CTK Raleigh Sermons

CTK Raleigh Sermons is a ministry of Christ the King Presbyterian Church located in Raleigh, North Carolina. CTK is a community rooted in the depth of the gospel, refined by hard conversations, fueled by meaningful relationships, and committed to redemptive work in Raleigh.

Corey Jackson planted and served for over fifteen years as the senior pastor of Trinity Park Church in Cary, a sister congregation to ours. It's a vibrant expression of Christ's kingdom with over 25 different cultural backgrounds within that church. Corey has left his ministry at Trinity Park to work full time with the Luke Alliance, where he is the founder and president. It's a ministry that supports persecuted believers among China's unregistered house churches—very important work and very powerful work.

I heard Corey speak at general assembly a couple years ago during COVID, and he spoke about the difficulty of being a pastor in China and how his relationships with Chinese pastors helped carry him through his time in ministry here during COVID. I found that incredibly helpful, and I think it was an incredible testimony to the value of our interconnection with the church worldwide.

Corey, we're really glad to have you. Corey will be preaching for us today, and he'll also be back Sunday, December 7 at 09:30 during our Sunday school time to tell us a little bit more about his very important work. Please join me in welcoming Corey Jackson.

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It's wonderful to be with you here this morning. We've been visiting here every now and then since transitioning from Trinity Park and just love this congregation. I love James and Jeff and just love what the Lord is doing here.

I am preaching today from First Kings 19. As I understand is our tradition here at CTK, we read that out loud together. I'm going to read with you verses one through thirteen. So if you can turn to First Kings 19—it's also in your bulletin—let us read it together.

Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah saying, "So may the gods do to me and more also if I do not make your life as the life of one of them by this time tomorrow." Then he was afraid and he rose and ran for his life and came to Beersheba, which belongs to Judah, and left his servant there. But he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness and came and sat down under a broom tree. And he asked that he might die, saying, "It is enough now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my fathers." And he lay down and slept under a broom tree. And behold, an angel touched him and said to him, "Arise and eat." And he looked and behold, there was at his head a cake baked on hot stones and a jar of water. And he ate and drank and lay down again. And the angel of the Lord came again a second time and touched him and said, "Arise and eat, for the journey is too great for you." And he arose and ate and drank and went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb, the mount of God. There he came to a cave and lodged in it, and behold, the word of the Lord came to him and said to him, "What are you doing here, Elijah?" He said, "I have been very jealous for the Lord, the God of hosts. For the people of Israel have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. And I, even I only, am left, and they seek to take my life to take it away." And he said, "Go out and stand on the mount before the Lord." And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind tore the mountains and broke the rocks in pieces before the Lord. But the Lord was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire, the sound of a low whisper. And when Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. And a voice came to him and said, "What are you doing here, Elijah?"

— 1 Kings 19:1-13

Let's pray.

God, I just pray that you would speak this morning through me. Lord, this is a powerful text. It's meant a lot in my life—in low times and in times when maybe I'm not quite as low. But I thank you that you're a God who moves toward us in our times of need, in those low places, when we need that gentle whisper from the Holy Spirit. We ask this in Jesus's name. Amen.

Olivia and I just returned from Nepal. It was one of the most fun trips I've ever taken in my life.

We were asked by Mission to the World to go over together and encourage their leaders in the Asia Pacific region, and they gave me three and a half hours to teach on this passage. So this is going to be a really long sermon this morning, and we'll just see how you guys do.

I've spent a lot of time over the last six months in 1 Kings 19 thinking about the restorative movement of God toward us as his servants. Whether you are a minister of the gospel, whether you do something else for work, the reality is we all face low times. James read part of my bio this morning. The interesting thing about bios is there's always another side of the bio that's not on the websites. The other side of the bio that you don't put on websites is that through the last twenty-seven years of ministry, I have walked through some really deep and difficult times. Times of depression, times of anxiety, times not knowing how to move forward. Some of that had to do with ministry. Some of it had to do with me. Some of it had to do with moving forward in our marriage. Some of it had to do with raising children.

If you are a human being alive today, at any age, you have experienced some kind of hardship and brokenness in this world. The big question that this text asks us is, where is God in our burnout? Where is God in the low places that we find ourselves in life? How does God respond to us in these times that we don't want to be in? Like the Vanderwarf shared in their video, they didn't move here to Raleigh to experience spiritual warfare, housing situation that was untenable, anxiety. They didn't move here for that. Where is God in those times when we need him to show up the most?

A little bit more about me: Olivia and I—before I was a pastor in Cary, we were missionaries in China for the better part of seven years. When you're a missionary, they subject you to all kinds of testing and personality understandings. They put you through these assessments, and they should. It's hard to live there.

One of the tests they put us through was called the Bergman. The Bergman is a fascinating personality assessment where it measures your usual behavior against your stress behavior. It's fascinating because not only does it help with your self-understanding, but it helps with your understanding of other people on your team, other people that you're married to, and all kinds of things like that.

For me, in my usual behavior, I am in the top 99 percentile, according to the Bergman, of activity level. I have a lot of energy. I like to get a lot of things done. I feel like it's a challenge to do as many things as I possibly can. It's good and bad. When I'm stressed, my activity level drops to about the fortieth percentile. What that means is that when I'm stressed, you know it. People around me know it. I go from being really energetic to doing a lot of planning, a lot of thinking about what can I really get done?

Olivia is the opposite of me. She's above average in activity level, but when she's stressed, she gets busier. So you can imagine in a marriage, maybe you have a marriage like this where you respond differently in stress. I'm trying to pull back, really trying to gauge what can I pull off today, and she's trying to do everything. This realization that we really function differently under stress was important for us in our marriage.

So there's your usual behavior, and then there's your stressed-out behavior, and then there's your burned-out behavior. It's moving beyond stress into a state that we don't want to find ourselves in, where we are just flat out exhausted.

The good news of the gospel is that when we are in that stressed-out and burned-out place, God is there with us too. And this passage, like none other in the Bible in my opinion, shows us the heart of God for the burned out.

Knowing the Signs of Burnout

So the first thing we're going to talk about today is knowing the signs of burnout, and then we're going to talk about how God restores the burned out and how he moves toward us as whole beings, embodied souls that need his care in multiple ways.

This text begins with Jezebel's rage. Just to reflect back on the previous couple of chapters, since I know you haven't probably read 1 Kings recently, Elijah's been super busy. He's had a profound ministry. In the beginning of chapter 17, he has predicted a drought that has happened. It's overtaken Israel, meant to lead Israel back into repentance. After that, he feeds the widow at Zarephath—an incredible miracle where the oil doesn't run out. You've probably heard of it.

And then in 1 Kings 18, he goes toe to toe with all the prophets of Baal, faithfully stands with the Lord, calls down fire, calls down thunder and all the things, and God wins. Yahweh wins. It's this incredible moment.

And then coming out of that, he's thinking, surely repentance is gonna come to Israel. And then he really thinks it's gonna happen when he predicts the end of the drought that lasted about three years. He tells Ahab, the king, this is going to happen. God is going to send the floodwaters to end the drought, and God does. And that is how chapter 18 ends. He is at the top of his game, and he is seeing God do some incredible things. And I believe that his momentum toward that moment and this belief that surely God will do x when y happens. Surely, after I get through this difficult season in my ministry, in my marriage, in my parenting, in whatever financial moment we're going through, surely if we work hard enough to get to the endpoint, surely then God will show up and bring his kingdom and everything will be made new and it will be great in the end.

But what he finds is not that. What he finds at the beginning of chapter 19 is that Ahab does not repent, he's still passive, and his wife is enraged. Jezebel goes after him and swears an oath that she wants to kill him. And so Elijah does not get what he thinks is coming to him, and he runs now not so courageous, afraid for his life all the way to Beersheba. It's about a hundred miles south of Jezreel.

Signs of Burnout

So after reaching Beersheba, talking about the signs of burnout, here's a few things that we can look to in the text that show us just how poorly Elijah is responding in this moment. First of all, he leaves his servant. He isolates himself. That's not a good thing to do. And then he goes by himself into the wilderness. Now this is not just a bad decision, it's dumb. This is what we read about in the news—people that go hiking by themselves for days at a time and it's usually a bad ending. So he's making bad decisions. He's not necessarily suicidal, but he's close to suicidal. He wants to die. He asked God to kill him. He feels worthless. He's misunderstanding reality. He says:

It is enough. I am no better than my fathers. Take my life. — 1 Kings 19:4

Now let's talk about that. Elijah, like you and I, is a sinner, as part of his story, but that's not the full part of his story. I mean, this guy, I just told you his bio. Right? He's done a lot. He has been faithful. He ends up being on the mount of transfiguration with Moses and Jesus. He's not no better than his fathers. I mean, I guess you could say that from a really low, confession of sin point of view. But the fact is the guy has had a lot of times that would not be considered worthless in his life. He's not meaningless. His life is not worth nothing.

And then he lays down and sleeps. His body shuts down. He is emotionally and physically fried. Again, the timing of this breakdown, he believed he was going to be somewhere else. He was wondering, is my ministry worth it? Has anything good happened through my ministry? And when he's looking at it through his own eyes in this moment of burnout, he can't see anything good.

If we read the previous chapters a little more carefully, backwards through the lens of 1 Kings 19, maybe we can see some signs of slipping in Elijah. I mean, he's been under spiritual pressure for a very long time. He has been under physical pressure. He's lived through a drought that he predicted and called the end to. He's been under relational pressure. I mean, he has a servant, but that's not really like having a friend. He's pretty alone and isolated. And now he's under political pressure. I mean, the king and his wife have made it their goal to kill him. He's going through a lot.

What About You?

Now none of us have been exactly through what Elijah's going through, but if you've been alive for very long, and the longer you've been alive, the more you know this is true, we all go through times like this where we're at the end, where we're exhausted. Like Elijah, maybe you've been really faithful to the Lord in a really hard place for a really long time and you're just kind of wondering when things are gonna change. You're wondering when your marriage is really gonna actually get better. You're wondering when yet that child or children that you're really concerned about, when are they gonna start doing better? When is work gonna turn around?

As a human being, we have to ask ourselves the question, is it okay to have really low points? I mean, none of us want to be there, but is it okay? Like as a Christian, is it okay to have really low points? And the resounding answer from this text and from other texts in the Bible is that it is. In fact, it's expected of you that you're going to go through seasons of drought and discouragement.

In his excellent book, Gentle and Lowly, Dane Ortland identifies there is only one place in all the gospels where Jesus tells us directly what is in his heart. Where he opens up his own heart and he says, this is what makes me tick.

Come to me when you are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and lowly in heart and you will find rest for your souls for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. — Matthew 11:28-30

So you have to ask the question, of all of the things that Jesus could reveal to us about his heart, what is going on inside of him that motivates him? How surprising is it that he says, I am gentle and lowly in heart?

When I was experiencing one of my first moments of burnout in ministry, I was in my young twenties, I was a missionary in China and I was looking for a book to read. I picked up a book called Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire by Jim Simbala, who's a Pentecostal pastor in Manhattan. I was hoping the title of the book would lead me to believe that maybe I could read this book and I would get my fire back, right? Without a lot of effort, it would be like magic. I could learn a few things. And Simbala said something in the book that really surprised me. He said, one evening when I was at my lowest, I discovered an astonishing truth. God is attracted to weakness. He can't resist those who humbly and honestly admit how desperately they need him.

He challenged the reader to find an instance in the gospels when someone comes to Jesus for mercy and Jesus does not give them what they ask for. He said, go find one place where someone cries out and says, Lord have mercy on me, I need your grace. And Jesus says, I'm sorry, I'm not doing that right now. You will not find an example of that in Jesus' ministry.

Elijah says, I am no better than my fathers, take me. David says in Psalm 142, no one cares for my soul. Peter says, master, don't you even care if we drown? And Paul says, everyone in Asia has left me. But Jesus moves toward each and every one of us with his profound grace to us in our weakness.

God Restores the Burned Out

Let's look a little more deeply at how God moves toward Elijah in this passage. There are four ways that God moves toward Elijah specifically in this passage that are incredibly encouraging to me, and I think you'll find it encouraging as well.

First of all, God restores Elijah physically. I want you to hold on a minute because we get used to hearing things like that and we're like, okay, God restores him physically. It's actually really surprising that the first thing God does—at least to me from growing up in the Christian world that we've lived in—that the first thing that God does is move toward Elijah to care for his body, to care for him as an embodied soul.

I would have expected that God would have sent him a podcast, maybe sent him to a conference, maybe pointed out a few really killer books that he could read or something like that. But that's not what God does. God doesn't give him content first. He's not directing him to a website. There's nothing he needs to do. The fact is he needs to be in this place where he's just tired. The guy is sleeping and he's borderline suicidal. And so what does God do? He sends him an angel.

He knows our frame. He remembers we are dust. — Psalm 103:14

How surprised is God when dust turns out not to be infinite? When dust turns out to have limits. God's not surprised. God sends him an angel. And this angel—this is incredible to me. What does the angel do? The angel feeds him. The angel bakes him a cake. For real? The angel bakes him a cake. That is not what I expect angels to do. I don't expect angels to bake cakes. I don't expect angels to bring jars of water, but angels do whatever God wants them to do.

What Elijah needs first before he can have any kind of an encounter with God or anything else that happens in his life, he needs to be restored physically. So the angel bakes him a cake. This is incredible kindness from God. After Elijah eats and drinks, he falls asleep again. And again, the angel arouses him and says, keep eating. And then he falls asleep and then he gets up and then he has enough energy to continue on.

Listen to the compassion of the Lord through the words of the angel:

Arise and eat Elijah for the journey is too great for you. — 1 Kings 19:7

This journey that God's called us to is too great for us sometimes and God knows it. He knows that we need a strength that comes to us in our weakness. So God begins with physical restoration.

How do we respond to God's physical restoration? Well, if you're burned out in this type of a place, then you need to rest. It can be something that we feel like we don't have the freedom to do or the margin to do, but God gives you the freedom and the margin to do it and he calls you to rest.

Sometimes you might need to eat something instead of continuing to work as hard as you are. Sometimes you need to enjoy a moment with friends and family around a table with good food and good drink. And Ecclesiastes tells us many times that that is the goodness of God to you if you get to have moments like that. So take advantage of those moments and realize that they may be from the Lord when you have them.

The national director of China with Cru, who I served with when I was in China, once I heard him giving a talk and he said these words which really blew me away. And now I think I understand them and believe them a little bit more, but he said, sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is to take a nap. When I first heard that I was like, no, man, that's not true. But it is. It is true. Best thing you could sometimes do for yourself and your marriage and your family and for the Lord is just to rest a little bit more than you are right now. And that is God's goodness to you.

Physical and Spiritual Restoration

So God restores us physically. We're not just brains on a stick, we're embodied souls and God knows it. So he restores us physically. And then he moves after the physical restoration to restore Elijah spiritually. So now he's in a place where he can receive from God what God wants to give to him in his spirit. And so he's called to go to Mount Horeb, which is called the Mount of God, and God directs him to be there to be in his presence.

It was different in the Old Testament times. God's presence was locational. His spirit was only in certain places or resided over certain people. So in this instance, he's on the mountain. For us, if we have his spirit, God is with us all the time. You don't have to go revival chasing. You don't have to go to some special place. God is with you. But back then, he needed to go to this mountain to meet with God.

And so he goes and he meets with God there, and I find it incredible the question that God asked Elijah. He asked simply, "What are you doing here, Elijah?" Now God knew what he was doing there. So why is he asking the question? Well, God wants Elijah to say to God, to himself, what he's doing there. Like, tell me what is on your heart? Do you know yourself? Do you know what is going on in your brain and in your heart?

And Elijah answers not with a perfect psalm from memory or some kind of rote prayer. He answers from his soul, the exhaustion of his soul. He says:

I have been very jealous for the Lord, the God of hosts. The people of Israel have forsaken your covenant and thrown down your altars and killed your prophets with the sword. And I, even I only am left and they seek my life to take it away.

I want to look at this response carefully. What do I hear in this response? Well, I hear a few things. One, he's in an incredibly self-centered place. I, I, I, I—I only, me. I am doing all the things that I need to be doing. He's also very critical of others. Everybody else is not doing the things that they need to be doing. And he's critical of God. I've done all this and other people haven't done this, and you also, God, have not come through for me in the ways that I wanted you to. In fact, I'm being pursued. I'm on a hit list of the queen. That's not what I thought was going to be happening here. He's consumed by all of these things. Elijah cannot see God clearly in this moment.

Listen, if you are a Christian and you've been following God for a while, I'm going to assume that you have made a lot of your decisions in life based on that belief that God loves you, is with you, and is calling you to something. So if at some point later in your Christian journey, you have a moment in time where you're really disillusioned and you can't see God and you can't see who he is, that can be extremely concerning because nothing in your life makes sense without God.

And so what Elijah needs and what God knows Elijah needs more than anything else—not just for his ministry but for his soul—is to have an encounter with God. Only God can make sense of Elijah's life. Only God can restore Elijah's soul. And so God moves toward him in this moment to revive his soul.

I also find it fascinating here that God does not rebuke Elijah for his lack of faith or for his less than stellar and true answer to the question. God doesn't call him out, doesn't do a theological deep dive or anything like that. He just listens to Elijah in this moment. God moves toward him.

And I find it also really instructive that I don't know what Elijah thinks he needs, but what we often think we need when we're in the lowest points is we think we need something big to happen. Some huge phenomena, some massive answer to prayer that we've been waiting for forever. But God's not in the wind, and he's not in the earthquake, and he's not in the fire. God knows that what Elijah needs is not the big thing. He needs to know Elijah. Elijah needs to know God in his soul.

He needs to encounter God in his word. And this word for how God meets him, it says that he meets him with a gentle, low whisper. Take us back to Matthew 11.

I am gentle and lowly in heart. — Matthew 11

This is the gentle and lowly God whispering the gospel into Elijah's heart and into his soul. Elijah had seen fire from heaven, rain from nowhere. He'd seen the resurrection of dead people and food that never runs out. But what he needed was more profound than that. He needed to know God in his soul and God needs him there in a whisper. This is the lowly gentle personal God at work.

What did God say exactly? Well, we don't know. We don't know what God said exactly, but this is God's word. This is the revelation of God himself through his word in the appropriate time by the power of the spirit to meet him in that time of need. And so then after this brilliant encounter in the soul, God asked Elijah the same question again. What are you doing here, Elijah? And Elijah's answer just blows me away. He says the exact same thing. He doesn't change his words at all.

What do we make of that? Well, the Bible sometimes reads a little flat. Maybe there was a tone of voice change. Maybe there was some impact. Maybe he's a little more humble now. I think the better answer is that when we're not doing well, we get stuck on loop in our prayer life. We just pray the same things over and over again, and we say it the same ways. We're utterly uncreative in our own thinking about what could be happening because we've already decided that the narrative that we're saying to ourselves is the narrative. And so he says the same thing back to God and God is still kind to him. He still doesn't rebuke him for not immediately being impacted by God's word.

I find this incredibly encouraging because this happens to me all the time. I will encounter God. I'll have a nice time reading the Bible and a good prayer time, and I will in thirty seconds be doing the same thing I did before I read the Bible. It's not like an automatic thing where we just change. It takes time and God takes time with us.

Another great book is A Praying Life by Paul Miller. And in that book, Paul Miller says something like this: the sacrifice of Christ on the cross is so great and the resurrection of Christ is so profound. He's opened up such a gateway for us to pray that we can actually pray real prayers. Like we can actually just go to God on loop and say the same things over and over again, and guess what? The atonement of Jesus makes that prayer okay. Even our rote loop prayer lives, it's okay because of what Christ has done for us on the cross.

How to Respond to God's Spiritual Restoration

So how do we respond to God's spiritual restoration? Well, you need to recognize that what you need from God if you're in a low point is not some huge phenomena, some major answer to prayer in order for you to then be like, okay, actually I do believe in God again and I'm gonna keep following him. That's not what you need. What you need from the Lord is to experience his compassion toward you and his gentleness toward you with the whisper.

What we can learn is that you can say the same prayers over and over again if you need to, if that's where you're at. God will meet you there and he will encounter you where you are with his gentle love and care for you in that place. One of the hardest things for us when we are in that low place is to actually receive the love of God for us. God is moving toward us in love and care and grace, and we're all fried. And so we don't want to receive that sometimes. And so we have to actually receive the grace of God that he is giving to us in that moment.

So God restores us physically and he restores us spiritually. And then he also restores us vocationally.

Vocational Restoration

Vocation is a word we throw around a lot in church. It's calling. It encompasses your job, but it's not just your job. It's kind of why God created you and why you're here and what you're doing in your life in a holistic way for him.

When we're in that low place in our vocation, when we're in that low place personally, we can sometimes think that what we really need to do is change our calling. We need to do something completely different than we've been doing because otherwise we wouldn't be where we are right now. The problem with that is when you're really low and not doing well, it's the worst time to make big decisions. We think when we're in that really low exhausted place, "Let me recreate my calling." I would encourage you not to do that, and I think this text encourages us not to do that.

It confirms for us first that another question we ask in our burnout is, "Is God finished with me?" I know for pastors, for people that are in ministry, this is a huge fear. If I get burned out, will God be done with me or will people be done with me?

And that's a really brutal place to be because the answer from God is no, I'm not done with you. And the answer from the church also is not that or should not be that. Because God here with Elijah, here he is in this place where he's just said, I'm really not doing well, like maybe I should die. And like 10 verses later, God is saying, I've got some really important things for you to do. Still, I'm not done with you. Here's a couple things I want you to do. I want you to go anoint a couple of kings. That's kind of important. And then I want you to also call Elisha to be the one to come after you. God is not finished with Elijah. God is not disqualifying him from ministry. He's calling him to press on in the next chapter, and that next chapter looks a lot like the chapter before as well with maybe some slight tweaks. It's not a wholesale change. It's a continuation in a clarified direction.

How to Respond to Vocational Restoration

And so how do we respond to God in vocational restoration? We need to recognize that your burnout can be a place of grace for you. You need to resist the temptation to just go take another job or do something completely different with your life. That's really a bad time to make a decision like that. You need to stop obsessing about your life purpose because that's not the way out of burnout. The way out of burnout is to meet with the Lord and to rest. And then you can maybe make some decisions after that.

So God moves toward us physically, spiritually, vocationally, and then he moves toward us relationally. Now again, I know that we know that God cares about us relationally, but let's just remind ourselves that this is awesome. That God doesn't just tell us to go download some information or go listen to this podcast series by your favorite preacher. He actually knows that we need more than content. We need people, we need relationships.

So God bakes him a cake and then he gives him a gentle whisper and then he gives him some really important things to do and then he gives him Elisha in this moment. Before he does that though, he says that also going back to the vocation point is kind of both a vocation and a relational point. He says, you're actually not alone, like in terms of the only person who's still worshiping Yahweh. Like your ministry isn't a failure. There are 7,000 people who have not bowed their knee to Baal. Now in terms of percentage of population in Israel, it's not a very high number. That's not like a wow number. But there's still 7,000 people like his ministry has been meaningful. He's not been a waste. He's not meaningless. God is still working through him and these are other people that still trust God. So maybe they can also be a part of the community with him.

But in particular, he gives him Elisha in this moment. I find it beautiful that he gives him Elisha in a moment when he knows he needs that relationship. If Elisha had walked up at Mount Carmel when God has just rained down fire and he's like, Elijah's at the apex of his ministry, and Elisha walks up and he would have been like, hey, man, I'm really looking for a good mentor. He might not have cared. He might not have been like, hey, yeah, that's what I want to do right now. But now that he knows he's lonely, and he said it twice by the way, in his response. The big theme of the response is I'm alone. And so God meets that core need by giving him a friend, not just a friend, a protege that Kenneth's verse 21 says, assist him in ministry. He'd been doing it alone for so long, and that must have felt really good to Elijah.

How to Respond to Relational Restoration

So how do we respond to God's relational restoration? Well, part of the cry of the burned out soul is I am alone or am I really alone?

No one cares for my soul. — Psalm 142

That's how it can feel. Now I will tell you, you're in church, that's not true. You have pastors and elders and other people who do care about you. The burned out mind can say, I'm alone and nobody cares about me. It's actually not true. It's actually not true. But you need more than pastors and elders to care about you. You need friends.

And so one of the challenges when you're burned out or when you're low is to actually continue to live in community because you just don't want to, frankly. Like, you just want to be miserable and frustrated, and you think, well, this is not the best time to go make friends because I'm not my best self right now. But the reality is you should do it anyway. You should go to community groups. You should stay in community groups. You should keep worshiping even when you're tired, even when you're exhausted because you need other people, and frankly, they need you too.

The best friends I can look back on my life, the best friends I've made in my life, I've made not in times when I am put together and it's the website part of the bio. It's the times when I'm low and I need someone. And turns out that's when God sends people into your life.

How Can We Know This Is True for Us?

In conclusion, how can we know for sure that this isn't just an awesome moment tucked away in the Old Testament that we can pull out every now and then and be like, "Man, that is such an encouraging story"? How can we know this is true not just for Elijah, but for us? How can we know that first Kings 19 is not just the way God responds to Elijah but how he responds to you?

How can we know that when Jesus said:

I am gentle and lowly in heart, my yoke is easy and my burden is light for you

...that is true?

Well, Jesus, first of all, he came for us physically. Jesus came for us with a human body and he suffered all of the miseries of this life, all the physical human pain and brokenness so that you would never be in a physical situation where when you pray to God, he can't relate to you. He came to you with a body.

He came for us spiritually. He came to us not just in the fire and in the earthquake—actually there were a lot of phenomena at the cross. But what he really did at the cross is he came and he met the deepest need of the human soul by dying for us on the cross. Who would have ever thought that the second person of the Trinity would disrobe himself of his heavenly glory, or set it aside for a moment, and take on human flesh and walk through everything that we walk through and worse, and more so that he could go to the cross and die for us? And all that we carry—all the burdens, all the sin, all the misery—as Heidelberg Catechism question one puts it.

He came for us vocationally. Jesus made it his one job to go on a mission to save you and me and all of God's people from their sins. This is his vocation. This is what he does. He doesn't just save us on the cross and then be like, "I'm done." He continues to engage, continues to go after us in those weak and low places.

And he came for us relationally. You know, we talk about having a personal relationship with Christ. Why do we say this? Well, instances like when Jesus wept. This is the shortest person in the Bible, as most of us probably know. This is the kind of God that we serve. He's a relational God. He's impacted. He doesn't change because of your pain, but he stays himself and in your pain relates to you in your time of need.

This is the gospel of grace for weary people. This is a God who loves us in our weakness. Do you believe it? Do you believe this is the kind of God that we serve? Do you believe that when you are weak and in your lowest points that God moves toward you with a physical, spiritual, vocational, and relational renewal that is exactly what you need? This is the gospel of grace.

Prayer

Lord, I know some here today are experiencing that burnout right now, or maybe they're on the edge of burnout and they've been fighting what feels like the eventuality that will happen where they will be burned out. Or maybe there are people here today that are just making it—like a lot of us in life—that are not functioning at a very high level, but we know we have needs. Father, we just confess our tendency is to want to hide those needs from you and act like we're doing better than we are. But that's a fool's errand because you see and you know. And frankly, God, you love. So may we admit how much we need you. May we call upon you with whatever prayer we can pray, even if it's a loop prayer. And may we know that you are the God who loves and restores the burned out. And we ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.