HOW TO PREPARE FOR A MIRACLE
04-07-13 Sermon
Mark 6:34-44 New International Version (NIV)
34 When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd. So he began teaching them many things. 35 By this time it was late in the day, so his disciples came to him. “This is a remote place,” they said, “and it’s already very late. 36 Send the people away so that they can go to the surrounding countryside and villages and buy themselves something to eat.” 37 But he answered, “You give them something to eat.” They said to him, “That would take more than half a year’s wages[a]! Are we to go and spend that much on bread and give it to them to eat?” 38 “How many loaves do you have?” he asked. “Go and see.” When they found out, they said, “Five—and two fish.” 39 Then Jesus directed them to have all the people sit down in groups on the green grass. 40 So they sat down in groups of hundreds and fifties. 41 Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to his disciples to distribute to the people. He also divided the two fish among them all. 42 They all ate and were satisfied, 43 and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces of bread and fish. 44 The number of the men who had eaten was five thousand.
Miracles begin in the __________________________________.
34 When
Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them
1. I admit that I have ___________________________________.
35 By this time it was
late in the day, so his disciples came to him. “This is a remote place,” they
said, “and it’s already very late. 36 Send
the people away so that they can go to the surrounding countryside and villages
and buy themselves something to eat.”
37 But he answered, “You give
them something to eat.” They said to him, “That would take more than half a year’s wages[a]! Are we to go and spend that much on bread
and give it to them to eat?”
Three
self-defeating behaviors:
We P_________________________
By this time it was late in the day,
We B________________________________
Send the people away
We W_________________________________
“That would take more than half a year’s
wages[a]! Are we to go and spend that much on bread
and give it to them to eat?”
2. I assess what I ____________________________________________________.
38 “How
many loaves do you have?” he asked. “Go
and see.” When
they found out, they said, “Five—and two fish.”
3. I give God ____________________________….
God will use _______________________.
41 Taking
the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and
broke the loaves. Then he gave them to his disciples to distribute to the
people. He also divided the two fish among them all.
“Where your treasure is, there your
heart will be also. Matthew 6:21
4. I expect Him to _____________________________________.
“Whatever you sow you’re going to
reap.” Galatians 6:7
“All things are possible with God.” Mark
10:27
HOW TO PREPARE FOR A MIRACLE
04-07-13 Sermon
Today we’re going to look at
a miracle. It’s one of the most
famous miracles of Jesus. In fact
it’s so famous it’s the only miracle that He ever did that’s recorded four
times in the Bible. It’s found in
the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. It’s commonly called the miracle of feeding the five
thousand. But really there were
far more than five thousand people there.
The Bible says there were five thousand men that were there.
Where we have five thousand men, you’ve probably got five thousand women
and maybe another ten thousand kids.
So when Jesus took one little boy’s lunch and was able to feed all those
people there was probably, fifteen, twenty thousand people at this event. It was the most famous miracle because
everybody saw it happen. It was
widely known.
Miracles begin in the heart of God.
Jesus never did a miracle to
show off. Just to say, “Look at
this!” Miracles always begin in
the heart of God. We have a God
who loves us. The biblical text
here sys that Jesus looked at the crowd and was filled with compassion for them. The fact that miracles proved that
Jesus was God come in human flesh was a byproduct.
The fact that miracles taught principles was also a byproduct. God did miracles because he loves his people. In what we call the Lord’s Prayer Jesus taught his disciples to pray Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. So each time that God or Jesus or an angel did a miracle they brought a bit of the conditions of heaven here to earth. There is no blindness in heaven so when Jesus healed a blind person he brought the conditions of heaven here on earth—because he loved that blind person. And there are no demons in heaven so when Jesus cast demons out of people he brought the conditions of heaven here on earth—because he loved that demonized person. And here in the miracle that we are going to look at today, Jesus was filled with compassion for the people, and he saw that they were hungry and no means of getting food where they were, and he knew that there are no hungry people in heaven, so he brought the conditions of heaven here on earth and fed all those people miraculously.
The fact that miracles taught principles was also a byproduct. God did miracles because he loves his people. In what we call the Lord’s Prayer Jesus taught his disciples to pray Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. So each time that God or Jesus or an angel did a miracle they brought a bit of the conditions of heaven here to earth. There is no blindness in heaven so when Jesus healed a blind person he brought the conditions of heaven here on earth—because he loved that blind person. And there are no demons in heaven so when Jesus cast demons out of people he brought the conditions of heaven here on earth—because he loved that demonized person. And here in the miracle that we are going to look at today, Jesus was filled with compassion for the people, and he saw that they were hungry and no means of getting food where they were, and he knew that there are no hungry people in heaven, so he brought the conditions of heaven here on earth and fed all those people miraculously.
In this miracle we have the
story of how to have a miracle in your own life. How do you prepare for a miracle? First you realize that God loves you and wants to help you in
your situation.
How else do you prepare for a
miracle? Someday you’re going to
need one. You may need one this
week. A financial miracle, a
health miracle, a relational miracle in your family with your kids or your
husband or your wife. From this
story we find four key essentials of receiving God’s miracles in your
life.
Mark 6 says, “When Jesus saw the large crowd He had
compassion on them so He began teaching them. By this time it was late in the day so His disciples came
and said, ‘This is a remote place.
Send the people away so they can go and buy something to eat.’ But Jesus said, ‘You give them
something to eat.’ They said,
‘That would take eight months of a man’s wages.’”
What we have here is a
problem. It’s a large very hungry
crowd that’s been out in the middle of the desert all day to hear Jesus
teach. As the day wears on they
get hungry and there’s no McDonalds in sight, they can’t order a pizza delivery. There’s a real problem here. When you have a problem and you need a
miracle you need to do four things.
They’re all taught in this story.
1. I
admit that I have a need.
That’s the starting
point. If I want God to work in my
life I’ve just got to admit it: “God, I
need Your help.” But for many
of us this is pretty difficult. We
don’t like to admit our problems.
We like to hide our problems.
We like to cover up our problems.
We like to blame other people for our problems. We like to pretend our problems don’t
exist. But the first principle of
this story is God doesn’t work in your life until you ask Him to. He doesn’t save you until you ask Him
to. He says, “Ask and it shall be given.” Over twenty times in the New Testament
we are commanded to ask. So I come
to Jesus and say I’ve got a major need in my life. Because God won’t help until you admit you need help.
We don’t do this. What we usually do is three self-defeating behaviors. All three of them are in this story.
First the disciples procrastinated. They put off dealing with the problem. They delayed it. Notice it says, “By this time it was late in the day.” Anybody could have figured out these people are going to
get hungry some time. We’re out
here in the middle of the desert.
There’s no place to eat. No
fast food chains. What’s going to
happen? They just put it off.
Typically, we do this with a
lot of our problems. We delay, we procrastinate, we pretend it doesn’t
exist, we want to look the other way.
But the truth is procrastination only makes a problem worse. It’s like putting your homework off
until the last minute. Or putting
your taxes off till the last minute.
When you have cancer delay can be deadly. Procrastination never solves any problem. What it does is it makes the problems
worse.
Two,
We blame other people. We pass the buck. We say it’s not my fault. It’s all their fault. Notice what the disciples said. They said, “Send the people away.” In
other words, out of sight out of mind.
But basically they were saying, “Jesus
we didn’t ask these people to come see You. It’s not our responsibility to feed them. They’re all hungry. Tell them to get lost. Tell them to go into the countryside,
find a store and make themselves some food. We didn’t ask them to come and stay this long.”
We do this a lot with our
problems. We want to just kind of
pass it on. It’s not my
fault. It’s society’s fault. It’s the environment’s fault. It’s my parent’s fault. We blame other things and other people. But it’s not really their fault.
Three, we worry. We worry about our problems. If you prayed about your problems
as much as you worry about them, you’d have an awful lot less to worry
about. But we tend to fret and
stew. We get anxious and stressed
out. Look at what the disciples
did. They said to him, “That would take
more than half a year’s wages[a]! Are we to go and spend that much on bread
and give it to them to eat?”
They
said “Imagine the expense. It would take eight months of a man’s
wages.” They did a little cost
analysis. Their anxiety goes into
overdrive. I can imagine Peter or
some of the other guys going, “Jesus, how
are we going to do this? Feed
five, fifteen, twenty thousand people.
How are we going to transport the food out here? How are we going to keep it warm? Who’s going to clean up the mess? Who’s going to pay for the liability
insurance?” And all the other
problems they could think of.
Their minds were going into overdrive.
What they had forgotten was
who was there with them. Jesus
Christ the Son of God, standing right by them. This was a guy who could turn stones to bread if he needed
to. He’s standing right there and
they’re looking for a Colonel Sanders.
We do this a lot. When we
have a problem and we forget that God’s with us. He said, “I’ll help you
if you’ll just come to Me.”
But first, I have to admit that I have a need.
2. Step
two when I need miracle, I assess what I already have to work with.
I do a little realistic
analysis of my resources and I ask myself, What have I got? And, How am I using
it? In verse 38 it says “Jesus said, ‘How many loaves do you
have? [How much bread is in
the crowd?] Go and see.” When they found out they said, ‘Five
small loves of bread and two fish.’”
Why did Jesus do this? He’s God. He could just rain manna out of heaven. He’d done that before. Why would He say, “Go see what you’ve already got.” Because here’s the second principle when you need a miracle
in your life. First you admit you
have a need. Second, you assess
what you have to work with. The
second principle is God always starts with what you’ve got. You take the energy you’ve got and give
it to Him. You take the time
you’ve got and give it to Him. You
take the money you’ve got and you give it to Him. You take the relationship or the talent or whatever it is
that you’ve got, you say, “God, here’s
what I’ve got.” And you do an
evaluation of it.
Notice verse 36 Jesus said, “You give them something to eat.” You feed them. How would you like to be a disciple and
have Jesus say that to you? You’re
standing there and saying, “Lord look at
these fifteen, twenty thousand people hungry.” And Jesus looks at you and says, “Why don’t you take care of this problem?” The disciples’ responded, “Lord, this is impossible.” It’s humanly impossible. It’s financially impossible. It’s practically impossible. We can’t do this. We don’t have the resources. It is beyond us.
Has God ever asked you to do
anything impossible? If you’ve
been a believer for any length of time I guarantee you He probably has. Why? God loves to ask Him children to do the impossible. Why? He wants to stretch your faith. He wants to test you.
He wants you to see that He can be trustworthy.
John tells us the same
story. Jesus asked this only to
test them. He already had in mind
what He was going to do. Jesus
wasn’t sweating the problem. He’d
seen the need long before they did and He had a plan. He obviously knew they were going to get hungry. He knew what He was going to do. He was just testing the disciples by
saying, “Why don’t you do it?” Asking them to do the impossible.
This next week, you’re going
to have some problems come up in your life that you don’t have the slightest
idea are going to come up. A
crisis is a crisis partially because it takes you by surprise. Maybe some of you this week are going
to get that phone call in the middle of the night that gets your heart racing
and your adrenaline pumping. You
hear that there’s been an accident.
Or you hear that a loved one has been taken to the hospital. Or has passed away. Or you’re going to go into work and get
one of those little pink slips. Or
you’re going to be told that the place is downsizing. Or you’re going to be called up by your school saying, “We’ve got a problem with your child.” On and on and on. And you don’t know what those problems
are. That’s part of what makes
them problems. They’re going to come
up.
But here’s
the point. God knows the answer
before you even know the problem.
God knows the answer before I even know the problem. He’s not going to be surprised by
it. He sees the beginning and the
end. He knows every problem you’re
going to face the rest of your life.
He already does. He’s not
shocked. He’s not surprised. He’s not blown away by it. You just come to Him and say, “God, You knew this was coming. So obviously You know the answer even
before I knew the problem.”
I come to Him and say, “Here I am. I admit I have need.
Here’s what we’ve got to work with.” The little talent.
The little ability. The little
wealth. The little time that I’ve
got.
3. I give
God whatever I have.
This is the third step to a
miracle – give God whatever you have.
In the book of John it tells the story that a guy named Andrew, one of
the disciples, found a little boy in the crowd, who’d brought a sack
lunch. It wasn’t much. It was just five little barley loves,
five little muffins and a couple of fish.
Probably dried sardines.
I
am sure that in that crowd of fifteen to twenty thousand people somebody else
had brought a bigger and better meal.
But this little boy got to be the hero not because he brought the best
meal. Somebody out there probably
had wine and bree in their lunch.
Somebody else probably brought a real gourmet dinner, lean cuisine or
whatever. This little boy became
the hero of the story not because he had the biggest meal or the best meal but
because he gave it to God. He gave
what he had to Jesus. He said, Here’s what I’ve got. Five little rolls from Krystal and a
couple of fish. Here, Lord, You can
have these. So he gave God
what he had.
This is the third
principle. That God uses whatever
I give Him. The Bible says, “Jesus took the five loaves and the two
fish. He blessed the food and He
broke the loaves and He kept giving them to the disciples to set before the
people.”
This is interesting. I don’t know how He did it but
evidently as He broke the bread it just kept multiplying and multiplying. He’d break off a piece and there was still
a piece there. He’d break off a
piece and there was still a piece there.
He just kept on doing it and doing it and it multiplied and everybody
could see it, the whole crowd.
That’s why it was recorded four different times by four different
eyewitnesses. And in church
history and even today there are instances of God doing this miracle of the
multiplication of food again.
So, here’s the other half of
the third principle. God will use whatever I give Him.
He’ll take it and He’ll use
it. God likes to use ordinary
things to do extraordinary things.
God likes to use ordinary people to accomplish extraordinary tasks. Notice the kind of giving that this
little boy had that sparked a miracle.
He gave it willingly. He
gave it cheerfully and he gave it immediately.
The
Bible tells us in the book of Matthew that the little boy volunteered his
lunch. He said, Take mine. Maybe he liked peanut butter and jelly rather than
sardines. For whatever reason he
said, take my lunch. He did it
willingly.
And
he did it cheerfully. He didn’t do
it grudgingly or complaining or resenting or worrying (“I’ve got to think about what I want to eat. What am I going to have to eat if I give my lunch away?”) He did it cheerfully.
And
he did it immediately. He didn’t
hesitate. He said, “Here!
Take my lunch! Go ahead,
Jesus. Take my lunch!” He didn’t know what God was going to do
with it. But he gave willingly,
cheerfully and immediately.
That’s the kind of giving
that sparks a miracle. I saw a
bumper sticker a long time ago. It
said, “God loves cheerful giver but He accepts from a grouch.” That’s funny but it’s not true. God does not accept from a grouch. Why? Because God doesn’t want your money if you give it
grudgingly. He doesn’t want your
time if you give it grudgingly. He
doesn’t want your talents if you give it grudgingly. Why? Because
God doesn’t need it. He wants what
it represents – your heart.
God is more interested in the
attitude of your gifting than He is
in the amount of your giving. So if you ever feel pressured to give
or feel pressured to do this or that, or you feel grudging ,let me tell you up
front-- God says don’t even bother.
I don’t need your money. I
don’t need your talent. I don’t
need that. What I want is your
life. The Bible says, “Where your treasure is your heart is.” If you can’t give it with the right
attitude God says forget it. Don’t
bother. It doesn’t count.
Having been a pastor for
many, many years I’ve discovered that the most miserable people are the people
who feel guilty when they’re not generous. Then resent it when they do give. Either way, they’re miserable. It is not by accident that the root of the word “miserable”
is the word “miser”. When I hold
onto things and I’m not generous with my life and my time and my talents and my
money, when I am a miser then I’m going to be miserable. Yet the
more generous you are with your money, with your time, with your life, with
your talent, with your encouragement, the more God is going to bless it.
That leads us to the fourth
point. That is after I’ve admitted
I have a need and I access what I have to work with and I give whatever I’ve
got to God, then…
4. I
expect Him to multiply it.
I expect God to multiply
whatever I give Him. Notice what
happened in verse 42. This little
boy brings his lunch of just couple loaves and five fish and it says, “Everyone ate and had enough.” What do you not have enough of in your
life? “I don’t have enough time.” That means you’re not giving it to God. “I
don’t have enough money.” That
means you’re not giving it to God.
“I don’t have enough
relationships.” You’re not
giving that area of your life to God.
Whatever you give totally to
God, He multiplies it and blesses it in return. “Everyone ate and had
enough. And afterwards they
collected twelve baskets full of leftovers.” Can you image this kid going home with a whole bunch of
leftovers and his mother says, “Johnny! You did what? And Jesus did what?
Johnny, what were you smoking at that concert?” Would you believe your kid? I gave my sack lunch to Jesus and He
multiplied it and fed twenty thousand people. And by the way here’s the leftovers mom.” Kind of far-fetched really. Yet God had multiplied it. God makes sure of that.
God has set it up this way in
the world there’s a principle called sowing and reaping. The Bible says “Whatever you sow [whatever you give away] you’re going to reap.” If
you give away criticism, you’re going to get back criticism. If you give away encouragement you’re
going to get back encouragement.
If you give away your time to help others you’re going to find you have
more time than if you saved it all for yourself. Money, reputation, anything. God, set it up his way. The universe runs on the principle of sowing and
reaping. Why? Because God wants to teach you to
become a giver. You can’t be like
God unless you learn to be generous.
God so loved the world that He gave. God wants us to give so He wants us to learn to be like Him.
Here’s the principle. You always reap back more than you
sow. If you criticize other
people, guess what. You’re going
to be criticized back. If you
judge other people you’re going to be judged back. If I take one kernel of corn and I plant it in the ground
will I get one kernel back?
No. I’m going to get a
stalk of corn, several ears of corn, many kernels. You always get back more than you put in. Either positively or negatively. That’s just a law of life, a law of the
universe.
So God says give Me whatever
you need more of and watch Me multiply it. It’s the principle of sowing and reaping. Mark 10:27 says, “All things are possible with God.” Here’s the key to this verse. The key is that God likes to do miracles through
people. God could have just rained
down bread on those people or turned a bunch of stones to bread or dropped
flocks of quail on them, He could have done any kind of thing that He wanted
to. He had done some of these
things in the past. But instead He
worked through people. He worked
through the little boy who gave his lunch. He worked through the disciples who passed it out. What we often wait for God to do for
us God is waiting to do through us. Does that make sense? What we’re waiting for God to do for me
He wants to do through Me.
So will you realize that God
loves you and wants to meet your need?
Will you ask him for what you need? Will you assess what you DO have to work with? Will you give him what you have? And will you trust him to multiply it?
Then you are prepared for a
miracle!
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