2 Kings 4-6
When God took Elijah, Elisha, his replacement, asked for a double measure of Elijah’s spirit. God granted him this when he saw Elijah taken away. The text then launches into a series of stories demonstrating the spirit of the LORD that Elisha had received. These three chapters are full of these remarkable stories – stories of faith, provision, and mercy. There are a few things that stand out to me this morning.
One thing is Elisha’s generosity. He was always willing to help those in need. And he actively looked for ways to help those who had served him or shown him kindness. It was an active generosity, not merely a passive one.
Another is how God loves to work with what we have; with what we bring to Him. When the widow of one of Elisha’s under-studies came to him for help, he asked her what she had in the house. All she had was one jar of oil. When she willingly gave what she had to God, however, He multiplied it in abundance. And when a man brought 20 loaves of barley bread to Elisha, God used that to feed a crowd with leftovers. It does not matter if what we are or what we have is woefully inadequate to the need. What matters is that God is more than adequate for all things. We need only to be willing to give Him what we do have and to have faith that He can and will use it for good.
And one last thing I wanted to note has to do with expectations. When Naaman went to Elisha with the hope of healing from his skin disease, he almost walked away. Why? Because Elisha didn’t offer the hoped-for healing in the grandiose way that Naaman had expected. How often do we turn away blessings form God or answers to prayer because God doesn’t give them the way we wanted them? It’s rather silly, when you think of it that way. But pride has a way of blinding us to our own foolishness. Lucky for Naaman, he had a bold and sensible servant who called him out on his pride. And to Naaman’s credit, he conceded it.
James 2
At first glance, James 2 seems to address two different topics. The ESV Bible labels them as, “The Sin of Favoritism” and “Faith and Works”. I think, though, that the whole chapter is really addressing the same issue. James is saying that our actions and our claims of faith need to align. He starts the chapter saying, “do not show favoritism as you hold on to the faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ” (James 2:1). After expanding on what he means by that, he states in verse 14, “What good is it…if someone claims to have faith but does not have works? Can such faith save him?”. So he is still talking about holding on to the faith, but he is going a step further to stress that it must be a living faith.
James is not saying that we need more than faith to be saved. His point is that a faith that is not actively lived out in our thoughts and our actions is a dead faith, and thus is not really faith at all. So we need to be certain that what we are claiming as faith in our lives is really faith. If it is, it can’t help but show in how we think and act. That is just what real, living, saving faith does.
Taking this all back to the start of the chapter, we see that showing favoritism based on someone’s appearance or what you think you can gain from them (the likely culprit in James’ example) is not an action that aligns with any claim of holding on to such a living faith. So the message to me is that I need to constantly evaluate whether my thoughts and actions are a product of my own human heart or are a result of the faith I claim in Christ Jesus.