Reverend Jonathan Waits
He Cares for You (2 Kings 4:1-7)
May 11, 2025
Let’s get started this morning with a bit of confession time. I hope you are sitting down for this one…okay, good. I am…not a good mom. I know dads are supposed to be pretty awesome, but try as I might, I just can’t seem to hit that mark. Okay, well, if I’m being totally honest, I haven’t actually tried all that hard to hit it. When my boys need something that Lisa, my beautiful bride and their amazing mom, can do as a mom, they go to her. Every time. They don’t even give me a second thought when they need a mom thing. They just skip right past me and go to her. And get this: she does it for them. Really well (because she’s a great mom). You know, I’d almost be offended by all of this but for this one thing: I’m a dad. And dads don’t mom very well. But that’s an okay thing because God made moms. And moms are a good thing.
There’s a lie going around in our culture right now that parents are basically interchangeable. We talk about parenting rather than mothering and fathering. As long as you have at least one or the other, that’s good enough for the kids. Sure, it’s more convenient to have both, but it’s not totally necessary. Dads can do all the same things as moms, and moms can do all the same things as dads. Do you know what that is? That is grade-A, finely-processed, carefully-distilled nonsense. No, the culturally inconvenient truth here is that dads can’t mom, and moms can’t dad. God made us different. There’s really no such thing as parenting unless you happen to be talking about a mom and a dad raising kids together at the same time, and even then the very idea of parenting distorts the differences between the two. It’s far more accurate to talk about mothering and fathering. It’s why we have a Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and not merely a “Parent’s Day.”
Well, today happens to be Mother’s Day, and so, moms, I want to take a few minutes to just encourage you, and also to challenge you a bit, this morning to keep living up to the incredible calling you have in Christ. I want to do that today by looking with you at a story in the Scriptures about a mom taking care of her kids when she found herself in an impossible situation. For everyone else in the room, though, stay tuned in because what we are going to learn together in this story is some wisdom that applies pretty broadly.
Now, the story we are going to take a look at this morning is one I’ve known about for a long time. I mean, it’s there in the Scriptures, and when you read through the Scriptures sequentially, you’re going to come across it. That’s just how it works. But it’s not one I’ve really given much in the way of attention to until actually just last week. This story is from our Sunday school lesson last week. I was set to go in a different direction, but had one of those lightbulb moments from the Holy Spirit that this was the way we needed to go for this morning.
If you have a copy of the Scriptures handy this morning, find your way with me to the Old Testament narrative of 2 Kings. This is one of the collections of works that detail the history of Israel up to, during, and through the end of its independent monarchy period. There are two documents bearing the name of Samuel, Israel’s last judge, that tell of the rise of the house of David through the end of his reign. The other two collections, Kings, and Chronicles, tell the same basic set of stories about the main body of Israel’s monarchical period, but each with a different perspective. The books of Kings tend to give the facts, while the Chronicles focus a bit more on the moral of each story.
Our story today comes from 2 Kings 4. The nation has been split by civil war into two sister nations. Israel, to the north, abandoned faith in God, and as a result, God sent prophets to call them back. The second great prophet was a man named Elisha. Check this out with me starting in 2 Kings 4:1.
“One of the wives of the sons of the prophets cried out to Elisha, ‘Your servant, my husband, has died. You know that your servant feared the Lord. Now the creditor is coming to take my two children as his slaves.’” Now, there are a few things going on here worth unpacking for just a second. The first is this group the woman refers to as the “sons of the prophets.” Who were these guys? Think of this group a little like a prophets’ union. This would have been a group of followers of Yahweh, the god who brought the people out of Egypt and who was generally still worshiped in the southern Israelite kingdom of Judah. They worked under the leadership of first Elijah, and then Elisha, mostly in the northern Israelite kingdom of Israel. These were folks who helped to extend their ministry, spread their words, and call the people back to the covenant faithfulness they had left behind in favor of various other gods. They would have still had “normal” careers and lives. Their work with the sons of the prophets was in addition to that. There may very well have been a community of them that lived and worked together, but they were still fairly integrated into the larger cultural scene. Given the state of that culture, this would not have been an easy commitment to make.
In any event, one of these faithful men died somehow, and left behind a wife and two sons. This was a normal part of life. It still is today. What made this situation so hard was that the man was in debt. And in a culture in which men were the sole breadwinners for a family, now that the creditor’s source of repayment for the loan he had given the family was gone, he was coming to collect by whatever means were going to be necessary. In this case, he was going to take the woman’s children from her to hold them in debt slavery until their father’s debt was paid. This suggests these were likely young children or they would have been acknowledged as the source of support for their mother and left to work on their own.
Put yourself in her shoes, then. Your husband has died, and now there is a very real likelihood that someone is going to come and take your children away from you as well. And while you might be able to still have contact with them, that wasn’t a guarantee. How are you feeling right now? Perhaps a little desperate? This mother certainly was, and so she went right to the head of the group and asked for help.
Elisha, for his part, was compassionate with her. “Elisha asked her, ‘What can I do for you?’” We could hear that in one of a couple of ways. The first emphasizes do, putting the focus on his desire to help her. The second emphasizes I, shifting the focus around to his sense of personal helplessness in the face of her potential tragedy, but also his confidence that God can help her. “Elisha asked her, ‘What can I do for you? Tell me, what do you have in the house?’” In other words, what can you contribute to the solution to this problem? Elisha wasn’t just giving handouts, likely because he didn’t have any to give himself. He was inviting her to be a part of the solution. Unfortunately, she didn’t have much. “She said, ‘Your servant has nothing in the house except a jar of oil.’” This would have been a little like saying that she didn’t have anything but this one little jar of bills that had been saved for an emergency. This was definitely an emergency, but the jar wasn’t very big…or very full.
Hearing this, Elisha gave her some instructions that had to sound bizarre. As you keep reading Elisha’s story, this wouldn’t be the only time he gave odd-sounding instructions to someone in need of help. This helped keep the credit for the miracles he did firmly in God’s favor. If something “normal” worked, Elisha could get credit for it. But he wasn’t the one doing it. God was. The odd instructions made it such that God’s intervention was the only rational explanation. “Then he said, ‘Go out and borrow empty containers from all your neighbors. Do not get just a few. Then go in and shut the door behind you and your sons, and pour oil into all these containers. Set the full ones to one side.’”
I wish we did, but we don’t know how she initially reacted to these instructions. We don’t know if she balked. We don’t know if she questioned. We don’t know if she doubted. None of that. I probably would have because this was a weird instruction. We also don’t know how much time passed between Elisha’s instructions and what happened next. All we know is that the next thing we find her doing is just what the prophet told her to do. Verse 5 now: “So she left. After she had shut the door behind her and her sons, they kept bringing her containers, and she kept pouring. When they were full, she said to her son, ‘Bring me another container.’ But he replied, ‘There aren’t any more.’ Then the oil stopped.”
So, she did what God said, and she found herself with more resources than she could have ever imagined. When she went back to Elisha with the news of what had happened, he told her to go use what God had given to take care of herself and her sons. “She went and told the man of God, and he said, ‘Go sell the oil and pay your debt; you and your sons can live on the rest.’” This poor woman had a desperate need, but rather than trying to rely on herself, she went humbly to God, did what He said, and God took care of her needs. This is a pattern we see displayed throughout the Scriptures. We hear stories of it from the experiences of people around us still today. When we are willing to trust in God, He takes care of us.
Ladies, can we all acknowledge together that being a mom is hard. It’s hard when you’re actively in the midst of that journey. It’s hard when you’re past it, looking back and wondering if you did a good job. It’s hard when you’re just preparing for it. It’s hard when you’re not there yet and you want to be. It’s really hard when you’re not there because you can’t be for some reason. Being a mom is hard. Being a woman living in pursuit of Christ in a world that pushes you hard in every direction but the one that leads to life is hard. But when life is hard, God is good. And when we’re willing to trust in God, He takes care of us.
I think in this story here we can see several different things offer us some wisdom in seeking, receiving, and living in God’s care that apply directly to moms. Again, don’t miss the fact that the whole context of this story is a mom seeking to take care of her children. But I think these points apply more broadly than that as well, so everybody lean in here with me, and let’s see what some of these are.
The first one here hits us right out of the gate. When this woman found herself in this awful situation, she asked for help. Moms, there are times in life when your circumstances hit that point that they are more than you can handle. Now, everybody has a different emotional and relational capacity. Some can handle just a little bit. Others can handle a lot. The tough part about hitting our limits, wherever those happen to be, is that when we do we are faced with the uncomfortable realization that we are not enough on our own to handle our situation. Listen: we live in a world that puts a ton of pressure on us to be enough, to have it all together, to more than measure up to some imaginary standard that no one actually meets. We want to show the world that we can do it, whatever “it” happens to be.
But—and I say this with all the love in my heart for you—you’re not enough. Neither am I. Neither is that other mom on social media who posts all the videos that make it seem like she has it all together. Nobody is. And that’s okay. God knows we aren’t enough, and He’s okay with that. He made us. He knows us and our limits better than we know them ourselves. It’s okay to acknowledge weakness and need in your life, especially when you are part of a safe church community. Now, there are a couple of important caveats here. Acknowledging weakness doesn’t mean you need to take up a victim mentality that sees everyone as out to get you. They’re not. It doesn’t mean becoming an emotional vampire, always sucking everyone else around you emotionally dry to satiate your own unending hunger. It doesn’t mean airing all of your grievances on social media where you wear your weakness as a badge of pride, basking in the adoration of others for being so “brave.” It means very simply that you have the humility to know where your limits are, and to ask for help when life takes you past them as it is wont to do on occasion. And when with that posture of humility, you trust in God through it, He’ll take care of you. When we’re willing to trust in God, He takes care of us.
Let’s look at another point. When the woman asks Elisha for help, he doesn’t swoop in and solve all her problems for her. God’s solution for her was not to just drop what she needed into her lap. She was going to have to work for it a bit. She was going to have to contribute to the solution. She was going to have to contribute what resources she did have. She was going to have to contribute some effort in going and gathering jars from all of her neighbors. Now, she could have looked at what she had and thought, “There’s no way this is going to be enough.” And maybe she did that. But either way, she gave it. She put it into play. She was willing to extend enough trust to God to put what she had into His hands. That can be a scary thing to think about. Once it’s out of our hands, we don’t have control over it anymore. Either God is going to demonstrate Himself to be enough, or we are going to flop. When we are willing to put that much trust in God, He is able to come through for us in a big way. When we’re willing to trust in God, He takes care of us.
The way He does that, though, doesn’t always match up with our expectations. This mother certainly experienced this. She went asking for help, and God told her to borrow a bunch of jars. That’s weird. That’s okay, though, because God doesn’t need us to be faith superheroes. He just wants us to be willing to obey Him. Moms, sometimes God’s way of doing things feels weird or inconvenient or even counterintuitive, especially in light of what our culture constantly tells us. But we do it anyway because we trust in Him. And when we obey, we get to enjoy the blessing of obedience. Why would you let an odd set of instructions keep you from experiencing the hope and help of our God? Sometimes God invites us into a place where He’s the only explanation for the results we experience so there’s no question who should get all the credit. And when we know beyond a shadow of doubt that God deserves all the credit, our faith gets bigger. We become more willing to trust in Him. And, when we’re willing to trust in God, He takes care of us.
Speaking of that trust, did you catch how many jars Elisha told this mother to gather? It was tucked in there at the end of v. 3: “Do not get just a few.” That is: get a lot of them. Get as many as you can possibly get your hands on. God knew just how much He was willing to do for her—and it was a lot. He was inviting her into a place of expectation. He wanted her to expect Him to come through in a big way. Let me ask you this: Do you expect God to come through in a big way on your behalf? The God we serve is a God of abundance. The apostle Paul described Him as the God “who is able to do above and beyond all that we ask or think.” Other translations phrase that “above and beyond all that we ask or imagine.” God’s ability to provide goes beyond our ability to imagine. Do you really believe that, or do you have a different image of God that is not properly derived from the Scriptures? Do you really accept the things the Scriptures proclaim as true about Him? Our trust in Him comes out of a place of understanding His character. If you are getting God wrong, you won’t expect the right things from Him, and you won’t likely trust Him very much. Yet God’s plans to bless you are more expansive than your ability to ask for His blessing. Notice that the oil didn’t stop flowing until she had all she needed not only to pay her debts, but to live on as well. That’s a reason to trust Him. When we’re willing to trust in God, He takes care of us.
One last thing, Where did God send this mother when she sought His help? He sent her to her community. She was to go ask her neighbors for jars. That may seem like just a stray detail, but it’s not. If she didn’t have a community, she wouldn’t have had any help. If she wasn’t engaged and invested in her community, she wouldn’t have had any help. If she was too ashamed or too proud or too whatever else to be willing to call on her community, she wouldn’t have had any help. Moms—and everybody else too—you need community. So often, the help God provides when we need it comes by way of our community. Our willingness to depend on them is a reflection of our willingness to depend on Him. If in order to maintain a certain kind of appearance you stuff everything down inside and refuse to lean into your community, you are going to set yourself up for a very lonely road. It may be a lonely road in which you are surrounded by people on all sides, but that often just makes it worse. The harder you have to try to keep from being vulnerable, the lonelier you’ll feel.
You need to be connected to and you need to be invested in community. The God we serve is a relational God. He does what He does for us in and through relationships. And those relationships are best made, nurtured, and experienced through community. Our willingness to trust in the people around us who are on a journey after Jesus with us is a direct reflection of our willingness to trust in our God. Through community He does for us what we cannot otherwise obtain on our own. When we are willing to trust in Him, we’ll be able to receive it. When we’re willing to trust in God, He takes care of us.
Moms, your journey is tough. Ladies, this world doesn’t show you the support and respect and cherishing you deserve. For everyone, there are times when life just gets hard; harder than we can handle on our own. But the good news is that we have a God who cares for us. He invites us to cast all our cares on Him because of that. When we are willing to do that, we will experience that care. When we’re willing to trust in God, He takes care of us. Don’t be afraid to give that trust. It’s not easy. It can often be scary. It’ll likely mean saying no or goodbye to some things we are used to having as a part of our lives. But His ways are always better than ours. And, in the end, when we trust in Him, He will take care of us. He’ll take care of us for now. He’ll take care of us for later. He’ll sustain us through the hardest of times, never letting us face them alone. When we’re willing to trust in God, He takes care of us. May you know His care to the fullest.