In this sermon, the speaker draws parallels between the courage and dedication of the prophet Elijah and the need for believers today to have faith and obedience. He emphasizes that God is present and working miracles in the present day, just as He did in the past. However, the speaker emphasizes that there are conditions that must be met in order to experience the power of God. He warns against longing for the past and encourages listeners to embrace the present and trust in God's provision.

I asked when the Lord would take up Elijah into heaven by whirlwind, that Elijah went with Elisha from Gilgal. And Elijah said unto Elisha, Elijah being the old prophet and Elisha being the young one, Elijah said, Tarrin, here I pray thee, for the Lord hath sent me to Bethel. And Elisha said unto him, As the Lord liveth and as thy soul liveth, I will not leave thee. So they went down to Bethel. And Elijah said unto him, Elisha, Tarrin, here I pray thee, for the Lord hath sent me to Jericho. And he said, As the Lord liveth and as thy soul liveth, I will not leave thee. So they came to Jordan. And Elijah said unto him, Tarrin, I pray thee here, for the Lord hath sent me to Jordan. And he said, As the Lord liveth and as thy soul liveth, I will not leave thee. And the two went on. And Elijah took his mantle and wrapped it together and smote the waters. And they were divided hither and thither, so that they too went over on dry ground. Came to pass, when they were gone over, that Elijah said unto Elisha, Ask what I shall do for thee before I be taken away from thee. And Elisha said, I pray thee, let a double portion of thy spirit be upon me. And he said, You have asked a hard thing. Nevertheless, if thou see me when I am taken from thee, it shall be so unto thee. But if not, it shall not be so. Came to pass, as they still went on and talked, that, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder. And Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven. And Elisha saw it, and he cried, My father, my father, the chariot of Israel, and the horsemen thereof. They saw him no more. And he took hold of his own clothes and rent them in two pieces. And he took up also the mantle of Elijah that fell from him, and went back and stood with the bank of Jordan. And he took the mantle of Elijah that fell from him, and smote the waters, and said, Where is the Lord, God of Elijah? And they also had smitten the waters, they parted hither and thither. And Elisha went over. And when the sons of the prophets, which were to view at Jericho, saw him, I wrote in a tutorial one time, said, Contempt never should be felt by a Christian. But I have an awful time living up to that one, because I have a tough time to keep from feeling contempt for these sons of the prophet. And when the sons of the prophets, which were to view, they just came to look on, at Jericho, saw him, they said, The spirit of Elijah doth rest on Elisha. And they came to meet him, and bowed themselves to the ground before him. Now I want to ask the question, and try to answer it, Where is Jehovah, God of Elijah? For that word, of course, is Jehovah there. Let me begin by saying to you that we're living in the old age of the world. We talk about the early times as being the olden days, but they were not the olden days, they were the young days. And we now live in the old age of the world. And the Church, along with others, shows symptoms of senility. I wish I didn't have to talk like this. I wish I could get up and preach sweetness and light, and yet I wonder if I do wish it. I don't think I'd want to bother preaching lilacs and old lace. But it's true, nevertheless, that the Church is in a state of senility. Now, I don't want anybody to feel hurt by what I say now, because senility just means advanced old age. And old age is something that you always have if you live long enough. It's that which comes to us if we don't die too soon. And the old folks, very old, have some marks. One of them is stiffness. That ability to stoop down quick and scoop up something that fell on the floor, that goes along when you're about middle age. And you've got so that you don't move just any way, you move in straight lines. That's because there isn't the limberness that used to be there. And that gets into our thinking. We think in straight lines, and it's very difficult to get us to think of anything new. That happens to churches. A new church can think of new things. But a church that's been around a long while, it's very difficult for an old church to do anything that wasn't done. And they'll continue to do something expensive and useless for 25 years, and never anybody dares to question it. They're stiff. It's old age. Then there's luquacity. That is, the tendency to talk an awful lot. It's not children that do all the talking. It's the old people, I've found, that rule. And the older the church gets, the more she talks. She can cure anything if you just talk long enough. If anything goes wrong, they meet and have a talk fest. And when they're all over, they go home, and nothing's been helped, but there's been a lot of words. And weakness is another mark of senility. We get very weak when we get old. I remember my 83-year-old grandmother, she was so weak she walked around slowly. And weakness in the church is an indication that we live in the old age of the church. And then inactivity is another. We do little as we can, make up for it by talk. And then the worst of all, it seems to me, is retrospection. Now, the first four we can't help, probably, at least three, but the last one we can in retrospection. A lot of churches are hindered by the presence of people who saw a better day once, and they can't get over it. They look back and say, but you should have heard so and so. No preacher's ever been able to do them any good since. There are a lot of people, I guess they're getting fewer and fewer, but there are still some that heard Dr. Simpson, and they've never been able to listen to anybody since, except with smiling patients. Hearing Dr. Simpson, that was the knee plus ultra beyond which there was no place to go. Well, with all due respect to that great man of God, he's in heaven, and he's not preaching on earth now. And the Lord God of A. B. Simpson is the Lord God of his descendants and of his spiritual descendants, and retrospection won't do us any good. I remember in a certain church once, and I won't tell you where it was, but I told them that they had pictures of the big meetings that they'd had years gone by, and I told them that I think that if I'd been there about a week, I saw what was wrong, and I told them that I think that they ought to send for the Salvation Army truck and come and get rid of a lot of those pictures. Say, give them the frames. Tell them, take the pictures out and just use the frames. You can have them, use them, sell them again. And start all over and begin to look ahead and not back. Retrospect, you people who study Latin know retro means back, and spect means I see, and so you look back, always looking back. The Lord had wanted you to look back, to put your eyes in the back of your head. But the church of Christ is retrospective now. We gaze back on what we call a golden age, where giants walked on the earth. And they did walk on the earth in the early days, and we seem like midgets compared with some of the Bible heroes, such a contrast between us and them that we are led to question whether we really are Christians at all or not. They saw God, and we seem to see only the reflection or the picture of God. They drank of the pure water that flowed from the hills of heaven, and we drink bottled water that's stale. And they heard music, and we hear only the echo of it. But we can't go back. Now that's what I wanted to tell you. You can't go back. Don't anybody here say, I wish we could go back, too. If you remember when you do that, you shackle yourself and you put a 100-pound ball and chain on your leg when you say, I wish we could go back, too. I've never been guilty of thinking that I wanted to go back. I wouldn't go back five minutes if I could help it. I don't believe that it would do me any good to go back. I don't think so. I think when I read the sweet story of old, when Jesus was here among men, how he called the children his lambs to his fold, I should like to have been with him then. Well, now nobody loves children any more than I do. It's positive hysteria with me. But on the other hand, I wouldn't go back there. And for all the world, I'd rather live now than to live in the hour when Jesus put his hands on the head of the babies. Nineteen hundred terrible, bloody, wonderful years have intervened between those two periods, and I'd rather take now than then. And I don't want to go back to Wesleyan or Finney. I don't want to go back to Moody. I don't want to go back at all. This is our day if we know what to do with it. We have to be taught by the unbelieving philosophers and the great Ralph Waldo Emerson said, all times are good times if you know what to do with them. And he knew what we Christians don't seem to know. We sniffle over a yesterday, and oftentimes those yesterdays weren't really as great as they might have been. We just hear the best. You read a book and you read the best things that happened in those days. You don't read the worst things. You could select certain things now and write about them and get the impression that this was a wonderful world. I remember once a magazine came to the United States, came to my office from somewhere in England, London, Princeton, London. And it had a great, roaring article in it about the wonderful revivals that were sweeping America. Well, I don't write to editors as a rule, so I didn't write what I felt like writing. I just felt like writing over there and saying, dear brother, where? I'm living here. Where? Where are they? They'd been hearing little spotty talks about this or that, or some exuberant evangelist had been sending back airmail letters, and they got the idea that America was ablaze with revival. America hasn't been ablaze with revival in my generation, I'll tell you that. Well, some of those times that used to be, actually weren't. And even if they were, you can't go back to them. We stand today in a new age, and you can't call in any glories that might have been, any artificial means. By calling your church a Bible name, you can't bring the Bible glory. By addressing, as you think, like Bible Christians, you can't have the Bible glory, for the Bible glory did not lie in the way they dressed. It was an interior glow. And God never looks at clothes anyhow, so you can have the interior power. Anything God ever did for anybody, God will do for anybody else. And any blessing that God gave to Elijah or Abraham, God will give to John and Mary right now in 1961. Well, we stand at the Jordan as Elisha stood at the Jordan. Our Jordan is a different Jordan, and I suppose that each generation and maybe each country and each city and even each church has its own Jordan. The Jordan that's there, turbulent and swift and determined and muddy, and it doesn't want to part. But Elijah parted it. He took his mantle and gave it a fling, and in the name of the Lord, the Jordan parted. Now we have our Jordans. We have them here. I'm not satisfied here at all. That is, I love the people and I love to preach, but I think that we ought to be on the moving. I think we ought to be moving. I think that there ought to be revival bursting out here and there. I think there ought to be more people at prayer meeting. I think there ought to be less worldliness in the church. I think there ought to be more devotion and more worship and more of God and more fire. I think we ought to have it, and I think we can have it, and I think you want it. But we're not getting it. Why? Well, there's Jordan. Jordan's rolling between. There shines the glory for this church, for us. But Jordan rolls between, and we say, Where is the Lord God of Elijah? Elijah was here. If we could only get Elijah, he could roll back the river and we could go across. Elijah's God is here, and we don't need Elijah. We don't need Elijah this morning. We couldn't use Elijah. If we could use him, God would send him. God's working with what he has, not with the men who he's taken to heaven. Well, I'd like to ask you the question, Who is the Lord God of Elijah? I really don't have time to preach this fully, but I'll skip over it. Who is this Lord God of Elijah? If you don't know who God is and what God's like, your faith will never mount up. That's why I'm preaching this series of sermons Sunday nights. Now, this God of Elijah is a God who manifests himself. And I want you to notice here that God manifested himself to Elijah and to the people under Elijah's direction. And the Lord God was tapping on the window all the time, trying to get through and trying to manifest himself. He manifested himself in fire, sure, but he manifested himself in a still, small voice, too. And he manifested himself in providence and in prayer. God is ready to manifest himself. By manifest means to show himself. He's ready to take the veil away from himself and shine through upon his church, ready to do that. He's the God who manifests himself, and he is the God who works miracles. Now, I believe this with all my heart. I am not a miracle monger, and I do not believe we ever ought to announce we're going to have a miracle night. God works miracles, and you can't tell God what to do. If you have faith and you're in humility, trust God will work miracles when he needs to. And a miracle, as I have said, is an event divinely caused, an event in nature that does not have natural causes. An event, while it is not contrary to nature, nevertheless rises above nature because the source is in God. And God did miracles. Look at the widow's oil there, and meal, and how God kept that thing going, kept one little cruise of oil and one little barrel of meal going for a whole year or two years while she fed her family and the strange men of God that had come among them. And when the boy died, Elijah raised him again from the dead. There was an atheist once down in, I think, somewhere in Alabama, Birmingham, Alabama. He was going to have a, or was perhaps at that time, having some sort of meeting in which he and a preacher were debating. And he said this, this atheist said, and out of the mouths of babes and fools sometimes truth flows. And this atheist said this, he said, my esteemed opponent believes that God works miracles. Well, he said, I've got this to say to him and to you. If Christianity is to survive, God had better work miracles. Nobody said a truer thing than that. If Christianity is going to survive, God had better work miracles. Only he meant it in a wrong way, but I mean it in a right way. And if Christianity is going to survive, God had better work miracles. And we take our own society, which is only one branch of the great church of Christ, one little twig of the great church of Christ, and if we're going to continue to do the work that we've been set to do, God will have to do some miracles. When I came into the alliance many years ago, I used to hear the missionaries use an expression. They said, the doors are not only open, behold, I sit before you an open door. The doors are not only open, they've been torn off of their hinges. Somebody found those doors and put them back on their hinges again. And they're almost all either closed or closing. In New York, I heard sitting there listening to the reports, I heard only two weeks ago, of one door after another, one place they can't get visas. They don't say missionaries can't come, they just don't give them visas. And so they sit home and wait. And without a visa, they can't go. And if they don't want them, they don't give them visas, and that settles it. In these terrible words, we have thus and thus preparation made. If we have to evacuate this field, we'll do this and we'll do this. I hate those terrible words. If we have to evacuate this field, Laos, Laos as they say over the radio, is one of the fields. Congo could be another. Vietnam, South, could be another. It's becoming more difficult all the time to get permission to go to these countries. Some are trying it by going as teachers or mechanics or something else and then preaching the gospel. I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't go under false pretense anywhere in the world. I would go if I were a doctor as a medical missionary. I would go if I were a builder as a missionary builder. To go for one thing and do another seems to be to be a little false, and yet some are trying. I don't mean in the alliance, but we're going to have to pray and keep on praying. Where's the Lord God of Elijah? He's the God who works miracles, that's who he is. And he's the God of a father heart. Elijah was a stern, tough man, but Elijah's God was a God with a father heart. Remember when Elijah was in great straits, the Lord said to him, Elijah, go down to the brook, and I'll cause the water of the brook to flow by, and you drink of the brook. And he said, I'll cause the ravens to bring you meat. Now, the unbelievers have had an awful time with those ravens, but I can hear the flap of raven wings when I pray. And in my earlier life, I and my wife and I had to live on what the ravens had, the West Virginia accent. But they brought what we needed, nevertheless. So I'm not smiling at the ravens, I believe in them. He's the God and father with a father's heart. Later on, when Elijah was, the brook dried up, Elijah said, there'll be no rain. But he forgot if there's no rain, there'd be no brook. So later on, when it hadn't rained, the brook dried up. And Elijah was in an awful heat. He took his little tin cup one morning after sleeping under a bush and started for the water. And when he got down there, all he saw was a red lizard looking out on a perfectly dry, sandy bottom of the little brook. And Elijah said, my God, the water's gone. God said, what did you expect? You said there'd be no rain, no rain, no brook. But he said, I've taken care of it. So he sent him over to Zarephath to a widow woman. Widow woman, it says. Not a widow, widow woman. Harpers wouldn't let that stand, I know. And then the alliance witness would take the word woman out of there. And if the writer would want to know why, we'd say, well, she had to be a woman to be a widow. Why put widow woman in? But that's what the scripture says, a widow woman. And she was there, and she had a boy, and she just had two sticks left to make a fire, and just enough for one pancake. A little oil on it. Said, we're going to eat this, and after that, nothing will die. And Elijah said, no, no, I'm serving a God. And he told me that if you'd look after me, he'll take care of you. And he did. For two or three years he did, or at least two years. And then you remember those cakes that the angel made for Elijah. I've been delighted with this. I've mentioned this once before here, but I'll repeat it now. That here was Elijah, and he'd lost his courage temporarily. He had courage. He was a very courageous man. But that woman, Jezebel, she must have been the terror. Because when she sent word, he lit out. He wasn't afraid of her husband. He said, I stand before the Lord. But when Jezebel started to form, Elijah forgot that he stood before the Lord, and so he started for the mountains. And he was going to hold up where it was safe. And the Lord said to an angel now, Elijah, my boy, he's down there, and he's in bad shape. He's under a juniper tree, and he's lost heart, and he's discouraged, and blue, and frightened, and wants to die. And he said, he's my servant, and he loves me, and he has faith, and I can't overlook him. You go bake him some cakes. Sent an angel, mind you, to bake cakes for a prophet. Oh, God is a very tender, loving God, and we ought to keep that in mind. That's who the Lord God of Elijah is. He's God the Father Almighty, who manifests himself to his people, either inwardly or by miracles and whirlwinds. Even one way or another is necessary. That's the way God does it. Now where is the Lord God of Elijah? And I'd like to say the Lord God of Elijah is very near. He's very near, he's here now, and he's here waiting for certain of us men and women to meet certain conditions. Let me name them for you. Let me say to you that God is here today as he was here then, and that he was there then, and that there is nothing, nothing to prevent us from seeing God do anything now that he did then where it's needed to be done. The Lord God of Elijah is here waiting for somebody as fearless as Elijah was. Elijah was a fearless man, though we admit, as I've explained, that he had that one little breakdown there. Nowadays they'd say he had a nervous breakdown, but that wasn't a nervous breakdown, he was just scared. That woman came for him, and he lit out. Well, apart from that, he was a fearless man of great courage. And there's danger today, and it takes a lot of courage, it took a lot of courage to have that Mount Carmel experience, and it takes a lot of courage to stand out. Trying to get along with each other and never have any trouble and never get in trouble always weakens us. There were several men. There was this prophet, what was his name? Obadiah. Obadiah, and he had hundreds of prophets, and he had them hidden in a cave. Here they were hidden in a cave. Can you imagine hidden in a cave in the day when Jezebel was on the loose, and Ahab the wickedest king that had been since Jeroboam? And here were men hiding away in a cave, and only one fellow had the courage to go up and down the country, and that was Elijah. A hundred prophets, each in his own right, had got on him the spirit of Elijah, they'd have shaken Israel to a foundation, they would have frightened Jezebel back to Zidon where she belonged. And Ahab would have crawled in a hole somewhere and pulled it in after him, and the power of God would have leaped out on Israel. But here they were hiding. It takes some courage, it takes some courage, brethren. I sometimes say some pretty sharp things about preachers, and I say it to preachers, I say it to them in conferences. But if there's any one thing I don't like, it's a timid preacher, a man who's afraid of his board, and afraid of the deacons, and afraid of the elders, and afraid of his district superintendent, and afraid of everything, and afraid of everybody. Poor little tabby cat, with his claws trimmed, and he has to keep on everybody's good side in order to have any peace of mind at all. And they give him a degree, and after a while he becomes a doctor. He was a reverend scaredy cat to begin with, and when he comes he turns out to be a doctor scaredy cat, but he's a scared cat nevertheless. God help him and forgive him, and give him something of the courage of Elijah. Elijah had courage, and we've always had to have men of courage down the years. It takes a lot of courage, my brother, to stand for God in an hour like this, to stand for God among men, to be a son of God among the sons of men, to be a citizen of heaven among the citizens of the earth, and to be a good man in a bad world, and to have faith in a world of unbelief, and to want to be good in a world that loves to be bad. It takes courage, and all we're God's waiting on is something of the fearlessness of the man Elijah and the consecration of Elijah. Boy, that sounds trite, I know, and commonplace, but Elijah was a consecrated man. They use the word dedicated now. They say he's a dedicated man, and by that they mean he's dedicated to politics or science or something else. But we believe that dedication ought to be to God, and if God will find people completely dedicated to him, completely consecrated, you know I'm going to stand here and prophesy. I don't often do it, but I'm going to break down a little and prophesy. Unless God has plans that I don't know anything about, Ken Opperman is going to be an outstanding leader. Watch him. I only met him twice, New York and in here. But there's a boy God's on, and he's there to have the courage to see things in a new way and try something new on the field. And the board hasn't approved it yet, the New York board, and I sneaked around Wednesday night and I said, Ken, if you'll write that up, I'll print it. Whether the board sees it or not, I'll print it if you'll write it up, and I'll let the public get a hold of it, for that's the way to do things, you know. If you get to the public, you're all right. So there's a consecrated man, there's a dedicated man, and a man that hasn't lost his mind. He reminds me a little bit of the younger Jaffrey, when Jaffrey stood up and dared to face up to the world and dared. After he'd got there, they said, go ahead. That's the way it always is, you know. Boards and committees are usually monkeying around two or three months behind, and the prophets of God and the men who have courage to dare and who are dedicated, they see the vision. And then later on, the board comes linting along behind with their report under their arm, you know, 14 pages of mimeographed sheets saying, we did it. Yes, we did it all right. Oh, God help me if they ever hear this, that I hope the tape doesn't get to New York. Well, then there's a man as obedient as Elijah was. You notice that Elijah was an obedient man. It says here that he went and did according to the word of the Lord. And every time God spoke to him, he went and did according to the word of the Lord. And because he went and did according to the word of the Lord, God did according to the word of Elijah. And the two of them worked together on things. Well, God said, Elijah, do this. He ran and did it, and then he said, oh God, do this. And God ran and did it. God and Elijah worked together, because Elijah listened to the word of the Lord, the Lord listened to the word of Elijah. God's looking for obedient people. Obedient, I mean positively obedient, not passively obedient only. I think there are some songs that we ought to throw out and never sing again. I'm compiling a book now which I hope to call the Golden Treasury of Devotional Verse, and I'm going to throw all passive hymns out. I don't believe in passivity in the kingdom of God. There have been more people slowed down and came to a rusty stop and never have gotten started by singing, Have thine own way, Lord, have thine own way. That's passivity personified. And brother, you can sit disobedient and lazy and no good and sing every Sunday morning, Have thine own way, Lord, have thine own way. God can't have his own way unless you get up and do what he tells you to do. God having his way in your life means when God says, Do something, you do it. You who have been, somebody congratulated me on never raising my voice, and here I've done business. You that have been in the military service, you know, the officer says, Do something, march. You don't get on your knees and say, Have thine own way, officer, have thine own way. You'll go and do it. And yet the Church of Christ is cursed with the passive obedience, disobedience versus disobedience, and we sing, Have thine own way, have thine own way. Never do a thing. You've got to be obedient. If the Lord wants you to give a certain amount of money, write a check. Don't hug your checkbook to your chest and sing, Have thine own way, Lord, write your check. And if God wants you to go to a prayer meeting, don't kick your shoes off, put on your slippers and sing, Have thine own way. Go to a prayer meeting, and if it's raining, go anyhow. God's waiting for somebody as obedient as Elijah was. He'll find them. He's finding them. I have hope and courage. I believe he's finding them, and as full of faith as Elijah. Here was a man of faith. He had the kind of faith that was vital. It was sink or swim faith. A lot of people have the kind of faith that Martha had. She said, Yes, I know, Lord, he'll rise in the last day. And the Lord said, That's not the kind of faith that works. I want you to believe he'll rise now, right now. So we're looking for the rose-bordered way. Elijah took the tough, vital way of faith and obedience, and he put himself, as they say, on the spot. Dr. R. R. Brown talks about living hazardously, and the old man's done it, God bless him. I think he gets done, and it turns out, in the course of a year, he is utterly imperishable. Everywhere. An old fellow, seventy-what-is-it, five years old, and he jumps in an airplane and starts off for Peru or somewhere, you know. I won't even go. Look at me. I'm a lot younger than that. Well, anyhow, it takes faith, and it takes a hazardous faith. And then lastly, God's looking. And he prayed again. Notice that. He prayed again. He lived for prayer, and he commanded in prayer, and he claimed from prayer. Shall we sit down and say, Where's the Lord God of Elijah? Mournfully, as we sing, Where are the good old days? No. We don't want the good old days. We want the God of the good old days. They're electric outlets, we call them. Now, they're 120 volts, if it's the same here as it is in the States. 120 volts there. And you have power there, quiet, very quiet, but there's power there that will work your organ, that will work your vacuum cleaner, keep your radio on, cook your meals, shave with it, run your power mower. It's all there, but it just has to have a condition that there's a two-prong, two little things. You plug that down into the source, and things begin to hum. You say, But I don't hear any electricity. Of course you don't hear it. I don't see it. Of course nobody ever saw it. It's there. But how do you know it's there? I know because if I meet the conditions, I get the power. And so there are conditions to be met. God Almighty is here now. The Lord God of Elijah is our God today. He's the God and Father of Jesus Christ. He's the God who worked miracles in 1961, and certainly as he did in 1008 B.C. But there must be conditions met, faith and obedience. Faith and obedience. Plug them into the mighty source, and you will have the power that Elijah had. Where is the Lord God of Elijah? He's here waiting, waiting for a fearless people and a consecrated people and obedient people and faith-filled people, prayerful people. When he finds them, he'll begin to do for them what he did for other days and people in other days. Shall we then rise and dare to say, O Lord God, help us? We'll not settle down and take yesterday for the example of what tomorrow is to be, but we'll stop talking about yesterday and begin talking about the possibilities of bringing yesterday into our tomorrows. You'd like to see God do something for Avenue Road Church, wouldn't you? I would. I don't say it because I'm here. I'd like to see God do an unusual thing for this church. I'd like to see some of you dear old dried-up Christians that have been sitting around twiddling your blessed little thumbs for years. I'd like to see you shaken till your eyes shine with the glory of God. Doubters may just say, well, I didn't believe it. And they say, they place the church. But here we are, strategically located. Get here at the minimum of trouble from everywhere. Why can't we rise and claim the power of the Lord God of Elijah to make this a spiritual energy that'll touch and affect and influence the whole city? I believe it can be done. Amen? Let us sing. What's that number?