Most of us have spent so much of our lives in a constant battle that after many years we get to the point where we feel that enough is enough. I often hear many say that they have prayed for something to change in their lives but are tired of their current situation and don’t know how much longer they could possibly bear it. Truth is, we not only are able to bear it but most importantly we are capable of changing it!
Is it easy? No, it requires sacrifice! Any blessing that is valuable takes much sacrifice. I was reading about a woman that was a widow that had a lot of debt that was left by her husband and back in the old days when a family had a lot of debt the debtor to whom the money was owed to would take the children as slaves for payment of the debt. This woman was desperate, not only did her husband die but now she was going to lose her two sons. What horrible life her sons would face of slavery all because their father left them with debt and no means of paying it. The story also points something that caught my attention, it spoke that the husband of this widow was a prophet. He was a God fearing man, how could God allow the family of someone that served him to be left in such unfortunate circumstances?
I thought about this story for the last few days and it made me think that I always felt that as a God fearing woman that God would always provide for me and my family out of the love that He knows that I have for Him, but how different is the love that I have from that of the woman in the story? After all she to feared the Lord but yet she was found in such a mess. We tend to think that just because we love God and fear Him that everything will always come easy for us and that is such an illusion of the reality. Things don’t come easy we need to acquire our blessings through sacrifice.
In the story the prophet of God asked the woman what she had in her house and she answered that she only had a jar of oil and nothing else. The prophet than asked her to go to ALL her neighbors and ask for MANY empty vessels.
I started to think; if I was in her shoes I would think “wait a minute not only am I going through the embarrassment of owing many people money and am about to lose my only sons but now you are asking me to go ask people to borrow vessels? Like I don’t owe enough, who is going to want to lend to someone that is unable to repay?”
But the prophet knew that she was sacrificing her already broken pride and she was placing her trust on him, after all she didn’t have anything else to lose. God rewarded her by filling every single vessel she brought to her home with oil and she was able to sell that oil to pay all her debt and have enough left for her to live off with her sons. Praises be to God!
The moral of this true story is the following; we might be God fearing people and might have in the past placed our trust on God and He rewarded us for that, but now we might be facing different challenges that require different trust and sacrifice. Sometimes the sacrifice is something that will swallow our pride but the guarantee we will always have is that God is a re warder of those who place their trust on Him and no past sin can keep you from that reward. You can read about the widow on 2Kings 4:1-7
Sacrifice = blessings
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