If this sounds melancholy, I don't mean it that way. It's just the way the universe works. Nothing lasts forever, including you and me. We won't live forever on the earth. We are disposable creatures, very much perishable, "a flower quickly fading," here today and gone tomorrow. And we do live in cataclysmic times, in which God is shaking the world. That shaking will increase in the days to come as we near the return of Jesus Christ to the earth.

The Brain Strain and the Heart Pain

After living under the threat of terrorist attacks, rogue nuclear states, and being blindsided by earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes, I don't blame anyone for feeling a bit shaky. Patience is in short supply everywhere. I ran across a little poem that seems to describe contemporary life:

This is the Age of the Half-read Page
And the Quick Bash, and the Mad Dash
The Bright Night, with the Nerves Tight
The Plane Hop, with a Brief Stop
The Lamp Tan in a Short Span
The Big Shot in a Good Spot
And the Brain Strain and the Heart Pain
And the Cat-Naps, till the Spring Snaps
And the Fun's Done!

When the Bible paints the picture of its great heroes, it does not just use the light colors of victory and happiness and joy. It also paints the full portrait with the dark colors of sadness, difficulty, depression, defeat, sin and temptation. That is certainly the case when we come to the story of that great mountain man Elijah. He has just defeated Ahab and the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. Immediately the story moves from his greatest victory to his most humiliating defeat. Without a pause we go from the top to the bottom. This is the story of Elijah's personal breakdown. This is the story of Elijah's battle with discouragement, despondency and depression. One writer calls this "Elijah's nervous breakdown." I do not doubt that that is a good description.

Elijah is in trouble. He is messed up, depressed, discouraged, stressed out, burned out, mentally fried, physically drained, and spiritually out of sorts. He's exactly like many of us, in other words. The next to the last line of that poem seems to perfectly describe him when it speaks of the brain strain and the heart pain. At some point, if you keep on pushing, the spring snaps and the fun's done. For Elijah, the fun was done, at least for a while.

1 Kings 19 not only tells us what happened to Elijah, it also describes how God met him at his lowest point. Certainly Elijah was depressed and discouraged. After his great victory on Mount Carmel, I think he expected the nation to experience a vast turning to the Lord. But when Jezebel threatened him, he cracked under the pressure and ran south to Beersheba, and from Beersheba he went a day's journey into the desert. There he sat under a broom tree in utter dejection. Judging himself a failure, he prays that God might take his life. F. W. Robertson points out that his predicament is common to all:

What greater minds like Elijah's have felt intensely, all we have felt in our own degree. Not one of us but what has felt his heart aching for want of sympathy. We have had our lonely hours, our days of disappointment, and our moments of hopelessness, times when our highest feelings have been misunderstood, and our purest met with ridicule. Days when our heavy secret was lying unshared, like ice upon the heart. And then the spirit gives way: we have wished that all were over, that we could lie down tired, and rest like the children from life, that the hour was come when we could put down the extinguisher on the lamp, and feel the last grand rush of darkness on the spirit.

Because we are all made of the same clay, let us pay close attention to how God deals with his discouraged servant. We find it the text that Elijah needed four things, and those four things he received from the Lord.

Number One: He Needed Rest and Refreshment.