Elijah: Faith and FireSample

The Real Deal

Read 1 Peter 5:10.

Several years ago I took on the task of reading the Bible through in a year. Frankly, I found it a bit overwhelming. (Wrangling three small children at the time probably had a little something to do with it.) Maybe I needed the two-year plan, where I could take it more slowly and digest things a little more fully that way. Yet I distinctly remember, when I came to Elijah’s narrative in 1 Kings that year, how I felt completely consumed by the startling boldness of his faith, especially the one big highlight that stands out from his story: Mount Carmel.

Read 1 Kings 18:19-39. 

Imagine if Elijah were sitting beside you right now. What are the top three questions you’d like to ask him about his memories from that day?

As I think through the conversation I’d like to have with Elijah, I try to picture how he might interact with me. While I’d be all zeroed in on the spectacular moments of the story, I wonder if he’d intentionally point to other things—simpler, more foundational things, even difficult things that made up the underbelly of his journey with God. I wonder if he’d accentuate those quieter happenings from earlier in his life, in passages preceding 1 Kings 18, verses that are filled with refining and pruning. 

This moment of biblical proportions, high atop Mount Carmel, followed a much less public process that God had begun in him years before—a process that is already happening in you as well, which your loving Father will continue to develop throughout this study—a progression of development that I hope you’ll begin to recognize and value more than ever before.

I’m assuming you’re here with me because we both want what Elijah had. But the question for us remains: Are we willing to do what Elijah did to get what Elijah got? 

You have no idea how I wish I could lean in right now and see how you’ve prayerfully responded. Then I’d move out of the way and let you peer into mine. Because right here is where the battle is about to be waged—on the thin edge that exists between our eager anticipation about the next level where God is calling us and the prickling fear we sometimes feel about what it will cost us to get there.