple, or anything else that was permanent and final – it is because a people hardened their hearts to God’s breath withing that led them to live without any recognition of God’s breath, life, in the lives of others. Think of the people in the time of Noah, or the city of Sodom. They were a people who had no sense of God because they had hardened their hearts in a way that there was no return. They will abuse, they will disrespect, they will reject, they will misdirect, they will they will harm, they will dismiss, they forget that life is precious to all peoples because the breath of God is precious in all peoples.

Eventually this became a cultural custom that still exists, a custom a custom sometimes called hospitality. Eventually the term Hospitality lost its force and stronger words spoken by the prophets and then Jesus were spoken, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22:37-40)

This was the understanding that even the non Jewish widow understood. It was a calling from God that she followed. So, the call out from Elijah to the woman to give him water and food was not really that audacious in a human sense. It was this gentile woman, considered unclean to the Jews, act of following God, the God that she did not know but still she lived out of the breath God through which she had life even though it was currently a really, really, miserable life.

And, as she hesitantly followed, unbeknown to her, God had just introduced her to Himself. Her trust in the calling of this unknown God had just brought her, and this audacious prophet, home to what would soon be life.

This part of the story ends with hope. The woman not only feeds and houses Elijah, she ends up with a life supply of oil and flour. The widow and her son survive but that is not the end of their story. Fresh on the heels of this answer to the prayer they are both hit in the face with another crisis.

The son dies, he has no more breath, and Elijah is expected to raise him from the dead. The widow and Elijah are aggravated with God. The widow blames Elijah and Elijah blames God. The widow screams out at Elijah, “What have you against me?” Elijah screams out at God, “You brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I am staying, by killing her son?”

Both had forgotten the actions of God earlier. Their trust is still shallow. They had just rejoiced in the Oil and Flour, but they still were weak in their trust of God. God was now growing them. Allowing them to see God’s hand when life had once again become dark and hopeless. The widow saw her son die, no breath, and Elijah was now expected to do something he had never had to do before – raise a breathless lifeless body back to life. They both needed hope, they both needed to see God, they both needed God’s breath to return.

Elijah did the only thing he knew to do, because Elijah knew that he was not able to give breath. Elijah cried out, “O Lord my God, let this child’s life come into him again.”

And, God once again breathed the breath of life. Letting trust grow and life to return.

Rest of story…

Elijah and the Widow trusted God more with each moment of trusting God and watching and waiting for his answer. That growth become better sight on our part because we begin to more and more trust God with HOW He answers. As We trust God, As we trust His answer, we are more and more ready to trust God again and again.

Ill – Toronto Tower

Application

Continue God’s Universal Calling.

Strive to respect and love.

See God in the Answers, Allow Those Moments to Build Your Trust.

(Slides) Billy/Linda

10,000 Reasons CCLI Song # 6016351

Chorus

Bless the Lord O my soul O my soul

Worship His holy name

Sing like never before O my soul

I’ll worship Your holy name

Verse 1

The sun comes up it’s a new day dawning

It’s time to sing Your song again

Whatever may pass and whatever lies before me

Let me be singing when the evening comes

Verse 2

You’re rich in love and You’re slow to anger

Your name is great and Your heart is kind

For all Your goodness I will keep on singing

Ten thousand reasons for my heart to find

Verse 3

And on that day when my strength is failing

The end draws near and my time has come

Still my soul will sing Your praise unending

Ten thousand years and then forevermore

Tag

Worship Your holy name

Lord I’ll worship Your holy name

Ending

Sing like never before O my soul

I’ll worship Your holy name

Worship Your holy name

Community (Slides) Rick

Fall-Advent Sermon Series, ‘My Eyes Have Seen”, Next Sunday –

11.10.24 Inescapable, Jonah & Luke 18:9-14

Jonah’s attempts to escape from God Calling

Closing Peace (Slides) Rick (Slide)

Leader: May the peace of the Lord go with you.

Response: And also with you.

Intro to November closing song. Rick (Billy Playing)

‘Glory’- ‘representing’. Moses reflecting God, Us reflecting Jesus, ‘as we go we represent (glorify) God – Father, Son, Spirit. Reminder as we leave.

Closing Music Billy/Linda

Glorify Thy Name CCLI Song # 1383

Verse 1

Father we love You

We worship and adore You