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We shall continue in worship by giving attention to the reading of God's Word, the first book of Kings, the 19th chapter, beginning at the verse which is numbered 1. Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done and how he had slain all the prophets with the sword. Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah saying, "So may

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the gods do to me and more also if I do not make your life as the life of one of them by this time tomorrow." Then he was afraid and he arose and went for his life and came to Beersheba, which belongs to Judah, and left his servant there. But he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness and came and sat down under a

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broom tree and he asked that he might die saying, "It is enough now, O Lord, take away my life for I am no better than my father's." And he lay down and slept under a broom tree and behold an angel touched him and said to him, "Arise and eat." And he looked and behold there was at his head a cake baked on hot stones and a jar of

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water and he ate and drank and lay down again. And the angel of the Lord came a second time and touched him and said, "Arise and eat else the journey will be too great for you." And he arose and ate and drank and went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb, the Mount of God. And there he

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came to a cave and lodged there and behold the word of the Lord came to him and he said to him, "What are you doing here, Elijah?" And he said, "I have been very jealous for the Lord, the God of hosts, for the people of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down by altars, and slain by prophets with the

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sword. And I, even I, only am left and they seek my life to take it away." And God said, "Go forth and stand upon the mount before the Lord." And behold the Lord passed by and a great and strong wind rent the mountains and broken pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. And after the

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wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire a still small voice. And when Elijah heard it he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. And behold there came a voice to

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him and said, "What are you doing here, Elijah?" And he said, "I have been very jealous for the Lord, the God of hosts, for the people of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down by altars, and slain by prophets with the sword. And I, even I, only am left and they seek my life to take it away." And the Lord said

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to him, "Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus and when you arrive you will anoint Haziel to be king over Syria. And Jehu the son of Nemshi you shall anoint to be king over Israel. And Elisha the son of Shaphat of Abel Menholah you shall anoint to be prophet in your place. And him who escapes from

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the sword of Haziel shall Jehu slay. And him who escapes from the sword of Jehu shall Elisha slay. Yet I will leave 7,000 in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth that has not kissed him." And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word. Amen. Pray with me. In the

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name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. I was standing in the baggage examination line in Chicago's O'Hare Airport and I could see through a glass window to a display of books for sale in a book and magazine shop there. The title of one of the books caught my attention.

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From where I stood I could not see the name of the author and I could not get to the book so I have no idea as to its precise subject and style. But I haven't been able to forget the title. The title of the volume was this, "On Falling from Cloud Nine and Other High Places." I suppose that the book concerns those

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circumstances in which we find ourselves enjoying a great victory or a moment of triumph or a time of success and then suddenly we discover that the victory has turned into defeat, that the triumph has become a loss, and that success has become instead despair. If that's what the book is about, then it

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concerns a problem very common in our time, a problem which most people call burnout. Now I like that word burnout. It's a very suggestive word. It says to us that something which is bright and warm and satisfying has become dull and dark, cold, not warming, ash. And those kinds of circumstances happen to all of

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us. And if the experts are to be trusted, it is even true to note that those kinds of burnout situations are particularly common in the lives of those who seek to help other people, those who give as much as they can to as many as they can for as long as they can, know what it is to become crushingly

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fatigued and overwhelmingly disillusioned. They know what it is to fall from cloud nine and other lofty places. Now Elijah was a man just like that. He was a person of great courage. He's one of the most rugged personalities in all of the Old Testament. There wasn't him no fear at all. He would not

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capitulate to evil. He would not keep silent even when his king ordered him so to do. And you know the story of how he challenged the prophets of a false religion to a kind of spiritual Super Bowl atop Mount Carmel and how he said to the people, "How long will you limp between two opinions? If the Lord be God,

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then follow him, and if Baal be God, then follow him." And you know the rest of the story, how the fire of God came down and drove the false prophets to death. It was a great victory for God and the forces of evil were put into flight. But then Jezebel, the wicked queen of the land, got word about what had happened and she

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sent a messenger to Elijah and the message he carried was this, "By tomorrow you're going to be as dead as the prophets of my religion are." And for some reason that was the straw that broke Elijah's back. He'd worked so long, he put so much of himself into this conflict, and now he felt the battle had been won.

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And suddenly he discovers it hasn't been won at all, that in fact a new chapter of the war is just ahead and it's too much for him. He burns out. And all the classic symptoms of burnout are to be seen in the way he responds. First of all, he is physically and mentally exhausted. Now it's a dangerous thing when physical

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and mental exhaustion join together in a life. It's very hard to wear out your body. You know, if you take a muscle and use it again and again, you don't wear it out, you actually make it stronger. Studies have been made in which men have been put into a hypnotic state and then asked to do a particular exercise and

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they can do it on and on almost endlessly. That same man brought out of that state and told that he's very tired will find that he's almost unable to do the exercise at all. What goes on in our minds influences what goes on in our bodies, and when both our minds and our bodies are tired, we're in trouble. Now

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how this mind influences this body can be demonstrated in a thousand ways, but I'm sure you've seen the circumstance of the young fellow who comes home from working on a summer's day and he's very tired because it's been very hot, and he sits down on the back porch and he's drinking a glass of lemonade and his

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father arrives and his dad says, "Now you're going to have to mow the lawn. You were supposed to do it yesterday and you forgot, so it has to be done today." And the boy looks at his dad and he says, "Pop, I can't do it. I'm just so tired. I'm so utterly bushed. I just don't have anything left in me. I've sweat all my

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energy out. I just can't do it, dad." And his father said, "Well, I'm sure if you put yourself to it, you can do it, so get started." So the boy gets started and you wonder whether he's holding up the lawnmower or the lawnmower is holding up the boy, moving very, very slowly. And then suddenly into the driveway comes a

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vision of loveliness who's 16 years old, and she has a tennis racket under her arm, and she says, "Jack, let's go and play tennis." And the lawn gets done lickety- split and he grabs his racket and goes off to the game and stays out half the night. It's all you see in the combination of the attitude of the mind

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and the physical exhaustion. When the mind told him to go on, he could go on, but when the mind is as tired as the body is, when you're worn out as Elijah was, that's a dangerous situation. Elijah had come out of the contest on Carmel and then according to the Scriptures had run before the chariot of King Hayab all

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the way back to the capital city. Imagine that, running before a horse-drawn chariot. So exhilarated, you see. So thrilled by the victory, living in such a euphoric situation that he could do that. You've had that experience of doing something and you look back on it later and you say, "I wonder how I was able to

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do that." Well, when your mind leads you to do those kinds of things, even when the body is tired, you can do them. But when the mind is tired and the body is tired, beware. For then there's a price to be paid. We are not supermen and we are not superwomen. We are not able to leap tall buildings at a single bound. There

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comes a time when your body and mind are tired that you'll fall from cloud nine. Another thing to be seen in Elijah was this, he was afraid. We read in the third verse, "He was afraid and ran for his life." I think all of us know how attitudes determine what we see. As a matter of fact, we don't see things as they are, we

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see things as we are. For example, I've gone through a period of considerable fear myself in the last few weeks. I was very anxious that we have a wonderful Christmas here at First Church and that's very difficult when you're in a church for your first time at Christmas. You do not know what the expectations of

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the people are. You try to meet those expectations as best you can, but it is difficult. And to add to the difficulty this year, we received a number of threatening calls that we were to be attacked by the same people who attacked our sister congregation in Shadyside. And I was very concerned about this. I'm the

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shepherd of this flock. We've got some dear children in this church. We've got some very dear older people. I did not want them to be confronted with this kind of thing. And so we had plainclothes officers here for our worship services and I found myself jumping every time I saw a shadow in a corner. I became so

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focused on this that I saw things to frighten me everywhere. Last Sunday morning when I was preaching at just about this time, some people came up to the back door of the church. They're glass doors, you can see through them. And they stood there in the doorway and they looked through at me and then they began

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to make silly signs and finally obscene gestures. And I looked around and I was hoping there might be some usher would see them, but the ushers were also interested in what I was saying if they weren't looking at what was going on behind them. And I thought, well maybe I should interrupt what I'm saying, but I

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realized we were on the radio and they would not understand. And so I kept on going, but I became very jumpy inside. Now that kind of thing you see when you begin to overreact to situations, that's a factor in burnout. And that's what we see happening in Elijah. This man who before was not afraid of

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anything, now was filled with fear. Another thing we see in Elijah and it's typical of burned-out people is this, frustration which arises out of impatience. You see, Elijah expected the battle on Carmel to settle things. He had planned that this would be the decisive event and after this the land would be

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purified and God's name would be honored and held up. But things did not pan out the way he had planned them out. That often happens to us. We like things to close in life. We like things to come to a proper conclusion. My friend Ernie Campbell pointed out to me once that that's the reason we enjoy sporting

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events so much. We all know once the game starts that at a certain time it's going to be over. And there's going to be a winning team and there's going to be a losing team and there's going to be a winning pitcher and there's going to be a losing pitcher. And we like that and we'd like our lives to run like that, but

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the fact of the matter is that our lives are full of contradictions and upsetting circumstances and interruptions and in any case God does not move in accordance with our date book or our calendar. And there are ambiguities and deferrals and there are postponements and there are put-aside

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judgments which happen and all of these things have a tendency to wear us down. Elijah, it says in verse 6, says, "Take away my life. It is better that I not live." So overwhelmed, you see, by the fact that things were not happening as he had hoped and prayed they would that he became frustrated and filled with

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impatience. It's almost invariably a factor in burnout. And the other thing that we see in Elijah is a great amount of self-pity. In verse 10 he prays, "O Lord, I have been jealous for your name, but your people have forsaken your covenant. They have broken down your altars. They have slain your prophets so that I, even I,

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only, am left. And they seek my life to take it away." Now the fact of the matter is, as we find later in the story, there were still 7,000 people in Israel who stood on the same side with Elijah. But he was so overwhelmed by what had happened to him that he wallows in self-pity. His life becomes a

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kind of continued lament, "Even I, alone, am left." That happens to you when you're falling from cloud nine. Alexander Dumas in The Three Musketeers has one chapter, the title of which he has taken from a French proverb which goes, "At night all cats are gray." Now that's true. You know how it is when it becomes dark. You can't

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tell the difference between chalk and cheese, between wine and water, between brass and gold, between a weed and a flower, sometimes between a friend and a foe, oft times in battle times, in darkness. One warship, for example, will fire at one of its own sister ships. Artillery will pound its own troops. When

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we become darkened, when our spirits are shadowed, we become confused. When we enter into the dark night of the soul, when we begin to think, "I, even I, only am left and they seek to take away my life." When life becomes gray, when there's no brightness in it at all, then we're burning out. What happened to Elijah

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often happens to us. We become mentally and physically exhausted. We become too much focused on our fears. We're frustrated because of our impatience and we wallow in self-pity. And that's burning. That's falling from cloud nine or whatever other lofty place has been yours. But thanks be to God, he speaks to

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such times and circumstances. The gospel is that God has a prescription for that kind of problem. Look at what he does for Elijah. The first thing he does is, he says to him, "Get some rest and some good food." It's in verses 5 and 6. He causes Elijah to fall asleep under a broom tree. And when he wakens, there's some food

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there, nourishing, simple food for him to eat. And then he repeats that process. It's very interesting that the first loving counsel that Elijah receives from his father God is the same loving counsel that we might have heard from our earthly fathers at one time or another. "Look, what you need is a good

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night's sleep and some good food." You see, our bodies are remarkably resilient. I hope you won't mind this comparison, but I often think of our bodies in terms of crown vetch. Now you know what crown vetch is. That's that vine that we imported from Japan to use on our embankments to keep the weeds from

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growing up. The stuff is virtually unstoppable. I mean, it can freeze right down to its roots, but as soon as the spring sun comes out, it starts to blossom again. You can burn it out, you can dig it out, you can root it out, you can try to cover it up, and if one sprig is still alive, it will go on. There's a

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lot of bounce to the ounce in crown vetch. And that same bounce to the ounce is to be found in us. Jesus says to his disciples in Mark 6, "Come away by yourselves for a while." He's relying, you see, on this ability that the body has to reassert itself, if you'll just give it a little time to do so. Now the second

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thing that God says to Elijah is, "Not only do you need some good rest, some good sleep, and some good food, but you also need to take a break, more than a night's sleep. You need a time of vacation." And in verse 8 he spells out this vacation for Elijah, it's going to be 40 days. Now all of us aren't in a

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position to take 40 days off, but every one of us does have the capacity to build some kind of pattern of alternation into our lives, and we need to do that. We need at times to get away from what we're doing. I'm going to say something very plainly here, it may shock you a bit, but I mean it quite seriously.

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Never forget the fact that our Lord Jesus sometimes got so sick and tired of the tired and the sick, that he simply got in a boat and rode away. The poise and the power in Jesus, the strength and the certainty that were his, were in part his because he did not always lose himself in the purposes of God so that

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he was without contact with the presence of God. And that's what happens to us. It's a very easy trap to fall into. We get to giving ourselves so diligently to very good and worthwhile things, that soon we find ourselves to be fatigued, we find ourselves to be impatient, irritable, our children get on our nerves, the

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drivers around us on the highway are stupid, our lives become desperate, we become confused, our judgment is impaired, our psychosomatic aches and pains begin to bother us. To such things Jesus says, "Come away by yourself to a lonely place for a while." To such things God says in Elijah, "Look, I want you to spend 40 days

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at the foot of Mount Horeb and then we're going to talk." Wednesday I was up at the William Penn for lunch with some friends and I heard a speech by the man who formerly managed the William Penn at the great old hotel. For many, many years that was the second largest hotel in America and it's still one of the most

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historic. A lot of interesting things have happened there. And at this luncheon he showed us, this speaker, a machine that blew bubbles. Seems that about 40 years ago there was a band leader coming to Pittsburgh and he had a band called the Dakota Boys and he had one number that they played and when they played he

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thought it'd be nice if he had some bubbles coming up so he asked the engineer at the hotel to come up with a bubble machine and the guy did and there it was and it still works, blue bubbles all over every place. Of course as you've already guessed the name of that band leader was Lawrence Welk. Still playing,

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still blowing bubbles 42 years later. I thought to myself as I looked at that machine wouldn't it be wonderful if we had a machine that could blow bubbles back into our lives. When we're feeling that all the effervescence is gone, when there's no more fizzle and pop in it, wouldn't it be great to have a machine

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that could put that refreshment inside of us again. When we get exhausted and afraid and we're feeling sorry for ourselves and frustrated, what are we to do since there's no bubble machine? God says to us, here to Elijah and through the lips of his son to his disciples, "Come away and rest to us and pray." That's

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the last word, "and pray." Sleep, diet, the pattern of alternation, and prayer. In verse 10 of the passage God speaks to Elijah's prayer. Not in a wind and not in a fire and not in an earthquake. You don't talk to upset people like that. You speak to people like that with a thin, small, gentle voice. And so God spoke to

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Elijah. He honored his prayer. It was Maurice Metterling who told a very interesting story of a lighthouse keeper on a stormy coast. It was a very difficult coast in a cold and frigid place and the supply ship had not yet gotten to the coast for the oil for the winter. And many of the people who lived

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about the lighthouse were already suffering because their oil supply was running low. They were living in the dark and sometimes in the cold. And so this lighthouse keeper, a very compassionate and caring man, began to give some of the reserves of the lighthouse oil to the people who lived about the lighthouse.

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And soon he had given away all of his reserves and one night the lights in the lighthouse went out and there was no fuel with which to reignite it. And that very night the supply ship came and not seeing the lighthouse it was driven into the coast and utterly destroyed. My friends each and every one of us has a

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life that is a flame. And that flame is ignited by the grace of God. And when we cut ourselves off from God, when we separate ourselves from the sweet hour of prayer, our light will go out. It's an astonishing thing to me when some people who claim to be the servants of God tell me that they are too busy to pray. When

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they are too busy to pray their own light is going to go out. And when it is out there will be in them nothing but darkness and they will not be able to leave. No one can see light where there is only dryness and darkness. There must be the fellowship of prayer. Back in 1858 in Philadelphia there was a great

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spiritual revival and one of the young ministers who was very much caught up in that revival was a man named Dudley King. He was much used of God. In one meeting to which he preached more than a thousand were saved. Now following this revival he went out of town. He was invited to see a new corn shelling

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machine which had been invented. And not understanding the nature of the machine this young Episcopal clergyman got too close to it and one of the cogs in the machine caught his sleeve. And before he could be rescued it tore his arm from his shoulder. And in those days more than a hundred years ago they didn't have the

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skill to deal with such a situation and so he died of the injury. As his father leaned over him the last words that Dudley King said were "tell them to stand up for Jesus." Now the father remembered those words and he shared them with a Presbyterian minister friend, a friend of his son named George Duffield. George

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Duffield preached the funeral meditation for Dudley King. He took as his text that great word of Paul from Ephesians 6 verse 14 "stand therefore having your loins girt about with truth." And at the end of the funeral meditation, at the end of the sermon, young George Duffield speaking of his friend in the faith

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Dudley King read a poem which he had written for the occasion. And the words of the poem were these "stand up, stand up for Jesus, ye soldiers of the cross. Lift high his royal banner, it shall not suffer loss. From victory unto victory his army shall he lead, till every foe is banished and Christ is Lord indeed." And

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then in the third stanza of that hymn Duffield put a reference to what had happened to his friend. You remember how the third stanza goes? "Stand up, stand up for Jesus, stand in his strength alone. The arm of flesh will fail you. You dare not trust your own." That's my last word today. When you're in trouble on cloud nine, hold

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fast to God, his Son, and his Holy Spirit in prayer. The arm of flesh will fail you. You dare not trust your own. So rest in the Lord, be in prayer with the Lord, till he brings victory out of your darkness. Indeed until that time, when cloud nine is yours, forever and forever.

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Let it pray. This day the noise of battle, the next the victors song. We pray in Jesus name, Amen. (static)

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