Picking up Sticks

 

Have you checked your bank balance lately? Are your cupboards bare and lines of credit maxed out? Then you need to hear this story of a widow women and her son. A desperate mother living through a financial famine gathers a few sticks to build a fire to cook their last meal and then die.

 

So she said, “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.”
I Kings 17:12

 

Now, along comes Elijah, the prophet, and has the audacity to ask this frail widow to feed him first. Prophesying that if she did this there would be enough food for all three of them to survive throughout the remainder of the famine.

 

And Elijah said to her, “Do not fear; go and do as you have said, but make me a small cake from it first, and bring it to me; and afterward make some for yourself and your son. For thus says the Lord God of Israel: ‘The bin of flour shall not be used up, nor shall the jar of oil run dry, until the day of the Lord sends rain on the earth.’”
I Kings 17:13

 

At sometime or another we all have had someone tell us ‘GOD SAID’. Dropping names is one thing but to use the name of God to get what you want is extreme. In all fairness, we know that a true word from God can change one’s life in the blink of an eye. What do you suppose drove this widow women to share her last meal with Elijah?