The Running Prophet
Elijah didn’t get his answer right away, the way God answered his prayer in 1 Kings 18:38. Yet he sticks with it, he doesn’t lose heart or give up when God’s answer is “No.” He keeps praying with patience and with perseverance, sending the servant back and back and back until he sees that little cloud like a man’s hand over the horizon. Like the persistent widow of Luke 18, we are to keep praying until God in His providence makes clear that the time for prayer has ceased.
The story of Elijah running before Ahab in 1 Kings 18:41–46 is a strange and spectacular portrayal of the power and victory of the one true God over Baal and of the humility and gospel ministry of God’s prophet. Yet if we focus our attention solely on Elijah’s girding up his loins and running the seventeen miles from Mount Carmel to Jezreel by the hand of Yahweh, we will miss Elijah’s running first to God in prayer, and thus we will fail to learn what the “man with a nature like ours” (James 5:17) has to teach us about prayer.
Recall that this story takes place immediately on the heels of the contest on Mount Carmel between Elijah and the prophets of Baal. Yahweh had proven in a stunning manner that He is the only God of heaven and earth, and in so doing He had brought repentance to the idolatrous hearts of His rebellious people. The drought that Israel was suffering as a result of its idolatry could finally end, for that idolatry had been dealt with decisively by the execution of the prophets of Baal at the Brook Kishon. Yet the rains did not immediately fall, for God ordinarily sends His blessings through the channel of prayer. Thus Elijah, who had asked God to turn the spigots off three and a half years earlier, asked God to turn them back on. This is almost certainly the passage that James has in view when he says that Elijah prayed, and the sky poured rain and the earth produced its fruit. As we watch Elijah pray, we learn much about how to pray.
We Should Pray with Confident Faith in the Promises of God.
Down at the bottom of Mount Carmel, at the Brook Kishon, Elijah told Ahab to go back up and eat and drink, “for there is a sound of the rushing of rain.” Elijah wasn’t hearing literal thunder in the distance, for as we see in the following verses, there were no clouds in the sky. Rather, Elijah was hearing with the ears of faith in God’s promises. He knew that God had promised in verse 1, “Go, show yourself to Ahab, and I will send rain upon earth”(1 Kings 18:1). In light of God’s promises, he prayed.
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Loving People Isn’t the Most Important Thing in the Church
There is a definite chain of events that happen when it comes to love. The last link in the chain is that we love others. Back up on, and you get that we love God. And then back up to the beginning and you find that God loves us. Put it in reverse order and you find that God loves us. We love God. And we love others. Though they fit in concert with one another, the order matters, and it matters greatly.
In 1954, the American psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed that human beings possess two sets of fundamental needs. He organized those needs into a pyramid, with the most base needs at the bottom. He then divided the pyramid into deficiency needs (the first four levels), and growth needs (the highest level).
At the bottom, the absolute base, are physiological needs—things like air, water, food, shelter, and the like. After that come safety needs. These are things like resources, employment, and personal security. The very next level are the needs of love and belonging. In other words, and according to Maslow’s hierarchy, as soon as a person has the basic necessities the very next thing they need is love. They need friendship. A sense of belonging. Family.
We know that is true, even if we have never studied the hierarchy. We know it’s true not only because of our own experience; we know it because of the place Jesus gave love in terms of the greatest commandments:
One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (Matt. 22:35-40).
Of all the commandments within His reach, Jesus grabbed two that centered on love. Love of God, and love of people. And so Maslow, was in a sense, also affirming what Jesus has known from the beginning—the vital importance of loving and being loved to a person’s well-being.
If you were to say, then, that the most important thing in the church is loving other people, you would probably get a lot of head nods in agreement. And though it is vitally important, it is not in fact the most important thing.
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Supreme Court Affirms Religious Liberty, Rules in Favor of Public High School Football Coach Punished for Praying after Games
“Kennedy’s private religious exercise did not come close to crossing any line one might imagine separating protected private expression from impermissible government coercion,” [Justice] Gorsuch wrote on Monday. “Learning how to tolerate speech or prayer of all kinds is part of learning how to live in a pluralistic society, a trait of character essential to a tolerant citizenry,” the court added.
On Monday morning, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District that a public high school football coach in the state of Washington had his First Amendment rights violated after he was placed on administrative leave by the school district and banned from participating in the football program for praying on the field after games in view of students.
“SCOTUS sides with a high school football coach in a First Amendment case about prayer at the 50-yard-line,” SCOTUS Blog tweeted Monday morning. “In a 6-3 ruling, SCOTUS says the public school district violated the coach’s free speech and free exercise rights when it barred him from praying on the field after games.” The case was ruled along ideological lines.
The majority opinion was authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch.
“Here, a government entity sought to punish an individual for engaging in a brief, quiet, personal religious observance doubly protected by the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses of the First Amendment. And the only meaningful justification the government offered for its reprisal rested on a mistaken view that it had a duty to ferret out and suppress,” Gorsuch wrote. “Religious observances even as it allows comparable secular speech. The Constitution neither mandates nor tolerates that kind of discrimination.”
Joseph Kennedy, a Marine veteran, was an assistant football coach for the Bremerton High School (BHS) varsity team in 2008 when he started a tradition of kneeling and praying after games. Some students later volunteered to join him. In 2015, a school administrator addressed the issue with the coach after an opposing team complained. After an investigation, Kennedy was later placed on administrative leave and barred from “participating in any capacity in the BHS football program.”
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When Mental Illness Goes Viral: Social Contagions Are Destroying Our Girls
Millions of girls with instant access to our culture’s most viral (and dangerous) behaviors and beliefs are currently manifesting the results. Their sicknesses are a clear sign that our society is sick. In order to treat them and us, we’ll have to admit how the disease spreads, admit the connection between mental illness and gender confusion, and keep them away from clinics and smartphone apps where the disease is celebrated.
One of the strangest stories of the last couple of years is how teenage girls have been stricken with facial tics after browsing the video-sharing app TikTok. Earlier this month, Azeen Ghorayshi published a deep dive on the strange phenomenon in The New York Times. Looking back at the puzzling explosion of TikTok tics during the pandemic, she reported that contagious outbreaks of strange behavior are not new and have a technical name: “mass psychogenic illness.”
For example, long before TikTok, back in 2011, 18 girls at a high school in Le Roy, New York, broke into twitches and head snapping after one of their peers suffered a sudden spasm. The incident became a legend in medical literature. History is full of stories of patients, “mostly women,” who seemed to catch “tremors, seizures, paralysis, and even blindness” from each other like contagious diseases. Such mass psychogenic events used to be limited to real-life social circles, but social media has “dissolved the boundaries” that once kept outbreaks “geographically contained.” Now anyone with a smartphone can “catch” such behaviors.
Most interesting about Ghorayshi’s piece is the correlation between social media-induced mental illnesses and LGBT identities. In fact, she wrote, doctors at a recent conference in Switzerland admitted that “a surprising percentage of their patients with the TikTok tics identified as transgender or nonbinary.” Neurologists also told her that a “disproportionate number of gender-diverse adolescents” have developed “sudden tics.”
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