40 Days To The Mount

1 Kings 19:8 And he arose, and did eat and drink, and went in the strength of that meat forty days and forty nights unto Horeb the mount of God.

It has been 40 days as of today Feb 21 2021 when I am writing this, 40 days since God stirred this upon my heart. 40 days since I originally read this chapter in the Word of God, 40 days since God told me to mark that day. 40 days since the Lord gave me a direction to go towards based on this chapter and the pattern of Elijah, 40 days since the Lord began a work in me and I would like to take you through these 40 days and give to you what God has shown me about the pattern we see in Elijah here and how it can be applied to us today.

This is one of my most favorite chapters in the entire Bible and Elijah (other than Jesus) is by far my most favorite Prophet in the Bible and 2nd favorite (behind Peter) non Jesus person in the Bible. A few years ago the Lord spoke to me greatly concerning the Juniper Tree, which I wrote about but have not published on the website and may not have published on Facebook. And as I went to go find it to publish it, it seems as tho I have lost it.

As for this message we can see that Elijah is in a certain place when he is found under the Juniper Tree and reading the passage we understand that Elijah is asking to die. I wonder how many people have found themselves in that position, how many find themselves in that position now? As I was praying and studying this week I have had a few other messages on my heart which I hope to expound upon in the near future and one of them was the idea of what do real Christians look like.

See I have come to realize that there is a stigma attached to what “Real” Christians look like and it is weird to even use the word stigma to describe what I am about to reveal. That is because the idea of stigma is perceived as a person or thing that has a negative connotation to it, that word stigma literally means a mark of disgrace associated with a particular circumstance, quality, or person.

So what is the stigma that I see regarding what a “Real” Christian looks like? I believe in both the Church and the Secular World, there is this idea that “Real” Christians are perfect. That “Real” Christians are always happy, joyful, nice, outgoing, loving, forgiving ect. Are Christians called to strive for these things, yes of course, but do REAL Christians actually attain these things continually, absolutely not. However to say that seems to be forbidden in both and especially the Church and even to the Secular World.

I know what it is like to be in Church and feel like how can I be saved, how can I be a “Real” Christian when I am feeling like I am feeling all the time? I was hearing from the Pulpit that I should be overjoyed and the happiest person on Earth because I was saved. I was told that if I didn't project that type of joy and happiness then why would a Lost person ever even want to be Saved?

I am going to say something that may not go over well in many Churches, but REAL Christians are absolutely and totally a mess and screwed up. Yeah that is right REAL Christians are completely and totally broken in many many many different ways, and I have come to a point where I am no longer going to hide my brokenness, my screwed upness, my flaws, pains and hurts, to put on a facade of being this oh so happy guy all the time because that's what a “Real” Christian is supposed to do and look like. That my friend is a lie and if people are telling you this ignore it because I am positive that person is just as screwed up, depressed and broken as you are, they are just too scared to be real about it.

And so here we have a picture of a REAL Christian, in Elijah, who even tho he literally just called down fire proving that his God is the real God and defeating hundreds of the Prophets of Baal, he finds himself scared literally to death and straight up suicidal. Have you literally called down fire from God onto your enemies? Have you ever seen God move literally in that kind of way?

I highly doubt, in fact I don't believe anyone has ever seen such a literal manifestation of God in their life, and if we had I am quite sure that it would sustain us to accept that nothing is impossible for God thru us and motivate us to walk talk and do anything, yet we see Elijah just hours from an event of this magnitude depressed, afraid and asking God to take his life. If Elijah can find himself in this position, then it's clear that we too can, have and will find ourselves in the same position at times in our lives.

And that is where I have found myself recently, I was under the Juniper Tree directly asking God to take my life. I even went out on a limb of vulnerability today at Church and admitted I was completely and totally suicidal not too long ago, I had picked the day, I knew the method and was ready to kill myself. But Praise the Lord when everyone and everything else had turned it's back on me, and left me all alone, Jesus never gave up on me and just as Jesus represented by the Angel of the Lord came to Elijah, He too came to me.

It was shortly after my Juniper Tree, when God brought me back to this passage and put on my heart that it was 40 days to the mount and began to reveal more and more what His plan is for my life and what His Word meant and how we can all apply it to our lives. When God called me into this He gave to me some basic instructions modeled after the pattern we see Elijah take in these verses and I would like to share with you what He told me that you may adjust the details to yourself and what God puts on your heart, that you can also join me upon the Mount.

The first thing God showed me was that this journey, this 40 days would be too difficult for me to undertake alone and just as He gave Elijah bread and water to sustain him, He told me I too needed to eat some bread and drink some water. If God ever calls you into a 40 day journey I can promise you that you will need bread and water to survive it, but the bread and water God is speaking to us about isn't literal bread and water no it is Spiritual bread and water. So what is this bread and water God wants us to consume to make it thru our journey?

There was a point in Jesus life that He too found Himself in a 40 day journey and at the end of His journey He was tempted by the Devil, who knowing Jesus was starving tried to get Him to turn stones to bread, to end the Fast, to break His work, to submit to the Devil and Jesus replied to him in this manner:

Matt 4:3 And when the tempter came to him, he said, If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.

4 But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.

I tell you today that the bread that we need to sustain ourselves in our 40 days is the Word of God, and so God told me that I needed to get back into the Word that I had, during my depressed state, neglected. And so I began to read the Word in earnest and along with reading the Word God had told me to get back to writing these Posts, to make sure that once a week during these 40 days, 7 weeks in all to write and publish the message He would put on my heart. And so here it is, the fitting final message of this 40 days to the mount, the one about the entire process.

So we can see that we need the Bread of the Word of God during our 40 days, so what is the water representing then?

John 7:37 In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.

38 He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.

39 (But this spake he of the Spirit, which they that believe on him should receive: for the Holy Ghost was not yet given; because that Jesus was not yet glorified.)

The water that Jesus gives us is the Spirit, and I can tell you that I have felt the Spirit move over these past 40 days probably more and more real than I have in my life. You may ask what is it I did that has allowed me to feel, to drink in this Spirit and the first part has already been told to you, it started by reading the Word.

The second part was to begin to spend serious time in prayer, I have spent more time in prayer since my Juniper Tree incident and these 40 days than I have in my life. It has been a consistent, focused and desired time of prayer and I can remember the first thing God really spoke to my heart about in the beginning of this journey. He brought me to my mothers favorite verse:

Ps 46:10 Be still, and know that I am God

That's where my journey in rekindling my prayer life started, as simple as can be, just be still and recognize that He is God. And the more that I just came before God, just being still and letting Him cause me to deeply understand who He is the more and more I could feel the Spirit moving upon me.

And the 3rd and possibly the most important thing is this:

Hebrews 11:6 But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.

I had to start believing that God was listening, that God was going to move that God was here for me. The Devil had completely ruined me, he had me believing God didn't care, he had me believing God had literally given me over to a reprobate mind, and that I was doomed to Hell because how could a “Real” Christian be where I was, depressed, anxiety ridden, out of Church, heading for a divorce, losing my family, suicidal. However Jesus stepped in and told me to stop listening to the lies of the Devil and simply go back to what I already believed and start to wholeheartedly believe once again, in fact believe more than ever in Him and His promises.

When I did these three things, read the Word, pray and then believe that Spirit that is within me began to speak to me all the time, I began to feel Him much more than I have recently, I began to feel Him again at Church, when I pray, when I read, out with others, the more I read, pray and believe the more open my eyes are to His presence.

So I began to apply these things into my life during this 40 days and as I began to do this God had put on my heart to start to be focused on certain areas of my life. We can enter a journey but if we don't have a path, a focus then we may not make it out. I believe our 40 days is meant to get us to a place of focus and I can see that in Elijah. There was a focus to his journey, as he gives an identical answer when God asks him why he is where he is at. Elijah wanted answers and they were specific and didn't change regardless of what was going on, he was focused on God helping him in these places.

For me the things God had put on my heart to be focused on were of course a closer relationship with Him, but more specifically it was the areas of Shame, Vulnerability and Love. Through this journey God has revealed to me that much of why I have acted and reacted, much of how I viewed things have been skewed due to the massive amounts of Shame that has been heaped upon me in my life. And while I am not going to go into depth on it here because there is a different place that I am creating to specifically deal in depth with all this, what I can tell you is that Shame is the energy in which the Devil uses to bring us to Sin, to remove us from our relationship with God and with one another and the way to overcome Shame is to open ourselves to being Vulnerable. It is in this place of Vulnerability, where Shame is exposed that we begin to be able to truly Love and be Loved.

It is with this Focus that I have been traveling on my journey these 40 days, reading the Word, studying, writing, praying, being led by the Spirit, going to Church, worshiping and so today I have arrived, making it to this 40th day. And just as we see in the pattern of Elijah, God has also shown me the things needed for the next part of my life and what His will for it is. When we read back in this description of what Elijah saw and experienced once he got the mount we can take notice of a few things, things which I believe God wants to bring to our attention as well as lay out before us in kind.

First is that we see God ask Elijah why is he where he is, I believe as I stated earlier it is God trying to get Elijah to focus on what it is he wants and needs from God. Then the Word says that as Elijah was in the cave he was witness to a wind, an earthquake and a fire, now I know we can learn many different things from this text and I am know hundreds have preached and thousands have taught about these things, but for our message today as how it relates I see 2 things.

One is that even on the Mount we may have to endure or see winds earthquakes and fires as we wait on God to move in our lives. Second is that many times we want to see God do great things, big things in order for us to acknowledge it is God. A perfect example of what I am talking about from Scripture is found in 2 Kings 5 concerning Elisha and Naaman. I recommend reading it in whole to understand fully, but the short of it is this. Naaman had come down with leprosy and cried out to God to be healed, Elisah comes to him and says go dip in the river 7 times and be healed. Naaman instead of being happy he was going to be healed was mad because he expected some big fancy show with a huge miracle to take place.

See we are the same way, many times we are only looking for God to do some big show to know He hears us or is working to help us, but as we see with Elijah, God wasn't in any of the big things, He was in the still small voice. That word still in Hebrew means a whisper, and that is mainly how God operates. Can and does God do great things, yes of course, but when we need direction we need not to be looking for all the big things but instead we need to listen for that whisper of God that we will hear when we read His Word, Pray and believe that He rewards those who diligently seek Him.

During this 40 days, after reading, after praying and following the Spirit and after listening to that still small voice God has been speaking to me He did for me the same thing He did for Elijah, He finally gave him direction and answers. Before I go into the details of the answers and the confirmation and direction God has shown me about my life, I want to point out 2 things we see in Gods answer to Elijah that we all ought to keep in mind, not only during our 40 days but at all times.

The first thing I noticed in Gods answer to Elijah's dilemma was that Elijah didn't have the full information. Elijah believed that he was the only prophet of God left, that he was all alone and that was part of the reason why he found himself in a place where he wanted to die. However that wasn't the case, God reveals to him in fact that God actually had 7000 prophets still in the kingdom. I wonder how different things would have been if Elijah had the full information? Would he had wanted to die? Would he have secluded himself? Maybe he would have not even been scared at all, knowing that he wasn't alone, and in fact there were 7000 other people ready to defend and uplift him.

I can tell you that God really convicted me on this point, so many times I feel like I am all alone and I make these huge conclusions about this and that, but God had to remind me that I don't have all the info, but that He does, so I need to stop trying to jump the gun and just trust Him. I think this is a lesson we can all apply to ourselves…

The second thing I saw was that God made a promise that those who Elijah feared, that said were going to kill him, God said that the opposite would happen, that everyone that was against Elijah would all be wiped out. Right before I started writing this I was praying to God about everything and He directed my heart to Psalm 129 and said accept this and then go, I would like to quote it here in full:

Ps 129:1 Many a time have they afflicted me from my youth, may Israel now say:

2 Many a time have they afflicted me from my youth: yet they have not prevailed against me.

3 The plowers plowed upon my back: they made long their furrows.

4 The Lord is righteous: he hath cut asunder the cords of the wicked.

5 Let them all be confounded and turned back that hate Zion.

6 Let them be as the grass upon the housetops, which withereth afore it groweth up:

7 Wherewith the mower filleth not his hand; nor he that bindeth sheaves his bosom.

8 Neither do they which go by say, The blessing of the Lord be upon you: we bless you in the name of the Lord.

After I read that I was like umm what does that have to do with the 40 days, or my life or anything that you have put on my heart to write about, I was pretty confused but then God put it all together. Elijah was being afflicted, but God made him a promise that He would confound, actually slay them that afflicted Elijah. This Psalm is about God turning against those who were afflicting Israel and declaring that they will not prevail. In the same way I believe that God is also saying to me, Go do that which I have shown you and not fear because I am going to turn back those who are in the way, they will not prevail against you because I am with you.

I believe that this is what He will do for everyone whom He calls out into a 40 day journey, not only will He turn those who may oppose us away but just like He did for Elijah He will give us a clear direction in which we should go, and I am excited to testify that God has shown me clearly what the next part of my life in His will is to be and I know this with zero doubts.

As I mentioned earlier the focus God put on my heart during this time was Shame, Vulnerability and Love. I also mentioned that I will expand upon those things in more detail in a different place and that is because I know God has called me into a Ministry. I have waited a very long time for God to show me a definitive Ministry, a specific direct place that He would place me Himself and I have no doubts, after this 40 days what it is God has called me into.

I am going to go into it in great detail in the future but God has called me into a Ministry concerning Shame. Right now I work doing Doordash and so very often I see people on the street corners begging for money and it has been on my heart to want to share the Gospel with them. To go to the places most don't want to go and to tell them about Jesus, but I also wanted to know how I can do so in a place that is relatable to them or honestly anyone and that is when God began to reveal everything to me.

He showed me about my imprisonment in Shame and how much it has affected my life and my relationships, He has shown me that it isn't just a me problem or a Christian problem or a Lost problem but a Human problem. And knowing from experience about lifestyles that can cause one to be found begging on the street, it is no doubt that much of what drives them and me to these places is the massive amount of Shame that we are carrying with us.

So it was placed on my heart to begin to reach out to these people by offering them meals as I do not believe in handing out money because I don't want to support any bad habits, but more importantly than food or money I want to look them in the eyes and have a real conversation with them, I want to treat them like people, like humans and I am sure that many of these people (most people myself included) feel like the world doesn't see, notice or care about them.

And my hope is during this conversation to bring up Shame as it is something we can all identify with if we are honest and through that be given the opportunity to share the Gospel with them. And if they are willing to relay their stories to others so that Gods glory can be seen and shared.

What I love about God is that not only does He give us direction He will confirm it when it really is from Him. So a few weeks ago I had to go to CVS to get meds for my little girl and all of this was on my heart but I wasn't absolutely certain I should do it. As I was walking out the door an old man walked up to me and said `` Hey do you think you could buy me some food I am starving.” Immediately I felt the Spirit move and I was like yes for sure. I take him over to a restaurant near by and begin to talk to him. His name was Dwight and we started talking about the Lord and God opened up a Door where I was able to witness and tell him about the Gospel. As we pulled back into CVS I asked if I could pray for him and he said yes and we prayed together and it was amazing.

As he was getting out of the car he said you have no idea how much this means to me, you have no clue what you have done, you know when the Spirit is with someone and the Spirit is here. Now I don't say this to boast myself, I had nothing to do with it, I say all of this to show Gods hand in it all, and to give Him the Glory. That is what I want to do with my life, that is what God has ordained for me to do with my life.

So it is with great excitement that I want to announce that I will be building a new section to my site Dacipleinc.com and it will be called Despising The Shame, being based on this verse:

Hebrews 12:2 Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.

It is my hope that it will be a place for more stories as detailed above, that it will be a place to speak about Shame and it is my hope in the coming weeks and months to start reaching out and building a community where we can be open, honest and vulnerable so that we can overcome, heal and despise our Shame and allow and show how Christ is ready to get right into the middle of it and change lives!!!

Keep an eye out for a much more detailed description and introduction to come in the next week or so Lord willing!!!

And I want to encourage everyone who is finding themselves under a Juniper Tree to look to God and start their own 40 day journey to the mount and I would be so happy to hear of your journey and results!!!

I love you all, have a great day and blessed day in the Lord!

If you need prayer or anything else please feel free to reach out to me and I will help you the best I can and if I can't help I know one man that can, this man named Jesus!

Disciples

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Existence

1 Corinthians 1:18 For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.