Digging Ditches, Part 3

Greetings from the harvest field! I’ve had the distinct blessing of ministering in several churches in Puerto Rico this past week. The Lord truly blessed us with His presence and several visible miracles. I am very glad to report that the fire of God is permeating the land and people of this lovely place!

“Digging Ditches” has been the subject we’ve been dealing with in the last few articles. Please see Parts 1 and 2 if you’ve missed any portion of this series. We’ll pick up with 2 Kings 3:14.

¹⁴ And Elisha said, “As the Lord of hosts lives, before whom I stand, surely were it not that I regard the presence of Jehoshaphat king of Judah, I would not look at you, nor see you.”

Note that he’s talking to the king! Did you ever wonder what you’d say if you were in the presence of a king? There was Elisha, the prophet/man of God, and he looked at the King of Israel and was like, “You know what? If it weren’t for the King of Judah (Jehoshaphat), I wouldn’t even look at you. I would totally ignore you. You would not even be here.” Look at what was said next in 2 Kings 3:15.

¹⁵ “But now bring me a musician.”

This is important. Even prophets need to calm their souls once in a while as they can get wound up pretty tight. If you read the preceding chapter, you’ll find out that Elisha had just taken part in an altercation before this happened. Then here came “We Three Kings,” and they wanted the Word of the Lord. Elisha saw the son of Ahab and Jezebel coming to inquire of him, and he seemed to be a bit stirred up. Let’s look at the last part of verse 15.

“Then it happened, when the musician played, that the hand of the Lord came upon him.”

There is a God-ordained connection between music and the calming of the soul. Now, I’m not talking about Led Zepplin and Metallica! I’m talking about calming and soaking music. People have asked me, “Why do you soak?” I do so because it has a calming effect, and it puts me in a position/posture to hear more clearly from the Lord!

Elisha knew that he dared not speak forth the Word of Lord without knowing that he had received the Word of the Lord! The first thing the prophet needed to do was to get his soul calmed down. Do you know that one of the best things we can do is to quiet our soul? We think we’re hearing from God, and oftentimes, we haven’t even consulted Him! We assume we’re being led of the Spirit! So when things go wrong, our immediate reaction is to blame God! “Well, God brought us here.” Did He? Did God call you to that endeavor? “Well, the Lord put the two of us together!” Did He? Oftentimes we do not consult the Lord or seek to discern His will until we’re neck deep in a problem, and then suddenly we’re humbled and come on bended knee to inquire of the Lord.

So the prophet understands the value of calming his soul in order to hear the Word of the Lord! We need the Word of the Lord. So often we go consult others to give us His Word. Nothing wrong with that . . . sometimes people will come to me for advice and say, “I need you to pray about this and let me know what you feel God is saying.” Quite often the counsel I give is, “You need to go quiet yourself, seek the Lord, and see what He has to say about this, and HE will give YOU the answer.” It is not for me to answer all of your questions. I don’t have all the answers. Many times, Jesus won’t give the answer! I believe I’ve made this statement before: if you study the life and ministry of Jesus, you’ll see that He responds with many more questions than He does answers! A lot of times, He’s really giving the answer in the form of a question because He wants us to look within ourselves. Let’s continue with verse 16.

¹⁶ And he said, “Thus says the Lord: ‘Make this valley full of ditches.’"

We need to understand something about the geography in the region to which we referred. It was a very dry, barren land, particularly around the south side of the Dead Sea (it still is today). It’s very dry and has many craggy rocks . . . quite rough terrain. The man of God said, “Make this valley full of ditches.” This was a very difficult task.

I’ve named this series, “Digging Ditches,” and I believe it’s very relative for us today. Oftentimes God brings us to a place of digging ditches. I don’t know how many of you have ever been involved with digging literal ditches. When I was a young man, I did all kinds of labor in the hot Florida sun to include everything from digging, to roofing, to building tennis courts. I labored! When I was a young man, I WORKED HARD! If some of you wonder why I don’t work so hard anymore, I WORKED HARD when I was young. I remember living in a place called “Weeki Wachee, Florida.” I assisted with putting in the new water and sewer lines. There was a whole lot of ditch digging, and it was DIRTY work!

When it comes to digging ditches, I don’t care if we’re talking about digging physically, digging spiritually, or digging from a business perspective, there’s a reason for digging them! It just may be the Lord Who calls you to that place. Don’t despise the day of ditch digging; it is preparation for something! You can’t expect a miracle if you won’t dig the ditch. The ditch digging precedes the miracle!

Now that I have whetted your interest, next week we’ll find out what happens when we begin to dig!

Thank you so much for keeping our family lifted up in prayer as we seek to accomplish all that the Lord is directing and guiding us to do in Dominican Republic and elsewhere.

Grace and peace,
pg

Digging Ditches, Part 2

Hello! We’re just coming from a weekend of great ministry here at OceanSide! My wife gave a powerful word to the ladies on Saturday, and the men had an opportunity to serve those wonderful women that God gave us! It’s such a great privilege to be where God has placed us, and we don’t take it lightly.
 
In the last blog, we were talking about the Israelites and how they were experiencing trouble in the midst of their journey, and as a result, concluded that it was “God’s doing.” Let’s pick up right where we left off . . .
 
Jehoshaphat—remember, he’s the King of Judah—said in 2 Kings 3:11: “Is there no prophet of the Lord here whom we may inquire of the Lord by him?” Things got tough, and finally someone said, “Let’s inquire of the Lord.” It’s amazing how often we wait for problems to get so big that we can’t handle them and then we turn to God to see what He thinks about them. Is anybody listening to me? Nobody consulted of the Lord before they even embarked on this whole journey!
 
Nobody asked the Lord which route they should take. Nobody asked the Lord if they should even attack the Moabites. God was not consulted until the going got tough, and then suddenly they fell on their knees, got all spiritual, and cried out to God. They probably sounded something like this: “Oh God, what would Thou havest me to do? Here I am, your humble, broken servant.” Hello? Why do we wait for the going to get tough before we go to God when He’s always there and willing to be consulted?
 
So one of the servants of the king of Israel answered and said, “Elisha the son of Shaphat is here, who poured water on the hands of Elijah.”
 
I read that and said, “Goooolly (spoken like Gomer Pyle), well, lookie there! Elisha just ‘happened’ to be there!” What do you make of that? Talk about spiritual kingdom coincidence! Elisha could have been in one of ten thousand places, yet there he was in the middle of nowhere just waiting for somebody to come and consult the Word of the Lord.
 
Prophets have an uncanny way of being in the right place at the right time. Sometimes I wonder, “What has happened to the true prophets?” You know, I remember being around prophets thirty years ago, and it made me nervous. I didn’t like being around them. Nowadays, everybody is a prophet. If it isn’t a “good word,” then it isn’t deemed a Word of the Lord.
 
We tend to be like the Israelite king and say, “Oh, I don’t like that prophet because all he ever does is speak bad things to me. I like prophets who say good things.” Today, the world is full of prophets who have nothing but goooood things to say: “Oh, God loves you and wants to bless you, and He is giving to you and pouring out, etc.” Whatever happened to, “Turn from thy sin, and the Lord will bless you.” When I used to be around some of those prophets from back in the day, I always thought they knew things about me that I didn’t want anybody to know. Come on, you act like you’ve never had anything in your life that you didn’t want anybody else to know! We all have had things that make us think, “Hmmm, I wonder if he’s going to be reading my mail; I’d better repent before I go have lunch with this guy.” Anyway, enough about prophets, and I’m not saying that they can’t prophesy good words. I’m just saying that it seems like all we hear from these days are what I call, “Pop Culture Prophets.” There are far too many of them on the scene today.
 
¹² And Jehoshaphat said, “The word of the Lord is with him.” So the king of Israel and Jehoshaphat and the king of Edom went down to him.
¹³ Then Elisha said to the king of Israel, “What have I to do with you? Go to the prophets of your father and the prophets of your mother.”
 
See, this is what I’m talking about: the prophet looked right at the King of Israel and said, “What do I have to do with you?” He then sneers at him and treats him with a level of disdain. Elisha says, “Go the prophets of your father and mother.” Anybody know who his mother was? The king’s mother was Jezebel! At this point, she was still alive and continued to be so throughout this guy’s entire reign. 
 
But the king of Israel said to him, “No, for the Lord has called these three kings together to deliver them into the hand of Moab.”
 
Do you know that sometimes we speak the same curses over our own lives? Many times we think the worst of our own situations, and oftentimes we don’t realize that we’re thinking the same about God!!!
 
Whatever happened to, “Speak the Word only and my servant shall be healed”? Huh? Whatever happened to, “Where is the Word of God . . . what would Jesus say about this situation”? If we don’t know what God says, we ought to open the Scripture and find out! It seems that our first inclination is oftentimes to speak words of cursing over our own lives, families, ministries, and businesses. It’s almost like, “Well, I guess we’re all going under.” God’s not called us “to go under”! We might not always “go over,” but bless God, He’ll always bring us “through”!
 
Look how the king blames the Lord:

“¹⁰ And the king of Israel said, “Alas! For the Lord has called these three kings together to deliver them into the hand of Moab.”
 
I don’t recall anybody asking the Lord anything before they started this whole journey! The Lord didn’t do that! That was the king saying, “You owe us money, and since we want it, we’re coming after it.”
 
I’d better stop here. Thank you so much for joining me on this journey. Let’s continue to look for God’s hand in our lives and to seek Him early!
 
Grace and peace,
pg