My Life As A Follower (2 Of 6) Series

This message was originally given at Element3 Church in Tallahassee FL. To download this message’s corresponding PowerPoint, audio, and artistic elements for free please visit www.element3.org

Well good morning, I’m Pastor Mark and we are in a series called My Life. What we’re doing is looking at the phenomenon which is MySpace; a website where a lot of people go to connect as an extended metaphor for our life. On MySpace, there is something that people put a lot of time into and it’s called their profile. In that profile, you see heroes, people they’d like to meet, things they like to do, activities and all sorts of different things. I thought it would be beneficial if we looked at our life as followers of Christ, who we’re meant to be, as worshipers, as Christians, and look at our profile, where it currently is and look at the vision of the profile that God would have for our lives and see where the gap is, see if we can close that gap.

Last week, we looked at our life as worshippers, looking at where we are and where we should be. We looked at 1 Kings chapter 18. If you remember, we picked up with Elijah who was in the middle of a high stakes worship game with 450 prophets of Baal. What was going to happen is they said, “hey, whoever has the real God is going to show up and if your God shows up, we’ll be put to death and if our god shows up, then you’ll be put to death.” So, I mean, the stakes are pretty high. Imagine if you came here on Sunday morning and that was the stakes. You know, if God doesn’t show up, we’re hosed. So, luckily, we don’t have those kind of stakes happening. But, that was the situation that was going on when Elijah went up against the 450 prophets of Baal. When we looked at the scripture, at chapter 18, we discovered that Elijah did some interesting things that we could learn from.

The first one was, he expected God to show up. There was no doubt in his mind, he put his life on the line. He expected God to show up. We talked about how many times we go and approach our Father in Heaven. How many times do we come to church, if we are really, truly honest, and don’t expect God to show up? Then, we said, you know what that’s the first thing we need to do. We need to expect God to show up, that we’re going to have a personal encounter with Him.

The next thing that we saw is that Elijah was disciplined. He was disciplined in his preparation. We talked about how we should prepare our heart, bodies, minds and come and encounter the living God.

Finally, we looked at the difference between the prophets of Baal and Elijah. The prophets of Baal did not have worthy adoration; they were worshipping just an idol. What we need to always keep clear in our minds, is that God is the one true God and He needs to be in the center place in our lives. If we do these things, we will raise our profile as worshipers.

So today, we are going to be continuing on with the story of Elijah in chapter 19 and picking up right after this huge victory that he had, that God had shown up in a huge way. We are probably expecting what the next great thing that is going to happen in Elijah’s life, but we are going to find out that you know what, life doesn’t always go to plan. Before we jump into that though, we are going to pick up with Lindsay as she is working on her MySpace page and contemplating last week and looking forward to this week. So, join me.

(Drama Begins)

“Man, I guess I should know something about the person before I put them in my profile. Who knew I worked with the president of the Carol King fan club? That was embarrassing. I don’t know anything about her. Who really are my heroes? Hmm…I wonder if this has anything to do with what Pastor Mark was talking about last week at church. What was the phrase? Worthy adoration? Man, if I had to grade my heroes on worthiness, I don’t know who’d make it. So, heroes, my mom, and if anyone makes a mama’s girl joke, I’ll end you. Who knew one website could cause me so many problems. So, I’m a member of people who like the color green are stupid and should be put down? What’s the big deal? I keep getting all these nasty comments. Like this one, “my favorite color is green and I see you all the time and I thought we were friends. Guess not.” Who’s this from? P-Bomb? Oh, wow, huh. Guess that wasn’t such a good group to be a part of. Ouch.”