Daily Verse: 1 Kings 18:13-14

13 Haven't you heard, my lord, what I did while Jezebel was killing the prophets of the LORD? I hid a hundred of the LORD's prophets in two caves, fifty in each, and supplied them with food and water. 14 And now you tell me to go to my master and say, 'Elijah is here.' He will kill me!"
 

In the text above, Elijah (the Prophet…speaker for the Lord) instructs a man named Obadiah (King Ahab’s right hand man) to go tell King Ahab that Elijah was coming to the land. Elijah was not necessarily a welcome man in Ahab’s kingdom. In fact, Ahab had been angrily searching every nation and kingdom in the land to find Elijah. Not because Elijah was a long lost friend…but because, at the instruction of the Lord, Elijah had spoken a multi-year drought on the land…on Kind Ahab’s land. So Ahab was vengeful and wanted Elijah’s head. Obadiah is convinced that if he tells Ahab that Elijah is here, and Elijah doesn’t actually appear before Ahab, then Ahab is going to kill him for making the false claim. In verse 13 above, Obadiah recounts the numerous good things that he has done to serve the Lord. It’s as if Obadiah is saying, “Look, I have done a lot of good things for the Lord. Why must I do MORE good and risk my own life in the process? Have I not done enough?” It’s easy to take a similar position as Obadiah when the Lord calls us to complete a difficult task for him. We quickly point out our list of good deeds, trying to justify why we have done enough and the latest request should rightfully go to another. But serving the Lord is not a one-time shot…or two time, or three time. It’s an ongoing privilege that we hold for as long as we are breathing on this earth. After all, just imagine if God had a fixed number of “forgiven’s” in his pocket…and when we exceeded our quota, God simply stopped forgiving. What if God said “You know Joe, I really want to forgive you again this time, but I forgave you 30 times last week. Isn’t that enough? You really want more?” We are blessed to be called servants of the Lord. We are blessed to be so valued that the Lord actually chooses our simple, broken, mundane lives as avenues to complete his incredible work! What an undeserving and magnificent gift it is to be a servant of the Lord…may we embrace it daily, yearning to serve the Lord, even when the request seems intimidating, unnerving, and even downright impossible. To God be the glory!