When the Brook Dries Up: Waiting on God's Next Instruction

When there is nothing coming in to keep you sustained, you have to wait on God to give you the next instructions.

That is what the Lord was giving me when I thought about Elijah.

Remember when Elijah went to the brook? He drank water from the brook, and the ravens came and gave him meat. God had sent him there. He had everything he needed for that time.

Sometimes, when we are called into a new assignment, a new place, a new job, or a new space, everything can be going really well. We can have what we need. We can feel sustained.

But then we get to the place where it feels like we do not have what we need. Or maybe we really do not have what we need.

That is like Elijah at the brook when the brook dried up.

When resources dry up, or when we are in a situation where we do not have what we feel like we need, that is the place where we are to settle and wait for the next assignment.

Elijah had been sent by the Lord. God told him to go and hide by the brook. To me, that word "hide" feels like "come away."

When you are in hiding, you are removed from every other thing. You are removed from the space where you have been operating. There is no sphere of influence. You are out there alone, but God is with you.

God said, "Come away and hide. While you are there, I will sustain you."

He sent Elijah to a place where there was water. Everybody else was not going to have water, but God sent Elijah to a place where he could flourish for that time.

It may not have been what Elijah wanted originally, but God was saying, "Come away with Me, and I am going to supply your needs during this time."

But at some point, the brook dried up.

The brook dried up because there was nothing coming in to keep it sustained.

And it is the same way with us.

If you do not have funds coming in, eventually you are going to run out. If you have put away food, but no more food is coming in, eventually you are going to run out of that food.

Whatever that thing is that you prepared for, or God helped you prepare for, you can still run out.

That is where you have to wait for the next instructions.

One thing I have learned about God is that He does not give the whole picture.

He may give you one level, one place, one state, one assignment. Then you have to trust Him to get you to the next place.

God told Elijah, "Go to the brook. Hide there. I will sustain you there, and the ravens will feed you."

But Elijah probably was not thinking, "I am going to get there for a time, and then I am going to run out."

We do not usually think that way either.

When God is sustaining us for a moment, we think it will always be there. But if it were always there, we would never have to trust Him for the next thing.

If God had given Elijah a river instead of a brook, he could have stayed there much longer. But God sent him to a brook.

A brook is small.

That means, "I am going to sustain you, but you are going to have to trust Me."

And when the brook ran out, the Lord gave him the next instruction.

He told Elijah to get up and go to Zarephath, where there would be a widow woman who would supply his need.

But God did not tell Elijah that the widow woman did not really have anything. He did not tell him she only had a little water and a little flour, and that she was preparing to make one last cake for herself and her son before they died.

Elijah had to operate in faith.

And the widow had to operate in faith too.

That is important, because sometimes we think that because someone is spiritually strong, they do not have to go through the same kind of trust that we do.

But here is the prophet, and he had to trust God too.

He had to trust that when he left the dried-up brook, and the birds were gone, and the food was no longer coming, God would sustain him in the next place.

He did not know how.

He may have thought this widow already had what he needed. But when he got there, the situation did not look like what he expected.

So he had to pivot.

He had to shift his thinking to match what God was doing.

There are times when we go looking for something to be one way, and then it is not. We have to stop and ask, "Okay, God, what are You doing in this?"

Elijah told the woman to feed him first. That was her seed.

And that seed was going to grow.

God was not just sustaining Elijah. He was preparing a way for Elijah, the widow, and her son to make it through the famine.

That one act of obedience sustained all of them until the famine was over.

So when we are in a state of mind where we feel like we are in a famine, God has a plan.

It just does not always look like our plan.

When the brook is drying up, God may be saying, "We are going to pivot and do something different here."

But you cannot do anything until He tells you what to do.

That is the key.

You cannot do a thing until He tells you what to do.

And when He tells you what to do, you have to follow without expecting what it is going to look like on the other side.

That is where you have to really learn how to dig in and trust God.

When the brook dries up, wait for the next instruction.

God knows how to sustain you in this place, and He knows how to get you to the next one.