What Hast Thou in the House? And She Said Not Any Thing

There is a thing people say to me that I have learned to stop at, and it never sounds like a big statement when they say it.

They say: I have already asked about that.

Not angry. Not doubting. They say it the way a person says they have already used the coupon, and what is underneath it is a belief that a request has a quantity attached to it and that theirs is spent.

Nobody would say that out loud as a doctrine. If I asked them whether God has a limit on requests they would say no immediately and mean it. But the behavior says something different, and the behavior is what a person actually believes.

And it shows up most in the people who have been through the most. Somebody who has been asking about something enormous for years will very often stop asking about the ordinary things entirely, because it feels like taking more than their share.

There is a woman in Kings who is exactly there, and the first thing the prophet does is ask her a question.

Her first answer was nothing

The situation is as bad as it gets in that world. Her husband is dead, the debt is unpaid, and the creditor is coming to take her two sons as slaves. She goes to the prophet and tells him.

And he asks her a question that sounds almost careless.

And Elisha said unto her, What shall I do for thee? tell me, what hast thou in the house? And she said, Thine handmaid hath not any thing in the house, save a pot of oil. (2 Kings 4:2, King James Version)

Not any thing. That is her first answer, and then she corrects herself in the same breath.

Save a pot of oil.

She had something. She did not think of it as something, because it was not enough to solve anything, and a person in trouble discounts anything that is not a solution.

You have something in the house, and the reason you have not counted it is that it is not large enough to fix anything, and 2 Kings 4 has her saying nothing and then naming a pot in the same sentence, and it is the Spirit who brings a person's attention to what is actually there.

Why the question came first

Notice the order. The prophet does not begin with a promise. He begins by asking what she has.

That is not a mechanism, and I want to be clear, because this passage gets used badly. Nothing here says that naming what is in the house obligates God to multiply it. That story is a particular thing that happened to a particular woman, and it is not a pattern anybody is entitled to run.

What the question does is something else. It moves her from a total to an inventory. Before he asks, her situation is one large fact called nothing. After he asks, it is a house with a pot in it.

And people in trouble need that more than they need encouragement, because a total cannot be worked with and an inventory can.

You are not standing in front of a total, and the shape of your situation changes the moment somebody asks what is actually in it (2 Kings 4:2), and the Spirit is the one who does that asking in a person who has been carrying one enormous undifferentiated fact.

Jesus does the same thing with five thousand people to feed. He asks what they have. The answer is a boy's lunch, and the disciple who reports it adds the obvious.

There is a lad here, which hath five barley loaves, and two small fishes: but what are they among so many? (John 6:9)

But what are they among so many. That is the sentence of somebody who has correctly assessed the arithmetic, and it is also the sentence that comes just before the thing happens.

There is no quota

Now let me deal directly with the belief that started this, because it is the thing actually stopping people.

Nowhere in Scripture is there a limit on requests. Not a hint of one. The parable Jesus tells about praying is explicitly about not fainting, which means keeping on, and the widow in it asks the same thing repeatedly and is commended for it.

And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint. (Luke 18:1)

Always. And not to faint, which assumes people get tired, which assumes it goes on.

And the psalm has the widest invitation in the book, and it is about a mouth.

I am the LORD thy God, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt: open thy mouth wide, and I will fill it. (Psalm 81:10)

Open thy mouth wide. That is not the language of somebody rationing.

You have not used up anything, and the only limit named anywhere in that psalm is how wide a person opens their mouth (Psalm 81:10). The Spirit is the one who takes the ration mentality out of somebody who has been asking about one enormous thing for years.

I will say the honest part too. Asking again is tiring, and people do not stop because of theology, they stop because hope is expensive and they have been spending it. That is not weakness and it does not need correcting.

You have been paying for every one of those years and nobody has counted the cost of it out loud, and Luke 18 assumes people grow faint rather than pretending they do not, and it is His Spirit who has been supplying what a person could not have spent for nine years on their own.