#299: When the Meager is Multiplied

Welcome to Kingdom Writers, where we help equip and empower Christian writers of all genres to share your unique gifts with the world. We're your hosts, C.J. and Shelley Hitz.

This podcast is filled with spiritual encouragement as well as prayers to help you overcome the resistance you face as a writer. Your story matters.

This training and encouragement today. Today is titled From Meager to Multiplied. And so, cj, why don't you share what you have for us today?

Yeah, so I'm going to be looking at a little story that's tucked away in the Old Testament in Second Kings, chapter four, starting in verse one. So it's really seven verses, and I want to. I want to read the story here. It's. It's about the prophet Elisha and a poor widow. So listen to this. It says, one day, the widow of a member of the group of prophets came to Elisha and cried out, my husband who served you is dead. So she just lost her husband.

You might even say the breadwinner of the home, True has.

Has gone. And you know how he feared the Lord. But now a creditor has come threatening to take my two sons as slaves. And any of you that know about that culture, if you couldn't pay, then you work it off, right? And so her sons, her husband's been taken. So it's a bleak situation. The breadwinner of the house is gone, and now she's about ready to possibly lose her two sons to who knows what, where they might have to go to work this debt off. We don't know how large the debt was, but that's her predicament. She gives this to Elisha, the man of God, the prophet of God. And I love his question. Now listen to what he says here. He says, what can I do to help you? That's a great question, by the way. That's a great question for any of us to ask as we're going to church, as we're in our neighborhood. What can I do to help you? And that's many times the question that we hear when we walk into a store, right? The clerk comes up and says, how can I help you?

And it's actually a basic component of marketing. So you want to ask your audience, what can I do to help you? How can I serve you? What kind of tools and resources or things would be helpful to you? And you guys will notice I do that a lot in Christian Book Academy, Facebook Group, or in the emails. I ask you, like, what can we do to serve you better and to help you? And so That's a great component of market research and just being able to serve your audience as well.

And so Elisha, I think he actually has this question fresh in his mind. Why? Because if you look two chapters before, this is the same kind of question, almost exact along the same lines of what his mentor Elijah asked him.

In fact, Elijah is about ready to be taken away. And he knows this. He's heard from the Lord, and he basically approaches Elisha and says, tell me what I can do for you before I'm taken away. And what does Elisha do? What does he say? Well, he basically gives almost an obnoxious, crazy. Well, now that you've asked me, I'm going to go ahead and take advantage of this. He says, I would like a double portion of the spirit that you have. No small thing, right?

Big.

Right.

And, oh, by the way, I would like to be your successor after you're taken away here shortly.

Yeah.

And so here's the scenario. Now you have Elisha in this widow.

He follows that question up. What can I do to help you? And he says this very specifically. Didn't even wait for her answer. Specifically says, go ahead, tell me what you have in the house. Tell me what you have right now in your possession. Just tell me what you have. And here's her response. Nothing at all. Well, and I bet you she. She probably did an inventory. Well, except for a flask of olive oil, a lonely flask of olive oil, either sitting on that table or up in the cupboard. But she basically says, I'm. I'm down to almost nothing.

And Elisha said, borrow as many empty jars as you as you can from your friends and neighbors. Then go into your house with your sons and shut the door behind you and essentially says, just begin pouring that flask. Begin pouring.

And set each one of those empty jars aside when it's filled. Now, some of us may come here this morning to this virtual writing retreat feeling like we are down to our last flask of olive oil. We are down to $100 in our bank account. We might even just feel like, you know what? I barely have a flask of the Spirit of God in me. I'm down to a few drops of God's spirit. I feel exhausted. I feel empty. I feel like I've got nothing at all. I've got nothing to bring to this virtual writing retreat, let alone words that I feel like I can write. So in that regard, this first part is for you just to know that you know what. You take inventory, and as you look around at what you have, you say, this is what I'm down to. This is what I have. This is what I offer to you. It's very similar question to what Jesus asked. When the throng, the multiplied, the multitude of people is waiting to be fed, they're hungry. Jesus essentially proposes to his disciples, why don't you feed them? And of course, they look around and say, are you kidding me? It would take years, you know, wages to feed all these people. And Jesus just asked a simple question. What do you have? What do you have? Tell me what, what count counted up, how many loaves of bread do you have? And they come back, and eventually we know the end of that story. We actually looked at that the last. I believe it was the last virtual writing retreat.

And just a note for those of you that joined me for the Courageous Writer workshop this week. We talked about potential partnerships and looking at, who are you already connected with, right? What relationships do you already have? What is in your hand? What do you have right now? And praying and asking the Lord for wisdom on who to connect with and that sort of thing. But again, it connects with what CJ Is saying today of like, what do you have? You know, and allowing God to take that small thing that you feel that you have and to do what he wants to do with it.

And I love this. This is a very sort of unconventional way that Elisha is. Is working here. And you see in many of these stories that this is the way God works. It's unconventional. You better believe that those two boys were scrounging around that neighborhood, finding every empty jar.

Yeah.

Their very freedom was. Was on the line. You better believe they're hustling. And. And so they were. And I love this. It says in. In verse five.

So she did as she was told. She didn't even ask any questions. She just trusted the man of God and her sons kept bringing jars to her, and she filled one after another. Soon every container was full to the brim. I don't know how many containers were there, but she then says, bring me another jar. She says to one of her sons, and the son says, there aren't any more. We basically found every empty jar in the whole neighborhood.

And then the olive oil, it says, stopped flowing. How many know that those two boys could have found every jar in the country of Israel, all of it, let alone their little neighborhood in their town, and the oil still would have flowed?

Okay, we're only limited by the amount of empty jars available. Okay, we're not. God's not limited, but we Bring him our emptiness and he can fill that. What I want to say here today is that each one of us can come to this time as one of those empty jars. And I love that it says, after. After you get all these jars, close the door of your house and just begin pouring. And it's almost like we're in this house. We're in this house called cba. We're family. We're closing the door today. There's a few of us in here and we're going to endeavor writing words. And I'm here to tell you that if you'll bring your emptiness, if you'll bring yourself in the empty state that you find yourself, God will begin pouring into you and there will be a flow. That flow is only limited by the amount of emptiness that you bring to this writing time. If you'll bring that emptiness and honesty and listen to the the end of the story in verse seven, when she told the man of God what had happened, he said to her, now sell the olive oil, pay your debts.

And you and your sons can live on what's left over. Think about this now. God provided not only for the dead, but he then provided for them to continue living. I don't know how many jars Olive oil in those days and even today is a commodity. And olive oil is not cheap, especially the really good stuff, not the stuff that's watered down, but the really good stuff. And olive oil, oil of any kind in the Old Testament many times represents that anointing. It represents the spirit of God coming down, flowing over a person, in a person. And look at what Elisha asked his mentor. I want a double portion of the flow of God in my life.

And I just believe that tickled the Lord pink when he asked that. Because he wasn't asking that because he wanted to go around bragging. He wanted the Lord to work through him. He was willing to take up the mantle that his mentor was about to leave behind, and he was going to be that person. That's who God raised up. And I want to tell you today that God wants to do something through you, and I want you all. And we're going to have you do this in the comments. What if Elisha or Jesus is standing before you and asking you that question?

What can I do for you today? What can I do to help you? Do you know that that's the same question that Jesus asked blind Bartimaeus that came running up to him in the streets of Jericho when Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem to ultimately be crucified Bartimaeus comes up to him, and the first question Jesus asked him is, what can I do for you? What can I do for you? How can I serve you? How can I help you? How can I pray for you? It's a great question that, first of all, we can ask those around us. But I want you to picture Jesus asking you this morning as we kick off this virtual writing retreat, what can I do for you? If you were to be brutally honest, just like Elisha was, Elisha had to think, I got nothing to lose here by giving my mentor this answer. I got nothing to lose. At the very least, he's going to say no. And even, you know, you can just picture Elijah right after that, he says, oh, you can just imagine in his Hebrew accent, you know, you've asked a very difficult thing, you know, Elisha, and yet it still happened. God blessed that. God answered that and gave Elisha his request. Now, I'm not saying that we're gonna pretend that we're rubbing a bottle. You know, a genie's gonna come out. We're gonna get anything that we want. That's not what we're saying. We're saying, can you in great faith say, this is what I want? The sole purpose to honor and glorify you, Lord, but this is what I want to see happen with my writing. This is what I want to see happen with my book. What is it that you would boldly say, this is what I want. This is the predicament that I find myself in this morning and allow Jesus to just start pouring and filling that emptiness, filling what you have this morning, and watch again not only satisfy your debt, but to continue working onward in the future because of what he's done for you. He can take the meager and multiply it, and there aren't enough jars in the whole world to be filled by God's flowing.

How many of you know we serve a limitless God, and yet so many times we put limits, or we think, oh, like, it's too much, it's too big, it's too hard. And, you know, I've been guilty of that many, many times. Just thinking realistic, right? Like, realistically, like, what can I do in my own strength? Or what resources do I have? And yet God is able to take that meager and multiply it.

I like what Dee says in the comments here. She says, God pouring our anointing into empty pages. Yeah, Amen to that.

That's good.

That's the idea right there.

How many of you want God's anointing on your empty pages today. If so, just type me in the comments.

So good.

Well, that's all. That's what I have here this morning. But I want you to picture.

The Lord right now is asking you, what can I do for you? How will you answer that?

Well, let's just take a minute and Give you a minute. And if you have a journal and a piece of paper and pen, it's powerful to write out. There's sensory things and research that shows writing something out is powerful. So just take a minute. We'll give you literally just a minute and write out a prayer to the Lord. What is it you need right now?

And I also want you to answer that follow up question that Elisha asked. What is it that you have in your house? Now, don't be ashamed of this. Don't say, I don't want anybody to see this. I have such a meager little thing right here. I want you to.

Put that in the comments and say, this is all I have right now to work with. And guess what? We're gonna. We're gonna pray for that together. We're all gonna agree that that's plenty.

All right, we're going to give you one minute. Go ahead and write out this prayer to the Lord.

Sam.

All right, so keep praying those bold prayers. And God answers it in different ways, not always in our timing. Right. But he is the one that will supply. So, cj, why don't you close this time in prayer?

Yeah. Father, I just thank you again for this time. I thank you for your word. I thank you that this little story tucked away in Second Kings is able to be shared with the world. That we can look at this and say, you know what? Many of us have felt at times like we're down to our last flask of olive oil. We are at the bottom. And I just want to pray, Lord, that you would begin a flow this morning. And whatever you desire to do through each one of these kingdom writers, I pray you begin a flow that just continues that they're almost just overwhelmed because.

So much of the emptiness has been filled. Those empty places, those empty pages, the empty.

Marketing plans, whatever it might be. I just pray that you empty bank accounts emptiness here today. And Lord, we only ask, just like Elisha did, We only ask because we want to be vessels in your hands. We want to be people that can then point to you. You receive the glory. This isn't about us building our resume or building our own.

Platform for our own glory. But, Lord, we desire to honor you in the time that we have on this planet and we desire to bear fruit that lasts into the world to come. And so I pray, Lord, that you would just pour your anointing out today and tomorrow, Lord, on whatever you desire to do through each one of these Kingdom writers. And we will give you the glory, Lord. And we ask this in Jesus name. Amen.

Amen. I hope that encouraged you today. We are excited to see how God takes your meager and multiplies it so that your words, your books, can impact even more lives. Amen.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Kingdom Writers. We believe that you as a Christian writer, have a specific role to play in the Kingdom of Heaven to impact lives for eternity.

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Like you to not only tell your.

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