The Plow Was the Calling Before the Mantle Was

There was a young man out in a field who did not know that the day was going to be the day.

He had twelve pair of oxen in front of him and he was on the last pair. Twelve. That is not a hobby farm and that is not a poor man's plot. That is a working operation with hands under him, and he was not standing at the fence supervising it. The text puts him at the back of the line, in the dust, with the twelfth team, doing the part nobody watches.

And a man came across the field and threw a coat on him.

That is the whole ceremony. No service. No pulpit. No lights. An old prophet walked past a working man and put his mantle on his shoulders and kept walking, and the young man ran after him and asked if he could go kiss his mother and father goodbye first.

Now think about what that young man had been doing for the years before that afternoon. He had been plowing. Every season. Getting up in the dark, going out to the same ground, turning the same dirt, and if you had asked him what he did, he would have said, I farm.

Nobody has ever written a song about the ninth season of turning the same dirt.

But the coat did not land on a man who was waiting. It landed on a man who was working.

What the text actually says he was doing

Read it slow, because it is easy to read past.

So he departed thence, and found Elisha the son of Shaphat, who was plowing with twelve yoke of oxen before him, and he with the twelfth: and Elijah passed by him, and cast his mantle upon him. (1 Kings 19:19, King James Version)

He with the twelfth. That little phrase is doing a lot. The writer of Kings could have said Elisha was farming. Instead he tells you exactly where in the line the man was standing, which is at the back, eating the dust of eleven teams ahead of him.

That is not a detail about agriculture. It is a detail about character, and the Holy Spirit put it there on purpose.

You are not in a holding pattern, and the hours you are giving away right now are not being wasted on you. That is not a nice thought I am offering you. It is what the written word says about the last man in a dust line, and it is the Spirit of God who is naming your ground the same way this morning.

I know what the objection is, because I made it myself for years. Somebody is thinking, that is fine for a farmer, but my job is nothing. I move boxes. I sit at a desk. I clean a building at night when everybody has gone home.

Come on. Elisha moved dirt.

The house I learned this in

My father is a preacher and he does not take a check for it. I want to say that plain, because it is true and because it is the good part, and I am not going to spend an article being clever about a man who taught me to pray.

But in our house there were two kinds of hours. There were kingdom hours, which were Sunday and Wednesday and anything that happened at the church building. And there were the other hours, which were what you did to get from one Sunday to the next. Kingdom hours were real. The other hours were a tax.

And I lived that way until I was about twenty. I had a job hauling boxes and I hated every minute of it, not because it was hard, but because I had decided in advance that it did not count. I thought I was waiting for God to open something. I was not waiting on God. I was resenting a warehouse.

You have not been sitting in a waiting room, and God has never once filed the hours you work under something other than His will. Go read what the word says about a man plowing when the coat landed, and let the Holy Spirit settle it in you before you punch in tomorrow.

Here is the thing that turned it for me, and it is not complicated. The Bible has almost nobody in it who was called out of nothing. Moses was keeping sheep. Gideon was threshing wheat in a winepress. David was with the flock. Peter and Andrew were mending nets. Matthew was at a table doing accounts. Paul made tents while he planted churches and never once apologized for the needle.

The calling did not start when the work stopped. The calling walked out and found them in it.

The plowing did not go to waste either

Here is the part I love. Watch what he does with the oxen.

And he returned back from him, and took a yoke of oxen, and slew them, and boiled their flesh with the instruments of the oxen, and gave unto the people, and they did eat. Then he arose, and went after Elijah, and ministered unto him. (1 Kings 19:21, King James Version)

He built the fire out of the plow. The wood that had been his job became the fire that fed his neighbors on the last night of that job.

That is not symbolism I am pushing onto the page. That is what the sentence says he burned. The tools of the old work cooked the meal for the new start, and everybody in the village ate off the equipment.

What you have been doing has already put something in your hands, and it is not going to be thrown away when the ground changes. Scripture put the plow in the fire on purpose, and the Spirit who inspired that line is the one who knows exactly what your hours have been building in you.

And notice what he does next. He goes and pours water on Elijah's hands. That is a servant's job. The man with twelve teams of oxen becomes the man who carries the wash basin, and he does that for years before anybody calls him a prophet.

He was bad at the new thing first, the same way everybody is. Nobody hands you an office. You get the basin.

You are not behind because you started at the basin. The written word walks a man from twelve teams of oxen to a wash bowl and calls that promotion, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a person the grace to carry a small thing well for years.