Christian, whatever you do, don’t fall prey to the “Elijah syndrome” (see 1 Kings 19 for details) Do not let the resistance of the fallen world and your perceived failure to “make an impact” in a family, a congregation, a nation, or a denomination, cause you to give up hope and embrace despair or worse yet think you have a right to kill yourself.
To those who would respond, “Well Andy you don’t know what it’s like! You don’t know what it’s like to try your hardest to bring about reformation and revival and turn people out of the way of destruction and receive nothing but hatred for it!” Don’t I though? I spent most of my 23 years as an elder and a minister in another Presbyterian denomination saying, “If you do this, bad things will happen.” And while I don’t recall ever being actually acknowledged by a moderator of Presbytery or the General Assembly (GA) with the words, “Is that you, O troubler of Israel?” They made it very clear that that was what they believed I was.
I once said to a well-known minister in my prior denomination. “You watch, we’ll skip a station and instead of women’s ordination, we’ll start caving on homosexuality.” He looked at me as though I was insane. “I don’t see that at all,” he said. And from that point on he stopped talking to me. A few years later I listened in disgust as a homosexual minister argued on the floor of the GA that we had to accept gay (but celibate) officers, and then a legion of men went up to support him. I’ve actually heard people who disagreed being described on the floor of the General Assembly as Homophobic and guilty of toxic masculinity. I wasn’t that surprised; I’d heard the same thing just a little while earlier in my own presbytery. Yeah, that’s me folks, toxically masculine. Anyway, I suppressed my great desire to go over to the man I’d spoken to all those years before and say, “Do you see it now?” What would be the point? At that point, I’d had enough. I was pretty close to despairing myself. I was already close to doing the self-pitying “I alone am left” thing.
But by God’s grace, I remembered two things:
1) God wins
2) God has designed everything to work for the Good of His people:
“And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.” (Romans 8:28)
This means there are no “mistakes” in your life. As Matthew Henry put it, “God knows what he designs us for, though we do not, what service, what trials, and will take care for us when we, for want of foresight, cannot for ourselves, that we be furnished for them with grace sufficient. He that appoints what the voyage shall be will supply the ship accordingly.”
We may think we have come to an end and that no good will come from our efforts, but we forget in that moment that the Lord’s plans never fail and that even when it seems like all is lost, His Kingdom has not fallen and a remnant is preserved.
So when we are tempted to say with Elijah, “LORD, they have killed Your prophets and torn down Your altars, and I alone am left, and they seek my life” Remember what Paul tells us in Romans regarding this plea:
Romans 11:4 But what does the divine response say to him? “I have reserved for Myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.”
5 Even so then, at this present time there is a remnant according to the election of grace.
That will always be true, even to the return of Christ and the ushering in of the Age to Come. So, remember, your calling is not to be successful, especially as the world counts success, but to be faithful to your calling. And remember that on Saturday, even the Apostles thought that all was lost, but everything was changed forever by the Good News that was proclaimed on Sunday Morning (Matthew 28:5-9)!
Christ Has Died
Christ Is Risen
Christ Will Come Again