2 Kings 6 TIME for building = Axehead

Scripture selections are taken from the Rock Church Daily Bread Reading schedule for each month. “Lena’s Journalin’” are Lena’s comments on the specific passages from her Daily Journal.

If the e-mail text you receive is encrypted at all, just scroll down to the end of all of the text and click on Lena’s Journalin’ , which will take you directly to the web-page where you will be able to read the text quite clearly in it’s purposed form.

2 Kings 6:1-33 -
The Floating Ax Head
1One day the group of prophets came to Elisha and told him, "As you can see, this place where we meet with you is too small. 2Let's go down to the Jordan River, where there are plenty of logs. There we can build a new place for us to meet." "All right," he told them, "go ahead."
3"Please come with us," someone suggested. "I will," he said.
4When they arrived at the Jordan, they began cutting down trees. 5But as one of them was chopping, his ax head fell into the river. "Ah, my lord!" he cried. "It was a borrowed ax!"
6"Where did it fall?" the man of God asked. When he showed him the place, Elisha cut a stick and threw it into the water. Then the ax head rose to the surface and floated. 7"Grab it," Elisha said to him. And the man reached out and grabbed it.
Elisha Traps the Arameans
8When the king of Aram was at war with Israel, he would confer with his officers and say, "We will mobilize our forces at such and such a place."
9But immediately Elisha, the man of God, would warn the king of Israel, "Do not go near that place, for the Arameans are planning to mobilize their troops there." 10So the king of Israel would send word to the place indicated by the man of God, warning the people there to be on their guard. This happened several times.
11The king of Aram became very upset over this. He called in his officers and demanded, "Which of you is the traitor? Who has been informing the king of Israel of my plans?"
12"It's not us, my lord," one of the officers replied. "Elisha, the prophet in Israel, tells the king of Israel even the words you speak in the privacy of your bedroom!"
13The king commanded, "Go and find out where Elisha is, and we will send troops to seize him." And the report came back: "Elisha is at Dothan." 14So one night the king of Aram sent a great army with many chariots and horses to surround the city. 15When the servant of the man of God got up early the next morning and went outside, there were troops, horses, and chariots everywhere. "Ah, my lord, what will we do now?" he cried out to Elisha.
16"Don't be afraid!" Elisha told him. "For there are more on our side than on theirs!" 17Then Elisha prayed, "O LORD, open his eyes and let him see!" The LORD opened his servant's eyes, and when he looked up, he saw that the hillside around Elisha was filled with horses and chariots of fire.
18As the Aramean army advanced toward them, Elisha prayed, "O LORD, please make them blind." And the LORD did as Elisha asked. 19Then Elisha went out and told them, "You have come the wrong way! This isn't the right city! Follow me, and I will take you to the man you are looking for." And he led them to Samaria. 20As soon as they had entered Samaria, Elisha prayed, "O LORD, now open their eyes and let them see." And the LORD did, and they discovered that they were in Samaria.
21When the king of Israel saw them, he shouted to Elisha, "My father, should I kill them?"
22"Of course not!" Elisha told him. "Do we kill prisoners of war? Give them food and drink and send them home again to their master."
23So the king made a great feast for them and then sent them home to their king. After that, the Aramean raiders stayed away from the land of Israel.
Ben-Hadad Besieges Samaria
24Some time later, however, King Ben-hadad of Aram mobilized his entire army and besieged Samaria. 25As a result there was a great famine in the city. After a while even a donkey's head sold for two pounds of silver, and a cup of dove's dung cost about two ounces F14 of silver.
26One day as the king of Israel was walking along the wall of the city, a woman called to him, "Please help me, my lord the king!"
27"If the LORD doesn't help you, what can I do?" he retorted. "I have neither food nor wine to give you." 28But then the king asked, "What is the matter?" She replied, "This woman proposed that we eat my son one day and her son the next. 29So we cooked my son and ate him. Then the next day I said, 'Kill your son so we can eat him,' but she had hidden him."
30When the king heard this, he tore his clothes in despair. And as the king walked along the wall, the people could see that he was wearing sackcloth underneath next to his skin. 31"May God kill me if I don't execute Elisha son of Shaphat this very day," the king vowed.
32Elisha was sitting in his house at a meeting with the leaders of Israel when the king sent a messenger to summon him. But before the messenger arrived, Elisha said to the leaders, "A murderer has sent a man to kill me. When he arrives, shut the door and keep him out. His master will soon follow him."
33While Elisha was still saying this, the messenger arrived. And the king F15 said, "It is the LORD who has brought this trouble on us! Why should I wait any longer for the LORD?"
FOOTNOTES:F14: Hebrew sold for 80 shekels [0.9 kilograms] of silver, and 1/4 of a cab [0.3 liters] of dove's dung cost 5 shekels [57 grams]. Dove's
dung may be a variety of wild vegetable. F15: Hebrew he.
Copyright Statement: Holy Bible, The New Living TranslationCopyright © 1996 by Tyndale Charitable Trust. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers. All rights reserved.

~ Lena’s Journalin’
The place where we meet with you is too small….
Unto Him shall the gathering of the people be…Genesis 49:10.
The Lord is Lord of the whole earth, the earth belongs to the Lord and all of the inhabitants also. Psalm 24:1.
We are made from earth. Adam was formed from the dust of the earth.
Genesis 2:7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
If we do not realize why we were created, we will not fulfill our purpose in life. We were made for God. We were created as subjects of His great love and of His desire to conquer over the power of freewill rebellion. We are God’s hope that a freewill being will do as He has seen, amidst every opposing force.
Too small? Everything in life on earth that has not yet reached its fully purposed potential in Christ, is too small, has not grown into its fullness and stature.
So the invitation is given by the Lord, by His spirit in the earth, by prophets who hear the word, by leaders who hear the word. Let us (that’s plural) go up and build a larger place to meet with God. If we took over the whole earth with this meeting “place” it would hardly be large enough, because we’d have to move into the atmospheric realm and take that too.
How do we build or make room for God? By allowing Him to have His way 1st. The number one enemy of God’s purposes being accomplished is the will of people and time spent by the exercise of that will.
Whose time is it anyway? Yours? It belongs to you? You made it, deem it, can change it, and so you spend it on you? Wow. Then you have not yet seen Him clearly.
Our time is a tool to see who we love and serve. It is borrowed; we are stewards of it, because it does not belong to us. It is as the axe. We can use it to build places to meet with God, all over the earth. The places that would make His house as big as the whole earth is the hearts and minds and time of people. We are the dwelling places. It will never be big enough until He fills us all.
So they began to work the work of God on the borrowed time, building a place for God, by being available to serve Him, live for Him, spread the good news, become participators of the covenant “project”. Then something happens, circumstances come, there’s seemingly no time available, it is lost even smothered up by circumstances beyond our control, thus it sank out of sight. Then we might realize, “Oh No, that belonged to God”, but circumstances dictated it as belonging to circumstances rather than God. So what do we do? We’re swimming drowning in the circumstance.
Repent, Call out to the Lord for re-prioritization, for help. Go back to the prophetic words, the words of the vision. Insist they obey you, that circumstances come into line, that they do not take first place in the place that belongs to God and only God. Tell them what to do, rather than them telling you what to do. That is grabbing a hold of the purposes of God once again.
We have overcome. We have to let the enemies of time know that. If we submit our lives to them, they’ll take it and use it for their agendas, which are against God. They’ll make sure the vision of God is overwhelmed, we are overwhelmed. To whom we serve we obey, to whom we obey is whom we love, honor, respect and have given our lives to.
We must pray asking the Holy Spirit to speak to us ahead of time and see what will rise up to take away from the purposes of God being brought to fruition in our lives. We need to rise up to a new level of vision, a new view. We must see ahead to know what is up ahead of time. If one knows an enemy is going to come to steal from him, he’ll not only lock all doors, he’ll have a gun in hand, he’ll be ready to fight, he’ll be ready to win, he’ll gird himself, he’ll dress for victory.
Do we not know there is an enemy of our soul, who desires to steal the word from us, the vision of God for the earth from us? To bring us down to mere day to day existence? What should we do? Bar the doors, get out the guns, take the pajamas off and exchange them for armor.
If time were money, it is amazing what we spend it on and for. Donkey head, dove’s dung? It’s about that valueless, yet we give our whole lives, all of our energies over to them.
Seek ye first the Kingdom of God is not just a nice and good idea, we will all give an account. The price Jesus paid for us to be able to give this account is immeasurable. How much to we value the laying down of His life, enough to also lay ours down? Daily, giving of our time for His kingdom, or for our own, for His will or our own?

Daily Repetitive Verses:

Isaiah 58:12 You'll use the old rubble of past lives to build anew, rebuild the foundations from out of your past. You'll be known as those who can fix anything, restore old ruins, rebuild and renovate, make the community livable again. THE MESSAGE: The Bible in Contemporary Language