Giving Up the Limp

Our scripture text for today comes from a very dramatic passage from 1 Kings 18. I'll be starting at verse 1 and then reading verses 17 through 24. Hear the word of God. "After many days the word of the Lord came to Elijah in the third year of the drought saying, 'Go, present yourself to Ahab. I will send rain on the earth.' When Ahab saw Elijah, Ahab said to him, 'Is it you, you trouble of Israel?' He answered, 'I've not troubled Israel, but you have, and your father's house, because you forsaken the commandments of the Lord and followed the bales. Now therefore have all Israel a symbol for me at Mount Carmel, with the 450 prophets of Baal and the 400 prophets of Asherah who eat at Jezebel's table. So Ahab sent to all of the Israelites and assembled the prophets at Mount Carmel. Elijah then came near to all the people and said, 'How long will you go limping with two different opinions? The Lord is God, follow him, but if Baal then follow him.' The people did not answer him a word. Then Elijah said to the people, 'I even I only am left a prophet of the Lord, but Baal's prophets number 450. Let two bulls be given to us. Let them choose one bull for themselves, cut it in pieces, and lay it on the wood, but put no fire to it. And I will prepare the other bull and lay it on the wood, but put no fire to it. Then you call on the name of your God, and I will call on the name of the Lord, and the God who answers by fire is indeed God.' And all the people answered, 'Well spoken.'

Holy God we've gathered here to place our lives in front of your open word. We ask that you would now do what only you can do, which is to use these words to open our hearts to the high drama of the spirit and our lives as well. We ask this in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen. Our text today invites all of us to find ourselves with all of the Hebrews who are witnessing this dramatic event. So come and join them. Let us climb up Mount Carmel, and as we get to the top there we will find two very imposing stone altars. This altar, it's the altar to the Lord God known as Yahweh. By it stands the single prophet Elijah. The second large altar is to the Canaanite fertility god Baal, and beside it stand 450 prophets of Baal.

As we stand between these two altars it's clear that a contest is about to unfold, a contest between the Lord Yahweh and Baal, and it is to be clear a contest for your heart that can only have one God. To say the obvious, you're the kind of person who comes to church, at least apparently. That means we can make some assumptions that either you believe what we proclaim here or you're interested in what we believe here. You're seeking out what we believe here. You were dragged here by somebody who believes what we believe here. But this is a place of belief. We believe that God is our Creator, that we don't shape our own lives, that they are shaped by God.

We believe this God has come to us because we ran away from him, and he came to us in Jesus Christ. The Savior who went to the cross dying to forgive us and bring us home to his Father. We believe the Savior rose from the dead, who ascended into heaven, is still about the task of unfolding salvation in our lives. We believe, as the Apostle Paul said, that he who had begun a good work in you will bring it to completion. In other words, we believe God isn't done with your life. That's what we believe. We gather around the altar of the Lord every Sunday to reaffirm that strong, deep-rooted belief.

But if we're bold enough to tell ourselves the truth, we also believe other things. We believe our hearts have holes in them, and they can't stay filled up for long. We believe that we're very anxious about our relationships. We'd like to figure out how to get the intimacy back into them. We're very, very anxious about our children, how their lives are unfolding. We believe that at the end of the long day when we can no longer stay distracted, we lie in bed at night and stare at the ceiling. The loneliness often washes over us. And some of the loneliest people I know, by the way, are married.

We believe that our lives aren't kind of having the impact that we had hoped they would. We believe we're not really making much of a difference with our fleeting years. And so we find ourselves at this other altar, a second altar in our life, where we almost bow down before our anxiety. And at this altar, we're told you're on your own. If you're gonna make any difference, it's up to you. You better get realistic. You better make some new plans. That's what said at this second altar in our heart.

Then we come back to the altar of the Lord. We really believe that this should be true. Here we are told that the Lord is my shepherd I shall not want. But then there's this other altar that says, "I actually want quite a bit." The altar of the Lord says that Jesus Christ is living water and whoever drinks of his water will never thirst again. Wow, that's what I want. But then the other altar says, "I'm still pretty thirsty. I've worshiped at the altar of the Lord. Jesus is my Lord and Savior, but I have actually an insatiable thirst, a yearning for more than I have." We all do. I mean, we yearn, we thirst for more in our relationships, for more fulfilling work, for better health than we have.

Yeah, we just, we still thirst, we still yearn. There is this other altar and back and forth. We live between these two altars. We believe we have unbelief, every one of us. We would prefer for God to be the one to unfold our lives and to give us this extraordinary gift of a high adventure, day after day, in his hands. But just in case, we go to this, maybe we could call this other altar Plan B. Just in case salvation does not unfold the way it's supposed to, we've got Plan B.

At a parish in a church I used to serve, we called himself a suspender and belt man. Just in case the suspenders break, Scott has belt. And that's what we need. We think. A fallback plan, a just-in-case plan. And to be clear, these plans don't live together well. They are at war with each other. They're actually tearing at your heart because they're two different gods. To try to maintain two gods in one heart is a great way to have the heart just split apart. This is why I've never understood that advice. When you're stuck making a very difficult decision and you try to get counsel from the people you care about, what do they often say to you? Well, trust your heart.

If your heart is anything like mine, most days there's a really bad committee meeting going on in there. Everybody's trying to hijack the agenda. Pick me, don't pick me. Well, in the Old Testament, this other altar, this Plan B altar, was known as Plan Baal. As I mentioned before, Baal was a Canaanite fertility god who promised to give the people every kind of fruitful, bountiful life that they could yearn for. Baal was very different, dramatically different, from the Lord God Yahweh.

There's nothing mysterious about Baal. He's an idol. You shape idols with your own hands. You can make them look exactly the way you want them to look. Whereas God is the creator of our lives. We don't create God. God creates us. That means he's already mysterious to us. There's more to God than any of us understand. That's part of the definition of being a true God. But Baal we understand. We made him. We can figure him out. And not only do we make him, he's controllable because we make him. You can throw a rope around Baal. You can just drag him anywhere you want to go. Got God on a rope.

If you think you're doing okay without your God, you just leave him there. You go back to do what you want. You get a little nervous. He's right where you left him. You can go back and grab him again. Bring him into anything you need to. He's always there. Unlike the Lord God Yahweh, who will not be dragged around. You cannot get a rope around. It is in fact God who is providentially at work in our lives. Who does not always come when summoned. And sometimes he comes when we would prefer he not come. He doesn't always give us what we want and sometimes he gives us gifts we'd rather not have. That's the nature of a God. Mysterious God.

Baal, unlike Yahweh, is completely undemanding of you. There's no ten commandments from Baal. There's no ethical teaching of Jesus like love your neighbor as you love yourself. None of that. Baal doesn't care if you love your neighbor. Baal is all promises, no demands. We've always liked that in a God. Just buy my product. You'll be beautiful. You'll be skinny. You'll be sexy. You'll be popular. Just buy the product. No demands. Whereas the Lord God Yahweh has pretty high expectations for how we live. If God is going to be gracious to us, he expects us to be gracious to each other. He expects us to love justice, to seek mercy, to walk humbly.

Baal is completely void of any sense of jealousy. Baal doesn't care how many gods you have. He doesn't expect you to just have one God. You can have 10,000 gods. Baal doesn't care. Baal doesn't have a jealous bone in his body. Actually, he doesn't even have any bones in his body. By contrast, the Lord God Yahweh is a jealous lover of your soul. And he will not allow you to have any other God. Because out of his love, he knows that this is in fact going to tear your heart apart. And so it comes out of the Lord's initiative to set up this great contest in our hearts. To ask us to now make a choice.

So here, once again, the words of the prophet Elijah, who looks out at his congregation of Israel, and would look out at us today and ask, "How long are you going to go limping between two different opinions?" If the Lord is God, follow him. If Baal, follow him. And then the text says, "The people did not answer him a word." Isn't that striking? What would they have said? They've been completely busted, as have we. You're going to actually say you don't have two altars in your life? No, we do. We know we do. There is nothing that we can say other than to confess the truth that this is right.

Two altars, and as Elijah says, we just limp between them back and forth. Sunday morning, come here, and we bow down before the affirmation that God is faithful. Great is thy faithfulness, O God my Father. We believe that. But then the rest of the week, we find ourselves limping back over to this other altar that says we're on our own. And if we're going to find any salvation that's up to us to get there, we'd better come up with some realistic plans. By the way, I want you to know that the clergy aren't necessarily better at this. We just understand what the Bible is telling us. But we all struggle with this two-altar problem.

In fact, I ran into this in my own life just last week when I was teaching at Mount Herman Conference Center. On Monday, after speaking, a man came up to me and said, you know, could you pray with me? I just lost my job and was thinking maybe I wouldn't even come to Mount Herman because I couldn't afford it now. But I just knew I needed to be here and for the spiritual strength, would you pray with me? And we, I did. I prayed that God would be at work in this man's life, that he would realize there's still the future filled with hope, and that God would be about his own mysterious unfolding of hope in his life.

On Tuesday, we talked a little bit more and prayed some more. Wednesday, the same thing happened. On Thursday, I prayed some more with him, but I started thinking more about trying to provide some advice and counsel and some career counseling that you may need to get. And I've talked to your family about this, Chad, and that sort of thing. On Friday, he came to me and he said, you're not going to believe this. I just talked to my boss. He apologized to me for letting me go, and I've got my job back. And I said, how can that be? He looked at me kind of like, you know, when a dog gets confused, he kind of cocked his head and said, because you've been praying about it all week.

Really? Thinking that, you know, what, where his real hope was going to be is in my good advice of career counseling I was given him, as opposed to placing him into the hands of a God who wasn't done with his life. On Sunday, we lived by the affirmation that God is your Creator, and after creation, God looked at everything he made and called it good. And the rest of the week, we keep hearing messages that tell us we're not really good enough. You better try harder. You're living a B-plus life. You need to give a little more effort.

When I was in college, I dropped out for a while to go find myself. It was the 70s. We were all doing that. No one could graduate with integrity in four years. You had to go out and get lost and find yourself. And the assumption behind this was that your real self, your real life, was somewhere out there. Go find it. Like it's an adventure. It's hide and seek. Your life is out there. Now, I was already a believer. In fact, I had the blessing of growing up by the altar of the Lord. I believed that Jesus was the one who not only saved my life, but was giving me his life. That was my real life.

But I had been so inundated with this message of this other altar that says it's up to you to build your own life, find your own life, that I got tempted up to go out there in search of it. And over the course of that next, especially that first semester, I just hitch-hiked around and I just got more and more lost. Eventually, I got to New York City. It was out of money, out of ideas, and so I ended up working the midnight shift at a gas station. You would not believe the caliber of people you meet. Working the midnight shift at a gas station in Manhattan.

One of the guys I met every night there was a homeless alcoholic named Shorty. And he would wander into the station about two in the morning, completely gone, and I'd let him sleep it off in the station just so he was protected for the evening. And then I'd get him up the next morning and get him out before the morning shift arrived. One night he came in as usual. I got him tucked in. Then I went back out to the gas pumps and I just sat there and leaned against the gas pumps thinking, "Find myself. Boy, I hope this isn't me. This is what I found. I'm in bigger trouble than I thought."

How did I get there? Just because I just kept limping back to this other altar that says you can find your own life. If you stay at this altar long enough, just like Elijah says, you'll find yourself not running through life, not skipping through life, but limping because that's what this altar does to you. It cripples you. It keeps telling you you got to keep searching. You got to keep looking. You got to keep trying. You can't possibly be what God has created and called good. You're clearly not good enough. Buy another car. Find another job. Get into another relationship. Move to another town. Keep looking. Keep looking. Keep looking. And eventually you get so worn down, you're just limping through your own life like I was.

All these thoughts about how lost I was was washing over me as I sat by the gas pumps that night. Then an unusual thing happened. Shorty came out of the gas station, walks out to the gas pumps. He sits down next to me. He slapped me on the leg. He says, "I like you. You and me? We got a lot in common." He's right. It's like the Lord God's saying, "Wake up, Barnes." The next morning I did not limp. I ran back to college. Now since that time, I've gotten through quite a few academic degrees. That's no longer the problem.

But now when I'm tempted to leave the altar of the Lord, I'm tempted to limp back over to this other altar that says, "Work harder. Try harder. Get lost in your work." People are counting on you. Be a leader. It's all up to you. As if I could be a messiah to the people I care about. I'm no messiah. I work for one. But I'm not the messiah. And if I keep trying to be the messiah to the family or to the staff or the students at the same area, I just, it's not long before. Once again, I'm limping because it's not my job description. It'll wear me out.

Everything about salvation is, that whole job has been completely taken by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There's no room left for us. What we're just, we're employees. We work for them. A very mysterious messiah. It's one of the reasons why we come back to church once again to get our head straight, to remind ourselves we really live by this altar. The altar of salvation from Jesus Christ. But not just on Sunday mornings, right? The real purpose is to figure out how to live by this altar every day of our lives.

Imagine leaving today. You're driving back out of the home, out of the parking lot. You look in the rearview mirror, and Jesus is in the backseat. You get startled by this. You look around. What? Well, I thought I'd go home with you today. Don't they need you back there for the next service? Are they? Nope. I'm going with you. So you bring Jesus home. And think about how different everything would be at home this afternoon, with Jesus just kind of hanging around. He's in the family room. If you're married, you know, your spouse may say to you, "I don't think he's leaving." He's not.

And then tomorrow morning when you go back to work, you look in the rearview mirror. There he is again, in the backseat, going with you to work too. Yeah, let's go to work. So you take Jesus to work, and you're thinking this is going to be awkward. You're standing by the copy machine where some of your colleagues are. You say, "Everybody? This is Jesus. Jesus, everybody?" It's bring your Savior to work day, apparently. It may just change the way you conduct your meetings and your conversations. Now you can see where I'm going with this.

Through the Holy Spirit, Jesus does go home with you, right? Through the Holy Spirit, Jesus does go to work with you. In fact, he got to work before you did. He is always there. Our job, our mission, is to be a witness. Witnesses watch, and they see, and they talk about the reality of the presence of a Savior who is always, always with us.

Well, Elijah now sets out the rules for this great contest. Again, a contest set up by God because he's jealous for your heart. And he knows that you can only have one God, one Savior, at church, at home, at work, at school. There can only be one Savior in your life. And he knows that your heart's going to tear apart if you try to keep more than one. So out of love, he sets out this contest. Elijah says to the prophets of Baal, "You build your altar, I will build the Lord's altar. You place a bowl on your altar, I will place a bowl on the altar of the Lord. You call to Baal, I will call to the Lord." And the God who answers by fire, he is God. And all the people watching this say, "Yeah, this is gonna be good. Let's watch this. Let's see what happens."

The text tells us that from morning to noon, the prophets of Baal went first. It's three hours. They dance around their altar, screaming out, "Oh Baal, answer us. This would be a great time. Please, oh Baal, answer us, answer us, oh Baal." With a certain tinge of irony, the text tells us that the prophets eventually started limping as they went around this altar. By noon, Elijah is feeling pretty good about the way this contest is going because Baal, of course, has done nothing for his prophets. So Elijah starts teasing the prophets of Baal. "Cry louder. I think maybe he's gone on a trip. Maybe he's asleep. You gotta wake up that God." At one point he actually says, "I think he's gone to the bathroom." I don't make this stuff up. It's in the text. The Old Testament is so wonderfully earthy.

The prophets of Baal are completely unimpressed with Elijah's advice, but they did take it a step further. They start cutting themselves, thinking that Baal will be impressed if they bleed for him. It doesn't matter how much you bleed for an idol. Salvation's never going to come from something you make with your own hands. By three o'clock in the afternoon, Elijah figures things have gone on long enough. So after repairing the altar of the Lord, he then places a bowl on it. Just for a dramatic effect, he dumps 12 large jars of water over this, so it's gonna be harder for it to burn, I think.

Then he stands before the Lord's altar and he prays, and he prays, "O Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, answer me. Answer me that these people may know that you are God, and then turn their hearts back. Answer me that they may know you've done this, that you've turned their hearts back." Then he steps back. He throws his hands up into the sky. A bolt of fire shoots down from the heavens. The altar explodes into flames, and the flames consume the bowl and all of the water and even the rocks. People all fall on their faces and say, "The Lord, he is God. The Lord, he is God." Wow! That had to have been an impressive day.

But I will tell you what impresses me even more. Most of all, I'm impressed that God did not torch any of us idolaters. That's because God has no interest in judging us. Look again at this text from Elijah's prayer. What does God want? God wants your heart back. When you have worked and worked and worked for a promotion that you actually deserve and you don't get it. When you've been careful with your health, you've dieted, your exercise, but you still get a disease. When you just keep dating and dating and nothing remotely resembling fire is falling down from heaven. It's not because God is angry at you. God doesn't want to judge you. He just wants your heart.

Sometimes you have to see the failure of every other bail before you're now open to the love of God. And as he and Jesus Christ was literally dying to love you, so does he want you to love him. You can only be bound to this God by the heart. But this is no ordinary lover of your soul. Don't ever think that you can get God to prove his love for you. That's because no relationship in heaven on on earth exists well by trying to prove love. Have you ever been in a crummy relationship with someone who wanted you to keep proving your love for them? Well if you love me you would...well if you love me, that's the best way I know to put a little way of relationship to nothing with that phrase "if you love me you will do this this."

You can't prove love. Love only exists in the culture of faith and commitment and honor, but not proof. You're not going to be able to get God to come anytime you call just because you call him. You're not going to be able to manipulate God. God is the one who is at work in our lives and by loving commitment we choose by faith to keep loving in a God that frequently we do not understand. God's not gonna always come when beckoned. He's not gonna always give you what you want. As I said before he sometimes will give you what you don't want. He's a mysterious lover.

Inevitably it's not long before we all discover God's ways or not our ways, but all of that is a means by which God is leading us to a life that's far more adventurous, far different than we could ever have imagined. Leading you to a future that never occurred to you. How many of you are actually living the life you had planned? And aren't you pretty happy about that? That you're not? Of course because God continues to unfold his own plans in our lives. It's part of the mystery. And to live in the hands of a mysterious God means you don't always know where your life is headed, but that's okay.

You don't have to be certain about anything else as long as you are certain about the Lord who is at work in your life. That's the only certainty you need. When you're clear about the certainty of a God who is faithful, you can handle all kinds of questions and uncertainty. But as Elijah would caution you, you've got to stay away from this other altar. This altar that says not enough, not good enough. It's up to you. Try it. Try more. Because that altar is not only going to make you limp through life, it's going to lead you into a life of misery.

Because the misery is you're going to just keep being disappointed. The next job isn't going to be any better than this one. You can move to another town if you want to, but the problem is you're still stuck with you when you get there. The next relationship isn't going to be different. It's just going to be one disappointment after another disappointment after another disappointment. Sheer misery. But we keep doing that because it's what we know. It's what we've been taught to do. To keep trying. To keep trading in one misery for another misery.

But why would you prefer the misery you know to the mystery you do not? As a pastor it has fascinated me how many times people will leave mystery, the mystery of God, because they become addicted to their misery. This is completely illogical, but for reasons beyond my understanding they still prefer a familiar misery to living life in the mysterious hands of God. Don't settle for familiar misery. Choose to live out of the mystery of this Savior who just wants your heart. Holy God give us the courage to open up our hands, to open our hearts, to receive life from you as an unfolding gift of holy grace. Amen.