From the Famine He Brings the Feast

Summary

Summary prepared by Acts 2:38 Life from the transcript below — the preacher’s words follow in full.

Preaching a Wednesday-night service at Christian Life Church, Jacob Phillips builds a one-point sermon out of the siege of Samaria. His text opens at 2 Kings 6:24-25 — Benhadad has surrounded the city, the famine is so severe that an ass's head sells for eighty pieces of silver — and lands at 2 Kings 7:14-16, where the Syrians have fled in the night and fine flour sells for a shekel, according to the word of the LORD. Between those two readings stands Elisha's word, preached all night as a refrain: tomorrow about this time, the famine will be over. Phillips's point is about what famine does to people while it lasts. Famine is inevitable, it usually comes because an enemy has the upper hand, and it is not a sign God hates His people — God uses it to teach faith. But famine changes diets: a people forbidden by Leviticus 11 to eat the donkey are eating the donkey, and the donkey was God's own provision, the beast of burden and the beast of travel. In the sermon's figure, the donkey is the burden God laid on a believer's heart — the family, the city, the Bible study, the vision of revival — and the famine's real danger is that a hungry saint will eat his own burden and kill his own future, the way the women of Samaria agreed to eat their sons. Worse, the one who has killed her future then complains to the king that the other woman will not kill hers: a critical spirit is what a dead burden leaves behind.

The counter-command is to hold on one more day. Don't give up the burden in the famine; don't say "when the famine is over, then I'll believe, then I'll give, then I'll be a soul winner," because the famine never ends for the person who kills his future inside it. Abraham is the precedent: famine drove the favored man of promise down to Egypt and attacked his marriage, but he made up his mind to survive the famine, and the first time Scripture calls a man rich is Abraham coming out of it. Israel went into Egypt begging bread and came out with spoil. Famine arrives in small increments, Phillips argues — a bad week, a bad fight, another week of barely paying the bills, until the devil convinces you this is the new normal — but it does not leave in increments. It ends in a moment, suddenly, and it ends exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think (Ephesians 3:20).

The closing movement gathers the Bible's "abundantly" texts: water from the rock in Numbers 20, enough for millions; the Holy Ghost shed abundantly in Titus 3, enough even for the most crime-ridden city in America; and God's first commands in Genesis 1, 8, and 9 to bring forth and multiply abundantly. The altar call is for anyone on their last leg: get enough faith for one more day — faith to last until Sunday — and refuse to sacrifice the future God promised for an immediate reprieve, because from the famine He brings the feast.

Scripture index: 2 Kings 6:24-25; 2 Kings 7:14-16; Leviticus 11; Deuteronomy 17:16; Ephesians 3:20; Numbers 20; Titus 3; Genesis 1; Genesis 8; Genesis 9.