GODS PRINCIPLE OF MULTIPLICATION In 2 Kings 4:1-7, we find the following story:

A certain woman of the wives of the sons of the prophets cried out to Elisha, saying, Your servant my husband is dead, and you know that your servant feared the LORD. And the creditor is coming to take my two sons to be his slaves. So Elisha said to her, What shall I do for you? Tell me, what do you have in the house? And she said, Your maidservant has nothing in the house but a jar of oil. Then he said, Go, borrow vessels from everywhere, from all your neighborsempty vessels; do not gather just a few. And when you have come in, you shall shut the door behind you and your sons; then pour it into all those vessels, and set aside the full ones. So she went from him and shut the door behind her and her sons, who brought the vessels to her; and she poured it out. Now it came to pass, when the vessels were full, that she said to her son, Bring me another vessel. And he said to her, There is not another vessel. So the oil ceased. Then she came and told the man of God. And he said, Go, sell the oil and pay your debt; and you and your sons live on the rest.

It is remarkable that when the widow approached Elisha with her financial problem, the prophet asked, "What do you have in your house?" He did not say, "Come here and let me pray for you..." Nor did he say, "I cast out the demon of poverty!" He asked her, "What do you have in your house?" The first thing that came to my mind in reading this is, "What does that have to do with the widow's problem?" The truth is, it has everything to do with the widow's problem! What she needed was a material miracle. She needed money to pay for her dead husband's debt in order to save her sons from slavery. The Bible is consistent in showing that every Godly miracle that involved multiplication of anything material has to come from a material source.

When Jesus fed the five thousand men, He did so by using bread and fish that was available and surrendered to Him. He did not pray for bread to fall from heaven to feed the people. When He turned the water into wine during the wedding feast at Galilee, the wine did not magically appear in the room; it came from the water. Elisha also knows God's principle of multiplication. So when a material miracle was needed, he asked the widow if she had any material thing in her house that God can multiply. A material miracle will always use the materials at hand. Therefore, in order for God to perform a financial miracle in my life, I would need to surrender seed money to Him. My God is a righteous and consistent God. He will not multiply anything material that is not surrendered to Him first. Yes, He is Spirit. Yet He has shown in His word that in this physical world, He performs miracles through physical principles that He also established. The problem with so many Christians today is we expect to God to give us a material miracle without giving Him any material to work with. We treat God like the sweepstakes or the lotto, always seeking and praying to be the instant millionaire. We expect to wake up one morning and have someone hand us a bag of money simply because we are Gods children. We always have reasons why we cannot give so much to His work. Christians today must understand that God works in the principle of exchange. God can only bless that which is fully surrendered to Him. May it be your life, your future, your money, your relationships, or anything else. I love how the Lord is consistent. Even in mathematics, the principle of multiplication is consistent. If we take zero, and multiply it with one million, the product will always be zero. This means that even if God has the ability and the desire to multiply your money one million times, He will not do so unless you give it to Him to work with.

I challenge Christians today to let God perform material miracles as part of our daily lives. Hallelujah! --Bro. John Raymond Ramos