Fear No Fear

(All scripture from the NET, netbible.org, all rights reserved)

After this the son of the woman who owned the house got sick. His illness was so severe he could no longer breathe.
1 Kings 17:17 (emphasis added)

There are times that it seems we are challenged when we are obeying Adonai. Almost like someone is pushing us, testing us to see if we’ll throw up our hands and give up. Elijah had ALREADY faced two such incidents. First, challenging Ahab and declaring a drought – not something that would make him popular with the evil king when it came to pass. Second, being led to a place of safety where supernatural food delivery occurred – but then the water dried up. The next thing that happened harkens to the first thing. Elijah was directed to a town where again he would get shelter. The town was smack in the hometown region of the evil king’s wife and still controlled by her father – and it was a many kilometre trip through ‘enemy’ territory to get there. This COULD have been the breaking point.

Instead of buckling, trust rose up inside Elijah for something that had never been recorded as happening since the creation of the world. That’s quite a counterpoint to his situation. From one point of view he had been beaten around the bush, chased out of his own country. In the next chapter we’re told of Ahab’s search for Elijah. “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” (1 Kings 18:10). Ahab had really been searching for Elijah. Hounding him could be the impression, but based on Elijah that couldn’t have been his point of view.

At the beginning of Chapter 17, Elijah enters the stage with his pronouncement of a drought as judgment against Ahab’s behaviour. It doesn’t say that Adonai instructed Elijah to do that. He may or may not have been told to. But Adonai absolutely backed up the prophetic declaration Elijah made. Adonai does that. He is willing to back out plays when they are in accordance with His will (Isaiah 41:10). Not only that, but Adonai made a way for Elijah to thrive in the hard times. Elijah has told where to go AND that he would be supernaturally provided for: Uber Ravens food delivery service. He got bread and meat twice a day at the same spot (1 Kings 17:2-6). The food was provided before Elijah was even there (vs 4). Maybe so that Elijah knew when to stop. The brook he went to wasn’t tiny. Maybe he might have gone to the wrong part. My guess is he stopped when he saw the meat and bread piling up. Proof he was in the right place. Proof that the word of Adonai he was obeying was true. You should notice though, he had to obey it BEFORE he could know it was true.

Elijah didn’t always get it right. But when the word of Adonai came, he moved on it. Frequently he moved on it before there was evidence that it was going to work. In chapter 18 he is told to go confront Ahab. No details. No stated protections. Elijah went. He obeyed. Not perfectly, but he obeyed. The result was that he had trust in Adonai. When negative circumstances rose, his trust rose and he took an action you cannot take without trust in Adonai – especially since it was UNHEARD of at that time from everything we know. The widow he was staying with had a son so sick he stopped breathing. She blamed him, but he took her son and took the case up with Adonai. He called on Adonai and he stretched out over the boy three times.

In the Hebrew language, the number three (gimel) represented Divine Fullness, Perfection, and completeness. Gimel is a camel in Hebrew. It signifies to be lifted up. According to Jewish law, once something is done three times it is considered a permanent thing. As if by doing it three times you connected to it and connected it to this world. I don’t know if that factored in here, but he stretched out three times and cried out to Adonai again. And the boy was raised from the dead. First time in the Word that someone was raised. Elijah lived a life of obedience, and it unlocked his trust for the supernatural move of Adonai.

We too are called to live in obedience. We’re called to live it from a place of our love for Adonai. So much so that if we love Adonai, we will honestly seek to obey Him in every circumstance we find ourselves – we may miss it sometimes, but we’ll repent and strive again. We don’t accomplish it in our own strength, either. We manage it by Grace, being given His trust, His love, and His Spirit by which we can walk in the place He’s prepared for us (Ephesians 2:10). It isn’t about our success rate (1 John 1:9). It’s about our obedience rate. Whenever we find ourselves NOT obeying, it is because we are not loving Jesus in that instance. We are not consciously injecting Jesus into the situation. We aren’t consciously asking Him what to do – and listening for the answer. We can’t split hairs on this one. We need to obey. Everything that isn’t obedience is not obeying. We need Jesus in EVERYTHING we do and experience AND we need to LISTEN so that we will OBEY Him.

This isn’t a burden. It isn’t freedom to do whatever you want whenever you want. To have no control over your heart and passions. To have no control over your emotions. To let your feelings run rampant. It isn’t freedom to jump in and out of bed with people. To change pronouns or partners or orientation or gender expression whenever you want. It isn’t freedom to live in the moment because it all may be over in the next moment. That’s slavery. Having no control. Having no choice. Having no say. That’s being a robot. A mindless machine acquiescing to the current fads. That’s slavery to lust. Slavery to feelings. Slavery to lifestyle. Slavery to whatever it is that drives you. That’s why Jesus’ yoke is so light. It doesn’t come with chains. It comes with love and guidance and correction. It comes with Him.

We are completely able to have the same trust. Abraham did and he didn’t have the promises we do. His trust in believing Adonai was counted as righteousness (Genesis 15:6; Romans 4:3). He was called the friend of Adonai because of it (James 2:23). It was his lifestyle and it became Sarah’s too. “By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place he would later receive as an inheritance, and he went out without understanding where he was going. By faith he lived as a foreigner in the promised land as though it were a foreign country, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, who were fellow heirs of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city with firm foundations, whose architect and builder is God. By faith, even though Sarah herself was barren and he was too old, he received the ability to procreate, because he regarded the one who had given the promise to be trustworthy. So in fact children were fathered by one man—and this one as good as dead—like the number of stars in the sky and like the innumerable grains of sand on the seashore” (Hebrews 11:8-12). They heard the word of Adonai and they obeyed. When the time came for miracles, their trust was ready.

We have a better covenant with better promises (Hebrews 8:6). We’re called to have the same obedience and the same trust – especially when faced with a sickness or a situation that is so bad it looks like it may never have been before. Our trust will rise up to meet the challenge. Adonai will join His trust to ours, believing together with us about what the Father is about to do (Matthew 18:20, 28:20; Hebrews 13:5). When we live a life of obedience we are living a life of loving Him (John 14:15-17). When we live a life of obedience we are living a life of active trust (Romans 1:5). Obedience comes from trust in Jesus’ name. They play off each other, keeping us at the ready, and helping us to deny and put down disbelief (Mark 9:23). Consciously connecting to Jesus, to our Vine (John 15:5), puts us in the flow of obedience because we are acutely aware of our love for Him and His love for us. “Dear friends, if God so loved us, then we also ought to love one another. No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God resides in us, and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that we reside in God and he in us: in that he has given us of his Spirit” (1 John 4:11-13).

When we’re living obediently, humbly submitting to whatever He may ask – no matter if we understand or not – we are ready with our trust. Like Elijah it will rise up and not see us crumble. We won’t complain. We won’t be anxious. We won’t be depressed. We will be ready, eager, and able to see to the end whatever He asks of us. No matter what. We will KNOW that He can be trusted. More than a close friend. Trusted as a Good Father. A Merciful Father. A Gracious Father. Our Source and All (1 Corinthians 8:6). Our trust will rise without conscious thought. Ready in Him. Him in us. Both yoked and ready to do the Father’s will (Matthew 11:28-39).

Daily Affirmation Jesus IS Messiah: Isaiah 42:3

“A crushed reed he will not break, a dim wick he will not extinguish; he will faithfully make just decrees.” Messiah would bring hope for the hopeless. He would not crush the weak. He would not leave the disenfranchised without a future. He would be just. He would care for them. He would not favour people, but would treat everyone with the same scale. “But he had to pass through Samaria. Now he came to a Samaritan town called Sychar, near the plot of land that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, so Jesus, since he was tired from the journey, sat right down beside the well. It was about noon. A Samaritan woman came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me some water to drink.” (For his disciples had gone off into the town to buy supplies.) So the Samaritan woman said to him, “How can you—a Jew—ask me, a Samaritan woman, for water to drink?” (For Jews use nothing in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you had known the gift of God and who it is who said to you, ‘Give me some water to drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” “Sir,” the woman said to him, “you have no bucket and the well is deep; where then do you get this living water? Surely you’re not greater than our ancestor Jacob, are you? For he gave us this well and drank from it himself, along with his sons and his livestock.” Jesus replied, “Everyone who drinks some of this water will be thirsty again. But whoever drinks some of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again, but the water that I will give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.” He said to her, “Go call your husband and come back here.” The woman replied, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “Right you are when you said, ‘I have no husband,’ for you have had five husbands, and the man you are living with now is not your husband. This you said truthfully!” The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and you people say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” Jesus said to her, “Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You people worship what you do not know. We worship what we know because salvation is from the Jews. But a time is coming—and now is here—when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such people to be his worshipers. God is spirit, and the people who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (the one called Christ); “whenever he comes, he will tell us everything.” Jesus said to her, “I, the one speaking to you, am he.” Now at that very moment his disciples came back. They were shocked because he was speaking with a woman. However, no one said, “What do you want?” or “Why are you speaking with her?” Then the woman left her water jar, went off into the town and said to the people, “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Surely he can’t be the Messiah, can he?” So they left the town and began coming to him. Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, “Rabbi, eat something.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.” So the disciples began to say to one another, “No one brought him anything to eat, did they?” Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to complete his work. Don’t you say, ‘There are four more months and then comes the harvest?’ I tell you, look up and see that the fields are already white for harvest! The one who reaps receives pay and gathers fruit for eternal life, so that the one who sows and the one who reaps can rejoice together. For in this instance the saying is true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap what you did not work for; others have labored and you have entered into their labor.”” (John 4:4-54). Jesus reached out to a woman no Jew would reach out to. A woman who needed help. Jesus ALWAYS reaches out to those who need help. To those who have no other hope. No other chance at life. Jesus was and is ALWAYS just and loving. He reaches out to lift us because He loves us. He delivers us because He delights in us. Jesus IS the Messiah!

Your Daily Confession of Jesus/Yeshua’s Identity:

Yeshua is the Christ, the Son of the living God.

Matthew 16:16b