Sharing The Good News Series

“Sharing The Good News”

Passing on the Faith, Part 5

If you have your bible, turn to 2 Kings chapter 6, (pew bible _________)

This is the last message in our series called,

Passing On The Faith.

So we’re going to be talking about sharing our faith.

Now, maybe you’re sitting here this morning,

maybe you’re a visitor,

or you’ve come a few times,

but, you’re not even sure you have any faith,

or have any relationship with God,

And you’re certainly not thinking about

how to share your faith with others.

If that describes you this morning, that’s fine,

we love that you decided to investigate and check things out,

and here’s how you can approach this topic.

If you decided it was true,

at some point in the future,

If you decided there was something to this faith,

how would you want to pass that along to others?

If you decided it was true,

Would you tell anyone,

and how would you tell them?

We’re going to look at

a story out of the Old Testament,

Sort of a gruesome story at the start…

I have to warn you, it gets kind of gross.

2 Kings 6:24

Some time later, Ben-Hadad king of Aram mobilized his entire army and marched up and laid siege to Samaria.

Israel is at war with the nation of Aram.

So the king of Aram invades,

and his army surrounds Samaria

which was the capital city of Israel at the time.

There was a great famine in the city; the siege lasted so long that a donkey's head sold for eighty shekels of silver, and a quarter of a cab of seed pods for five shekels.

So during this siege,

the people of Israel run out of food,

and become so desperate

that a donkey’s head was bringing 80 shekels.

That was about a years wages for a common laborer,

so that would be like us paying $20,000

for a donkeys head.

Think about,

When was the last time

you had donkey’s head for dinner?

They were pretty desperate.

But it gets worse.

Verse 26

As the king of Israel was passing by on the wall, a woman cried to him, "Help me, my lord the king!"

The king replied, "If the Lord does not help you, where can I get help for you? From the threshing floor? From the winepress?" Then he asked her, "What's the matter?"

She answered, "This woman said to me, 'Give up your son so we may eat him today, and tomorrow we'll eat my son.' So we cooked my son and ate him. The next day I said to her, 'Give up your son so we may eat him,' but she had hidden him."

When the king heard the woman's words, he tore his robes.

It’s impossible for us to even imagine

this kind of desperation,

About the lowest form of life on earth we can imagine,

is the person who stoops to cannibalism.

But this is even worse,

because the woman wasn’t just a cannibal,

she actually ate her own son.

Basically it had gotten to a point of,

cannibalism or death.

There is no hope,

people are starving to death

everywhere around the city.

The richest people in the city

are paying fortunes for a donkeys head,

and the poor have become cannibals.

Then in the next chapter,

it tells us about four characters,

who are even worse off than the poor.

Chapter 7, Verse 3

Now there were four men with leprosy at the entrance of the city gate. They said to each other, "Why stay here until we die? If we say, 'We'll go into the city'-the famine is there, and we will die. And if we stay here, we will die. So let's go over to the camp of the Arameans and surrender. If they spare us, we live; if they kill us, then we die." At dusk they got up and went to the camp of the Arameans. When they reached the edge of the camp, not a man was there, for the Lord had caused the Arameans to hear the sound of chariots and horses and a great army, so that they said to one another, "Look, the king of Israel has hired the Hittite and Egyptian kings to attack us!" So they got up and fled in the dusk and abandoned their tents and their horses and donkeys. They left the camp as it was and ran for their lives. The men who had leprosy reached the edge of the camp and entered one of the tents. They ate and drank, and carried away silver, gold and clothes, and went off and hid them. They returned and entered another tent and took some things from it and hid them also.