To Advance, You Often Have To Leave Something Behind. Series

I may have mentioned before that I’m a bit of a magpie, Can I see a show of hands from magpies please, and yes you know the gathers of the random? While I’m talking about being a magpie, the family store is a great place to gather stuff and while I’m talking about the family store I’d like to mention the great staff and volunteers we have here and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Phyllis -------- for her 33 years as a volunteer, Phyllis has just retired from the best job in the Family Store - sorting brick-a-brac.

Back to being a magpie, I somehow think that this is genetic and that both my Mum and Dad have the magpie gene. I think that to gain the gene at least one of your parents must be carriers but if they both are it’s a dead cert.

I have a rule in relation to magpiedness and it’s this “that to get, you have to give up”. As I search through e-bay or trademe or my favourite and the next most relaxing place on earth after the outdoors, second-hand and antique shops and find some treasure that I need, you see for us magpies the word want equates to need. As I find a treasure I have to have given up something to get it, our be willing in the very near future too. For me my favourite things are books, art of different types – paintings, drawings, books, and small carved things, so the space around me could quickly become cluttered and previously has.

SO I have an established rule “to get you have to give up”, as there is a certain danger in continually bringing in and not getting rid of; particularly as the Salvation Army when they re-appoint officers, pay to shift a certain amount of stuff. it’s capped. So now as I buy, I give up, sometimes a bit begrudgingly and sometimes not wanting to, but if I sell something off it helps to pay for the next thing if I work it well.

I mentioned last week that over the next weeks it is my aim to talk about mentoring and that I’m going to be doing a series on mentoring and how we embrace the teaching of Jesus, how we learn from the scriptures of both testaments, how we journey, mentoring and being mentored in our Christian walk and how we encounter and learn to listen to God as He walks with us on that journey.

You may just now be wondering what this has to do with gathering random stuff, and the magpie gene. Well interestingly enough a similar principle applies to mentoring as it does to me gathering stuff, it’s this “to advance, you often leave something behind!”(SBI).

I said that this series is called “from here to there” it’s about moving forward from here today, with God to where he wants us, living in His will for our lives to there, that place where we are in his will.

The example that I want to talk about toady is based on two amazing men, two Old Testament prophets, one who never died and the other who was his attendant but ended up doing just as great things as his master and some would even argue that he did greater things.

For both of these men to get to their here to the there, where God wanted them, they both had choices about what they were willing to give away, for one to teach the other he had to be willing to pass on his knowledge and live an example in his life of what it was to be a prophet – but even more than that he had to be willing pass on a spiritual blessing.

For the one who was following him he had to give up his livelihood, the thing he was trained in, not to settle for what he knew but to leave that behind and be a servant to his teacher.

Let’s have a look at what I’m talking about! Let’s read 1 Kings 19:9b-18.

So here we have Elijah having a yarn with God up on Mount Horeb which is another name for Mount Sinai and he’s in a predicament, he’s letting God know what is happening how he has seen the people of Israel reject the covenant that God had made with them in this place many years before, how they had rejected the killed God’s prophets, his holy men and that he was the only one left. The Israelites had rejected God and his ways for the ways of the Baal and the Asherah.

Baal incidentally is a being who is considered one of the princes of Hell. Asherah is a Canaanite fertility goddess.