Widows from Kings

Auto-generated from the audio — may contain errors.

0:00 So I'm glad that we're here. I know it's like super weird. I feel like I keep saying that over and over again. I keep looking for something else to say about what we're in the middle of, but I keep coming up with it's just super weird. And part of what makes it so weird is how unpredictable it is. So it's nice to have something familiar, even for me. It's nice to have something familiar. And I think that like, especially in times like this, when things are weird, it's nice to have, it's nice to be reminded who we are.

0:39 So my hope for us today is that we have something familiar and we can be reminded of who we are in light of the gospel and the character of God. So wherever you are, whoever you're with, I want to encourage you to set aside this next few minutes together as holy. We can make something holy by setting aside for the purpose of connecting with God. It's a unique purpose in this time. And so, you know, the rest of your week, the week past, as crazy as God as it was in the week coming, as unpredictable as it will be, God can handle both of those.

1:19 So you can handle your week that's past and your week that's common. So for the next hour, we can set aside those things. We don't have to worry about a whole hour this time, but for however long we're together. We can set aside those times. We don't have to worry about them. And for the next time we're together, we can be available to God. So I want to start us with a call to worship this morning. And the call to worship is this threshold that we walk over together that says we're going into something that's different.

1:49 And then the call to worship ought to be a thing that brings to mind the sorts of things that we'll be thinking about in this next time together. And it says this is the kind of purview and scope. This is the beginning of a different kind of time, a holy time together. And our call to worship for this morning comes from Psalm 131. It says this. Oh Lord, my heart is not lifted up. My eyes are not raised too high.

2:24 I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me. Oh Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and forevermore. Let's pray together.

2:57 Oh Lord, nothing is uncertain for you. And, D. Lord, you have ordained and set apart the future already. From our vantage point, Lord, life can be very uncertain and confused. And so we ask for your comfort. We know that answers come in your time. Provision comes in your time.

3:30 But hope can come now. So we ask Lord for hope and joy in the midst of auditing confusion, even pain and suffering. We ask for hope from you. In Jesus name we pray. Oh yeah. So Mike says I need to speak louder so I am going to speak louder. The first thing to say is that we want to be praying for you in whatever you have going on.

4:03 And we have a team of people who are praying and some requests have come in. And don't be shy about those. If you are comfortable, you can just comment here and Michael Gazzam and we will try and pray for a few of you as we wrap a hard time together. But also you can just direct message us or respond to the email if you want to get connected to our almost daily emails going out. You can direct message us on these platforms and we will add your email to that list.

4:35 And you can always respond to that email with prayer requests. So we want to be available and supporting each other. That's part of how we have been in church in this time. So don't be shy about those and let us pray for you. In spite of all this, we are still in the season of Lent. Like it's still going on. So we have been thinking about what it means to be people that need God. And that Lent is a season where we prepare for the celebration of the resurrection.

5:10 And the way that we prepare is we equate ourselves with our need for the resurrection, for the death and resurrection of Jesus. And I had picked out this one story to think about. I had picked it out before things got odd. And I think it still works. I think it applies, unfortunately. And I added a couple to it. But it's a little bit obscure. And so if you are following along in a paper copy of the scriptures, the story I want to look at, the first story for the morning, is in First Kings.

5:43 If you want to look there with me, it's a little tricky to find. It's back in the chronological section of the story of our people, the story of Scripture, comes right before 2 Kings. And then before both of the chronicles to the left of the Psalms, 1 Kings. And we want to look at 1 Kings 17. And in chapter 17, there's this kind of odd, maybe not as odd as invisible virus or microscopic virus running around, but still odd plague that ought not to be happening among our people.

6:33 It's in First Kings chapter 17. It starts where Elijah goes to the king, Ahab, and tells him that it's not going to rain until God says it will rain. Which is kind of like a judgment on Ahab. It's not a good dude. And God wants people to know that he's in charge. Not the gods that Ahab is worshiping. But there's all these downstream effects, as you can imagine, of a drought. And we can see that God is the author of this drought.

7:06 And that's the first thing that made the story still relevant to me. It's like God is the author at times of things that we don't understand. And there might be downstream effects that we, from our vantage point, make absolutely no sense. And we are allowed to call those downstream effects just plain bad.

7:36 I don't know why God spun out a drought in the time of Elijah. I don't. But he did. He spun out a drought in time of Elijah, and he said, it's not going to rain again until I say so. And the story that I want to look at is in First Kings chapter 17 verse 8, right after God's issues or announces this drought to Ahab. The story goes like this, then the word of the Lord came to him.

8:06 The hymn is Elijah and says, arise and go to Zerephath, which belongs to Sidon and dwell there. And the whole day of command. He tells Elijah to go to this ravine. In the midst of this drought, God has this absurd and supernatural way of providing for Elijah. He says, it's not going to rain, so go to this little ravine. In the ravine will be a brook. You can drink from that brook, and I'll have birds bring you food.

8:38 It's crazy and unpredictable. And when Elijah announced to Ahab that there would be this odd and kind of bad pervasive situation, this drought over the whole land, he could not have predicted how God would take care of him. But available and listening to God and willing to believe that crazy solutions might come at the hand of a supernatural God, he goes to the ravine, finds the brook, and welcomes the birds that bring him food.

9:13 And I want to go down to skip a couple of verses because he survives like that for a while. And then look at verse 10. So he arose and went to Zarephath. And when he came to the gate of the city, behold, a widow was there. The brook dries up and he has to leave. And God says, go visit this widow in Zarephath, she'll take care of you.

9:43 So he arose and went to Zarephath, and when he came to the gate of the city, behold, a widow was there, gathering sticks. And he called her and said, bring me a little water in a vessel that I may drink. And as she was going to bring it, as she was going to bring it, he called her and said, bring me a morsel of bread in your hand. And she said, as the Lord your God lives, I have nothing baked, only a handful of flour in a jar and a little oil jug.

10:13 And now I am gathering a couple sticks that I may go and prepare for myself and my son that we may eat it and die. Sometimes I think that's the saddest line in the story of Scripture. I don't know why it sticks with me so much, but the prophet of God, Elijah, goes to this woman in this town and says, hey, make me some bread. I see your gathering sticks for a fire. And she says, dude, I don't have any bread. As a matter of fact, I'm going to make my last loaf of bread, and then I'm going to lay down and die.

10:50 That is a negative downstream effect of the act of God. Terrible. God is the author of the drought, and the woman is ready to make her last loaf of bread and die. And she said, as surely as the Lord God lives, I have nothing baked, only a handful of flour in a jar and a little oil in a jug. And now I'm gathering a couple of sticks that I may go and prepare for myself and my son, and we may eat it and die.

11:20 I don't know if there's resignation. I don't know what else she's tried. I know she's at the end of her rope, and this is the step that makes sense. And I think that there are times where we don't know what we're going to do. Like we don't know how things are going to work out. And Elijah comes to her and he says, hey, do not fear. First he says, do not fear. Go and do as you've said. If you read that and stop there, it's like, oh, he's like, but he goes on.

11:57 But first make a little cake of it and bring it to me. And afterward make something for yourself and your son. For thus says the Lord the God of Israel, the jar of flour shall not be spent, and the jug of oil shall not be empty, until the day that the Lord sends rain upon the earth. And she went and did as Elijah said, and she and her household ate for many days, and the jar of flour was not spent, and neither the jug of oil became empty.

12:30 According to the word of the Lord that he spoke by Elijah, this is the first thing that comes to my mind out of the story, is that God is caught up in like large global situations with unforeseen downstream effects. Like he's launching droughts across the world in order to do a thing, and part of that feels to me like only evil and bad. And from the perspective of the woman, the widow in Zareffeth, the drought has no redeeming qualities.

13:03 From the perspective of the woman in the widow in Zareffeth, the drought is only bad, and that's fair. What's interesting to me is that God does not forget the woman in Zareffeth. That he can hold both things in reality, even when we cannot. That he can move relatively small positives, but huge for individuals, while he's orchestrating big global things, as the Psalm says, too haughty for us, like too grand for us to understand.

13:51 There's another story very similar, just real quickly, in Second Kings. If you go to the right, if you're using a paper copy of the scripture, if you go to the right, God does a very similar thing again. It's amazing. In Second Kings, so just to the right of First Kings, in Second Kings chapter 4, Elijah has been working with a group of prophets whom he likes, and we find one of them has died in chapter 4 verse 1.

14:38 Now, the wife of one of the sons of the prophets of Elijah, cried to Elijah, your servant, my husband is dead, and you know that your servant feared the Lord, but the creditor has come to take my children to be his slaves. This is a terrible situation where the guy clearly dies before he ought to. It's not like he's lived a full life, it's an unjust death, and every time we experience and encounter death, but especially kind of unjust and premature death, it is not okay.

15:17 It is a wrong and evil and heartbreak, and we know even Jesus weeps at the reality of the death of his spread Lazarus, like death is wrong, all sorts of wrong. It's counter to what we were created for death, this plain bad. And I don't know what God is up to by allowing death to endure, and yet like the drop in the midst of that, God can deliver.

15:52 Oh, look at what he does here. Your servant, my husband is dead, and you know that your servant feared the Lord, but the creditor has come to take my two children to be his slaves, and Elijah said to her, what shall I do for you? Tell me, what have you in the house? And she said, your servant has nothing in the house except the jar of oil. He goes, okay, cool. Go outside, get a bunch of vessels from all your neighbors, empty vessels, and not too few. Give enough, get a good amount.

16:24 Then go in and shut the door behind yourself and your sons, and pour into all these vessels, and when one is full, set aside. So she went from him and shut the door behind herself and her sons, and as she poured, they brought the vessels to her, and when the vessels were full, she said to her son, bring me another vessel, and he said to her, there's not another. Then the oil stopped flowing, and she came and told the man of God, and he said, go and sell the oil, and pay your debts, and you and your sons can live on the rest.

16:57 Are you kidding me? Enough oil that she could pay her death, but not only that, that she could make enough money to live on the rest. This is a bizarre story. Why would God provide for her in this way? I don't know. Why would he just give her money? Why would he just bring the guy back from the dead? I don't know. Here's the thing that I like about these two stories. I mean, I like a lot of things, but here's the thing that I like for us this morning about these two stories.

17:33 If there is odd, uncontrolled, perplexing, bad, like running around in the streets literally, right? Like on people's hands and doorknobs, bad, running around in the streets. The widow of serif has had the strap completely out of her control. The widow of Elijah had lost her husband, completely out of her control, and the bad continues to run on, and yet in the midst of the bad, God finds very tangible, practical, custom tailored ways to deliver hope to his people.

18:22 I also like, I mean, I do God with deliver hope. That's just Emma. I just want to point out to you that the character of God has always been to deliver hope in the midst of fat. I also like that these women voiced their need in the midst of bad.

18:59 That when the opportunity presented itself to speak with the spokesperson of God or the people around them, they let them know what problem they were having, what need they had. I love that. I was thinking about this hope in the midst of bad situations and how important it is when you are kind of like tucked in a corner somewhere, one little widow in the vast country enduring a drought that you don't just huddle in the corner by yourself.

19:37 Overwhelmed at the scope of the problem and sure of no solution. But that you go out and gather sticks. And when people ask you how it's going, you respond honestly. And when they give you some crazy notion, you entertain it if it's in line with the character of God. God might just multiply my flower and oil so I have enough food to eat. God might just multiply the oil so I could live off it and be taken care of. I know that my God is a God of provision.

20:08 That's in line with the character of God. It's absurd. But I'm going to believe, I'm going to hope that it may be true. I want to encourage you as this danger pervades the streets. Not to huddle in your corner. Overwhelmed at the scope of a problem that's outside of your control. But do what is appropriate for you to continue living. And when the opportunity presents itself, voice your need.

20:42 I was trying to take this to the extreme to see if this is only true for widows in the story of scripture. And I remember the ultimate story in scripture is the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus. And I think one of the coolest moments in that story is just after he's washed his disciples' feet. They leave at night, walk out of the city, down through that gahana, that burning dumpster field,

21:19 and up into the garden of Gethsemane with the mount of olives and olive trees. Jesus leaves the group of them and goes a little bit further with his three closest friends and asks him to sit there and pray. He goes off by himself and in the hour of his greatest need, like an evil, like the evil, not just bad, all the bad, heaped upon his shoulders. At the moment of all the bad, Jesus himself voices his need to gahana fah.

21:56 In this season of Lent and in his weird time, I am encouraging all of us to find creative and authentic ways to voice our needs, not only to one another, but also and maybe even more to the gahana. And as you do, you would have the capacity to believe that God can deliver hope amongst bad.

22:32 That sometimes God's provision is unexpected and even supernatural. Sometimes it comes at you in ways you weren't expecting. I hope that we would be people who are open to that in this season. Let me pray for that. Hey Lord, we do not know what you are up to. But that's okay Lord, we don't need to know.

23:02 You will sort it out in the time and place that's appropriate for us. And Lord, we know that you don't need us to defend you. When we see evil, we can call it evil. When we experience pain, we can call it bad. And so as we notice injustice, pain and hardship, we point it out. And also Lord, we believe that your character is good.

23:38 And it is good for us. And we'll win out for the good of humanity in the end. So Lord, open our eyes to see the ways in which you are good to us today. And give us the courage to look for hope and provision in this time of uncertainty. We ask it in Jesus' name and for his name.