Transcript
Paul (0:00)
Foreign.
Shelby (0:05)
Hey, this is Shelby and Paul, and you are listening to the A Year in the Bible with Daily Grace podcast. We're going through First Kings today. We're in chapters 16 through 18. Paul, can you help us break down these chapters? We. We start following Elijah here, and so we get a lot out of his story in these couple of chapters. Can you break it down for us?
Paul (0:27)
Yeah. I love these chapters so, so much. I love the character of Elijah, and he's a critical figure in the biblical story, not just here in first and second Kings, but will also be later as well as. We'll see. So he kind of seemingly comes out of nowhere and immediately just starts speaking the word of the Lord to the king Ahab here, declaring that there will be no rain in the land. And following God's command, he flees Ahab and sits in the wilderness and receives bread and meat from birds and. But then God tells him to go and find this widow in the wilderness. And I'll come back to that story in a moment before returning to Ahab and having a showdown with the pagan priests. That's a really, really. Almost like out of a movie, this crazy moment. So we have this widow, though, that I kind of want to talk about. And God says, hey, this widow is going to provide for you. But when Elijah comes and says, hey, can. Can you feed me? She says, well, actually, I'm starving, and all I have is a handful of flour and a little bit of oil, so I can't do it. But Elijah's like, okay, no, just go and make the food. Just go do it. And when she goes, she finds that the flour doesn't run out and the oil doesn't run out, and she feeds him for quite a while, actually. And there have been so many days when I felt just like the widow, someone or something, some responsibility, asks me, make me bread. Do what you need to do. And I'm just like, I just have a little bit of flour and some oil, Right? But I think what this story shows us is that God takes the little that we bring and turns it into abundance. He takes just the little efforts, the little decisions that we make to be faithful, and he makes so much more out of them than we could ever imagine. And, you know, it even makes me kind of ask, like, why does God include me? I'm so unworthy. But that points me to his love, that he wants me to be part of his story, and he has a purpose for me and for every single one of us. Right? It's nothing special about an individual God Chooses us and uses us and equips us to do his work.
Shelby (2:37)
Yeah, I think we've all felt like the widow. We just have a little bit, but we feel like there's a lot being asked of us. It's so easy to calculate the possibility of something with our own strength, with our own wisdom, with the means that we see before us. But here we see the widow trusting in faith that God will provide, even when logically it didn't make any sense. And what does God do? He provides as he always does.
