9/27/2015 God Brings Life In The Face Of Death Pastor Josh Sheldon

Psalm 36 and Luke 7 as the Reading for the Sermon

I expect you to be reading this one. It is going to be found in two passages. In the Old Testament, it's going to be Psalm 36 and that will be on page 381 of your Review Bible. And in the New Testament, it's going to be Luke 7, 11 -16 which would be on page 695 of your Review Bible.

And here it is, Psalm 36.

Please stand for the reading, Dr. An oracle.

Is a transgression of the wicked. There is no fear of God before his eyes, for he flatters himself in his own eyes. When he finds out his iniquity and when he hates, the words of his mouth are wickedness and deceit.

He has ceased to be wise and to do good. He divides his wickedness on his bed. He sets himself in a way that is not good. He does not abhor evil. Your mercy, O Lord, is independent. Your faithfulness reaches to the clouds.

Your righteousness is like the great mountains. Your judgments are at great feet. O Lord, you preserve man and beast. How precious is your love and kindness, O God. Therefore, the children of men have their trust under the shadow of your wings.

They are abundantly satisfied with the fullness of your hands, and you give them drink from the river of your pleasures. For with you is the fountain of life. In your life we see life. O, continue your loving kindness to those who know you, and your righteousness to the operating heart.

Let not a foot of pride.

Come against me, and let not the hand of the wicked drive me away.

Better the workers of iniquity have fallen, they have been cast down, and are not able to rise. He said in Luke 7, 11 -16, the day after that, the day after, that he went into a city called Nain, and many of his disciples went with him in a large crowd.

And when he came near the gate of the city, behold, a dead man was being carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was his widow. And a large crowd from the city was.

With her. When the.

Lord saw her, he had compassion on her, and said to her, Do not leave me. Then he came and touched the open fountain, and those who carried him stood still. And he said, Young man, I say to you, arise.

So he who was dead sat up and began to speak, and he presented him to his mother. Then fear came upon all, and they glorified him. They glorified God, saying, A great prophet has risen up among us, and God has visited his people.

For the truth you have is in your.

People, glory to you, thank you, and your mercy is in the head. I will not only raise your physical body, but also our spiritual body, glory to you. We who were wicked, and it seems to be wise to do good, glory to you.

You give him words of truth and words of courage, and courage of good spirit, and seek your truth, and not not for any sake other than to know you better, and to obey you better. So this dear Pastor Josh, if you'd bring us a message in your name, I pray.

Amen. Amen.

The Widow’s Son in 1 Kings 17

Thank you. Open your Bibles please to the book of 1 Kings, chapter 17, verses 17 through 24 will be our text this morning. We're in our fifth message on a series we're going through on the prophet Elijah, and then Lord willing we'll proceed through the prophet Elisha.

But this message this morning, Lord willing, will be a stand-alone, enough of a message that having missed the first four, this one will still, I think, have meaning for us. 1 Kings 17 17 through 24.

Now it happened after these things that the son of the woman who owned the house became sick. And his sickness was so serious that there was no breath left in him. So she said to Elijah, What have I to do with you, O man of God?

Have you come to bring my sin to remembrance and to kill my son? And he said to her, Give me your son. So he took him out of her arms and carried him to the upper room where he was staying, and laid him on his own bed.

Then he cried out to the Lord and said, O Lord my God, have you also brought tragedy on the widow with whom I lodge by killing her son? And he stretched himself out on the child three times and cried out to the Lord and said, O Lord my God, I pray let this child's soul come back to him.

Then the Lord heard the voice of Elijah, and the soul of the child came back to him, and he revived. And Elijah took the child and brought him down from the upper room into the house and gave him to his mother.

And Elijah said, See, your son lives. Then the woman said to Elijah, Now by this I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is the truth. We've come here to the prophet Elijah, having spent three years in a town called Zarephath in the Gentile nation of Sidon, where he was sent by the Lord, having first gone to the brook Cherith after his first confrontation with King Ahab.

And he said, Thus says the Lord God of Israel, before whom I stand, there shall be neither dune nor rain for these years except at my word. And then he ran off to Cherith at the Lord's command. And from Cherith he was sent at a time back to this town where we find him this morning.

And you recall that when he first came to Zarephath he found the widow, the one that God said, I have commanded a widow to provide for your needs. He found this widow, and the Lord miraculously provided for her needs, her son's needs, and Elijah's needs as he stayed with her.

And now of course we come to this sad history, where this widow's son died. A widow is only able to anticipate poverty in that day. A widow without even a son, so much the worse. And a widow without even a son, and in a time of famine, is a terrible situation for her.

We come here to the prophet, Elijah's going to raise up her son. We've already read that to you, so you know the climax of the story already. This woman is in Sidon. Sidon is the home of Jezebel, Ahab's queen.

Jezebel is a devotee of a pagan god, a demonic god called Baal. And around her, everywhere, is nothing but death. People are starving. People are worshipping this dead god. In her home, where the prophet Elijah has brought the word of God, there is food, there is provision, there is life.

As we think about this, the situation that she was in, the place that she lived, the paganism all around them, this Baal worship that was going on, this horrific cult, which was really the main adversary of Elijah through his ministry, through his prophetic time there.

God's ways are life. God's ways are life. All else is death. In God is light. We read in the opening of the book of John, in Him, in Jesus Christ was life, and that life was the light of men. In God life and light are virtually the same thing.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. This woman is beginning to comprehend something about the light, but surrounded by death. Death because of the famine, death by starvation, death by Baal worship.

The thing about death is that it was never in the beginning in God's mind. God did not designate death, not at the first. The first, do this and you will live, you will recall way back in Genesis, was given in the negative.

In other words, if you do this thing, if you eat from this tree, you will die. A negative command, as it were. Avoid that one constraint, and life is yours. Man chose death. Death by disobedience, death by self-determination, death by following what is right in his own eyes.

It's death, death, death. And that's what this woman is surrounded by and has been brought up in. But there's nothing new under the sun. Ever since that one act of rebellion, when God declared that the two seeds, one of the woman, a godly seed, and one of the serpent, the devil's seed, since that day, mankind is defined by which ancestry is theirs.

Since that day, death has reigned and fear of it has held us in bondage. Yet all the while, there's been a testimony of God, a seed, a remnant that has found life. There are those who, by God's grace, have been transformed from death to life, from darkness to light.

As long as the two peoples, those who are of God by faith in Jesus Christ and those who remain in the natural state to which they were born, and we know we're by nature children of wrath, following the will of their father, the devil, as long as they live side by side, which we shall until Christ's return, then one of the defining characteristics of these two peoples is going to be their view of death.

As Christ's children, we live, as did Elijah, as representatives of life. Around us, as in Elijah's day, is death. There is today a culture of death that is so morbid as to be beyond the stuff of horror movies or nightmares.

Baal, back in the day of Elijah, Baal was the god of fertility and had been imported into Israel. He was thought to be the ruler of the universe, but it was also believed that he had to kneel down to a god called Mot, very similar to the Hebrew word for death.

It's just death, it's darkness, it's blackness all around. Nothing new under the sun, nothing new in the nature of mankind. The governor of our state is considering a bill labeled ABX 2 -15 called the End of Life Act, which would allow a doctor to prescribe fatal drugs for terminally ill people.

Now let these words sink down into your ears. Doctors trained to preserve, extend, or improve life, doctors able to end it. How long it will take before life termination is required remains to be seen.

But if this bill passes, and I didn't look it up this morning, I don't know if the governor has yet signed it, but I fear we will soon drop into even greater depravity. I fear this will lead some people to being required to enter into such a process.

I fear state-mandated murder will be the next chasm. As we think about this culture into which God sent a prick of light in Elijah, I want to apply it immediately, before we even pull the text apart, to where we are today, because modern Baalists already have their culture of death at the front end.

Here our governor has this bill on his desk, which is the back end, if you will, of life. But they've already got it at the front end. They call it woman's choice. They call it health care. We call it abortion.

In our state, a minor girl cannot be denied an abortion. Did you know this? If a minor girl goes to a school administrator and says, I want an abortion, they are required to help her get one. And they are legally barred from telling the parents.

On Tuesday this week, Senate Democrats in Washington show their loyalty to Ahab's God when they blocked legislation to prevent abortions after 20 weeks. They call it 20 weeks of gestation. We who belong to Christ call it what it is.

No matter what your definition of is is, we call it what it is. 20 weeks of life. It's five months of nurture of a child at his most vulnerable and most needy. And then if all the inconvenient consequences of sexual relations are overcome and a child happens to be born, then they want us to celebrate life as if they think it's something precious.

But just days before birth, that amalgamation of biological fetal tissue can be yanked from the only place where life is possible, or it can be washed and poisoned, or it can be partially removed and its cranial matter extracted.

Death is all around. We read 1 Kings 17. Let us understand that there's nothing new under the sun. That things today are no less morbid, no less death-celebrating, really, than they were then. Malcolm Muggeridge said all news is old news happening to new people.

Israel and Elijah's day was really just a forecast of our times today. And we come to him this morning, continuing his stay in Zarephath with the widow and her son, the three of them having been miraculously sustained by God with this unending flower and oil that they had.

While all around them, Baal helplessly allowed his adherents to starve. After many days, a second disaster struck this widow. She was already a widow. She's in drought. Now she loses her son. When Elijah had found her, you recall she was at death's door, gathering sticks, trying to find just a reasonably comfortable way to die.

And she's confronted by life. She's confronted by a pinhole of light against all this darkness. It's Christ shining through hopelessness. Before her was Israel's one prophet, the prophet of the giver of life, and that's Elijah, promising her that if she gave him her last, she would be filled with all.

God, of course, was true to his word. He staved off death, and by the power and certainty of his word, he replenished the bin and the jar with flour and oil. So God had given her life. Surrounded by this darkness, surrounded by this death, God had given her life.

And then verse 17 tells us her son became sick and he died. If her status as a widow was one that meant only poverty, as I said before, this is even worse. We have no idea what sickness led to this death.

We don't even know how old the young man was. And you see where I just slipped? I called him a young man. We don't know if he was a young man. We just know he was her son and he died. Now there are some who said, who say, some commentators say he was only dying.

That he was going into a coma or something like that. It's the oddity of that expression. There's no breath left in him. They make them, they take it to mean maybe he just passed out or was passing out.

And in verse 22, though, in verse 22 it says he revived. Some take that to mean he passed from sickness to health, not from death to life. These sound to me like theories of Jesus swooning on the cross instead of actually dying.

Verse 18, the widow asks Elijah, why did you kill my son? In verse 20, Elijah asked God almost the same thing. Have you killed her son? And finally in verse 21, he prays that God will return his soul to him.

We need to understand as we look at 1 Kings 17, verses 17 to 24, that what we're looking at is the first resurrection recorded in the Bible. That this lad, this young man, this child, whatever he was, was dead.

He had died. This poor widow has no way to understand this turn of events. When she goes to Elijah, she betrays a sort of pagan theology. She attributes the death to Elijah. You've killed my son, she says.

And then she takes some of the blame herself by acknowledging her sin. Now what sin she means, we have no idea. Maybe it's just sin generally. But she lays the charges at Elijah's feet. Say, you brought my sin to remembrance, and because my sin's now out in the open, therefore this God of yours is displeased and has struck my son in order to punish me for this thing that has come out in the open because of you.

Very pagan way of looking at things. But here she is laying this charge at Elijah. Which really means it to whom? To God. Because she knows that he represents the true and living God. She even says the Lord God, or the Lord your God.

So she knows. She's been for three years sustained. She's lived for three years on this jar of oil, this bin of flour that will not go empty. It simply won't because God said it would not. Three years while all her neighbors have nothing, they're all gathering sticks as she was three years ago, trying to find a comfortable way to die.

And she has food in her house for three years because of the word of God. And now she's angry at God by being angry at the prophet. How quickly we forget God's goodness. We just sort of get used to it, don't we?

When things are rolling along, the checks are not bouncing, the car is not breaking, the job is not failing, the relationships are good. We get sort of comfortable with it, don't we? I'm not saying we feel like we deserve it.

No Christian would say, I deserve this goodness from God. We would not say that, but we get used to it. We sort of forget that God's mercies are new each day. It's as if God thinks a mercy for us each day and gives it to us, and perhaps it's the same mercy we had the day before, and the day before, and the week before, and the month before, and the year before.

We just sort of get used to it. Not in an entitlement kind of mentality, but how quickly we forget God's goodness. She and her son were alive because of the word of the God of Israel, and is it possible that for even one day, when she scooped into that bowl to get the flour, and it was there for her, is it possible she ever forgot that it was God who put it there?

All around her starvation, in her house, daily food? How easy it is for us when things go awry, if even for a moment, to cry foul and say, God, you've been unfair. Now here, brethren, here we must guard our hearts.

I would suggest to us that there's really no more dangerous time for our souls than those times of God's special, regular, day after day after day mercy. We just get used to it. We forget that God owes us nothing, and everything we have is from His hand.

We forget Job's words. Shall we indeed accept good from God, and shall we not also accept adversity? When we're in her situation for those last three years before her son died, when we're in a situation like that, let us remember to give thanks to God.

Let us remember that God owes nothing, and that what He gives is because of His special mercy. His mercies are new each day, and that even if it's the same one we had yesterday, He's no more obligated to give it to us than He is to give us life.

We need to thank Him as if it was the first time we ever sat down to breakfast and had bacon and eggs before, so whatever you like for breakfast. We go home tonight, most of our tables will be filled with some food, and we need to thank God for that food as if it's the first time we ever had food put on our table, so that we don't become like this, become comfortable so that as soon as one thing goes wrong, something goes awry, we forget all that and say, God is just no good to me, because He's always good.

His mercies are always fresh. Now she attributes her son's death to Elijah, which is to say to God. Now we know God is the one who numbers our days, but to say He personally killed someone goes too far.

That's her paganism, that's her Baal-driven death culture seeping through. God has reached His finger from heaven and taken life. He has done that, but only rarely. Now we do harm to Scripture and our souls if we take it as normative.

Let's go through just a few of them, or not a few of them, the few that we have. He killed the wicked sons of Judah. He consumed Nadab and Abihu for their presumptuous offering. He destroyed a man named Uzzah for touching the cart that carried the ark when the ox stumbled.

Ananias and Sapphira were killed in Acts chapter 5. Herod for taking the glory for himself instead of giving it to God. In Acts 12 he was killed. Joshua 7, Achan and his family, and the rebels against Moses much later in the Exodus, or excuse me, earlier in the Exodus.

Only these few. Eons of rebellion and sin and only these divine executions. What I say is do not blame God for these, but wonder that these are rare. That it's not the norm. That for all the rebellion, for all the sin, for all the pugnacious attitude that God has to see before Him, that it's not a daily occurrence that His finger actually reaches down and touches a sinner and kills him dramatically.

Jesus' disciples understood this whole concept no better than the widow really. In John chapter 9 they come across a beggar, a man who had been born blind and they say to Jesus, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?

The Lord answered, neither this man nor his parents sinned, but that the works of God should be revealed in him. Think of John chapter 11, when Jesus is explaining the reason for Lazarus' death. Did I not say to you that if you would believe you would see the glory of God?

You see, God did not kill the child for His mother's sin. If He did that, then no child would live because all mothers, and all fathers for that matter, were all sinners. And if our children would die for our sin, no child could live.

Matter of fact, we all being children of someone, we wouldn't be here either. Nor would our children be. Nor would our parents have been. See, Elijah goes to her when she asks him this question, when she blames him, when she blames his God, when she forgets all the three years of goodness, the miraculous provision, and says he took the child.

He says, give me the child. Then he says he took the child. The way it is in the Hebrew might imply that his taking was not a single act of taking. The verb used is in a form which denotes a kind of incomplete and continual action as though she resisted or just held on to him.

Now none of our better English Bibles translate this way. I'm a bit on my own here. But the form of the verb is what we call imperfect, a continual incomplete action. And so I do have the impression that Elijah said, give me the boy.

Now she's had enough of prophets for right now. Because this prophet, because of what he brought into the house, caused that God to strike down her son. And she's not taking any more chances. This is the way I see it.

And so he's pulling. There's a bit of a tussle going on here. There's some persistence on Elijah's part. Even as God persists in his grace despite man's resistance against him. Even as Jesus persisted with the disciples who were sometimes so dull of wit that I wonder that Jesus didn't just call twelve others sometimes.

Even as God persists now withholding final judgment by delaying his son's return. Elijah wants the boy. We'll see why as we go through this. And he's simply not going to take no for an answer. It's not simply a well, God has a wonderful plan for your life.

Give me this boy. Okay. You're not with me on this? I'll go back to my upper room and start studying the scripture again. No, that's not Elijah. That's not our God that he represented. Whether she gave him over or tried to hold him a little longer we do know Elijah ended up with the boy.

And he took him to the upper room where he'd been staying. Now first he prays to God for himself as one wrestling with God to understand his ways. He cried out to the Lord and said, Oh Lord my God have you brought tragedy on the widow with whom I lodge by killing her son.

He seems to ask also this? This on top of all else Father? She's lost her husband and now lives in poverty. She lives in poverty stricken as a widow and now she loses her son. Must she live not just as a widow but now without children?

Father God is that not enough? Do not widows and orphans have a special attention from God's heart? There's no reproach against God here. It's his heartfelt compassion for his hostess. He's been there for three years.

We don't presume too much to look at the scripture and say Elijah was attached to this family. There's a love bond there. They've been together for these three years. According to Kiel and Delitch the meaning of his prayer is more like, Thou O Lord my God according to thy grace and righteousness canst not possibly leave the son of this widow in death.

Father God you wouldn't do that. It's not a rebuke against God. He's reciting to God his own nature, his own understanding of him. Elijah was not reminding God of anything. He was declaring his confidence in God's revealed nature.

But then he acted. He had the child in the upper room and he praised to God and said God you wouldn't do this. You would not leave this child in death. And his widow with nothing. Not this woman who I've been with for these three years.

And he acted. He stretched himself out on the child three times and cried out to the Lord and said O Lord my God I pray let this child's soul come back to him. Three times over and over unwilling that God that he knew would remain silent at such a time as this.

Now you know emphasis is shown in the scripture with simple repetition. Something repeated twice well better stand up and take notice. Think of Genesis 17. In the day you eat of it you shall surely die.

In the Hebrew it's mot to mot. Mot is the word for death and it's sort of like saying in dying you shall die. There's this repetition that increases the certainty of it. Think of Pharaoh's dreams. Pharaoh had these dual dreams.

They both meant the same thing but the duality of the dream the repetition meant that it was firmly established by God that he was going to do this thing. God will shortly bring it to pass. Threes are even more so.

Think of Isaiah chapter 6 with the angels calling out this attribute of God. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God almighty. That's how holy God is. Can't just say he's holy. Can't just say it twice. He's holy, holy, holy.

The emphasis on this core attribute of his nature. Think of Jonah in the belly of the well for three days. That sign that Jesus pointed to as Jonah was in the belly of the well for three days so the son of men will be in the belly of the earth for three days.

Peter's vision in Acts chapter 10 was repeated three times to show him that the gospel was going out to the Gentiles. That anything God declared clean was now clean and he better not declare it unclean.

Three times for him to get the point. Paul prayed three times for his thorn in the flesh to be removed. Peter denied Jesus three times which was later met with a thrice repeated restoration. Do you love me?

Feed my sheep. Before even that, Jesus prayed three times at Gethsemane for the cup to be removed. Jesus lay for three days in the grave and here Elijah prays three times to the boy stretching himself out over him each time.

How do you picture Elijah? How do you picture Elijah? Usually it's very similar to how you see John the Baptist except Elijah would be a little older, have a longer beard, has got more grain is usually the way it's pictured when we have those drawing books for kids.

A solitary and rugged figure. But what do we see here in the upper room with this dead boy that he's lived with for three years? We see compassion. I think we see an emotional involvement, engagement in what's happening here that we normally don't think of with this prophet.

It's like the energetic, the uncompromising Paul who faced down kings and Pharisees alike who didn't hesitate to dress down Peter. But like Paul his sternness is matched by his heart. Neither of them erred as we so often do on one side of the other.

Mercy versus being stern. Elijah is a forerunner of the Baptist, John the Baptist who is also I think far softer of heart than usually portrayed. He cared deeply for people. That's why he confronted them with their sin.

But he didn't stop there. When they were crushed by their sin, when they saw their hopeless condition before God after hearing God's word through him, when people, when tax collectors, when soldiers begged him and said, what shall we do?

He had a ready answer. He said, repent and henceforth do what is right in God's eyes. Collect no more than is your due. Do not intimidate people, he told the soldiers. He had an answer. Repent and do what is right before God, which is a caring, a loving, and a truly gentle answer.

Normally the way John the Baptist is pictured, much like Elijah, is like this guy is almost frothing at his mouth. He's got thunderbolts coming out and consuming people because he's so angry at them for their sin.

Peter, much the same way at Pentecost. Same question. At the end of his sermon, this sin convicting sermon that brought forth Jesus Christ as the only answer to sin. Repent and believe in him. They said, men and brethren, what shall we do?

They said, we're all condemned because you're lousy sinners. If you weren't as bad as you were, you would not have crucified the Prince of Peace. Was that his answer? No. Like John the Baptist, he had a real answer.

A compassionate answer. A heartfelt answer, like Elijah, laying down three times on the lad. Peter's answer was repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sin. Which is the gentlest, the softest, the most compassionate answer possible.

We are too often too merciful to confront sin, or too stern to be heard when we do. And it's not merciful to fail to confront sin. And yet if we imitate our usual picture of a prophet like Elijah or John the Baptist, we're so harsh.

And we finally go to a brother to show him his fault, to take that little speck out of his eye. They're not going to hear us. Because we're playing the part of Elijah, at least as we think we see Elijah or John the Baptist, or even Jesus Christ.

All we can do is pound our fist and show you how bad you are. And we do need to know that we have sinned. And even as children of God through faith in Jesus Christ, we need to acknowledge our sin and confess and repent and know God's forgiveness again.

I look at Elijah and I say, well, let's put aside that picture we usually have of him, prophets like him. And let's start trying to err a little bit on this compassionate side. This side that would not let the widow keep the boy, but insisted on taking him and brought him upstairs and lay on him three times for to show him how important that triple repetition is.

He would not take no for an answer from the widow, neither would he from God. Too compassionate of heart towards his charge. Elijah lay over the child, which is sort of an odd posture. It's only repeated by his disciple, Elisha.

Now, nothing mystical transpired because of this. Elijah was showing his identification with the boy. He had lived there with him and his mother for three years, so he had some familial attachment with him.

This greatest prophet, this man who is the paradigm for the prophets, was one with his charge. He knew the same weaknesses of the flesh. Remember, James says in James 5 .16, Elijah was a man with a nature like ours.

Like this lad's. He was prone to the same death the boy now suffered. His laying on the lad is really, to me, it's akin to Jesus taking on human flesh. When the Word became flesh, his identity with us was complete.

When Elijah laid on the lad, he was identifying with him. You need to understand, nothing in Old Testament Israel, according to the law, nothing was as unclean as a corpse. It passed its uncleanness to anyone who contacted it.

And then they had to go through a ritual purification before they could enter into temple worship. Elijah, the prophet who demanded Israel return to the law, he knew this better than anyone. But no matter, no matter the purification laws, no matter the ritual uncleanness of a corpse, as Jesus taught about the Sabbath, where acts of mercy bring honor to the Lord of the Sabbath, so ritual uncleanness was no barrier to the prophet's cause.

We could say he was no Pharisee, but he knew God's priorities. He knew God's standards. He prays here for something totally out of bounds. Totally out of bounds. When he prayed for drought three years before, he was asking God to do what God in his word had already said he would do.

Deuteronomy 28, 23. God says this will be his response to Israel's idolatry. And your heavens which are over your head shall be bronze, and the earth which is under you shall be iron. Bronze heavens give no rain, iron earth gives no food.

Most commentators, and I agree with them, would say that this is the prayer that Elijah prayed. James 5, 16 tells us that Elijah prayed for the drought to come. He prayed on this basis, on the basis of God's revealed word.

But for Elijah to pray for the boy's life to return, for him to be resurrected, and that for the sake of mercy to a Gentile, what scripture can he stand on? You're going to open up to Ezekiel 14, verse 17, or whatever it is, where are you going to find this?

To say, God, you and your word said that Gentile widow's sons, if that's all they have, will be resurrected? We can't do that. What does he plead if not God's word? On what basis does he make his supplication?

We know that a righteous man's prayers are fervent, and thrice repeated ministry shows intensity. But what does he plead to God? Well, his plea is one of the best we can make. He pleads God's nature. Does she deserve God's favor because she accommodated His prophet with food and lodging?

No. Doing our duty wins us nothing before God. Jesus even says in Luke 17, 10, that when we've done our duty, we should say we're unprofitable servants because we've only done what's required of us. Should she be relieved of her sorrow because of any inherent righteousness in her?

No. Our only hope of righteousness is to have faith in Jesus Christ, by which God will impute to us His righteousness. See, Elijah's only hope is the same for any prayer, really. What's his hope? His hope is in God, in His mercy, that He will do that which He is able for the good of others and for the honor of His own name.