F4F | Levi Lusko and How The Water is the Problem

Fighting for the Faith

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Welcome to another installment of Fighting for the Faith. My name is Chris Rosebro. I am your servant in Jesus Christ.

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This is the channel that compares what people are saying in the name of God to the Word of God. Now if you've ever been told that the story of Elijah on Mount Carmel, that it's a story about how you can expect

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God to, when he calls you to do something, it's gonna be something, the details are gonna be really impractical or kind of crazy and and that's kind of proof that you know that God's calling you to do something.

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And then worse than that, if you've ever been told that this text is about tithing, mm -hmm, yeah

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I'm not making that up, go ahead and hit the subscribe button down below. Don't forget to like the video and ring the bell.

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You've been taught something that's not true. Case in point, we are heading over to Levi Lusko's church, and Fresh Life Church in in Montana, and we're gonna be listening to a portion of his sermon titled,

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The Water is the Problem. And we're gonna listen to a big chunk of this particular sermon, but I'm what

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I want to say this, in order to prepare you for the longer biblical teaching on this, you need to go back into the archives of Fighting for the

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Faith, back a few weeks to July 11th, 2019, and the video we produced titled,

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Jennifer Toledo and Waterless Rain Clouds. And that's the video that you're gonna want to take a look at, you know,

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Jennifer Toledo and Waterless Rain Clouds, because this is the one where I do an entire teaching on 1st

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Kings chapter 17 and 18, so that you can get the entire context of the biblical story.

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So I'm going to assume that you have listened to that or watched that, because that's gonna be, you know, part of the counterpoint in all of this.

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But what we're gonna note then, as we listen to this portion of Levi Lusko's sermon,

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The Water is the Problem, he's gonna be engaging in the first part of it using a

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Bible twisting technique known as Narcissus, the narcissistic reading of yourself into the biblical text.

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And what he's doing here is he's seeing in the Old Testament stories some kind of pattern that we are to expect when

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God has called us to kill our Goliath to, you know, you kind of get the point.

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It's just nonsense, and this is no way of reading the biblical text.

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But then once he's done working on the narcissistic, eisegetical way of reading the text, he's gonna switch gears and turn this into a text about tithing.

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I wish I was making that up, but I'm not. So let's get to it. Here's Levi Lusko, and The Water is the

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Problem. Here we go. The people were spectators to almost all of the events that occurred that day.

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They watched as Baal's prophets sang. They watched as Baal's prophets danced and cut themselves.

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They watched as Elijah mocked. They watched as Elijah calmly rebuilt the broken -down altar.

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They watched as he dug a trench. They were close. He said, come close. They had a front -row seat.

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They observed. They watched. They even got to watch when God did something that day, when God sent fire from heaven in response to the simple humble prayer of Elijah that was not showy, was it?

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That was not flashy? That did not exalt himself? He said, Lord, let them see that you are

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God. Let them see that I'm speaking true words, but let them see and let their hearts be turned to you. Our job is to lead people...

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Actually, I need to pay attention to the details on that part, because in Elijah's prayer, the thing he prayed was that, well, that they would know that the

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Lord is returning their heart. Let me, yeah, let me read, let me read the actual prayer.

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So, Elijah said, come near, and then

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Elijah took the twelve stones, and then he put the, and then he said, do it a second time.

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Alright, so then Elijah, at the time of the offering of the oblation, that's 3 in the afternoon, same time that Christ dies on the cross, he said,

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O Yahweh, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that you are God in Israel, and that I am your servant, and that I have done all these things at your word.

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Answer me, O Lord, answer me, that this people may know that you, O Yahweh, are

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God, and that you have turned their hearts back, that you are bringing them to repentance.

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And so, note that the active agent is God. God's doing the work here. God's gonna cause the fire to come down, and so that's kind of an important bit, and he didn't really correctly state that.

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Let me back it up just a smidge and listen again. The humble prayer of Elijah, that was not showy, was it?

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No. That was not flashy. No. That did not exalt himself. He said, Lord, let them see that you are

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God. Let them see that I'm speaking true words, but let them see and let their hearts be turned to you. Our job is to lead people in a relationship with God.

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That's our heart's desire. And so, in response to that, they watched as God shot fire down from heaven, flame throws from the sky.

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Oh my gosh, pyrotechnics on Mount Carmel, tonight at 7, Bob. Right? I mean, this is newsworthy stuff.

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They watched everything and were passive spectators for it all, except for one thing.

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The people had one job, and what was it? Just add water.

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Now, he's gonna make a big to -do about this piece of this a little later in the sermon, but he's got to engage in narcissus first, and so he's laying down a stake, just add water.

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He said they were passive. They were passive except for the one thing they had to do, so he's turning that into some kind of a requirement.

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God can't act unless you're acting first. That's really bad theology here, and he's gonna be adding details to the text that are not there.

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That was the assignment that God gave them. I want you to add the water. He gave to the people the same responsibility that we should live under the weight of.

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As we ask the Father, He's gonna give us the water that's gonna flow out in our lives. If we're obedient, if we're walking like we're gonna walk, the result is gonna be this river, this torrent of water.

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Now, note, I'll say this right here, is that water now is going to become code talk for money.

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Yeah, I wish I was making that up. A flow out of our lives that will allow us to lift the unliftable, to move the unmovable, to do things unbelievable as the water does the work, and we just get to float over it in life.

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And if you missed last week's message, please do. We're referencing a lot because we're in that flow.

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We're in that stream, and so this definitely builds on what we learned last weekend at Fresh Life Church.

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You can get it on our app. You can get it on our website. It's all there waiting, free of charge, 24 hours a day.

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And so that was the deal. So we learned that water must be added, and that's the exact assignment that people were given.

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Now, if I was one of them, I actually might have objected. If the goal here is fire, if the goal here is burning, if the goal here is combustion, maybe we shouldn't douse it all in bucket after bucket after bucket.

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Now, note, the way he's telling this story, it's as if somehow Elijah was in partnership with the people who were spectators.

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That is a total twisting of this text. They had no say in what was going on. This was a showdown between the prophets of Baal and Elijah, and yes,

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Elijah did ask for assistance, but in no way was he in partnership with the spectators.

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Like, not at all. Bucket after bucket of water. Man of God, sir, your honor, with all due respect, you seem to be very crazy and capable of stopping the rain for these last three years.

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So we don't want to in any way interfere with your general prophecy that you're in the midst of prophesying, but just maybe rethink the strategy, because the goal is burning, and this would seem to be a barrier to burning.

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I don't know about you. I go on one camping trip a year with my family, and I have a tough time lighting dry wood on fire successfully.

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So to me, I'm thinking, will this be a good plan to pour so much water over it that it's literally filling up a tiny reservoir?

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We've made a moat now. A moat surrounds. There's a drawbridge that actually went up and down. Like, what is happening,

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Elijah? He's gone crazy. It was the ravens. They told him to do all this, didn't they? This is not a good plan. So if I'm one of the people there,

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I'm... This isn't exegesis. This is narcigesis and stand -up comedy, but it's not...

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He's not exegeting the text. What he's saying is not helping us understand its true sense.

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Again, go back to the Jennifer Toledo video where I work through in the entirety of 1

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Kings 17 and almost all of 1 Kings 18, and you can see the context of what's going on in this text.

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And what Levi Lesko is doing here is not exegeting the text. It's actually quite alarming what he's doing because it's harder to spot, because it sounds like he's exegeting, but he's narcissistically reading certain things into this text and assumptions that cannot hold up.

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I might say to Elijah, if the strategy is fire, then the water is the problem.

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This is not a good plan. This doesn't make any sense because wet wood doesn't burn well.

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Yeah, Elijah wasn't asking their opinions at all. In fact, when Elijah confronted the people who were there, they pretty much were quite stoic.

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And here's what it says, 1 Kings 18, 21, Elijah came near to all the people, said, how long will you go limping between two different opinions?

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If Yahweh is God, follow him. But if Baal, then follow him. And the people did not answer him a word.

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So Elijah doesn't need their opinions. He confronted them, and they remained silent.

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They're bystanders here. And although he asked them for their assistance as far as putting water on the sacrifice, that does not mean that somehow he was soliciting their opinions as to what he was going to do.

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And so this is just nonsense. And so we'll note here, he put the wood in order.

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This is verse 33, cut the bull in pieces, laid it on the wood, and then he said, fill four jars with water, pour it on the burnt offering and on the wood.

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He said, do it a second time. They did it a second time. He said, do it a third time. And they did it a third time. And the water ran around the altar and filled the trench with water.

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So nothing here about them saying, if the goal here is fire, why are you doing that?

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And of course, I pointed this out in the last video, and I'll point it out here, where the water come from.

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This is Mount Carmel, at least where it's located on the map in Israel, just south of Haifa.

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And the place where this took place is less than a mile, less than a kilometer, in fact, from the big blue wet thing known as the

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Mediterranean Sea. And so the question is, where did the water come from? The water came from the big blue wet thing.

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That's the thing that makes a lot of sense, because they were in the middle of a famine. They wouldn't have had much of any other kind of water.

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And so there was an abundance of water quite close nearby. In fact, I pointed this out, if you go to maps .google

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.com, you take a look at photos of the area around Mount Carmel, there seems to be quite a lot of water nearby.

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And that's going to be an important fact in this, because Levi Lusko is going to stick stuff into the text that's not there in order to make a point regarding tithing.

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But we come back to the narcissistic part of the sermon before we get to that part.

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But there's a principle here at play, and I think we ought to pause and take note of it from the very beginning. God can do the impossible, but He often calls us to do the impractical.

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Really, what impractical things am I called to do? So you'll note here that the assumption is that what

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Elijah did, you're going to be called to do something similarly impractical like Elijah was.

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This is the basic presupposition of narcissistic eisegesis, is that you read these texts and you go, well, see, there's a pattern here.

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Elijah was asked to do something impractical. Gideon was asked to do something impractical.

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Oh my goodness, take a look at Jericho. They were asked to do something impractical. So therefore, we can see this principle in play.

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God's going to ask you to do something impractical too. No, this is not an actual biblical teaching.

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This is a narcissistic reading into the biblical text. The assumption that you are as important as Elijah or Gideon or whatever, you get the point.

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But all the types and shadows point to Jesus, not you, and that's the problem. You got to know this about our

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God. Otherwise, you'll always be grinding up against stuff like, what? What? God does stuff that's impossible.

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That's like his MO. He's God in heaven. Nothing's too difficult for him. Owns the cattle on a thousand hills, speaks the word and stars come flying out of his mouth that he knows the name of them all.

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So he's bad to the bone. You can do anything he wants. Impossible stuff, not hard for him at all. But he often, in accomplishing impossible things, calls his people to do impractical things.

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Just all over the Bible. We don't have time to go into it, but Joshua and Jericho. Want to knock the city down?

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Oh yeah, I got a plan for that. Just walk around it and yell really loud. Note, this is not how this really went down.

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And claiming that this is a principle is something far different than saying this is a biblical teaching.

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There is no biblical text that says, therefore, you should expect that when God is speaking to you to change the world or do something impossible, that he's going to ask you to do something impractical.

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The problem here is that you're assuming the biblical texts are about you, and they're not.

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They're about Christ. You know, that's one option.

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Let's put a pin in that, and let's talk about other ideas you might have up there, because clearly that's not a good solution.

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There's this nine -foot -tall giant. He's cussing at us every day. Stuff about feeding our flesh to the birds of the air.

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It's not kind. Which is, again, a type in shadow pointing to Christ's defeat of the devil.

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We'll get to that in a future edition of the Pirate Christian's Guide to Understanding the

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Old Testament. We think something should happen, and God's like, I have the perfect candidate. He is this tall and has a slingshot.

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Well, you know what, God, that's option A for sure. That's, you know what, we're brainstorming.

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Nothing's off limits. Let's go ahead and put it on the whiteboard, but let's just keep on generating. Do you really think that when

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God says he's going to do something that you can somehow just take

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God's, the way he says he's going to do it, and put it aside and discuss other possible options?

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This is blasphemous. This is utterly blasphemous and a complete mangling of these accounts to make them about you rather than about Christ.

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A few others, just so we, and you could go through the whole

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Bible that way, couldn't you? God can do the impossible, but he often calls his people in doing that to do the impractical.

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Why? Because he's interested in faith. Now, granted, God definitely is interested in faith and trusting in him.

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Indeed. And his ways are not our ways. And if he always came up with strategies that made sense and always called people...

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Strategies. What are you talking about? People to do things that you look to them and go, oh, that makes total perfect sense.

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Like, I wish I could bring you on the road with me. I wish you could be in every back room

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I've been in at every conference because you would laugh hysterically for when the moment comes that someone looks me in the eyes and sits back in their chair and says, so tell me, why

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Montana? Are you an avid hunter? Have you always had an interest in the outdoors? And the guys who travel with me, they probably suppress laughter inside their hearts because they watch me always, oh yeah, like as though like, whoa, that's a great question.

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That's a whoa. Never, never heard that before. Didn't hear that last night and didn't hear that the week before that in Chicago.

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So notice he's talking about himself. See, this is true because look, I was called by God to go to Montana.

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Uh -huh. Right. Yeah. See, so now he's pointing to his own life as proof that this principle is true because he himself has been called by God to change the world the way

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Elijah did and Joshua did and Gideon did and uh -huh. And lots of people in the

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Bible and stuff. And in Dallas and in Philadelphia and in Baton Rouge and in Asheville.

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And I'm not trying to be like, be rude. It is a perfectly good question. Why? Because none of this makes any sense.

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None of this makes any sense. I don't know. Pastoring people in Montana makes perfect sense.

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I happen to pastor people in eastern, sorry, western Minnesota, northwestern

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Minnesota. Yeah, there's human beings there. They need to hear about Christ and be called to repent of their sins and trust in Him for the forgiveness of their sins.

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That God called us here, that we would do this, that we would see this, that we would go here, that we would go to Salt Lake City, that we would of course open up, that the

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Pulsum would open up by itself. Like none of this makes sense, right? But God can do the impossible, and He often calls us to do things that are impractical.

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So apparently it's impractical to preach the gospel in Montana. Huh? Like that's it.

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I want to reach big cities. Yeah, go to rural America. Well Lord, that's one idea.

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Right? I want to save the world. I'll send a guy to a virgin. So now here, the principle even applies regarding Jesus.

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See, He's just like Jesus, because you know, sending a guy to a virgin, that's impractical too. This whole thing is breaking down now.

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This is just God's style. So let me just give you some like general operating procedural information.

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When God tells you to do something, the actual instruction is honestly irrelevant.

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It's the source. Now notice the people near the front of the stage who are going, oh wow, that's called the bullpen.

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Yeah, these are people who are volunteered and trained. They volunteer and then they're trained to whenever the pastor says something pseudo profound, they're to gawk and sit there with slack jaw and go, wow, that's amazing.

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Yeah, this is a form of manipulation. These bullpens are of the instruction that's super significant.

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Like within the revealed Word of God, okay, like I'm not saying like He tells you to like punch your brother. I go, oh,

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God told me to do that. He often tells us to do things His ways are not our ways. Okay, stop it.

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I'm talking about like as God leads you to just go up to a stranger and God bless you. Yeah, or maybe go and brush their hair like Beth Moore claims.

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Uh -huh, right. You see the problems here? If you at least feel like God would have you linger and be generous and give something to someone just for no reason.

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So notice we're outside of the Bible at this point in the voice of God anywhere.

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In line at a store. As you follow the impulses of the Holy Spirit, as this river rushes out of your heart, there are going to be things

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He's going to call you to do that are irrational, that don't make sense, that don't jive with your plan, the human wisdom, that your girlfriend, that your parents aren't going to think like, and the actual action is honestly irrelevant.

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It's the source of the instruction. It's a who, not a what. Always a who, not a what. Is God telling me to do this?

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So you have to ask. If you have to ask, God's not telling you. The godly voices in my life, what is my community, my fresh life group, what is my campus pastor, my team leader, are the voices in my life saying, yeah, that's something that God would do.

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Okay, it doesn't make any sense, but we'll go with you on it. We'll step out in faith with you on it. You know what I'm saying? It's the who, not the what.

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It's the source, not the actual thing. Because no, the what is not a good plan.

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So note here, he's not pointing people to the Bible, for real. He's not pointing them. This is where you go, you know.

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All scripture is theanoustos. God breathed the prophethood for teaching, correction, for reproof, and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be complete and equipped for every good work.

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Now we're, you know, the voice of God is out on the wind. It's in the grocery store.

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You never know where it's going to show up, and you need other people sit there and go, yeah, well, maybe that is the voice of God, and we think that's something he would do, and we're not exactly sure, but we'll go with you on it.

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And the crazier and the more irrational it is, well, the more probable it is that that's

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God talking. Wrong plan. But where God is concerned, his strategy with what is the wetter the better?

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The wetter the better. The more ridiculous, the more preposterous, the more human wisdom.

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That's how you know it's from God. The more ridiculous and preposterous it is, that's got to be God.

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No biblical text teaches this. And would say not going to happen, isn't going to work. There's no way

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God could do that. And the wetter the better. Ask Gideon. Ask Gideon, who

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God whittled down his army, going to fight a far superior force. God whittled down his army until he was left with only 300 dudes to go up against a force that was numbering over 100 ,000, as numerous as locusts, right?

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And Gideon's standing there urinating. But what did I tell you? Where God's concerned, the wetter the better.

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See how I combined two things and one of them was peeing your pants, right? But I'm just telling you, like what is impossible to us is not impossible to him.

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That's true. But what you're teaching these people is not taught in the

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Bible. And so if something phenomenal is going to happen, if God's going to write a great story, it has to have a hook.

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It has to have a part, a plot twist. It has to. So if God's going to write a story, you know, he's going to write your story into the next edition of the

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Bible. And since you are so important, it's got to have a hook. So God's going to tell you to do something impractical.

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Catch the narcissism here. Of course, there's going to be a part where nothing's working out. Of course, something's going to go bust.

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Of course, your car is going to break down. Of course, of course, a horse is a horse. Of course, of course.

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But there's going to be like, when that chapter comes, don't throw your hands up in the air. I thought I was serving God. Here you are.

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I'm pleased to meet you. Plot twist. I'm pleased to meet you. Walk around the city. I'm pleased to meet you. The woods wet.

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God. Yeah. The assumption is, is that your life is going to be chapters in the

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Bible. That's it's same level here. Wets the wood before he lights it.

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It's how he gets started writing a great story because he's a good author. Like, like what's

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Braveheart without all of the hard things he went through? Just a dude in a dress.

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But you add the. So is the story of Braveheart what we should expect then?

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Freedom. Yeah. Yeah. You're you're you're the next, you know,

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William Wallace, right? Yeah. You're the next. And apparently his story is going to be written in scripture to the hardship.

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You add the bitterness, you add the antagonism. Now it's a movie someone wants to watch. And God is seeking to produce a brilliant story.

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Yes. God wants to make a movie about you and other people are going to want to watch it. So expect him to make the story really interesting so that people will want to watch the story about you.

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Uh huh. A real edge of your seat thriller in our lives, in our day.

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What's considered the alternative? Do you want a life that by the end of it, it's like, meh, that totally happened.

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They were here. Do you want a boring life that nobody wants to hear about? Or do you want to participate in a life bigger than the sum of its parts?

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Where after it's all said and done, looking back, the only explanation is God did it.

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He moved. Is that the reason why First Kings chapter 18 was written?

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To motivate us to desire to have a life that everybody would be interested in reading about or hearing about?

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Is that the reason why First Kings 18 was written? Not at all.

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Empower for his glory with his strength through his hand, by mobilizing his people as they were willing to do things that didn't make sense to live a part of it.

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He's got everyone on their feet. They're standing. Oh man, this is so inspiring. It's narcissistic beyond all belief.

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And that's not why God had First Kings 18 written. Journey bigger than themselves.

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That's the life I want. It's what we were born to live. We, I want a life that everyone's going to focus on me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, and say,

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Oh, what a great life he lived. And that's a great story. Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me.

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Narcissism. That's what this is. We are the people of God. We are the hope of this world. As he builds his

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Christ is the hope of this world church. And it's going to include stuff that's weird.

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Now he's going to make the segue. Because that's how he normally preaches this. He's not going to eschew that.

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He's just going to build on top of it. And that's how I usually preach this text, but not this weekend.

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Every time I've read 1 Kings 18, that's what I thought. God had them wet the wood just to stack the odds against him, just to show how tough he was.

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Yeah, he baptized that sacrifice three times in the name of the

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Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, just saying. But then I started thinking, I was like, wait a minute, fire from heaven is impossible.

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So, like, water on it really doesn't ratchet up the level of difficulty at all.

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If a meteorite is going to fall from heaven at the command of the prophet, on that exact spot, at that exact moment, wet or dry, the sucker's going to burn.

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So he was already doing something. God was already calling him to do something impractical. When he threw down, at my command, fire's going to fall after you try.

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You can even go first. I'll be the finale. Like, there was already all the, this is crazy, wetting yourself action needed.

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I don't believe anymore that the water, as good of preaching as that was, it was really good.

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I don't actually believe. What God showed me that I want to show to you. Now, notice what he just said here.

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God showed me this. He's claiming direct revelation from God, and that this is a

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Holy Spirit inspired interpretation. In other words, to challenge what he says next is not to challenge

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Levi Lusko, it's to challenge God himself who put this on his heart to share the story in this way.

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You is something else I saw in the text. And so notice he's not eschewing the other part.

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He's just saying he saw something else and that God's the one who showed him this. Get there, we have to ask this question.

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Where did all the water come from? I don't know. The big blue wet thing called the Mediterranean Sea.

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That's a view from Mount Carmel right there. There's a lot of water out there in that Mediterranean.

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And even during the drought, the Mediterranean was still full and it's less than a kilometer away from Mount Carmel.

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Just saying, we continue. Because we're in a three year long drought.

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Yeah, the bullpen's going nuts here. The pseudo profound bovine scatology is flying at this point and heaping up in large piles.

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And they're going, wow, yeah. Big blue wet thing, Mediterranean. That's less than a kilometer away from where that was.

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We know the people were called to come on this field trip. And what did they have to bring with them? Some sort of a camelback, canteen, wooden hip water bottle with the aluminum top shaped like a bowling pin.

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So trendy right now. Clean canteen, whatever it was. They had to have hydration to come from wherever their tribe lived.

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So they all, and how precious were those few drops? Because I'll tell you, the reservoirs are getting low, y 'all.

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God allowed them. I mean, they had reserves and they had water. They had cisterns and all that.

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But for three years, they weren't getting replenished. The aquifers weren't getting replenished. They were getting, the wells were getting pretty dry.

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Doing soundings and man, right? There's not a lot of water left. So whatever water was there on top of this mountain.

32:25

There's a ton of water. Just like a gazillion tons of water.

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It's right there, you know? Just walked out of the Mediterranean and loaded up.

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Yeah, I'm just saying. Was water they brought with them? Because there's not like naturally occurring water on top of this mountain.

32:45

No, it's less than a kilometer away though. It's like right there. Yeah, mm -hmm.

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And so Elijah, somehow, God led him to pull out the one job that was gonna be the people's job.

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Now he's gonna make a lot of hay about, oh, this is the one thing that was the people's job. And that was gonna be something that they could do, but only if they worked together.

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And that is each of them pouring out the little bit of water they had. Maybe all the water they had.

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And once they filled those water pots up and they all did okay, everyone did it. Everyone who had water on her system, do you have water?

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Yeah, no, I didn't bring any. Once everyone had poured their water out, he dumped it out and said, let's fill them up again.

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Got me more water. Can't continue till these are full again. Now a couple guys, oh, I forgot my canteen.

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Oh yeah, you forgot it. And now they get filled again. And one final time, until maybe he's passing people through a metal detector.

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I don't know how he got it all. But eventually all the water had been poured out. Everyone gave the water that they did.

33:57

Yeah, I know that there's a lot of water. I mean, just noodles. I mean, you can float tanker ships on it and container ships and all kinds.

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I mean, there it is. I mean, it's so close to Mount Carmel. I mean, I have no idea where they, where could they possibly have gotten that water from?

34:20

Yeah, I'm sure. I mean, they had to give until it hurts, yeah. And only then, when they had all done their part, their human element, did

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God do his part. Yeah, this is what we call putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable, okay?

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Because what is a passing bit of information? He's really making a lot of hay and turning this into the thing they had to do.

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God promised that there would be rain, promised. And God was not going to somehow not make good on his promise.

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And him keeping his promise to make it rain that day was not contingent upon them giving up their precious little fresh water that they had.

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I mean, it's not like if they hadn't have done, you know, given up their fresh water, God was gonna go, well, I was gonna make it rain today, but I guess

35:12

I'm not. That's, I mean, this is nonsense. So here's the point

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I wanna make out of this. It's giving, not keeping, that leads to receiving.

35:28

That's not what 1 Kings 18 is about at all. This is deceitful beyond belief here.

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This is manipulation because what he's really trying to do is put the thumbscrews down on these people and make them say, well, there it is right there in 1

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Kings 18, you gotta be tithing. If you wanna receive from God, well, you better give till it hurts.

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Because the story ends with an unlimited amount of water opened up for them once again.

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This is a form of the prosperity heresy. But the only way they got to that was in giving up what was currently all they had.

36:11

Yeah, no, they had a lot of water, right? Yeah, I'm looking there. Yeah, that's quite a bit of water.

36:17

Yeah, right next to Mount Carmel. I mean, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of water. Just saying.

36:23

And once they came to a place where they were willing to take what was in their hands that was precious to them and let it be poured out for God, did they come to a place where God could then open up the windows of heaven on them?

36:37

God apparently couldn't open the windows of heaven until they had given up their precious little water. Their lives again and gave them a blessing that they could not even calculate had they had the ability.

36:51

A blessing. The reason why it wasn't raining for the last three years is because God was making a point that he's the one who brings the rain.

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This is all about him defeating Baal and showing the whole narrative about Baal bringing the rain is a complete idolatrous lie.

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It's giving, not keeping, that leads to receiving. And this is counterintuitive, but it's true.

37:19

Because had they hung onto the water, that is all they would have had. No text says that.

37:27

You just inserted that. And you can claim God laid this on your heart all you want, but there is no textual evidence.

37:34

In fact, a whole lot of it to deny that what you're saying is true. But only when they poured out what they had could they then from God receive more.

37:44

It's the principle, it's in the Bible. It's in Proverbs 11, verse 24. It says, one man gives freely, pours out freely, yet gains even more.

37:55

Yeah, Proverbs 11, 24 is not a cross reference to 1 Kings 18 at all.

38:02

Another withholds unduly, but comes to poverty. Again, it has nothing to do, this has nothing to do with 1

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Kings 18, nothing whatsoever. Eugene Peterson put it this way, the world of the generous gets bigger and bigger, but the world of the stingy just gets smaller and smaller as he closes in on himself.

38:23

1 Kings 18 is not a tithing text at all. This is true with resource.

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This is true with time. This is true with affection. This is true with warm words.

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This is true in every way. When we withhold, we have a closed mentality. Well, listen, closed hands can't receive a gift.

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Again, this text has nothing to do with generosity or tithing.

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But the hands of openness, the hands that give, the hands that are generous, generous in time, generous in money, generous in life.

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I wanna live a life that gets bigger. I wanna live a life that just pours out. I wanna live a life that lays before God and shares with people, knowing that is how

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God then can see fit to bless us with more once we've given out what we have.

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And I believe that principle was at work here. And it was so important to them because the whole system that Jezebel introduced was carnal and materialistic and worshiping of sex and worshiping of money and living me, me, me, my, my.

39:25

Yeah, worshiping of Baal, worshiping of Asherah. My, my, and not caring about eternity, only caring about this life.

39:33

And God knew that God of Mammon had a stranglehold. It wasn't Mammon that they were worshiping.

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It was Baal. On his people and only generosity can break the back of the

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God called greed. The God called greed was not the one that was being challenged that day.

39:53

The God that was being challenged that day had a name and his name is Baal. This is,

40:00

I, if you can tell, I'm a little bit incensed. I'm a little hot under the collar here. This is manipulation of the worst kind.

40:10

And, you know, turning this into a tithing text is deplorable beyond all belief.

40:17

I, I'm having a hard time listening to more of it. Only generosity can free us from its shackles when we open up and give.

40:26

And I love the beauty of this picture, that it's giving, not hoarding, that leads to having.

40:32

There was no hoarding going on and there was no giving of money. And the God of greed was not the thing that was on trial that day.

40:40

It was Baal. I think you get the point.

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So if you are sitting under a pastor who takes 1 Kings 18 and turns it into a tithing text, you're attending a church where the pastor does not know how to rightly handle

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God's word. And he's being influenced by all kinds of nonsense and he needs to repent.

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And if he won't, you need to find a different church because you're being manipulated and pushed hard and pressed into in order to cough up your resources to ingratiate the vision casting leader and his vision.

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And you're being told false things about God and his word in the process. So I think you get the point.

41:24

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41:29

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41:39

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