Emptiness And The Fullness Of God

2 Kings 4:1-7

January 22, 2023

Emptiness and the Fullness of God

Is the pandemic over? Are you looking out of the window of life, and you feel stuck because you see the world going on around you but your motivation to move is gone. Somehow your belly is full and yet you are empty? Yes, they still say You Sing so Well or You Speak so Well or How Wonderful a Job You Do, but you are empty because the last few years have inwardly drained you with circumstances beyond your control.

I was watching the news and heard a tearful announcement from the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern. After 6 years of exemplary service, she resigned. She said, “her tank was empty.” She was the worlds youngest female head of state. Through her leadership in response to COVID19, New Zealand recovered faster than almost every other country in the world. After two mosques were attacked by a gunman killing 51 people she banned military style semiautomatic weapons just six days after the attack. In the same year she bought back over 60,000 AK & AR15 from her citizens and there was no uprising. She enacted laws that lifted almost 100,000 children out of poverty and led 48 countries in the Christchurch Call to Action Summit with the goal of eliminating violent extremist content online. All these accomplishments and yet she says her tank was empty.

• What do you do when you are facing problems with your children that you cannot solve?

• What do you do when your marriage is falling apart and the crashing waves of hopelessness are unrelenting?

• What do you do when there are problems at work and it seems that there is no one in authority to address your concerns?

• What do you do when you have all this month left and you are already at the end of your money?

• What do you do when you have placed a loved one’s body in the earth and you cannot escape the loneliness, the grief and the pain?

• What do you do when your heart is broken, your dreams are shattered, and your hopes have been dashed by the cruel rocks of reality?

• What do you do when you are walking through a spiritual valley and there seems to be no river of hope for your weary soul?

Jesus has the answers to all these questions in His word. We can find hope in this the history of a poor, widowed, preacher’s wife, who was empty. In her pain and her poverty, she did the only thing that she could do… She turned to God. This passage teaches us the glorious truth that God has a plan and a promise for our problem. Biblical history shows us that just as God took care of this widow, He will take care of you. It lets us know how an empty vessel can be used by the fullness of God.

I. V. 1 The PROBLEM - “Now there cried a certain woman.” The word “cried” means “to moan; to weep out of grief.” This woman comes to the man of God at the lowest moment of her life. It’s not easy to come to the prophet at the beginning of your problem! That’s why people wait until they are at their wits end! She was married to one of the “sons of the prophets” (Elisha’s associate ministers in training). Her husband, her lover, her friend, her provider, her protector, had been taken away from here in death. And since her husband is dead she cannot pay her bills. As a result, her creditors are coming to take her sons away as slaves so they can work off the debt. This was allowed under the Old Testament Jewish Law, Leviticus 25:39. She has been deprived of her husband, now she is about to lose her sons as well. She needs help, but she does not turn to her family or her friends. She does not try to find someone to loan her more money. In her desperation she turns to the man of God for help. Elisha was God’s representative, and in spite of her pain, her problems and her lack of possibilities, she still looked up to God for the help she needed! Even though she didn’t understand everything she was facing, she still believed that God could do something about her situation, so she cried out! ILLS: Home Closing in 2000

II. v. 2-4 The PROPHET - The Lord established the widow’s faith through two questions asked by Elisha in the text. 1.) What do you need? 2.) What do you have?

By those two questions, this woman was made to see the size of her need and the smallness of her own resources. She needed everything and she had little. Often God will use the trials, heartaches and burdens of life to bring us to the place where we can honestly see our need and our own inability to meet it. Think about it, as long as we think we can handle things, why should we look to the Lord? If we have all the answers, why should we turn to Him with our questions? He isn’t trying to weaken our faith; He is trying to erase our faith in ourselves. As long as we think we can, He won’t!