Scripture: 1 Kings 19:1-13
[Show Clip #1]
“Something must be wrong with me,” Charlie Brown tells Linus. “I’m not happy. I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to feel.” Then he tells Lucy, “I know I should be happy, but I’m not.”
Is it okay for believers not to be happy all the time—even at Christmastime? Yes. It is okay. In fact, for people who are trying to be faithful to God, unhappiness sometimes comes with the territory.
Consider no less a man of God than Elijah—arguably the greatest prophet in the Bible next to Moses. Like Charlie Brown, Elijah isn’t happy—certainly not in 1 Kings 19. He is discouraged, exhausted, and deeply depressed.
Why? For one thing, his people have turned away from the Lord and embraced Baal. In the chapter just before today’s passage, Elijah publicly exposes Baal as a false god on Mount Carmel. But instead of leading to national repentance, it enrages Queen Jezebel, a devoted worshiper of Baal… and the wife of Israel’s King Ahab. She vows to have Elijah killed.
So Elijah runs. He flees into the wilderness, collapses under a broom tree, and tells God that he wants to die. He feels like a complete failure. “I alone am left,” he says. “They have torn down your altars, killed your prophets, and now they’re coming for me too.” Like Charlie Brown, Elijah feels let down. This is not how his life and ministry were supposed to turn out.
Faithfulness, it turns out, does not guarantee happiness… at least not in the short run. Sometimes it guarantees the opposite.
And that’s true even in the Christmas story—maybe especially in the Christmas story.
Think about Mary. After the angel appears and tells her of her role in God’s redemption plan, she responds with extraordinary faith: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” And then Luke adds a detail we often overlook: “Then the angel departed from her.”
That is the last time, as far as we know, that Mary ever sees an angel.
From that moment on, she is left alone with her thoughts—alone to ponder the long and difficult road ahead. Very soon, for instance, she must explain her pregnancy to Joseph: “I’m expecting a child, and you’re not the father—but let me explain!” When Joseph pulls away, at least temporarily, there are no angels to comfort her. No reassurance. No heavenly voices reminding her that everything will turn out fine.
Do you think, in that moment, Mary was happy? Probably not. But she was faithful.
Faith, at times, feels lonely. It can feel heavy. It can feel dark. And that is not a failure of faith—it is often a sign of it.
The Bible is remarkably honest about this. Psalm 42 gives voice to what many believers feel but rarely say out loud: “My soul is cast down within me… My tears have been my food day and night… I say to God, my rock, ‘Why have you forgotten me?’” Imagine saying that in Sunday school and seeing the looks you’d get!
But notice what the psalmist does next. He speaks to himself: “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?” He doesn’t deny his feelings… but he also doesn’t surrender to them either! Instead, he argues back. “Hope in God,” he tells himself, “for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God.”
One pastor put it this way: much of our unhappiness comes from listening to ourselves instead of talking to ourselves. The psalmist talks to himself: he stands up and says, “Self, listen for a moment.” He reminds himself who God is, what God has done, and what God has promised to do. And then he defies despair: “I shall yet praise him.”
So when your heart tells you that everything is hopeless—talk back to your heart. Argue back. Because your heart—as sincere as it may be—does not always know what it’s talking about.
Let’s watch this next clip…
[Show Clip #2]
Charlie Brown has a hard time commanding the other kids’ attention. They don’t listen. They get distracted. They focus on themselves. But before we judge them too harshly, maybe we should pause and ask: what must it be like for God to deal with us most of the time? How difficult is it for us to keep our attention focused on the Lord?
And unlike Charlie Brown, God doesn’t shout at us through a megaphone. Sometimes we wish he would. It would make things easier.
Remember Elijah, whom I mentioned earlier. He hides in a cave on Mount Horeb, waiting for God to speak. He expects God to show up with volume and force—with a mighty wind, an earthquake, or fire. But God isn’t in any of those things. Instead, God speaks in what the King James calls a “still small voice.” In the Hebrew, it’s even quieter than that—something like a thin whisper, barely audible. And yet Elijah hears it.
That raises a hard question: how many “still, small voices” from God do we miss? Hearing God often requires quiet, stillness, and sustained attention. It takes the old-fashioned discipline of prayer. No wonder we’d rather have wind and earthquakes and fire.
We often assume that the heroes of the Bible had it easier than we do when it came to hearing from God. But that’s not really true. Think about Joseph, the adoptive father of Jesus. God spoke to him through an angel—and we think, Well, if an angel showed up to me, things would be clear! But Joseph’s angel didn’t arrive glowing brightly or flying around with wings. Angels in the Bible often look like ordinary people. And in Joseph’s case, the angel didn’t even appear in person at all!
No… the angel, please notice, spoke to Joseph in a dream.
A dream! And we all know how strange and unreliable dreams can be.
My son Townshend graduated from Georgia Tech last Friday. Praise God! But I was reminded of a dream—a nightmare—that I was plagued with for years… until relatively recently. A couple of times a week, I would dream that I was back at Georgia Tech—as a much older adult—taking the same classes I took years earlier… doing the same labs… except this time I had no idea what was going on… no idea what the professor was talking about… no idea how to work these engineering problems… I was lost… I was falling behind… I was failing.
The worst thing is, these nightmares wounded my pride.
And every time I woke up from these nightmares, I’d have the same realization: “Brent, you don’t have to take these classes again. You already have your engineering degree. Which you’re not using anyway, because God called you into pastoral ministry. Remember?”
And then I’d feel a sense of relief! [Sigh…] It was just a silly dream!
So how do you know when a dream is meaningful and when it’s just the result of something you ate the night before? Joseph had to wake up, think about the dream, wrestle with it, and take a risk—to believe that God was really speaking, even when the message sounded unbelievable—that his fiancée was pregnant, not because of unfaithfulness, but because God had done something miraculous!
Joseph had to act on that whisper. He had to trust that God was speaking—even without a megaphone.
And that leaves us with the question we all have to face:
Would we be willing to take that risky step of faith?
Let’s watch this next clip…
[Show Clip #3]
Surrounded by big, shiny, brightly colored, indestructible aluminum trees—any one of which would have satisfied his friends back home—Charlie Brown instead falls in love with the smallest, ugliest, weakest, most despised little tree. “This little green tree needs a home,” he says. “I think it will be perfect. I think it needs me.”
It’s hard not to hear an echo of one of Jesus’s stories. A shepherd has a hundred sheep and loses one. Just one. Who would even notice something so insignificant?
But the shepherd does. He searches until he finds it, and when he does, Jesus says he is filled with joy. He lifts the sheep onto his shoulders, carries it home, and tells everyone, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.”
Charlie Brown is overjoyed when he rescues that little tree, carries it back, and places it on Schroeder’s piano. But his friends—or, I should say, his “frenemies”—don’t see the tree the way Charlie Brown does. They don’t love it the way he loves it. And it doesn’t take long before their scorn for the tree turns into scorn for Charlie Brown himself. He’s mocked, rejected, ridiculed, and abandoned.
Sound familiar?
He was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities…
All we like sheep have gone astray…
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
Christmas means that God himself, in Jesus Christ, came into this world because he loved us. God looked at lost, broken humanity and said, “These people need a home. They’ve made a mess of their lives and of my good world through sin—but I can fix them. I can rescue them. I can carry them home.”
The good news of Christmas is that God loves the smallest, the ugliest, the weakest, and the most despised—which means God loves sinners like you and me. And in Christ, our Good Shepherd, God has come to rescue us so that we can finally be home where we belong.
If he hasn’t already, Jesus Christ has come looking for you too.
Will you let him find you?
Will you let him carry you home…?
Now let’s watch this final clip…
[Show Clip #4]
Just last week I was reading 2 Chronicles 13, about King Abijah of Judah, the grandson of Solomon. In 1 Kings, Abijah is judged harshly: “He walked in all the sins that his father did before him, and his heart was not wholly true to the Lord his God.” In other words—not a righteous man.
And yet, in 2 Chronicles, Abijah has a righteous moment. Before leading his army into battle against the northern kingdom of Israel—remember, the nation is divided at this point—Abijah stands on a mountain and addresses the enemy army. He tells them they have abandoned the Lord by following Jeroboam, golden calves, and illegitimate priests. He reminds them that Judah has remained faithful in worship at the temple, and he warns them plainly: God is with Judah, and to fight Judah is to fight against the Lord.
It is a perfectly true—and deeply faithful—speech.
Then, when Abijah’s badly outnumbered army appears doomed, he and his soldiers cry out to the Lord, and God grants them an unlikely victory.
And when I read that last week, I thought, “Wait a minute. Abijah is one of the unrighteous kings. Why is God showing him mercy? Why answer his prayer? Why give him victory?”
I’m ashamed to admit that I had this thought—because it assumes that God’s grace is something we have to earn.
See… I fear we imagine that grace works like this: when we first come to Christ, we owe God everything, of course… but over time… with enough faithfulness, obedience, and good behavior… over time, we begin to deserve the good things God does for us. We start to think we’re paying God back in some way for what God has done and continues to do for us.
Brothers and sisters, that is never how grace works!
We never earn God’s favor. We never deserve his mercy. Every good thing God does for us flows from grace alone, grounded in what Jesus Christ has done for us—living the life of perfect faithfulness to his Father that we could not live and dying the god-forsaken death we deserved to die.
And here’s why this matters for A Charlie Brown Christmas.
Charlie Brown’s friends—let’s face it—are awful to him. They mock him, dismiss him, abandon him—frenemies, at best. And yet, at the very last moment, something changes. They repent…? They seem to love Charlie Brown…? And they even worship God at the end.
Are they just a bunch of hypocrites?
No. Not hypocrites… They’re just sinners saved by grace… like the rest of us.
And let’s notice what changes their hearts…
Nothing other than God’s Word—and the gospel of Jesus Christ—read aloud by Linus from Luke chapter 2.
We all need to hear that again and again and again… Because we are all works in progress being changed by God for the better…
Also… I said earlier that, in addition to merely listening to our hearts, we need, like the psalmist, to speak to our hearts… Speak God’s promises to our hearts. The only way we know what those promises are is by immersing ourselves in God’s Word. As scripture says of itself, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man [and woman] of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”
May God inspire us to allow his living Word do this good work!
[Invitation…]