One year from now

By John Stallings

Elisha said to her, “This time next year you’re going to be nursing an infant son….. 2Kings 4: 16-- The Message

Because we’re created for eternity, all of us have dreams.

A little girl dreams of someday becoming a ballerina.
A little boy wants to grow up & be a fireman.
A young woman dreams of becoming a lawyer.
A stay- at- home mom dreams of running her own business.
A single mom dreams of someday being able to stay at home & take care of her kids.
A business man dreams of one day owning his own business.
Some want a new truck or a piece of land.
Still others dream of “making it” in singing, acting or sports.
Some want to raise kids to be successful in life.
Each of us has the desire for more of life, to do more, to accomplish more & get more out of our lives.


One thing we all have in common; everyone has & needs dreams. Someone has said, “If you have no dream, how you will ever have a dream come true?” Dreams deliver us to a new reality. We need to follow our dreams, and never stop dreaming, though we reach 100 years of age. What dreams languish in your heart today? W.H Murray said, “Whatever your dream began it, for boldness has magic in it.” How true. We are drawn by our dreams.


DREAMS CAN SOMETIMES BE TRICKY


There seems to be a principle about dreams that they are born, die and then surprisingly they come to life again. Every song I’ve ever written has gone through a cycle; the birth, - attacks of doubt about its validity, --death, --and resurrection. I write the song, get excited about it, and sleep on it for awhile, and then excitement starts to wane. Then, sometimes almost immediately, sometimes weeks or months later, the feeling I had about the song reignites. The danger of this is that in the cooling period, a lot of worthwhile writing can drop through the cracks and be lost. None the less, this is the way it works with me, and I would guess others.

In the book of Second Kings the fourth chapter there is a great story with just such a dynamic; the birth, death & resurrection of a dream. The story unfolds among four characters; Elisha, God’s prophet, Gehazi, his assistant, the Shunammite woman, a noble, wealthy & pious woman, and her miracle son. Each of these characters has modern day counterparts which makes the story more intriguing & allows it to be instructive for Christian living.

Elisha, God’s servant, who was Elijah’s successor, is presented in an extremely positive light in the biblical record & it’s almost impossible to find a word of negativity spoken of him or his actions.

Gehazi, Elisha’s assistant on the other hand seems to be pretty much a hireling. We find his name popping up often & in the next chapter he takes money from Namaan the leper, money Elisha refuses to take as payment for the Syrian commanders healing. For this, God struck Gehazi & his descendants with Namaan’s leprosy. He’s a perfect type of a minister who’s in it for the money.

The Shunammite woman is described as “great” or “notable”, a Hebrew word that can speak of wealth, piety, renown or all the above. Elisha periodically passed by her home as he traveled the countryside. As she became acquainted with him she perceived him to be a great man of God so she and her husband built a room or prophet’s chamber in their home for him. This woman to me is a type of the church.

Because of her hitherto childlessness, this woman could have become bitter but she was still reaching out to people & loving them. Because of her lack of children she could have blamed God for it & felt she wanted no man of God to stay in her home. She definitely had the right attitude & there must have been an atmosphere of faith & godliness in her house.

Though the Shunammite woman might not be very familiar today, she served as an important symbol in the 19th & early 20th centuries. There weren’t enough clergy for every town to have their own minister so frontier preachers maintained a circuit & served several communities which meant they were traveling all the time. My grandfather was one of these circuit riding preachers & served Tennessee & Georgia as an evangelist for the Presbyterian Church. He had only one eye, he played the violin & was later a piano teacher.

In those days, numerous homes along the preacher’s way were known as “Shunammite Households” because they would maintain a “prophet’s chamber” available on a moments notice to provide food & lodging to those doing the Lord’s work.

Lest we forget the Shunammite woman’s son, he was born as a result of an Abraham-Sarah-like miracle. To me he represents Everyman, a child of the church & the individual Christian.

The father in this story seems basically to be only background or “white-noise,” & he plays a “bit part.”

Elisha was grateful for the kindness shown him by this Shunammite woman & in turn he wanted to bless her. When He found she had no children & her husband was old, he spoke the blessing of a child into her life.

AT FIRST THIS WOMAN DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH FAITH TO BELIEVE GOD COULD GIVE HER A CHILD.


Elisha gave her a word of prophecy that one year from that time, she and her husband would have a son. She reacted by telling the prophet not to lie to her, showing that her faith was weak in this area. None- the- less, exactly at that time the next year the prophecy came true and she held a son in her arms. Isn’t it great that even when we don’t have enough faith, God is gracious to have mercy on us in spite of our doubts? However God expects our faith to grow so He’ll stretch us & test our faith just as He did in this woman’s case.

So this Shunammite woman realized her dream & it came to fruition at the precise time Elisha told her it would happen, exactly one year from the time he prophesied it.

MAY I ASK-- WHERE WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE ONE YEAR FROM NOW?

Why not take the long view and believe that one year from now you will be out of debt, greatly blessed, or maybe engaged to a great person, if you’re single, and on your way to a great future. Isn’t that better than believing that you’ve fallen into a black hole and things will never improve? There’s nothing wrong with a one year plan, because a lot can happen in one year. I’m not talking about a New Years resolution, but rather believing God for something great exactly one year from now.

When this son was about 12 years old he was with his father in the field one day and suddenly the boy ran to his dad complaining of pains in his head. Though the details are scanty, most commentators believe in all probability he fell victim to a sunstroke because of direct exposure to the sun. Being a child he succumbed quickly because he probably wasn’t wearing any protective head-gear. This is reminiscent of young Christians who expose themselves to the perils of this worlds system for long periods of time without making sure they're constantly protected by “The whole armor of God.”

When the boy fell ill they took him to his mother to be comforted but within a short time he died in her arms. How many former Christian workers have we seen die in the arms of the church in the last two decades? The Shunammite woman knows her son is dead but she does a rather strange thing. She takes him up to Elisha’s room, lays him on the bed, & shuts the door. Then she goes out & shouts to her husband from a distance asking him to send her one of the servants with a donkey, she wants to go see the man of God.

So now this woman has seen her dream come true, held the dream in her arms, and then sees the dream shattered & her son die right before her eyes.


THIS WOMAN STUBBORNLY REFUSED TO BECOME OFFENDED AT GOD.

This Shunammite woman doesn’t seem to accept that her child is really dead. She tells no one & in effect by putting the child in the prophet’s private room & shutting the door, she’s effectively hiding his condition from her husband, & to an extent, even from herself.

Look at some of alternatives she now had: she could go into a rage, start panicking and screaming and cursing the God who had given her the gift and now so cruelly taken it from her. She could have had a melt-down & gone on a tirade saying, “Well I quit. If that’s what God does to you, I want no more to do with him.” Some people blame God when bad things happen to them. I’ve seen folk who never again darkened a church door after life dealt them a disappointment similar to this.

But you don’t see those kinds of hysterics with this woman. Look what a paragon of faith she is. She doesn’t even cry or tell her husband what’s happened, probably because she knows he isn’t able to handle the situation spiritually or emotionally. It would have been understandable if she’d gone into a rage & ranted against God & His man who’d built her up for a letdown. But this woman is a model of level-headedness. She wasn’t going to make a big scene; she was going to seek out the originator of the promise made to her. She wasn’t going to go public against the man of God & malign his character but rather she was going to him privately with her problem.

She’s in mission mode now. Nothing would deter her. She climbs on the donkey & says, “Drive & go forward. Don’t slacken the pace unless I tell you to.” The servant is probably running beside her goading the little donkey with a stick. We’re not told how much trouble she had finding Elisha. It probably wasn’t all that easy because he was at Carmel about 15 miles away. But she found him and when she saw him she ran to him & fell at his feet to tell him what had happened.

When some folk have trouble, they run from God. They stay out of church and hibernate, but this woman is going in the right direction; God is always the right direction.

Isaiah 55: 6-7 says, Seek ye the Lord while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near……

LONG BEFORE THE MODERN CONFESSION TEACHING, THIS WOMAN HAS A STRONG POSITIVE ATTITUDE.

Elisha must have been eternally vigilant because he wasn’t in bed sleeping; he was outside & saw her coming. He asked her if things were well with her & back at home & she answered, “All is well.” Think about that. She acts like she’s already read Romans 4:17 hundreds of years before Paul ever penned it, by “calling things which were not as if they were.”

It’s interesting that when the Shunammite woman fell at Elisha’s feet Gehazi attempts to push her away from the prophet. The bible has little good to say about Gehazi. Though he takes the commands of the prophet & obeys them well, there’s that sense of unbelief that hovers between the lines when he’s mentioned. We know one thing for sure; he had a greed for money which finally proved his undoing. It’s sad because Gehazi had all the time in the world to soak up righteous principles from his master Elisha but he doesn’t seem to hunger for that. He’s emblematic of people who are exposed to the church but never internalize the truth for themselves. They [especially the professional hirelings] see the church only as a place to extract dollars.

Elisha was so sensitive to her need that he immediately tells Gehazi to run ahead and place his staff on the child. Here again Gehazi shows his inadequacy & spiritual impotence. The narrative doesn’t mention him praying for the boy. Even laying Elisha’s mantle on him does no good.
Gehazi simply didn’t have the spiritual goods to get the job done even with Elisha’s mantel. He tried & failed once, & he gave up. Evidently he’d never heard about, “try, try again.”

To me this Gehazi fits the description of those Paul speaks of in 2nd Timothy 3:8,….. Having a form of godliness but denying the power thereof.

The boy is stone cold dead. In the bible the euphemism for death is sleep. “For this cause many are weak & sickly among you & many sleep.--1 Cor. 11:30 God’s people need to be awake & alert in these days when sin & darkness abounds. Paul says in Romans 13:11-12….it is high time to wake out of sleep…..

When Elisha arrives at the Shunammites house things are still the same & the boy lies dead on his bed. The boy is now with the prophet but he’s still dead. Many people are “in the church” on a weekly basis but they remain asleep. Parking a lawnmower in a garage doesn’t make it an automobile.

Unlike Gehazi, Elisha throws himself into the task of reviving the child. First he shuts the door, putting everyone outside. This is a private matter. I don’t know about you but I think we’ve been remiss in airing the church’s dirty laundry & allowing our business to be put in the streets. We have “Christian Magazines” just for this purpose. However one reason for that is we haven’t had, as the body of Christ, the spiritual power to restore anyone. Paul told us when a Christian slips, …Brethren if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual restore such a one in the spirit of meekness, considering thyself lest thou also be tempted. Gal.6:1

Maybe I’m reading it wrong but it would seem to me if people aren’t restored, it must be because there’s no one around spiritual enough to restore them. We can criticize, we can publicize but we can’t restore. It becomes much easier to just cut the fallen ones loose.

Elisha knows he’s the only one that can get the job done & that any hope of life for the boy depends on his relationship with God.

Notice how hard Elisha works to get this boy healed. He stretches himself out on the child eye to eye, mouth to mouth, & hand to hand. We’ll never win the world from behind the four walls of a church. We must “press the flesh” so to speak to ever see the lost won to Christ. There are only two types of institutions that I know of who have stained or clouded glass on their windows & that’s the church & bars.

For too long the church has sat behind walls & been entertained with no connection to the lost & dying in our world. Consequently we’ve lost our “street cred.”

Elisha stretches himself out on the boy the second time & this time something happens. The boy sneezes. He not only sneezes, he sneezes seven times. Do you know what a sneeze is? The dictionary defines it as—“a sudden violent, spasmodic audible expiration of breath through the nose & mouth especially as a reflex act.” A sneeze occurs as a reaction to an irritant of some kind; dust, dander, allergen etc.

I did some research on sneezing & found that in sneezing, the respiratory system convulses with a blast of air traveling at the speed of 240 mph in its attempt to dislodge and expel the offending particle.

The spiritual counterpart to sneezing is repentance. Listen to 2nd Cor. 7:10-11---

For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death. For behold this selfsame thing that ye sorrowed after a godly sort what carefulness it wrought in you, yea what clearing of yourselves, yea what indignation, yea what fear, yea what vehement desire, yea what zeal, yea what revenge. In all things ye have approved yourselves to be clear in this matter.

In the analogy of reviving a body to life, sneezing is a perfect picture of the individual Christian’s repentance.

Why did the boy sneeze seven times? The number seven in the bible is the number of completion. The book of Revelation has seven churches, seven lampstands, seven spirits, seven eyes, seven seals, trumpets, plagues, bowls, thunders, heads, crowns, mountains, & kings. There are many other lists of seven in the bible.

When the child sneezed seven times it was an example of complete repentance. One or two sneezes won’t get the job done; he must sneeze until all the impediments are completely gone.


I WANT GOD TO WORK IN MY LIFE LIKE THAT--TO STRETCH OUT & BREATHE ALL OVER ME.

What a miraculous story. A story that would never have happened if the woman had not been a fighter. What if she had gotten so caught up in the finality of death that she collapsed in despair? She could have allowed a hundred things to divert her that day and her dream would have been over. She could have gotten mad at God for what seemed like a cruel joke played on her by granting her a son and then taking him away. She could have even been angry enough at the man of God that she would never want to see him again. She could have said, “Well, the Lord gives and the Lord takes away.” She could have said, “Well I’m too old now to see another miracle, that’s it for me, after all, God works in mysterious ways.”

It's one thing to bow to Gods will, we haven’t much choice, but it’s another to give up when a little more fight may win the day. The violent take it by force! If I’m lying on my deathbed I don’t want to hear people praying, “Lord, if it be thy will, heal Him.” I don’t want my wife to pray, “Take him on Jesus, I know heavens a lonely place & you need a few more roses to bloom in your flower garden.” I’ve told Juda if she ever prays for me like that I’ll come back & haunt her for the rest of her life. God didn’t kill this young man, the devil did. It’s my conviction that when someone is facing death, we shouldn’t pray, “if it be they will, heal the person, but according to thy will heal them.”

Let’s look at this story and understand that just because a dream comes, doesn’t mean it can’t and won’t slip away. However, If it does, we need to fight with everything within us to see it resurrected. There may be something in your life today that you need to fight for. Let me ask you about your dream, how much do you want it? Are you going to give up without a fight? You may have laid your dream up on a shelf and it’s been there for years. It perhaps has grown dusty and parched with age but I want to encourage you to take that dream off the shelf today and allow God to breathe life back into it. Do believe it can happen? I know it can.

WHAT ARE YOU EXPECTING IN 2008—0NE YEAR FROM NOW?

Friend, don’t settle for shallow living. Maybe you’ve seen some of the dreams you’ve had for yourself turn to nightmares so consequently you’ve began to dream dreams that are always safe & quiet requiring little risk, practically none in fact.

But have you considered lately the dreams God has for you? Listen to 1 Cor.2:9;

No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has imagined what God has prepared for them who love Him.


In the great New Testament Hall of Fame in Hebrews 11:35, the Holy Spirit brings the Shunammite woman back to our remembrance; ---Women received their dead raised to life again.

God made sure the story of this woman & her son lived on for a reason. If like her, your promise has died, follow her example & stretch it out before the living God & expect a miracle. Ask the Lord to revive the promise—your life----your ministry---your job. Ask God to remove everything in your path.

Dear friend, dream big with huge faith attached to it. Most of all make sure you’re dreaming never scheming. Know that any dream worth its salt will have some opposition.

If we, like this woman, will stay positive, will keep our eye on the one who placed the dream in us, refuse to quit or become offended, act in faith & keep our love-level high, our future also holds some miraculous surprises,

ONE YEAR FROM NOW!

Blessings,

John