How many believers in this day are like the poor widow of Sarepta before she met Elijah! They know so little of the wonderful service they are predestined of the Lord to fulfill for Him here that they are, ignobly enough, looking only for a couple of sticks, accounting that they have just sufficient in the barrel and the cruse to die upon, but far from enough to live on! They have so little understood the wonderful fact that they have present possession of Christ and of the Holy Spirit, as the inexhaustible resources of faith — of which the meal (or wheat flour) and the oil were types — that they go along with their eyes upon the ground, and their piety chiefly consists in a suitable preparation for death! It may be in the near or distant horizon, but this only is looming before their souls. These are they who religiously affirm that “in the midst of life we are in death,” never having learned how much happier it is to be able to say, and how much more divinely true it is to the saint, that in the midst of death we are in life, not knowing how incomparably greater a thing it is to be fit to live than to be fit to die.
And in like manner, how little now do saints generally recognize that no higher dignity and no greater privilege could be conferred upon us than are ours already, in being sent here to find in the interests of Christ our first consideration, and in being made competent, by the divine resources we possess, to minister of them as freely to others as we have partaken of them abundantly ourselves! How simply and how confidently did the Zidonian widow receive and act upon the Tishbite’s testimony! She goes back into Sarepta ennobled by faith and enriched with promises, qualified and commissioned by Jehovah to dispense His bounty to His honored servant. She was also to be the witness of divine superiority to the deepest human exigencies, as to herself and her house—a poor Gentile by nature, but bound up now in the bundle of life with Elijah and Elijah’s God!
Bible Treasury, Vol. 12