You Are Not the Only One Left

There is a woman I keep thinking about who prays in her car.

Not on the way anywhere. She pulls onto the drive, turns the engine off, and then she sits there for four or five minutes with her hands on the wheel and the house lit up in front of her, and she says what she came to say. Then she goes in and puts the shopping away.

She did not decide to do this. Nobody told her to. It happened the way most things happen, which is slowly and without a meeting: she prayed out loud in the kitchen once, and somebody sighed. Not cruelly. It was the sigh you make when the weather comes on and you were watching something else. And she heard it, and she filed it, and a few weeks later she found herself finishing the same prayer in the car instead, and then that became where the praying lived.

Here is the part I want you to notice. She does not think of herself as persecuted. If you asked her she would tell you her husband is a good man and her son is kind and her mother-in-law would drop everything for her at two in the morning. All of that is true. She is not living in a hostile house.

She is living in a house where she is the only one, and those are not the same thing, and almost nobody writes to the second one.

The prophet did the arithmetic and got it wrong

There is a man in the Scripture who ended up in a cave doing the same sum.

Elijah had just come off the biggest day of his life. Fire from heaven, the whole nation watching, the thing everybody said could not happen happening in front of them. And a few days later he is under a bush in the wilderness asking God to let him die, and when God asks him what he is doing there, this is what comes out:

And he said, I have been very jealous for the LORD God of hosts: for the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away. (1 Kings 19:14, King James Version)

I, even I only, am left.

He says it twice in that chapter. It is the sentence he cannot get past. And the striking thing is that he is not being dramatic and he is not being faithless. He is reporting what he can see, and what he can see is real. The altars really were thrown down. He really did stand on that mountain by himself.

He was accurate about everything except the total.

You are not the last one, and God has never once been short of people. That is not a nice thing to say to somebody who is lonely. It is what 1 Kings 19:18 actually says four verses later, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my telling who makes a sentence like that land somewhere a person can feel it.

What God did not say

Watch what happens next, because I think most of us expect the wrong thing.

God does not tell him to cheer up. He does not correct his theology. He does not point out that he had just seen fire fall and ought to have more faith than this, which is what I would probably have done and it would have been the wrong thing.

He feeds him. Twice. He lets him sleep. Then, in 1 Kings 19:12, He puts him on a mountain and goes past him, not in the wind and not in the earthquake and not in the fire, but in a sound so small you would miss it if you were braced for something bigger. The Spirit of God has not raised His volume since.

And then, only then, He says the number.

Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him. (1 Kings 19:18, King James Version)

Seven thousand. Elijah had said one. He was out by six thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine, and he was not lying, and he was not exaggerating. He simply could not see them from where he was standing.

I want to be careful here, because I am not telling you there is a secret congregation in your kitchen. There may genuinely be nobody in your house who prays. That may be exactly and precisely true, and I am not going to talk you out of a fact.

What I am telling you is that being the only one you can see has never once been the same as being the only one there is.

You are being counted in something larger than your own address, and the arithmetic was never yours to do. The word says seven thousand while a prophet was saying one, and the Spirit of God is the one who widens a room that has felt very small for a long time.

The house was never empty

But there is a second thing in that cave and it is the one I actually want to give you.

Before God mentions the seven thousand, He shows up. Before the number, the presence. Elijah is not comforted by finding out there are others. He is comforted by the fact that the Lord came out to a cave in the middle of nowhere for one man who wanted to die.

And that is the piece that changes a car prayer.

Because the loneliest thing about being the only believer in your house is not that nobody agrees with you. It is the quiet suspicion that God is out there somewhere with the people who do agree, and that you are on your own in here holding up your end. Psalm 139:7 asks where a person could go from His Spirit, and the answer the verse gives is nowhere.

You are not holding up your end.

God is in that house and He arrived before you did. Psalm 139 says there is nowhere a person can go from His Spirit, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a verse like that and makes it mean the actual kitchen you are standing in.

He is not waiting at the church for you to get back. He is not out with the seven thousand. He is in the room where somebody sighed, and He was in it before you ever came to faith, and He has been at work on the people you love for longer than you have been praying for them.