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VOW
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Lesson Four: A Widow's Miracle
Desperation Cries Out “Now a certain woman of the wives of the sons of the prophets cried out to Elisha, “Your servant my husband is dead, and you know that your servant feared the Lord; and the creditor has come to take my two children to be his slaves.” II Kings 4:1We may have forgotten her name but we will never forget her portrait. In a single verse, II Kings paints a picture of complete desperation with human features. Her husband is dead and she grieves. In the sleepless teary nights following the funeral, she tells herself, ‘Nothing could be worse than this.’ The next day she opens her mail and learns for the first time of the astronomical debt which now falls to her. ‘It couldn’t be worse; the death of my husband and now the death of my financial security.’ She’s right, it couldn’t be worse, until the next day when then the cruel heartless creditor pounds on the door and issues the ultimatum: “Either pay up now, or I’ll take your two sons as payment.” Can anyone imagine a worse predicament? Hardly so. She is truly a picture of desperation. Gaze again at the portrait and she becomes for us a picture of what to do when we fall into despair. Like this great woman of faith, don’t linger long in despair. Notice how she takes the initiative to do something about her problem. She has hardly been introduced to us when she seeks the help of the Almighty through His representative, the prophet Elisha. The first great life lesson the Widow teaches is this: Don’t linger long in desperation for it is the most dangerous state you could ever live in. Seek God’s help. Cry out to Him. This is what life looks like when you see only through eyes of despair:
You know that old saying about bad things coming in threes? You can fall into despair when three comes and is followed by four, five and six. Despair comes when there seems to be no end to our sorrow. So, in one sense, despair is a response to the heavy and painful waves of sorrow that overwhelm us. But in another sense, despair is something we fall into when we have been trying for far too long to handle our problems by ourselves. You may have the fortitude to weather one, two and three all by yourself. Good for you! But when four, five and six come, you are going to need help. People in despair are invariably people who haven’t turned everything over to God. He’s there to help. He can turn our sorrows into joys. We just have to be willing to cry out to Him. Ask the members of your circle to think of the people in the Gospel record caught in despair who cried out to Jesus. List as many as the group can name. One such soul is found in Luke, chapter 18. Verses 35 through 43 tell the story of a blind beggar by the roadside who “cries out” (verse 38), and then “cries out all the more” (verse 39) as Jesus is passing by. Luke uses two different words to describe the blind beggar’s voice. First, it is simply a shout or a loud voice. But the cry of verse 39 would best be viewed as the scream of a person who teeters on the razor’s edge of life and death. Like the widow of II Kings 4, it is a cry of complete and utter desperation. The widow of II Kings has lost nearly everything dear to her. The blind beggar of Luke 18 lives in a world of darkness, loneliness and hunger. But notice what happens when Jesus hears a cry of desperation. Luke says that Jesus stops. (verse 40) That’s glorious good news! “Jesus stopped.” The cry of desperation stops Jesus in His tracks. It gets is undivided attention. It captures His loving heart, because Jesus cares about desperate people. God cared about the widow’s plight. Jesus cared about the blind man. And He cares about you. Are you sinking into desperation? Cry out, and your Rescuer will come! An Invitation to a Miracle “And 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 except a jar of oil.” Then he said, “Go, borrow vessels at large for yourself from all your neighbors, even empty vessels; do not get a few. And you shall go in and shut the door behind you and your sons, and pour out into all these vessels; and you shall set aside what is full.” II Kings 4:2-3Upon first reading, some may want to take issue with Elisha’s seemingly less than pastoral ways. “What do you have in the house?” he asks. She has almost lost everything dear to her in life, she stands on the brink of losing it all, and he wants to know what she has in the house! She comes to Elisha with the problem of her enormous debt and the potential consequences and what does Elisha command? “Borrow!” Isn’t that precisely how the problem was created? But before you come down too hard on Elisha, remember that he is simply God’s representative. God speaks through the prophet and God is not asking the woman for an inventory list or for advance payment of services soon to be rendered. He’s inviting her into a miracle! Today, too many church folks want to dismiss the miracles of the Bible. They don’t like miracles because, as they say, “they’re illogical and unnatural,” and not the kind of thing that intelligent believers believe. I don’t get too upset with them for thinking such things. I just pray that one day God will change their minds with a stunning miracle, and I’ll bite my lip to keep from saying, “I told you so!” Philip Yancey, in his book, The Jesus I Never Knew, says: “Some see miracles as an implausible suspension of the laws of the physical universe. As signs, though, they serve just the opposite function. Death, decay, entropy, and destruction are the true suspensions of God’s laws; miracles are the early glimpses of restoration.”Yancey goes on to quote noted theologian Jurgen Moltmann: “Jesus’ healings are not supernatural miracles in a natural world. They are the only truly ‘natural’ things in a world that is unnatural, demonized and wounded.” Do you believe in miracles? Your Savior certainly did. He performed the 42 miracles recorded in the Gospels. How many more went unrecorded? Survey the miracles of Jesus and you will begin to understand that He never displayed such power to dazzle us, but to reveal something profound about the heart of God. Look too, at the recipients. Most of them are the kind of folks the world doesn’t give one wit about. He healed the blind, the lame, the lepers, the deaf. With healing hands He touched the outcasts, the unclean, and the unloved. And to think, that some who would claim Christ as their Lord would dismiss His miracle working power; that which is so central to His being and to ours. One of the greatest minds of the Church, Saint Augustine, believed in miracles. He taught us that miracles happen all the time, and that miracles are perfectly natural. Augustine believed that what we call a “miracle” is simply when God chooses to do very quickly what He ordinarily does gradually. For example, Augustine draws our attention to the first miracle of Jesus at the wedding feast of Cana. Water was turned into wine. Augustine celebrated the miracle, but what he wanted us to understand is that the same miracle is taking place all the time! Who makes the rain fall? Who causes the sun to shine? Who places life into the heart of the seed? Who makes the seed sprout and grow and produce abundant fruit? Who holds the secret to the finest wine making? The answer to each question is a resounding “Only God can!” Water is always being turned into wine. The fact that it sometimes takes years makes it no less miraculous. Another great saint of the Church, my oldest son, Stevie, has taught me another great life lesson about miracles: Usually, in miracle making, we want God to do all the work. But in most of God’s amazing miracles, He calls us to join Him in the process. Fourteen years ago, I prayed for a miracle. After a very difficult labor, Elizabeth gave birth to our first born. Words could not express my joy. I watched the pediatrician examine my son. He held out his fingers so that Stevie could instinctually grasp hold and pull himself up. Over and over again the doctor tried. Stevie tried too, but couldn’t. His arms seemed weak and flaccid After watching the examination for what seemed like hours, I sensed that something was not right. I asked, “Doctor, what’s wrong?” With great compassion he said, “I think your son has Downs Syndrome,” and suddenly celebration turned into desperation. Elizabeth was strong. I fell apart. I turned to God in prayer and tearfully asked for a miracle. Sinking deeper and deeper into the cold darkness of despair, I prayed with clinched fists the same prayer over and over: “Lord, let the diagnosis be wrong. Please, Lord, do something about this. Spare my son from this kind of life. Change him, Lord, you have the power to do it. Please, God, give us a miracle.”God heard that prayer and answered it with a miracle, but not with the kind of miracle I was begging for. The life that needed miraculous change was not Stevie’s, but mine. That still small voice spoke these assuring words to me, “Work with Me. You will see miracle after miracle through this boy’s life, but you will have to work with Me.” And that, we have! The miracles I’ve seen in the past fourteen years are too great to number. Here are just a few: Five Presbyterian churches in Africa were built in Stevie’s honor by the good people of First Presbyterian Church of Nashville. It was miracle that involved a great deal of human participation. One day, while sitting in the bleachers cheering for his little brother, Stevie said, “I want to play baseball too.” Not long after that another miracle came. The Challenger Baseball league for physically and mentally challenged children was inaugurated in Vicksburg, Mississippi, followed by the Buddy Ball basketball league and Camp Silvercloud, a summer day camp, all of which involve hundreds of special needs children and many faithful volunteers in our community. Miracles have happened. Lot’s of lives of countless special children have been richly blessed. God worked the miracles but He called us into the process. God said, “I’ll do My part. You give me your best, and together we will see a miracle.” Three years ago, another miracle was born. Jacob’s Ladder Learning Center, a Christian special education school, was created for mentally challenged adolescents. God did it, and He gave us the privilege of joining Him in the miracle. And the miracles keep coming! On Mother’s Day last May, I presented our congregation’s first “special” confirmation class, including Stevie. There they were, standing before the congregation to profess their faith in Jesus Christ - it was nothing less than a miracle! There may be times in the future when I’ll need to pray for the conventional kind of miracle, one of those sudden, dramatic, inexplicable reversals. Mostly though, I’ll be praying for the kind of miracles that involve me and God working together, side by side, hand in hand, just like the widow of II Kings 4. “So she went from him and shut the door behind her and her sons; they were bringing the vessels to her and she poured.” II Kings 4:5She needed a miracle and she had the faith to do her part. What was her part? “...and she poured.” There behind closed doors, she and her sons experienced a miracle of Divine/human cooperation; the most beautiful kind of miracle, and certainly the most fulfilling! In my mind, these final words of verse five are the most significant words in the entire story. Why? Because so often, despair causes us to want to throw in the towel, to give up, to lay down and die. But God is Almighty. He doesn’t need much. Remember, He created the Universe out of nothing. When there seemed to be nothing left, God still had something to work with. Not much. Just a broken heart, but one still full of faith. Just a little jar of oil, and a willingness on the part of a truly great woman to say, “Okay, Lord. I’ll work with you. I’ll do my part.” God lifted her above despair. She poured, and poured, and kept on pouring. God filled, and filled some more, and kept on filling. And together she and God experienced one of the many glorious miracles of Divine/human cooperation. “And it came about when the vessels were full, that she said to her son, “Bring me another vessel.” And he said to her, “There is not one vessel more.” And the oil stopped. Then she came and told the man of God. And he said, “Go, sell the oil and pay your debt, and you and your sons can live on the rest.” II Kings 4:6-7Friends, you don’t have to linger in despair. Cry out. He hears and will come to your rescue. Prepare for God to do what only He can do. Get ready even for a miracle. And don’t look surprised if He invites you to join Him in the miracle making! Closing prayer: Almighty and powerful God, Lord of miracles, Giver of new life, we come before you with great humility of heart and mind. We know how small we are, and how great Thou art. We praise you for this opportunity to pray. You know our concerns and we lift them to your throne of grace. There are people near to us who find themselves in the darkness of despair. Hear our cry on their behalf. Bring healing to the sick, comfort to the grief-stricken, peace to those who are anxious, and your presence to those who feel absolutely alone. And Lord, we dare to pray even for miracles! If it is in your will, use us in the miracle making. We’re ready! We may be feeble and flawed, but Lord, we are willing. What a great privilege and joy it would be to serve you, and to serve Christ in our neighbor. Send us into a world of despair to shine the glorious light of the Savior! In His strong name we pray, Amen. |