Make This Valley Full of Ditches
Years ago my wife Gillian and I were in Phoenix, Arizona, preaching at a church there, and on the Monday morning I went out for a bike ride. In another lifetime I was a fairly competitive road cyclist, so I'd scheduled three hours in the Arizona wilderness. I hired a bike in Scottsdale at seven in the morning, and it wasn't until I pulled away from the shop that I noticed something of peculiar importance. There was only one drink cage on the frame. On a three-hour ride you carry two bottles minimum. But I thought, no problem, this is America. There'll be a gas station down the road. There wasn't.
The strange thing was that I wasn't sweating. It's warm, but I'm dry. This is amazing. Of course I was sweating; the desert air was so dry it pulled the perspiration off my skin the moment it surfaced. I was emptying out and I couldn't even see it happening. At the two and a half hour mark my body began to shut down. Dizziness, nausea, pain in my legs, and no house in sight in any direction. Then I came down a hill and there in the distance it appeared like a five-star resort shining at me across the desert. A lonely Subway store. It was over forty degrees, and when that air conditioning hit me I felt the glory of the Lord. I bought a Powerade and felt fabulous for about one minute. Then I ran for the bathroom and didn't quite make it. I had heat stroke for the rest of the day.
I've never forgotten the lesson. It is a dangerous thing to run out of water.
In 2 Kings 3 there's an army in exactly that position. Israel, Judah and Edom have gone out together against Moab, and the road to the battle is a seven-day march through the wilderness. Seven days. And at the end of it there's no water. Not for the men, not for the horses, not for the livestock. The animals are unsettled, the soldiers are restless, and there's still an army out there waiting to destroy them.
And the king of Israel falls apart. He cries out that the Lord has only brought them here to hand them over to Moab. He's the king, he's meant to be leading the way, and instead he's moaning to the world, because he has no relationship with God. He's putting his fear into the atmosphere and everybody is breathing it.
Then one man asks one question. Jehoshaphat says, "Is there no prophet of the Lord here, through whom we may inquire of the Lord?" (2 Kings 3:11)
Think about what he's doing. The common view in that camp is that they're finished. But Jehoshaphat pauses in the middle of it and asks whether there might be another perspective, another voice that could come into this situation. Isaiah asks, "Who has believed our report?" (Isaiah 53:1) There's a report coming at you from every direction, and there may well be a God who has a different report for you.
And here's what I love: what you're looking for will determine what you find. Their whole search had been for water. Now the search is for a prophet. And the moment they change what they're looking for, they change what they find, because Elisha, the successor of Elijah, the man who performed twice the miracles Elijah did, had been travelling with them the entire seven days. They didn't have some low-grade preacher in their midst. They had the prophet. They just weren't looking for him.
It's so easy to spend your life looking at low things. The budget. The bank account. The health report. I'm not telling you to bury your head in the sand about any of it. But there comes a point where you put it all to one side and ask God, "Do you have something different you want to say to me?" Because his word over your situation is more powerful than any other word spoken over it.
So Elisha is brought forward, and the first thing he says is: bring me a harpist.
Don't rush past that. Seven days deep, no water, hungry men and hungry animals, an army waiting, and the prophet asks for music. He's saying, I need a different atmosphere around me. Jesus did the same thing. He arrived at a house where a girl lay dead and the mourners were playing their dirge, and before he raised her he stopped the music. Sometimes you have to change the atmosphere to receive the miracle.
And while the harpist was playing, the hand of the Lord came upon Elisha. That's not hype. The hand of the Lord is anointing. It's power. It's glory. It brings healing and it brings freedom. And under it, he says this: "Make this valley full of ditches. For this is what the Lord says: You will see neither wind nor rain, yet this valley will be filled with water, and you, your cattle and your other animals will drink." (2 Kings 3:16-17)
He tells them plainly. There will not be a single discernible sign that the water is coming. No cloud. No wind. Nothing you could point to. It's coming anyway. But when it arrives you'd better have somewhere to put it, or it will run straight across the valley floor and keep going. That's the whole thing. The miracle is on its way. Your job is the ditches.
And notice what it costs them. These aren't military trenches. These are exhausted, dehydrated soldiers being asked to spend their very last reserves digging holes in dry ground under a clear blue sky. Everything in them is saying conserve. And God is saying, spend it. Dig. Sometimes it's our action before it's his intervention. Sometimes we respond to his word first, and then we experience his provision.
So let me ask you the question I've had to ask myself. Would you be more surprised by your destruction or by God's favour? Which one feels more likely to you? Because it's very easy to drift negative. I disaster-plan, I do it all the time. Are you preparing to survive, or are you preparing to be blessed? Are you rehearsing reduction, or are you rehearsing revival? Are you the king of Israel expecting defeat, or are you Jehoshaphat looking for the word of the Lord?
If God caused his blessing to flood across your life this year, would he find a ditch for it to sit in? If the door finally opened, if the contract came, if the healing arrived, would there be room in your life to hold it?
There has to be a season where you look strange to people who don't have the word inside them that you have inside you. Somebody says, what are you doing? You say, digging ditches. There's not a cloud in the sky. Don't need one. God said the water's coming.
And it came. Before dawn, water with no origin came flooding down into the valley, and because the valley floor was full of ditches it stayed. The soldiers came out of their tents to wet feet and full ditches, and they drank, and the livestock drank. Then the sun came up red over the water, and the Moabites looked across and thought they were seeing blood. Certain the three kings had turned on each other, they charged down in disarray, straight into an army that had just been watered.
Don't live your life limited by the fear around you. Do something that defies the way you feel. Use your last piece of energy for expectation instead of conservation.
Make this valley full of ditches.
