2 Kings 4:8-37

Last week we learned that God uses ordinary people to do extraordinary things. We also learned that we need to cry out to God for help, listen to what he has to say, and trust that he is going to take care of us. We also need to step aside to allow God to work. But what happens when our faith needs to be worked on? I can tell you, there are times where our faith needs to be refined. You know, we all have faith. We put our faith in different things throughout our lives. The question is, what or who are you putting your faith in? One thing we need to remember is that we can have faith in many things but God alone is faithful. He alone is capable of honoring and responding to our faith. We are going to read about a Shunammite woman who placed her faith in things other than God. There have been times in our own lives that we have our faith misplaced in things. We also need to remember that faith and trust are different, but they both work together. There was once a man named Charles Blondin. Now, you probably have not heard of him, but you might have heard about things he had done. Charles Blondin earned the reputation as the greatest “funambulist” of his time. While you might think that this term would imply fun, but it indicates activities involving great personal risk. Blondin, was born in France on February 28, 1824. He was billed as “the Great Blondin,” “The Daredevel Wire Walker,” and “The Prince of Manila”/ At this point, you might have an idea as to what he was do. He became interested in high wire acrobatics at a very early age. When he was five years old, a circus troupe performed near his home, and he became enthralled by the tightrope walker. It was the first time he had ever seen anyone attempting these stunts. He was so impressed that he felt compelled to try and accomplish the same kind of feats. He went home and erected a makeshift tightrope in his back yard, using two chairs as supporting structures and he tried to master the skill of rope walking. Fast forward to several years later and he decided to go bigger. He decided that he was going to use a tight rope to walk across Niagara Falls. Each time he would do this walk, he would add a little more to it. The crowd of spectators had plenty of faith in his abilities. They’d seen him successfully travers the falls multiple times, and when he reached the other side, he asked a simple question, “Who believes I can carry a person across in this wheelbarrow?” Of course the crowd would get really excited for it. Then he would ask, “Who wants to get in the wheelbarrow?” Sometimes we treat God the same way. We have faith. We believe God is in control, but when w’re asked to get in the wheelbarrow, we look the other way, pretending not to hear.

The same is true for the shummanite woman we are going to look at. She had faith, she just had misplaced her faith, and did not fully trust God. One day, God wanted to deal with her misplaced faith and we are going to see how he did it.

Verses 8-17

a. So, first we see that she was challenged. We see that there was a prominent woman who lived there that showed delighted in showing hospitality to Elisha. I love how my version says that she persuaded him to eat some food. She knew that Elisha was a man of God and wanted to get help from him. She even persuaded her husband to build him a room so Elisha could rest. Perhaps she was thinking that if she did something good then maybe God would give her the desires of her heart.

b. See this woman had longed for a child, but had failed. I would have to imagine at this point, she has decided that she needed to move on with her life, even though it probably pained her every day. Have you ever wanted something so badly, that you would try to do anything for it, until, you realize that it wasn’t going to happen? It would still hurt as you go about your days, you still desire it, but you have given up on it. That was this woman. We can see that she had become comfortable with where she was in life. We can tell this because of the way she says “I dwell among my own people.” See, she is saying that she has nothing to fear, really because she had her own house and after her husband dies, then she knew that her people would take care of her. Unlike that of the widow we learned about previously.

c. So what happens? We see in verses 14-16 that Elisha asks what she needs. He knew he wasn’t going to get an answer from her, so he asked elsewhere. So he asked Gehazi, his servant what she needed. Now, Gehazi was given specific duties and was learning the “tools of the trade” as it were. So he called him to himself, and Gehazi said that she has no child and her husband is old. So, the best thing that Elisha could do was to make a promise to her. This was a dangerous promise. I mean, he was promising that within a year, she was going to have a son. So not only was he saying that she was going to have a child, but she was going to have a son! You know, this sounds a lot like when God promised to give Isaac. You may go back to where I said that this was a dangerous promise. When we think about it, we already know that her husband is old. I can just picture in her mind that she might have been thinking, what if the family members thought she was cheating and disowned her? This would have been out of her comfort zone and she, at this point, was uncertain about the results. So, we see that the Lord is challenging her faith. She even questions it, telling Elisha to not lie to her.

d. You know, she didn’t have the new testament yet, but we do, so we can pull a little bit of information for that. We can look at 1 Corinthians 2:9. You know what that says? It says “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him.” See, we don’t know what God has prepared for us, for those that love him. But how do you find out what those are? Well, we have to take a step of faith. We tend to get into our comfort zones and don’t want to take that step. The problem with that is that they replace our faith in God with a fake sense of assurance that we find inside our comfort zone. Sometimes when we get too comfortable in our comfort zone, God brings us to a place where he challenges our faith.

Verses 18-31

a. She needed to be refined. The definition of refined means “with impurities or unwanted elements having been removed by processing.” Now that we have talked about comfort zones preventing us from discovering the good things that God has for us and he needs to challenge our faith, it can be an eye-opener. Sometimes our faith needs to be refined.

b. So we have this woman, who had a child, just like Elisha had told her that she would do. We don’t know much about this boy, we don’t know how old he was when all this happened, but it seemed like everything was going well, until disaster strikes. You know, sometimes God has to use disasters to get our attention.

c. But there is more to this than just the death of this child. The response that she has is different than the norm. We see that she placed him on Elisha’s bed, instead of preparing for his funeral. Then I love this, she did the first thing that came to her mind. She went to seek Elisha. But you know, she didn’t go to him slowly. She got on the donkey and told the servant to go as fast as he could. So she heads to Elisha and getting there, Elisha knew something was wrong, but did not know what as God didn’t make the particular issue known to him. I am going to let you in on a little secret, the prophets, just like preachers today, did not know everything. They knew only what God made known to them. She came to Elisha as an act of faith. She believed God could raise her son from the dead.

d. God had given this woman her own measure of faith and now it needed to grow. Did you know that each one of us receives a measure of faith? Romans 12:3 tells us “For I say, through the grace given to me, to everyone who is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly, as God has dealt to each one, a measure of faith. But we can see that this woman’s faith was still clouded with insecurity, it was hindering her growth. Perhaps she found it difficult to trust the Lord wholeheartedly. Look at her resonse when she came to Elisha. She said “did I ask a son of my lord? Did I not say, “Do not deceive me?”” See, her faith needed more refinement. In order to do this refinement, God temporarily took her son from her.

e. Our faith needs to grow because discovering all the good things that God has for us is not always easy. There are things that come to pass quickly and other things just don’t. What tends to happen when those things don’t come as easily as others? Sometimes, we give in to our feelings of insecurity, we feel happy about what the Lord has already done for us and forget about the greater things yet to come. Sometimes, God takes the freedom to refine our faith.

Verses 31-37

a. One thing we need to realize is that the staff that Elisha used was symbolic of the power of God and the authority of the prophet. When he laid it on the boy, it was signifying that the prophet intended to come, and that he had faith the God would restore the boy.

b. Elisha had promised that he would stay with her. So Elisha went to the house to see the boy. Here’s the thing, Elisha’s actions demonstrate that his faith was in the person and power of God alone, and not in the staff that symbolized his prophetic office. Although he repeated the symbolic actions learned from Elijah, his faith transcended mere symbol and ritual. He sought God who alone can grant life and perform the miraculous. The restoration of the boy’s life is a demonstration that life itself is in the hands of God.

So we see that God brought this boy back to life, but I want to go back to being refined. How are we to respond in times of refinement?

We can take a page from this woman that we just read about. She had a choice, she could have blamed God and turned her back on God, or she could have submitted to God’s authority and allowed Him to refine her faith and let it grow. We see that she chose to go to God. We too should go to God when our faith is being refined. It will allow God to refine our faith and let us grow.

There are times where we will have to have our faith refined, but not only that, we will have to step out in trust as well. Remember the story of the man who was crossing Niagra Falls and pushing a wheelbarrow? There may be a time that we need to get in the wheelbarrow and trust that our faith will lead us through.

Does this mean every time we step out on faith it will be easy? Absolutely not, but it does mean that we will be allowing God to refine our faith and help us grow.