A longtime friend -- veteran teacher of many Bible classes for small children -- told me once that we make a mistake when we call the people described in scripture "Bible characters." Her complaint was about creating a larger-than-life aura around the men and women of the Bible stories we teach kids.
After all, it's only reasonable that if they are superheroes, then their lives are super lives and their interaction with God is super too -- not like mine. That reasoning separates me from the promises of the Bible and from God himself in a fundamental way.
I think James is addressing this (5:17) when he says Elijah was a man just like us. Elijah had his ups and downs. Elijah was exemplary one day and down in the pits the next. Just like us.
In his book Hearing God, Dallas Willard writes, "The humanity of Moses, David and Elijah, of Paul, Peter and Jesus Christ himself -- of all that wonderful company of riotously human women and men whose experience is recorded in the bible and in the history of the church -- teaches us a vital lesson: Our humanity will not by itself prevent us from knowing and interacting with God just as they did.
Don't you love that? Not only can their story of faith be our story of faith, their God our God, but their interaction with God can be repeated in our lives.
That's why God told us about them.
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