I Need Some Room

“I Need Some Room”

Text: 2 Kings 6:1-7; Isaiah 54:2

1 Now the sons of the prophets said to Elisha, “Behold now, the place before you where we are living is too limited for us. 2 “Please let us go to the Jordan and each of us take from there a beam, and let us make a place there for ourselves where we may live.” So he said, “Go.” 3 Then one said, “Please be willing to go with your servants.” And he answered, “I shall go.” 4 So he went with them; and when they came to the Jordan, they cut down trees. 5 But as one was felling a beam, the axe head fell into the water; and he cried out and said, “Alas, my master! For it was borrowed.” 6 Then the man of God said, “Where did it fall?” And when he showed him the place, he cut off a stick and threw it in there, and made the iron float. 7 He said, “Take it up for yourself.” So he put out his hand and took it.

“Enlarge the place of your tent;

Stretch out the curtains of your dwellings, spare not;

Lengthen your cords

And strengthen your pegs.

Introduction:

President John F. Kennedy,

“There are risks and costs to a program of action, but they are far less than the long range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.”

The second by Max Depree who said,

“In the end, it is important to remember that we cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are.”

The Third by Ronald E. Osborne,

“Unless you do something beyond what you’ve already mastered, you will never grow.”

I. Too Small

Which brings me to the text. In this portion of text is found what must become your anthem and heart’s cry for the rest of your life and our life as a church. I need to tell you that APATHY will try to overtake your soul. APATHY will try to seep into this church and make us comfortable, complacent and satisfied. We wouldn’t be the first church and group of people to succumb to this sickness. The cry that parted the lips of this young man must become our constant, daily, weekly cry. It should be our cry individually and corporately.

The sons of the prophet make a statement that was literal for them but must become a spiritual statement for us. They approach Elisha and state, “The place where we are living is too limited for us.”

This statement has implications for us personally:

The place where some of you have been living spiritually is too limited.

- I understand that you have been getting by on 2 minutes of prayer a day.

- I understand that you have been making it on reading one psalm a day.

- I realize that one meal you have been fasting a year has brought you

breakthrough in the past.

It is time to realize that the place where you have been living, where you have been abiding and spending your time is too limited.

Touch your neighbor and say, “I need some room”.

We know we are living in a small place when:

- you have that favorite author who pushes your buttons and so you won’t read anyone else’s stuff.

- you have that one favorite preacher and that one teacher who’s views you think are the only right views.

- you think that worship is only real worship when it is led with an acoustic guitar.

- you are convinced that you can’t really have church without a Hammond B3 and some thumpin’ bass.

- you think that the message is only anointed if the preachers stands real still and is stoic in his delivery.

- you that think the message is only for you and from God when the preacher adds and “a huh” on the end of every phrase.

But I declare to you that the place in which you have been living is too limited.

Touch a neighbor and say this place is too small for me.

The Word constantly tells us that we are commissioned to grow and mature. We are to move from glory to glory, precept to precept. We are to move from milk to meat. We are commanded to press onward and upward. We were never called to grow comfortable, stagnant, stationary, a monument. We are told to expand and lengthen the lines. And as much as I know you would like to stay with what you know best and what you grew up with you cannot grow if you stay in the same place and do the same things you have always done. You can never graduate to living in the level of the significant if you continue to stay in the small place. You must come to the place where you realize where you are living is too small. There is more out there. There is room to grow.