TD Jakes - How to Survive the Feeling of Emptiness
It is with great spiritual deliberation that we approach this text, not in the traditional sense of merely exegeting the text itself. Though the text is extremely profound, it comes at a time when we observe a widow whose husband, now deceased, had formally served Elijah as a servant, a mentee who sought to better understand how to release his prophetic gift.
It is interesting to note this fact because Elijah himself had once sought Elisha to better pull his gift out. I can’t help but notice that you always need someone to help you pull out of you what God put inside of you. Having had that experience himself as he served Elijah, he then had regimens of sons under him that he trained in the ways of the Lord. It is interesting to note that he had to be older than his mentees, yet he had survived something that his sons did not. Hats off to every survivor out there who beat the odds, who lasted longer than records would have suggested, and who are still effective at this age and at this stage in your life.
So, it was Elisha, because his mentee is gone, but the mentor is still standing. Thus, we enter into this cross-generational conversation not between him and his successor or him and his son, but with the wife of the successor. She comes to him, reminding him that before he died, her husband was loyal to Elijah; he was a son, as it were, and he was serious about God, yet he died. I have to pause there and acknowledge the fact that bad things do happen to good people. The woman is clear when she says, «You are a man of God; there is no question about it.»
If anyone knows who you are, your wife does. It is clear that he is a man of God, but that did not stop death. Death has this unreasonable ability to defy reason and pick and choose whoever it will, whenever it will—sparing neither the young nor the old. There is no guarantee that because you are young, you will get to be old. Becoming old is a gift given by God; it is not a promise. To grow old or to live long enough to gray is a gift given by God, not a right that you can assume. Hence, you must live every day as if you might not make it to tomorrow.
Such was the case with her husband, who never knew he would not finish raising his sons, that he and his wife would not grow old together, nor would he always be there as a force to provide and protect for his family. Now, the force is gone, the strength is abated, and the breath has left his nostrils. There is nothing left as evidence that he was ever there except for the cries of his wife and the concerns of his sons. His absence has left them uncovered; his absence has left them ill-prepared for the challenges of the times. They have suffered not only the emotional toll of him being taken from the house but also the economic impact. Without him, the provider, the provision was gone.
Little by little, the cupboards grew empty, the pockets became bare, and they started living off promises they could not fulfill. By the time Elisha steps on the scene, this woman’s pockets are empty, her cupboards are bare, and the creditors are numerous. She is about to lose her sons. What kind of mother wants to give up her two sons to pay off her debt? We know clearly that this was not the way she wanted her life to go, and yet this is where it is. She is a woman of God.
There are other widows in the Bible, and it is not clear whether they were truly women of God or not, but this is a woman of God. Yet trouble can come to anyone. I don’t care how you pray, how you fast, how you speak in tongues, or how you dance all over the church; that does not exempt you from having dark days, empty days, or days of tumultuous winds and complexities. We step into this woman’s life not during the good times. The Bible does not mention when things were going well, when the cupboards were full, or when the closets were overflowing with abundance; this is irrelevant. God is showing us how to survive emptiness. She has lost everything; the only thing she has left is her sons, and she is about to lose them too.
Elisha comes on the scene, and she reminds him of who her husband was: «My husband was your mentee; he went to your school of prophecy; he was a good man of God, and now he’s gone.» I believe she is trying to create a relationship with Elisha so that he has a vested interest in responding to her. She doesn’t come in her name because she doesn’t have the clout in her name to provoke a miracle, but she knows whose name to call to get Elisha’s attention. She says, «My husband was one of your spiritual sons, and he’s dead. I’m his wife, and they’re about to come and get my sons.»
Elisha asks, «What am I to do with you?» What do you do when you meet someone in a particular slice of their life that threatens to define and deter the rest of their life? What do you do when you meet someone in a moment of desperation? What do you do when they expect you to do something beyond human rationale? Elisha asks her a paramount question: «What is in your house?» It is important to understand that God will always use something you already have, whether it is a pot of oil, a handful of meal, or two fish and five loaves of bread. Miracles are birthed out of normalcy when God magnifies what you have overlooked and deemed invaluable. It might not have seemed valuable to you, but it becomes invaluable when you place it in the hands of God.
Something as ordinary as a jawbone of an ass or two fish and five loaves of bread—something you walk past all the time—what the prophet does is illuminate that which you have ignored. «What do you have in your house?» You’re telling me about what you lost; I want to know what you have left because God never uses what you lost. No, He is not interested in you giving Him a litany about who all left you, who hurt you, and who forsook you; that is carnal talk. God doesn’t need anything you lost to bless you; He will always use what you have left. And she says, «I don’t have anything left.»
Listen to their discussion as they go back and forth, bantering toward a miracle. The Holy Spirit has recorded only those things that are necessary for our faith to be built up by eavesdropping on their conversation. This text is not written to give us the historicity of this woman’s life; God does not address her bank account during the time she had a husband. He does not talk about her good days because faith does not shine in good days; faith always shines when all hell is breaking loose in your life. You’ll never experience the power of God when you are on the mountaintop. Who needs God on the mountaintop? You need God when you are in the valley, at your wit’s end, and you don’t know what else to do.
I wanted to preach about this because I imagine, in my own mind, that love allowed me to use my spiritual imagination to illuminate the text. I imagine that she had spent many sleepless nights. The Bible doesn’t say it, but I know if they are about to take her sons, you don’t go to bed when someone is about to take your kids. She had faced turmoil and discomfort; she was stressed out and at her wit’s end, saying, «I don’t have anything, I don’t have anything but a pot.»
Oh, I don’t know what kind of oil it was, but it was just a pot of oil; it could have been cooking oil. «I’m out of everything; I’m empty. Man, I got nothing.» Then he says to the woman who is already in debt, «Go borrow.» Did he not hear me? I told him I am in debt! Who lends to someone in debt? I don’t have any credit; my credit score is down to 200! I cannot get a car, I cannot get a house, I cannot get an apartment—my credit is bad! The creditors are coming to take my children; I am using my children as collateral! I’m broke, and you tell me to go borrow? You have the nerve to tell me that I am not empty enough?
I want you to hear that; I want that to sink into your head that God is saying it’s not bad enough. When it gets bright enough, you’ll see My hand. When it gets bad enough, you’ll see My glory. When it gets bad enough, I’ll open up the windows of heaven and pour you out a blessing you won’t have room enough to receive. But what you’re talking about is child’s play. You’re talking about you, and God said, «Go borrow.» You see, this is for radical people. This is not for your average, ordinary, superficial Sunday morning person who just happened to click into the broadcast and was fooling around and ran into me—this is for radical people who are backed into a corner and shoved against the wall.
You don’t have any choice but to believe God because if you don’t, you’re going under. If you don’t believe God, you’re going down. If you don’t believe God, you’re going to lose your body. If you don’t believe God, you’re going to lose everything you have. If you don’t believe God, you’ll never get out of this. I want to talk to somebody who’s in enough trouble to hear this message because some of you are doing too well to hear this message. Some of you have too much to get this message; some of you are too intellectual to receive this message; some of you are too full to hear this message. God is best experienced from a place of vulnerability.
All this teaching we’re doing on praise and worship and how to get glory from God—all that is cute for people who are not in trouble. It only becomes sustenance when you are desperate enough for the Word to come alive. «Go borrow from your neighbors.» But it is not that he told her to go borrow; that is not what I really came to preach about. Sometimes, when we start talking about making room for God and economic impact, we discuss how sometimes your valley isn’t deep enough to attract God, and sometimes you have to dig ditches in your valley to draw Him in.
When God comes, He will come with such force that your little problem isn’t deep enough for Him to flow in your life. But I don’t have time to talk about that today. No, no, no; that’s for another Sunday. But it is good to note that sometimes the only way to get out of trouble is to get deeper into trouble. You have to be desperate to receive that truth because if you’re rational, you won’t get it. You have to be desperate enough to throw in everything and say, «I’ve got nothing to lose; if I lose it, I’m going down anyway. I have nothing to lose.»
It is your nothingness that attracts God. It is your void; it is the vacuum, the abyss of need in your life that attracts God. It is not your stuff; it is not your degrees; it is not your money; it is not your Gucci bag; it is your need somewhere deep down in your soul. Oh God! Somewhere down in your soul, you have to be empty enough to have a faith experience. You have to be vulnerable enough to have a faith experience. Jesus, I need to teach you how to walk. When you’re walking on concrete, it’s only when you’re walking on water that you have to be vulnerable enough for God to get your full and undivided attention.
God has this woman’s attention, and He says, «Go borrow from your neighbors.» Now, it’s one thing to be broke; it’s another thing to tell your neighbors you’re broke. They are already talking; they are already looking at you; they are already noticing that your lawn is untidy, that your house needs paint, that you haven’t had a manicure or pedicure, and they have already noticed that your hair is not done. And God says, «Go tell your neighbors that you need something!» He doesn’t tell you to beg for it as if asking them to give it to you; He says, «Just borrow it.» When you hear the word «borrow,» think of Jesus borrowing a grave. This won’t take long; just let me borrow it!
I’m just going through some things; this situation that you are in right now will not last. You just need to borrow a solution because after a while, everything you lost will come back. Away is going to come running back. Everybody who walked off is going to come knocking on your door. This is a temporary situation. He says to go to your neighbors and knock on doors with your sons that they’re about to take. Send them out into the neighborhood. Now, when you borrow something, it has to have value. Nobody listening to me right now goes up to a bag lady and asks her for a loan—nobody. Nobody goes into a trash can and says, «I want to borrow some food.» When you borrow something, there is a perceived value in order to pursue it, and what God says He values is vessels.
God says He values vessels. Why does God value vessels when everybody else values content? God says, «Go borrow vessels.» Everybody else goes to Neiman Marcus and buys perfume. God says, «Go buy perfume bottles.» Yeah, nobody usually goes down to the store to get a bottle. I don’t want the bleach; just give me the can. God says to borrow not just any kind of vessel; He says, «I want you to get empty vessels.» In order to get your miracle, I’m not taking just any kind of vessel. Don’t bring me a half-full vessel. Don’t bring me three-quarters full; don’t bring me one-third full. They must be empty to be eligible. Are you empty enough?