đź“– So Elijah left there and found Elisha son of Shaphat, whose plowing was being done with twelve yoke of oxen, and he drove the twelfth. Elijah crossed over to him and cast his mantle upon him.
He left the oxen and ran after Elijah and said, Let me kiss my father and mother, and then I will follow you. And he [testing Elisha] said, Go on back. What have I done to you? [Settle it for yourself.]
So Elisha went back from him. Then he took a yoke of oxen, slew them, boiled their flesh with the oxen’s yoke [as fuel], and gave to the people, and they ate. Then he arose, followed Elijah, and served him.
—I Kings 19: 19-21 AMPC
When God is doing a new thing in your life, don’t go back to the old. The new is always better. It was time for Elisha to enter a new phase of life. His old life of plowing with the oxen was over with. It was time for him to serve under Elijah in preparation for him to eventually succeed him as a prophet of God. Elisha would eventually kill the oxen and serve them to the people to eat. This was a symbolic gesture. This was Elisha’s way of turning his back on his old life and moving forward to this new phase that God had for him. Every one of us will have to do this at some point in our lives. Jesus told his disciples that “no man with his hand to the plow, looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God” (Like 9:62). One cannot move forward looking back. We must all look in the direction that we are headed. If we are moving forward, we must look forward. Paul made an important decision in his life and wrote about it in Philippians 3: 13-14. He wrote:
I do not consider, brethren, that I have captured and made it my own [yet]; but one thing I do [it is my one aspiration]: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the [supreme and heavenly] prize to which God in Christ Jesus is calling us upward.
If we are going to walk in all that God has for us, we must do the same. We must forget what is behind and toward the goal.
#new #vcccharlotte #outwiththeold #devotional #moveforward