What are you doing here?  That is the question God asks Elijah in our Scripture passage today.  It is also a question that we can ask one another this morning – what are you doing here?  Maybe you’re starting to wonder what you are doing here in church listening to me at this point!  But the reality is that whether you’re in school, or you are graduating, working, at home, or retired, every follower of Jesus needs to answer the question “What am I doing here?”  We all want to answer that question for our own lives, and that is what we want to focus on this morning.

We continue my sermon series this morning on the prophet Elijah, and we talked last week about how Elijah was depressed, in large part because he didn’t know what he was doing.  He had been so ardent in his desire to have the nation of Israel return to their worship of the one true God, and for a moment on the top of Mt. Carmel, it looked like it would happen, like the nation would turn their hearts back to the Lord.  But then Israel’s evil Queen Jezebel threatened to kill him, and Elijah fled into the wilderness where he begged God to take his life away because what he was doing felt like such a failure.  Have you ever felt like a failure in your life, like you are not succeeding at what you are doing, whatever that may happen to be?  Well then, you know how Elijah felt, but God was compassionate to him, providing food and water and a chance to rest, and because of that, Elijah felt strong enough both physically and emotionally to walk for about 300 miles over 40 days to Mt. Horeb, the mountain on the Sinai Peninsula where God spoke to Moses hundreds of years before.  This is a picture of what that mountain looks like, and this is where Elijah hoped that God would tell him what he should be doing with his life.  And in our first key point today,

GOD SPEAKS TO ELIJAH.

So our passage today opens with God asking Elijah, “What are you doing here Elijah?”  Elijah basically has a pity party and says that I and I alone Lord have been so faithful to you, but it has all been for nothing – your people have rejected you and your covenant and there is no hope for the future.  He is still obviously still depressed and incredibly frustrated with everything that has happened.  Now comes one of the most interesting passages in the entire Bible.  Let’s say it together from vs. I Kings 19:11-13 (NIV):  “The Lord said, “Go out and stand in the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.  Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind.  After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake.  After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire.  And after the fire came a gentle whisper.  When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.”

It is interesting to note that God does sometimes in the Bible use dramatic events to get the people’s attention – Elijah himself experienced this when God sent the fire down on the sacrifice he had prepared when he was challenging the prophets of Baal.   But maybe God in this passage is telling Elijah not to just wait for some spectacular sign of God’s presence, but to be open to God’s gentle whisper, for this is usually the way that God chooses to communicate with us.

 I was at a conference last weekend, and one of the speakers was a pastor serving at a church in Quincy.  She was describing her call from God, and said that before she became a pastor she had been an executive with a human services agency while being active as a layperson in her local church.  She was relatively happy at her job and extremely capable at it.  But then she said, at night while she was in bed, she began to hear her name spoken in a gentle whisper.  It was not any of her family members, so she set up a meeting with her pastor to discuss what was going on.  He told her to look at I Samuel in the Bible, where a young prophet is spoken to by God in a gentle whisper, but he could have just as easily told her to look at this passage.  She ended up going to seminary and then into the ordained ministry, and God has blessed the church where she is pastoring in many exciting amazing ways.  You see, God is still using His gentle whisper to speak to His people.

Yet it is incredible to note that when God does speak to Elijah, this doesn’t make Elijah feel better, but rather we now turn in our second point to

ELIJAH’S LAMENT AND CALL.

Let’s say together his lament from vs. 14 (NIV):  “He replied, I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty.  The Israelites have rejected your covenant, broken down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword.  I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too.”    Does this sound familiar?  It was exactly what Elijah said before God spoke to him!   We can clearly see here how human Elijah is, how he can easily lose track of what he is doing and become afraid and frustrated like all the rest of us sometimes.  So God now in a very matter of fact way tells Elijah exactly what to do.  He tells him to form a team, to not try to do everything by himself.  He is to anoint Hazael as king over the land of Aram, and Jehu as king over the land of Israel, and to anoint Elisha as his successor as prophet.  In other words, God is saying to Elijah, it is not all about you.  You are not indispensable, and my plan goes beyond what you can see.  Did you know, God says to him, that I have 7000 people in Israel who have not bowed down to Baal?  Cheer up Elijah, you are part of a team that you are not even aware of, so pull yourself out of your self-pity party and get to work!  Those are words that we need to remember too when we seek to answer the question, in our last point, of

WHAT AM I DOING HERE?

In whatever we are doing in life, we have a tendency sometimes to get discouraged, to feel like Elijah felt.  Now sometimes that is because we do need to do something different, because we are not doing what we are supposed to be doing.  But other times, we just need to remember that it is not all about us that God is still working through our lives even if we are not spectacularly successful, that we are a part of a larger team that goes beyond ourselves.  So how do we know then whether we are doing what God wants us to be doing, or not?  How do we hear God’s gentle whisper in our own lives? 

In his book Character Forged from Conflict, Gary Preston writes, “Back when the telegraph was the fastest means of long distance communication, there was a story about a young man who applied for a job as a Morse code operator.  Answering an ad in the newspaper, he went to the address that was listed.  When he arrived, he entered a large, noisy office.  In the background, a telegraph clacked away.  A sign on the receptionist’s counter instructed job applicants to fill out a form and wait until they were summoned to enter the inner office.  The young man completed his form and sat down with seven other waiting applicants.  After a few minutes, the young man stood up, crossed the room to the door of the inner office, and walked right in.  Naturally, the other applicants perked up, wondering what was going on.  Why had this man been so bold?  They muttered among themselves that they hadn’t heard any summons yet.  They took more than a little satisfaction in assuming that the young man who went into the office would be reprimanded for his arrogance and summarily disqualified for the job.

Within a few minutes the young man emerged from the inner office escorted by the interviewer, who announced to the other applicants, ‘Gentlemen, thank you very much for coming, but the job has been filled by this young man.’ The other applicants began grumbling to each other, and then one spoke up saying ‘Wait a minute – I don’t understand something.  He was the last one to come in, and we never even got a chance to be interviewed.  Yet he got the job.  That’s not fair.’  The employer responded, ‘I’m sorry, but all the time you’ve been sitting here, the telegraph has been ticking out the following message in Morse Code: ‘If you understand this message, then come right in.  The job is yours.’  None of you heard it or understood it.  This young man did.  So the job is his.”

You know, there is a Morse Code to the spiritual life too, of hearing God.  God is constantly trying to speak to us, but if we do not understand His ways of talking, we will miss out what God has to say.  Now, we know that we hear God when we read the Bible, and when we pray.  We hear God when we come to church and when we are part of a small group.  We hear God in community, and also when we are silent before Him by ourselves.  For we know this to be true, and let’s say this together from Jeremiah 29:11 (NIV), “For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”  This is God’s desire for you, to give you hope and a future to use your gifts for the kingdom of God in this world.

I am going to play a song, which may be a familiar hymn to many of you, Spirit of the Living God.  This song opens with all of the noise of our culture, all the things that can keep us from hearing God’s gentle whisper in our own lives.  But it then talks about how we desire the Spirit of the Living God to melt me, mold me, fill me, use me.  Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me.  As you listen to it, may you ask God whether you are doing the things in your life that you are supposed to be doing, and if so, ask Him to fill you afresh to do them.  And if not, may the Spirit mold you to see what else it is that you are supposed to be doing.  Don’t let self-pity or fear keep you from answering the question, “What am I doing here?”  We give God the thanks and the praise today, Amen.