Sermon series

Elijah: God's Mountain Man

Empty Barrel Graduate School

Regular readers of these sermons know that China has become very important to our family in the last two years. During that time God has called all three of our sons to China, at least for the short-term. Our oldest son returned from a year in Beijing in July. Our youngest son spent the summer […]

Is There No God?

This is the story of Elijah’s last assignment. God has one final job for his mountain man, and then he will take him home to heaven. The story begins this way: “After Ahab’s death Moab rebelled against Israel. Now Ahaziah…” (v. 1). Ahaziah was Ahab’s son. We find out later that Ahab had two sons, […]

Burning the Plow

“It does not matter whether or not people understand us or think we are even sane as long as we are true to God. Obedience to him is the important thing.” Theodore Epp Elijah was not the most balanced man in the Bible. If you made a list of adjectives that described him, balanced would […]

Payday Someday

Three years have passed since the showdown on Mount Carmel. During those three years, the people of Israel defeated the vastly superior Syrian army, which resulted in a period of peace and prosperity. And I think it is fair to say that along with that peace and prosperity, Baal worship apparently had taken its previous […]

Dry Brook University

Christ’s followers must all spend some time by the drying brook to prepare us for greater work God has for us later. It may be the drying brook of popularity, or the drying brook of failing health or a sick loved one or a failing career, or the drying brook of a friendship that is slowly fading away. God wants to teach us not to trust in his gifts, but in himself. He wants to drain us of self, as he drained the apostles by ten days of waiting before Pentecost.

Baal Buster

It is sometimes said that a crisis never makes a man–it only reveals what he already is. That thought is both comforting and frightening because we all wonder how we would react if everything we held dear was really on the line. Our family … Our health … Our career … Our life … We […]

Elijah and the Ravens

Until recently, everything I knew about ravens, I learned from Edgar Allen Poe. I don’t know when I first read his poem The Raven, but it might have been in Mrs. Graves’ ninth-grade English class. All I remember about the poem is the spooky refrain, “Quoth the raven, ’Nevermore.’” And until I read about Elijah […]

How to Help a Caveman

We do live in strange times. Someone has called this the Age of Anxiety, and it seems appropriate enough. All week long I’ve been watching those “2005 Year in Review” specials. We have just finished twelve months that started with the tsunami disaster and included the worst hurricane season on record. I don’t blame anyone […]

Obadiah: A Good Man in a Hard Place

Ahab was angry and that wasn’t good news. It wasn’t just that he was having a bad day or a bad week or even a bad month. For Ahab things had gone bad for the last three years. That’s a long stretch of bad luck, and it was bound to make a man grouchy, nervous, […]

Prophet on the Run

The Bible doesn’t sugarcoat the truth about its heroes. It gives us the whole story, the good news and the bad news at the same time. When the Bible describes the great heroes of the Old Testament and the New Testament, it tells us about the unvarnished truth about their struggles, their temptations, their difficulties […]

Resurrection Hospital

Of all the episodes in the life of Elijah, this is probably the most troublesome. There really isn’t anything else like it in the Old Testament. In our text Elijah lays himself out over the body of a dead child and the boy comes back to life. And it’s not exactly like the story of […]