If He Will Bless It

The Olympics are captivating our household, usually later at night when it is time to head on to bed.  But as a pattern for a mindset of pursuing  victory, I thought the following was a better reminder than the stories of success and defeat we are seeing played out during these epic Games:

“[In feeding the five thousand, Jesus could have] simply swept His hand over the horizon, turned all the stones into loaves of bread, and sent everyone out with instructions to pick one up for himself.  But the Lord obviously wanted to feed this hungry assembly by using His disciples to do it.  He wanted to begin with what they had, or could find, and then make much more of that.  That is how He intended to bless the ministry and the lives of His disciples.

“All of us at one point or another feel He asks us to do more than we can do.  But He is not asking us to do anything by ourselves, by our own devices, or in our own strength.  In giving us commands, He is telling us what He will do with the little we have…

“Many times a day you and I do not do what the Lord calls us to do because it does not occur to us to think that we can.  He asks too much; we have too little, whatever it is we have too little of: courage, brains, faith, love, self-control, money, gifts—whatever it is we have too little of it with which to do what the Lord has asked of us.  We can’t love our enemy with the five loaves and two fishes worth of humility and tenderness and sympathy and Christlikeness that we have.  We can’t conquer lust, or put to death a sinful desire with the five loaves’ worth of hatred of sin, love of holiness, zeal or he Lord’s name, and self control that we have.

“But he Lord never intended his disciples to feed the multitude with only five loaves and two fish.  He took that amount – which was all they had—and made much of it, much more, sufficient to do the job and then some.  And so it will be with every disciple who answers the Lord’s summons in the confidence that the Lord is able and willing to provide what we do not have.

“He did not simply have the disciples break the loaves and the fish and send the food around.  He took what they had from them, gave thanks, and then broke it.  Then and only then did He give it to His disciples for them to distribute…

“We all have some measure of power and ability.  And we find it very easy to think that whether it is in succeeding at work or in raising our children, in making friends or in winning others to Christ, or in doing some other difficult work or Christian service we have accomplished it with what is ours: our talent, our fortitude, our perseverance, our good sense, even our faith.  But Jesus told His disciples and then showed them that, in everything that really matters, “without Me you can do nothing”…at every point when they forgot it, they foundered and He had to teach it to them again…

“The Lord will use what we have but He must bless it; His blessing is the key…whether your work is teaching or parenting or putting on godliness or bearing witness to an unbeliever or loving others: what you have is enough if only Christ will bless it and use it.  No matter your limitations, if Christ blesses your efforts you can accomplish great things…

“Jesus “gave the bread to the disciples to set before the crowd”: the tense of the verb gave is actually the imperfect, the past tense of continuous action—“He kept giving them to the disciples to set before the crowd”—the impression of the grammar, very clearly, is that every time the disciples came back to the Lord for more, there was more to give them, but not until then…however it multiplied it did so over time as the disciples came back empty ready for more.

“What a perfect picture of the manner in which we are called to serve the Lord in our lives…we struggle against the notion that every time we find ourselves in need we have to return to the Lord once again for more, to get what, once again, isn’t there until we receive it from His hand.

“We would prefer to learn all our lessons at once, to resolve all our problems at once, and then need nothing more.  Our constant need is an offense to our pride, our self-sufficiency, and our internal fortitude.  But it is not our Savior’s way and surely He knows best what suits our holiness and the world’s salvation.”   
--Rev. R. Rayburn