Presenting Our Vessels

Have you ever experienced a time in your life in which you were going through trials and hard times? Probably everybody has. Perhaps during this time you felt distant from God and spiritually dry. Dwight L. Moody used to say, “The only way to keep a broken vessel full is to keep it always under the tap,”(1) and that’s what I am going to talk about this evening – keeping our vessels, or our spiritual lives, full and overflowing by presenting our vessels unto the Lord for His use and service in His kingdom; therefore, I have entitled our message “Presenting Our Vessels.” We will gain an understanding of this spiritual concept by studying the Old Testament account of Elisha and the Widow.

Sometimes We Encounter Difficult Situations (v. 1)

1 A certain woman of the wives of the sons of the prophets cried out to Elisha, saying, “Your servant my husband is dead, and you know that your servant feared the Lord. And the creditor is coming to take my two sons to be his slaves.”

Here we find a woman, or widow, who had been married to the son of a prophet. Who the son’s father was, or who the prophet was, we don’t know; but what we can likely conclude is that this woman served the Lord.

So, we see here a God-fearing woman who had somehow gotten into debt, and now the creditor, or the bill collector, was coming to take away her sons to pay off her debt. We don’t know how this woman got into debt, and we can’t sit here and judge her and say that those who serve the Lord shouldn’t get into debt. Today, we can try our very best to stay away from credit cards and not purchase what we can’t afford; however, life sometimes has a way of creeping up on us, with cars breaking down and unplanned hospital stays, or what have you. Perhaps this woman could not help what happened to her. Maybe she was responsible for her husband’s debt after he passed away.

What I wish to point out here is that even if we serve the Lord with all of our heart and we know Jesus as Savior and Lord, all of us encounter difficult situations in life at some time or another. Not one person in this world is immune from trials and difficulties. In Matthew 5:45 we read that the sun rises on the evil and on the good, and that the rain falls on the just and the unjust. The question we must consider is this: “How will we respond to our trials?” We see here in verse 1 that this widow turned to one of the prophets (Elisha); which shows us that she was looking unto God for help.

Give unto the Lord Whatever You Can Give (vv. 2-3)

2 So Elisha said to her, “What shall I do for you? Tell me, what do you have in the house?” And she said, “Your maidservant has nothing in the house but a jar of oil.” 3 Then he said, “Go, borrow vessels from everywhere, from all your neighbors—empty vessels; do not gather just a few.”

The woman turned to Elisha, meaning that she was seeking help from the Lord. And what was the reply? Elisha basically asked, “What do you have to give?” or “What do you have in the house?” When we are going through a difficult time, probably the last thing we want to hear is that we need to give. We often feel that we have nothing left to expend – no energy, no passion, and no enthusiasm. How in the world can we give when we feel as though we are being drained and that the very life is being sucked out of us? But that’s what the Lord will often ask us to do – to give.

We can see here that this woman responded like many of us. We look around us, and all we see are the basic necessities of survival – the last amount of groceries, the last amount of money, or perhaps the last amount of our health or energy – and we respond, “I have nothing left but this one little thing.” And this widow was probably thinking, “I need this oil to survive.”

Oil was used in making bread. If we look back in 1 Kings 17 we see that the prophet Elijah asked a widow to prepare for him some bread and she replied, “As the Lord your God lives, I do not have bread, only a handful of flour in a bin, and a little oil in a jar; and see, I am gathering a couple of sticks that I may go in and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it, and die” (1 Kings 17:12).