When I was a child, I was encouraged to ‘say grace’ before a meal, a short prayer of thanksgiving for the food on the table. I found this odd, as I could not see how God had provided the meal when I’d watched my father go shopping for the provisions and my mother cook the food. What did God have to do with that?!
Over time, I learned more about God’s provision, including how He gave my parents the strength to earn money to buy the food and the skill to prepare it, as well as being the source of all that we find in the earth. I learned to pray ‘give us today our daily bread’ (Matt 6:11) and about God’s provision of manna in the wilderness (Exodus 16).
One of my favourite stories of God’s provision is in 1 Kings 17, when Elijah, having predicted a great drought, sees God provide food and drink for him through the ravens and a widow at Zarephath. All she had was a little flour and a small jug of oil: not exactly a vast amount! But just as the boy who gave his loaves and fish to Jesus found that these could go much further than he had imagined, so too this widow found that the flour and oil lasted much longer than was humanly possible. Elijah prophesied to her “For this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘The jar of flour will not be used up and the jug of oil will not run dry until the day the Lord sends rain on the land” (1 Kings 17:14) and so she discovered that God’s provision could outlast her supplies!
A similar story is told in 2 Kings 4, when a woman is told by Elisha to get every jug and jar available from her neighbours and to pour her little jug of oil into all of them as a means of paying off her debts!
I find that these stories not only encourage me to trust God to provide for all my needs (Phil 4:19), but I am reminded that oil is often a symbol of the Holy Spirit. We are encouraged to pray for daily bread; the Israelites collected manna on a daily basis (except for the Sabbath), not being required to hoard food, but to trust God to supply it. In the same way, Paul urges us to keep on being filled by the Spirit (Eph 5:18). We need the oil of God’s Spirit every day, to anoint us, to equip us, to give us strength for the tasks ahead. We need fresh oil. It’s not enough to live on past blessings. Just as bread easily becomes stale and is then unfit to eat, so too our lives can become stale if we do not come before God every day for His infilling and refreshing. And just as I learned that it was God who helped my parents to put the food on our table, so too we need God to help us in the ‘everyday’ things, the ordinary, mundane things: our ‘sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life.‘
