A Hard Journey
Scripture Reading: 1 Kings 19:1-8
Elijah, after his great triumph at Mount Carmel, is threatened by Jezebel. He flees for his life and ends up exhausted and alone in the wilderness. He prays to die and falls fast asleep. An angel awakens Elijah. He has brought bread and water from heaven to the prophet. Elijah eats and drinks and sleeps again. The angel returns. “Arise and eat, for the journey is too great for you,” he tells him.
If you will allow me some liberty here, let me allegorize the text…What the angel said to Elijah, could be said to all of us. There are times in life when we intensely feel it to be true that the journey is too great for us. We understand what Paul meant when he wrote, “We were utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself.” (2 Corinthians 1:8).
Thankfully, most of life isn’t that intense. But still, even when we don’t feel it, we walk this road dependent on God’s grace every step of the way. The really hard days only serve to remind us of what is true every day. The exhausting, lonely, “I feel like dying” moments remind us that the words of the hymn, “I need thee every hour,” aren’t just a lovely sentiment, but the absolute truth. To quote the Apostle once more, “that was to make us rely, not on ourselves, but on God who raises the dead,” (2 Corinthians 1:9) and “Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God…” (2 Corinthians 3:5).
As it was for Elijah, it is for us. The journey is too great for us. It is too hard, too challenging, too difficult, too far for us to do it in our strength. There are too many side roads and detours, too many temptations to draw us away from the true path. There are too many nights, too many miles through the valleys, too many steps into the darkness to go without some other Light.
We need, we must have, we are completely dependent on Christ to get us all the way home. He is the Bread of Heaven, the Water of Life we need to fill us and strengthen us for this journey. We are not sufficient in ourselves. Our sufficiency is in Him.