The Bride Will Be The One Riding A Camel - Part 6
Writer Author Jerry Lee Kay Sr.
Christian Article
:
Bible Teaching
- Fiction No
I am teaching in Matthew 14...This is Part 6:
The Psalmist said, “How sweet are Thy words unto my taste! Yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth! Through Thy precepts I get understanding: Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path".
This miracle is the only miracle recorded in all four Gospels. And it is mentioned at least nine times in the Gospels;
The miracle occurred at the end of a day which Christ and His disciples had originally planned to use for much needed rest. Christ had insisted that He and the disciples take some time to rest. Both Christ and the disciples had been through some busy and stressful times and needed quite time away from the crowds.
So in view of the needs of both Himself and His disciples, Christ insisted they "come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while; for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat". It was a wise move, "If you don't come apart and rest awhile, you may come apart." Spiritual and physical health must be ministered to. When Christ and His disciples came to the place of solitude for rest, the Bible says, "There he sat with his disciples". When Christ "sat" with His disciples, it was always a time of spiritual refreshing and instruction for the disciples.
I will not re-teach the previous 5 parts here, so as not to be laborious to the reader, if you haven't read those parts you should at least scan them to be here, where I am continuing in this letter.
I am teaching this series from a Spiritual point of view, I make mention of that point because I am aware there are literalist that do not read the word of God in that view.
My text for this miracle gives us a threefold reason why the need of food was so critical. The three reasons were the darkness of the day, the desert location, and the lack of food. Or, ‘The hour in which we live,’ ‘The hunger of people,’ ‘The distraction of supply’ and ‘the answer to the problem.’ If you are a preacher, knock yourself out, your Spiritual mind should be running at breakneck speed right about now.
The disciples are recorded here as giving Christ some advice on how to solve this problem. "Then came the twelve, and said unto him, Send the multitude away, that they may go into the towns and country round about, and lodge, and get victuals " The disciples thought they had this whole problem figured out and gave advice to Christ on how to solve the problem. Their answer was to send the multitude away so they could go into the towns and buy food and if necessary find lodging there since some, and perhaps many of them, were too far away from home to make it back to their homes that day. Also some of the crowd was probably on their Passover trip to Jerusalem and could be very far from home.
In one scene of the popular movie Robin Hood, The Prince of Thieves, Kevin Costner as Robin comes to a young man taking aim at an archery target. Robin asks, "Can you shoot amid distractions?"
Just before the boy releases the string, Robin pokes his ear with the feathers of an arrow. The boy's shot flies high by several feet.
After the laughter of those watching dies down, Maid Marian, standing behind the boy, asks Robin, "Can you?"
Robin Hood raises his bow and takes aim. Just as he releases the arrow, Maid Marian leans beside him and flirtatiously blows into his face. The arrow misses the target, glances off the tree behind it, and scarcely misses a bystander.
The disciples were distracted by and capitalized on the problem, distractions come in all types, I grow weary when I see the child of God distracted with politics, the economy and such. Whether they are painful or pleasant distractions, the result is the same: We miss God's mark.
The one great flaw in their answer was that the disciples would solve the problem by sending people away from Christ. The disciples were in a habit of trying to send people away from Him when the people had a need. The Syrophenician woman was an example of this. When she came to Christ pleading for help to rid her daughter of demon possession, the disciples said to Christ, "Send her away; for she crieth after us" (Matthew 15). Also when people brought little children to Christ for a blessing, the "disciples rebuked them" for bringing the children to Christ. (Matthew 19)
That kind of stuff is still going on today. We still have churches that send folk away from Christ in their effort to solve the people's problems. These folk do not think Christ is enough. They think we must have psychology and psychiatry as well as or even without Christ and His Word. Sending people away from Christ does not solve problems but only complicates the problem and may even increase them.
Christ did not need their counsel! They should have been asking Him the solution, not telling Him the solution. They did not need to tell Him that the people had no food and what time it was and the fact that they were located in a desert location. Did they think Christ did not know all these things? It was all stinking thinking.
Mankind is ever trying to give God advice on how to solve problems. Sometimes when we pray we act as though God is not aware of our situation, and we seem more eager to tell Him what to do than to do what He tells us to do. Furthermore, we often refuse His orders and go our own way in trying to solve problems. This does not solve any problems; it only aggravates and enlarges them. We need to go to the Lord in time of trouble—not to tell Him what we think but to seek His counsel.
Christ responded to the disciples by saying, "They need not depart, Give ye them to eat" As I noted a bit earlier, the world does not think Christ is enough. In fact, many do not think they need Christ at all. But the Word of God teaches that Christ is "I Am that I Am" and is essential and all sufficient. You either believe all the word or you don't!
When God commands God enables. "He gave his disciples the duty of feeding them, and God gave them the ability to feed them, but it had to be through Him.
This should be a great encouragement to all of us when God's commands seem to involve a great deal more than we can do. When such commands come, we should not throw up our hands in despair; but look to Him for the help to do the command. If He says to feed the people, and we have nothing at hand to feed them, then He will provide the food to feed the people as He did here.
There are four words, which describe the way He fed the multitude, and they reveal the way in which He deals with us on this journey of the redeemed... Those words are: He "Took" He "Blessed" He "Broke" and He "Gave".
I must confess, I realize this teaching series has absolutely no end. The more I study this miracle the more I realize how much it contains. I have always been mesmerized by the young boy that was there that day. The Holy Spirit has shown me what he would have missed in his life had he not given his lunch to Jesus!
In Run with the Horses, Eugene Peterson writes about seeing a family of birds teaching the young to fly. Three young swallows were perched on a dead branch that stretched out over a lake. One adult swallow got alongside the chicks and started shoving them out toward the end of the branch—pushing, pushing, pushing. The end one fell off. Somewhere between the branch and the water four feet below, the wings started working, and the fledgling was off on his own. Then the second one. The third was not to be bullied. At the last possible moment his grip on the branch loosened just enough so that he swung downward, then tightened again, bulldog tenacious. The parent was without sentiment. He pecked at the desperately clinging talons until it was more painful for the poor chick to hang on than risk the insecurities of flying. The grip was released, and the inexperienced wings began pumping. The mature swallow knew what the chick did not—that it would fly—that there was no danger in making it do what it was perfectly designed to do. ? ?"Birds have feet and can walk. Birds have talons and can grasp a branch securely. They can walk; they can cling. But flying is their characteristic action, and not until they fly are they living at their best, gracefully and beautifully. Giving is what we do best. It is the air into which we were born. It is the action that was designed into us before our birth.... Some of us try desperately to hold on to ourselves, to live for ourselves. We look so bedraggled and pathetic doing it, hanging on to the dead branch of a bank account for dear life, afraid to risk ourselves on the untried wings of giving. We don't think we can live generously because we have never tried. But the sooner we start, the better, for we are going to have to give up our lives finally, and the longer we wait, the less time we have for the soaring and swooping life of grace." You see I am convinced the Master knew what was going to happen that day, and He was preparing the Lad for a lifetime of soaring with the Eagles. Oh' how I would love to know more about that boy's life after that day. Amen? ? ?The first word is "Took". He took (received) the Five loaves and two fishes from the lad that He might enlarge them into a supply for many thousands. The real bread with which Jesus feeds the world is that of His own body, He tells us that except we eat His flesh and drink His blood we have no life abiding in us. In order to feed the world, He must take a human body, and, just as He took the loaves and the fishes from the lad, so He took flesh and blood from His human mother, that by that flesh and blood He might feed all who believe on Him.
That bread and those fish were greatly used of the Lord. Before He could use them, however, they had to be placed in His hands. There are some of you reading this letter that need to place your lives in His hands, you may be already saved, but you, and not the Master are in control of your life.
The act of taking the bread and of taking a human body is significant, it shows that before He can use anything in redemption or grace it must pass into His own power, and be pervaded with His own will, and, as it were, be baptized with His own choice and saturated with His authority. Just as long as the loaves and fishes were in the hands of the lad they were under the lad's control, and not under the personal and absolute will-power of Jesus, but when the lad turned them over to Christ, they passed from his personal choice and became the personal property of the Master, from the human to the Divine, from the control of a man to the control of God.
Dearly beloved, how true this is, that God's will must get perfect possession of anything in order that it may be multiplied and used for the glory of God!
Christ himself could not use His humanity - His flesh and blood - as an instrument of suffering and sacrifice until He took it from one of His creatures and baptized it into all His will. As long as the substance of His human body belonged to Mary it was her personal property, and under her will, but glory to God when she resigned herself absolutely to God, to please God in all things, she relinquished the substance of her body to God's will, as the young lad gave up his loaves and fishes without any reserve to the power of Jesus.
This brings us to another thought, that our Lord recognizes and honors the free agency of His creatures in a most amazing manner. No one in the universe pays so much respect to the free will of man than the God that created him. Everywhere in the bible we see God coming to man asking for his heart, for his submission, and then waiting for him to choose. He did not and would not trample on the rights of a poor fisherman's little boy by seizing his lunch against his will. Likewise God would not compel the free agency of the Holy Virgin, but when the Holy Ghost spoke to her through the angel Gabriel, she yielded her-self to be the vessel of the Holy Spirit, and said: "Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to Thy word." It was then that the fountain of her life was turned over into the absolute possession of God's will.
It is the longing of our Lord to get boundless control of you and I, to have us saturated in His will, but in order to do this He must wait for us to place ourselves into His complete possession. The measure in which we yield to His desire is the measure in which He is able to use us for the advancement of His Kingdom and the feeding of a hungry lost and dying world. Before I move ahead let me inject that Jesus is not looking for Filet Mignon, He is asking for loaves of bread - little common loaves - such as the working man makes a sandwich of - loaves of ordinary life, loaves of common capacity that are placed in His hands that He may use them in a supernatural way for the nourishing of hungry souls. The word "Blessed" is the second of the four words that describe the feeding of the multitude by our Savior in Matthew 14. Earlier in this letter I talked about Christ receiving into His own possession the five loaves and two fishes from the lad, as a typical act of taking into His power whatever we yield to Him.
Now let’s consider the blessedness which flows from Jesus into whatever comes into His possession. After taking the loaves and fishes that were given Him, He stood in the presence of thousands of hungry souls, not only physical hunger but also Spiritual hunger, He lifted His eyes to heaven while holding the loaves and fishes in His hands and blessed them. He told His Father in thanksgiving that the bread was good and the fishes were nourishing. He thanked His Father for providing such good, healthy food. You see, as soon as these loaves and fishes were given up by the lad, and passed into the personal possession of Jesus, they entered, as it were, a supernatural world, and became flooded with the divine will and glory, and were then in the realm of the miraculous. As long as those loaves were in the boy's hands, they were under what we call natural law, but when Jesus took them in His hands they were above natural law, they, then were under the immediate will of the Creator of all laws.
There are two sides to this word blessed, on the one side Jesus blessed the bread by eulogizing it, and appreciating its virtues; and on the other side He blessed the bread by pouring into it a stream of miraculous power, and multiplying it, and making it the instrument to show forth His Glory. In this way Jesus blessed His own body, and thereby that body was anointed to serve as a sacrifice for the redemption of mankind, and in that blessed body the Son of God is to judge the world, and conquer the nations, and reign on earth, and rule all the worlds of angels and men. The body of Jesus has been blessed beyond any formation in all the created universe, that body has been elevated above all angels and principalities, and has been seated at the right hand of God the Father.
Thus every act of Christ is related to every other, and every act of His is a type or a prophecy of every other act. And this same truth of blessing the bread applies to us. When we put ourselves into the hands of Christ, and His personal will can seize control of our hearts and lives, He then lifts us up, and "says grace over us," and blesses us just as He did with the loaves and fishes. He takes us into His own hands He blesses us by the impartation of His own life and holiness and power. It is His blessing that maketh rich and addeth no sorrow. It is the touch of self-will and holding things in our own hands that prevents the down flow of the blessing of God. If that little boy had even held on to those loaves and fishes with his little finger, or with the unseen clutch of an unwilling mind, it would have prevented Jesus taking the bread and blessing it. Just as Jesus blessed the bread and fish that day, He blesses the lives of His people. Think about His blessings since the day He placed His hand upon your life! Remember the answered prayers. Remember the mountains He has moved. Remember the needs He has met, Remember the times He came to you pulled you up close to Himself and held you in His arms and whispered His grace is sufficient for you, Remember the lonely hours when He reminded you that He still cares for you, His blessings are wonderful and He deserves to be thanked for them!
When you think about the blessings of God, remember one child's description of an elevator: "I got into this little room and the upstairs came down.".... Continued.
God Bless You
Poppa
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