God & Country
GOD & COUNTRY
Week 4 – Faith Over Fear
We started a new series called God & Country. The series is based upon two books that I have been reading, New Days, Old Demons by Mark Driscoll and Return of the Gods by Jonathan Cahn.
The point of this series is to open up our eyes to what is going on in our culture.
We are looking at a story in history of the Nation of Israel from about a thousand years ago found in 1 Kings.
So we've established our basic thesis. And that is that these are actual historical people but working through them are different spirits and powers.
Through Jezebel is what we're calling the Jezebel spirit:
demonic, controlling, domineering, overbearing, and manipulative.
Working through Ahab is what we're calling the Ahab spirit:
passive, indifferent, tolerant, doesn't like conflict and responsibility.
Then entering into the scene is Elijah. He shows up here for the first time.
1 Kings 17:1 ESV
Now Elijah the Tishbite, of Tisbe in Gilead, said to Ahab, “As the LORD, the God of Israel, lives, before whom I stand, there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word.”
We don't know anything about this man. He literally just showed up for the first time in all of human history or the Bible.
We know of Jezebel's family. We know about her family.
We know about Ahab's family. We just looked at five generations.
We know nothing about Elijah's family. Nothing. We don't know anything about his life history. We don't know his credentials.
We know nothing because it's not about Elijah.
Elijah is about the Lord. He is a prophet.
Elijah doesn't spend a lot of time talking about himself. He's talking about his God.
Here's what we do know. His name is comprised of two parts.
• Eli means the strength of the Lord.
• Jah, my God is Jehovah.
Here's what his name literally means. I live by the strength of my God.
Here's what he's saying. I'm spirit filled. That's what his name means.
I live by the power of the Holy Spirit.
He literally walks out of the woods.
Now we know that politicians walk out of dinners, they walk out of fundraisers, they walk out of spas, they walk out of privilege.
Prophets walk out of the woods. This was a lifestyle. He's that guy.
He wore a garment of hair with a belt of leather.
Later on, comes a guy named John the baptizer that comes in the power and spirit of Elijah, he's Elijah 2.0.
It says that he,
Matthew 3:4 English Standard Version
4 Now John wore a garment of camel's hair and a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey.
These guys don't look the part. They don't tuck their shirt in.
Now here's what's interesting.
You've got Ahab and Jezebel the politicians and you've got Elijah the prophet and this is going to be the head-on collision.
• Ahab and Jezebel have money, but Elijah has the anointing.
• Ahab and Jezebel have power, but Elijah has the anointing.
• Ahab and Jezebel have religion, but Elijah has the anointing.
• Ahab and Jezebel have a staff and an army, but Elijah has the anointing.
They had everything minus God, Elijah had nothing plus God.
You've got to decide. You've got to determine in your heart, would I rather have everything minus God or nothing plus God?
The most important thing in the life of Elijah is the most important thing in your life and mine. It's the anointing of God.
The anointing of God is the presence and power of the person of the Holy Spirit.
Elijah doesn't live a natural life because he lives by a supernatural source.
So, let’s look at this story:
1 Kings 17:2-6
2 And the word of the LORD came to him:
the most important thing is the Word of the Lord. There's a lot of noise. We must open our ears and hear the Word of the Lord.
We like to ask a lot of people, get their opinions. We should probably just ask the One. And if He tells us, we have our answer.
We believe that God spoke the world into his existence through His Word.
And Jesus Christ, came into the world as the Word of God dwelt among us.
We believe that God works through His Word.
This is key, once Elijah gets a WORD from God, he obeys.
A prophet is someone who speaks the WORD of God.
Paul says this:
1 Corinthians 14:1 English Standard Version
1 Pursue love, and earnestly desire the spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy.
So if you are sitting here today and thinking that you are not called to be a prophet, then you are mistaken. The WORD of God is the Gospel, the Word of God is TRUTH, the WORD of God is JESUS. We are called to be .
2 Corinthians 5:18-20 English Standard Version
18 All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; 19 that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. 20 Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us…
We are called to be prophets. Not just pastors, or YouTube “prophets”, we are called to speak God’s Word!!
Let me remind you though, it’s the WORD that you share, not your opinions, or your religious traditions.
How do we do this, let’s go back to Elijah…
3 “Depart from here and turn eastward and hide yourself by the brook Cherith, which is east of the Jordan.
4 You shall drink from the brook, and I have commanded the ravens to feed you there.” 5 So he went and did according to the word of the LORD…
So, obey the Word of the Lord and you will walk in His anointing.
Think about it, the anointing is HIS DIVINE FAVOR. How many of you want to walk in God’s blessings? His abundance?
The simple and yet confound example is salvation. It is an act of obedience to accept Jesus as your Savior and Lord….what do you receive in your obedience?
You receive forgiveness….and ultimately eternal life!!
1 John 5:2-3 English Standard Version
2 By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. 3 For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome.
Let’s continue with Elijah.
…He went and lived by the brook Cherith that is east of the Jordan.
cherith means either to cut off or to cut down
And here I believe it means both. He's been cut off from society, and God is going to cut him down…like a 5 star player at his first fall camp.
6 And the ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning, and bread and meat in the evening, and he drank from the brook.
What we see here is separation for preparation.
Some of you right now, you're in a season like this.
Sometimes, God will call you out of one thing but not call you into the next thing right away.
Elijah going to be here for an extended period of time. During this time there's no indication that God said anything else to him.
It happens in solitude because he's meeting with the Lord.
The same thing happens to the Lord Jesus, 40 days in the wilderness. Same thing happens to the apostle Paul, three years in the wilderness. Here it is Elijah's time in the wilderness.
It’s not a place of being alone, but solitude. The Holy Spirit calls us to be in a place of communion with Him.
Put down the phone, turn off the tv, get into your closet with God.
Maybe it is time for some of us to go into the wilderness.
Maybe that is why our attendance went down when Covid hit.
God needed to take us as a church, as families, as individuals into the wilderness to prepare us for what is coming. I truly believe that.
Let’s pick up what happens after the wilderness…
1 Kings 18:1-2
After many days the word of the LORD came to Elijah, in the third year, saying, “Go, show yourself to Ahab, and I will send rain upon the earth.”
We know that God had earlier told Elijah to tell Ahab that it wouldn’t rain so we see that God waited three years 2 So Elijah went to show himself to Ahab. Now the famine was severe in Samaria.
Three plus years, no rain and no dew. I know this is hard to imagine, but just imagine living in a place that was very dry and had issues with water. Just imagine that, how terrifying that would be.
The whole nation is a funeral. Every day is a bad day. Literally everyone and everything is dead and dying.
The livestock. No crops. And what do you think happened to the economy? It's dead.
Does this not sound like our nation spiritually? Have we not seen the effects of our sin?
LQBTQ+, Transgenderism, abortion, BLM, Climate change, Big Pharma, etc.
Our leaders are making decisions based upon these things instead of the WORD of the LORD. We are feeling the effects.
Dire mental health crisis, lack of respect for human life, economy is struggling, rich get richer, poor get poorer.
SO, here comes Elijah. And Elijah has a rebuke for the King from the Lord. And he's going to give a word to the King from the Lord.
I want you to see here, first Elijah understands the difference between God's will and God's timing. You need to get both right. Not just God's will, but God's timing.
And so God's will was “you need to go rebuke Ahab”
and God's timing was you need to “wait over these years”.
1 …there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word.”
From what I can tell, scripture doesn’t say that God told how long, it just says “these” years, except by my word”.
If he would have just rushed ahead, if he would have not been on the timeline of the Lord, he would have not seen the blessing of the Lord.
Many of the mistakes and errors in my life, maybe this is true of you, I knew the Lord's will, but I got ahead of the Lord's timing. I was impatient.
What I love about Elijah, he knows the will of the Lord and he waits for the timing of the Lord.
In other words, Elijah was waiting on God’s NEXT command…but what do you do while you wait?
You don't want to waste your time while in the season of separation for preparation. Instead, you want to invest your time. You want to make it count right?
What did Elijah do?
It tells us this in:
James 5:17 English Standard Version
17 Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth.
What did he do? He prayed fervently.
What does that mean?
To pray fervently is to pray with intensity, fueled by the Holy Spirit.
It can be any king of prayer. You can be intensely thankful, deeply in need, or embroiled in spiritual warfare. The prayer can be outward, and often fervent prayer does manifest itself physically in movement, words, and sometimes tears.
Look at the verse that precedes talking about Elijah praying…
James 5:16 NKJV
16 Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much.
ESV
The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.
Elijah is used as an example…While you're waiting, be fervently praying because here's what God is doing:
God is preparing the circumstances and he's preparing the servant.
In other words, God is working on them and he's working on you.
THEN He will send you to do or say what needs to be said and done to them.
So ultimately, he waits and he prays and then he goes and he has the conversation with Ahab.
This is going to be the rebuke of the king. The kings don't like this.
Let me just say this. Nobody likes this. Especially if you're an Ahab, because if you're an Ahab, you're passive. So you don't like people being assertive and confronting you. And that's what's going to happen for him. People do not like the truth.
Elijah is the most wanted man in Israel. There's a bounty on his head. This is dangerous. There are lots of reasons that Elijah could be fearful, but he chooses FAITH OVER FEAR.
The best way to overcome fear is to get a Word from God and then have faith in that Word from God.
• Faith looks at the future and says, my God will be there.
• Fear looks at the future and says, my God's enemy will be there.
• Fear is what happens when you have faith in Satan. You believe that he's going to show up tomorrow.
• Faith is what happens when you have faith in God.
God is working, are you noticing?
1 Kings 18:3-7
And Ahab called Obadiah, who was over the household.
So Obadiah, he works for the political leader, Ahab. (Now Obadiah feared the Lord greatly, [He's a man of God.] 4 and when Jezebel cut off the prophets of the Lord, literally killed them, Obadiah took a hundred prophets and hid them by fifties in a cave and fed them bread and water.) 5 And Ahab said to Obadiah, go through the land to all the springs of water and to all the valleys. Perhaps we may find grass and save the horses and mules alive, the drought is severe, and not lose some of the animals."
6 So they divided the land between them to pass through it. Ahab went one direction by himself. Obadiah went in another direction by himself. 7And as Obadiah was on the way, behold, Elijah met him. And Obadiah recognized and fell on his face and said, “Is it you my Lord, Elijah?” And he answered, “It is I.”
So here we see Obadiah and he comes across Elijah. This is God's providence.
God works things out for His good because He is good. God is in the details. God is sovereign, He is in control, God does rule and reign.
It's good for you to know that!!
Sometimes God’s providence literally causes your path to intersect with other people. I call them divine appointments.
Those are some of the most important encounters of our life. We didn't have them scheduled, but God did.
And so Obadiah here works in the palace and is a man of God.
Obadiah is like Joseph in Egypt. He's like Daniel with the Babylonian Persian empires. He's like Nehemiah in the Persian empire. He is in a significant trusted political position for an evil king and kingdom. But he is a man of God.
Jezebel murdered and slaughtered all the prophets because she wanted Asher and Baal to be worshiped, not the God of the Bible.
So you got to get rid of all the Bible teachers.
Obadiah has been protecting the God’s servants and his path crosses with Elijah. He honors Elijah as a man of God. He bows down, fell on his face, calls him my lord. And what we see here is that Obadiah is part of a remnant.
As dark as things are, the good news is there are some people who do love and serve the Lord.
Now, what happens here is Obadiah and Elijah, they're both men of God, they're practicing something called civil disobedience.
Civil disobedience is where the servants of God disobey the government so that they can remain loyal and faithful to God.
What happens here is the government has sent out a decree. No more worshiping God. We are taking God out of the schools. We are closing the churches. We are murdering the pastors. You need to have transgenderism and sexual confusion and lots of sexual sin, lots of tolerance and diversity, and we're going to sacrifice our children to the demon gods.
Elijah is a fugitive and Obadiah, he's disobeying his own king who pays his salary. He's taking the king's salary to preserve a hundred prophets.
Daniel was told as well that he was not allowed to pray publicly. So what does he do? He prays…
You will see it repeatedly, prophets and politicians have head-on collisions.
In the New Testament, Acts 4, the religious leaders told the first disciples, no more preaching Jesus.
You can do self-help, positive self-esteem, give some motivational talk. But literally they said, no more Jesus.
Acts 5, they said, we need to obey God, not men. We're preaching Jesus.
That's faith over fear.
Christian faith is simply this, Jesus Christ is Lord.
Well, the government didn't like that, so they arrested him and killed him. But he rose from the dead, came back three days later and said, I told you, I'm the Lord.
So, there is going to be a time when the government or society is going to tell you to do something that God tells you not to do.
When COVID hit, churches should have said, no, we're staying open, we worship God.
When the government comes along and says, here's what you need to teach kids about sex and gender, the answer is no. We can't tolerate that. That's not what our God says.
When the government comes along and says the highest authority is not the parents but the government, the answer is no.
You can’t shut us down, shut us up. We choose FAITH OVER FEAR.
Let’s jump back into the story.
1 Kings 18:8-16 English Standard Version
8 And he answered him, “It is I. Go, tell your lord, ‘Behold, Elijah is here.’” 9 And he said, “How have I sinned, that you would give your servant into the hand of Ahab, to kill me? 10 As the Lord your God lives, there is no nation or kingdom where my lord has not sent to seek you. And when they would say, ‘He is not here,’ he would take an oath of the kingdom or nation, that they had not found you. 11 And now you say, ‘Go, tell your lord, “Behold, Elijah is here.”’ 12 And as soon as I have gone from you, the Spirit of the Lord will carry you I know not where. And so, when I come and tell Ahab and he cannot find you, he will kill me, although I your servant have feared the Lord from my youth. 13 Has it not been told my lord what I did when Jezebel killed the prophets of the Lord, how I hid a hundred men of the Lord's prophets by fifties in a cave and fed them with bread and water? 14 And now you say, ‘Go, tell your lord, “Behold, Elijah is here”’; and he will kill me.”
You can sense the fear in Obadiah as he is speaking to Elijah. He keeps coming back to his deepest fear. I don't want to die. And he had reason to believe this way because he had seen it… Jezebel killed the prophets of the Lord,
Obadiah struggles with fear. Let’s be honest, we all do from time to time.
Let me ask you a few questions:
Who or what do you fear? Who or what do you reverence? Who or what do you regard? Who are what do you submit to? Who are what do you surrender to?
In this moment, Obadiah fears death.
Let me talk briefly about fear.
Fear makes you a false prophet in your own life.
Here we have Elijah, who's a prophet. Obadiah is hiding a hundred prophets. And at this moment in his life, he's a false prophet. What he says is, if I go tell Ahab, Ahab's going to kill me, the Holy Spirit's is going move you, I won't be able to find you. You're going to live. I'm going to die. That doesn't happen. That's a false prophecy. Let me say this.
The most dangerous false prophet in your life is you.
“Well, this is going to happen, and they're going to say this, and they're going to do this, and then this is going to happen, so now I need to make these decisions or feel these feelings.”
No. What is the Word of the Lord?
God didn't tell Elijah, “Send Obadiah to be killed by Ahab.”
That's not what he said. God already told him what was going to happen. Here he's got fear. And he's a false prophet in his own life.
And what happens is
fear will come upon you, but you can't let it in you.
You cannot listen to the lies that you tell yourself. You can’t listen to lies that society tells you. You can’t let them plant a seed of fear in you. If you let it in you, now you're allowing a spirit of fear to control you.
And here fear is on Obadiah and wants to get in Obadiah.
Give you two scriptures.
2 Timothy 1:7
7 for God gave us a spirit not of fear…
When you are fearful and timid, you know it not of God.
…but of power and love and self-control.
These are the fruit of the Holy Spirit.
When you've got fear on you and it wants to get in you, you need the Holy Spirit in you to give you faith.
Many times, we try to push away fear when instead we should be asking to fill us with His Holy Spirit. Give us a WORD from the LORD to REPLACE the fear.
Apparently it is a “GIFT”.
Let’s read this scripture in this way,
God gave you a spirit of power and love and self-control, not fear.
In addition,
1 John 4:18 ESV
18 There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear…
This is where Obadiah finds himself. And what we see is that he is a good man, he has a bad day, but he overcomes this fear. Elijah encourages him to believe…
15 And Elijah said, “As the Lord of hosts lives, before whom I stand, I will surely show myself to him today.”
16 So Obadiah went to meet Ahab, and told him. And Ahab went to meet Elijah.
Elijah tells Obadiah tell Ahab, ‘Behold, Elijah is here.’
In other words,
Today is the day. This is it.
See you in the ring.
I'll see you in the middle of the street like an old Western. We're pulling guns. Only one's going home for supper.
That's where we are. This is a conflict. This is a fight.
What we're seeing here in this story is that it's not Elijah versus Ahab, it's God’s Holy Spirit versus demons.
So ultimately here, truth be told, the battle belongs to the Lord.
1 Samuel 17:47 ESV
47 and that all this assembly may know that the LORD saves not with sword and spear. For the battle is the LORD’S, and he will give you into our hand.”
It is your choice,
I choose FAITH OVER FEAR.
1 John 5:4 English Standard Version
4 For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith.
1 Corinthians 15:57 English Standard Version
57 But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Romans 8:37 English Standard Version
37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
Revelation 17:14 English Standard Version
14 They will make war on the Lamb, and the Lamb will conquer them, for he is Lord of lords and King of kings, and those with him are called and chosen and faithful.”