Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] When I walked in this morning, I noticed these little green fruits being given away.
[00:00:07] Has anyone ever eaten one of these?
[00:00:10] Are they nice?
[00:00:13] Excellent.
[00:00:16] I'm glad I have one. I'm actually going to use it as a sermon illustration a little bit later. So there's a reason why it's there.
[00:00:23] Yesterday I had the weird pleasure of sitting down with Tracy's. My wife's brother.
[00:00:33] She had never met her brother. He is 63 years old.
[00:00:38] He is the son of her father's first marriage that apparently ended when his mother found out that her best friend was pregnant with Tracy.
[00:00:51] And all of a sudden, things changed rapidly.
[00:00:55] And in the process of going down there, I met him because he'd just lost his own brother. There was two of them, and he was going, I have no family. Who can I connect with?
[00:01:09] And started searching. Well, my dad must be out there somewhere. I need to find that he'd passed two years earlier.
[00:01:17] Okay, well, I've still got a brother and a sister. Apparently never met them. Let's go and meet them and find out who were they.
[00:01:24] And they sit down and they talk, and they start piecing together bits of life and bits of stories, and they start going, actually, this makes sense now that we get the whole story and I've got your part and your part.
[00:01:39] When you read little passages of scripture, how often is it that we don't get what the passage is actually saying until you get the story around the story and you start to understand this is the context that this story sits in?
[00:01:57] And all of a sudden you start going, oh, I didn't see that.
[00:02:04] The most obvious part of this passage is the obvious bit that we all have.
[00:02:10] Some of us like food, some of us like good food. Some of us like some other types of food, like McDonald's.
[00:02:19] And, you know, whatever it is, we like to eat, we like clothing. And I'm glad to see that you're all dressed.
[00:02:29] We like shelter. We like to go home and sleep somewhere. And even in rich countries like Australia, there are thousands of people every night that have nowhere to sleep, that go to bed with the same clothes that they went to bed yesterday that they'd worn all day and all night, and they'll keep wearing it. And there are people that struggle to have food.
[00:02:54] And there are places all around the world where that struggle that is in Australia is far worse, where they have very little to eat, very little to survive on.
[00:03:09] And the rich are very rich and the poor are very poor.
[00:03:13] And we all know that. We all see that. We get that Jesus Made the statement, the poor you will have with you always.
[00:03:22] Why? Because greed fights in our hearts. And people take little things like this and they go mine and they don't share.
[00:03:32] And in our verse, there's a crowd that's followed Jesus.
[00:03:37] Now, I suspect that crowd is the very poor.
[00:03:42] Other people right at the bottom of the thing that are struggling to find anything to survive with, that are sick, infirm, the low class.
[00:03:54] And they've come, jesus, help us.
[00:03:58] We're struggling, we've got nothing. Can you do something for us?
[00:04:06] And you get, that's their context.
[00:04:10] And then you look over here, here's Jesus and the disciples.
[00:04:13] What's their context?
[00:04:16] Their context is that John the Baptist has just died.
[00:04:22] And they are trying to find a place where they can go and be by themselves and process that and work through their grief, their challenge, their difficulty, and just be alone with one another.
[00:04:37] And in the midst of them wanting to be alone where they can process, here comes this crowd with their needs, their wants, their desires, and goes plonk.
[00:04:50] Hello, we're here. We're hungry. What are you going to do?
[00:04:56] Have you ever felt in your life that sometimes situations are just unreasonable?
[00:05:05] That for these poor disciples working through their grief and their challenges, this ask of these people turning up is just. It's unreasonable.
[00:05:17] What are you doing here? Leave us alone.
[00:05:20] We've got enough of our own stuff to work through.
[00:05:24] Go somewhere else.
[00:05:27] And when you get to this little point where they've been around a while, the disciples come up to Jesus and go, jesus, can you just send them away, please?
[00:05:41] Now, the scripture doesn't record the please, and it doesn't give the emotional context of that. It just says, can you please send them away.
[00:05:50] But when you read it and you understand it, you can just hear the agony in their voices of we've had enough of this please send them away.
[00:06:03] And yet what does Jesus say?
[00:06:07] Some of the most unreasonable verses in scripture.
[00:06:11] You give them something to eat.
[00:06:18] Have you thought for a moment what it would be like to have been a disciple?
[00:06:27] You're in that group, you're grieving, you just want to be alone. You've got no food. At best you may have.
[00:06:37] And in front of you is 5,000 men, 5,000 women most likely, and perhaps another couple of thousand kids.
[00:06:47] And Jesus has just looked at you and gone.
[00:06:51] You feed them.
[00:06:56] What would be your response?
[00:06:59] Of course, my Lord, I would love to.
[00:07:04] Only one small issue.
[00:07:06] All we've got is a couple of fish and some loaves.
[00:07:11] How do you make that stretch?
[00:07:20] And yet somehow, the verse tells us it stretched somehow that little bit that they had when they gave it to Jesus and Jesus blessed it and they broke it and they started passing it around, reached this one, this one, this one, this one, this one. And all 5,000 people, 5,000 men, 5,000 women and kids all got food.
[00:07:51] Isn't it amazing that when we give stuff to God, how God is able to multiply it and make it into more and reach further than what we could do on our own?
[00:08:05] I don't know if you've ever experienced that.
[00:08:09] Yesterday, when I was driving back after all of the excitement of the day, of Tracy meeting her brother, I overlooked one small but somewhat important detail.
[00:08:23] The fuel gauge.
[00:08:26] When I got to Deleraine, the fuel gauge decided that it would show me this little orange light that said, you have 40 kilometers worth of fuel left.
[00:08:35] Now, I don't know about you, but Deloraine is more than 40 kilometres away from Longford and any fuel station anywhere that time of night.
[00:08:45] As I slowly drove from Deloraine, trying to conserve every drop of petrol, the numbers go down and down and down and down.
[00:08:57] And there was a section from the turnoff of the highway to Longford where the amount of fuel going down stopped.
[00:09:09] And it just said, you have six kilometres worth of fuel left for 10km.
[00:09:17] I pulled into the house and it said 2km worth left.
[00:09:21] And I go, how did that happen?
[00:09:29] There's a passage in Genesis 22, a story about Abraham and Isaac.
[00:09:37] It's one of the more challenging scriptures that you can find.
[00:09:42] It records where Abraham was going to take Isaac and they were going to do this sacrifice to God.
[00:09:50] And in verse seven, it says, abraham took the wood for the burnt offering, placed it on his son Isaac, and he carried the fire and the knife. And the two of them went on together. Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, father, yes, my son. Abraham replied, the fire and the wood is here, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?
[00:10:17] Now, if you know the story, you know that in Abraham's mind, the lamb for the burnt offering was the guy carrying the wood, his son Isaac.
[00:10:29] And Isaac was trying to piece together what's going on here.
[00:10:34] It goes on in verse eight, Abraham answered, said, God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.
[00:10:41] And the two went on together.
[00:10:44] Now, just think about this for a moment.
[00:10:47] A lot of people, when they think of these verses, think of Isaac as a little child.
[00:10:53] But Isaac is carrying the wood for the burnt offering.
[00:10:59] He is carrying enough wood to be able to cook an entire animal.
[00:11:08] He is not a little boy. A little boy couldn't do that.
[00:11:12] He has grown up. He is a strong young lad.
[00:11:17] They walked together, and verse nine says they reached the place where God had told them about.
[00:11:22] Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on top of it.
[00:11:27] He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar on top of the wood.
[00:11:33] Abraham is an old man.
[00:11:36] Isaac is a strapping young lad.
[00:11:41] How did Abraham bind Isaac?
[00:11:48] The only way that happened is if Isaac said, yes, dad, it's okay.
[00:11:56] The only way that could happen.
[00:12:02] And Isaac is on top of there, and Abraham is about to do this horrible, disgusting sacrifice.
[00:12:13] Now, what we know is that that didn't happen.
[00:12:17] Isaac was not sacrificed.
[00:12:19] And what we know that in this weird culture that existed at the time where the firstborn sons were sacrificed, Moses, years later, had to write into the law, do not do this. Redeem the firstborn. Don't do this.
[00:12:36] Yet in this place here, Abraham was going to do it. And God comes down and stands there and says, stop.
[00:12:44] Don't do this.
[00:12:47] And in verse 13, it records, Abraham looks up and there in a thicket, he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over, took the ram and sacrificed it instead. Good boy.
[00:12:59] Instead of his son.
[00:13:01] And Abraham called this place, the Lord will provide.
[00:13:05] And as it is said on the mountain of the Lord, it will be provided. And from that verse we get the name Jehovah Jireh, which people celebrate but often forget the context which it come from.
[00:13:19] God will provide.
[00:13:22] And in our verse, we saw Jesus providing.
[00:13:29] Last night, driving home, I saw God provide.
[00:13:34] And in our lives, I suspect most of us have stories where we have seen weird things just happen. And God has provided and God has made a way where things just didn't seem to fit together, but somehow they did.
[00:13:53] And in both cases, there's something very similar.
[00:13:59] Abraham and the disciples both had to take the first step.
[00:14:06] They both had to go to the place where God had designated. They both had to reach around and find what they could, even if it's only one of these.
[00:14:17] And with that, they offered it and they gave it to God.
[00:14:23] And when they did that, God met them there.
[00:14:28] God saw their struggle. God saw their best effort and went, yep, here it is.
[00:14:36] Now we can say, okay, well, that's all the disciples had.
[00:14:42] But can you imagine if you were the one person in that crowd of poor, struggling people that had the fish?
[00:14:57] And God said, I want your fish to feed all of these. And the disciples is looking at you going, hand it over.
[00:15:11] Sometimes the giving of what we've got to God is a big ask. And it's hard.
[00:15:20] And we should never underestimate how hard it is to take the first step.
[00:15:27] Yesterday I said to Tracey's newfound brother, well done on being brave enough to contact and open the door for a connection because you did not know what you were going to find on that other side and because you stepped in and you tried. Now you've got a new brother and a sister and a new family that loves you.
[00:15:54] God turns worlds upside down when we give him the best we've got and ask him to fill in the gap.
[00:16:05] Sometimes he does not fill it how we would like him to fill it. Sometimes he doesn't do it how we want.
[00:16:12] But what we do know is that every time we offer our best to God, God, God comes alongside of us and makes it into more than we can imagine and causes it to reach further than we thought it could reach.
[00:16:27] Now, I don't know about you and what you will do in your lives, but I suspect most of you have got stories that you could tell of where you thought you could do X and God made it into X, Y and Z, and suddenly this little bit became all of this and, and reached further than you thought it could ever reach.
[00:16:49] That's the God that we serve.
[00:16:53] And not only does he do it physically, he does it spiritually, emotionally, mentally, in all areas of our life.
[00:17:02] Let's think physically. It was loaves and fishes.
[00:17:06] And I believe on Friday afternoon there was an example of, of a church coming together and providing some loaves and some fishes that met a need that needed to be met.
[00:17:18] And that's what God does, isn't it? He uses the arms, the feet of the church to reach and to help others.
[00:17:26] And that's a blessing spiritually.
[00:17:31] God has met our needs in abundance, hasn't He? With his grace, his love, his forgiveness, his chocolates, And met a need in us that desperately needed to be met.
[00:17:51] And he doesn't say, you must go from this moment of salvation and live a perfect life. He says, go and do the best you can, and I'll fill the gap.
[00:18:04] Emotionally. How many of us come to God broken and hurting, and yet God shows us his love and we go away strengthened and encouraged, that we are held by his hand and we are the apple of his eye and we have a place mentally. How many of us come to God with weird and wonderful frameworks of how the world works and God slowly, gently puts us together and says, hey, here's a better framework.
[00:18:37] Here's a better way of understanding the world.
[00:18:41] See, we have a God who meets us when we offer him the best that we've got.
[00:18:47] He meets with us and says, I can make this more than you can believe.
[00:18:52] I can do things with you that you didn't think you could ever do.
[00:18:58] I could help you achieve more than you think you could ever achieve.
[00:19:02] Will you trust me with the little bit that you've got?
[00:19:06] Will you put it into my hands and let me multiply it?
[00:19:10] And that is the call that is consistent from the beginning of Scripture, right the way through the end.
[00:19:16] God just keeps calling his people, give me your best and I will meet you there.
[00:19:24] Because who knows, maybe one day one of you could be serving 12,000 people with one of these.
[00:19:35] Maybe God will give you a bit more to start with. I don't know, maybe it will be your grandchildren.
[00:19:42] But what I do know is that day by day, God walks with us and provides.
[00:19:50] Let's pray.
[00:19:52] Father, we thank you so much for the awesome provision that you give us mentally, physically, spiritually, emotionally. You meet with us, you walk with us, you help us.
[00:20:07] You use your church, you use your people, you use us.
[00:20:15] And in that you show your love and your care to so many around the world.
[00:20:21] Father, help us when we are the ones with the fish that we need to give, to give it.
[00:20:28] Help us when we're the ones that need to receive, to be open and humble enough to receive it.
[00:20:36] And Father, help us to have the faith to know that you are with us and that you can multiply.
[00:20:43] Help us to have the confidence that you will never leave nor forsake us, but you will walk with us.
[00:20:52] And while you don't always do it the way we think you're going to do it and the way we would like you to do it, we know you always meet with us.
[00:21:01] So, Father, bless your people.
[00:21:04] Fill them with peace, fill them with joy.
[00:21:07] Fill them with an abundant confidence in you and in who you are.
[00:21:13] I ask this in Jesus name, Amen.
