Debunking Greater by Steven Furtick - Burn the Plows

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Time for a Steven Furtick update. You're so vain,

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I probably think the Bible's about you. You're so vain,

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I bet you think the Bible's about you. Don't you? Don't you?

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Fool me several years ago, when I was just a baby sheep.

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Well, you told me we were made to serve, and my time was all you'd need.

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But you twisted up the Bible so no one else had said a peep.

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I was afraid, then I heard the real gospel. Heard the real gospel, and you're so vain.

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You probably think the Bible's about you. You're so vain,

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I bet you think the Bible's about you. Don't you?

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Don't you? Alright, so have you burned the plows in your life?

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Did you understand that when we read the story of Elisha, the way Steven Furtick tells it in the book

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Greater, he makes a big point. You know, Elisha did some important things. He burned his plows.

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He commanded ditches to be dug. So have you burned your plows? Have you dug ditches?

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Is this any way to read the Bible? Anyway, hang on, let me kill the music here.

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Alright, you're so vain. Anyway, so is this any way to read your Bible? The answer is no. This is no way to read your

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Bible. Let me give you an example here. Okay, today's theme here is allegory.

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Alright, so that's our theme here. This is a big problem. It's one of the major tools of twisting the

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Bible if you're going to twist the Bible narcissistically and read yourself into the text. Here's the idea.

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Okay, if you read Steven Furtick's book Greater, then what you discover is that he selectively picks, and he doesn't tell the whole story of Elisha, he selectively picks different vignette stories from the story of Elisha, and then he allegorizes them to fit into his grander narrative that God has a greater plan for your life.

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See, you've got to ignite God's vision for your life, and so we can look at the story of Elisha and see

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Elisha burned his plow. Okay, Elisha commanded ditches to be dug.

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So now we're going to allegorize it. Then I ask you the question, have you burned your plow?

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You're going, I don't own a plow. Well, the question is, what's your plow? I don't have a plow.

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What are you talking about? What ditches am I supposed to dig? Well, this is no way to read the

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Bible. No way to read the Bible at all. Let me give you some other examples. Jesus talks about John the

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Baptist, John T. Baptist. John the Baptist, that does not, by the way, I just want to let you all know this.

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I'm absolutely convinced that John the Baptist was a Lutheran. Okay. You're going, wait a second,

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Roseboro. He was a Baptist. Yeah, I know. You're using two different definitions there.

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Anyway, John the Baptist, okay. Jesus says that there was none greater born of woman than John the

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Baptist. Okay, so, I mean, in Jesus's view, and since he's the son of God, he kind of gets to weigh in on these things and his view gets to stand.

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John the Baptist was like the premier, uber primo prophet, okay, even greater than Elisha and Elijah.

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Okay, even though he, you know, and you got to understand that he was the Elijah that was prophesied in the Old Testament who would precede

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Christ, you know, when he came. Anyway, none greater born among women than John the Baptist.

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And, well, that being the case, you know, we can look at the life of John the

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Baptist, apparently, and ignite God's vision for your life. Okay, so here's my question for you.

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Have you eaten your locusts yet? Trust me,

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I mean, isn't eating locusts an instrumental part of the story of John the

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Baptist? Have you eaten your locusts yet? Have you eaten them with honey? You know, by the way, I find that my locusts are much easier to eat when

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I put honey on them. So what's your honey? What's your locust? Have you eaten it yet? And you're going, you're not making any sense.

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Right, I know I'm not making any sense because this is no way to read the Bible. So let me ask you, have you lost your head yet?

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Where's your platter? You know, you want to ignite God's vision for your life? Where's your platter? Have you worn your camel's hair yet?

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I mean, if you want to ignite God's vision for your life the way John T. Baptist ignited his vision for, you know,

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God's vision for his life, then you've got to eat your locusts with your honey and you need to wear your camel's hair and lose your head.

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You can't do that! Well, I know. Neither can you burn your plow.

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You see what I'm saying here? Okay, let me give you another example. Okay, Hosea. Y 'all familiar with the prophet

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Hosea? Now he's a minor prophet, and so I know that there's a lot of Christians out there even listening to this program who may have never read the minor prophets and read the story of Hosea.

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It's a fascinating, fascinating little book there in the Bible that points us to Christ.

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But right off the bat, what did we learn that poor prophet Hosea was ordered to do by God? Well, God's vision for Hosea was for him to marry a prostitute.

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No joke. Read the story. So let me ask you this. Have you married your prostitute yet?

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You're going, What? Have I married my prostitute? Yeah, yeah, have you? You've got to get busy.

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You need to be eating your locusts with your honey, put on some camel's hair, and marry your prostitute. And you're going,

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How do I marry my prostitute? What's my prostitute and how do I marry her? What are you talking about? Well, what about Ezekiel?

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Ezekiel was commanded by God to bake bread over dung. Have you baked your bread over your dung yet?

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You can't ignite God's vision for your life until you bake your bread over your dung after you eat your locusts and honey and have married your prostitute.

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So you've got to get busy if you want to ignite God's vision for your life. And you're going, Wait a second.

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Something's really screwy here. And you go, That's my point. See, the story of Elisha is not told in scripture so that you can allegorize it and somehow backwards engineer the steps to igniting

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God's vision for your life. That's not what that text is about. In fact, the story of Elisha is about Jesus.

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It's true. The story of Hosea, it's about Jesus. And even John the Baptist makes it clear his story is about Jesus.

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Right? So when you come across somebody like Stephen Furtick who is selling a book to teach you how to ignite

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God's vision for your life and somehow he discovered these principles for igniting

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God's vision in your life by allegorizing the story of Elisha and asking such silly questions as,

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Have you burned your plows? Have you dug your ditches? I ask the question then, Well, have you eaten your locusts?

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Have you married your prostitute? Have you cooked your bread over poop yet?

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Okay? Because none of those stories are given to give you steps to ignite God's vision in your life as if somehow you can mirror the actions and historical events that took place in the lives of these prophets.

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But see, the one thing that we do have in common with them, now work with me for a second, is that we all hear the word of God.

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Now, I want to make a distinction. The prophets, they, the word of the

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Lord came to them very objectively. It wasn't a hunch inside of their heart. It wasn't some subjective feeling they had.

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Very objectively, the word of the Lord came to these prophets. They knew exactly who they were dealing with and what he was saying in, you know, in clear, unambiguous, certain terms.

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Okay? Now, here's the common ground that we have with them.

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God's word comes to us in as clear and unambiguous ways as it came to them.

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And how does it do that? In the written word of God. You want to hear

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God's voice? You want to know what God's will for you is? Open your

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Bible and read it. There you will have

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God's word instructing you and preparing you for every good work to which

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God would have you do. God's word, the written word, will do that. And it's objective.

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It's outside of you. And it is truly the word of God. Okay? And so, think of it this way.

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The word of the Lord that came to Isaiah, it's right there in the Bible for you. The word of the

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Lord that came to Hosea, it's right there in the scripture for you. For your building up, edification, correcting, training, rebuking, all of these things, so that you are equipped for every good work.

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It's right there. Okay? Stop looking internally. God has not called you to be a prophet.

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And when you listen to these people, you listen to like Stephen Furtick and others, okay? They're trying to get you to chase some subjective, internal, maybe not so knowable, mystical, fuzzy, weird, hard to define thing that maybe

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God's sort of kind of maybe laying on your heart or just to the left side of your, your, your, your,

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I don't know yet. You understand? Listen, cut that nonsense, nonsense out.

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Go to the written word of God. You know what God, you will learn what God's will is for your life, what a good work is, and how you love and serve your neighbor in vocation.

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And you won't despise the things that God has given you to do. You will gladly receive them and love and serve your neighbor in your different vocations.

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Anyway, so without any further ado, that's kind of the, the preparation. This is from this past Sunday's, yesterday's sermon at Elevation Church where Stephen Furtick is explaining people how to burn their plows.

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Because if you want to ignite God's vision for your life, well, you got to burn your plow.

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In fact, I'll go back to the very, very, very, very beginning of this sermon so that you can hear how this sermon was pitched.

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And then we'll just go to the part where he's telling people, it's a kind of a three point sermon. But the important part here, the meaty, the meaty thing is looking at the story of Elisha.

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Elisha burned his plow. So what's your plow that you got to burn? Well, yeah, here's one of the young kids at Elevation Church to explain what the sermons about.

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And then I'll fast forward to where Stephen Furtick explains why you need to burn your plow. Thanks for joining us online today.

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The message you're about to hear is from the series greater based on the book by pastor Stephen Furtick. And during the series, we're going to be taking a look at how to dream bigger, how to start smaller and how to ignite

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God's vision for your life. So that's the setup. How do we ignite God's vision for your life?

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And immediately the question comes up, what's that? How do you define such a thing? And well, they can't give you any specifics because God's unique vision for you is going to be not, not the same as God's unique vision for me or whatever.

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Yeah, this is a subjective chasing of the tail based upon, well, narcissistic isogenesis.

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Here's Stephen Furtick. Now to explain how to burn your plow.

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And the Bible says in verse 21, that for a man who had spent his life behind the plow, Elisha does something remarkable and terrific.

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It says that he left them and went back and he took his yoke of oxen and slaughtered them.

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Now this in itself wasn't an unusual act. It wasn't like that was cruel to the animals for Elisha to slaughter them.

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Animal sacrifice was so common in Elisha's day. Like it would be nothing for him to, to sacrifice the animals.

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His neighbors weren't calling PETA, you know, we've got a crazy man. He's killing his, he's killing his oxen.

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He's, he's, he's on the loose. He's, he's out of control. So there's nothing abnormal about that necessarily.

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What gripped my heart is what he did next. And this is where I want to land my sermon today. It says that he, he burned the plowing equipment to cook the meat and he gave it to the people and they ate.

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I can understand killing the animals. There's some value in that. Everybody gets fed, but to take the instruments of your livelihood and use them for fire.

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So you can grill this oxen. To me, that's irresponsible and short -sighted and a little bit over the top.

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When you agree, I mean, if, if God called you to quit your business, you wouldn't burn the building to the ground.

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You'd sell it to somebody and get something out of it. And you'd give half of it to the church. Amen. It's always safe to talk about what you would give to the church.

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If you had it, when you don't have it, it's when we talk about what you're doing with what you do have that, you know, it gets a little more difficult.

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Three people stayed with that. But my, my suspicion is that God didn't put this story in the

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Bible to teach us how to best steward farming equipment. It's a picture of surrender.

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It's a beautiful picture of surrender. I don't know about that. And let me just challenge that concept real quick.

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He says that it's a picture of surrender. What's a parallel to this in the new

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Testament. Actually, there there's a, there's a very clear parallel to this in the new Testament, the calling of Elisha.

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The details are very similar to the details of the calling of Jesus's disciples.

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I mean, when Jesus shows up, says, come follow me. And they leave their nets behind and follow him.

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It's not a picture of surrender. It's a picture of God's electing and calling.

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Okay. Very different because to somebody who's a synergist and a Pelagian like Stephen Furtick, well, they've got to look for the thing that they, that the person did to obey.

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They, that part that they did that them, that then somehow activates, you know, God does his part.

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They do their part and blammo, whammo. No, it's, this is a very monergistic calling.

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One day he's plowing, he's working in the fields. He's in the vocation of farmer and he receives the direct word of God.

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And boom, he is changed and it's the whole course of his life changes forever.

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And if you think about it, then the saint, something similar happens to us. I'm not going to allegorize, but let's roll up here.

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Okay. The word of the Lord does come to us. And when the word of the Lord comes to us, it commands us to repent and to be forgiven and to believe.

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That's what God's, God's word clearly comes to us. And that's the call of God. And those who are brought to faith and trust in Christ, similar thing.

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They are raised from the dead. Not that Elisha was dead, but you know, their lives radically changed.

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The call of God, you know, raises them from the dead spiritually.

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They're reborn, born to new life. They will never be the same.

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So this is not a picture of surrender. This is actually a picture of electing and calling.

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And so we've got a problem here. We've got a major problem. And on top of it,

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Elisha, there's nothing sinful or wrong with the, with the farming life that he was doing, nor was there anything sinful and wrong with the fishing life of the apostles.

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So there's a, there's a parallel here to the calling of the apostles and by extrapolation, a similar way to the way in which

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God calls us to himself through the preaching of repentance and the forgiveness of sins in Jesus name.

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But they didn't have to repent of the vocations. They were called then into ministry, but we continue.

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Sing a song earlier. I have decided to follow Jesus and we sang two of the verses.

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And one of the verses that we didn't sing is I think the most powerful one in the whole song.

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And it really corresponds with the message that I'm trying to bring to you today. As we launched this series, it says the world behind me, the cross before me, the world behind me, the cross before me.

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So you're not being called to follow Elijah today. You're being called to follow one much greater than Elijah.

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And, and, and Elijah the prophet isn't coming by and dropping his mantle on you. Jesus Christ, the son of God is walking up and down the aisles of these campuses in and out of the rows, touching the hearts of people saying, that's you.

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You're mindlessly plowing. That's you. You're stuck. That's you. You're playing safe. That's you.

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So Jesus is walking up and down the rows at all of the different camp. I have elevation church saying, that's you.

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Your life is stuck. You're, you're just mindlessly plowing by the way. I got to point this out again.

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Elisha was not mindlessly plowing. There's nothing in the text that says he was mindlessly plowing and that somehow his life was stuck in a rut.

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I mean, this is completely at a step with just the historical facts regarding farming.

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Okay. The plowing portion only occurs during the time when you're preparing the field to receive the seeds that then get sewn.

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When they are sewn, the plowing is done and you wait for the crops to grow and then you harvest them.

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So no, Jesus isn't going up and down the road saying, yes, your life is just like Elijah's. You're mindlessly plowing.

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Again, this is an allegorizing of the text. You're numb, numbing yourself to the reality of what

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I want to do around you, but you're not entering into it. That's you. You're testing the water. You're not stepping in.

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That's you. That's that issue in your heart. I've been talking to you about and what's going to happen if you just feel that and you go, okay,

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I want to come out from life behind the plows. I want to be greater. Who doesn't want to be greater? Anybody, anybody not want to be greater.

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Everybody wants to be greater. And so many people have launched out to be greater and yet there's no change.

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And yet we're still the same. And so now we're back in a life. That's just good enough.

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Wondering what went wrong. And I would suggest that the reason many people never exit out of spiritual mediocrity and advance into greater things is because we pick the wrong starting point.

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The greater life that God is calling you to doesn't start with you building a dream house or drawing up blueprints for the life you want.

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It begins with you burning the plows of the life that you've lived.

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Can't get a stop there. Wrong starting point. Okay. Steven has falsely identified the starting point of a

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Lycia's ministry. The starting point was not, it was not, it was not his burning of the plows.

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The starting point of a Lycia's ministry was when he received the direct word of God from the prophet

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Elijah. Okay. When the mantle was put on him, that is when everything changed.

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The call was there. He was elected, called, set apart, and he received that directly from the prophet

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Elijah. Thus begins the prophet, you know, the basically the, the ministry of the prophet

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Elisha. Since he is no longer in the vocation of farmer, the next thing is, well,

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I won't need these anymore. And he acts in accordance with that. This is not a surrender.

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This is an acknowledgement of the call of God and the call of God is first. So Steven here has misidentified the first important thing in the ministry of the prophet

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Elisha. And that is the clear objective calling and election of God and offering yourself to God as a blank plot of ground saying, offering yourself to God, Elisha had already received the call before he did anything.

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He didn't need to offer himself. In fact, the burning of the farm equipment and the killing of the oxen had nothing to do with offering himself to God.

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I will follow you wherever you lead the world behind me and the cross before me.

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And many people never get to greater because we don't leave good enough behind. And so we step out from behind the plows and we try to live for God a little bit.

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But while we're singing the world behind me, the cross before me, what we're not singing is the world.

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Isn't very far behind us because we've got our hand right there on the back door. And if it gets a little bit tough and if it gets a little bit sacrificial, and if it gets a little bit uncertain to follow

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Jesus forward, I'll go right back to the world, right back to the plow. But God didn't bring you here.

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So you could, but there was nothing sinful in being a farmer. That's a perfectly legitimate and Godly vocation.

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Go right back into the same way that you were living before you came today. We're going to burn some plows in our hearts.

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Great. You're going to burn some plows. Are you going, are you going to cook some bread over dung? Are you, are you going to eat some locusts and honey?

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Will you be wearing some camel hair? Will you be marrying some prostitutes? See, it doesn't make any sense.

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Here is it. We're going to burn some plows. What plows are you going to burn? And where are you? We're in the biblical text.

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Are we commanded to burn plows? We're not. And in our lives and in our affection, cue sappy music.

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Hang on one second, Eric. I want to tell the people a story before we close. The third thing I want to talk to you about is the invitation to greater things, greater things, shouted out, greater things.

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Elisha went on to do twice as many miracles as Elijah did. Elisha went on to raise people from the dead, changed the economy of an entire city with one word from his mouth.

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We'll talk about those things in the weeks to come. But it started with deeper surrender.

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God is the only one. No, it didn't. It did not start with deeper surrender. It began with the electing and calling of God.

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That's what it began with. Who will call you higher and tell you that the way to get there is by going deeper into your dependence on him.

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Jesus is the only one who said, anyone who doesn't take up his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.

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What does that mean? It doesn't mean that God isn't going to love you till you get rid of this one sin or God isn't going to love you until you take this one step of faith.

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It just means that your life is going to continue to be limited until you set fire to whatever has tethered you to your old life.

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Yet, Elisha's life wasn't limited.

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It wasn't. And he received the electing call of God from the prophet

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Elijah. His vocation changed and his actions basically demonstrate that he believed the word of God.

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That's what that shows. It shows that Elisha trusted, believed, had faith in Yahweh and his calling and the word of the

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Lord spoken by the prophet Elijah. And yet, what is

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Stephen Furtick doing here? Moralizing this and somehow making it so that Elisha's burning of the plow is the activating ingredient on the greater calling in his life.

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And it's not. The change in vocation, it was activated by the word of the

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Lord spoken by the prophet Elijah. He was called before he burned any plows.

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The mantle had already fallen on Elisha before any plows were burned.

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This is a complete moralizing and legalizing of this text. And I know what I'm talking about because, you know, like as somebody who had a great mom and a great family and grew up in church.

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And now we're going to get a story about whom? Stephen Furtick. I thought I knew what it meant to belong to God and be a

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Christian and wear a cross. There was a moment in my life where the mantle hit my shoulders.

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What? Really? A mantle hit your shoulders? Hmm. Notice now

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Stephen Furtick is now on par with the prophet

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Elisha. And I sense this calling. Couldn't have explained it at the time. It sounds subjective.

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Elisha's calling wasn't subjective. It was objective. Found when I say it to you now, but at the time it was just an impression, an interruption that became

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God's invitation. And even though the life I was living was pretty good, God was calling me to an impact that was greater.

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And so I had this tension of my love for music.

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Ever since I was really even too young to play an instrument, in my mind

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I've always had a band. Even before I had any friends who could play instruments,

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I would gather groups of people and I would tell them what instrument they played in our imaginary band, and I'd make imaginary CD covers with imaginary track listings.

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And I wanted to be an imaginary mantles, an imaginary plows, an imaginary... You get what

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I'm saying? He goes on to tell the story of how he, just like the prophet

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Elisha, burned his plows. What was his plow, by the way? All of his CD collection that he collected because he wanted to be a rock and roll star in a band.

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So he had a ceremony where he burned all of those CDs. That was his way of burning his plow.

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So what's your plow that you are burning? What's the plow that God wants you to burn in your life?

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To which I would ask, and what's the locust that God wants you to eat? And what will he help you to swallow it with?

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What honey will he give you to help you swallow that locust? What prostitute does God want you to marry? What bread does

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God want you to bake over dung? You see, this is a complete allegorizing of the text and a missing of the point.

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And who gets the credit in Stephen Furtick's mishandling of the text?

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Well, the prophet Elisha does by having greater surrender.

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His greater obedience means that it's the prophet Elisha who gets the glory.

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Who gets the glory and the retelling narcissistically of the story of Elisha, the way

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Stephen Furtick does in comparing his own life and himself to the prophet Elisha? Well, Stephen Furtick does.

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See, Stephen Furtick, just like the prophet Elisha, he surrendered deeply and burned his plow too.

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So who gets the glory? Not God. Not God. No. God's just the one who wants to coach you to greater, but it's all up to your obedience and surrender to earn that.

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And that's what's going on here. This is greater by works, not greater by grace as a gift.

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And yet, when you look carefully and pay attention to the details of the story, number one, you can't allegorize it.

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Number two, the calling of God was there before even the remotest of obedience was there to the call, which means it wasn't dependent upon the person but dependent upon the

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God who elects, the God who calls, the God who commands, the

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God who spoke the world into existence, is the one who speaks to us repentance and faith and trust in him.

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So that's what's going on with Stephen Furtick's greater sermon series in the burning of the plows, and you now understand what the primary hermeneutical problem is.

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So if somebody asks you, if you know a friend, and they're telling you about the greater book and they say, yeah, you know,

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I'm really learning how to burn my plows. Ask them, have they married their prostitute yet?

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Have they eaten their locusts? Have they cooked their bread over dung yet?

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And then help them understand that this is no way to read the scriptures and it misses God's faithfulness,

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God's electing and God's calling. All right, we're up on our second break. If you'd like to email me regarding anything you've heard on this edition or any previous editions of Fighting for the

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Faith, you can do so. My email address, talkbackatfightingforthefaith .com, or you can ask to be my friend on Facebook.

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It's facebook .com forward slash pirate Christian, or follow me on Twitter, my name there, at pirate Christian. Sermon review when we come back, weird, it's going to be a sermon on the movie

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The Avengers, and it's going to be a divisive sermon about unity. Strange.

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Yeah. Stay tuned for details. We don't need to rethink