Have you come across those promotions in which you can win free supplies of something for life?  BP did it a few months ago for gas – free gas for life.  Sounds pretty good doesn’t it?  The winners were the Bransen family.  Then there’s free pizza for life given away by a pizza joint in New York City.  Or how about Philips Sonicare Free Dental Care For Life.  Which is, er, free dental care for life.  And then, amazingly, in 1994 a 3-year-old named Taylor Caldwell from Woodlands, Texas, won free Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream for life (now we’re talking).  He’s now 19 and is still eating it.  From his photo in the online edition of the Woodlands Chronicle, I’d guess he weighs around 170 pounds, which is incredible in itself.  It strikes me that either Mr Caldwell has the self-control of a saint or this prize is being seriously wasted on him and it should be given to someone who can really put it to work, like me.  

However, like they say, if something sounds too good to be true it probably is.  And there are catches to these prizes.  First, of course, is they usually require the purchase of a raffle ticket.  Or, as in the case of Mr Caldwell and his ice-cream, you need to write a one hundred-word essay on Ben and Jerry’s ice-cream (if you’re thinking, ‘how did a boy of three write a prize-wining essay?’ the answer is ‘his parents wrote it’).  So you have to make an investment for your prize – either gambling or hard work.  So that makes it not really very ‘free’.  Then there’s the definition of ‘life’.  The Bransen family who won the free gas for life are actually limited to $1,200 a year of gas for 50 years.  So, in 50 years’ time, when gas costs $20 a gallon they’ll only get 60 gallons a year – hardly ‘free for life’.  And those pizzas for life – it’s just one a week.  And that dental care – it’s only up to $25,000 for life.

We read about a lifetime winner in the Old Testament lesson just now.  A widow from a town called Zarephath, a town ravaged by drought at that moment.  Her prize was ‘bread for life’, or at least until it rained.  And it was free on one condition.  No raffle ticket, but faith.  The story revolves around God’s prophet Elijah.  And one day God tells Elijah to go to this town Zarephath.  When he enters the city gate he is met by the woman who is collecting firewood.  Elijah asks her for some water and a small piece of bread.  The woman explains that she has none to spare.  In fact, she says, she is going straight home to make a small loaf of bread to feed her son and herself and then they are out of food and will die.  Elijah’s response seems a little selfish to us.  He says that before she feeds her son and herself she should give some bread to him.  But, he promises, if she does God will make sure that her jar of flour and oil will not run out until it rains again.  She went home with Elijah, she baked her bread, gave some to the prophet, and there was enough food for her and her family until the drought ended, just as God promised.

Now there are three things I think we can learn from this strange-sounding little story.  Because sometimes it feels like we’re going through a drought, doesn’t it?  Not a drought of rain but another kind of drought – a lack of spiritual resources.  Like this widow we can be stretched to breaking point and as we look ahead all we can see is calamity.  We’re making our last meal with what meager resources we have and then we’ll die.  So we think.  We’re reaching the end of our supplies of faith or love or hope or joy and now here’s some joker demanding what little I have left.  Ever felt that?  You’re tired; you’ve been giving of yourself all day, dealing with people’s problems, listening to them, focusing on serving others.  And then you get to the end of your ability to cope.  Here’s one more person who wants my time or energy or compassion or love or patience, or politeness.  And that’s it, you can’t take any more.  It’s not always a telemarketer who is that one person who is going to get it with both barrels, but sometimes it is.

So I wonder if you feel ‘all in’.  Spiritually you’re tired; you have given all you have.  Your resources are drying up.  Emotionally you are wrung out.  You’re tired of carrying other people’s burdens.  But you soldier on, even though you don’t know how you’re going to meet all the demands you have on your time and energy.   Well, if that’s you.  Here are the three things in that story.

1          God’s deep desire was to give back to the widow.  God is no one’s debtor.  As we have given ourselves to his service and the service of other people, so he wants to return the precious resources we have given.  God wants to refresh us and build us up and fill us with his Spirit.  But, before we can receive his resources we have to make a response to God.  The widow had to act on faith.  She needed to believe in Elijah’s promise that as she gave what she had to him so God would give to her.  God didn’t give her an endless supply of flour and oil and then ask her to make a loaf for Elijah.  It was the other way round.  She had to step out in faith and bake Elijah’s bread and then God gave her an infinite supply of food.

This is the spiritual law of reaping and sowing.  In the New Testament Paul says, “A person reaps what they have sown.  The one who sows to please their sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction.  The one who sows to please the Spirit from the Spirit will reap eternal life.  Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” (Gal 6:7-9.)  So, in other words, when we give of ourselves to God he will give back to us.  If we sow in kindness we will reap in kindness; sow love, reap love; sow patience, reap patience.  But let’s not forget it’s that way round.  We don’t reap before we sow.  We must sow first.  We must give before we receive.  And that requires faith.

2          When the widow gave all she had to feed Elijah God supplied her need until the rains came.  And only until the rains came.  God will provide for us what we need, not necessarily all we want.  And so if there’s something God has not given us then it stands to reason that we don’t need it.  How hard is this message to receive?  Of all the peoples on the earth we Western capitalists have more than we need.  And yet we want more and more.  The tragic irony is that the things we really need to make us whole we so often neglect – peace with God ourselves and other people, prayer, forgiveness, purpose, love.  A few weeks ago CNN covered the findings of the HPI: the Happy Planet Index.  It is a study into how happy people say they are.  It includes things like life expectancy, relationships with natural surroundings, and answers to the question “How satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?” asking for a number out of 10 to indicate the level of satisfaction.  Now let me hear your guesses for the happiest country on earth… The country with the highest level of satisfaction was Costa Rica.  Huh?  Yet, it is only 79^th in the list of wealthiest nations.  It shows what we instinctively know that material prosperity doesn’t make a person or a nation happy.

3          I suspect that this woman was genuinely changed by her experience of God’s miraculous provision, this never-ending flour jar, this lifetime supply of bread.  I think that she really did trust God and found him to be reliable.  Her faith genuinely grew.  But she still had her doubts and her fears.  The steps she took were baby steps.  She wasn’t transformed into a person of world-shattering faith overnight.  The next time reality served her up a dose of pain she responded in a very human way.  Her son dies and she wails at Elijah, ‘What do you have against me, man of God?  Did you come here to remind me of my sin and kill my son?”  She was, understandably, angry, grief-stricken, looking for someone to blame, furious at God, and doubting his love.  She had become that glorious but frustrating, wonderful but infuriating thing like you and me – a person who has experienced the grace of God, who has felt his love and closeness, who genuinely believes in him and trusts him, but who also knows the doubts, the fears, the frailties of a faith that is not yet complete.  Her life of faith is unpredictable.  It is not smooth and serene.  She is growing.  She’s walking in faith – two steps forward, one step back. 

Isn’t she just like us?  One day of experiencing the closeness of God can be followed by a day in which God feels a gazillion miles away.  One Sunday we feel caught up in the worship and we hear God speaking through the Bible readings, and we really get something out of the sermon; the next Sunday the worship feels like watching re-runs of a dull soap opera; the Bible readings sound like they’re in a foreign language, and you’d get more out of the sermon if I were to read the phone book aloud instead.  In our devotional lives we see an answer to prayer, and then we see no visible answer to prayer.  And we don’t understand, and we’re confused by God’s plan for us.  One day we see a miracle, then next we see nothing.  Why does God seem to be here and then far away?  Why do I have such doubts and questions, and then everything seems to fall into place and believing is easy?  Do you know these questions?  If you do then there’s a word to describe you.  Christian. 

In the epistle reading today Paul writes of his conversion from a hater of Christ and persecutor of Christians into the great missionary and church-planter that he became.  And a little detail he mentions is that after he was converted on the Damascus road he went into seclusion for three years.  Three years of trying to process what had happened to him on the road that day when he was thrown from his donkey and encountered the risen but invisible Jesus.  Three years of wrestling with the vision, trying to get his head round this new information that he’d received from God, trying to piece it together with what he already knew, seeing where his old life intersected with his new life, how his old view of God had been challenged by this new revelation.  How can we think that we should have all the answers?  How can we expect of ourselves lives that are free from doubts and questions and struggles of faith?  Like the widow in Zarephath and Paul of Tarsus we will have our struggles.  There will be things that happen in our lives that we just can’t work out.  Things that we thought were God’s plan for us, but they turned out not to be.  There will be disappointments, unexpected losses, and heartbreaks.  And God doesn’t remove these things from our lives.  But gently, gradually, lovingly he accepts us as we are – with all those frailties and doubts, and moves us on bit by bit, growing in our faith day by day.

Finally look at how the widow of Zarephath finishes the story.  Elijah prays for the dead boy and God heals him.  His mother says to Elijah, “Now I know that you are a man of God and that the word of the Lord from your mouth is the truth.”  See, one moment in despair and doubt, the next strong in her faith.  Friends, that’s the life God has called us to.  The life of faith, not sight; the life of unanswered questions and unpredictable futures.  But lives where we have a solid, reliable promise of a free supply of God’s grace and love for the rest of our lives.