The God Who Provides (1 Kings 17:7-24)

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Yeah, I’ve been forced by some kids to say, welcome to the Thanksgiving Reeves service. Happy Thanksgiving. Cityview family turn with me to 1 Kings 17, 7-24 and as you go there, let me tell you a story. My family got to America at the end of 2019 and my dad went job hunting for months, day in and day out, sending in applications, trying to find a place that would hire an immigrant that just moved into the country. And this was definitely one of the hardest seasons of my family’s life, and it can’t be the hardest and scariest seasons for the life of an immigrant after many months, finally, a pharmaceutical company responded to his application, and my dad started rejoicing. He was so grateful that the Lord provided him a job, and it was a pretty good job. And see, my dad is a very prayerful man, very compassionate and very trusting of the Lord. After all, it took us 14 years to get our visas approved, and if God provided for us, then surely God will provide for us now. So he takes this check, he gleefully, goes to the bank, and he gives it to the teller. And as he gives this check to the teller, the teller looks at the check, looks at him, looks back of the check and says, We can’t cast just that check. This is a fake check. My dad was shocked and startled, and he says, Are you sure this cannot be true? Except it was true. My dad’s first response after months of trying to find a job was a deviously orchestrated scam. I remember him coming home feeling so defeated and telling me about how he felt so disheartened that he, for the first time, felt a sense of hopelessness. Can I trust God? Is he really going to provide? I know moments like this are in foreign to us. Surely at some point in your life, maybe it was a job opportunity, or maybe it was just struggles and providing in any sort of form, whatever it may be, you have asked the same question, Lord, can I really trust you? Will you really provide? And maybe if we can answer that, we might actually be able to thank God for the various situations in our life. So let us look to the Word of God to answer that for us. As Ceely just read, this is the case of Elijah and the widow Zarephath in First Kings, 17 seven to 24 and before I break down to see how God’s provision in all of this, let me set the stage for you. The relationship between Ahab, the king of Israel at the time, and his wife, Jezebel, was one that led people away from worshiping the one true God, Yahweh to worshiping Baal, the Water God of Sidon. See, water meant harvest. Harvest meant daily provisions, money, keep them going. So it just made sense to worship somebody who would give us what we need. This isn’t just true to them. Of course, it’s true about us. It doesn’t really take much for us to stop coming to church and communing with this family when what we think is most essential in our lives takes priority over God. We make Gods out of the things we think about the most. Keeping this idea in mind, let me suggest to you three ways in which we ought to be thankful in light of the story, beginning with thank God for taking away in verses seven to 12, we see that the Lord God of Israel takes away the rain from the land, not just in Israel, but also in Sidon, where he ends up sending Elijah. He tells Elijah to go to this Phoenician land, where a widow will supply him with food. But as he goes there and finds this widow and makes this request, she says, I don’t have any bread, only a handful of flour and a jog and a little oil left before we even see God providing for Elijah and this widow, we have to ask, why did he cut the water supply in the first place? It seems so counter intuitive, because we have this version of God where He provides. So why would he remove? Given the context we know that this was so that the chosen people of God and the Gentiles of the world would know that God alone, Yahweh alone, is the living God. Since Baal is who the people of Israel and Sidon believed was providing water for them, it only makes sense for God to remove their water. Hosea two, five to eight helps us picture Israel failing to acknowledge who God is and how they lusted after. Baal, it goes like this. She Israel said, I will go after my lovers who give me my food and my water, my wool and my linen, my olive oil and my drink. Therefore I God will block her. Path with thorn bushes. I will wall her in so she cannot find her way. She will chase after her lovers but not catch them. She will look for them but not find them. Then she will say, I will go back to my husband as at first, for then I was better off than now. She is not acknowledged that I was the one who gave her the grain, the new wine and oil, who lavished on her the silver and gold, which they used for Baal. To you, this text may be just graphic, but to God, this text is a heartbreak. This text is not just to dig at the Israelites who failed to honor God. It is a call to you who’ve been given in abundance and still live a separate life from him. We’re so blessed. And I say that as someone who’s lived in three different countries, it is not close how much more we have in comparison to the world, and maybe we do need a lot of these things taken away from us so we can come before God and pray, Give us this day our daily bread, and actually mean it, and know that he’s been faithful in providing for us. Our abundance has clouded our faith. So the only time we acknowledge God is when something impacts our comfort. And if you are in a place where you have attributed all these blessings to yourself and you’re gripping so tightly to the things of the world, hear this message. Let go before it is taken from you, if not in this life, then definitely in the life to come, we need to thank God for taking away from us. All that stops us from taking ourselves to him. Thank God for taking away. Secondly, thank God for giving in verses 13 to 16, we see God’s response to the widow’s lack of resources. Elijah said to her, don’t be afraid. Go home and do as you have said, But first make me a small loaf of bread for me for what you have, and bring it to me. And then make something for yourself and your son, for this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says. The jar of flour will not be used up and the jug will not run dry, until the day the Lord sends rain on the land. She went away and did it, as Elijah had told her. So there was food every day for Elijah and for the women and for her family, for the jar of flour was not used up and the jug of oil did not run dry, in keeping with the word of the Lord, spoken by Elijah, this whole sequence is nothing short of a miracle. In fact, it is an absolutely profound miracle asking anything of a widow, especially now, but definitely back then, especially to provide just sounds like a contradiction. Being a widow implied poverty and abject need. See a widow in Iron Age Israel didn’t attend night school or gain computer skills and work at the local medical clinic, nor did she babysit children of women in the workforce. Widowhood was a dead end street. So then, why does God send Elijah to a widow in the first place. Well, we know it isn’t because he anticipated her to provide for him. God did not send Elijah to this widow because God needed something from the widow. Nor did God send Elijah to this widow because she needed something from Elijah. They both needed God, and God used both of them as instruments of His grace. For Elijah, God used the widow’s deficiency of resources to bring forth abundance. For the widow, God used the sufficiency of His Word through Elijah to bring forth sustenance. And we get a glimpse of this in the life of Jesus. And we’ve heard this story before in Matthew 14:17-21 we have here only five loaves of bread and two fish. They answered, bring them here to me, he said. And he directed the people to sit down on the grass, taking the five loaves and two fish and looking up to heaven. He gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the people, they all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up 12 basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over. The number of those who ate was about 5000 men, besides women and children, every morning for this widow, was a fresh episode of the faithfulness of Yahweh to his promise, the word of Yahweh that can bring forth a famine, can at the same time sustain anyone he wills imagine thinking you’re about to die with no food, and now you get pancakes every morning. That sounds pretty bad. I’m a waffle guy myself. Nonetheless, God’s provision is absolutely unfathomable, and maybe we don’t feel this, because this feels like a story way back when God used to work in miraculous ways. But let me remind you that every single thing you have is by the grace of God, and that is a miracle you. It’s a miracle that you have a home, a family, a church, community, friends to trust. Thank God. Thank God for giving us sufficiently everything we need, day in and day out and more. Lord, I pray that you help us see that we need to receive these mercies as yours. Thank you, God for giving. And finally, the third point in this is a tough one, thank God for suffering. Something we aren’t promised in this life is comfort. If there’s something that the Bible actually assures us of is that suffering will come upon us, whether that’s because we live in a world of sin, or whether it’s because we follow Jesus, suffering is just inevitable, and we see in verse 12, the widows was experiencing a kind of suffering. She didn’t have enough food, so she and her son were about to eat their final meal and die. It’s almost certain none of us in this room probably experienced that kind of lack of resources, even in joblessness and even in circumstances where we feel like we don’t have enough. We have way more than we think. But this widow, she did experience such a deep, deep suffering she thought she was going to die because of the lack of food, but then she experiences the favor of the Lord and is provided for morning after morning. And in verse 17, we get an abrupt, dramatic twist one way, her son died and food wasn’t the problem anymore. See, food, clothing, shelter, career, are all problems that arise when we have people to live with. There’s something about people that adds meaning into our lives. When this widow lost her child, she realized one thing she lost, the only thing in her life that gave her life meaning. So in deep agony, she runs to Elijah and says, What do you have against me? O man of God, did you come to remind me of my sin and kill my son? It almost sounds as though she’s complaining, but considering that she lived plenty more days, potentially years, with God’s provision, with God providing for her. Question is earnest. She lived in the abundance of God’s provision, but didn’t acknowledge her sin until the source of meaning in her life was taken away. When your child is when your trial is as great as this widows, what will your response be? She went to the only person that could bring her any comfort, she went to the man of God, Elijah. And what does Elijah do? He laments. Elijah takes her son, lays him down in the upper room, and cries out to the Lord, look at verses 20 and 21 Lord, my God, have you brought tragedy even on this widow I’m staying with by causing her son to die. Then he stretched himself out on the boy three times and cried out to the Lord, Lord my God, let this boy’s life return to Him. Lord my God, have you brought tragedy? Lord my God, let this boy’s life return. These are words of lament. That is the language of suffering. It doesn’t make sense to experience such a devastating loss, such a meaningless moment in Elijah ticket to the Lord and cried out to recognize the beauty of Elijah’s tears, we need to ask who didn’t earnestly cry out to God, the chosen people of God, the Israelites. Isaiah, 65:1 helps to see this, I revealed myself to those who did not ask for me. I was found by those who did not seek Me to a nation that did not call my name. I said, here? Am I? Here? Am I? This is God saying I was ready to help you, but you never asked. I was ready to be found, but you were never looking. I called out to you, though you did not call my name. God is doing something so redemptive when this widow approaches Elijah, and Elijah intercedes on her behalf, what the chosen people of God failed to do this widow did. She acknowledged her sin. She acknowledged that sin brought upon death and approached Elijah, and Elijah, without dismissing or lost, brought forth an intercession on behalf of the widow to God and CD view, our God is not silent. God is not silent now and he wasn’t silent back then. God hears. God hears Elijah’s prayers and answers him by restoring the life of the widow’s son. And then we see another miracle, the widow’s response. Now, I know that you are a man of God, and that the word from the Lord, from your mouth is the truth. I. The suffering she experienced was a revelation in light of the resurrection of her son, what she knew about God till the loss of her son was that God can provide, but even Baal can do that if water is all she needed, at least that’s what she thought when she lost her son, is when she realized there’s something far more threatening than not having food or water. That’s when she realized she is experiencing true loss. Matthew 1028 says, Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the one who destroys both the body and soul in hell. See, this is what she realized. Yahweh is not just in control of what she needs to survive. He doesn’t just give food, water, money, sex. Yahweh is in control of life. He gives life. It is in her suffering she realizes who God is, but we can’t leave this message with the wrong idea about suffering. Look, it’s easy to thank God when the miracle comes, but what about when it doesn’t come? In fact, in this story, if you looked to First Kings 19, you see that during this famine, there were more than 7000 Israelites that did not bow down to Baal, but suffered the famine, and some even died. Thinking about the trials we face. What about when your child passes away? Well, unexpectedly, a close friend has a terminal illness. When you get news that just doesn’t make sense. How can we thank God? Then? Why should I trust him? As Christians, we don’t know why suffering exists, but we know what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean that God doesn’t love us. Hebrews 12 two shows a God who embodied love by enduring the suffering for the joy set before me, endured the cross, scorning its shame. Second, Corinthians 521, God made Him. God made Jesus, who had no sin, become sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Jesus took on our sinful flesh and put it to death, the death we deserve for our sin. He died on our behalf, and he gave us life in Him, we might experience loss, we might even go through some incomprehensible pain, but we will never know what it means to truly suffer the eternal death that Christ did, because in the midst of suffering, God sent His Son to experience the greatest injustice, the greatest suffering, Christ, Jesus, suffered the eternal wrath of the Father for our sins so that we may have eternal Life with him, In Him forever. Thank God for suffering, because in that we see how involved he is in our lives, in our suffering. If you’re here today and don’t know Jesus as your Lord and Savior, then invite Him into your life and know that what this world offers is nothing, nothing, in comparison to the life we can have in Jesus, He gives us all the reasons to be thankful. See, this is why we can trust God, because in Christ, God did take away all our sin. He did give us the righteousness of Christ, Jesus, as Christ, Jesus suffered on our behalf that we may experience life and life to its fullest. I want to close with the words of Paul to the Thessalonians who are suffering greatly for Christ and to this greatly persecuted church. Paul says, in First Thessalonians, 516, to 18, rejoice, always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for your life. This is what Christ did when he came to the earth. This is what we’re called to do as followers of Christ. And this here in verse 18, is the big idea. Give thanks in all circumstances for this is God’s will in your life. Give thanks in all circumstances for this is God’s will in your life. Pray with me.