David Jeremiah - The First Resurrection in the Bible
One of the greatest men to ever walk on this earth was a man by the name of Elijah. He was a prophet of God and in many respects the greatest prophet Israel ever had. We do not have one single written word from the pen of this prophet, but we have the record of his life, and it is plainly foretold in Malachi chapter 4 that Elijah the prophet would return to the earth. When Jesus came preaching his majestic sermons and doing his mighty works the people mistook Jesus for Elijah, and John the Baptist, the forerunner of Jesus Christ, we are told in Luke 1:17 he came in the spirit and power of Elijah. Elijah and Moses were the two characters brought back from the heavenly world to meet Jesus, and Peter, and James, and John on the Mount of Transfiguration.
One of the two witnesses which are prophesied to be on the earth during the Great Tribulation will be Elijah. I've only hit the highlights of this man's life and career and it is quite evident just from what I have said that he was a man way above men, a man of great accomplishment, a hero of heroes, a prophet among the prophets. But the Bible says he was a man of like passion as we are. And we are following the story of his life, and as we follow the story of his life there's not one thing we have discovered yet that would make us believe that this man, who we are studying, is the same man that I just described because this is the quiet behind-the-scenes working of God in the life of this prophet, preparing him to stand on the mountain with his hands up high in victory.
This is the untold story of the lives of those that God uses. These are the words that describe a man whom God is preparing to be the greatest prophet whoever walked on this earth, but these are the things hardly anybody ever talks about; and these are the things that the Spirit of God puts in the Bible so that we don't lose perspective ourselves, so that we don't think this man is different than we are, just that God prepared him in a special way to use him in a way that is beyond anything you can imagine. For several months, Elijah has enjoyed the provision of God in a very miraculous way. When he was by the brook in Cherith, God met all of his needs by the brook itself and by the ravens which were sent to feed him morning and evening. And when the brook ran dry God moved Elijah to Zarephath, and once again God maintained him this time through a barrel of flour, a jar of oil, and a distressed widow.
It's interesting to imagine what kind of life Elijah would have been living during his extended stay with the widow in Zarephath. On one hand, everything seemed to be going quite well. Elijah was living in a beach town along the Mediterranean Sea. And as we will learn today, he even had his own upper room. Private accommodations. Sounds rather exotic, but this room was probably not much more than a flimsy little lean-to on the rooftop of his house.
If you've ever been to Israel, one of the first things you notice as you see the houses in the Middle East is that they're all pretty much one story, flat-roofed houses; and the roof of the house in that area is like the extra room in the house, and much of the daily work from the house was done on top of the roof. On the rooftop they stretched out their clothes to dry them. On the rooftop they dried the grain that they had harvested during the day, and the children probably played up on the rooftop. It was like the utility room of the house. It wasn't the penthouse, but it was something. It was a beautiful place because it was God's place. To get to the roof of the house, you couldn't do so from the inside like we do in our homes. You would have to walk out the front door and there was an outside set of stairs, and those stairs would take you up. And we're going to see in a few moments that while Elijah was being cared for in his own special prophet's chamber, he still faced a relational challenge. Elijah was living with a widow who apparently was something of a complainer.
There are only three statements recorded from the lips of the widow in the Scripture and two of those three are complaints. That might give us a clue as to what it was like to be around this woman. I resisted the urge to go back to the Proverbs and talk about complaining women. I thought it might be better if I not do that. But I want to tell you that this widow was probably not easy to get along with, and we'll see some of that in our story today. She was a woman who was filled with anger and bitterness because of the problems in her life. Her husband had died and she had had to raise her son all by herself in the midst of a catastrophic famine. She didn't seem to have any friends or relatives around to help her. She had a lot to be upset about, and it's quite evident that she did her fair share of complaining. This widow probably was not what we would call an Old Testament Christian.
Notice how she addressed Elijah when she first met him in verse 12. "And she said, 'As the Lord your God lives...'" Wasn't the Lord our God, it was the Lord your God. The Lord God wasn't her God; He was Elijah's God, and she probably was a pagan. Strikes me that the story we will study today seems to be about her journey from paganism to faith in God. It's about God using Elijah to bring her from the place of looking at Elijah's God as his God to the place where she could have enough faith to embrace that same God as her God. In our culture today, the lifestyle of the believer has become more important than ever before in sharing the faith that God has given us.
I know there are some who say, "No, I never witness. It's my life that's the testimony to those around me". There's an extreme on both sides of that discussion. If all you do is live your life in a good and godly way and you never say a word, people will say, "Oh, what a good person he is". But they won't know why. On the other hand, if you're one of those people who talks a good game but doesn't walk a good game, you'd do more damage to the church than if you would just not say a word. There's a wonderful combination. The Bible says be ready always to give a reason to those who ask you about your faith. In other words, it sounds like if you live your life the way you should live your life somebody is going to ask you about it, and be ready to give them an answer. Here in this story we see the power of a godly life, but it all began this story with a tragedy.
In verse 17 we read, "Now it happened after these things that the son of the woman who owned the house became sick, and his sickness was so serious," says the Scripture, "that there was no breath left in him". We are not told what was wrong with the widow's son, but the illness was so severe that the boy died. The Scripture says he had no breath left in him. Apparently this was not from some sudden illness that took the boy in one night, it was the kind of sickness that developed gradually over months. And perhaps one day she heard her son moaning and then a fever developed, and she didn't know what to do. And she tried her best to nurse him back to health, but the sickness became so serious that one day she went into his room and he was no longer breathing, and there is nothing in my estimation that could be more tragic than her experience.
She had no husband, no other children, and apparently no other friends to walk alongside of her. Her life was wrapped up in that one son and now he is gone. His death meant for her an overwhelming sense of loneliness. Just you imagine her grief. It is also meant for her a sense of meaninglessness. What did she have left to live for? Her life had been nothing but disaster and disappointment and the only bright spot that she could point to was her son. Someday this boy would marry, someday this boy would have children and carry on the family name, but now her legacy, her hope for the future is dead. The death of her son also meant a kind of hopelessness. As long as her son lived, she knew there was somebody she could count on to care for her.
Now she looks at the only hope in her life and he's gone. But there's good news. In spite of the pain and sorrow, in spite of the loneliness and despair, God is at work in this woman's life. And while we don't often appreciate it, we would never ask for it, we often sense that in those difficult things in our lives in the hurts of life something's going on in our life. We may not understand it, we may not even be able to explain it to the closest person to us, but down deep in our heart we know that, "This hurts really bad, but God is up to something in my life".
I want you to notice, first of all, in this journey to faith the consistency of Elijah's life in verse 18. You know, it's human nature when something goes wrong to want to blame somebody. Can I get a witness? Sometimes we even blame the people who have been the most helpful to us. That's hard to understand, but it's true. It's very true. At first this widow held Elijah totally responsible for the bad thing that had happened to her. Listen to her words in verse 18. "So she said to Elijah, 'What have I to do with you, O man of God? Have you come to me to bring my sin to remembrance, and to kill my son?'" "Elijah, all of this is your fault".
The widow of Zarephath has come to a sense of guilt. That guilt obviously was because of the holy walk of the tenant who was living in her upper room. She has watched Elijah and she has concluded that her son's death is punishment for sin. She believed her son died because of something she had done against Elijah's God. The consistency of your life and of my life will bring conviction to the people around us. Don't you know? If you just live a quiet, consistent, godly life, your life will bring conviction to the people who watch you. The consistency of Jesus's life brought conviction to his followers. For example, when Jesus called Peter to follow him, Peter responded by falling down at Jesus's knees and saying, "Depart from me for I am a sinful man". The apostle Peter wrote these words. He said, "Wives, when you are married to a husband who doesn't know God, here's how you win him to your faith. Wives, be submissive to your own husbands so that even if some do not obey the word, they may, without a word, be won by the conduct of the wife".
Over the years, as a pastor I've had a lot of girls come to me and say, "My husband's not a Christian. Sometimes he comes to church, but mostly he stays home and watches the football game. And I come and I want so much for him to know Jesus". And some of them have told me of their strategies, which are not very good. I actually had a woman told me one time she used to put "The Four Spiritual Laws" in the centerfold of the "Playboy" magazine her husband got. That was not all that effective. Sometimes they would tell me, "Oh, I go home, pastor, and I tell him everything you said". And I can't imagine what that's like for the poor guy sitting at home. You know, what that might be like. My sermons are hard enough for me. I can't imagine them being interpreted with the idea that, "Maybe if I just say this, this man will come to Christ".
I don't know all the answers, but I know this answer. This answer says, gals, if you want to win your husband, the best thing you can do is live before him as a godly woman, and one day, maybe through your conduct, God will bring him to faith. So Elijah was living his life before this woman. Let's stop for a moment and ask ourselves, "What do you think the woman's sin was that she was so conscious of? Was it the worship of Baal"? Obviously that could have been it. She lived right in the center of Baalism. "Was it immorality"? Maybe it wasn't anything at all. Maybe she just thought, "If I only had been there when he died, if I could only have been there, maybe". We don't know the specific reason, but she was overwhelmed with guilt and this guilt surfaced as she watched Elijah's life.
Conviction is always the first step toward God. I mean, it's one of the things that's left out of a lot of presentations of the gospel these days. Sometimes we think we just woo people into the kingdom. And let me tell you something. Until you know you're a sinner, you won't really have much motivation to be saved. My father used to tell me when I was growing up in the church that he pastored, he said, "Do you know what, David? The biggest problem I have as a pastor getting people saved is getting them lost". And I didn't understand that, but I do understand that now. Before people become Christians, they have to understand they need Christ. This woman is in a very special place right now. She's got great conviction. She's under conviction for her life.
Now, notice the compassion of Elijah's love in verses 19 through 21. Let's watch how Elijah responds to this widow. Up to this point, the prophet's been kind of a loner, been strong, self-dependent, but now we will see a whole new picture of his character. Now we will see the real Elijah in action. We will discover that he was a man of compassion. Notice what he did in verse 19 after listening to her long soliloquy of anger toward him. Verse 19, "And he said to her, 'Give me your son.'" Elijah could have justifiably reminded the widow of all the things she had just said to him, but he did not.
One writer has written, "Do you know what really impresses me here? It's the silence of Elijah. Somehow he knows that nothing he can say at this moment will satisfy this grieving mother. No words from him can soothe her stricken spirit. So he does not argue with her. He does not rebuke her. He does not try to reason with her. He doesn't remind her of all she owes him or of how ashamed she should be for blaming him. He simply asks her to place her burden in his arms".
You might be surprised at this, but occasionally people get mad at me. Every week there's somebody who's not really sure that we should be doing any number of things that we're doing. And I'm the point man and I've got a target painted on my back. And sometimes people say things that are cruel and hurtful, and if I'm not careful, it's easy for me to take their complaints personally, but I have learned that often their complaint has very little to do with me or the church. Instead, it's the result of some personal pain they're feeling in their own life.
Someone once told me that people who hurt hurt. In other words, people who are hurting in their own hearts may try to hurt others for no other reason than their own pain. And sometimes when you can get past the angry words to the pain that the person is feeling, you can help them, and then there's healing for everybody. Elijah knew this woman was grieving, he knew she was crying out against God, but he didn't respond harshly to her. Instead, he treated her with compassion, his command.
Notice his chamber in verse 19. "So he took the child out of her arms and carried him to the upper room where he was staying, and laid him on his own bed". Elijah cradled the widow's dead son in his arms and silently climbed the outside stairway to the room where he had been staying. That's probably the place where he had already spent hours, even days on his knees in prayer, and now this man of prayer wants to go behind closed doors, get alone with God, and wrestle for this little boy's life. Someone has said that he who prays only for others to hear has never truly prayed. Have you ever been in a prayer meeting where it's pretty evident that the person who's praying isn't talking to God, but he's praying so everybody else in the prayer meeting can hear how wonderful he is or she is? How many of you know there's prayer and then there's prayer?
I love what they say at the Brooklyn Tabernacle. They cry out to God. When was the last time you cried out to God? That's what prayer is. You pray differently when you're by yourself, and especially if you're in anguish over something that's going on in your life. Don't you love to go behind closed doors where nobody can hear you and talk to the Lord, especially when its serious stuff like it was for Elijah? So what do you do when tragedy strikes? What do you do when a test comes? What's your first response? Is it to complain? Is it to blame somebody else, to try to reason your way out of it, or have you formed the habit of doing what Elijah did? Do you go to your special place and get alone with God?
Elijah provides this incredible example of what we should do when something gets out of sync in our lives. Don't panic. Don't fear. Don't rush. Don't doubt. Pray. Have you ever heard anybody say this? "Well, I've tried everything else and I'm down to the last resort. I've gotten nothing left I can do, but pray". I have had people say that to me, and I say, "Well, you've got this thing all messed up because you just put your first resort at the bottom of the list. Get it back up to the top and see what happens".
Now we're going to see that Elijah understood what it meant to cry out to God, his cry in verses 20 and 21. Actually, after he put the dead boy on his bed, Elijah went before the Lord in prayer. In fact, he prays two prayers. One in verse 20 and one in verse 21. The first is a question and the second is a request. Notice his first prayer in verse 20. "Then Elijah cried out to the Lord and said, 'O Lord my God, have You also brought tragedy on the widow with whom I lodge, by killing her son?'"
Now, I don't know if you've noticed this. The widow blames Elijah and Elijah blames God, and they're just kicking the can down the road. Do you see what I'm saying? Everywhere Elijah had been on his journey as he went from the brook Cherith to Zarephath, he had seen death and devastation. He had seen hurt and tragedy. There was a huge famine that'd been going on for many months and people were starving and dying. There were no crops. The nation was under the judgment of Almighty God, and Elijah felt the pain himself as he saw this happening all around him. He saw Baal worship in the country, and now he sees another tragedy in the life of this woman, and he asked God, "Are You going to get this straightened out? Are You going to let this continue to go on? Why, God, are You letting this happen"?
Now, Elijah's prayer is a model of honesty and ultimately a model of trust. Elijah teaches us that it's okay to raise tough questions with God as long as we do it with humility and faith. I know this is a real different thing for all of us, but we will incredibly increase the effectiveness of our prayer if we get our arms around this principle. Many of us have ideas about prayer that actually keep us from praying. We may have the idea that we have to be polite and formal or meek when we pray or that we have to muster up the right thoughts or feelings. It may not occur to us that we can bring our doubts and our fears and our terrible questions about God to God. Throughout the Scripture we are shown over and over again by people of great faith and people struggling with faith that questioning God is not out of the question.
In his book on prayer, Philip Yancey tells the story of a man who asked to see a hospice chaplain as he laid dying in his hospital bed. He was in great emotional distress because he felt so guilty. You see, he had spent the previous night ranting and raving about God to God, and the following morning he just felt so dreadful and he imagined that his chance of going to heaven now had been lost forever and that God would never forgive him for all the things he had said the night before. And the chaplain very wisely asked the patient this question: "What do you think is the opposite of love"? Quickly, he said, "Well, the opposite of love is hate". Very wisely the chaplain said, "No, the opposite of love is indifference. You have not been indifferent to God or you would never have spent the whole night talking to Him, honestly telling Him what was in your heart and mind. Do you know the Christian word that describes what you did that night? The word is prayer. You have spent the night praying".
If you want illustrations of this, don't just take my word for it. Just go back and read the Psalms. I read the Psalms one day with this in mind, and I couldn't get over the stuff that David actually said to God in his prayer. I mean, one time he said, "Lord, how long? How long do I have to wait"? What you notice in the prayers of David is what one man said to me one day. The prayers of David usually start with a sigh, but they end with a song. David goes to the Lord and he empties his heart of all the anguish and hurt and tells God exactly.
You say, "Well, doesn't God already know"? Yes, but He wants you to express it, and that's how you pray. Now, you don't just get up in public and pray a complaining prayer. I'm not talking about that. But when you're alone with God, you should feel free to tell God everything that's on your heart. In whatever way you have to say it, according to the Bible, that's prayer. What was Elijah doing? He was pouring out his heart to God in the midst of this situation. He was saying, "Lord God, look, I've been watching all this death and dying in this country, and now this little boy is dead. How long are You going to let this go on"? Now, in the second prayer in verse 21, this is one of the strangest things in the Bible. For we read that after he had put the boy on his bed, "He stretched himself out on the child three times, and cried out to the Lord and said, 'O Lord my God, I pray, let this child's soul come back to him. Let him come back to life.'"
Here Elijah is pleading. Here Elijah is begging God in the quietness of his own bedchamber for the life of a little boy. We have no reason to believe that the widow was allowed in the private room. She could not have missed however, the deep love and compassion. I have a belief in my heart that when Elijah took that little boy in his arms, he was in tears, but why did he stretch himself out on the child three times? Why did he do that? I've read everything I can find on why he did that, and there's no consensus. I actually read one commentator who said that all Elijah was doing was CPR. I scratch that one off my list.
There's no human answer to what's going on in Elijah's chamber at this moment. Maybe he was stretching himself out on the corpse and confessing his own powerlessness. Maybe he was saying, "I am as powerless before you, O God, as this corpse. If you don't do something, there's no hope for this little boy". Others have said Elijah was expressing persistence, stretching self out over the boy and praying, "O God, bring the soul back into this body". And then he got up to check the boy's pulse, and there wasn't one. So he covered the boy again and prayed, "O God, bring this boy back to life". And when that prayer didn't bring life, Elijah prayed one more time, and the boy was given back his life. Maybe the simplest explanation for Elijah's action is that they were simply an expression of his love for this child.
Let me explain. Elijah was a Jewish prophet who knew that he was forbidden by the Old Testament law to be in contact with a dead body, and by laying out on the body of this dead boy, Elijah showed that he cared more for the soul of that boy than he did for the purity of his own religion. Old Testament professor Raymond Dillard said although Elijah almost certainly did not have any clear idea of the doctrine of the Trinity, Christians in all ages have seen in his stretching out in prayer three times over the child a reminder of prayer in the name of the Father, in the name of the Son, in the name of the Holy Spirit.
So you're going to say, "Well, pastor, I'm with you up to this. Great story. Old Testament story doesn't touch me at all. So if I have a sick child and I lie on the bed on top of him for three times and pray, God's going to heal him, right"? Well, God can, and I believe that God sometimes does. I also believe that God sometimes gives to his servants a sense of confidence about the outcome of the sickness.
Let me tell you something that happened to me recently. Not too many weeks ago, we introduced a missionary family from Romania, the guest family, and they had a little 8-year-old girl who had already had four heart surgeries, and that day in church we found out that in a few days she was going to have her fifth surgery. You couldn't look at her without falling in love with her, and I did. I wanted to give her a hug and take her home. On the day of her surgery I found out where she was, and I went to the hospital to pray with her and to encourage her. Her parents, who are very godly people, were trying to help their daughter prepare for surgery. The doctor had told them, apparently with the little girl listening, that the surgery was very serious and it was possible that Abby might not survive.
Whether she heard that from the doctor or it became apparent in their discussion, she was very frightened and she became incredibly curious about heaven. So when I arrived at the hospital, I walked into a situation where the family was having a family discussion about heaven and what it was like there. When it was time for me to leave, a comment was made about seeing Abby in heaven if she did not make it through the surgery. And something came over me at that moment. I heard myself say this: "Abby, I know I'm going to see you in heaven someday, but it's not going to be this week and it's not going to be next week. This week you're going to have a successful surgery, and I will see you again in a few days". And I thought, "I don't think I've ever done that before. I wonder if that's the right thing to do".
I prayed with her. And after she went into surgery, I had to leave town for a few days. So I kind of kept up, and I heard that the surgery went well. I came home, and I wanted to go see her, but before I could go see her, she and her parents went back to Romania. So God healed her and put her back in service. Let me be very gentle and careful here, friends. I think there are rare occasions when God gives His people faith to believe that a loved one or a person will be healed, and in that faith they pray and God answers. It is absolutely right to believe that God can do miracles today. It is absolutely wrong to try to schedule them.
In 1540, Martin Luther's great friend and assistant Friedrich Myconius became sick and was expected to die within a short time. On his bed, he wrote a loving farewell letter to Luther with a trembling hand, and Luther received the letter and sent back a reply. And I must tell you after my wondering if I had done the right thing with Abby, when I read this I felt a lot better. Here was Luther's reply to his great friend Friedrich Myconius: "I command you in the name of God to live 'cause I still need you in the work of reforming the church. The Lord will never let me hear that you are dead, but you will be permitted to survive me. For this I am praying, this is my will, and may my will be done because I seek only to glorify the name of God".
And although Myconius had already lost the ability to speak, when Luther's letter came, he recovered his voice completely, lived 6 more years, and survived Luther by 2 months. Sometimes God gives to people faith to believe, and that's what He did with Elijah. Don't make that standard operating procedure for every person who is sick. It is not true that it is God's will for every sick person to be healed, or there would never be another funeral on earth. One more thing, listen carefully. This little boy did not come back from death because of his faith. The widow's son had nothing to do with his own resurrection. He was powerless. He was dead. He's a picture of all of us in our sin. He could not help himself, but God gave to Elijah the faith to believe that this child's soul would be restored to him again, and Elijah prayed in faith and God heard him and the boy was resurrected.
Now, let's notice the capability of Elijah's Lord. The provision of the Lord is recorded for us in verse 22. "Then the Lord heard the voice of Elijah; and the soul of the child came back to him, and he revived". Now, can you just imagine being in that little upstairs room when the corpse began to stir and Elijah saw a life come back into the boy's body? I mean, I can't imagine what that would have been like. This is the first resurrection recorded in the Bible. It is a perfect picture of the power of God over death. And thank the Lord that the same God who raised up this child, gave him back his soul is the God who raised up Jesus from the grave. Someday the trumpet will sound and the voice will be heard, and the same God who raised up this child and answered to Elijah's prayer is going to open up all the graves of the dead and the dead in Christ shall rise up in glad obedience to the voice of their master, for our God is the God of resurrection. Hallelujah. Amen.
The provision of the Lord. Notice the presentation of the son. The Bible says that after the child was restored, "Elijah took the child and brought him down from the upper room into the house, gave him to his mother. And Elijah said, 'See, your son lives.'" I imagine the scene went something like this. Elijah picks up the child in his arms, carries him down the outside steps of the house into the front door of the house, walks into the house, and he looks in the sitting room, and the boy's mother is still there wailing in anguish, her head is buried in her hands, and she doesn't see Elijah when he walks in, and Elijah walks right over to the front of the woman and says, "See? See, your son lives".
Can you imagine that moment in the life of that woman? Her trembling hands reach up, and Elijah takes this child and places this child in the hands of this woman, and now the tears that she has shed in grief are turned into the tears of joy. I believe this is one of the things that the writer of Hebrews was talking about when he said, "By faith, women received their dead raised to life again". Did you know that according to the New Testament, Jesus only ever raised three people from the dead? Now, He probably raised more than that, but according to the New Testament, only three records.
Listen to this. There is a remarkable characteristic that is true about all three of these resurrections. It was the only son of a widow who Jesus raised at the gate of Nain, it was the only child whom He raised in the house of Jairus, and it was Lazarus, an only brother, whom He called out of the tomb in Bethany. Jesus seems to specialize in onlys. After all, He was the only begotten Son. Now we get to the pinnacle of the whole story, the praise of the widow. Verse 24, "Now by this I know," she said, "that you are a man of God, and that the Word of the Lord in your mouth is the truth".
Now the widow knows. Now she believes. Now she trusts. It was not until the woman held her living, breathing son in her arms that she came to a firm conviction of the truth of God. When she saw that her son was alive, she didn't just see Elijah, she saw the Lord. "Elijah, I've heard you talk about God, I've heard you refer to him, but now when I look at what he did in this miracle, I know you speak the truth. He really is God". And that's the heavenly strategy. The Bible tells us that that's how we're to operate.
Matthew 5:16 says this: "Let your light so shine before men," now watch this, "that they may see your good works and tell everybody what a good person you are". I don't read that in my Bible. "That they may see your good works and," what, "glorify your Father who is in heaven". Peter put it this way: "Having your conduct honorable among the Gentiles, that when people speak against you as evildoers, they may, by your good works which they observe, glorify God in the day of visitation". When God is at work, God gets the glory. Oftentimes we take his glory and steal it from Him. We should never do that. Elijah lived his life out before this woman. When the moment came, God heard his prayer, and the result of it was this woman not only got her son back, but she became a follower of the living God. So many things I'd like to say beyond what I've been able to say in this time period, but let me just leave you with one thought, and that is the power of a godly life.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you just decide to be a person of God and live a life that's honoring to the Lord, you will begin to see the residual benefits of that. And if we all did that, if we had a collective commitment and we could follow through on it, that we're not going to be just called Christians, we're going to be Christians, we're not going to just say God is our God, we're going to live as if He's our God every day humbly before Him, the world has never yet seen what would happen. There would be many who would come and say, "I want to know the answer to your faith". Why? I had a guy come to me one time and I was working in a freight company, and he said, "I want to know why are you the way you are". Then you can say, "It's not about me. It's about my God, my God who lives within my heart".