And please turn with me now in your Bibles to the Gospel According to Luke for our New Testament reading. We’ll read from chapter 9, verses 51 through 62, with a special emphasis on those final verses because they relate to our Old Testament reading in the sermon text. And we’re going to see some aspects in which they agree and some aspects in which they differ. But first, Luke 9, 51 through 62. Listen to this. This is the very word of God.
When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem, and he sent messengers ahead of him, who went and entered a village of the Samaritans to make preparations for him. But the people did not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem. And when his disciples, James and John, saw it, they said, Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them? But he turned and rebuked them.
And they went on to another village. As they were going along the road, someone said to him, I will follow you wherever you go. And Jesus said to him, foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests. But the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. To another, he said, follow me. But he said, Lord, first let me go and bury my father. And Jesus said to him, leave the dead to bury their own dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God. Yet another said, I will follow you, Lord, but first let me say farewell to those at my home. Jesus said to him, no one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.
And then now, I direct your attention to the book of 1 Kings, as we continue through that portion of God’s word. 1 Kings chapter 19, we come to the end of that chapter. Just those three verses, verses 19 through 21. 1 Kings 19, starting in verse 19, and reading to the end of the chapter.
So he departed from there and found Elisha, the son of Shaphat, who was plowing with 12 yoke of oxen in front of him, and he was with the 12th. Elijah passed by him and cast his cloak upon him. And he left the oxen and ran after Elijah and said, let me kiss my father and my mother, and then I will follow you. And he said to him, go back again, for what have I done to you? And he returned from following him and took the yoke of oxen and sacrificed them and boiled their flesh with the yokes of the oxen and gave it to the people and they ate. Then he arose and went after Elijah and assisted him.
Thus far, the reading of God’s word. Let’s pray once again for his blessing upon it. Father, this is your Holy Word, and as has already been prayed, we are confident that it was breathed out by your Holy Spirit and that you’ve given it along with the rest of Holy Scripture for our instruction, for our correction, for our reproof, and for our training in righteousness. So use it for those purposes in each of us tonight, we pray. We ask that it would go forth, not in word only, but also in power. You’re asking for the power of your Holy Spirit, and we’re In the name of your Holy Son, Amen.
At our most recent Presbytery meeting, there was a man who has a sense of a call to ministry, and so the Presbytery examined him for licensure. And during his licensure exam, or maybe it was during the exhortation that he brought, he spoke about his former career, because he’s now aiming to enter full-time vocational ministry, but he used to be a lawyer. And he served in some, if I remember correctly, some kind of corporate law. And although he didn’t go into a lot of detail about that, and he certainly didn’t say anything specific about his wages, I got the impression that he was in a very comfortable position and was making a very good living doing corporate law. And he gave it all up to enter the ministry. And we have something a little bit like that in our passage tonight. What has happened and the context in which this takes place, what led up to these three verses that were looking at this evening.
Remember Elijah had gone into the wilderness. He went in the power of the food that the Lord had provided 40 days to Mount Horeb, which you remember is also Mount Sinai, same mountain, just two different names. And there he met with the Lord. And the Lord, in a certain sense, recommissioned Elijah.
He had become discouraged. He was despondent. He thought his ministry was ineffectual and he just wanted to die. But the Lord ministered to him graciously, compassionately, and recommissioned him. He came to his discouraged prophet and said, I still have use for you, Elijah. And he gave some assignments, some specific assignments to Elijah. One of them was that he was to go and anoint Elisha to be prophet in his stead, to be his successor, in other words. And so when he called, extended that call to Elisha in our text today, Elisha did something similar to what that man in presbytery did, kind of turned his back. on what he used to do and the life he used to live, a life which apparently was also pretty lucrative, pretty comfortable.
He gave it all up to serve the Lord as his prophet. And the message for us here, the lesson for us to learn is that answering the call of Christ requires that we be willing to give up everything for him. Answering the call of Christ requires that we be willing to give up everything for him. We need to be willing to do that. He doesn’t always call us to give up everything necessarily. But we need to be willing. To give everything for him. I’ve got three points. Each one of them is just one word. They all begin with C. Here are my three points calling. consent, and consecration. Calling, consent, and consecration. So first of all, let’s consider this idea of calling and we’ll consider it in the first place with respect to the call of Elisha. That’s a very specific call that we find in the text, the call of a prophet of the Most High.
So as Elijah passes by, Elisha is working in the field and he places his mantle. on Elisha. That’s his cloak. It could be translated robe. But you remember there was a particular way in which Elijah dressed and people recognized him for that. He wore this skin of camel’s hair and a belt around his waist. And so that was his mantle. It’s probably the very article of clothing that he cast upon Elisha. And of course, you remember how when John the Baptist appeared preaching in the wilderness, he dressed.
Because he’s the one who came in the spirit and the power of Elijah, he wore the same garment. He wore the same kind of clothes to make that connection and to show the continuity of ministry there. But Elijah places his cloak on Elisha. And it seems pretty clear that Elisha understood what that meant. He understood that this was a symbolic act. It was an act of calling.
And he understood also that the ramifications of being called to be Elijah’s servant and eventually his successor meant that he was going to have to leave his family. He was going to have to leave his vocation, his current vocation, to take up a new one. He was going to have to leave his work, his livelihood, And so that was the calling for Elisha, but it prompts us to consider other callings, because God has many different kinds of callings for people. He has other callings. The office of prophet, at least in the sense of forth telling new revelation from the Lord, that office no longer exists in Christ’s church. We don’t have prophets in that sense any longer. We don’t need prophets in that sense any longer. But God’s people can and do receive other sorts of calls. In fact, every single one of us has at least received one kind of call from Almighty God.
Now, as we reflect on some of those different kinds of calls, I would bring to your attention, for example, the call to church office. God appoints officers for His church, and in the Scripture and in our standards, God describes this call as him giving gifts to his church. And so men that he raises up to serve in the office of elder or in the office of deacon are God’s gifts that he gives for the governance and the maintenance and the care of his church. And that ordination is a permanent ordination. We believe that.
So for instance, there are people in our congregation who at some time in the past had been ordained to the office of either elder or deacon. They might not be serving in that office actively at the time, but the ordination doesn’t go away. They are still ordained men. We have an elder emeritus, at least one in our congregation. Even just hypothetically, somebody could come to Westminster who has been ordained somewhere else. He still has ordination, even if he’s not actively serving in office at any given church at a given time.
So that’s one calling. God calls men to the office of elder and to the office of deacon. He also calls men to gospel ministry, calls teaching elders, as we sometimes call them pastors, in other words. And if God calls a man to that, to the office of minister, that usually involves putting aside some secular job. In some cases, as in the case of the man I mentioned at Presbytery, that involves leaving a job that makes pretty good living. lucrative career fields. And I’ve known many men over the years who have been doing quite well for themselves and for their families in some field of endeavor or other. And then they sensed the call to ministry and the church confirmed that inward call through an outward call. And they set it aside to serve God as a minister of the gospel.
So those are some of the kinds of calls that God has for people. But the most basic call that comes from God through the power of his Holy Spirit is what we could refer to as the call to Christian discipleship. In other words, the call out of darkness into his marvelous light. The call to be a Christian, the call of the gospel, whereby Jesus, through his spirit, says to the heart of a man or a woman or a child, follow me. Regardless if you ever experience any of those other calls that we’ve referred to, that call is the most basic and it’s the most important. The call to follow Jesus, that effectual call that calls us out of darkness into his marvelous light, out of death into life. And there are things that scripture teaches us about that call.
For example, in Mark 8, verse 34, it says, Jesus called the crowd to him with his disciples and he said to them, if anyone would come after me, Let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. So the call to discipleship demands self-denial. And that’s what we mean when we say answering the call of Christ requires that we be willing to give up everything for him.
It’s a call to self-denial. Or as we see in Matthew 10, verses 37 and 38, Jesus says at that point, whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.”
So you see there again the reference to taking up the cross. And people in the first century in the ancient Near East under the Roman Empire knew what take up your cross meant. But he’s saying that he as our King, Jesus, demands our highest allegiance. You can’t be his disciple if you love your father or your mother or your son or your daughter more than you love him. And that reference to the cross teaches us that discipleship entails dying to self, being willing to give up all for Jesus.
So those are some reflections on the idea of calling and the effectual call, whether it’s to office in church, or whether it’s simply that call, that effectual call that regenerates. It’s all the work of the Holy Spirit. It’s not something we just muster up within ourselves. It’s the work of God’s Spirit in us, fulfilling that which he has ordained from eternity past for us. Well, having reflected on calling, let’s take a look at what happened after Elijah called Elisha by placing that mantle on him.
Because we see his reaction, and it’s swift, but it might be a little bit hard to understand at first, at least in some respects. We look at verse 20, and it says, he left the oxen and ran after Elijah and said, let me kiss my father and my mother, and then I will follow you.
And he said to him, go back again, for what have I done to you? Now, Elisha’s question to Elijah and Elijah’s response may, to some extent, seem a little bit cryptic. What exactly does he mean by that? What exactly is Elisha asking when he said, let me go and kiss my father and my mother? What in the world did Elijah mean when he said, go back again, for what have I done to you? What’s at work there? Well, as we arrive at a conclusion about that, let’s consider, first of all, what did Elisha do first and foremost?
It says he left the oxen and he ran after Elijah. So keep that in mind. He left the oxen and he ran after Elijah. That shows us in the action of Elisha that this call issued In behalf of God through Elijah and through the symbolism of that cloak being laid on him, the call was a powerful call. It was an effectual call. And it was clearly by the prompting of the Holy Spirit that Elisha would just leave the oxen and run after this prophet.
And so he asked the question, let me, or it’s not, stated as a question, but he’s essentially asking permission here. Let me kiss my father and my mother, and then I will follow you. And as I wrestled with this text, I’m of the conclusion that he just wants to say goodbye. He simply wants to honor his parents.
That’s what’s at work there. And the reason we read from Luke 9 is because there’s similarities there between these interactions that Jesus had in his day with people he was calling to serve him and to follow him, and this dialogue, this interaction between Elijah and Elisha. But it’s not the same scenario precisely. If you think back to to our New Testament reading.
First of all, when Jesus called one man and said, follow me, and he said, let me bury my father. The man who asked Jesus, first let me bury my father, then I’ll follow you. He wasn’t saying, my father’s dead, I’ve got to arrange the funeral, and then I’ll be right there, Lord. He’s saying, let me wait until my father passes away and I’ve taken care of him and laid him in the ground, then I’ll come and be your disciple. So what he’s asking for is a fairly protracted delay. in answering the call to ministry, the call to follow the Lord.
Now, the trouble with the one in verse 61 is it sounds very much like what I just told you Elisha was asking for, because that’s what he says, let me first go say goodbye to those in my house. And there’s no blatantly obvious difference between that and what Elisha asks for, but The conclusion that’s inevitable is it really comes down to the heart, really comes down to the heart of the person who’s making the request. Because we see that Elisha was eager, and he’s ready to follow. And he’s just saying, let me. kiss my father and my mother.
In other words, say goodbye to them. Whereas this one was called by Jesus, or who actually offered himself, I’ll follow you, Lord, but first let me say goodbye. It seems inevitable that there was some kind of procrastination in his heart. In fact, when Jesus answers him and says, no one who has put his hand to the plow on that turning back is worthy of me, you get the sense that maybe this man had started on his way and followed Jesus and then says, oh, wait a minute. Let me go say goodbye.
At any rate, we shouldn’t equate what Elisha is asking for with either of these two whom Jesus said rebuked or said weren’t worthy of him. And that’s supported by the way Elijah responds to him. Look at what he says to Elisha. He said to him, go back again, for what have I done to you? By saying go back again, he’s essentially giving him liberty to go. Sure, go kiss your father and your mother. He’s giving him permission. And then with that phrase, for what have I done to you? That seems an odd thing to say, maybe. But here’s the essence of it. When he says, for what have I done to you?
He’s saying, this call is not from me, it’s from the Lord. And so how you respond to that call is really up to you. I haven’t done anything to you. I was just the messenger. I laid my mantle on you. as a sign of God’s call. What you do now is up to you. And so along those same lines, it’s as if he’s saying, I’m not forcing you to follow me. It’s your choice.
In fact, the Puritan Matthew Henry kind of reinforces that when he wrote, the efficacy of God’s grace, and he’s not speaking just about a call to ministry or a call to faith, he’s talking about God’s sovereignty in our lives and in our choices. But he’s saying the efficacy of God’s grace preserves the native liberty of man’s will. So that those who are good are good of choice. and not by constraint.
They’re not pressed men, but volunteers. In other words, God doesn’t press them into service. It’s not conscription. He receives them as willing servants. So he’s looking for consent from Elijah, and he receives it. And he very quickly dispatches what he said he wanted to do, and that brings us to our final point, consecration. Elisha’s family owned land. That’s the land that Elisha was out there working, plowing the fields that were owned by his family, by his father. And they owned oxen, 12 yoke of oxen. That’s 24 oxen. And in the ancient Near East, oxen weren’t cheap. So if he’s got 24 oxen, that means he’s got several garages full of BMWs or something along those lines.
And he’s out there. You got to hand it to Elisha. He’s a he’s a humble man. He’s out there working with the servants plowing the fields right along with them. I remember reading when we when we lived in Asheville and we lived near the Biltmore Estate, the historic home of Vanderbilt. You know, he was a he was a businessman, a very, very wealthy man. But we read and heard that back in the day, when they were getting behind in production, he would get out there on the factory floor, and he’d work right along with the men. That’s sort of what Elisha’s doing here. He’s working with his servants, not relaxing in the house while they work. But they were a wealthy family.
Some writers think that Elisha’s family was probably very wealthy. It’s a little bit like Isaiah. Not all the prophets were poor men or impoverished men or men of low means. Isaiah was from the aristocracy. He was from a family that was very influential and probably rather wealthy also. So the point being, Elisha has received this call to prophetic ministry, and by accepting that call, he would be turning away from a lot. He’d be giving up a lot to answer the call of a prophet.
And so what he does in verse 21 kind of reminds us of a of a tactic, a move made by both Alexander the Great and Hernan Cortes. Both men were military leaders, and they led expeditionary forces, and they led them via naval vessels to the shores of a land that they were going to conquer. And if what I’ve read is correct, in both cases, Alexander the Great and Hernan Cortes ordered that the ships in which their armies had arrived be burned. I know that’s the case with Alexander. I think Cortes may have just had the ships scuttled, sank them or something.
But the point was, men were not going back. We are not going to retreat. We are not going to surrender. We are going to conquer. And to ensure that, burn the boats. Burn the ships. It eliminates the possibility of retreat or turning back. And metaphorically, burn the ships has come to just refer to a resolute commitment to some course of action.
We are going to do this, and there is no plan B. And that’s what Elisha did when he sacrificed his oxen. Remember, he was behind the 12th yoke of oxen. He took those oxen and he sacrificed them, announcing to the world he was through plowing. And then he, burned the yolks. These oxen work in pairs. They work side by side. And they’re joined by this wooden apparatus, this equipment. And he took that, broke it up, and burned the wood for fire to boil the flesh of these oxen. And the interesting thing is, he didn’t do that because he had lack of other available wood. He did it to show, just like he did when he sacrificed the oxen themselves.
No more plowing for me. I’m done with that. I’m leaving it all behind. Writing in the ESV expository commentary, one writer said, this has the effect of making it clear that this is a serious and permanent commitment to the call of a prophet. or to put it in New Testament language, he was forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead.
And God’s calling requires that kind of consecration. To be Christ’s disciple means saying from the heart, Lord, take my life. and let it be consecrated unto thee. It means take my everything. Being Christ’s disciple means the kind of consecration that says take my time, take my moments, take my days, take my hours.
Let me use them in your service. It’s not my time anymore to use as I please. It’s not my time anymore to waste. It’s not my time anymore to use idly in things that don’t profit. To be Christ’s disciple means saying take my voice, take my words. I don’t want to use my words anymore to serve the world.
Or to speak profane things. I want to speak your words. I want to declare the glory of your name. I want to use my voice to sing your praises. So, Lord, take my voice and use it for that. Take my silver. Take my gold. Nothing that I have, whether it’s in my home or whether it’s in my bank account, belongs to me. It belongs to you now, Lord. Take it. Use it. Let it be consecrated to you. Take my whole being, my heart, my mind, my will, everything with which I’m supposed to love you. Take it. It’s yours. That’s consecration.
And the call to discipleship requires nothing less. Answering the call of Christ requires that we be willing to give up everything for him. Now, that doesn’t mean that he requires you to throw everything away. It means we have to be willing to let go of anything, though, that he may call upon us to let go of. And it means to use everything to serve Him. It means to serve Him with everything that we have.
It means that our hearts say, borrowing scripture language again, our hearts say, to me, to live is Christ plus nothing. If a person is struggling in some way, a lot of times it’s because, if a Christian, I should say, is struggling with something, it’s often because something else has slipped into that equation. Because the algebra or the mathematics of Christian discipleship is, to me, to live as Christ plus zero. But sometimes our hearts drift. And we start to live as if, to me, to live as Christ plus something else.
And we’ve got to have it. Or we can’t be joyful. We can’t be happy. We can’t really live. The consecrated heart has to say, to me, to live as Christ, period. It’s important for us to note. The call to discipleship usually doesn’t require changing jobs, usually doesn’t require you to relocate or anything like that. Usually, in fact, and we can even make this case from Scripture, usually it means remain where you are, but start serving Christ there.
It says in 1 Corinthians 7.20, each one should remain in the condition in which he was called. Sometimes when people get called or they have a sense of fervor for the Lord, they think they need to just change something huge and leave the job and sell everything. No, remain in the situation in which you were called is usually the marching orders that Christ gives to people when he calls them.
So if a person is called, While they’re a dentist, they need to just serve Christ as a dentist. Called while a plumber, be a Christian plumber. If you were called while a businessman, honor Christ and serve him in your business. Christians ought to serve and they ought to excel in every lawful field of endeavor for the glory of Christ their Savior. They ought to be beacons. We ought to be beacons for the gospel in whatever we do, in every lawful endeavor, every lawful pursuit and field of employment.
Now, I want to make one particular and very specific point of application, and that’s to the young men. And maybe they’re not quite so young men. To the men of the church, I think an application that you can make from this passage is you should ask the Lord of the harvest whether he might be calling you into gospel ministry. Ask him. I was in church when I was fairly new in the Reformed faith and the pastor preached and made application and he called upon all the young men in the church. to ask the Lord to pray and ask him whether he might be calling us into ministry.
And I prayed that. And in retrospect, it seems that the answer that I got at the time was not yet. But pray whether God might be calling you and the answer might be no. The answer might be yes, or as it was for me in 1988, and then again in 1994, and then again in the later 90s, and then even in the early 2000s, the answer was always not yet. But then in 2008, the answer was yes. And here I am. But the question is, are you willing to take up that call?
Because the harvest is plentiful and the laborers Elijah admirably took up the call to serve God as a prophet and for a time, even before he was sort of the big man on campus, he humbly served as Elijah’s assistant. And that reminds us of our Savior, who unswervingly answered the call of his heavenly Father and humbled himself in order to redeem us. In his high priestly prayer that we read in John chapter 17, Christ was praying and he was praying for you. He’s praying about you. When he said to the Father, for their sake, I consecrate myself that they also may be sanctified in truth.
Answering the call of Christ requires us to be willing to give up everything for Him. But that is not loss. That’s gain. Christ promises that whoever loses his life for His sake will save it, and in the age to come will have eternal life. So let’s consecrate ourselves, brothers and sisters. Let’s fight the good fight of faith. and take hold of the eternal life to which we have been called. Let’s pray.
Father, we thank you for your effectual call. We thank you that your gifts and your calling are irrevocable. We praise you, Lord, that you do call sinners to yourself. Thank you that you called so many of us. We pray that if there’s anyone here who has not yet heard that call, that they would hear it. that you would effectually call to yourself.
Lord God, grant us the grace of your spirit that we might consecrate ourselves unto you and live our lives for you. Run with patience the race set before us. Fight the good fight of faith. We need your strength for all these things, and we’re asking it, and we’re confident that you will give it, because we’re praying in Jesus’ name. Amen.