Galatians 1:16

The LORD will . . . satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land. . . . You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail.

Travelers are enthusiastic over a species of palm tree which grows in South America. They call it the rain tree. This tree has the remarkable power of attracting, in a wondrous degree, atmospheric moisture, which it condenses and drops on the earth in refreshing dew. It grows straight up in the parched and arid desert and daily distributes its refreshing showers, with the result that around it an oasis of luxuriant vegetation soon springs up.

This is not a very gratifying endorsement of Elijah. Doubtless the man’s heart swelled with eagerness to start a great reformation; his mind expanded with dreams of world-empire. To flee now, when the audacious approach to the king has been made, is to contradict all accepted methods of operation.

Nothing now but solitude? But God knows His plans and Elijah, his servant. There is wholesome truth here. To trust where we cannot trace is to give our God the full sovereignty that He longs for. The most formidable barrier in His dealings with His children is their self-will. “Let him do what is good in his eyes” (1 Samuel 3:18) is not resignation but triumphant faith, if we trust.

If Jesus Christ is to regenerate me, what is the problem He is up against?

I have a heredity I had no say in; I am not holy, nor likely to be; and if all Jesus Christ can do is to tell me I must be holy, His teaching plants despair. But if Jesus Christ is a Regenerator, One Who can put into me His own heredity of holiness, then I begin to see what He is driving at when He says that I have to be holy. Redemption means that Jesus Christ can put into any man the hereditary disposition that was in Himself, and all the standards He gives are based on that disposition: His teaching is for the life He puts in. The moral transaction on my part is agreement with God's verdict on sin in the Cross of Jesus Christ.