Faith begins where you trust God’s promise enough to obey his commands. Real faith is never simply a belief in God out there. Believing in a God who exists out there is easy. It demands nothing of you. But obeying God is another thing. Welcome to Open the Bible with Pastor Colin Smith. I’m David Pick. And Colin, today we’re going to hear about a mother’s journey of faith. Yeah, this is one of my favorite stories in the Old Testament. The story of the widow who had almost nothing. Here she is with her son and they’ve no food, just enough for one meal. And then she anticipates that it’s going to be the end of their life. And God sends a prophet. And what does he do? He asks that she’ll make something for him first. And this is an extraordinary, extraordinary call to sacrifice. And yet we read in the scripture that this woman did what Elijah said. There was a step of faith, a step of obedience. And this is where her whole journey began. It is an amazing story. And I think it gets us to the heart of where the journey of faith begins for any of us today. So where does the journey of faith begin for us? Because as you said earlier, it’s easy to say we believe in God. Yeah. And what this woman did was that she responded with a step of obedience to what this God said. So words are now turned into action. And the reality of the woman’s faith is demonstrated by what she did. Now, the Bible speaks to us about that very often. And it’s a very important principle. But for anyone who wants to know where the journey of faith begins today, we’re going to look at that very straight from the scriptures. We’re going to be looking at the first book of Kings chapter 17 and verses 17 to 24. So if you can, why don’t you open your Bible and join us as we begin the message where faith begins. Here’s Colin. Well, on this Mother’s Day weekend, we come to the story of a mother, a mother whose heart was broken and then a mother who entered into overwhelming joy. I hope you’ll open your Bibles at first Kings and chapter 17. If you are visiting today for this Mother’s Weekend, we are so glad that you are here. We’re in a series on Elijah. Great story from the Old Testament. And we’ve been learning from Elijah’s life. This man was a prophet. That means that he spoke the word of God. He lived at a time when the people who claimed to belong to God actually didn’t want to listen to what God said. They turned to idols. They turned to all the sins that come with them. And so God held back the rain and we followed the story of how there soon was a famine. God provided for Elijah at a brook called Cherith. But then after a while, the brook dried up and God sent Elijah to a widow, a mother, a woman in Zarephath and provided for him there. And we’re going to take up the story at first Kings chapter 17 and verse 17, a story of desperate sadness that ends in wonderful joy. And I want us to learn from it today in three ways. First, and we’re going to spend most of the time today here, we’re going to look at the story through the eyes of the mother. That seems the place where we should spend our time today. Then more briefly, we’re going to look at the story through the eyes of the prophet, through Elijah, and then just very briefly at the end, through the eyes of the little boy who died and amazingly was raised to life again. Let’s begin here there with a mother’s journey of faith. And I want to suggest to you that the story of this mother gives us a marvelous picture of the Christian life. We looked at the beginning of her faith in the message last week. Her food had all but run out. She had just a small amount of flour in a jar and a small amount of oil in a jug. She had come out to the city dump in order to gather a few sticks in order to make a fire and make what she thought would be her last loaf of bread. And the word of God came to her through the prophet Elijah, verse 13, first make a little cake and give it to me. And we saw last time that God was calling her to make a great sacrifice and to do this for the sake of greater joy. And the promise that was given to her was that in verse 14, the jar of flour will not be spent, the jug of oil will not be empty until the day that the Lord sends rain on the earth. So here she’s given this call to a great sacrifice. She’s given this extraordinary promise. And what we noted is that up to this point she had not been a believer herself. We know that because she talked about the Lord as Elijah’s God, verse 12, not her God. Now folks, straight away here is something very important. It is one thing to believe that God exists. It is another thing altogether to come to the place where you would say the Lord is my God. Remember Thomas did that before Jesus after the resurrection. He knelt before Jesus and he said, my Lord and my God. Well, this woman had not come to that point when Elijah arrived at her town. But when she heard the promise of God, she took this great step of faith. She became truly a believer. I want you to notice where her faith began in verse 15. She went and did as Elijah said. She believed the promise of God that he would provide for her. She stepped out in faith in the light of that promise. She moved in costly obedience to God. That is where her journey of faith begins. That is where every journey of faith begins. Think of it this way. Faith begins where you trust God’s promise enough to obey his commands. Real faith is never simply a belief in God out there. Real faith is when you trust God’s promise enough to step out and to obey his commands. Believing in a God who exists out there is easy. It demands nothing of you. But obeying God is another thing. Placing your weight, as it were, upon his promise, that is always costly. And this is what this woman did. She believes the promise. She steps out. She ventures everything on the promise of God. And as she did that, we read in verse 16 that the jar of flour was not spent and the jug of oil did not become empty according to the word that the Lord spoke by Elijah. So, before we move on, because that’s all by way of review, I simply want to ask this question. Has your journey of faith begun? Here you are on this Mother’s Day weekend, and you’ve come to church, perhaps with your mother. The whole family’s come together. And that is a wonderful thing. I want to ask you this question. Has your journey of faith begun? Or you say, I believe in God. That’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking, have you come to believe the promise of God to the point where you are ready to step out in obedience to his commands? Have you come to the place where Thomas was after the resurrection of Jesus, where he was not simply saying, oh, the Lord is someone else’s God, but, oh, Lord, you are my God. You are my Lord, and I submit my life to you. That is where the journey of faith begins. Has it begun for you, stepping out in costly obedience, because you believe the promise of God that is for you in Jesus Christ? If you haven’t come there, I hope and pray that you will take that step today. The woman’s journey of faith, where it began. Here’s the second thing I want you to notice as we move on. I want you to notice how her faith is tested. And here we take it up at verse 17. After this, after the woman has taken this costly step of obedience and faith, and she has trusted God, after this, the son of the woman became ill. And his illness was so severe, verse 17, that there was no breath left in him. Think of this. After the miracle of God’s provision for this family, with this amazing jar of flour that never emptied, and this amazing jug of oil that never ran dry, miraculous provision by God for this family every day. After this, and after this woman’s amazing costly commitment, Elijah comes to her and says, you’ve got almost nothing, but first make a cake for me and bring it to me. And this woman does it. That’s amazing commitment to God. And after all this, the son of the woman becomes ill and he dies. And you say, oh God, of all the women who are in Sidon, why would you allow this to happen to this woman, to this family, the very family that you have been providing for by a miracle of grace throughout these last days, weeks, and months. Have you noticed, friends, how often God seems to act in contradictory ways? You’re listening to Open the Bible with Pastor Colin Smith and the message, Where Faith Begins, part of our series, The Surprising Influence of a Godly Life. We’ll get back to the message shortly. Open the Bible is only able to be on this station and on the Internet because of the generous financial assistance that our listeners give us. And this month, if you’re able to set up a new donation to the work of Open the Bible, we’d love to send you as a free gift a book. It’s called The Fight. It’s one of Colin Smith’s personal favorite books, and he’ll be talking a little bit more about it later in this broadcast. Back to the message now. Here’s Colin. Have you noticed, friends, how often God seems to act in contradictory ways? The woman’s son’s been at the point of death, and down to their last meal, God steps in, saves the boy’s life, saves the mother’s life with a miracle, and now the same God who saved the boy’s life allows him to die. What is the sense in that? Sooner or later, every Christian comes to a point where you wonder at God’s seemingly contradictory ways. And most of us can relate to that experience. Some of you will be there now. All of us will be there again at some point in the future. You come to a place in your life when you kind of scratch your head, and you simply cannot figure out what God is doing. God seems to open a door for you, and you say, ah, now this is a wonderful door of opportunity. God is opening it for me. And the next thing, it closes in your face. You have a loved one who is in hospital and seriously ill, and you pray, and you exercise faith, and there seems to be some improvement in her condition, and you tell her, friends, this is wonderful. God is answering prayer. It’s a marvelous thing. And then you hear that her condition has changed for the worse. We’ve all been there. The place in life where God’s ways seem to be contradictory. And you say, what in all the world is God doing? Is he playing games with me? And how can God allow such a thing to happen to a mother who has already suffered so much? Not only that, this woman is a new believer. How can God allow this to happen to a new believer and when she has suffered so much already? Elton John gets to the question in his song, Written in the Stars. Do you know these words? Is it written in the stars? Are we paying for some crime? Is that all that we are good for, just a stretch of mortal time? Is this God’s experiment in which we have no say, in which we’re given paradise, but only for a day? That gets to the question. That’s what it must have felt like, by the way, for this woman, mustn’t it? She was given paradise. She’d come to the end of her road, the end of her resources, and now she has a miracle of the oil and of the flour, but now the son who was delivered by God’s grace lies dead in her arms. She was given paradise, but it was only for a day. You step out in faith and in obedience to God, it will not be long before you look at the events of your believing life and you say, this makes no sense. This woman who is a young believer and she’s now besieged by questions and it’s not much help to her to say, well, no, dear, just pray about it. That doesn’t help at all at this point. How can she pray to the God who has done this? And so she says, verse 18, to Elijah, what have you against me, O man of God? And then notice what she says after that. You have come here to me to bring my sin to remembrance and to cause the death of my son. She feels now that Elijah, who has looked like her savior, seems more now to be her judge. It seems that God, who seemed to be so for her, seems now very much to be against her. And I want you to notice there in verse 18 where she talks about, you’ve come to bring my sin to remembrance, she says to Elijah, that the word sin here is singular. That would seem to suggest that somewhere in her background there was a particular sin that haunted her. Maybe you relate to that. Something that made her feel ashamed. Something in the past that she wished she had never done. And she’s left with this feeling that because of that, God has it in for her. That God in some way was going to pay her back. And that now that this man had come, Elijah, and that it had seemed that he had brought so much good, actually this was just a cover for what was really going on, that God had finally caught up with her after all. Is it written in the stars, are we paying for some crime? Well, you see, that’s what she thought. And it’s not just the unbeliever who asks that question, as Elton John did. It’s the believer who’s asking that question too. Is this what it’s about? Pastor, do you think that God is judging me? And this young mother’s faith is tested. And your faith will be tested as a Christian. There will be times when you look at events in your life and you say, well, it almost seems that God is against me. Your past seems to come up against you. Your own heart condemns you. And when that happens, you need to know that you are not alone and this is not an unusual experience in the Christian life. When the apostle John writes to Christians, he says, whenever our hearts condemn us, this is 1 John and chapter 3 and verse 20, whenever our hearts condemn us, he’s writing to Christians. Now, that clearly communicates that a Christian will experience from time to time your own heart condemning you. Whenever your heart condemns you, it’s not going to happen just once or twice, but there will be many times in the Christian life when the memory of your own failings, the knowledge of your own weaknesses sort of rises up and you feel that your own heart condemns you. And John tells us what to do when you come to that place. He says this, 1 John 3, 20, whenever our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our heart. That’s what you need to know. Quick illustration. Suppose you owe money to the bank and suppose the bank manager just clears your debt. That’s a big suppose, right? You think this is pretty fanciful now. When the bank manager clears your debt, you don’t have to worry if the teller complains. Think about it. You walk into the bank where your debt has been cleared by the manager, by the highest authority. But there at the counter, there is a miserable teller who doesn’t like you. And she always wants to remind you that you used to be a debtor. And when you go to the bank and you’re doing your business, she sort of mutters under her breath while you stand there. She says, you owed the bank money. You didn’t pay that money. You couldn’t have paid that money back if you tried. Listen. Who cares about what the teller says when the manager has cleared your debt? Now your heart is like the teller. And when your heart condemns you, here’s what you need to know. God is greater than your heart. You’ve been cleared at the highest level. So when there is muttering at this level, you tell your heart that God is greater than your heart. You tell your heart that condemns you. There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. That’s how you deal with it. So her faith began. We’ve looked at her faith tested. Your faith will be tested if it’s begun. And perhaps sooner than you think, even as a young Christian. And then I want you to see this third snapshot in her faith journey. It’s her faith triumphant, verse 24. The boy is raised from the dead. The woman received back her son. And at the end of the story, she says to Elijah, verse 24, Now I know that you are a man of God and that the word of God in your mouth is the truth. Christian, your faith has begun. Your faith is tested. One day you will stand in the presence of Jesus and you will say, Now I know. What a day that’s going to be. That is the whole point of the resurrection day and that’s the application of what we’re learning here. Faith will one day for you be turned to sight. Every question you have struggled with will one day be answered. Every tear will be one day wiped away. Now the Bible says we know in part. Then we will know fully even as we are fully known. None of us is there yet, but one day every person in Christ will be. And until then, faith lives on the promise of God even when we cannot understand his ways. So friends, it seems to me that the whole of the Christian life is really laid out in this one mother’s faith journey. Faith begun, faith tested, faith triumphed. There’s the Christian life right there. If you are not yet a Christian, I hope that you will begin a faith journey with Jesus Christ today. If you have begun a journey of faith with Jesus Christ, you must know this, that your faith will be tested. You will come to places where you say, I just do not understand what God is doing in my life. You may come to places where your own heart condemns you and you need to say, God is greater than my heart. But when your faith is tested, remember this, in all the questions that you cannot answer now, the promise of God to you is very clear. One day you will stand in the presence of Jesus and on that day you will be able to say, Now I know. Now I know. Faith begun, faith tested, faith triumphed. You’re listening to Open the Bible with Pastor Colin Smith and the message, Where Faith Begins, that’s part of our series, The Surprising Influence of a Godly Life. And if you ever miss one of our broadcasts, you can always go online. Go back, listen again, or download as an MP3. Our website is at openthebible.org.uk. Also on Open the Bible website, you’ll find Open the Bible Daily. This is a series of short two to three minute reflections, a new one every day, written by Pastor Colin Smith and read by Sue MacLeish. And now you can also find Open the Bible as a podcast from the beginning of August, you can hear Pastor Colin Smith’s messages as a podcast on your favourite podcast site. Simply search for Open the Bible UK or follow the link on the website. Open the Bible is supported by our listeners, that’s people like you. And if you’re able to set up a new regular monthly donation to the work of Open the Bible, we’d love to thank you by sending you a free copy of the book, The Fight, written by John White. Colin, what can we expect to get out of reading this book? Well, you know, every Christian has a responsibility before God to grow. And that came home to me freshly when I was visiting a friend at another church. The senior pastor is a friend of mine. I was waiting for him after the service. I got into a conversation with someone who was on the security team in the church. I asked him, how long have you been in this church and how did you come here? And he said to me, well, you know, every Christian has a responsibility before God to grow. And he said, in our last church, my wife and I weren’t growing. But, you know, since we’ve been here, we’ve been growing and we’ll be here for as long as we continue to grow. Now, that brother was exactly right. Every Christian has a responsibility before God to grow. And, you know, early in my Christian life, God used this book, The Fight, by John White to help me get growing as a Christian believer. It’s still on my shelf. The pages are really, really worn because it’s a book that I’ve gone back to many, many times. And it just is a practical encouragement on living the Christian life. How to grow as a Christian. My edition is years and decades old and delighted that there’s a new edition and that we’re able to share it with friends who listen to Open Bible this month. Well, the book is called The Fight and it’s our gift to you if you’re able to set up a new monthly donation to the work of Open the Bible for £5 or more each month. Go to our website for details, openthebible.org.uk. For Pastor Colin Smith and Open the Bible, I’m David Pick, and I hope you’ll be able to join us next time. Have you ever wondered what Jesus is like as a leader? Is he as tough as nails or gentle and tender? Or something in between? Find out next time on Open the Bible.