God’s Idler 5

Allow me to sum up God’s Idlers, if that is possible.

God requires His servants (I am talking about choice servants) to be idle on His purpose and intent.

Let me say another thing as we look at a few other examples.

I think for the most idlers, God requires them to idle to develop them into massive powerful instruments for His express use.

What do I mean?

That idling is meant to prepare them for the huge assignment that God has for them.

It therefore means that in that idleness there is intense warfare in the spirit for and through that idler.

And it is so because the devil knows that God is setting in place a plan that will demolish his kingdom through that servant. He knows that what we call idleness is detrimental to his kingdom.

Do you think God took Elijah to Jezebel’s hood simply to eat a widow’s food? Could God not have made sure that that brook never dried or prepared another source of his provision, knowing that even in Ahab’s palace was His servant who had rescued a hundred prophets?

God sent him there because there was something there for him to do. He sent him there because there was a battle to be waged. He sent him there because his spiritual muscle needed some building to handle the assignment we see him handling when he left that idling.

Many people have speculated and even come up with crazy narratives of what Elijah was doing in Sidon. But for me I always deal with what I read in the scriptures.

But from my study of the scriptures I am sure there was something major that made God send him to Sidon, the first being to build his spiritual muscle. I do not need to read between the lines to see it.

Look at Job.

Do you think that God took him through all that hell simply to multiply his wealth? Could He not have done it without inciting the devil against Job? Couldn’t He have done it without allowing His servant to go through all that persecution from his friends and even desertion from his wife.

The assignment God was preparing for Job was the reason he fought those battles. No wonder he had to live a hundred and forty more years to complete that assignment.

Do you think God could not have taken Joseph straight from Canaan to Pharaoh’s palace? Why did he have to go to prison, of all places?

He needed that idling experience to be ready for that assignment.

Why did Moses need to go to Midian, and for a whole forty years?

Why did God who had preserved him from the killing whose sole focus was Moses not have started him directly on his mission?

Moses needed to experience God enough to develop enough muscle to handle the challenges that would arise in the forty years of his leadership.

The idling experience was therefore not a time-wasting experience. It was a training experience God had put in place for His servant.

The Bible rarely writes about what happens in that idling season. It just shows the explosive release out of that experience.

We read Paul’s letters. We read the Revelation. We read about Joseph’s promotion. We read about Elijah’s explosive dealing with idolatry.

But God does not allow us to walk with the idlers in those idling times.

We are not able to know how Joseph was able to see sadness in those other prisoners. We are not able to see John in the process that released the book of Revelation.

We are able to have a sneak view of Job’s idling time. And I believe so that we can be able to appreciate the same when God decides we are His choice servants as well.

But there is no other servant God has allowed us to see during those idling times.

We are not allowed to see the process that made Ezra so instrumental. We are not allowed to see how Nehemiah, a eunuch, was prepared to lead in that huge rebuilding. We are not able to see what made Daniel and his three friends, also eunuchs, so confident of God’s intervention that they dared the king’s dieticians to give them vegetables and water instead of the carefully and professionally prepared food. We are not able to see what made David confident of facing the giant that the giant of Israel, who was the king, was so scared to face. We are not allowed to see how was he able to turn the hopeless rejects into an army that killed the giants of Philistia.

We are only allowed to see the product of that idling.

Why am I using such a negative word to share such an instrumental message? I know many are wondering.

One reason is that God uses the mundane for great purposes. He uses the apparently foolish for mind shattering purposes.

I am therefore using the word intentionally to get us to think about God and His training regimen for some of His servants. I use the word because He does not use that method for the run of the mill servants but on those He has set apart for great exploits in the spirit.

It is possible that this message does not relate to you as that servant. And that is why I have also addressed you as a supporter of the same to help you appreciate that you may not be able to understand what God is doing to His servant so that you do not trash him and thus invite judgment on your person.

Please stop talking about Elijah staying with a heathen widow if you do not have the whole picture. Please stop talking about Moses running away from responsibility by becoming a wife of sorts to a Midianite priest. And do not talk of David’s pride like his brother when you find him asking questions like his elder brother did.

I have said it many times and will repeat it.

Job’s three friends quoted the scriptures correctly. The only problem was that those scriptures did not apply to Job since he was in his idling season.