Steven Furtick - There Is Nothing To See Here (06/10/2017)
Pastor Steven Furtick continues from 1 Kings 19, picking up after Elijah's Mount Carmel victory. Now in a cave, hiding and discouraged, Elijah hears God's gentle whisper and receives a new perspective. The message titled "There's Nothing to See Here" challenges us to look again, look around, and look ahead—moving beyond shadows and echoes of comparison, fear, and regret to God's real presence and purpose, even in dark seasons.
Picking Up Where We Left Off – Elijah's Journey Continues
The last time that I preached a proper sermon to you, I came back on Father's Day, but that didn't really count as a sermon. That was more like a God thing that was really cool. But the last time I preached to you was, I preached about Elijah, and I thought we'd just pick up right where we left off. And I want to use a different passage, kind of a continuation, because the last time we saw Elijah, God was moving him around and using him to meet needs.
And I preached to you, remember the last sermon I preached to you was called, You Had to Be There. You Had to Be There. And if the person next to you didn't hear that sermon, touch them and say, well, you had to be there. And, and, and I want to pick up, I want to pick up on that a little bit. And, uh, we're using thumb more as a kind of a series heading, but, you know, usually I just call the series something and then preach whatever I want. So that's what I'm gonna do today too.
But, look at this in verse 11, First Kings 19, Verse 11, The Lord said, Go out, stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by. And then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, and the Lord was not in the wind. And after the wind there was an earthquake, and the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire. We got earth, wind, and fire. Hello, Jesus.
The Lord was not in the fire and after the fire came a gentle whisper. And when Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave. And then a voice said to him, What are you doing here, Elijah?
Drop down to verse 19. Verse 19. So Elijah went from there and found Elisha, son of Shaphat. I want to use as a title a little saying that you might have heard before. I want to call this message, There's Nothing to See Here. There's Nothing to See Here.
Turn to 15 people. Nothing to see here. There's nothing to see here. There's nothing to see here. You may be seated. There's nothing to see here.
Periscope and the Question: What Are You Seeing Now?
I have a new addiction. It's called Periscope. I am enjoying this new expression of social media. I find it to be delightful. There are a few commenters who are crass, but you can block them. Periscope is a live streaming service. You can stream video of yourself wherever you are. I always wanted to have my own TV show. Now I have one on my phone called Periscope. Pretty cool.
I don't know. It's the novelty of it, but one thing I like about it, it asks an important question. Here's a little screenshot of Periscope. How many of you have used Periscope before? Let me see your hands. The rest of you, I'm going to need you to follow me because I might have something important to say. I might stream it out, and you might need to hear it. It'll come on Periscope, and if you're not on Periscope, you might miss it because a Periscope is powerful.
I almost called this message the power of Periscope. But how many of you don't even know what Periscope is? So that's why I chose a different title. I wanted to connect with the whole audience. You see that question? This is what it looks like when you go on Periscope on the app. It asks a question. What are you seeing now?
I know it's just a social media tool, but to me, that's an interesting concept to organize a technology around. The idea that now we all have cameras and technology in our hands to be able to show the world what we're seeing now in any given situation. It's just a really weird day we live in. It's narcissistic in some ways, but it opens up great opportunities.
I thought that was a cool question because what you are seeing is not always reflective of reality. What you are seeing in any given moment is not necessarily what's actually there. There was a philosopher called Plato. He was the student of Socrates. Socrates was killed for his beliefs, and Plato spent much of his life as a philosopher defending the ideas of his teacher, Socrates, and Plato actually became more widely known than Socrates.
Maybe you remember this from a philosophy class somewhere along the line that Plato had this thing called the allegory of the cave. He kind of used it as a picture to talk about people who are enlightened and people who are not enlightened.
There's a scripture in Hebrews, Hebrews chapter eight, verse five, that many people think was lifted from kind of the platonic ideal of the world. Plato had obviously lived hundreds of years before the writer of Hebrews, the New Testament book, but he's comparing and contrasting two systems. He says, they serve, the Old Testament priests, at a sanctuary that is a copy and shadow of what is in heaven.
And this is why Moses was warned when he was about to build the tabernacle, the place where God would meet with the people. He says, see to it that you make everything according to the pattern shown you on the mountain. Plato had the idea of forms that everything that exists, that you see, is an imperfect reflection of something that exists in another unseen realm.
The writer of Hebrews Plato was possibly picking up on this motif when he said that the Old Testament was like a shadow of what's in heaven. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. An imperfect manifestation of a perfect form.
To explain this further, Plato said that you should imagine a group of men sitting in a cave. He said that if you imagine these men being chained together, and they've been chained from birth, and they've been in the cave since birth, they've never left the cave. They were born in a cave, and they were chained in a cave.
And he said, imagine that these men are staring at the back wall of the cave, and because of their chains, they're never able to turn their heads and see behind them. But behind them, imagine that there is an opening of the cave, and the opening is illuminated by a fire that is on a shelf that's just below the opening.
Are you visualizing this so far? So he said, imagine that these men who are chained staring at the wall are seeing shadows on the wall as the people pass by behind them and hold up objects much like puppeteers do on their stages, and the fire is casting the shadows of the objects on the wall.
And imagine also that the men who are walking behind the men who are chained staring at the wall, imagine that the men from behind make noises and their voices begin to echo in the cave. Plato's question was this, would not those men who have never turned around, would not those men who have never seen the opening, would not those men who have only ever stared at a wall begin to assume that the shadows were reality and that the echoes came from the shadows?
It's kind of deep, but I wanted to put the two together, Plato and Periscope, to talk about the fact that today, it seems like more than ever, we live in a world of shadows and echoes. Are you there with me? A world of shadows and echoes chained sometimes to content and ideas streaming across the screens in our life, thinking that it's real.
Being fed images that are supposed to represent reality, they even call them feeds, feeds, seeing stuff. And would not we, if we never turn around, if we spend all of our life in the cave, would not we eventually begin to assume that what we're seeing that's a shadow is the object itself? That what we're seeing that's presented as success is really success.
That what we're seeing that's presented as happiness is really happiness. That what we're seeing as presented as fear is really something to be afraid of. See, we live in a world of shadows and echoes and shadows and echoes and shadows and echoes. And we're all kind of asking what's real? What's real? What's really worth living for? What's real?
Plato might have said it 2400 years ago, but we're still asking it today. Periscope is asking it. What are you seeing now? Now, the funny thing about Periscope, and I'm actually going to log on Periscope for a moment so I can show you this, and we're going to broadcast live on Periscope. And I'm going to show you how cool this is.
Yeah, we're going to put this guy, his Nascar hat, on Periscope. Church. And so they're asking me, what are you seeing now? And see, I'm going to hit this button, start broadcast, and I'm going to put you on Periscope. And you are now live on Periscope. Isn't that amazing? Live on Periscope.
What are you seeing now? What are you... Now, it's funny, because when you first launch the app, it's pointing outward. He said it's creepy. What's going to be really creepy is when I put this live feed on the screen for everybody to see in the whole church. But the audience is growing. It's 500 people, 540 people. The count is rising. Come on, somebody.
You can't see it because the heart... No, there it is, down at the bottom. 500 set, 581. It's real dangerous because we've got the comments on there, so we might need to take that off the screen real quick. You never know what somebody is going to say. Yeah, that's good.
But it's an interesting technology, isn't it? Just the ability at any given time to share my perspective with the world. What are you seeing now? What are you seeing now? And is what you're seeing only on the surface level?
From Mount Carmel to the Cave – Elijah's Shift in Perspective
Our Bible hero, Elijah, is in a predicament. He's seen God move in power. And I love that we get to read about him in 1 Kings chapter 19, because when we saw him in 1 Kings chapter 18, he was the king of the hill, the man who stood high atop Mount Carmel and called down fire from heaven.
And when the fire came, it was so remarkable in its demonstration of God's presence that the whole nation turned back to God because of this extraordinary act of bravery and boldness. That's on Mount Carmel in 1 Kings 18.
By the time we encounter the same character in 1 Kings 19, he's no longer on Carmel, but he's in a cave. He's no longer standing for God, but he's hiding from evil. And this is one of the ways that I know that my Bible can be trusted, because if the Bible were a book of superheroes meant to convince me of a religion, I have a feeling that 1 Kings 19 would have been edited out of the pages of Scripture, and we would have cut Elijah's life at 1 Kings 18 with him standing on the mountain.
But the tape keeps rolling, and we get to see Elijah go from Carmel to the cave. Do you not know that life is lived both on Carmel and in the cave? Do you not know that there can be a shift from one moment to the next in your perspective, where one moment you see possibility and the next moment you only see pain, and where one moment you're in triumph and the next moment you're in trouble, and one moment you're real holy, and the next minute you're... We'll just leave it right there.
And he goes into the cave and spends the night. It's a place where he can hide for a little while. It's a place where his perspective is obstructed. It's a place where, frankly, he has no business being, but the voice of the Lord comes to him in the cave and speaks to him and moves him along, reminding him of some things.
One thing that bothers me about myself is how good I am at giving people advice that I myself struggle to take. That really bothers me. It's easier to preach most stuff than to practice it. You know how you have really good advice for your single friends. You know how you really have good advice for what they should do with their kids.
That's because your kids are five. When your kids are 15, you might be a little slower on the advice dispensing, and you might be a little bit higher on the please, Lord Jesus, come, prayer life, and you might be a little bit lower on the directions for other people and a little bit higher on the desperation for yourself, because there's something about when you're on the mountaintop and you can see things as they are, you don't have a lot of sympathy for people who are curled up under the covers, and then life hits.
So, I was imagining this scenario, and I was imagining that I could give Elijah advice. And this is stupid, because he's Hall of Fame, and I'm just like a 35-year-old preacher in Charlotte, so he probably doesn't want to know what I think, but I wanted to give Elijah some advice today, and I thought it might apply to you for the times in life where your perspective perspective is stuck staring at shadows and hearing echoes.
And I want to tell Elijah just three things, and these three things will be very simple, and they're things that we all know to do, but if you found yourself in a cave lately, a cave of condemnation, a cave of addiction, if you found yourself in a cave lately, thought patterns, and you know it's dark in there, and yet your eyes are so used to the darkness that you don't even know if you want to see the light anymore or if you could adjust to the light.
If you've been there lately in places where you feel like nobody cares about you, because that's what happened to Elijah. He started to feel very isolated and very alone, and we've never been in a time where we're reaching more for connection, yet finding none that is really satisfactory.
We've never been in a time more where we have the illusion of intimacy without having the real fruit of intimacy. We've never been in a time more where we're all trying to present a version of ourself that leaves us feeling empty because we know deep down that's not who we really are.
Chains and caves and shadows and echoes and mountains. It's a weird world, but there's some advice. There's some advice, and it starts with this. I would like to tell Elijah, number one, look again. Look again. Everybody say, look again.
Look Again – Persistence in Faith
Elijah knows this principle because after he called down fire on Mount Carmel and God showed up in a great way, he went up on the mountain. He went up on the mountain, and he went to the top. And the Scripture says in 1 Kings chapter 18, verse 41. Is it 41? I think it's 41.1 Kings 18, 41.
Here it comes. Elijah said to Ahab, go eat and drink, for there is the sound of a heavy rain. Everybody say, sound. Everybody say, sight. If you walk by faith, not by sight, you'll always hear something from God before you see a sign of it.
And you've got to develop a certain level of comfort to know that there's a space between sound and sight. It means that God will tell you he's going to make a change in your life, but he won't show you anything to demonstrate the change for a little while, because he doesn't want your faith to be in the change. He wants your faith to be in the promise.
That way, when the change is a little slow in coming, you'll know how to trust in him while you wait for it to come to pass. Am I preaching okay on my first Sunday back? And he said, go tell Ahab to get down the mountain quick. So Ahab went off to eat and drink, but Elijah climbed to the top of Carmel, bent down to the ground, and put his face between his knees.
Now, I thought about illustrating that, but I'd practiced it, and it was a little awkward, and so I'm not going to do it up here, but you can use your imagination. But it said that he told his servant, go look toward the sea. And the servant went, go look toward the sea. We're talking about perspective. We're talking about what are you seeing now?
He said, go look toward the sea. And the servant went up and looked, looked, and he came back with a response. There is nothing there. And seven times Elijah said, go back, look again. Go back, look again.
God's perspective requires persistence. To have God's perspective in the world we live in requires persistence. I just got done preaching to our students at student takeover camp. They were amazing. I'd rather preach to them than you guys any day. I preached to them for an hour and a half, and they were not bored. It was amazing.
And I actually preached from this same text to them. And what I was trying to get them to see is, you know, you go up on a mountaintop like where we were as students, and you sense God changing you. But then when you get back into your life, all the things that you thought were going to change, don't change right away.
And if you don't develop the habit to go back and look again, the first time that you measure your life as it is against your life as God said it would be, and the two don't match, you'll walk away. The first time you look at your situation as it is and your situation as God declares it can be, the first time you compare your defeat to the victory that you thought you were going to have, the first time you go look toward the sea and you're expecting a cloud and all you see is a clear sky and you need rain and you hear no response, you'll be tempted to think that what you saw wasn't real.
But real faith looks beneath the surface. Real faith knows that faith works. sometimes in dark places. Real faith knows that sometimes in order to see a change, having to see change, you have to stare through your situation to see it I don't know what you're looking at in your life today that doesn't look right, doesn't line up with the Word of God, but I can tell you something about perspective, I can tell you something about perseverance, I can tell you something about persistence.
Some of the greatest things you'll see God do in your life will be because. Some of the greatest things you'll see God do in your life will be things you are about to walk away from, but you came back just one more time to say, Now, wait a minute. Let me look at this differently, because I was about to give up on this marriage, but I think I see something I didn't see last time, so let me get a different perspective.
We always think God's presence is provided to fix our problems, but what if God's presence is more about fixing your perspective. so that you have a new way to see your problems? If I promised you today that God was going to fix all your problems the first time you went back and looked at them, I could make the church shout. We could have a good emotional experience, and we'd have 18,000 disappointed people when you go back home and everything you left looks just like it looked when you left it.
If you didn't make up your bed this morning, it ain't made by angels when you get back home from church. If you didn't put anything in the crockpot before church, it's not going to be a feast when you get home. It's faith, not sight. They're opposites. We always think that the opposite of faith is doubt. The opposite of faith scripturally is not doubt. It's sight.
So the opposite of faith is not that I have questions sometimes. The opposite of faith is that I accept the surface answer to my question. The opposite of faith is that I don't look through it. Touch somebody and say, look again. Look again, because sometimes you'll look at something in your life and it'll seem like there's no way out.
That's how Moses felt when he was standing at the Red Sea. He wanted to know, what do I do about these chariots? God spoke to Moses and said, it won't be the chariots that'll kill you. It'll be your complacency, because I can make a way through it if you look again.
Now, as long as you're looking back at the chariots that are chasing you, you won't see the way that I've chosen to make in front of you. But if you'll look again, I believe you'll see water starting to split. I believe you'll see a sign that I'm with you to deliver you. I believe if you'll look again, you'll see something that was there all along.
Look again. Touch somebody and say, take another look. That's for every single person. That guy that broke up with you, I know he didn't see much in you, but he needs to look again, because the next time he sees you, you're going to have such a confidence about who God made you to be that you know that you didn't need it to begin with.
And what he did, all he did is make you take another look within yourself to see, I am something. I am special. I am valuable. I do have something to offer. High five somebody. Say, look again. I know I don't look like much right now, but look again. I'm coming to the back. I'm coming to the very back of Blakeney to tell somebody who's been looking at something in your life that seemed hopeless, that God brought you here on this mountain and gave me this microphone to tell you, look again. Look again. Look again. Look again. Look again.
Look Around – You're Not as Alone as You Feel
And also, also, look around. You see it on the screen? I'm going to put it on the screen. Look around. Look at the screen. You see it? I see it. But they can't see it at the other campuses because the camera was facing the wrong way. See, they were looking back here. Come on. Come on back here.
And so they missed what was happening up there. See what I'm saying? See, because. he said that the presence of the Lord was about to pass by, but you'll miss it. if you're in the cave when you should be on the mountain. The cave is the place where the devil will chase you, because since he figured that he can't destroy you, the best he can hope for is to distract you. Absolutely.
Elijah had a lot of faith, and he had made up his mind to serve God. And so the devil couldn't destroy his faith, so the best he could do was distract him. So here's what he did. Since Elijah wasn't scared of Ahab, which was the king, and he stood face to face with the king, and since he was victorious in the big battle on the mountain, what the enemy had to do was distort his perspective with a distraction.
So the devil sent Jezebel, who was Ahab's wife. Somebody said that the last decision Ahab ever made was, I do. It was that kind of marriage, you know what I'm saying? I'm not talking about your marriage, I'm talking about Ahab and Jezebel.
And they sent a threat to Elijah. Jezebel sent a threat to Elijah and said, May the gods deal with me, be it ever so severely, if I don't kill you like you kill all my prophets on Mount Carmel. by this time tomorrow.
Elijah heard it, and he was afraid and ran for his life. It always puzzled me why it didn't scare him to go against 850 false prophets on Carmel, but one woman could run him into a cave. It always puzzled me. Until God told me, it's always the things you least expect.
It's always the little things, the thumb wars, the little things that destroy a marriage. It's always the little things that make you lose your confidence. Usually, you can recover from one big failure. It's just when the failure becomes a pattern of. little things, and it drives you into the cave.
But if I could share any advice with Elijah, I would remind him that while he was on his way running to that cave in 1 Kings 19, 5, and he laid down under this broom tree, and he prayed, and he asked God to kill him. Now, this is hilarious. You're running for your life, and you ask God to kill you. I don't want to die. God, kill me.
Have you ever felt like that? Not you. Just Elijah. He had an understanding that God was his protector, but that didn't prevent the pain from being real. It's not sometimes that you're scared you're going to lose. It's just that you're afraid to have to fight another day.
It's not sometimes that you're scared you're going to lose your job. It's the fact that you know you have to keep it, that you have to show up another day. It's not that your kids ran away from home. It's It's that they're still there.
If we put it on Periscope again, and I don't even know. I think I'm off Periscope now. I might still be going. I don't know. But if we put it on Periscope, this sermon, and probably everybody who's following this Periscope account is really annoyed right now, but I want to use it.
But it's all depending on our angle, what we see. If I'm on Periscope and all I show is this, you wouldn't get a real good sense for what's happening in this room. until I back up and look around and see. I mean, if you're logged on and that's all you saw, you probably log off.
But when I start painting the room and I show, you know, hundreds and hundreds of people who really love Jesus and who are hungry for his word and who came to church today to praise God and don't mind getting up on their feet for a moment and showing Periscope what it looks like when Elevation Church praises God, see, it's a different perspective.
Watch this. We're in the same place, but we just changed perspective. That's all that happened. So I would remind Elijah, I would say, remember when you were running through the wilderness and remember when you were laying under that tree and asking God to kill you? And look at 1 Kings 19, verse 5.
Look what God did. Look how good God is. Look how gracious he is, even when your perspective is off. Look how faithful his promise is. It says, He lay down and fell asleep, and all at once an angel touched him and said, Get up and eat some of this angel food cake I prepared for you.
And then he what? Come on, look at the screen. Don't look at me. He what? He looked where? He looked around. Some of you came into church looking down today. Looking down, looking back. Looking down, looking back. Looking down, looking back.
Some of us, all we ever do is look inside. We've got our lens so pointed on ourself. We've got our spirit stuck in selfie mode. And then we wonder why we're miserable. And then we wonder why we're limited. And then we wonder why we have no joy. And then we wonder why we have no peace.
God said, if you would flip the lens for a minute. Now the lighting crew is really upset, because they've been following me all over this auditorium, but they don't have a camera for this. What I'm about to do now, huh? Are you still here? I can't see you.
The fact that I can't see you isn't an indication that you left. It's just an indication I need to switch positions. Sometimes the fact that you can't sense God isn't an indication that he's not there. It's just an indication that you're hanging out in the wrong place.
Now, if you think I'm talking about a physical place, you missed the whole message, because the cave is not a physical location. It's a state of mind. The cave is a place of what? It's a place of comparison, where you measure yourself against somebody else.
And the problem with comparison is, when you're making your comparisons, you never have the full context. So you see somebody else, and you see what you think they have, but you don't know that they're barely making the payments for it. Some people take pictures and stuff that they tuck the tags in, because they have to take it back after they post it.
It's a puppet show. It's a puppet show. It's shadows and echoes, and it's killing our kids. It's killing our kids. You need to pray for me, because my kids are nine and seven and four, and I don't know how I'm going to raise them in this world of shadows and echoes and still get them to see what's real.
It makes me nervous that they're going to think that the echoes are the sound and the shadows are the sight. We compare ourselves, and sometimes we compare ourselves to people who have less than us, and then we get cocky. Sometimes we compare ourselves to people who have more than us, and we get condemned.
Sometimes we compare ourselves to people who we think are right there on our level, and we get complacent. But either way, we don't fulfill our calling, because we're in a cave of comparison. Comparison. The cookies you made your kids were fine until you went on Pinterest. It was fine, and now your kids' cookies don't have Elsa braids. They're going to be in therapy.
No, they're not. Your cookies were fine. It was a comparison. You know what will do you good every once in a while? Get around somebody who completely blows your mind. Because sometimes you can get feeling like you're a big deal or something like that, maybe.
As a preacher, there's this thing that I call preacher famous, and it's not real famous. It's just enough for preachers to think they're famous. It's like, I can't even go to Macaroni Grill. Yes, you can. Just go one town over. Nobody knows who you are there, okay? It's preachers.
Preachers are like that. I met a guy the other day who… He's not preacher famous. He's like real famous. Real, real, real famous. Famous. Everybody knows him. And he had listened to me preach, and we were talking afterwards, and he was about to go on vacation. And he was leaving the service to go to vacation.
I said, where are you going? He said, Turks and Caicos. And I felt kind of proud because I had just been there with Holly. We took a trip there, and I was proud of our trip, taking her places. And we stayed at a nice resort, and I was telling him about the resort, and I couldn't remember the name.
He said, where did you stay? I said, I don't remember the name. Holly, do you remember the name? She couldn't remember the name. I said, but it was nice, man. It was a nice resort. I said, where are you staying? He said, "'I don't remember the name of the island.'" No, no, you missed it.
While I was feeling cocky about the resort, he had rented the whole island. Touch somebody and say, "'You're not that big.'". But I want to tell you something else. You're not that small either. You're not that small either.
Because some of the people that you envy their stuff, they envy your satisfaction. Some of the people that you envy are actually miserable and wishing that they could be set free from their own cave. And as long as we're comparing, why don't we take a moment and get a real perspective?
The Scripture says that all of our righteousness is like filthy rags. Some of us get a real attitude about how holy we are, and we love to look down on other people who don't measure up to our standard. I have a feeling that if we could get one good glimpse of God, none of us would be running our mouths about anybody else's struggle.
I don't think any of us would be strutting. If we could see him as he is. But you won't see that in the cave. In the cave, all you'll think is that everybody else has something that you don't, and everybody else knows something that you don't, and everybody else, and everybody else.
And that's what Elijah did. He started talking to God. He said, "'I have been very zealous for the Lord God. They have torn down your altars.'". And he's right. He's right. He had been through a lot. But you know what God told Elijah? He said, "'Hey, I have 7,000 people who haven't bowed down to Baal.'"
In other words, you're never as alone as you think you are. But in the cave, you feel all alone. And then the anxiety starts in the cave. And then you start fearing outcomes that you can't control. And then you're so tired the next day because you stayed up all night, and now you don't have the energy to deal with real life because you were up all night watching The Puppet Show.
Look Ahead – God's Plan Is Still in Motion
Not everybody needs this today, but somebody really does because you've been chained in a cave. You've been chained up in a cave, and God wanted you to look what? Look ahead. That's my third letter, A. Look ahead.
Because while Elijah was in the cave fearing for his life, God had already worked out what he was worried about. You know, there are only a few biblical characters that did not die, just a few. Elijah is one of them. Could it be possible? I'm just asking that the thing that you're worried about is never even going to happen. unless you create it through your fear.
Could it be possible that God really has surrounded you with people who love you, but you're so scared they're going to leave you? Because instead of looking ahead, you're looking back. What are you seeing now? Now. That's the question.
Some of us aren't seeing possibilities because all we see is our past. And so God said, Elijah, go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of God. Go out and get a vision. See, God's voice will reach you in the cave, but his vision will only be revealed on the mountain.
God will always love you and he will always speak to you. But when you lose your perspective, you won't see his plan. And so all you can see when you're in the cave, all you can feel when you're in the cave, all you can hear when you're in the cave is the echoes of what went wrong and the pre-play of what might.
Plato said, if one man. ever broke free. from the chains in the cave and were led outside to the mouth of the cave and began to behold not a shadow of a tree but a real tree and not a shadow of a stream but a real stream and not a shadow of an animal but a real animal, he said, would it not take the man's eyes a little while to get used to the light?
And at first, would he not think there was something wrong with his eyes? And if he were led up a mountain and he were made to behold the sun which was the source of all life, would he not remember his comrades back in the cave? And would he not feel compelled to go back down the mountain and back into the cave and even though they laughed at him tell them the way things really were?
All this talk about caves and chains and chains in caves and I couldn't help but conclude. that our whole faith really revolves around what happened in a cave. Sorry, Plato. I know this was a little bit after your time but see, my whole reason that I can look again and have hope and my whole reason that I can look around and have joy and see potential and my whole reason that I can look ahead and see a future is because of what happened with one man in a cave.
They don't call it a cave they call it a tomb but if you ever see a model of it it actually looked like a cave that they put Jesus in. And they came to look for him and he said that he was going to rise from the dead but when they came to look for him his body was still there on Friday. and when they came to look for him on Saturday he was still there. the guards went to check and the body hadn't moved.
It wasn't until Sunday that the women showed up with some burial spices and they were looking real funny because the stone had been rolled away from the mouth of the cave and while they were looking inside this angel interrupted and said what are you doing here? you're looking for Jesus but you better look again because he's not here he's risen he went on ahead of you to Jerusalem just like he told you he was going to do
you're looking for the living amongst the dead but you better look again because he is not here he is risen Listen! Look again! Look around! They were staring as Jesus ascended into heaven, and the angel interrupted and said, Why are you standing looking into the sky? This same Jesus, in like manner that he came, will return again in all of his glory, but you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, to the ends of the earth.
What's he saying? Look around! And Jesus, who knew that his followers would take on the greatest challenge of their faith after that he was gone, and they would have to hold on to what they could not see, said, All authority on heaven and earth has been given to me, and surely I am with you always, watch this, even to the end of the age.
What's he saying? Look ahead! And although you don't know exactly what you will encounter along the way, you have my assurance that I will accompany you with every step. Look ahead with faith.
While you're in this cave crying, the voice of God is on the mountain calling, pointing you in a new direction. The chains have already been broken. Your perspective is the problem. The chains have already been broken. Now you're standing at the mouth of the cave, wondering, God, have you still got a plan for me?
God, can you still use me? You still there? You still love me? You still got this? Is anybody ever going to really love me? Scripture says, 1 Kings 19, it said, Elijah went from there. He went from there. There. What are you doing here, Elijah, when my plan is waiting for you there? There. There.
There's nothing to see here, Elijah. When you lived in the cave, all you see is the same sights. All you hear is just shadows and echoes. There's nothing to see here. Why would you stay in a place where there's nothing to see when there's so much more to see?
If you'll just peek your head up. I like how it says, Elijah went and stood at the mouth of the cave. He didn't even have the courage to come all the way out. He just peeked, and that's all God needed to remind him of the promise. That's all God needs is just catch a glimpse.
He's passing by. He's passing by. He's passing by. And the only way that you'll miss it is if you stay in the cave. It's a simple message, really. But I've spent so many nights in the cave, and I thought maybe that you had too.
I thought maybe it'd be helpful to call you out publicly. For every person who has been spending too much time in the cave, spending too much time in the memory, spending too much time in the regret, spending too much time in the fear, spending too much time in comparison, spending too much time in condemnation, if that's you, and the voice of God is calling, and you say, I need to catch a glimpse of God today.
I want you right now in God's presence to just lift your hands. Lift your hands right now if that's you. If the message. The Lord is passing by. Not always in the wind, not always in the quake, not always in the fire. It's not the pyrotechnic. Sometimes it's the still, small voice, the presence of God saying, come on out of that cave.
Come on out. Come on out. Come on out. Elisha's plowing in the field. I got the next step covered. Just go. Go back. Just go back. Still a small voice. Spirit of the living God calling you forth now. Illuminate, shining light in your darkness.
The cave's too dark. You can't get a perspective in there. You can't see it there, but he's still here. Come on out now. You've been there long enough. Stretch your hands high. Stretch them high. Stretch them as high as you can get them. And say, God, I'm coming.
Say it again. Say, God, I'm coming. I'm coming forward. I'm not looking backward. I'm coming forward. I'm not going backward. I'm looking ahead. I'm not looking back. And the Spirit of the Lord says to you this day, I am for you, not against you.
I know the plans I have for you. They're still my plans for you. Nothing's changed about my plans. Your pain didn't change my plans. Your failure didn't change my plans. Your doubts didn't change my plans. A person can't change my plans.
I still know what I called you to do. And I still call it finished. In Jesus' name.