18.Mar.2009 Supernatural intuition.

1 Kings 18:41-45

Then Elijah said to Ahab, “Go get something to eat and drink, for I hear a mighty rainstorm coming!” So Ahab went to eat and drink. But Elijah climbed to the top of Mount Carmel and bowed low to the ground and prayed with his face between his knees. Then he said to his servant, “Go and look out toward the sea.” The servant went and looked, then returned to Elijah and said, “I didn’t see anything.” Seven times Elijah told him to go and look. Finally the seventh time, his servant told him, “I saw a little cloud about the size of a man’s hand rising from the sea.” Then Elijah shouted, “Hurry to Ahab and tell him, ‘Climb into your chariot and go back home. If you don’t hurry, the rain will stop you!’” And soon the sky was black with clouds. A heavy wind brought a terrific rainstorm, and Ahab left quickly for Jezreel.

It strikes me that we here in this church need to come to understand the spiritual concept of discernment. It is my observation that there exist a whole lot of people, good people too, who are trying to solve weighty problems—poverty, disease, recession—and whose efforts are worthy of our respect, but whose decision to leave God out of the answer will only enable them to solve a portion of the problem. So the question, I suppose, is how to find the God Answer. The good news is that God wants to get involved in the very intricate parts of our world. He is not only the God of the Global, of the universe, of the whole. He is not a distant God in all respects. No, He is, additionally, a God of the Details. Just look out how He created the cosmos and the earth; it was a very detail-oriented process!

Returning to our ongoing discussion of the prophet Elijah, we look into chapter 18 of 1 Kings. Here Elijah hears a rainstorm in the middle of a drought. How does he do this? Because he is operating under a level of discernment that every Christian can achieve if seeking to do so. We can hear and see things that are not apparent in the natural but exist in the spirit. The spiritual realm, you see, is overlaid our natural world. It’s always there, but existing just beyond our five senses. The moments when our spirit connects to that other realm, then, are instances of where the supernatural rests at our fingertips. And discernment is how we align ourselves with that dimension. Remember, Jesus says in Matthew 11:15, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” This speaks directly of that supernatural intuition.

That’s what Elijah exercises here toward the end of chapter 18. He possesses ears to hear. And he hears rain. Ahab, on the other hand, cannot. So what you have essentially are two people, one who can experience this supernatural realm and one who can’t. What separates them? What is the difference? An essential thing: one lives for, and is guided by, God, and one isn’t. One speaks God’s promises into his world, and one doesn’t even know what His promises are in the first place. We get a good contrast here in the middle of this verse: in time of crisis, Ahab, the godless man, goes to a feast while Elijah, the godly one, goes seeking God on a mountain. He remains patient, in other words, and awaits God’s answer.

You and I need to do likewise. You see, we cannot help but clutter our lives with stuff, some useless, some necessary, some neither: things like our jobs, our marriages, our kids, our hobbies, our friendships, our indulgences. Ninety percent of our lives, in fact, are made up of such things. But every now and again, we need to pull back a little, go find some God space—it could be your bedroom, could be a trail where you like to walk, could be an actual mountain—and seek Him in a way that our day to day life doesn’t always allow. In times of crisis especially do we need to find this God space. We see things differently up there.

Seven times Elijah has his servant go look toward the sea to see if the rainstorm has begun. And six times he returns having spied only clear, empty skies. But on the seventh trip, he returns having seen, not a big, black storm cloud, but a tiny, little puff of a thing—the size of a man’s first, scripture says—far on the horizon. While this is not the obvious, God-sized answer one might expect when a prophesied three-year drought is broken, Elijah knew this was the seed, the beginning, of the answer he’d been waiting for. And sure enough, the rain coming shortly thereafter.

So what answer are you waiting for? What breakthrough? What provision? And where is that God space, that mountain, that will put you in a position to listen with the ears God has given you? These are things worth pondering, for no man who is unfamiliar with his problems and deficiencies can solve them, and no Christian can realistically expect breakthrough without a regular connection to his Provider.