2 Kings 4

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2 Kings 4

Have you ever faced a situation you just didn’t know what to do in? You didn’t know where to turn? Let me tell you a story. When I was in high school, I would get lost, a lot, when I was driving. Unless I had driven the section of road many times, I would get lost. Thankfully, the story I am about to tell you, I was not lost in, but I knew my way. One day when I was driving home from school, I was driving on the interstate. It was a good day. If I remember correctly, it was just at the beginning of spring, so it wasn’t too hot. So there I am, driving in my Oldsmobile, when all of the sudden there is no power in it anymore and the cab of it started filling with smoke. Well, I did what any reasonable person would do in this situation and I crossed 3 lanes of traffic without looking, just to come to rest on the right shoulder. I get out of my car and pop the hood, something I heard later is not necessarily a good thing, and smoke came billowing out. I didn’t know what to do. You have to realize this was before everyone had a cell phone and we didn’t have a car phone either. It was too far to walk back to the school and too far to walk home, besides, most high schoolers would not walk along the interstate anyways. I had no idea what to do. I could have hoped that someone would have stopped, but I was scared because of, you know, stranger danger. So, I figured maybe just maybe I could find something, I walked up the embankment and came across a little art museum that I had no idea about. I was able to go in and ask them to use their phone. Thankfully, I had my parents phone number memorized. So, I called my parents, then ran into another problem, having to tell them exactly where I was broken down at. Thankfully, my father is better with locations than I am.

I bring this up to say, hopefully you can relate. Not so much for the things that happened, but to the helpless feeling of not knowing what to do. If you’ve ever been faced with a major life decision, made a major mistake, or suffered a major losss, then you know what it is like to feel this way. When we get into these situations, we feel desperate and wonder if we are going to make it out at all.

If you have been there or are there, then I bet you can relate to someone we are going to study in 2 Kings 4

Verses 1-7

a. So here we are, we have a woman who is in the middle of a crisis. She is face-to-face with the challenges and contradictions of circumstantial hardship and crisis. But one thing we do see: she does not know what to do.

We have read this and the question that I have for you today is, what do you do when you don’t know what to do? Have you ever heard the phrase that desperate times call for desperate measures? That’s what’s going on with this widow. We see in verse one that her husband has died. While death of a spouse is bad enough, this was during a time when the men ruled. Meaning that the men made the money, made the decisions, everything. It was a patriarchal time. Now, we don’t know why she was in financial crisis, but it does mention the creditor was coming to take her two sons to be slaves. Both the bible and other ancient laws permitted selling one’s family members into slavery for the payment of debts. She was about to lose her children. She had already lost her husband and was about to live them too. Can you imagine knowing that you were about to lose your children because of debts? As parents, we would do anything we could possibly do to protect them.

So what does she do? She comes to Elisha with a request. She doesn’t know what to do. What do you do when you don’t know what to do? This section gives us a few answers to this question.

The first thing is to ask. When you don’t know what to do, you ask. Look at verse 1 again. It has the verb of cried out. She was crying out for help. This phrase occurs eight times in 2 Kings and almost every time, it means to appeal for help. To cry out is to say “God, I need you to come to my rescue, I need you to come to my aid.” So that is what she is doing. By coming to Elisha she is, in effect seeking out God through him and saying I need help. We can see that her husband had served the Lord. We don’t know why the creditors were coming, meaning we don’t know the debt that needed to be paid, but now that her husband was gone, they were coming. Now that he is gone, she’s asking, she’s pleading. She is crying out to God.

Now, I want to know, is this the first or last person in scripture who cries out to God for aid? Of course not. We can see the prophet Isaiah crying out in the midst of a crisis as well in Isaiah 64:1,2 where it says “Oh, that You would rend the heavens! That you would come down! That the mountains might shake at your presence-As the fire burns brushwood, as fire causes water to boil-to make your name known to your adversaries, that the nations may tremble at your presence!” He was desperate for God to intervene. We have another example in Marks gospel, in Mark 10:47 where it says “And when he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out and say “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!’ In case you don’t know who that is, that was a blind man named Bartimaeus, as he was sitting by the edge of the road. If that doesn’t sound like a cry for help, then I don’t know what does. This woman that we are reading about is part of a long line of people who recognize that God is the source of their help and consolation. To cry out to God for help is the norm in Scripture-not the exception.

So let me ask you, are you too proud to cry out to God for help? How is this for a thought. French philosopher Blaise Pascal says “Our principal malady is our pride which cuts us off from God.” Ouch. This brings me to my next thought. When life just goes horrible, where do you go, to whom or to what do you go to? There are times where we run to all kinds of things other than God. We look at advice columns, we go to our phones, we run to distractions. What happens when we do that? We cut ourselves off from God. We look to God as our last resort, when he should be our first resort. When we don’t know what to do, we need to cry out to God for help.

b. So we know when we don’t know what to do, we should ask for help, but the next thing we need to do is to listen. Now, you might be sitting there thinking, Pastor, how do you get listen out of these verses? Let’s look at verses 2-4 again. Elisha asks what she has in her house. She responds with she doesn’t have anything in the house except a jar of oil. Now, most interpretations, don’t have this, but this was a small jar of oil, possibly intended for anointing, or it was about one serving of oil. Either way, there wasn’t very much there. So what does Elisha tell her to do? He tells her to go to her neighbors and get empty vessels. I love this, he says do not gather just a few. I can just picture her with a bunch of these jars and wondering what will happen. He tells her to empty what little bit she had left into these jars. He is asking her to take the only thing she has left and give it back to God.

Now, she has a choice, does she do it or does she not? See we too have a choice. Will we listen to divine instruction, or will we look at the things going on around us that would distract us from this instruction. There are so many voices in this world that want to distract us from what God is telling us to do. But will we listen to God? When the circumstances are desperate and dire, where will we turn? Who will we listen to?

Now, I want you to understand something. God is still speaking to us even today. He speaks to us through the Bible, through his Holy Spirit. He speaks to us through other people, through the church, through those we work with. He even speaks to us in times that we think are strange. The question isn’t if he still speaks, but the question is, will we listen?

There is also a difference between hearing and listening. This can lead us to understanding. When we hear, we usually hear so we can give an answer. Our mind has already been made up. But when we listen, we listen to understand. We take that time to really let it roll around our minds. We see how we can apply it.

There’s a connection there. It takes us from listening to obeying. This can also be found in Deuteronomy 6:4 “Hear, O Isreal: The Lord our God, the Lord is one!” Not only does this say to hear, but it can be translated as obey. the Hebrew word is shema, which means listen and obey! This is just like when we talk to our kids and say “You’re not listening to me.” what we really are meaning is that they are not obeying what we say.

So what does all this have to do with 2 Kings 4? We see this woman has a decision that she has to make. This is a decision that we all have to make as well. Will she hear and ignore it or will she listen and obey? She must decide if she will obey what the servant of God has instructed her to do.

I have told you all before that sometimes I have a listening problem. Dove can vouch for that. But sometimes I have a hard time listening to God. I can tell God about my plans, but sometimes I have a hard time listening to God about following his plans. It is a struggle.

So are you listening to the voice of God in your life? Are you trusting in his instructions? What do you do when you don’t know what to do? You ask, then you listen. But then there is one more thing. We must trust.

Going back to this, we see Elisha giving her instructions. She listens to them. She did exactly as he said. So not only did she listen, but she trusted that everything would be taken care of. Even though the thought of losing everything was about to happen she trusted. She trusted that God was going to be the best way forward for her life and her family’s life.

When we look at this example, we see that Elisha told her to pour out all that she has. He was wanting her to pour out everything that she has and wanted her to see what happens. You want to talk about faith and trust. We have no idea if this would cause the oil to be tainted, we don’t know if these other jars are clean, there is just simply no telling what would happen. She didn’t know what would happen, but she needed to decide that she would trust God, regardless of the outcome.

We know that it is easy to trust God when everything is going ok. But what about when the storms of life are happening around us? Will we be able to trust God when life is falling apart?

The widow’s decision is ours to make as well. Will we decide that when all we have is little pot of oil and Jesus that Jesus will be all we need? Will we keep on believing, trusting?

When you don’t know what to do will you trust? will you listen? will you ask?

What is great about this passage is that it is more than just Elisha and the widow. They are both small parts of a bigger plan. What this passage shows us is about God. God does extraordinary things through ordinary people.

But we have to be willing to trust him with what we have. He does extraordinary things in people who have little or nothing, just like this widow has, and who decide anyway that they are going to trust Him, they are going to ask him, they are going to listen to his voice.

See when Elisha told her to go get some vessels from her neighbors, he is using a different word than what she used. She used a word for something small, he used a word for something like a storage container. Elisha knew that God was going to do something big. Elisha gets out of the way so the thing that God does will not be mistaken for a prophetic sleight of hand. He wants her to see with her own eyes that god is great and stronger and able to do more than we ask or imagine.

this is not the only person in the Bible who was willing to give an ordinary life to an extraordinary God. Think about Moses, God used his staff and turned it into a snake, the same staff that turned the Nile into blood, and open the Red Sea.

What about David. All he had was a slingshot. Yet, he was able to kill Goliath. Think about the boy that had five loaves and two fish. They were able to feed more than 5,000. See, God does extraordinary things with ordinary people who are willing and ready to give themselves back to him.

You know what that means for us? We don’t have to have the best of everything. We don’t have to have the latest gadget or gizmo. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but if you think you need them for God to work in your life, then you are missing the point. You are missing out on what God has for you.

God uses ordinary people to do extraordinary things.

Maybe you are sitting there today and you are barely hanging on. You are at the end. What are you holding on to in your hand? Perhaps you are holding on to that last little bit of oil. It’s time to ask God for help. Not only ask, but listen. Not only listen, but trust that God will provide.

I would ask that during this time of invitation, if you need to pray, you can come up to the altar or if you need, you can do so at your seat.

If you are sitting there and think that you have never asked God to be the ruler of your life and today you feel called to take him as your savior, I encourage you to come up and talk with me during this time of invitation.

If you would like to join this body of believers, then please come and talk with me as well.