Twenty Years Chasing a Mountain

He was nineteen and he had gone up because he was angry, and what came down on him up there he has never told more than four people.

It is not dramatic to describe. There was no light and no voice. What there was, for something between ten minutes and an hour, was a sense of being known so completely and wanted so entirely that he lay face down on the ground with his hands over his head. And when it lifted he was a different person, and he stayed a different person for about three years.

He promised God on that mountain that he was His and would go wherever he was sent. He said it into the dirt.

He is thirty nine now.

What happened after the three years was ordinary. Work, and a marriage that took everything he had for a while, and a period he does not discuss, and by thirty he was a man who went to church at Christmas and thought about the mountain most weeks.

And here is his position, held without ever being examined: he will come back when it comes back. Not something like it. It. He knows what the real thing is because he had it, and everything since has been thin by comparison, and he is not going to settle for a thin version of a thing he has held the real one of.

So he goes up there. Not often. Once every year or two he drives out and walks up and stands there, usually at dawn because that is when it happened, and he waits, and nothing comes, and he walks back down.

Twenty years of that.

You may be waiting for a return of something. You may have had one hour, once, that has quietly become the standard by which you judge whether God is present, and you may have been going back to the same place ever since.

A prophet on a mountain waiting for the big thing

Let me take you to the only other person in Scripture who did exactly what you are doing, and God's answer to him is one of the strangest passages in the Old Testament.

Elijah has just seen the largest display of divine power in his lifetime, fire on a mountain in front of a nation, and it has not fixed anything, and he has run for his life and is now sitting in a cave wanting to die. And God tells him to go out and stand on the mount.

And, behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the LORD was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.1 Kings 19:11-12

You are met at a volume you have been discarding, and the size was never the address. 1 Kings 19:12 removes God from the wind and the earthquake and the fire on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been speaking at the small end of the register for twenty years.

The three big things, and the one small one

Wind, earthquake, fire. Every one of them enormous. Every one of them the sort of thing that would flatten a man.

And after each one, the same clause, repeated with a kind of patience: but the LORD was not in it.

Now, this is a man who has staked his life on the big thing. Fire from heaven was his whole ministry. And God arranges a demonstration in which three overwhelming phenomena arrive one after another and He is deliberately absent from all of them, and then speaks in a sound so small that the text has to strain to name it.

That is not a rebuke of Elijah's fire. God sent that fire. It is a correction of what Elijah had come to believe about where God is to be found.

You are listening for a magnitude, and Scripture goes out of its way to show a man that magnitude is not the address. 1 Kings 19:12 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a cave on Horeb and stands it on a mountain at dawn twenty years running.

And now I want to say something careful about your hour at nineteen, because I am not going to shrink it and a lot of preaching would.

It was real. God was in it. You were not nineteen and overwrought; something was given to you, and it changed you for three years, and the fact that you have never been able to describe it is one of the marks of it being genuine rather than manufactured.

It was also a gift, given once, unasked. And you have spent twenty years treating it as a doorway when it was never a doorway. Nobody can go back through a gift.

You were given something you could not generate, and you have been standing where it happened asking it to happen again. It is written in exactly those terms, and that is exactly the correction the still small voice is making, and the Spirit of God has been speaking at that volume all twenty years while you listened for wind.

The volume is not the verdict

Let me guard this now, because it would be easy for me to promise you something here and I am not going to.

I am not telling you that the still small voice arrives if you go up the mountain and stand quietly. That would make a technique out of it and put you back on the same road with better instructions. I am not scheduling anything. What He does and when is His.

What I am saying is narrower and more useful. The absence of the large thing is not the absence of God, and you have been treating them as the same fact for two decades.

You are met at a volume you have been discarding as nothing, and it counts entirely. The word puts it plainly, and that is the plain sense of a still small voice arriving after God has absented Himself from three cataclysms, and His Spirit has been the one at that end of the register the whole time.

And the flat return? That counts too. A man who walks down a mountain having felt nothing and says the words anyway is not settling for a thin version. He is doing the thing Elijah was taught to do, which is to stop waiting for the size and answer the small one.