1 Kings 17:2-6 And the word of the LORD came to him: 3 “Depart from here and turn eastward and hide yourself by the brook Cherith, which is east of the Jordan. 4 You shall drink from the brook, and I have commanded the ravens to feed you there.” 5 So he went and did according to the word of the LORD. He went and lived by the brook Cherith that is east of the Jordan. 6 And the ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning, and bread and meat in the evening, and he drank from the brook.
Before God’s servants can stand in high places before men, they must first bow low before Him. Elijah, fresh from proclaiming God’s judgment to Ahab, might have felt indispensable to God’s plan. Yet the following command was unexpected: “Hide yourself.” The brook Cherith became Elijah’s place of humbling, where pride was stripped away, self-reliance was broken, and his soul learned the sweetness of depending on God alone.
So it is with us. We are often too eager, too confident in our own strength, too certain of our usefulness. But in His wisdom, God leads us to our own Cheriths–hidden places where we learn to trust Him afresh.
Shabbat is our Cherith, week after week–not just a pause from labor, but a posture of the soul that says, “I trust You.” It is God’s invitation: “Cease striving. Rest by the brook. Let Me supply your need.” Like Elijah, we cannot stand on Carmel in victory until we have first knelt at Cherith in surrender.
Even at Cherith, the brook dried up. Day after day, Elijah watched the stream diminish until the final drop was gone. But God had not forsaken him. The drying brook taught Elijah to trust–not in the gift, but in the Giver. It revealed a more profound truth: when one source runs dry, God opens another.
So it is with us. We, too, find ourselves beside drying brooks–when health fades, resources run low, friendships waver, or doors of opportunity close. In those moments, God invites us into deeper rest, into stillness of soul, into unwavering trust. “My soul, wait silently for God alone, for my hope is from Him” (Psalm 62:5). His living water never fails. His grace flows, undiminished by the thirst of generations, unwearied through the ages. The promises of Yeshua (Jesus) remain true, especially in our Cherith moments: “Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst.” (John 4:14).
If you find yourself beside a drying brook—take heart! God has not forgotten you. This is not the end. Beyond Cherith lies Zarephath. Beyond this wilderness, fresh provision, new purpose, and greater power await. Hear His voice above the silence: Rest in Me. Trust in Me.
Shabbat is His gift—a holy invitation to be renewed, strengthened, and refreshed. Like Elijah at Cherith, hide yourself in Him. Trust His miraculous provision, even when it comes in ways you never expected—as when ravens fed the prophet in his secret refuge. The God who sustained Elijah will sustain you. His grace still flows. His living water has not run dry.
Now is the time to be refreshed and renewed—for Cherith and Zarephath were God’s training ground for triumph on Carmel, where the prophets of Baal were crushed and a nation was turned back to God. But it all began with Elijah first learning the lessons of surrender and trust at Cherith!
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[worthy_plugins_devotion_single_body]Revivals, that is, genuine Divinely ordained seasons of the activity of God among men, have a universally unusual character. Normal activities and behaviors give way to the tangible influence of God’s Holy Spirit, whose inspiration brings a freedom of expression, emotion, conviction, worship, and other variations from normal experience.
During the Catholic inquisitions, as millions of Christians were being killed by the Jesuit Priests for apostasy, throughout Europe, Christians were fleeing. In Bohemia alone, there were an estimated 4,000,000 Christians before the Jesuit inquisition, and ten years later, only 800,000 people remained in Bohemia – all of whom were Catholic. These terrible events prepared the ground for one of the greatest moves of God that have ever been recorded, the Moravian Revival, which lasted for over 100 years. Gustav Warneck, the German Historian of Protestant Missions, testified, “This small church in twenty years called into being more missions than the whole Evangelical Church has done in two centuries.”
I love to study past revivals and in studying them, there are two recurring themes that stand out:
First, that He has often used obscure and unknown individuals to lead revivals, and that even these men whom He used so powerfully never considered themselves to be “special”, but often wanted to stay out of the limelight.
During the Great Depression, poverty swept across America like a whirling tornado, ripping up dreams and scattering hopes to the wind. One such poverty twister hit a small part of Texas where a man named Yates ran a sheep ranch. Struggling even to keep food on the table, Yates and his wife did all they could to survive. Finally, they had to accept a government subsidy or lose their home and land to the creditors.
When Joseph was thrown into prison, his life was thought to be over. How could anyone escape an Egyptian prison? But then, in one day, according to God’s perfect timing, he was instantly promoted to reign over all Egypt with only the Pharoah, (“god on earth”) as his Lord…
As we continue our study of Mashiach ben Yosef, we observe that both Joseph and Yeshua (Jesus) were chosen or ‘anointed’ for a special task. When Jacob gifted his son Joseph with a coat of many colors, lifting him up above his brothers, he reflected Joseph’s calling by the Lord for a life work as a leader.
Joseph interpreted dreams and revealed their meaning to those around him, and so Pharaoh gave him the name, Tsofnat Paneach (Zaphnathpaaneah) which means the “Decipherer or Revealer of Secrets”. Yeshua, (Jesus) at his first advent as “Mashiach ben Yosef” also came revealing secrets; not as an interpreter of dreams, but as one who disclosed the secrets of men…