The Big Feed...Matthew 14:13-21...Life around Jesus' table

 

This isn't 5,000 men plus women and children as in the passage last Sunday but this is our 5,000+ for the week.  It is amazing to be all around the table at once.  There are now 20 of us.  We have went from addition to multiplication in our family as each of our 4 children are now having their families.  Our 2 year reunions have been highlights of our lives and this one was spent in Colorado.  This picture featured the 20 rainbow trout the grandchildren caught at a local kids' fishing pond.

Jesus is going to present 2 amazing events back to back for his disciples.  In this big feed they are ready to pass off the responsibility to someone else.  They tell Jesus to send the crowd away and their solution is that those people can fend for themselves.  They use the word "only" and calculate what was possible with the money they may have had.  The disciples were identifying and pointing at the need but they were not going to get involved in applying any physical help from themselves.  This has become a pattern very prevalent in our day.

We are great at pointing out what is needed or what is wrong and sometimes it is accompanied by some criticism.  We may even feel this is our "duty" to state the obvious and then we are done.  We have done our job by pointing it out but Jesus has other plans for His disciples when He tells them "No, you feed them!" But how would that even be possible?  The disciples point out they "only" have 5 little loaves of bread and 2 little fishes, a boy's lunch for the day.  They calculated what they had and maybe what they had in the money bag but they didn't factor in Jesus.  They calculated to time of day and how far it was to the nearest town but they didn't factor in Jesus.  They didn't come to the One who had done so many amazing things so far and even provided all their needs on their recent mission trip with a question rather than a statement.

I have seen the church and myself so much like the disciples over the years.  It is the rare occasion when we see the need and take it right to Jesus.  We usually state the problem and see its enormous size and then stop before taking it to the Savior.   We add up what we have and say that it is not enough.  We want to send them onto another place.  We point but offer no physical help.  The church budget gets in the way and we state, "We don't have a line in the budget for that!" Therefore we miss out on seeing the awesome hand of God at work through us.  We miss seeing the multiplication that God can do and participating in the distribution of it.  We miss pointing to and saying, "Only God could have done that!"

I think we sell God short of what He is able to do through us.  We say we are too small in number.  We say that our resources are too limited.  We say that we don't have the right credentials.  We say that others could do it better.  We say that we just don't have the time.  We say a lot of excuses when Jesus says, "No, you feed them!"  This could be taken individually and corporately.  Also, this usually revolves around money but there are plenty of other valuables in our lives that might be harder to part with than our money.  A huge part of this process is not only coming to Jesus with what we have but also surrendering our wills for His.  What goes on in the head and the love of the heart needs to come in line with His perfect and better plan for our lives.

Next week Jesus will do another amazing feat and we will see how far the disciples have come after this amazing miracle.  Maybe this will be another sign of how we are much like the disciples of Jesus' day.

Adam