Stronger than Our Needs

Listen Online:

Transcript:

A few weeks ago, I started talking to you on Sunday nights about some of the miracles of Jesus. And I realized as I made the list for myself and went through all the Gospels and made a list of the miracles He did, and then paired them up, some of them will be in Matthew and Mark, some in Mark and Luke, some in all three of those, some in all four, some just in John, and put them together, you know, if they were the same miracle in multiple Gospels, and came up with a list of the miracles that he did, I started just in my own mind seeing them fall into about six categories. And they illustrated to me his mastery, his control, over different areas of the world and of human life.

And tonight I want to talk to you about his control and his sovereignty over our needs. And sometimes we all have needs. Our needs may be different.

Our needs may be different in a particular situation, but we all have needs, and a lot of us have the same needs. At some level, we all have the same basic needs. We all need shelter and food and oxygen and water.

We need a certain amount of money to live off of. We all have needs, and sometimes when those needs are not met, we really notice what they are. Sort of like going back to this morning, talking about the parts of the body, and Paul saying in the body, you know, some are jealous of others and think they don’t matter as much to the body.

And I talked about how, you know, we forget about the foot until the foot acts up. We forget about some of our most basic needs until they act up. We forget about our needs until they’re not, you know, we forget about the need for oxygen until suddenly we find ourselves we can’t breathe.

And just immediately, that need for oxygen becomes apparent, and it becomes paramount. We all have needs, and sometimes those needs get to a point where they take priority, where that is the most important thing. And quite frankly, it gets to the point where that’s the only thing we can see and focus on, and we get so consumed with meeting that need that it looks impossible, it looks insurmountable, oh, it looks like nothing could ever happen that’s going to meet that need.

And it gets us to the point where we forget that God is sovereign even over that need. That God has everything, that God is not broke, that God has everything he needs in order to meet that need for us. And we forget about that sometimes.

I want us to look in Matthew chapter 14 tonight, Matthew chapter 14, at one of these needs that Jesus met. And this is a story that I’m sure you’re all familiar with, but we’re going to look at it tonight again from this perspective of Jesus showing his sovereignty. Starting in verse 15, it says, And when it was evening, his disciples came to him, saying, This is a desert place, and the time has now passed.

Send the multitude away, that they may go into the villages and buy themselves victuals. Now, if you’re wondering what victuals are, it’s an old-timey English way of talking that eventually, in our American way of speaking, became the word vittas. The disciples were coming to Jesus and saying, the people are hungry.

They had been out in this desert place, out in this wilderness area, where there wasn’t a great deal of food. It’s not like the wilderness here, where you can go out in the wilderness and there are plants you can eat and there are animals you can strangle with your bare hands and you can feed yourself. When the Bible talks about wilderness in Israel, it was real wilderness.

And the thing they grew best out there a lot of times was sand and rocks. So they’re out in the middle of nowhere and there’s no food to be found and it’s late in the day and the people have followed Jesus out there because he’s teaching and really a lot of these people are looking for the show. They have seen the miracles that he’s done.

They’ve seen the healings. They’ve seen people raised from the dead. They’ve heard the incredible things that he’s saying.

And so they’re following him. A lot of these people, unfortunately, are following him for the entertainment value of it. And they’re following to see what he’s going to do next.

What is he going to say next? And so he’s drawing this huge crowd. I point that out because it’s not too much further in the gospel narratives before that crowd is gone.

Things get a little difficult and that crowd is gone. And Jesus knew that was coming, and yet he still looks on these people with compassion. The disciples said, we’ve got this massive crowd of people out here.

There’s nothing to eat. It’s late in the day. We really ought to let them go.

Now, I know you’ve been teaching all day. We really ought to let them go so they can go back to the villages and get their own food. Go feed themselves.

The disciples want to cut them loose and say, I know you’re hungry. Go deal with that. Go get your own food.

what’s that okay they want them to go get their own food well they were probably capable of getting their own food except this is a multitude of people they probably my guess is they’re not going to find enough food in the villages either so he said so they come with this need the people need food food is not a well sometimes food can be a want but food is a need I need food I want certain kinds of food believe me but I need food it’s a necessity and without it they won’t survive if they stay out there in the wilderness long enough they won’t survive and so Jesus says there’s a need here and there’s a need for all these people to find food instead of sending them to the villages to find what they can and maybe they can’t find anything let’s just give them something to eat here so he says in verse 16 to them but Jesus said unto them they need not depart give ye them to eat I love this the disciples say there’s nothing here so send them back to the villages so they can buy food and Jesus says now let’s just feed them now if I’m one of the disciples I’m looking around saying with what I just said there’s no food here and they say unto him we have here but five loaves and two fishes that’s not very much We know from some of the other gospel accounts that this was the lunch for a young boy.

We don’t know how young. So I’m not picturing here two giant catfish, which they wouldn’t have eaten anyway, but two giant fish and big loaves of bread. I think what we’re looking at here is probably something more along the lines of sardines, maybe something a little bigger.

Two little fish, just a little bit of protein, and probably we’re talking like tortilla type. loaves of bread. And so they’ve got five of those and two little fish.

I mean, it’s miraculous enough, the way I grew up here in the story, the way you probably grew up here in the story, it’s miraculous enough that Jesus took these two huge fish and these five massive loaves of French bread and made that enough for 5,000 men and their families. See, that’s another thing. I heard growing up 5,000, feeding them to 5,000, feeding them to 5,000.

And he’s feeding them with these massive fish and these massive loaves of bread. That would be miraculous enough. But what Jesus is actually doing here, it says that there were 5,000 men, in verse 21, I’m getting ahead of myself here, that 5,000 men beside women and children, their wives and children, there might have been 20,000 people out here in the wilderness.

Now combine that with, we’re talking about a young boy’s lunch, we’ve probably got two little dinky fish and five tortillas, essentially. Maybe a little fluffier than that, but that’s not a lot of food. That’s not a lot of food for anybody, let alone 5,000 or 20,000 people.

And Jesus looks at them and says, feed them. If they’re hungry, let’s just feed them. And they’re thinking, with what?

We’ve just got this little bit of food. And Jesus says in verse 18, bring them hither to me. Bring me the fish, bring me the bread.

And he commanded the multitude to sit down on the grass and took the five loaves and the two fishes. And looking up to heaven, he blessed and break and gave the loaves to his disciples and the disciples to the multitude. So he tells everybody, come sit down.

And he took the food. He took what little that they had to offer. And it says he looked to heaven.

He looked to God the Father. Now, Jesus was no less God during his time on earth. He didn’t become suddenly not God.

He was God in human flesh. And yet we find that everything he did during his lifetime on earth, everything he did during his earthly ministry, he made sure was directly in line with the will of God the Father. He voluntarily, in his human form, voluntarily submitted himself to God the Father.

Doesn’t mean he was any less powerful, but what we see here is the tremendous respect for God the Father. And so he looks to him, and then he blesses the food, and he begins to break it apart, and he gives it to his disciples, these little bits of fish and bread. He gives it to the disciples, and they begin distributing it to the multitude.

I don’t know if this was a Baptist meeting, but I would have been afraid if I were the disciples to say, we’ve had these people out here all day listening to sermons. They’re hungry, and we’re going to start passing this out, and we’re going to get through about two people, and we’re going to run out of stuff, and we’re going to have a riot. on our hands.

The Bible doesn’t give any indication of that. That’s just where my mind would be going. I’d be afraid that people are going to riot if we tell them we’re going to feed them, and then this is all we have.

But something miraculous happened in verse 20, as you all well know. It says, and they did all eat and were filled, and they took up of the fragments that remained 12 baskets fed. They managed to feed everybody that was there.

20,000 or more people. With these five little loaves of bread and these two little fish, they fed upwards of 20,000 people, and then they had more food left over at the end than what they started with. That’s amazing.

I mean, I’ll joke about that sometimes, but there are certain things that we’ll cook at the house, and I don’t know how to cook for small batches. I cook for about 18 people any time I make dinner at home. And so we eat on it for about a week.

And by the end of that week, we’ll get so tired of it, my goodness, can this pot of whatever just be gone already? And yet it seems like there’s always some there. And I’ll joke that we eat on it and we have more than we started out with.

I know that’s not true. This really is what happened, though. They started out with less than a basket full.

And they ended up with 12. After they’d fed 20,000 people. That’s incredible.

That is incredible. And I’ve heard some so-called Christian teachers who want to strip all the Christianity out of the Bible. They want to strip out all the miracles and all that kind of stuff because they think they’re too smart to believe that.

Say, well, this is not a miracle of Jesus. This is just a story about sharing. They all took what they had and put it together, and God made good use of it.

If they all had that much food, there wouldn’t have been an issue in the first place. My goodness, sometimes you start trying to strip the miracles out of the Bible, it makes less sense than if you just believed them. There wouldn’t have been a concern.

If everybody brought a big picnic with them, there wouldn’t have been a concern about how are we going to feed all those people just to have everybody sit down and eat. No, there was a miracle here. Jesus took two little pieces of fish and five little loaves of bread and fed upwards of 20,000 people and had 12 baskets left over them.

Now the Bible doesn’t, and it says, and they that had eaten were about 5,000 men beside women and children. And the Bible doesn’t go into specifics here about the significance of the 12 baskets. But I’ve always sort of felt like each of the disciples would be handed a take-home basket here as a reminder to them.

Because they had really doubted Jesus’ ability as they had so many other places, they really just didn’t get how powerful Jesus was. Here’s you a basket of food that is of itself more than we started out with. Here’s a reminder to you of what God can do.

And we have needs just like these people needed to be fed. And some of these people would have needed to be fed now. It says they had their children with them.

I know if I don’t eat in the next two hours, I’ll be fine. But most of you, if not all of you, have raised children and realized they get to a point where if they don’t eat now, it’s the end of the world. There’s a reason we feed our children before church on Wednesday and Sunday nights.

Because they just get to a point they can’t wait anymore. There was a need here. They had families.

They had children. They had older people. They had people who needed to eat.

And Jesus met that need. Jesus was able to take what little they had to offer. Jesus was able to take what few resources they had.

And he was able to bless it. And he was able to multiply it. and he was able to use it.

And folks, the same is true for us today. We don’t see miracles like this happen all the time, but we see smaller miracles. We see things that just don’t quite add up in our human imagination.

That God meets these needs. He takes what little we have, and he blesses it, and he multiplies it, and he uses it to meet needs, and we’re left wondering, how did that even happen? And again, I’ve never seen anything quite as dramatic is the feeding of the 5,000.

I hate that name just because it’s more than 5,000. We should change it. The feeding of the 25,000.

I’ve never seen anything quite that dramatic, but I’ve told some of you before, when I started out in ministry, I was bivocational at a little, little tiny church. I had six people when I started there. And we were trying to build this church up, trying to get it to grow.

And I just at one point realized I’m never going to be able to do this if I’m working full-time for the county government and trying to fit this in on the side, plus time with my family and all that. And so I decided God was leading me to quit the full-time job and go full-time on less than a part-time salary. And I don’t know how we survived.

I don’t know how we survived on what we survived on. It would have been less than a week’s pay for most people per month. I don’t know how we did that.

But somehow God made the money stretch in ways that, I mean, it’s like the dollars were made out of rubber. I don’t know how he did it. But we always had food.

We always had the electricity on. We always had water, gas to put in the car to accomplish. God did amazing things.

And maybe your circumstances have never been that dire, but I’m sure you’ve had a circumstance where you’ve thought, I don’t know how I’m going to get to the end of this month, and God stretches everything. Suddenly, what little you had to start with, God has blessed and multiplied, and he’s used it to meet the need. And it’s not just money.

God can do that. Folks, God can do that with food. God can do that with energy.

Hello, parenting. I don’t have another drop of energy left in my body, and yet God somehow gives you the ability to chase a two-year-old. Whatever the need is, whatever the need is, God can meet the need.

God is not broke. Whether it’s money or any other resource we’re talking about, any other need we have, God is not broke. And God can take what middle we have, again, and bless it and multiply it and use it.

But a lot of times we get into those circumstances and all we see is the need. I use the hurricane analogy a lot. And I know you’ve heard it just in the last month where I’ve told you that when you’re standing in the eye of the storm, all you can see is the storm and it looks like the whole world is a storm.

And that goes for the storms of life. That also goes for needs. Sometimes when you’re standing in the middle of the need, all you can see is the need, and it looks so big and so daunting.

And you step back and look at it on a satellite, you step back and look at it from God’s perspective. It’s just a tiny blip on the radar once you’re outside of the storm. We get so fixated on the need, but we see all around us that we forget that for God, that’s nothing.

I can meet that easy. I use that hurricane analogy of standing in the eye of the storm so much because that just hit me one day when I was going through one of the worst days of my life, and I didn’t see how God could possibly do anything about this. And I realized I was looking more at the storm than I was at him.

So no wonder that was all I saw, because that’s all I was looking at. Sometimes the need looks so big, but it seems impossible God can do anything about it. But God’s not broke.

God can meet our needs. God can meet a big need, even with just a small amount of resources, because he takes it, and he blesses it, and he multiplies it, and he uses it. And for us, the problem a lot of times is not only that we’re so focused on the need or the storm or whatever it is.

The problem for us a lot of times is our view of God. Because of those storms, we get into what we call real life, where we have our theological beliefs, our theology over here, but then we have the way we see the real world over here. We shouldn’t separate those two, by the way.

Our theology, our view of God should impact our real life. It should be consistent across the board. But we have our view of God.

Yes, I’m in church on Sunday. I believe, I know that God can do anything. God can do everything.

God can do whatever He wants. I get over here to Tuesday and here’s this big need and there’s no possibility that it can ever be met. Well, God can do anything.

Yeah, I know, but I just don’t know. Our view of God, is it consistent? Is our view of God consistent or not?

When we begin to despair, is our view of God consistent or not? Did God suddenly become any less powerful than he was on Sunday, on Tuesday, just because the need is there? Or is there perhaps a problem that we’re not seeing the power and the sovereignty of God because we’re getting our focus off on the need?

See, God will not be any less powerful on Tuesday than he is today. And God is not any less powerful today than he was 2,000 years ago. Now, God operated a little bit differently 2,000 years ago.

God moved in these miraculous ways a lot of times, and there were signs and things to validate what people were saying because we didn’t have his written word in its completed form yet. And so a lot of the signs and miracles that the apostles did, those were to validate their ministry. A lot of the signs that Jesus did were to prove to people that he was the Messiah.

So if you wonder, why don’t I see these miracles today? We do, we don’t see dramatic ones like this because there was a time and a purpose for them. But just because we don’t see, just because we don’t see every day somebody rode to Damascus, just because we don’t see every day 5,000 people being fed, just because we don’t see every day somebody walking on the water with Jesus, doesn’t mean that God is any less powerful in 2016 than he was back in the 30s AD or before.

See, the God that stood there with them in human form and broke that breath is the same God who came to earth as a tiny baby and took on human form in the first place. He’s the same God who brought his people back from Babylon. He’s the same God who parted the Red Sea to bring his people out of bondage in Egypt.

He’s the same God who gave David the aim and the force to bring down a giant with a rock. He’s the same God who spoke the universe into existence with the words of his mouth, made everything that we see before us. He’s the same God who stood before them and broke the bread and passed it out.

He’s the same God who died for our sins, and he’s the same God who by his Holy Spirit indwells each of us today. And he’s the same God who promises to never leave us or forsake us. And he’s the same God who promises that he’ll supply all of our needs through his riches and glory in Christ Jesus.

There’s not a need we have that God can’t meet. And I believe when we really understand the difference between a need and a want, there’s not a need that we have that God won’t meet. We get wants and needs confused a lot.

I need food. I want water. I need a vehicle to do my job.

I want a big truck. There’s a difference. There’s not a need that he can’t and won’t meet.

We’ve got to realize that when we start to doubt God, when we start to doubt his ability, when we’re looking around going, you’re going to feed all of them with this, it’s not God’s abilities that are the problem. It’s our understanding of God. It’s our view of God.

It’s our forgetfulness that we would look at the God who’s done all these mighty works that we read about and that we’ve seen in our own lives and look at him and dare think for a minute that he’s bothered by the storm, that he’s bothered by the need, that it might present a challenge to him at all. We need to remember who it is we serve and what he’s done for us before. God is stronger.

Jesus is stronger than any need we ever have and he’s not limited by our limitations.