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The
Floating Axe Head |
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A Pocket Paper Robert J.
Morgan In our study of the life of the prophet Elisha, we’re coming to a simple little story that conveys a couple of things. It’s found in 2 Kings 6:1ff.: The company of the
prophets said to Elisha, “Look, the place
where we meet with you is too small for us. Let us go to the Jordan, where each of
us can get a pole; and let us build a place there for us to live.” And he said, “Go.” Then one of them said,
“Won’t you please come with your servants?” “I will,” Elisha replied.
And he went with them.
They went to the Jordan and began to cut down trees. As one of them was cutting down a
tree, the iron axe head fell into the water. “Oh, my lord,” he cried
out, “it was borrowed!” The man of God asked,
“Where did it fall?”
When he showed him the place, Elisha cut a
stick and threw it there, and made the iron float. “Lift it out,” he
said. Then the man reached out
his hand and took it. God’s Power Through Us There are two great lessons here. The first concerns God’s power and how it operates through us. When I was a young minister just starting out, my favorite preacher was the old North Carolina evangelist, Vance Havner. Some of you undoubtedly heard him preach, and there was no one like him. One of his greatest sermons was one that was first published in 1938 on the lost ax head of this passage; and I’d just like to read you a little of this old sermon because Havner said it better than I could. After having told the story in 2 Kings 6, he said: Many of the Lord’s
workmen today have lost the axe head of power. They have lost the joy of salvation, they have not the upholding of God’s
Spirit. The axe head of the
Spirit’s unction has fallen into the waters of worldliness, ponds of
indifference, swamps of sluggishness. They have ability, training,
earnestness, but they are chopping with the handle. Observe, first, that this
axe head was borrowed. The
believer’s power for service is from God, he has nothing he did not
receive. He may study, have
personality, enthusiasm, but the axe head is borrowed…. Consider, next, that this
workman lost his axe head. The
tragedy of lost power! Was there
a time when you could pray with liberty, teach with power, preach with
freedom? Was there a time when
you had influence with your children, and your neighbors had confidence in
your testimony? And now you have
lost the axe head; it has fallen into the water of business cares, pleasure,
worldly living, evil habits, indifference or laziness…. You are going through the same old
motions of wood chopping, but it is all a vain show, for the power is not
there…. Consider, again, that the
prophet stopped chopping until the axe head was recovered. That is natural, but would to God that
His workmen would stop hollow motions in His service until power be recovered….
Men work all the harder to hide their lack of power as sometimes the
preacher pounds the pulpit all the harder when he has run out of something to
say. But there is no sense in
working doubly fast with the handle just to keep men from seeing that there
is no axe head on it!... Elisha asked the distressed
workman, “Where fell it?”
The place to find lost power is where you lost it. If you have disobeyed God, go back
there and confess it…. There must be confession before God can cleanse
and empower…. [Vance Havner,
The Secret of Christian Joy (Old Tappen, NJ:
Fleming H. Revell Co., 1938), chapter 7]. That’s so well put, so wisely stated, that I
can’t improve on it.
Without the empowering and unction of the Holy Spirit, we’re
just workers flaying away with a headless axe. Or, to use another analogy, have you
every gotten stuck in the mud and all you could do was spin your tires? You can sit in the driver’s seat
all day, gunning the engine and feeding the gasoline; but there’s no
forward progress. In fact, you
just run yourself deeper and deeper into the mire. That’s what it’s like without the
traction of the Holy Spirit.
We’re chopping without an axe head. We’re spinning our tires. We’re doing the work and going
through the motions, but it isn’t by work or by motion—it’s
by the empowering of the Spirit of God. The old song says, “All is vain unless the
Spirit of the Lord come down.” We read in the book of Acts that they
were filled with the Spirit and spoke the word of God with boldness. That’s why I think it’s
important every morning to have a time of prayer in which we confess our
sins, yield ourselves afresh to God, and ask Him to fill us with His Holy
Spirit. Fill with Thy Spirit Till all shall see Jesus only always Living in me. God’s Care for Us But there’s another lesson in this story, for it speaks not only about God’s power in us, but of God’s care for us. Many of you know the story of John Newton, the English sea captain who was a transporter of slaves and a vile and wicked man. He was wondrously converted and became a prominent London pastor. Several years ago while I was in London, I searched out the church where he preached. It was a relatively small church sitting in the heart of London’s financial district. The church was empty, but the doors were unlocked. I went in and spent a wonderful half-hour, and I even had the audacity of climbing the steps and standing in Newton’s old pulpit. Newton was not only a great preacher and a great leader in the movement for the abolition of slavery; but he was a hymnist and the author of the hymn “Amazing Grace.” He very often wrote hymns that went along with his sermons. Steve Turner, who did quite a bit of research into this, wrote about it in his book, Amazing Grace, saying: “(John Newton’s) self-imposed challenge was to complete at least one fresh hymn each week for use in conjunction with a sermon. The hymn would either reinforce the main points of the preaching or itself become the topic of the sermon that followed. Several times in his letters, Newton mentions ‘expounding’ a new hymn as though he had made its words the text for the day.” [Steve Turner, Amazing Grace: The Story of America’s Most Beloved Song (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2002), p. 78.] Well, we actually have a John Newton hymn based on the story of the lost axe head. Undoubtedly, Newton preached one day on this very passage and he wrote out the story in verse form; and even though it is a little archaic-sounding, I want to quote this hymn to you in its entirety, noticing especially the last verse, which must have been the main point of Newton’s sermon. The prophet sons, in time of old, Though to appearance poor; Were rich without possessing gold, And honored, though obscure. In peace their daily bread they eat, By honest labor earned; While daily at Elisha's feet, They grace and wisdom learned. The prophet's presence cheered their toil, They watched the words he spoke; Whether they turned the furrowed soil, Or felled the spreading oak. Once as they listened to his theme, Their conference was stopped; For one beneath the yielding stream, A borrowed axe had dropped. Alas! it was not mine, he said, How shall I make it good? Elisha heard, and when he prayed, The iron swam like wood. If God, in such a small affair, A miracle performs; It shows his condescending care Of poor unworthy worms. Though kings and nations in his view Are but as motes and dust; His eye and ear are fixed on you, Who in his mercy trust. And here is the last verse and the main point: Not one concern of ours is small, If we belong to him; To teach us this, the Lord of all, Once made the iron swim. One of the most comforting truths of Scripture is that God is concerned about the details of our lives. Psalm 37:23 (NLB) says: The steps of the godly are directed by the Lord. He delights in every detail of their lives. Matthew Luke And Romans One morning this week I came across Fanny Crosby’s old hymn, “He Hideth My Soul,” and I was struck the third verse, which I’d never really noticed before. When I was growing up, the song leader in my church would almost always skip the third verse of whatever song we were singing; so as I reviewed this song in my morning devotions it was as though I were reading it for the first time. The words say: With numberless blessings each moment He
crowns, And, filled with His fullness divine, I sing in my rapture, “O glory to
God For such a Redeemer as mine.” What a wonderful verse -- “With numberless blessings each moment He crowns.” It reminds us that God is concerned about the details of our lives. We have a saying that we sometimes use when we have foul-ups and snafus. We say, “The devil’s in the details.” But for the Christian, the Lord is in the details. And one of the wonderful juxtapositional realities about God is that He guides the galaxies with one hand, and He counts the hairs of our heads with the other. That is illustrated in a set of
circumstances described by the Irish evangelist, J. Edwin Orr. Dr. Orr was the world’s foremost
authority on the subject of revival, and when he was an old man he spoke at As a young man, Dr. Orr had launched out as an itinerant evangelist, much to the distress of family and friends. He was a shy young man and without financial resources. But he felt God was calling him to travel across the British Islands and preach, and he had a remarkable set of experiences which he described in a little book entitled Can God? Then he felt nudged to go further afield, and he traveled to the Continent, and one day showed up in Copenhagen, that beautiful city of canals, marinas, and Hans Christian Anderson. But Dr. Orr didn’t know a single word of Danish, nor did he know a single person in the city. Arriving in the morning, he left his baggage with a sympathetic shop keeper and started walking back and forth on the streets, trying to pick up a few words of the local language and trying to figure out what to do. He had just enough money for one meal, which he ate at lunch. Then he was penniless, friendless, homeless, and helpless. He prayed for one thing—that God would give him a bed with four legs. Suddenly it dawned on him that
a friend of his had an acquaintance who lived in The woman sent for her husband who left his work and came home at once. He said that he had been praying earnestly for Dr. Orr to come to Copenhagen. In fact, there was a Gospel meeting that very night, and he addressed several hundred people. Afterward, his new friend said, “If you please, you must change your hotel. I have been praying much that you would come to Denmark. Now that you are here, I have arranged for you to become my guest at a hotel near the City Hall.” When Orr was shown to his room, he found that it contained four beds—all for him. “You can sleep in them turn about,” said the bellhop with a smile. Instead of one bed with four legs, he had four beds! His last meeting in Copenhagen was unforgettable. When the meeting started on Sunday evening, the ballroom of the Teknologisk Institut was crowded, with over 700 people seated and many others standing both inside and outside. As Dr. Orr preached, many people made life-changing decisions for Christ. [J. Edwin Orr, Prove Me Now (London: Marshall, Morgan, & Scott, 1935), chapter 3]. It all goes to show that the Lord orders and arranges the lives of His children, down to the number of legs on their beds and the number of beds in their rooms. He sends others to us, and causes our paths to cross with those of others as He ordains it. He opens doors, closes doors, and performs little miracles. Our God is not only a God of great miracles, like the parting of the Red Sea and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. He’s the God of little miracles, too. He can make the axe head float like a cork. How wonderful to remember: Not one concern of ours is small, If we belong to him; To teach us this, the Lord of all, Once made the iron swim. Copyright StatementWe grant permission for any edition of The Pocket Paper to be photocopied for use in a local congregation or classroom, provided no more than 1,000 copies are made, the material is distributed free, and the copies include the notice: "Copyright (year) The Donelson Fellowship."For any other use, advance permission must be obtained from The Donelson Fellowship church office. |
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