One of the most powerful stories of Elijah is the tale of his encounter with the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel, told in 1 Kings 18:16-40.
Under King Ahab, Baal-worship had become dominant in the land. Elijah challenges him to put his pagan prophets to the test. It's High Noon in Israel: whichever God can light the fire of his own sacrifice is the winner.
So the prophets of Baal, 450 of them, ritually dance and cut themselves to the point of exhaustion, while Elijah mocks them – perhaps Baal's out, he says, or asleep, or in the lavatory. Of course, nothing happens.
Then Elijah repairs the Lord's altar, lays the sacrifice on it, drenches it with water, to underline the impossibility of what's going to happen, and prays a brief prayer. And the fire from heaven falls, and the sacrifice burns. The losers, incidentally, are slaughtered; we wince at that, but that's how it was in those days and we shouldn't try to sanitise it.
It's a great story. But a good way of reading any Bible story is to ask ourselves how we fit into it. Perhaps we'd like to think of ourselves as Elijah, strong for the faith in the face of impossible odds. Perhaps, if we're honest, we are more like the onlookers, wavering between two opinions, keeping our options open.
But perhaps we are more like the prophets of Baal than we care to imagine. They believed that the more effort they put in, the more devotion they showed, the more it cost them, the more noise they made and the longer and more fervently they prayed, the more likely it was that their god would answer them.
That's a temptation we face today. The Church is weaker than it has been. The job is harder. So the temptation is to think that if we just pray harder and work harder, God will hear us. If we can just encourage everyone to attend our prayer meetings, go out and evangelise the neighbourhood, or double-tithe their income, everything would be alright. Or even, if we get our worship band up to scratch with some really good amplification.
There's no excuse for not trying our best to reach out to people who don't know Christ, or trying as hard as we can to serve him in the world. But we shouldn't think that the more we do, the louder we pray and the more we sacrifice, the more likely God is to act. Elijah just prays, and leaves it up to him; God doesn't need convincing. His blessings are not a return for services rendered; they are gifts of grace.
There's an old saying that we should pray as if everything depends on God, and work as if everything depends on us. I like that balance: it doesn't let us off the hook and allow us to be lazy, but it affirms the sovereignty of God. He will act when he chooses to act. What he requires of us is patient faith. Perhaps we'd like him to move more quickly, but we aren't going to change his mind by shouting louder. That's what pagans do; we're called to trust him anyway.
In Matthew 6:7-8, Jesus says: "And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him." He's introducing what we know as the Lord's Prayer: short, simple and trustful, and a pattern for Christian prayer today.
Follow Mark Woods on Twitter: @RevMarkWoods
