Talk 12
Gilbert Lennox · Wisdom and Foolishness
30 March 2025
https://media.glenabbey.church/talks/talk-12

[0:00] Well, welcome back to the Book of Kings, or welcome to the Book of Kings if you haven't been part of these series before.
[0:10] I apologize for my voice.
[0:12] It was fine at the start of the first service, but it has disappeared somewhere since then, so I'll do my best to keep going.
[0:21] But if I struggle, perhaps somebody will get me some water to help me keep going.
[0:27] So for those of you new to this journey through Kings, can I encourage you to read up on what you've missed and perhaps even watch the previous series that we did.
[0:43] This book of Kings begins at a very high point in the history of the nation of Israel.
[0:49] It begins with King David, a brilliant leader who succeeded in uniting the nation.
[0:57] And Ian has kindly got me a...
[1:00] Did you put anything in it for me, Ian?
[1:01] No?
[1:04] So this is one of these...
[1:07] Trick ones?
[1:07] It's a trick one?
[1:10] Fantastic.
[1:11] Thank you very much.
[1:13] Great.
[1:14] Thank you.
[1:16] No, we didn't add anything, Ian.
[1:18] That's sad.
[1:20] So David was a brilliant leader.
[1:23] He succeeded in United the Nation, established the capital city, provided national security and economic prosperity.
[1:31] He was also a singer-songwriter who wrote the nation's songs and who led the nation in its devotion to God, despite very public flaws.
[1:43] But now David, the start of 1 Kings, is old and cold, as the historian puts it.
[1:49] And the big question in the minds of everybody around is how to keep things going when David is no longer with them.
[1:56] That is not just how to maintain their unity and security and prosperity, but the thing that underpinned their life as a nation, their relationship with God.
[2:08] And when you put the question that way, then it becomes clear that it's a question that all of us who trust in God face.
[2:14] How do we maintain a healthy vitality in our relationship with God?
[2:22] So we get lessons on that as we move through this.
[2:26] Now David's son Solomon carried on his success for a while, but he lost his way by losing his heart.
[2:35] He fell in love with women who didn't share his faith, and he enticed him to introduce into the nation the very idolatry out of which God had originally called Abraham, they were back into it again.
[2:49] And as a result of Solomon's divided heart, the kingdom itself was divided after him.
[2:57] There were two tribes under one king in Jerusalem, 10 tribes under another king in the rest of the territory, and both parts of this kingdom were in a mess.
[3:09] King Jeroboam ruled in Jerusalem.
[3:11] He was bad enough because he added in the worship of false gods to the worship of the one true God.
[3:20] So he kept the temple, the ritual, and so on going.
[3:23] But at the same time, there were other temples.
[3:26] He added in all kinds of other stuff that had nothing to do with the worship of God.
[3:31] In the other part of the country, there was King Ahab.
[3:36] He's the king that we are currently dealing with.
[3:39] And his infamous wife Jezebel ruling over the ten tribe.
[3:44] And there the situation was even worse.
[3:46] They made absolutely no pretense of worshiping Jehovah.
[3:50] They had turned completely to the worship of Baal.
[3:56] And since Baal, even though he doesn't actually exist, plays such an important part in the story, the concept of Baal, the ideology that went with him, it's important just again to remind ourselves that Baal was, first of all, the storm god that the Phoenicians, the seafaring people, worshipped.
[4:17] That's where Jezebel was from.
[4:19] And he was also the fertility god.
[4:24] And of course, all of this worshipping gods may seem really foolish to us today, but in the end, you have to believe in something.
[4:33] And if we leave God out as creator, we end up with some substitute, an alternative that we acknowledge as ultimately in control of our destiny.
[4:46] And today in our worship of money, power, sex, or fate, or modern Gaia worship, or in the materialism that grants godlike status to gravity and natural selection and artificial intelligence, we're not really that much different.
[5:04] We don't necessarily make physical symbols out of wood and stone and gold and silver, but we worship the same basic forces that they worship.
[5:15] And it was at this very turbulent time that Elijah served as God's prophet to the nation.
[5:22] So we're going to pick up the story where we left Elijah in a cave on a mountain, an exciting place for a prophet to find himself.
[5:31] This is 1 Kings 19, and we're going to read from verse 9.
[5:36] And Elijah went into a cave, and he spent the night there.
[5:39] That was after a 40-day journey that he had made.
[5:43] And the word of the Lord came to him, what are you doing here, Elijah?
[5:47] And he replied, I've been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty, the Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, put your prophets to death with the sword, and I am the only one left, and they are trying to kill me too.
[6:03] And that was literally true, because Jezebel was out to kill Elijah, which is why he had run, and ended up in the south in this cave.
[6:16] And the Lord said to him, go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.
[6:23] And then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind.
[6:32] After the wind, there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake.
[6:36] After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire.
[6:40] And after the fire came a gentle whisper.
[6:43] And when Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.
[6:50] And then a voice said to him, what are you doing here, Elijah?
[6:53] And Elijah replied, I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty.
[6:58] The Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, put your prophets to death of the sword.
[7:04] I am the only one left and now they are trying to kill me too.
[7:08] And the Lord said to him, go back the way you came.
[7:12] Go to the desert of Damascus and when you get there, anoint Hazael king over Aram, also anoint Jehu's son of Nimshi, king over Israel, and anoint Elisha son of Shaphat from Abel Meholah to succeed you as prophet.
[7:28] Jehu will put to death any who escaped the sword of Hazael and Elisha will put to death any who escape the sword of Jehu.
[7:38] And yet I reserve 7,000 in Israel, all whose knees have not bowed down to Baal, whose mouths have not kissed him.
[7:48] So Elijah went from there and found Elisha son of Shaphat.
[7:52] He was plowing with 12 yoke of oxen.
[7:54] He himself was driving the 12th pair.
[7:57] And Elijah went up to him and threw his cloak around him.
[8:01] Elisha then left his oxen and ran after Elijah.
[8:04] Let me kiss my father and mother goodbye, he said, and then I will come with you.
[8:09] Go back, Elijah replied.
[8:10] What have I done to you?
[8:11] So Elisha left him and went back, and he took his yoke of oxen and slaughtered them.
[8:16] He burned the plowing equipment to cook the meat and give it to the people, and they ate, and then he set out to follow Elijah and become his servant.
[8:29] So this scene on Mount Horeb, it's very different from the scene we were looking at last time on the previous mountain, Mount Carmel.
[8:39] That's in chapter 18.
[8:40] And if you haven't had a chance to read that, I encourage you to do that.
[8:44] Because it was there that Elijah challenged the nation to make up its mind.
[8:50] If God is God, follow him.
[8:53] If Baal is God, follow him.
[8:55] So basic logic.
[8:58] Make your mind up what you're doing with your life.
[9:01] You have to follow something or someone.
[9:04] Which is it going to be?
[9:07] And of course, the prophets of Baal, convinced about Baal, they chanted and shouted and cut themselves all day.
[9:14] But of course, Since Baal doesn't exist, he has no voice.
[9:18] Idols can't speak.
[9:20] And there was no reply.
[9:22] But the living God demonstrated his reality when Elijah called out to him by bringing fire down on the sacrifice and consuming it in the full gaze of the people.
[9:35] And the people responded then by declaring that the Lord is God.
[9:41] And even Ahab seemed to have got converted, but it was short-lived.
[9:46] And Jezebel was certainly having none of it and went for, well, our plan was to kill Elijah.
[9:53] So he ran for his life and headed south, guided and sustained by God on the way.
[9:58] And after 40 days, made it to this cave.
[10:01] So we come to his prayer or his complaint against God.
[10:07] Repeat it twice so we don't miss it.
[10:09] The Israelites have rejected your covenant, he said to God, torn down your altars, put your prophets to death with the sword.
[10:16] I'm the only one left, and now they're trying to kill me too.
[10:21] Now, it may escape our attention where this is happening.
[10:28] This is happening in Mount Horeb, the very place where the covenant that God had entered into with Israel through Moses was made, and now they're back here again.
[10:39] It's as if things have come full circle and of course they have in a very real sense because they're saying or Elijah is saying to God listen when the covenant was first made the people rejected it at that time we know the story of Aaron and making the golden calves and all of that and now they said here they're doing exactly the same thing again and I am the only one left and they're trying to kill me.
[11:06] A thousand years later, when Paul is writing a letter to the Christians in Rome, he refers to this incident, and he actually quotes Elijah's prayer.
[11:21] And he calls attention to the way God responded.
[11:27] God left his specific response right to the end, where he said to Elijah, I have reserved for myself 7,000 who have not bowed the knee to Baal.
[11:40] Now everything else that Elijah said in his prayer was correct.
[11:45] Israel as a nation had abandoned their agreement with God.
[11:49] They were seeking to kill Elijah.
[11:51] They had killed the prophets, but God put his finger on the one thing that Elijah had got wrong, understandably, because he had no way of knowing.
[12:03] He wasn't the only one left.
[12:08] Of course, it seemed like that to him, but it wasn't the case.
[12:12] There were 7,000 others.
[12:17] Now, of course, this was not just good news.
[12:20] It was good medicine for a weary man, for Elijah, exhausted, alone feeling that his witness had been entirely ineffective.
[12:29] God's cause hopeless.
[12:31] He's the last one.
[12:32] Might as well kill me now.
[12:34] The show's over.
[12:36] He had no way of knowing that there were 7,000 others who hadn't bowed their knee to bow because he could only see a little bit of the picture, as is the case for all of us, we can only see a tiny fraction of the big picture of what is going on in our world.
[13:00] And with that tiny fraction, he had jumped to a conclusion that was completely false.
[13:10] Because the little tiny bit that he could see was just totally discouraging.
[13:15] Demoralizer.
[13:17] He was tired, he was weary, disillusioned, felt alone.
[13:22] And God is opening it up so that he can see a bit of the bigger picture.
[13:29] There are 7,000 others.
[13:30] Just imagine what would happen in Elijah if I released 7,000 Elijahs on the country.
[13:35] So, you know, calm down.
[13:37] Don't try to take control of everything.
[13:40] I'm in control.
[13:42] So let me get you back on your feet, Elijah.
[13:46] There's still a role for you to play, and I have called you to play that role.
[13:50] I haven't called you to control the world, to understand everything that's going everywhere.
[13:56] I've called you faithfully to do what I've called you to do.
[14:01] And Paul found this enormously encouraging because he was in prison for the gospel.
[14:10] He preached it faithfully.
[14:12] he had hoped that the nation that he came from he was a Jew himself he had hoped that that nation would repent and trust in Jesus as their Messiah and there would be a national revival and it never came some thousands did but the majority didn't and now they were persecuting the Christians in particular Paul spent so much time in prison and it broke his heart this is not some dispassional cerebral monk.
[14:44] This is a man of deep feeling and it broke his heart.
[14:48] My prayer to God for Israel is that you might be saved.
[14:54] Broke his heart.
[14:57] But in prison God reminded him of Elijah and his prayer and he wrote about it.
[15:04] There's 7,000 they haven't bowed the knee.
[15:08] Keep going.
[15:09] You're not alone.
[15:12] I will fulfill my purposes.
[15:16] And perhaps some of us need a little dose or maybe a big dose of that good medicine.
[15:26] Especially if we spend our days doom scrolling through Twitter and all the rest of it.
[15:31] And you can get so easily convinced that there's nothing good.
[15:36] the whole thing's a mess and so on.
[15:39] And you were not the first.
[15:42] I remember my parents talking like that when I was a teenager.
[15:45] And there was me with all my excitement about life.
[15:47] And they were talking gloom and doom is going to be another world war and all of that.
[15:51] So we're not unusual in that way.
[15:55] But what sustains people at those times is coming to God and allowing him just to pull the curtain back a little bit and show you the bigger picture.
[16:05] You've got a little part, and I want you to play it.
[16:08] For as long or short, you're on this earth.
[16:11] But it's not the whole story, and I'm going to work out my purposes.
[16:15] And it is hard, isn't it?
[16:17] Serving God in a world that has largely rebelled against him, it's draining.
[16:24] The daily challenge of being faithful to the Lord, of seeking honesty and integrity in our daily work, of helping our kids navigate the often choppy seas that surround them, including every conceivable type of Baal worship.
[16:40] It just takes its toll emotionally, physically, intellectually, and it drains us spiritually.
[16:48] And it is unlikely in this country that anyone is literally seeking to kill us.
[16:53] But there is the misunderstanding, the misrepresentation, the incomprehension, The people who think, as Peter puts it, that you're crazy.
[17:02] What are you doing this for?
[17:03] Wasting your time.
[17:04] Church, religion, God, you're mad.
[17:07] And they think you're mad not to join with them and the stuff that they're getting up to in their so-called progressive approach.
[17:15] And it often turns into sheer hostility.
[17:18] And it's easy then to feel that you are in a tiny minority because you may be actually in your workplace, a tiny minority.
[17:28] you may be in your neighborhood you may be in your family what is going to help us there it's coming to meet with God and listening to his word all of us need a cave not a man cave just a cave occasionally
[17:48] and then a mountain the cave for the intimacy where we can pour our heart out to God and then the mountain where we can stand and look and get a vision above what's happening down below and a bigger picture of God and his purposes in life.
[18:10] Now there was a storm.
[18:13] There was a massive wind, but the Lord wasn't in the wind.
[18:15] There was an earthquake.
[18:18] The Lord wasn't in that.
[18:20] After the earthquake came fire, the Lord was not in the fire.
[18:24] And then there came a gentle whisper, or as the King James translation of the Bible famously put it, the still small voice that some of you may well have heard of or sung about in the past.
[18:38] A lovely phrase, the still small voice.
[18:43] And when Elijah heard that still small voice, he came out of his cave.
[18:50] What does it mean?
[18:53] You see, it's tempting and quite traditional, really, to interpret this as to say, well, sometimes God speaks dramatically with a loud voice, but there is another side to God where he speaks quietly and gently to our conscience and our inner being.
[19:08] Well, that's true, but I don't think that's what's going on here.
[19:13] Because consider what the small voice was saying.
[19:17] In a small voice, calm, measured voice, God was announcing to Elijah devastating, sweeping judgment through Hazael, Jehu, and Elisha on the entire house of Ahab and those who had gone off to worship Baal.
[19:43] God doesn't shout and rage and lose his temper as we humans can do when he judges.
[19:56] His voice is still, it's calm, but it's very clear.
[20:02] And it makes sobering reading when we actually read it.
[20:08] And then when the judgments fall, as they will later in Kings, they make even more sobering reading.
[20:15] And you know what it's like sometimes with a movie you've seen before?
[20:20] I don't know, maybe it's just a virtue of my old age, but we tend to watch older movies now.
[20:28] We'll watch The Fugitive or, you know, old movies like that.
[20:31] We know the ending.
[20:33] It's just safe.
[20:34] But there are sometimes certain scenes we don't like.
[20:37] So we just fast forward.
[20:39] It's wonderful you can do that.
[20:40] You just fast forward the scene or pause it and then, you know, whatever.
[20:45] And this is the bit that a lot of people want to fast forward.
[20:49] They want to fast forward anything to do with judgment.
[20:53] Christianity's critics are quick to point to the graphic nature of these Old Testament stories of judgment.
[21:00] And they pour scorn on the character of God.
[21:03] How could God get mixed up in such destruction?
[21:08] in what often looks like ethnic cleansing.
[21:11] And there are many professing Christians who are also uneasy about any representation of God as a God of judgment, a God of wrath, and even people like me who do actually believe that God will judge.
[21:26] We find these incidents disturbing at an emotional level and also trying to get our heads around it intellectually.
[21:36] It's hard.
[21:39] And the problem is that if we find ourselves questioning the rightness of God's judgments, it will undermine our confidence in him and undermine our faith in the gospel itself.
[21:54] So I don't want to fast forward this completely.
[22:00] I just want to have a look at it for a few minutes.
[22:02] It's a massive topic.
[22:04] There are no easy answers.
[22:06] And in a world that's looking for sound bites, that itself is problematic.
[22:11] All I can do is to share some considerations that I have found helpful.
[22:19] Remembering that understanding judgment and theory is very different to actually experiencing it.
[22:28] But the first thing that comes to my mind is this.
[22:32] Is it possible that I could be more just, more righteous, fairer than God?
[22:43] Is that possible?
[22:45] Because we're not just talking about a line manager at work here, or a member of the judicial system, or a politician.
[22:53] It's little me versus almighty God.
[22:57] It reminds me, since this is Mother's Day, I have to talk about my mother, don't I?
[23:01] It reminds me of the corny joke she used to tell repeatedly during my childhood about the fly and the elephant.
[23:08] And the old saying was, as the fly said to the elephant, who do you think you're shoving?
[23:14] Some of you haven't got that yet.
[23:15] Do you want me to repeat it?
[23:18] It's the sheer incongruity of a fly complaining to an elephant.
[23:24] But it's pretty similar, isn't it?
[23:26] Little me, an almighty, omniscient God, if that's who God is, then little me coming with a complaint.
[23:34] God doesn't mind us complaining.
[23:36] He didn't mind Elijah doing it, but we do need to remember who we are and what our place is in this scheme of things.
[23:47] But suppose I could be more fair than God.
[23:51] Well, what then?
[23:53] Because ultimately God made me and therefore this conscience I have, my moral awareness, my sense of justice, that instinct that I've had since I was a little boy, saying that's not fair, and blaming my brothers or my mother or the whole world or excusing myself, that instinct is in the end just an illusion.
[24:16] Why evolution would want to produce it, I have no idea, but it's simply an illusion.
[24:22] It's just not right.
[24:27] Because it was given by God, and if it's faulty, and I'm using a faulty mechanism to judge God for being faulty, I'm in a mess.
[24:39] The very thing I'm using to criticize God is itself flawed, because it comes from an obviously flawed God.
[24:45] It doesn't make any sense.
[24:47] This thing's an illusion.
[24:50] So I can't, much better that God is right and every man a liar, as the Bible puts it.
[24:56] Far better, because the alternative turns heaven back, turns the kingdom of God into a complete mess.
[25:03] No one would ever want to go there because you couldn't trust the person who rules.
[25:08] So then perhaps it is that we've just got it wrong, that these Old Testament prophets, well, that was for them, but now that doesn't happen, and the God of the New Testament is totally different, and all these evangelical preachers who talk about judgment and so on.
[25:22] I've got all this wrong.
[25:23] God will never judge and punish anyone.
[25:27] And of course, it's very tempting to go along that line.
[25:29] But if that is the case, then I start asking a whole host of other questions.
[25:33] Why is forgiveness necessary?
[25:38] It doesn't make any sense to me.
[25:39] Why would you need forgiveness if God's never going to judge?
[25:42] That's silly.
[25:43] Do what you like.
[25:45] Get away with it.
[25:45] It doesn't matter.
[25:47] So that's a question I would have.
[25:49] In what way would Jesus' death be a death for the sin of the world?
[25:52] What sense does that make if there's going to be no judgment?
[25:57] And if what I do has no moral value, if it doesn't matter, if God just said, no, it doesn't matter what you do, well, good, all good for you, bad, doesn't matter.
[26:09] Well, then I don't matter because my actions don't matter.
[26:12] They have no moral value.
[26:13] that reduces me to the level of a robot or an animal, not a distinct human created in the image of God.
[26:21] And it also changes the nature of God.
[26:25] What kind of God would it be who doesn't judge the evil of an Ahab or Jezebel or the evil of those who sacrifice babies to Baal and the other gods.
[26:42] If God just said, oh, it doesn't really matter.
[26:44] Tough luck.
[26:45] Wrong place, wrong time.
[26:46] That's hard luck.
[26:47] But I don't care.
[26:48] It's all the same to me.
[26:50] That wouldn't be either a God of love or a God of justice.
[26:54] So what about going the other way?
[26:57] Instead of changing the nature of God, let's get rid of God altogether,
[27:03] as atheism does.
[27:05] The implications of that are equally horrific.
[27:09] as Dawkins himself pointed out.
[27:11] Some people are going to get hurt.
[27:13] Other people are going to get lucky and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice.
[27:18] No design, no purpose, no evil, no good.
[27:20] So the price you have to pay for atheism is that deep-seated sense of injustice is in the end an illusion.
[27:28] That atheism gets rid of good and evil at the same time.
[27:32] It gets rid of hope of ultimate justice.
[27:34] It says to those murdered by Jezebel, sorry, just hard luck.
[27:38] It says to the thousands who died at the hands of suicide bombers, well, we can't bring them obviously to justice in this world, and there'll be no justice in the next.
[27:47] They will simply get away with it.
[27:49] How different is the Christian gospel that tells us that not only does God judge on occasions within history that at the end of history there is going to be a judgment.
[28:03] And the judge of all the earth will judge the whole earth.
[28:07] Evil people will not get away with it, and evil will not win.
[28:14] Because death is not the end.
[28:18] As Paul pointed out in Athens, God now commands all people everywhere to repent because he has set a day when he is going to judge the world in righteousness by the man he has appointed.
[28:31] And he has provided proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.
[28:36] So the resurrection of Jesus is what tells us that there will be ultimate justice beyond the grave and that it will be totally fair because the judge will be no other than this Jesus himself who gave himself for the sin of the world in order to make forgiveness possible and a free gift to all who trust him.
[29:03] And that brings me back to where I started.
[29:06] Little me and God and my struggles to understand his judgments.
[29:13] And I will continue to struggle all my life because I won't understand everything that there is to do with this.
[29:20] But I need to learn to let God be God.
[29:23] And one of the things that helps me is to realize that the books in the Bible that talk about God as a God of forgiveness, compassion, and love also talk about God as a God of judgment without seeing any contradiction between the two, because there isn't one.
[29:39] They are two sides of the same coin.
[29:42] Both are necessary for either to be meaningful.
[29:46] But God, as we see here, doesn't judge without warning.
[29:51] The judgments announced here didn't come immediately.
[29:54] There was an interval.
[29:56] We'll have to wait until well into 2 Kings for the appointment of Hazael and Jehu.
[30:01] And thirdly, in that interval, as we see, God appointed and sent Elisha to serve, to witness, to preach God's word, to demonstrate the gospel of God's grace.
[30:13] Before judgment fell in the house of Ahab, God gave him and the nation opportunity after opportunity to repent.
[30:24] And it's exactly the same in the New Testament.
[30:27] Before Jesus went to the cross, he announced the judgment that would one day fall in the nation because of their rejection of the prophets and their rejection of him as Messiah.
[30:37] And he announced the judgment that would come on the last day.
[30:41] And he actually quoted from 2 Kings, because it was in the interval before this judgment fell that Naaman, for example, was healed of his leprosy.
[30:52] There was an interval in the Old Testament.
[30:54] There was an interval in the New.
[30:56] Jesus announced the judgment that would come in Jerusalem.
[30:59] It was years before it happened.
[31:01] And during those years, the apostles went out with the message of reconciliation, of forgiveness, the resurrection of Jesus, and thousands trusted Christ.
[31:12] So there's a warning in advance.
[31:16] There is an interval when the message of grace is preached, and the same is true for the final judgment.
[31:25] It hasn't happened yet, because God is not willing that any should perish.
[31:30] He's given an opportunity for people to repent and to respond to him.
[31:36] An opportunity for people's lives to be transformed by his forgiveness and power so they can witness to his grace in this world.
[31:45] But judgment will come.
[31:49] It did in the book of Kings.
[31:52] It will at the end of history.
[31:56] Jesus was crucified for claiming to be the one that Daniel foretold who would come in the clouds of heaven and every eye would see him and he would judge the world in righteousness.
[32:17] And this was not a cause for embarrassment, a cause for rejoicing.
[32:23] Don't you want justice?
[32:26] Don't you want to see it done ultimately?
[32:31] how it will be done we leave that to the Lord himself but it's one of the things that drives me on knowing that it will be done and be seen to be done
[32:46] so as we finish God told Elijah I was going to say to get back on his horse not quite but to get back into the game having given him this time out to think to reflect, to complain, to listen to God.
[33:02] And anoint your successor, Elisha.
[33:05] And that's where our chapter ends with the call and response of Elisha to be Elijah's understudy and successor.
[33:13] We know very little about him.
[33:14] His father Shaphat and his mother were still alive.
[33:17] He was a farmer because when Elijah found him, he was plowing.
[33:21] His name means God is salvation.
[33:25] Great name, named that way by his parents, obviously indicating that they must have belonged to the 7,000 who hadn't bowed their knee to Baal.
[33:35] Great thing to go through life with a name like Elisha.
[33:38] It was more than a name to him.
[33:40] And Elijah threw his mantle over him, a symbolic gesture like passing on a baton, we might say.
[33:48] Elisha was to be his assistant and successor.
[33:51] And just as we finish, let's focus on this brilliant response.
[33:57] I just love this story.
[33:59] It's very simple.
[34:00] Let me kiss my mom and dad.
[34:02] I love that.
[34:03] Isn't that just so fantastic?
[34:06] And Elijah kind of looks at him.
[34:08] What's stopping you?
[34:09] I mean, what do you think this is?
[34:14] That serving God means I can't kiss my dad and mom and I have no honor or respect for my parents.
[34:18] Of course not.
[34:20] Go back, kiss them.
[34:22] That's the first thing.
[34:23] I love that.
[34:24] It was just me.
[34:25] Then he slaughtered the team of oxen.
[34:27] He would no more need of them, making it clear that there was no going back.
[34:33] But then he used the wood from the plough that he no longer needed and the harness that he no longer needed to build a fire, and he had a massive barbecue for his family and all the neighborhood.
[34:47] I love that.
[34:49] How often we lose that sense of celebration.
[34:54] and Elisha, it appears, had it.
[34:57] Imagine that, to mark the occasion.
[34:59] God has called me to something else.
[35:01] Let's have a party.
[35:02] Fabulous.
[35:04] And then we get three simple actions and I want to leave you with these.
[35:09] They'll come up on the screen.
[35:11] He left, he followed and he served.
[35:14] Those three things.
[35:17] He left, he followed and he served.
[35:19] And if I was to sum up God's call upon us, it's those three things.
[35:25] To leave, to follow, and to serve.
[35:28] The leaving bit is what happens when we trust Christ.
[35:32] I mean, God literally called Elijah to leave his work.
[35:36] We will notice that he was working when God called him.
[35:38] He wasn't some dreamy-eyed, sort of evangelical, you know, dreamer.
[35:43] He was just doing nothing, expecting everybody to pay for him, and then waiting for God to zap him and call him into Christian work.
[35:50] he was a worker he had calluses on his hands he was doing stuff just like peter a fisherman the new testament god called him in the context of daily work work whether it's paid or not
[36:05] it's what we're all called to it's part of life it's part of the definition of humanity that god gives to us it's vital so in his case he was called to replace one form of work with another most of us are called to stay in our work.
[36:23] But we do leave, don't we?
[36:26] Because we're different.
[36:27] The person who's in Christ is a new creature.
[36:29] All things have passed away.
[36:31] We look at life differently.
[36:32] We have a different citizenship.
[36:34] Our home is in heaven.
[36:35] We're aliens and exiles here.
[36:37] Read 1 Peter and see how this is spelled out.
[36:39] And when people think you're crazy, just go, yeah, I know.
[36:42] From your perspective, I am.
[36:43] This whole thing is madness.
[36:45] Except I'm following Jesus Christ.
[36:47] to have left that system, and I'm part of a new citizenship.
[36:52] He left.
[36:53] Good thing to think about over lunch.
[36:55] What does it mean to leave?
[36:56] What are the implications of becoming a Christian in the 21st century in our culture here?
[37:01] Why not think that through?
[37:02] Talk about it in the home groups.
[37:03] He left, and he followed, and he served.
[37:07] I love the idea that he plowed in the old-fashioned way with the oxen and the basic skills of that.
[37:17] Plying, keeping your eye fixed on the goal at the end of the field so you don't wander all over the place.
[37:22] And Jesus uses that as an illustration of what it means to follow him.
[37:28] Nobody he starts plying is set for it if he keeps looking over his shoulder back home at the comforts at home.
[37:35] Unfortunately, a mistranslation has got people into a lot of trouble and that.
[37:40] But it's basically the idea is not set for you.
[37:42] You're not geared up for it.
[37:46] We need to gear ourselves up to follow.
[37:47] We need to learn the lessons of the playing.
[37:50] That's the goal.
[37:51] We head in a straight line towards that goal, wherever that straight line takes us.
[37:57] Elisha had learned that, and he would carry that through in his own life.
[38:03] If you're constantly looking over your shoulder at the life you left,
[38:10] you'll not be fit for, set for, playing.
[38:17] This isn't easy.
[38:19] There's a cost involved in leaving.
[38:22] Choices that are made.
[38:24] I mean, let's take ourselves back just for a moment, just for fun.
[38:29] So when you were a student, Oh, do you remember the irresponsibility of your young student?
[38:34] Maybe you were in the Christian Union, as I was, and doing all sorts of things, and you had loads of time.
[38:39] And here's the thing.
[38:40] People were volunteering to give you money to go to France and Spain and India and different places.
[38:44] You thought, this is amazing.
[38:46] What a life this is.
[38:48] Of course, I have promised to serve Jesus and follow him to the end.
[38:51] I'll do all of that.
[38:52] And then I met Heather.
[38:54] Well, I met her when I was a student, and we got married.
[38:57] And then funny things started to happen.
[38:58] No idea how they did, but we had four children.
[39:01] And how that happened, I have no idea, but life got complicated.
[39:05] And then there was a mortgage, and then there was responsibilities in work, and there's all kinds of other things pulled in.
[39:10] And it is very tempting to say, well, you see all that serving God and following business, that was great for back then, but now it's different.
[39:22] Do you know what?
[39:22] I'm just going to take a wee hiatus.
[39:24] I'm going to have a pause in this, a wee Sabbath, and I'm just going to focus on the kids.
[39:31] I'm just going to focus on my work.
[39:32] I'm just going to focus on my career.
[39:35] And I'll pick all this stuff up later, and you never will.
[39:43] We need to learn what it is to deal with getting the balance right.
[39:49] And it will change, not just annually, but possibly monthly and weekly.
[39:54] But this postponed service of the living God just hang on God because I've got these kids to look after of course I give you the kids that's part of your service but don't make it the whole thing don't make your work the whole thing you follow me, you serve me in all that you do, there are no divisions this isn't some hobby you play at for 10 minutes on a Sunday or whatever this is the whole direction of your life
[40:24] and it's going to have implications then on the choices you make You can't have it all.
[40:31] You can't do everything.
[40:34] You've got to choose Elijah to the nation.
[40:40] If Baal is God, follow him.
[40:42] Don't waste your time with this Christian stuff.
[40:44] But if God is God, follow him.
[40:48] Please don't hang around on a fence, thinking that somehow that's the solution.
[40:56] Let's pray, Father, thank you for your kindness, your goodness, the challenge of these words to us, for these great Old Testament stories.
[41:04] Guide us as we process them so that they would help us to think through and make the decisions that we need to make today about today's life and tomorrow's life and what we're doing and our priorities and values for ourselves, our kids, and our work, and everything that goes in to make life so busy and complex and wonderful that it is.
[41:27] Help us, guide us, we pray for the glory of Jesus.
[41:30] Amen.
[41:30] Amen.