be the axehead

It sounds ruthless.  But what Jesus showed me about an odd little story as I prayed the other day is so cool!  It began with a prayer for a miracle, but as with the best prayers — the ones given and led by Holy Spirit — it became a Word marking life.  

It’s a somewhat random story not often told, but a pretty radical miracle as Elisha and his band of prophets were just beginning to build a camp by the Jordan, because having a roof over your head is not entirely overrated even while you’re on mission.  It was an ordinary day of getting things done, but also one of those days when life throws a curveball and derails you — just ask the poor prophet chopping away with his axe when the axehead goes flying off into the river.  The Jordan River.  So it’s not exactly shallow or small.  That precious chunk of iron is gone.  But the poor prophet is even more undone because it’s not his axehead.  He borrowed this to accomplish a task.  

Elisha calmly steps in, asks where it landed, cuts a stick, and throws it to the spot.  The iron ridiculously rises from the depths to the stick and the now stunned prophet is able to wade into the rushing depths to retrieve his borrowed tool.  A crazy miracle!  

As I read this, wondering how it applied to my own crazy miracle ask, I saw first the life of the one for whom I was praying, like this axehead, rising from the rushing river of souls, miraculously set apart.  But immediately He expanded the parable vision and showed me more.

For we who are His, God has shaped and crafted and sharpened each of us with weighted purpose, and we are never meant for the riverbed, to be sunk and lost in the depths of the chaotic rushing of humanity.  We are meant to rise.  Yet we rise TO something.  To Someone.  Elisha did not throw in the old axe handle the poor prophet had been using.  That would have been convenient and easy.  No.  A new stick was cut.  This Word suddenly filtered through prophetic promises and gospel truth like a living picture and before me I saw The Branch.*  Jesus.  Cut and thrown into the chaotic rushing of our humanity.  He is the One we rise from the swirling depths and are fitted to.  Yes!  For the purpose of building not a temporary place to lay our heads and camp out, but to be hard after the Kingdom He is building every day.  My whole prayer shifted into something far deeper and amazing….  

May each of us who love Him, believe in Jesus, and therefore are entirely His never be found laying useless at the bottom of the riverbed because we would not rise from the chaotic distracting, racing disrupting, muddied depths of our own pursuits, but every day miraculously rise with the crafted and sharpened weight of glorious purpose, fit to Christ alone, and ready to accomplish His Kingdom building.

I’ll be the first to admit.  Some days this is my all-in heart.  But there are plenty of derailed days when I feel like the poor undone prophet.  Fortunately, Jesus is always already there, joyfully ready to bring me up from the depths and get back to work.  And now I have this crazy cool image in my mind to be the axehead for that extra nudge of encouragement.

 

*The Branch prophecies:  Jeremiah 23:5, Isaiah 4:2, and Zechariah 6:12-13