Living by Faith

"His thoughts are not our thoughts, neither are His ways our ways" Isaiah 55:8.

Even when His purposes are not fully clear to us, we can rest in the confidence that He does what is right. We can be equally certain that He will always have His way. He is utterly sovereign over all that happens, even when we do not understand what He is doing- even when it appears to us that things have gone out of His control. We can always trust that what He is doing is best, and it is always for our ultimate good.

It is the very essence of faith to lay hold of those truths and trust implicitly in the wisdom and goodness of our God- especially when it seems to our limited human vision that everything around us is entirely out of His control. That was the lesson that was indelibly stamped on Elijah's heart and mind during those years he spent in the desert. And he emerged from those years of drought stronger in his faith than ever, and now truly ready to be used of God.

Let us see "how Elijah learned to trust". James 5:17, keeps telling us that "Elijah was a man subject to like passions as we are" but it is very clear that Elijah was able to rise above those passions in a way that few of us do, and he learned to walk by faith in an extraordinary way. In fact, James's whole point in using elijah as an illustration was to remind us of Elijah's remarkable faith and the answered prayer that resulted from that faith. Listen to the rest of James 5:17-18:

17 "He prayed earnestly that it might not rain; and it rained not on the earth by the space of three years and six months.
18 And he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth her fruit."

So Elijah is set before us as a paragon of faith, and we can learn much about walking by faith as we look closely at his life.