I am the pastor of a small church. It can be very easy for small churches to fall into the thinking that “we don’t have enough.” We don’t have enough to make a difference. We don’t have enough to change the world. Heck, we don’t even have enough to take care of ourselves half the time!
The disciples thought the same way because they focused on the same things. They didn’t have enough money. They didn’t have enough food. And if you think about the amount of time and energy it would have taken to go buy enough food for well over 5,000 people, then they probably didn’t have enough time and energy to do it either. They didn’t have enough and they knew it. And they focused on what they didn’t have.
Conventional expectations offered no solutions to the crowd’s needs. Yet, even after all they had seen up to this point, the disciples didn’t even consider the very unconventional solution in Jesus. Jesus was right there, but they didn’t trust him enough yet to know that he would care for these people no matter what.
Like the disciples, when we focus on what we lack, we are not trusting in Jesus. When we focus on what we lack, we take our focus off of Jesus. We take the focus off of him and we put it on us and what we can do. We don’t have that kind of power.
So, Jesus takes what is available and makes it MORE than enough. Five loaves and two fish feeds over 5,000 with twelve baskets to spare. And whether you believe that this miracle states literal history or metaphorical truth, you get the same revelation: Jesus can take the ordinary and too little and make it more than enough to meet the needs of his followers. Jesus can take what we DO have and make it more than enough.
You’re worried about your budget? Trust that when we use that money in the name of Jesus that it will be made more than enough to meet your needs.
You’re worried about having too few people around to do all the work that needs to be done? Trust that Jesus will take the collective effort of a small but mighty crew and make it more than enough. Heck, miracles happen right? Maybe we will find helpers in all sorts of unlikely places. Jesus can make that happen.
It is important that we trust in the power of miracles. We cannot expect or plan on miracles because that goes against the definition of a miracle. Miracles are literally the least likely thing to happen, otherwise, they’d just be ordinary.
But, if Scripture is clear about nothing else, it is clear that miracles did and do happen. We can debate all day how we identify miracles, but we cannot deny that we have all been witness to something that absolutely could not happen…but it happened anyway.
We’ve seen the miraculous before. We WILL see it again. So, let’s trust and keep our eyes peeled.
StainedGlassRebel 