If God has not made your next step clear, could it be that you have not yet finished what he has already told you to do? Move forward with all that God has given you to do now, and then trust him to show you the next step at the right time. Welcome to Open the Bible with Pastor Colin Smith. I’m David Pick. Colin, what we’re talking about today, guidance, is something I think every Christian can relate to. Yeah, I don’t know if I’ve ever met a Christian who didn’t have questions about, how do I know the will of God? Am I to do more of the same? Am I to carry on? Am I to do something different? And there are huge questions that relate to the whole question of guidance. One of the things I know many Christians struggle with is feeling like, is this God closing a door, or is he saying, be patient, wait for me to open this door and press on ahead? And it’s not easy to discern sometimes. One thing that I’ve found helpful is that you can only guide a moving object. And so the real question that has to be at the front of my mind is, what is God calling me to do now? What is my responsibility in this situation? What is right? And to keep doing that, and not to get my mind always on to what the next thing is, but to trust God to reveal the process of what he wants me to do one step at a time. That’s a hugely important principle. I find it to be very helpful, and we’re going to look at how it works out in the life of Elijah today. We’re looking at 1 Kings chapter 17, the first verses. So if you can, I hope you’ll join us as we continue the message, When God Hides You. Here’s Colin. God leads his people one step at a time, and he will guide you as you need the next step, as you move in faith and obedience. Now of course, just before we move on, there is a very important difference between the way in which God led Elijah and the way in which he leads us. God spoke directly to Elijah. We keep having this phrase, the word of God came to him. I understand that to mean that he heard God speak with an audible voice, as God spoke with an audible voice in the baptism of Jesus. You remember, this is my son in whom I am well pleased. And at the transfiguration, the same words, listen to him. This is my son in whom I am well pleased. Remember the audible voice that the apostle Paul heard from the risen Christ on the Damascus road. Well, it seems to me that this is how God spoke to the prophets. The word of the Lord came to Elijah. Chapter 17 verse 2, chapter 17 verse 8, chapter 18 and verse 1. This is what it meant to be a prophet in the Old Testament. Prophets received direct revelation from God, which is why we don’t sit around trying to test whether we agree with what God said to Elijah. It’s the word of God. God spoke to him directly, and through him speaks to us. But that gift is not promised to us. Well, sure, God could speak in an audible voice to any of us if he chose, but this is not how God normally chooses to work. God does not say in an audible voice to you, go to this college, choose this major, marry that man or that woman, join this church, pursue this career, and so forth and so on. Now, you may wish that he did. You say, well, if he would do that, I’d know exactly what to do. That would make you like one of the prophets, and you don’t envy the prophets. God gave them the toughest things to do, and believing people stoned them. That’s what Jesus says. He stoned the prophets, killed them. So don’t envy the prophets. But the question remains, given that God speaks directly, direct revelation to the apostles and the prophets, which is why the apostles and the prophets are foundational. There’s not a foundation that can be relayed. That’s in the book of Ephesians. How then does God lead us? How can we discern what he wants us to do? Let me simply give to you this wisdom that I’ve drawn from others. Ask, what is the best that I can do for my God? And then read your heart and use your judgment. Ask the question, what is the best that I can do for my God? Because that’s what you’re here for, to live for his glory, to be as useful in your short life to him as you possibly can be, whatever he places you. What’s the best that I can do for my God? And then read your heart and use your judgment. Because God’s guidance comes through a meshing of the desires of your heart and the judgment of wisdom as you pursue doing the best you can for the glory of God. Dr. Jim Packer, who is so helpful in demystifying this whole issue of guidance, which desperately needs to be demystified for some of us. He says this, when God has a particular career in mind for a person, what does he do? He bestows on that person an interest in that field of expertise. When God plans for two people to marry, he blends their hearts. But God’s inclinings of the heart, as opposed to our own self-generated ambitions and longings, they’re two different things, are experienced only as meshing in with the judgments of wisdom. Thus, he says, interest in an unsuitable person as a life partner, or interest in a ministry that is beyond one’s ability, should be seen as a temptation rather than a divine call. You see what he’s saying? We live with this problem. How do I know when it’s God and how do I know when it’s me? How do I know simply if I’m looking at my own heart’s inclinations? How do I know when that’s of the Lord and how do I know when it’s of myself? And Packer says, well, you apply the judgment of wisdom. And you may like to get other people to help you in that process. Because God will lead you on paths of wisdom. The Holy Spirit is the spirit of wisdom, so he’s not going to lead you contrary to the path of wisdom. So here the greatest calling of a Christian believer is to walk the path of wisdom, asking the question, what is the best that I can do for God, and discerning the right steps by the inclinations of the heart in relation to the judgment of wisdom. In Packer’s words, the right course is always to choose the wisest means to the noblest end. That’s very helpful. And God has given you his spirit to help you as you need direction, and he will lead you. But this is how he will lead you in helping you to discern the wisest means to the noblest ends. So what is God doing for Elijah? Well, he’s doing two things at Cherith. He hides him as the first, and he leads him as the second. That leaves one more. God fed him. Hid him, led him, fed him. Verse four. You shall drink from the brook, and I have commanded the ravens to feed you there. In verse six, the ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning, and bread and meat in the evening. Now, in this miraculous provision, these birds that flew at the command of Almighty God were the means by which Elijah was brought food every morning and every evening. This was a miracle of grace comparable to the manna in the wilderness. Remember that God provided every day as his people were in the desert. And what we’ve been told is that God provided for this man everything that he needed during this most difficult time in his life, and that is a marvelous reassurance for us. Now, notice that it was a brook, it was not a river. Elijah might have preferred a river. You probably are wishing that God would give you a river of provision rather than the brook of provision that you may have, but the brook contained what he needed. And as for the food delivered by the ravens, not exactly what you would call fine dining, not exactly what they were enjoying chowing on at Jezebel’s table, but enough to keep body and soul together in this hardest, hardest time of life. God sustained his servant through the drought, and God will do the same for you at Cherith if you are pursuing him in faith and obedience. Remember this, there’s a condition in God’s great promise, seek first the kingdom of God and all these things will be added to you. You seek first his righteousness, you seek first his kingdom, you be like Elijah and go after God and you can trust him with all the rest. Don’t imagine for a minute that if you’re living any old way that you please that that’s a promise for you. But if you seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, if you’re seeking to walk the path of faith and of obedience and to honor Christ in your life, then when you come into the hardest time and the hardest situation, take this promise, all these things will be added unto you and take to yourself as a legitimate application, God sustained his servant Elijah and as I seek to walk as Elijah walked, God will also sustain me. It’s all true. God hid him, God led him, and God fed him. That’s a good place to pause as we think about what God has done for Elijah, but what does that mean for you and me today? Stay tuned, we’re going to look at the application in a moment. This is Open the Bible with Pastor Colin Smith and the message When God Hides You, part of our series The Surprising Influence of a Godly Life, and we’ve been looking at 1 Kings chapter 17. We’ll get back to the message shortly. Remember if you ever miss any of our messages, you can always go online, catch up, go back, download an MP3 for free, or stream any previous messages directly from the website. We’re going to get back to the message now. Here’s Colin. Now here’s the striking thing that I want you to notice, and it has a powerful application for us at the end of the message today. The striking thing is that the birds that flew at the command of God and provided the life-sustaining food for Elijah were ravens. You say, why is that striking? Well it is fascinating because in the Bible, ravens are among the unclean birds. You remember that in the Old Testament, God gave laws about what his people could eat and what they could not eat, and in these Old Testament laws that you’ll find in Leviticus in chapter 11, if you want to check them out, you will discover that ravens were definitely off-limits. In fact, they’re described as detestable. Leviticus chapter 11 in verse 16. And so it is very surprising that when God chooses to bring life-sustaining food to his faithful servant out there by the brook Cherith, that God chooses to do it by means of ravens. And this teaches us a very simple, and it’s a very important truth, that God can deliver life-sustaining food through unclean birds. Think about that. Because you may have had the experience in your life of being fed by an unclean bird. You say, what do you mean? I mean this. Maybe you were taught by a Sunday school teacher. You were taught the Bible by a Sunday school teacher, or a pastor, or a Christian friend, or someone who discipled you at college or whatever, and you looked up to that person. And you saw them as a role model, as an example. And then some years later, you found out that that person was not what you thought they were. Maybe they committed a crime. Maybe they abandoned the faith that they once taught you. And you were left saying, now wait a minute, what in the world was happening here? What is all this about? How could this possibly happen? I received spiritual food from this person, and now I find that they’re denying the very thing that they taught to me. What in the world is all this about? And you felt robbed. I know this experience myself. And if it has happened to you, it will greatly help you to know and to remember that God can deliver clean food even through an unclean bird. Maybe the person who led you to Christ has subsequently abandoned their faith in Jesus. And you’re left saying, what does that say about me? What does that mean for my faith? You remember in the Gospels that Jesus sent out 12 apostles on mission. And they went out and they were remarkably used and wonderfully blessed in all that they did. People would have come to faith in Christ through each of their ministries. Can you imagine meeting these people? There’s one day you will in heaven. And you say, now how did you come to Christ? And one of them says, oh, I was led to Christ by Peter. You talk to someone else and you, how did you come to faith? Oh, I was led to Christ by the apostle John. Big smile on the face. There’s someone over here and they’re not coming forward or saying anything. You know why. You say, how did you come to faith in Jesus? Actually through Judas. I don’t really like to mention it. You say, is that actually possible? Could that happen? Could it be that someone could be led to a genuine faith by someone who did not have it themselves? Absolutely. God can create genuine faith through the ministry of fake believers. And the reason for that is this. It is the gospel that saves, not the person who speaks the gospel. You are saved by the power of the gospel, not by the integrity of the person who spoke it to you. You desperately need to know that if you’ve been let down by the person who spoke it to you. And if you discovered that at their core they turned out to be an unclean bird, you really need to understand this. You may say, now wait a minute. Are you saying to me that integrity doesn’t matter? Of course not. Of course integrity matters. Lack of integrity amongst those who speak in the name of Jesus Christ in a Sunday school class or even from a pulpit like this is the reason why Jesus says that he will say to many on the last day, many who have served in ministries, many who have served in churches, many who have taught Sunday school classes to little children, and he will say to them, apart from me, I never knew you. But remember what they then say. They say, now wait a minute. We’ve done all these works. Did we not prophesy in your name? Did we not cast out demons in your name? Did we not do mighty works in your name? Listen, God can create genuine faith even through the ministry of fake believers. So let that come as an alarm bell to any person in our congregation who says in their mind and in their heart, well, now I’m involved in ministry. God blesses what I do. God must be pleased with me. And I say to you, remember the ravens. Because the fact that God is using you does not make you clean. Service is never a substitute for holiness. And without holiness, the Bible says, no one will see the Lord. No one enters heaven because of service. So beware of being an unclean bird who flies high in the service of God. Being in ministry of whatever form or whatever shape can never make you clean. Service is never a substitute for holiness. It is possible to do good for the church and still to be a raven. Folks, this is serious. What could be more tragic for a Sunday school teacher to stand on the last day and to see children that he taught and young people that she taught entering into everlasting life, but because of being an unclean bird, that man, that woman, that teacher remains outside him or herself. If you are resting today on your involvement in ministry as the basis of your standing before God, I urge you with all that is within me today, to place your life today under the blood of Jesus Christ that alone can make you clean. Nobody is justified by service. Nobody is justified by going on a mission trip. Nobody is justified by serving the poor. There is only one way for you to be made clean before God, and that is through the blood of Jesus Christ applied to your life as you embrace him as your Lord and as your Savior. And the blood of Jesus is applied to the humble and to the penitent, not to the self-confident or the self-righteous. So God hides his servants at Cherith, and when they’re there, he leads them and he feeds them. Let me give you one more phrase as we wrap this up. At Cherith, we learn to live on God. At Cherith, we learn to live on God. I take the phrase from John Bunyan, his Cherith came when the man was thrown in prison. Here he is, a pastor serving the Lord, he has a family. It’s a time of persecution for believers like us in England, and Bunyan’s taken from his church, he’s taken from his family, he’s incarcerated in a prison in Bedford, and God takes this man out of public ministry, he hides him there in the jail. And when Bunyan wrote about his Cherith experience, he said that he had learned there to live upon God who is invisible. What he’s saying is this, God put me suddenly in a place where I could no longer live on my work. God put me in a place where I could no longer live on my family, a place where I could no longer live on my friends or on my pleasures or on my ministry, I was put by God in a place where I had to live on him who is invisible. That’s where Elijah was at Cherith. To live on God who is invisible means to find what you need in God when there isn’t anything else and there isn’t anyone else, and that’s what God does at Cherith, and he takes his servants to Cherith before he takes them to Carmel. So when you come to the place where God hides you know this, if you will walk with him in faith and obedience even here, he will lead you and he will feed you. You will find that he is faithful to you even in Cherith, and you will come out saying even Cherith was in the purpose of God for me. What a helpful reminder as we get to the end of our time knowing that even Cherith, as Colin was talking about, is in God’s purpose for us. The message is called When God Hides You, part of our series The Surprising Influence of a Godly Life, and it’s been, I think, very helpful and practical. Maybe you’ve been wrestling with some of the questions in this message. It’s good to ask the question when we feel that God’s silent, to ask what’s the best I can do for God, and then use your heart and your judgment. If you ever miss any of our messages you can always go back and listen to any of the previous messages online at openthebible.org.uk. There you can also find Open the Bible Daily, a series of short two to three minute reflections written by Pastor Colin Smith and read by Sue MacLeish. You can also find the message as a podcast. Go to your favourite podcast site and search for Open the Bible UK. Open the Bible relies on its listeners to keep this programme on the radio and on the internet. People like you. This month, if you’re able to commit to a new regular monthly donation of £5 or more, we would like to thank you by sending a copy of John White’s book The Fight. Colin, who is this book written for? Well, it’s for every Christian who wants to grow, and that has to be every Christian. I mean, it’s every one of us. This is just a practical handbook on how to grow in the Christian life. It has been helpful to me over many years. I first read it as a young Christian when I was a student in college. It’s still valuable for me today. John White just goes through some of the basics of the Christian life, how to pray, how to grow in holiness, how to seek the guidance and the will of God. Very practical, laid out very clearly and drawn wonderfully from his deep understanding of Scripture. It’s written in a compelling manner. And so if you’re looking for something that will help you grow in the Christian life or something that you could give to someone who needs to grow in the Christian life, this is a really helpful, practical, accessible and biblical handbook. And The Fight has stood the years of time, and I’m just delighted that there is a new edition available now that we’re able to make available to all of our listeners. So this book, The Fight, is our gift to you this month if you’re able to start a new monthly donation to open the Bible of five pounds per month or more. You can find details on our website, openthebible.org.uk. For Pastor Colin Smith, I’m David Pick. Thanks for listening, and I hope you’ll join us again soon. God has more than one way of supplying what you need. Are you learning to trust the God who provides or the particular way that he’s been providing for you? Find out next time on Open the Bible.