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[ Silence ] [MUSIC - "THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER"] (SINGING) Fair is he, the dead of the night o'er. Till morning's bright, still the day, till all that I can see.

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May it be seated. [music] ♪ For the pain of my heart ♪ ♪ No way ♪

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♪ It was there by me ♪ ♪ I redeemed myself ♪ ♪ And now I am happy all the day ♪ ♪ And the cross ♪

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♪ And the cross ♪ ♪ Where I first saw the light ♪ and the burden of my heart roll away. It was there, I think, I received God's light,

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and now I am happy all day. Hear this word recorded in 2nd Kings chapter 4 verses 1 through 7. "Now there cried a certain woman of the wives of the sons of the prophets unto Elisha, saying, 'Thy servant my husband is dead, and thou knowest that thy servant did fear the Lord, and the creditor is come.

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to take unto him my two sons to be bondmen. And Elisha said unto her, "What shall I do for thee? "Tell me what hast thou in the house?"

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And she said, "Thine handmaid hath not anything "in the house save a pot of oil." Then he said, "Go borrow the vessels abroad "of all thy neighbors, even empty vessels,

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"borrow not a few. "And when thou art come in, thou shall shut the door "upon thee and upon thy sons, "and shall pour out into all those vessels,

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"and thou shall set aside that which is full." So she went from him and shut the door upon her and upon her sons who brought the vessels to her, and she poured out.

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And it came to pass when the vessels were full that she said unto her son, "Bring me yet a vessel." And he said unto her, "There is not a vessel more." And the oil stayed.

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Then she came and told the man of God, and he said, "Go sell the oil and pay thy debt and live thou and thy children on the rest." The subject of the message, "Banquet of a Bankrupt Borrower." This is a message that we had announced a couple of weeks ago and we said we'd leave

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it on the back burner, so to speak, and here it is, being brought to the front burner this morning. "The banquet of the bankrupt borrower. Go borrow thee vessels abroad of all thy neighbors.

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empty vessels bar and not a few and he said go sell the oil and pay thy debt and live thou and thy children of the rest. Our message today is about a miracle related to the prophetic presence in the life of Elisha the prophet. Elisha engaged in numerous spectacular events. He seems to have been

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involved in many everyday experiences. He represents God and the wonderful thing about the God we serve is that he is involved in our everyday experiences. He is involved in the bread and butter issues of human existence, what we call the nitty-gritty of human experience. attention today is focused on a widow. She's the wife of a preacher, her husband

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is what we may call today a member of the seminary. He has two sons. Now her husband has died, she's left deep in debt, she has these two sons and she has borrowed and borrowed in vain efforts to make ends meet. Those of us who have had some financial crisis, you know what it is to have to borrow.

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This situation is one in which her creditors have come time and time again to collect the debt and she has failed to make the scheduled payments.

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Now her back is against the wall. The interest increases, she has no steady source of income, at last she is faced with foreclosure. The creditors have notified her

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that her two sons will be taken into slavery in keeping with the provisions stated in the Law of Moses. This is the last straw. This poor widow

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has utilized every human resource available. In desperation she comes to Elisha

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begging for help. Notice her bankrupt condition, unable to pay her debt,

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facing the enslavement of her children. She has gone as far as she can go. The predicament of this poor widow is a common experience. It's not unusual for an individual to become inundated by creditors.

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I remember a lady who had a very good job teaching school and

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in those days teachers were paid for nine months and they got their checks so that in the summer that if you didn't have anything to do you had to manage your affairs in such a way that you could live through the summer and

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she borrowed from creditors high interest rate 50% some of them. Some of them those days were a hundred percent.

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You kept adding you borrowed a hundred dollars and you didn't pay that back and you borrowed some to pay that back and you added that interest to that interest and that interest to that interest. She had run up some $6,000 and based on what she was receiving at that time and what she owed the creditors if she

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would make those monthly payments, it was impossible for her ever to get out of debt as long as she lived. Well, this is the situation this poor widow is in. She has no means of support, her husband is gone. And there are times when we run out of resources.

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There are times when our limited resources are insufficient to meet the demands life makes on us. And our creditors want what is owed when it is due. And human existence has a way of saying pay now or else.

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And borrowing is a way of mortgaging our future, borrowing. It's something that we

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we live by to borrow. I was coming up that the very popular dollar down in a dollar a week you get what you want and pay that whatever

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carrying costs may be borrowed. In fact In the community, the neighborhood where I lived, you know, if we ran out of something, we'd go next door, you'd borrow a cup of sugar, a cup of flour. That was very common when I was a boy,

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to borrow. And still very common, in fact, we have now made it possible for young people who want to get an education, if they don't have the resources, they can borrow. Student loan programs, pay it back when you get out of college.

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In fact, we wouldn't be able to make it as a city if we didn't borrow. We have our bond program both as a city, we have it in our schools, our public schools, we borrow. In fact, this is what, this is the way the country is run. We, we've borrowed and borrowed and borrowed. In fact, we have, we have mortgaged the future of unborn generations

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by what we've done. That's a way of life. It's true of personal lives, it's true of our city, it's true of our state in a sense that we find ourselves in a financial crisis. We say in Texas that we cannot have a debt

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but we certainly could not operate as a nation without it. Aristotle Onassis made a fortune by borrowing. What he said is that you use somebody else's money, you take and borrow from somebody else and you invest and you make money on somebody else's money,

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and that's the way to get ahead. That was his philosophy. But we must depend on borrowing in order for our personal finances,

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the banks that are in business provide resources for borrowers, but bankruptcy occurs when we cannot pay back what has been borrowed.

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We notice that a number of airlines that are facing bankruptcy, number of businesses today facing bankruptcy. It's when one finds oneself in deep debt and is unable to meet that obligation.

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I speak from time to time of the man who had so many debts that he just wrote the amount and the name of each debtor creditor. He wrote that and put it in a hat and he just shook up the hat and drew out how much

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his check was each time and that's the ones he paid. The poor widow faces having her sons taken into slavery by her creditors. This is her predicament. She faces bankruptcy. Pushed against the wall without any resources of her own,

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here she is. When this poor widow comes to Elijah, Elisha rather, she comes and she presents her problem to the prophet. And Elisha says to her, "What do you have in the house? What resources do you have?

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What do you have of value?" She replies, "I don't have anything but just a jar of oil." He says to her go borrow as many empty vessels as you can from your friends and neighbors And how strange are the directions of the Prophet this dear lady has been borrowing all the time

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That is what got her into trouble Borrowing and borrowing and borrowing And yet Elisha tells her to borrow some more This time she is to borrow from friends and neighbors

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This is a new kind of investment. She is to take the pots and pans in her house that she borrows from neighbors and to take the jar of oil that she has and fill a pot. She fills the first one and she fills the next one. She fills the next one and the next one and the next one until all of the pots that she has

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borrowed are filled with oil. Then Elisha says to her go sell the oil and take the money and pay your debts and she obeys that prophetic word. We know when Israel left Egypt on the journey toward Canaan they received a command to borrow and they borrowed of the Egyptians jewels and silver and gold and

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clothes and the Lord inclined the Egyptians to act favorably toward the Israelites. They took heavy payment and they took their journey having borrowed the things that they needed. Borrowed. I remember when I went away to college that most of the money that I had, practically all of it, had been borrowed

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from Longsharks. My registration fee and all of that was borrowed. And sometimes the only way we can make it is to borrow, but yet in the midst of this borrowing, in the midst of the bankruptcy that she faces, in the midst of the command to borrow there also comes a blessing. This poor widow

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obeys the prophetic word, she fills one pot after another, and she sells the oil and pays her creditors, and she still has money on which to live, and that's the way it is with God. But when we find ourselves at our wits end, when we find ourselves without any human resources on which to depend, God says come to me,

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come to me, and he provides what we need. That's the miracle, that's the miracle. Not only is this woman blessed, but she is blessed because she has extravagant faith. And so today we find ourselves many times up against it, but how extravagant is your faith? How extravagant is your faith to somehow trust God to

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stretch out on his word and say, "Well Lord, I don't know where to turn. I've done everything." When it comes to the human resources I've exhausted every mean, but she comes to the man of God and the man of God tells her to go and borrow and she finds that by her obedience to this word that she's blessed.

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Harry Emerson Fosdick tells of a woman who was comparatively young and she was left a a widow with five children and by careful management she saw all of them through school and college. One son became president of a railway system, another became president of a university, another became a leading pioneer in the

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field of medical research and that woman had extravagant dreams for her children and because she did they eventually fulfill them. That lady died in her 96th year and on the day of her funeral the children said that they had never seen her impatient or distraught to the point of giving up even in the most troubled

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times. It was the university president who said that no one could understand his mother who did not understand the meaning of extravagant faith. Her faith, he said, was a force that released radiance and power. So God wants us to come to him in the midst of our stress, in the midst of our difficulties, in the

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midst of every crisis we face, that what he wants us to do is to come to him, to borrow from him, to borrow from him because you see we often run out. You know, you run out of patience. There are many situations at your face where you say, "Well, I don't have the patience to deal with that." God said, "Well, borrow from me." We run out of strength.

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"Well, I don't want to put up with this, I don't want to put up with that." And there is one who says, "Borrow from me." You know, sometimes we don't have the love to deal with some situations. There are a lot of unlovely people that we have to deal with.

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And many times we find ourselves without enough love to deal with those situations, but there's one who says, "Borrow from me." That's what Jesus did in the midst of the challenge when they were there hungry. He said, "What do you have?" they said well we only have a lad here with with three barley loaves and and

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and and and some fishes just some loaves and he said bring these to me five barley loaves three fishes that's all but Jesus took it and blessed it and not only did the boy have as much as he had for lunch but everybody else had been fed and there was plenty left to spare. And Jesus said well if you really want to find the

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secret of life you learn how to borrow from the right one borrow from God borrow from God. He said that there's a situation here that explains how this really worked?" Said there was a man who had retired. He'd gone to bed and there's a knock at his door at midnight. And he stays there, he hears the knock there, but he doesn't

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respond. The man just keeps on knocking. And finally he gets up and he comes to the door. He sort of wipes the sleep from his eyes, asking what does he want. He said, "Well, I have a friend that has come upon me tonight and I don't have anything to set before him lend me three loaves lend me three loaves in other

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words I want to borrow something from you I need it desperately I'm in a crisis and so I've come to borrow because I know you have what I need and so I've come here at this critical moment in my life I've come asking that you would lend me three loaves and he said he though this friend is in sleep with his family and even though he doesn't want to get want to be disturbed he gets up and he comes and he lets him have the three lows. Well he said God is like that. If you ever find yourself in the midst of

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a crisis, if you ever find yourself up against the wall, there's always one to whom we can go and say friend because he is our friend. He's a friend that's always there in a midnight hour when we cannot find our way, he's always there at our side. He comes to bless our lives. So this poor widow not only sells her all and she has money to pay her debts, but she has a banquet. Her life becomes a banquet because she goes to God in the

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midst of her crisis. You really want life to be a banquet. You really want your life to be a source of joy. If you really want your life to be radiant with hope and enthusiasm and excitement, you somehow learn to borrow from God. So Lord, Lord, Lord, give me a little faith. I'm weak here, but give me the faith that I might

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completely yield myself to you. Lord, give me more hope that in the midst of all of the despair of the times that I can have that hope, that living hope in you and then above all Lord give me your love, give me your love that I can really celebrate every day of my life. That's what it means to have a banquet with God,

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to have a banquet with God. You see God has made that possible because He knows every one of us is a debtor but he has sent Jesus Christ to live the life and to pay the debt that we owe the debt of sin Jesus lived the sinless life and he has paid it all on Calvary's rugged brow he's paid it all and it's by accepting

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him, it's by coming to him, it's by borrowing of his righteousness that our life can be a banquet, a life of joy, a life of hope. We invite you to come now as the choir leads us in singing "Jesus Paid it All, All to Him I Owe." [ Music ]

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[MUSIC] ♪ His grace ♪ ♪ In me is found ♪ ♪ Child of me ♪

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♪ With one done frame ♪ ♪ I believe ♪ ♪ Thy holy name ♪ ♪ Jesus ♪

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♪ He's home ♪ ♪ Home to the Ohio ♪ ♪ Ten and a half miles from here ♪ ♪ I'm sure he'll be ♪

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♪ One big wonder soon ♪ ♪ For now, if ye have done ♪ ♪ Thy proud, fragile load ♪ ♪ And changed the young'st heart ♪

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♪ And left the oldest stone ♪ ♪ Jesus, pray behold ♪ ♪ All to Him I owe ♪ ♪ Stay and help the dismal strain ♪

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♪ Be gone, with my head stoned ♪ ♪ Oh, how sweet the sound ♪ ♪ When power by grace could win ♪ ♪ What fun, what fun it was ♪

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♪ When the world was as one ♪ ♪ Jesus made you whole ♪ ♪ All to Him I owe ♪ ♪ There I found my Christmas care ♪

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♪ He washed in my blissing ♪ ♪ Jesus, may behold ♪ ♪ All to Him I owe ♪ ♪ Sing and let the birds of spring ♪

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♪ Be one in life and soul ♪ ♪ Light and soul ♪ [BLANK_AUDIO]