Steven Furtick — Frozen Oil and Chosen
Lord put it on my heart to share from this passage, and this thought with you. And I want to speak to you today from 2 Kings 4:1-6. And really I want to speak to someone, who is in a deficit in an area of your life. The more I become exposed to, I'm convinced there are many different varieties of poverty, and so, you can be rich financially, and broke emotionally. You can be rich financially, and broke relationally. You can have a lot of responsibility, and not a lot of joy. Or you can have a lot of joy, and not a lot of influence. And so I learned that poverty, although we tend to associate it with finances, can be a poverty of a different kind. And that really helped me, when I was first started preaching I thought, and I was telling Mike this this morning, right before I came out to preach, how... you know some people come to church, and take the bus, and some people come in a bitly in the same church.
And so you kind of feel on the surface, like well, maybe you can't preach the same message to the person who is in the top tax bracket, and maybe the person who hasn't had a job for for two and a half years. But you learn over time: if you pastor people and pay attention, that everybody has a deficiency. And we're not all that different.
The reason I like this text from 2 Kings 4, is because it seems like a small little practical, I don't know, almost incidental miracle on the surface, but understanding the surrounding context in the life of the Prophet Elisha, he just finished solving a problem for three kings, and right after this he performs a great miracle for a very wealthy woman. And sandwiched between those two magnificent miracles on a grand scale, where he's consulting political advisors, like a real prophet would, and where he's hanging out with a top donor. There's something that happens, that seems so small on the surface, and that's where my assignment is today in 2 Kings 4:1-6. And I hope to be able to preach it to you on a very personal level.