What to Do When Your Brook Dries Up?
I Kings 17: 1-24
There comes a time in the Christian walk that you’ll experience a dry place. You feel a disconnection in your spirit; your prayers gone from fervent to routine, and you’re not feeling the presence of the Lord as you used to.
There is an explanation for your spiritual condition. Be encouraged, God has not left you. The dry place that you’re experiencing is what happens when your soul is thirsty for the Lord.
This thirst comes from being in a dry place spiritually. Understand that being in a spiritually dry place is not always because you’ve sinned against God. Growing pains come with spiritual growth. We need to grow from always thinking that every negative thing that happens to us is because either God is mad at us or that the devil is attacking us. Being in a spiritually dry place is a sign that you’ve accomplished all that could be accomplished where you are, you’ve experienced all that you’re going to experience, at the level you’ve been, and it’s time to grow; it’s time to go to another place in God.
In 1 Kings 17: 1 Elijah prophesied that it would not rain for years. In 1 Kings 18: 41-45, Elijah again prophesied that a great rain would come, which it did. In 1 Kings 18: 36-38, on Mt. Carmel, Elijah prayed, and the Lord sent down fire from heaven. This same Elijah, in 2 Kings 2:11, didn’t experience death, but God taken up to heaven in a world-wind.
God didn’t accomplish these things through Elijah just by Elijah coming to church. It wasn’t because Elijah faithfully read his bible or fasted on a weekly basis. Before God used Elijah for His glory, He first grew Elijah by putting him in circumstances where he would experience God, which would increase Elijah’s faith in God.
Elijah’s growing process is how God grows His people. Your dry place is a normal part of the spiritual growing process.
When we exam the process we note the following:
In 1 Kings 2: 2-6, God directed Elijah go to the brook, and at the brook Elijah experienced the care of God. Every morning and every evening ravens would bring him meat and bread while the brook provided Elijah with water to drink. All Elijah had to do was eat, drink, and sleep.
In verse 7, the brook dried up because there was no rain. Once the brook dried up, Elijah was in a dry place. You find yourself in a dry place when your spirit is dry, your pray life is dry. Your soul becomes thirsty for God. It can seem as if God’s not there. Be encouraged, God is there, he’s just calling you to another place.
When we look at Elijah’s brook situation, God’s provisions were coming automatic. Elijah was living a life style that he could have gotten used to. But then the brook dried up. Not because God was angry with Elijah, not because Elijah had committed some terrible sin, God knew that the brook situation was only temporary.
The drying of the brook meant that it was time for Elijah to go to another place because God was in another place concerning Elijah. In 1 Kings 17:9, the Lord told Elijah to go to Zarephath. Often times we experience a dried brook and we stay at an empty brook, discouraged because the ravens haven’t visited us in a week. Then we try to get spiritual, and stay stuff like, I’m gone wait at the brook until my change comes. Your change is not coming! Not at the brook. The brook has dried up!
In 1 Kings 2: 8-16, while in Zarephath, Elijah was engaged in the ministry of exercising his faith to get someone else to exercise their faith in God. It took faith to tell a widow to give him her last, and feed her and the child after he had eaten, but as foolish as it sounded God moved. God moves in what seems foolish to man.
Elijah could have questioned God until God’s instructions made sense to Elijah, but part of trusting God is obeying him de-spite weather it makes sense to us. God’s ways and God’s thoughts are higher than mans.
Because of Elijah’s obedience, he was in another place in the Lord, being used by God to cause the widow woman to experience God. The woman didn’t have to want for anything. God used Elijah to increase the woman’s faith from being ready to eat her last meal and dying, to experiencing the Lord’s daily provision.
But in 1 Kings 17:17, the brook dried up again when the woman’s son became sick to the point of death, and she accused Elijah for being responsible for her son’s death. The son falling sick is another growing opportunity. It was time to go to another place in God. 1 Kings 17: 19-20 reveals that this new place is unfamiliar to both the woman and Elijah. From Elijah’s prayer it’s clear that he doesn’t like the predicament that God has put him but it was God’s time for Elijah to grow to another place in the Lord, and it’s the woman’s time to grow to another place in the Lord.
Elijah took the child to his room, prayed, then laid on child 3 times, and the child still was unresponsive. Elijah, in desperation, cried to the Lord. Elijah is in a position of desperation, I can’t take this woman’s child back to her dead, she has experienced the goodness of God; she has experienced the result of obeying God’s word. Sometimes God will allow us to experience desperation as a way of teaching us how to depend on him, and not on your own efforts. In 1 Kings 17:24, when Elijah brought the woman’s son alive, she said to Elijah, I know by this that you are a man of God, and that the Lord’s Word that you speak is true. She had been through another one of God’s growing process.
When God’s grows you to the place where He uses you mightily, in a Mt. Carmel situation, it will be your desperate bedroom prayers in Zarepath that would have taught you how to pray when you need God to show up because there’s nothing that you can do.
What do you do when your brook is dried up? First know that God is still with you. Know that you’ve come to a place where you’ve out grown your present life. Then you have to submit yourself to God’s direction to pour your life into the lives of others. God didn’t save us to remain at the brook, and experience the good life, but to go ye therefore, and testify of God’s goodness, that someone else would know him, and experience him.