Turbulence Ahead

SUMMARY

In this sermon from 1 Kings 19, Karl uses the analogy of airplane turbulence to explore Elijah's emotional and spiritual crisis following his great victory over the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. Despite witnessing God's incredible power, Elijah finds himself running from Jezebel's threats, exhausted and praying to die under a broom bush. Karl emphasizes that Elijah wasn't faithless but simply burned out, and God's response wasn't to lecture him but to provide rest, food, and care through an angel who told him to "get up and eat."

The sermon's central moment comes when God appears to Elijah not in the powerful wind, earthquake, or fire, but in a gentle whisper. Karl explains that whispers don't compete for attention but invite closeness - you have to be still and lean in to hear them. He challenges the congregation about how much time they spend on their phones (noting his own eight hours that week) versus how much time they spend in quiet with God. The modern world fills our lives with noise, notifications, and even algorithms designed to make us angry, but God often speaks most clearly when we quit striving and get still. Karl concludes that God's slowdowns in our lives aren't punishment but preparation - He restores before He recommissions us, just as He did with Elijah before sending him back to complete his work.

TRANSCRIPTION:

If you have your Bible with you this morning, invite you to turn over to First Kings 19. We're doing a series right now. It's a little different than any that I've done before. I actually started this series at the beginning of the year and this theme of staying grounded. How do we stay grounded in our lives and just the nature of calendars and schedules and different things happening.

We're going to revisit it over the next couple of weeks together to finish that series off. But this morning I wanted us to spend some time thinking about the story we find in First Kings 19. If you've ever ridden in an airplane and experienced turbulence, you remember that feeling, don't you? I was wondering about that this week watching the Artemis module come back down, the capsule come down from space, descending from outer space, traveling at 24,000 miles an hour, descending to 17 by the time it hits the water and thinking about the turbulence that they experienced. So I went back and just asked my good AI buddy Chat, you know, what is the turbulence like for the Artemis capsule that's coming back through the atmosphere?

And it talked about it's traveling so fast that the particles around it are superheated where they become like molten lava almost. It's not lava, but it's like that unbelievable shaking and violence in that turbulence, pulling somewhere close to five GS. Gary Backus could give me a better idea about this, though. I've never experienced that kind of turbulence. I have ridden on an airplane several times and experienced that kind of turbulence.

I was laughing this week thinking about a story. When I was a freshman in college, I had gone to California for school. And on one long weekend I got to fly back home to San Antonio. Well, as you often have to do, there's a stop in the middle and we stopped in El Paso. And as we're descending out of the clouds and into the city of El Paso to the airport, the pilot comes on the overhead speaker and he says, now there's some crosswinds, there's going to be a little turbulence, so just make sure you got your seatbelt fastened.

And so as we're coming in to the airport, you can start to feel the turbulence. And the plane is moving and literally we're kind of rocking back and forth almost like on a swing. And it was so significant that I was about halfway up the plane, I could turn around and see the people behind me and they were literally rising, falling like this. And there was a mom in the back with her little five, six year old son. And as Five and six year olds do.

They're asking a lot of questions. Mom, what's going on? Why are we doing this? What's happening? Well, it got pretty significant as we were lowering down.

He finally couldn't take it anymore. And he just screams out about, about 10 seconds before we land, he screams out, we're all gonna die.

And of course mom pounces on him, you know, to stop him from talking. And we hit the ground, boom. And we land and everybody's fine. And the plane erupts in laughter. Just.

He was saying the quiet part out loud, right? Every one of us was thinking it. Only this 5 year old had the courage to actually name it, right? But we know that feeling when that turbulence hits and the plane shakes and the sign bings to put your seatbelt on and everybody around is nervous and we're kind of looking around. You're strapped into this metal tube hurtling 30 something thousand feet above the earth and you can't do anything.

All you can do is hope and pray and trust. Is this going to be okay?

What Gary Backus and other pilots, I know many of you have piloted a plane before, will tell you is turbulence doesn't mean the plane is going down. It doesn't mean we're all going to die. It means we're moving through some air, some displaced air. It's an unstable air. The plane is sound, the pilot is still in control, the destination hasn't changed.

But we're feeling something, aren't we? I mean, life has turbulence too. Sometimes it's emotional, sometimes it's relational, sometimes it's spiritual. One moment you're flying high and the next thing you know you've dropped 2,000ft in just a second. And things feel a little scattered, a little shaky, a little scary.

How are we going to respond? Plans fall apart, energy disappears, faith starts to feel thin. And suddenly it's not just a vacation that you want, it's an escape. That's, I think, where we find Elijah in our story this morning. And First Kings 19, go ahead and invite you to turn there if you haven't.

Now, this is just days after this incredible experience has happened on Mount Carmel for Elijah, right? Calling down fire. It's an amazing story. If you haven't read it in a while, go back and read chapter 18 this week. It's this public, intense, undeniable victory that the Lord gives to Elijah over the prophets of Baal.

Things are going along pretty well. And then Elijah hits a little turbulence, doesn't he? Those reds words that Melanie read For us. Just a moment ago, after Ahaz tells Jezebel what Elijah has done to all the prophets of Baal, she says, I got a message for Elijah. You tell that guy, may the gods deal with me, be it ever so severely, if by this time tomorrow I don't make you like one of them.

And Elijah, we're told, was afraid. And he ran. And we go, what? What are you talking about, he ran? Didn't God just show up in this powerful way?

Didn't fire just rain down not only on top of the mountain, and it wiped out everything, even lapping up the flames like a dog licks at the water bowl? Right? It just lapped up all that. It burnt everything to the ground. Why is Elijah running?

Well, apparently, even spiritual victories don't keep us from experiencing some turbulence. Sometimes turbulence comes not after a loss, but it comes after a victory. Elijah, we're told, he came to a broom bush. He sat down under it and he prayed that he might die. I've had enough, Lord.

Take my life. I'm no better than my ancestors. Then he lay down under the bush and he fell asleep. Does this sound at all familiar to a story we've studied recently? Isn't it amazing how these themes keep showing up in Scripture?

But certainly they're echoes of Jonah. Have you ever said this kind of thing to God? I've had enough, Lord. I can't take it anymore. I can't stand it.

I can't do this. I'm done. Those words don't typically follow weakness. They tend to follow weariness, exhaustion. Elijah wasn't faithless.

He was exhausted. He wasn't rebellious. He was burned out. And notice how God responds to him. He doesn't lecture him or even correct him.

There's no Mufasa moment for Elijah. Elijah, you are more than what you have become. It's not what happens, right? Instead, he lets them sleep. He lets them rest.

And an angel shows up in verse five. And again in verse seven. Get up and eat. Get up and eat. For the journey is too much for you.

God allows Elijah to rest, to get some nourishment and some care.

Now, this may be the most important line for some of you this morning. Sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is take a nap and eat a meal. Can I get an amen? Amen. Now, we don't often think about that, but I wonder, how many times have we missed a moment to have a spiritual moment, a little soul care?

Our culture prizes busyness. Keep grinding, keep working. No pain, no gain. There's even rumors that around here, some people have been known to say, you can't coach hustle, Right? Right, Brian can't coach hustle.

Gotta work hard. And yet we've taken this kernel of truth that's somewhere in those phrases and we've made it the whole story. See, God designed us with limits on purpose. Turbulence has a way of revealing those limits, doesn't it? Instead of pushing Elijah harder, he actually slows Elijah down.

He pulls him back, not because he's done with him, but because he cares for him. You see, Elijah's delay under the broom tree wasn't God punishing him. It was God actually providing for him. See, sometimes God slows us down because our soul needs some attention. Because if we're not careful, that exhaustion, it builds up and it begins to distort how we see things.

And rest helps to bring clarity, new perspective. So Elijah rests. But if you keep reading the story, we notice the turbulence hasn't fully passed yet. The plane's not in trouble, but it's definitely shaking. And God's not quite finished yet.

So Elijah, we're told, travels for 40 days, and he winds up in a cave. And God asks him a question.

Elijah, what are you doing here?

I don't think that question is a location, geography kind of question. I think that's a soul care question. Elijah, what are we doing here? He asked him twice. What are you doing here?

Elijah replies, I've been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I'm the only one left. And now they're trying to kill me too.

And the Lord said, go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord's about to pass by now, my guess is having seen God come in a pretty powerful way on Mount Carmel, not but maybe a month, month and a half before this. I imagine that Elijah has an idea of how God's going to show up, of how he's going to be present to him. And God shows up. This powerful wind, it breaks the mountains, we're told. And then this earthquake, it shakes everything.

And then, as we thought, fire, fire comes. And yet we're told God's not in any of it, none of it. It's not until the gentle whisper. And we're told, Elijah goes to the mouth of the cave and he falls to his knees. Now, why a whisper?

Why would God show up to Elijah in a whisper? He has fire, he has wind. He has earthquakes. He has all kinds of power to show and display his strength, and instead he shows up in a whisper.

I wonder if it's because whispers don't compete for attention.

They invite closeness.

I was thinking this week about our kids, and you kind of have to teach a kid how to whisper. You know that, hey, dad, why does that person look like that? You know, you're like, the right idea, not quite the right execution. That's not typically how whispers work. You can't hear a whisper when you're bracing yourself for panic, when you're trying to control everything, when you want to make sure that every I is dotted and every T is crossed.

You have to stop and you have to be still, and you kind of have to lean in again. I was thinking of my kids whispering into my ear and how for them, the whisper is just this breathy. Hey, Dad, I feel moisture coming into my ear.

You have to be still. You have to be quiet. I can't be moving all over the place and hear my kid. No, no. And God shows up in a whisper.

You see, some of us are still gripping on the armrest of life these days. We're experiencing the turbulence and we're trying to control. And God's saying, you don't need control, you need connection.

So sometimes the delays that we experience are silence. And it feels like God's gone quiet. But what if the silence isn't God being absent? What if it's his invitation to be still?

We fill our lives with so much, don't we? We? So much noise constantly, all the time. We have podcasts and notifications and opinions and distractions. I went and asked my trusty friend Google, how.

How many hours does the average American spend on the phone? And if you have an iPhone, I imagine that a Google phone or whatever will do the same thing. But it tells you, I get a notification every Sunday morning. Here's how much time you spent on the phone on average this week, pal. Right?

It's five plus hours for the average adult. I got a notification this week that staggered me. I said, Karl, you spent. Can I be real a second for just a minute? You spend eight hours on average on your phone this week.

I was like, that can't be right. I'm a preacher. I'm not like the riff raff that shows up on Sundays.

The average American adult spends five hours or more on their phone. An average teenager, seven hours or more on their phone a day. How much do you spend?

We fill our lives with noise, and then we wonder why God Feels distant.

See, the turbulence hasn't stopped. For Elijah, God's still speaking. The question is, can we get quiet enough? Will Elijah be quiet enough to hear him? See, God often speaks most clearly.

When we quit striving and we quit stressing and we get quiet, we get still.

But we fight that, don't we? Because our culture sees that, and not just spiritually, but just in any way. That's wasted time. But what we discover is getting still with God. It's not wasted.

It's actually sacred. That's holy ground. And as we learn to get quiet, to get still with God, we recognize we don't need God to speak up. We need to quiet down.

See, God's whisper doesn't remove Elijah from his journey. It helps reorient him, focus him in a new direction. You see, after the rest and after the food and after the whisper, we're told, God speaks again. And this time he says, go back the way you came. Go back to the desert of Damascus.

And when you get there, anoint Hazael king over Aram. Also anoint Jehu, son of Nimshi, king over Israel. And anoint Elisha son of Shaphat, from Abel Meholah to succeed you as prophet. Jehu will put to death any who escape the sword of Hazael. And Elisha will put to death any who escape the sword of Jehu.

Yet I reserve 7,000 in Israel, all whose knees have not bowed down to BAAL and whose mouths have not kissed him. And Elijah thought, my work, it's over. It's finished. Everyone hates me. Nobody is right.

Nobody likes me. I think I'm going to eat some worms. Lord, God wasn't finished with him yet. He still had work to do. So Elijah's slowdown was not his inevitable fade into oblivion.

Rather, it was his recalibration to continue and to complete the work that God had for him. I know some of us this morning feel stuck. We feel stuck in the work that we are pretty sure God called us. But man, we're getting a lot of turbulence. We're facing a lot of challenges, a lot of pushback, and we're not sure God, it feels like everyone is against me.

But what if you're not stuck? What if God is helping you learn to stabilize? What if the season in your life, it's not about stopping you, but it's about preparing you. Because as we see in Elijah's story, God helps restore before he recommissions him, before he sends him back to the same way, to the same people. To the same struggles, into that same turbulence.

He refreshes and he renews him and he restores him. In the quiet. You see, God wasn't finished with Elijah, and he's not finished with us either. Thank you, Lord.

Like Jonah, we see, Elijah runs and he hides and he wanted to quit. God, just take my life now. I'm no better than anybody else. Echoes of Jonah's prayer. God, just kill me now.

But God didn't kill him, and he didn't betray him. And he doesn't lecture him. He draws closer to him. He slows him down. He gives him rest and replenishment and restores him.

And then he speaks to him in a whisper. And he sends him out with a renewed strength and a renewed hope and a new mission. Well, maybe that's you this morning. Maybe you're experiencing that turbulence. It may be emotional or maybe spiritual or maybe relational, and you feel shaken and you feel delayed and you feel like perhaps you've been left alone and you're exhausted.

Let me invite you to remember this morning, turbulence does not equal abandonment.

The plane, it's still sound. Your pilot, he's still in control, and your destination has not changed. See, if you feel like God is slowing you down, it's not because he's forgotten about you. It's he's preparing you. He has more for you to do.

So this week, the invitation is, would you take some time to be still before God? Would you take a moment and I don't know when your notification comes, but would you assess, Do a little self assessment? God, how much time am I giving to my telephone now? A telephone? Young people.

That's actually what you call people. I know you don't have one of those. You just.

But how much time do we spend listening to all the things around us, the notifications, the news feeds, versus how much time do we stop and say, God, would you speak into my life? I'm feeling the turbulence here. I'm feeling the stretch and the strain. I'm feeling the pull of trying to live as your witness, your disciple, your faithful follower in the midst of a culture that doesn't prioritize things, and in a world where there's a zero sum game where it's people win or people lose and there's no middle ground.

God, I'm trying to live differently. I'm trying to show people a different way, that I don't have to live from stress moment to stress moment to stress moment. I was telling Kaylee, one of the apps that I spent some time on has this little algorithm and it's geared to make me mad. I was reading about this, reading a couple of books about this, and this week, it was like the first time my eyes were opened. I was talking with Kaylee about some medical advice that I had received from my doctor, and all of a sudden I get these tweets that are like, are you tired of doctors trying to tell you what to do?

I'm like, yes, I am. Are you tired of having to take these drugs so that your cholesterol stays low? And I'm like, yes, I am. And then all of a sudden, it was like, hold on a minute. I didn't give it that information.

I was talking to my wife about that information. How did they get this? All of a sudden, here we go, eyes open, boom. Like it was trying to encourage me to get mad. And you know why that is?

It's because they've learned getting you angry, getting you stressed, that's way more powerful than trying to entice you some other way. You know, I was a kid growing up, the fear, the eventual fear, was if you see these images, it's going to make you think about sex too much. Well, what these guys have discovered is, no, no, there's actually a drop off after so much time that doesn't entice people anymore. But you know what never has a drop off? Anger.

You never get tired of being mad, right? Anger hijacks us, and there's no end to that. So they know, well, if I could just make you mad, if I could just remind you how those silly doctors who don't really know what they're talking about, and Big Pharma, who's just trying to make you a slave, that and all of a sudden, off I go.

Or is there a moment where we stop and say, God, is there. Is there a new direction I need to go? And I'm dealing with turbulence and voices all around me trying to tell me what to do. God, would you help me? So maybe for you, I just invite you to take 10 minutes this next week.

Pick a day. Maybe it's with your cup of coffee as you're sitting on the porch or you're sitting in your living room or wherever it is you have just a moment to take a breath. If you're a young parent, good luck with that. Maybe at the end of the day, when you finally get those little rascals to bed, you can sit down with a glass of water or something that won't caffeinate you too much and just ask, God, would You speak to me because I realized, like Elijah, I'm no better than the people before me. I'm feeling all kinds of pressure and pain and push and pull, and I'm struggling.

God, would you speak to me? Maybe for you it's maybe a walk without your phone. Maybe it's a prayer time without an agenda. Maybe it's just being still in your bedroom when you wake up first thing in the morning. You see, God is not absent in the turbulence.

He's present in the stillness. God, would you help us to get still with you this morning and this week? We have so many competing agendas in our life that, Father, maybe the biggest one is this little device that we carry around in our pocket or our purse or in our backpack that competes for our attention.

Thank God, all too often in the midst of turbulence, we turn to it, seeking some form of comfort, only realizing it just makes us more angry or. Or more stressed or more worried or more anxious. God, would you help us to find our own broom brush this week? Bush rather, and just lay down, get still, get quiet. God, for some of us, it's going to feel like the hardest thing that we'll do is to quiet a distraction, even just for a few minutes.

But, God, would you give us the courage to try? Would you remind us that in the turbulence you're present with us, that the plane is not in danger? God, the pilot, you are in control, and our destination is sure. So, God, may that turbulence just be a reminder to us of the chaos all around us. And instead, may it help us to remember our quiet, our need for quiet with you.

It's often in that quiet that we hear the whisper of your voice speaking life and truth and hope and love. God, would you do that for us? Once again, we pray in Jesus name. Amen.