We had enough.
Where is your boundary? We all have different boundaries. What determines your boundaries? When Israel left Egypt their boundaries were being slaves. They struggled to comprehend what it meant to be free. They struggled with trusting God for provision because as slaves they were fed even if it was slave food. They never had to prepare it for themselves and now in the wilderness they had to pick up their manna themselves everyday. They struggled with that because their boundaries had to change, especially the boundaries in their minds.
We cannot live without boundaries. It defines us and we all need them. You cannot drive on the wrong side of the road. You cannot dump your trash in the middle of the road. These are all boundaries that make society function. What happens when we need to change some of these boundaries? It often happens that we are challenged to change. Somewhere we get to the point where we have had enough and say stop. This happened in this story in the bible.
2 Kings 4:6 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 stopped.
In this story there was a widow with two sons. Her husband died and the debtors wanted to take her sons as slaves to pay the debt. Lucky for her, Elisha was there and he asked her what she had. She only had a jar of oil. So he told her to borrow as many vessels as she could find and to go into her house and pour the oil into the vessels. As she was pouring, the oil kept running until the last vessel. She asked for more and when her sons told her that there was no more vessels to pour oil into, the oil stopped. This was a supernatural miracle. What intrigues me is that they got to the point where they believed that they had enough. The supernatural was flowing, but when there were no more natural vessels to receive the supernatural, the supernatural stopped.
I wonder sometimes how many times we were in meetings and God was ready to do the supernatural, but because it took time to prepare the natural vessels, someone got tired of waiting and said that they had enough and that stopped the flow. How many times did God show up in our midst and our boundaries were challenged to change but were not ready to stretch and we declared that we have no more capacity and it prevented God from doing something great? How many times have our boundaries limited God from delivering us and giving us all we need to get out of our debts? How many times did our boundaries limit our blessings not because God does not want to bless but because we could not take more?
What is keeping you from abundance? What boundaries need to be revisited and changed? Where do we need to stretch ourselves so that we can see His supernatural intervention in our lives? I have heard people so many times complain about the length of the service. They complain about the songs we sing or the way we preach. In the same service you have people that loved the singing and loved the preaching and left with a blessing. Who is right and who is wrong? Neither, I believe. One person is uncomfortable with his boundaries being stretched and the other is comfortable to get more. I love the story of Jacob when he encountered God for the first time. I believe every boundary he ever had was not changed but shattered. Yet he grabs the Angel and demands that he will not let him go until the Angel has blessed him. He left there walking with a limp. Everyone could see he walked differently than he did before the encounter. Think what would have happened if Jacob said that he had enough and left before God could touch him. I long for the day when we will have people crying out to God to shatter their boundaries, but we will not stop what God wants to do until we become a blessing in the earth.