I know the power of the God who fills up those who have become poor. He never lets the flour container go empty or the oil cruet run dry ( 1Ki 17:9-16). But perhaps His rescue will not come until we have run out of resources, until what we think, wrongly, we have produced for God has run out. Sometimes we do not hunger for what is God's until we become starved.

God is willing to let us starve if we need to starve. God forbid that he should withdraw his generous care of us; that he would snatch the gifts of body and blood from our altar or that He would deprive us of His holy life-giving Word. Paul alerts the Corinthians to their starvation from the gifts of the Table: "It is not the Lord's Supper you eat" ( 1Co 11:20)! Lutherans have suffered precisely this fate where modernistic liberalism has taken over the church and her proclamation. This has happened here in America and in the home of the Reformation, Germany itself. The church has become a slave to every wave of culture by which it is tossed to and fro and blown about by every windy man-made doctrine. Preaching has become dry as dust, mouthing only political correctness. The Bible is no longer taken seriously as God's gracious self-disclosure. The spiritual pantry is empty here and in Europe. And we in our Lutheran congregations are not immune from these baleful influences. Our flour canister can run dry and the oil cruet can go dead empty if we ourselves no longer hunger for these things, just as the elderly suffering from Alzheimer's disease sometimes starve to death, because they no longer savor food; they no longer hunger for it.

The outward appearances of life can fool us into believing that we have true life and true abundance. The widows in 1 Kings 17 and Mark 12 were not fooled by this appearance. They could give away what was left of the appearance of their life, knowing that they had a life that was quite beyond what was in the pantry. There are many people who think lots of stuff means that they have an abundant life. Jesus wants to disabuse us of that notion by pointing the widow out to us. About her Jesus says, "Truly, I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the offering box. For they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on" ( Mk 12:43-44). She gives away her whole living and yet still has life in abundance, because it comes from God, not from her possessions. This is a wonderful lesson to learn. She gives not left-overs. She does not offer from the margins but gives away the very center of her earthly existence and yet without fear of losing true life. Her true life cannot be taken from her, because she has a God who cares for her.