On February 19, 1519, Spanish explorer Hernan Cortes set sail for Mexico with an entourage of 11 ships, 13 horses, 110 sailors, and 553 soldiers. Two previous expeditions failed to establish a settlement in the New World, yet Cortes and company conquered much of South America. What was the difference? Cortes issued an order that turned the expedition into an all or nothing proposition: Burn the Ships! As the crew watched the ships burn, they had to come to terms with the fact that retreat and returning home was not an option.
There are moments in life when we need to burn the ships to our past. We need to make a defining decision that will eliminate the possibility of sailing back to the world we left behind. If we will truly be All In with God, we need to burn our ships named Past Failure, Past Success, Bad Habit, My Old Way of Life, and Back to Normal.
That is just what Elisha did when God called him from his former way of life (1 Kings 19:19-21). Elisha said good-bye to his old way of life by turning his plow into kindling and his oxen into barbeque and throwing a party. Burning the plow and roasting the oxen was Elisha’s way of burning the ships. He eliminated the possibility of going back to farming. He couldn’t go back to his former way of life because he destroyed the means to return.
Elisha didn’t have to destroy his farming tools to follow Elijah. But it made a statement, a statement of faith. This was Elisha’s all-in moment. Elisha wasn’t just buying in. Elisha was about to begin a new chapter in his life and to do so he had to end the previous chapter. He had to put a period, or perhaps an exclamation point, on the last sentence of the last paragraph of the last page. Then he could turn to a fresh page and begin a new sentence for a new paragraph of a new chapter.
So it is with us. If we want to break a habit, stop a conflict, and restart church after the pandemic we need a period or exclamation point. We need to start a new chapter and begin with a statement of faith … a defining decision that’s accompanied by a dramatic action that symbolizes our absolute commitment to Jesus and his mission in and for us.
The last church I served had a week of family camp each year. At one, a relatively new member spoke at fire bowl. As he told his story it was apparent that there were defining decisions marked by dramatic actions. Early in life those decisions were away from God and God’s purpose for him. But then God entered his life and he began to make new defining decisions that were accompanied by dramatic actions. He shared how easy it is to get caught up in things that aren’t good and how hard it can be to overcome them on his own. At the age of 13, Brad started smoking cigarettes and, even since accepting Jesus as his Lord and Savior, he struggled to quit. That night, he ended his fire bowl talk with a defining decision and a dramatic act of faith. He took the pack of cigarettes from his pocket, walked up to the fire bowl, and threw them into the fire declaring, “With God all things are possible!”
One of our problems is that we want God to do something new while we keep doing the same old thing. We want God to change our circumstances without us having to change at all. We are asking God to make us a church that brings love, hope, and encouragement to our community, but we don’t want to have to do anything. We complain that people haven’t returned since in-person worship has started up, but we haven’t reached out to those who we miss. We want to see young families in our worship service so that they can get to know Jesus and God’s great love, but we don’t want to change how we worship because “That’s the way we’ve always done it so don’t you change anything.”
Friends, if we will go all in for God we’re going to have to burn some ships. God told the Israelites, “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?” (Isaiah 43:18-19). I believe this is an ongoing statement from God even to us. Paul tells us, “Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God had called me heavenward in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:13-14).
Change is a two-sided coin. Out with the old is one side. In with the new is the other. When we accept Jesus as our Savior and Lord and we are then in Christ Jesus, “the old has gone, the new has come!” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Most of us get stuck because we keep doing the same things while expecting different results. I believe either Ben Franklin or Albert Einstein called that the definition of insanity. Now spiritual routines are essential to spiritual growth, which I strongly encourage. But when the routine becomes, well, route it must change. What brought us to where we are now may not get us to where God wants us to be next.
On the other hand, where we need to go to next won’t happen if we simply let it happen. Instead, we need to make it happen. How? We make it happen when we let go of the past and start learning from it. Don’t idolize what was, learn anew what passion caused you to try something different and new and use that same passion to try something different and new again. Don’t regret the past mistakes and wallow in guilt, lean into God’s grace and let the Spirit of God heal you.
No, we can’t act as if the past never happened, but we can let God reconcile the past by redeeming it. When Paul tells us that in Christ we are new creations he follows by saying, “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:18). Let God reconcile the past – good and bad – by redeeming it. God is in the recycling business: He makes recycled Goods out of wasted lives. And, amazingly, God then tells us to use our recycled lives to help others become reconciled. God “gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:19).
Elisha was born and raised in Abel Maholah, the meadow of dancing, the breadbasket of the Jordon River Valley. Having 12 yoke of oxen, along with the farmhands to plow with them, is evidence that Elisha came from wealth. Burning the plow equipment and barbequing the team of oxen meant divesting himself from his share of the family; it may even have meant writing himself out of the will. But Elisha chose to go all in with God; and because he did God did mighty things through Elisha.
Elisha could have lived his entire life in the dancing meadow. So can you. You can play it safe instead of stepping out in faith. You can protect your reputation instead of risking it. You can save your money instead of giving it. You can keep plowing your fields instead of following the call of God. Sadly, too many of us go in until we start feeling the pain of change. We get comfortable with comfort. We follow Jesus to the point of inconvenience, but no further. And because we go no further, we fail to see the wonders that God will do in, for, and through us.
It’s difficult to imagine burning our ships. That means there’s no escape. But, if we have the courage to burn the ships, we’ll discover that we don’t need them to get where God wants us to go. God himself will get us there. And God himself will get the glory!