Dock Resource Kit
Sunday sermon, 28 September 2025
Summary
On Sunday we launched our new Formation series, exploring how God shapes us through the stories of Elijah and Elisha. Brigid reminded us that discipleship is not just about following Jesus with our actions but allowing God to form us on the inside — shaping our character, identity, and purpose. Just as Elijah was formed through encounters with God and Elisha through following closely, we too are constantly being shaped. The question is not if we are being formed, but what is forming us. God, the good potter, takes the real and messy clay of our lives and lovingly moulds us into His likeness, sending us out to reflect His kingdom in the world.
Key Points & Takeways
Discipleship leads to formation — following Jesus with our actions shapes us inwardly into His likeness.
We are always being formed — by habits, culture, voices, and choices; the question is who or what is shaping us.
Elijah’s formation came through solitude, struggle, and encounters with God’s presence.
Elisha’s formation came through discipleship — following, learning, and being mentored.
Formation is constant, relational, hard, and purposeful — it doesn’t happen alone or without cost, but always with God’s intention to make us more like Him.
God the potter shapes the real you — not an idealised version, but your true, messy, unfinished self.
Formation equips us for mission — as salt and light, reflecting God’s likeness into the world around us.
Dock Discussion Questions
Brigid said the real question isn’t if we are being formed but what is forming us. Looking at your week, what are the main things that shape you right now?
Elijah was formed through solitude and struggle; Elisha was formed through mentorship and following closely. Where do you see yourself more at the moment — in a season of wrestling with God, or learning from others?
Formation can be hard, but also purposeful. Can you share a time when God shaped you most deeply through challenge, change, or difficulty?
Brigid used the image of clay and the potter. What “real, messy, raw” parts of your life do you think God might be wanting to shape right now?
How might our Dock community help one another to be formed more intentionally in God’s likeness?
Long-form, edited transcript
Foundations
Learning From Elijah And Elisha
1 Kings 16:29-33
James 5, Isaiah 64
Morning everyone. It’s good to be with you this morning starting our new series.
Over the last few weeks Phil has reminded us who we are as a church community. A church that wants to make disciples, transform communities and plant churches. It’s a vision that’s dynamic and needs all of us hands on deck. But more than that, it needs God to show up. SPS is God’s church and as we live out our vision we see God’s kingdom come here in Shadwell and East London and beyond.
And we don’t just talk about it, we get to see it happen. Alpha started this week, as did Our Father’s House, our new recovery dock, and our youth and kids groups are meeting again. As we meet in our docks, as we come along on Sundays, as we serve in all sorts of different ways, as bring God’s kingdom in the places God has put us.
And it’s exciting.
But as Phil reminded us a few weeks ago, the real challenge that we have, especially in this season, is discipleship. That’s the call that we all have. Not to chase after fleeting spiritual experiences, not to strive to be good people. But to be disciples, followers of Jesus.
And to follow Jesus means to open ourselves up to the ongoing, life-shaping formation for all of us into the people that God has made us to be.
Discipleship is the active journey we go on to follow Jesus - learning from him together and applying what we learn to our lives.
And discipleship leads to change through formation.
Formation is the internal transformation. As we follow Jesus with our actions and deeds, internally we are shaped into the likeness of Christ. We grow in depth and character and wisdom and maturity.
It’s like discipleship is the going to the gym, while formation is the muscles actually building.
And that’s what we are going to look at over the next few weeks.
How are we being formed more and more into God’s likeness?
Because when we are formed into the bearers of God’s image that we designed to be, that’s how we know who we are. That’s where we find our identity. It’s where we find our purpose. It’s where we find our ability to reflect God to the world around us. It’s where we are equipped to live out God’s kingdom values here and now. It’s where we are renewed and restored from brokenness into wholeness.
In other words, being formed in God’s likeness is the most important thing about it. It defines who we are, shapes how we live, and anchors us in God’s plan for relationship, transformation, and mission.
And the truth is that if we aren’t being formed into the likeness of God, we are still being formed. We are shaped by our choices, our habits, the voices we listen to, the culture around us, the relationships we keep. The question isn’t ‘Am I being formed?’ but ‘What am I being formed into and what is it that’s forming me?’.
A few years ago I lived with a friend called Hilary. Hilary loves Park Run. LOVES Park Run. And I did not love park run.
If you don’t know, Park Run is a worldwide, free community 5K run or walk.
We lived not far from a course and every Saturday morning Hilary would skip out the house to go and complete her 5K and then get a coffee and stroll home feeling successful.
Every week, for over a year, she invited me to go with her. Now I’d only ever totally failed at running before and so it was a very easy no. But gradually, over time, seeing Hilary’s joy and delight at running park run each week made me wonder. What if park run really is as great as she seems to think?
One fateful Saturday morning, I woke up, pulled on some old trainers, and walked down to Mile End. I stumbled round the course and just about managed to complete it in one piece.
But that was it, I loved it.
I hadn’t realised that over the year or so living with Hilary she had been forming my thoughts around running. It had gone from something that sounded awful to something that looked quite appealing. Without noticing, my attitude towards running had changed and I had been formed into a park runner.
But I’ve also been formed negatively without me realising. I reckon I’ve had some kind of smartphone for just over a decade and without a doubt, having a smartphone has formed me.
Kings College London did some research and found that the average UK adult estimates that they check their phone 25 times a day. Actually, the average UK checks their phone every 12 minutes - 80 times a day.
If you’re in the middle of a task but have an interruption, like checking your phone, it usually takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to fully regain focus on the original task.
Imagine how that trains us in distraction. No wonder our lives can feel fragmented or unfocused. It can feel hard to be in quiet or disconnected.
Having my clever phone has formed me to think about it. Now I’m not saying that having smartphones is terrible, but I am saying that unless we are conscious of it, we will be formed by things that we don’t necessary want to be formed by.
Early church leader Paul instructs us in Romans 12:2, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” If we are not intentionally being formed by God, we will naturally be shaped by everything else around us.
And to help us do that, we are going to head back into history, around 3000 years, and look at the lives of two people whose stories can help us to see what formation looks like.
Elijah and Elisha. We are going to look at the books of 1 and 2 Kings in the Old Testament where we find some fascinating and wacky tales of what these two men got up to. But through this series you’ll see that under the miracles and politics and drama, there are two people learning what it is to be formed by God.
But before we get into all of that.
Let’s set the scene. The books of 1 and 2 Kings tell the tale of the kings of Israel and Judah. Both books are a sort of commentary on the royal history of this period and how well the kings led God’s people in following - or not following - God.
The books start with the end of David’s life - you know, David and Goliath, on the whole a man who sought to rule God’s kingdom with wisdom and God’s way at its centre. He unifies God’s people into one kingdom and God promises that a messianic king is coming to fulfil all the promises made to them.
And after David dies, his son Solomon takes over. Solomon has this amazing success as he builds the temple in Jerusalem, but his reign ends with his careless, disobedient self-indulgence as the power of being king gets to his head.
David’s reign of peace is firmly over, and the nation splits into two rival kingdoms. Judah in the south and Israel in the north. Out of the 42 kings described in the books, only 8 showed any kind of desire to follow God. The rest of them are power hungry, corrupt and unjust. Crucially, many of these bad kings start to introduce the worship of other gods into the kingdoms.
And so fast forward to 1 Kings 17 and we find a key purpose for why these books were written. To introduce the role of the prophets. Prophets in the Bible are not fortune tellers or seers. They are those who speak on behalf of God to his people. They are like watchdogs - they call out injustice or when God’s people lose their way - holding them fast to the promises that God has made and reminding them who they are.
We see prophetic voices today: people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer who spoke out against the Nazi regime, Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks fighting for an end to racism, or Malala Yousafzai fighting for girls’ education. All people who spoke truth in the face of injustice. Elijah and Elisha were those kinds of voices for God’s people.
Let me introduce them to you.
Elijah is a bit of a wild man. We find him living out in the desert and his nemesis is Ahab.
In 1 Kings 16:29-33 we read:
In the thirty-eighth year of Asa king of Judah (that’s the southern kingdom), Ahab son of Omri became king of Israel, and he reigned in Samaria over Israel twenty-two years. Ahab son of Omri did more evil in the eyes of the Lord than any of those before him. He not only considered it trivial to commit the sins of Jeroboam son of Nebat, but he also married Jezebel daughter of Ethbaal king of the Sidonians, and began to serve Baal and worship him. He set up an altar for Baal in the temple of Baal that he built in Samaria. Ahab also made an Asherah pole and did more to arouse the anger of the Lord, the God of Israel, than did all the kings of Israel before him.
You can see why Elijah spoke out. This royal couple has got everyone worshipping a false god, and so we constantly see Elijah confront Ahab’s unjust and cruel behaviour.
Elisha is Elijah’s follower; he leaves his life ploughing fields to learn from Elijah. Elijah literally passes his mantle or his cloak on to Elisha as a sign that the calling to speak to God’s people was passing onto him. That’s where we get the phrase from.
And Elisha prays this bold prayer - that he might inherit a double portion of the power and experience of God that Elijah had.
We will see that Elijah was formed by encounters with God. Encounters we’ll talk about in coming weeks.
When he miraculously sees God provide for a desperate widow.
When he prays and sees a young man brought back to life.
When his prayers see rain come back after a long drought.
When he learns to hear God’s voice on a mountain top.
In moments of isolation, in moments of desperation, through moments of great success and great failure, Elijah was formed as he realised God’s presence was always, patiently with him.
We will see that Elisha was formed by following closely. By being a disciple - learning through proximity to Elijah, hungry to be formed into who God had made him to be, wanting to be transformed.
When he purified a water supply in Jericho through prayer.
When he prayed and saw a widow’s oil miraculously multiplied.
And so on and so on. Learning from Elijah who had gone before him.
Just as Elijah was formed through solitude, struggle, and encounters with God, so are we.
Just as Elisha was formed through mentorship, persistence, and openness to God’s Spirit, so are we, shaped by who we follow and what we desire.
Through encounters with God, through deliberate discipleship.
Both lives remind us that formation is constant and directional. The question isn’t if we’re being formed, but who and what we’re being formed by.
As we look at their lives over the next few weeks, it would be easy to think that these two men were kind of superheroes. They swoop into some crazy situations, bravely speak out against injustice and see amazing miracles.
But Elijah is featured again in James, a letter in the New Testament. James the author writes in chapter 5:16-18:
The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective. Elijah was a human being, even as we are. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years. Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crops.
In other words, Elijah was just a normal human being. Like you, like me. He had fears, weaknesses, doubts, failures. He wasn’t a special case human, he wasn’t semi-divine. He was just a human. We’ll see that as we travel through Kings.
Which means just as Elijah is called by God, trained by God, tested by God, formed by God, so we can be too.
Just as Elijah passes on what he has learned, mentors Elisha in the way of God and leaves an amazing legacy of discipleship, so can we.
James tells us in his letter that the reason Elijah’s prayers were answered is because he was a righteous person - those prayers are powerful and effective.
Well Elijah wasn’t described here as righteous because he was extra special in some way. He’s described as righteous because he was faithful and obedient to God when it would have been really easy to just go along with everyone else.
Elijah did his best to follow the law that God had given and to live out God’s kingdom values in a crazy culture. But of course Elijah was living before Jesus’ incarnation, and life, and death and resurrection.
What that means of course, is that now living after the revelation of Jesus, we are given righteousness, right standing with God, not because we do our best to follow perfectly, but because Jesus was that perfect person. We are given the gift of right standing with God, simply because God calls us his own.
And more than that, God wants to transform us away from brokenness or half living into the children of God, made in his image, that we truly are.
We just must follow as disciples, and allow ourselves to be formed by God.
So what can we expect from formation?
Formation is constant – We are never standing still. Our choices, our habits, relationships and experience are always shaping us. So we must choose what we allow to form us.
Formation is relational – It was Elijah’s proximity to God and Elisha’s proximity to Elijah that allowed that formation to happen and stick. Being formed with the support and help and input of others is way more likely to make it last. It’s why we believe so completely in the importance of docks. Spending time together.
Formation is sometimes hard – Elijah and Elisha experienced the wilderness - both literally and emotionally. They encountered trials and challenges that refined their character. Formation isn’t always easy, sometimes it’s actually hard. Park run, putting down my phone. Going through grief or illness or anxiety. So on. But it’s often in those places where we are formed the most.
More than that, psychologically it isn’t easy. Author Will Storr says that in relation to the formation of the parts of us that are less pretty, “Identifying and accepting our flaws, and then changing who we are, means breaking down the very structure of our reality before rebuilding it in a new and improved form. This is not easy. It is painful and disturbing. We will often fight with all we have to resist this kind of profound change.”
But as Christians, we are not looking to be formed and changed simply to be better people by our own force of will. We are looking to be formed into the image of God, not based on our sense of feeling like we can make it but by the gift of Jesus’ example and the light of the Holy Spirit leading us. And the righteousness of Jesus defining who we are. That means exchanging brokenness for glory, ashes for beauty, hopelessness for hope. Though hard, being formed in God’s image is the best thing that can happen to a human.
That’s where we can say I am not always right, or always good, but I am always loved, and always opening myself up to be formed anew.
And not just for ourselves and our own flourishing and fulfilment.
Formation is purposeful – God is forming us into His likeness, preparing us to reflect him to the world. You are the salt of the earth, you are the light of the world, says Jesus. In other words, you are the stuff that makes heaven come on earth.
But here’s the thing - who is God going to form?
Only the real you.
Think of it like clay. I wonder if anyone has ever had a go at making pottery.
You start with something unformed and if you’re skilled enough, you can turn it into something really purposeful and beautiful.
In the Bible we are given the image of God as the potter, and us as the clay.
Isaiah 64 says ‘Yet you Lord are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand’.
We are the clay that the skilful hands of God can turn into something purposeful and beautiful.
But the reality is that God can only form who we really are. Not the version we wish we were, not the person we think we should be. Certainly not the version we compare ourselves to in someone else.
Too often, we try to start our journey of formation and discipleship from an imaginary place of perfection. We measure ourselves against others, against idealised visions of holiness, or even against our own expectations. But God doesn’t operate in those terms. He works in reality. He sees the real you: your strengths, your weaknesses, your fears, your potential and He begins there.
He is delighted to begin there.
Last week, I was hanging out with some of our church kids while their parents’ had Young Life team training. And we had a great time making things with playdough.
We took squishy blobs of playdough, soft and unshaped, a bit messy, and sometimes a bit brown where too many colours have been mixed together. And with some plastic tools and a bit of patience, we turned the playdough into blueberry pies, ravioli, a couple of burritos and so on.
We didn’t mind what the playdough looked like to start with. It was all about the potential that the playdough had to be formed into something exciting.
It can be easy to feel like the unformed, messy, raw parts of ourselves are too much, or too sensitive for God to form. Elijah had moments of fear, doubt, and despair, yet God didn’t bypass him or erase his struggles. He worked with him as he was. Elisha, too, wasn’t already a powerful prophet when he left the plow; he started where he was and allowed God to guide him.
Here’s the good news: God is forming you, clay safe in the hands of a good and kind potter, into something purposeful and beautiful. And God’s formation of the real you is also your calling. You don’t need to become someone else first. You don’t have to fix everything before you follow Him. Your life, as it is, with its messy, raw reality, is the clay God wants to shape. Your obedience, your willingness to be moulded, and your openness to God’s Spirit are your invitation to participate in God’s kingdom mission.
In other words, your starting point is not a limitation, it’s the beginning of your calling. God meets us where we are, forms us in truth and love, and sends us out to reflect His likeness in the world. The process isn’t always easy, but it’s ultimately transformative.
I can see as I look back with hindsight how God has been forming me all the years I’ve been a Christian. Sometimes through the fun things, sometimes through the hard things. Sometimes I’m willing, sometimes I’m less willing. Or downright stubborn to formation.
I’m not a finished product. The clay in me still needs forming. But I do want to be shaped and moulded by the God who I love and trust, and who loves me.
So let me ask you to reflect on now in your own mind.
What or who has formed you over your life?
What is forming you now?
What parts of you do you want to bring before God to be formed over the rest of this year?
Perhaps you want to be formed to depend on God for all you need, to trust God will provide.
Perhaps it’s about trusting God with your purpose, or the things you see going wrong.
Perhaps it’s about all you will pass on to your children or grandchildren. How you will be someone who they can follow in the way of Jesus.
Elijah and Elisha were called as prophets to form a nation, but God also formed them individually. The real, raw, and sometimes messy reality of their lives.
As we look at their stories over the coming weeks, we’ll see:
How God forms us constantly when we are willing to let him.
How discipleship - following, observing, learning - brings formation to life.
How formation is relational, sometimes hard, and always purposeful.
God is patiently shaping, sometimes pressing, sometimes stretching, always with a purpose - to form us into His likeness, ready for the mission He has for us.
God can only form the real us in the real places we live with the real people around us. Not the version we wish we were. Or the place we wish we were in.
What’s the reality we need to acknowledge in order to allow God to form us?
Closing Prayer
Lord, You are the potter and we are the clay.
Thank You that You love us as we really are — raw, messy, unfinished — and that in Your hands we are safe.
Form us into the likeness of Jesus. Shape our minds, our hearts, and our desires.
Where we are stubborn, soften us. Where we are broken, mend us. Where we are distracted, refocus us.
Fill us with Your Spirit, that we might reflect Your love as salt and light in the world.
Keep us faithful, obedient, and open to Your work of transformation,
for the sake of Your kingdom and for the glory of Your name.
Amen.