Jesus Does More Than Meet Your Need
One of Jesus’s most well-known miracles was when He feed a massive crowd with a kid’s lunch. It was certainly well known back then. Everyone gets hungry, and I’m sure we all see this as a miracle we could personally benefit from.
This afternoon, I’m headed to a potluck dinner at my church. It would be amazing if only one person bothered to bring something—say, that weird green Jello salad thingy—and it miraculously fed the whole crowd of ravenous Baptists. We’d talk about that for years.
What Jesus did was no fluke. He did it twice! Matthew 14 recounts the occasion when Jesus fed five thousand, but in the next chapter, Jesus did it again when he fed four thousand (Matt. 14:13-21; 15:32-39).
I’m not prone to tell Jesus how to do things, but there was an easier way He could’ve handled the situation. There’s the crowd. Kids running around. Everyone is straining to hear Jesus speak, but they’re enraptured by what they hear. But then the hunger pangs kick in. From personal experience, I can tell you that when my stomach rumbles, it affects my hearing.
Pastor: Our love needs to be grounded in …
[stomach rumbles]
My brain: Tacos
Pastor: Without being grounded in the truth, our love can drift from …
My brain: A plate of ribs
I wonder if those in the crowd that day turned from pondering God’s truth to thinking about the Jewish first-century version of a chimichanga. But Jesus could’ve kept them focused if He had miraculously taken away the hunger pains. Problem solved. Jesus could have continued teaching without an interruption.
I know better. Jesus had another lesson He wanted them to learn. Jesus wasn’t just a good public speaker; He was the Messiah. By miraculously feeding the crowd, He did what only God can do, pointing to the fact that He is God. And the God who miraculously provided for their ancestors in the wilderness wanderings could still provide for them.
So instead of the conversation on the trek home being on how Jesus’s teaching kept them from ever thinking about eating, the conversation was about being eyewitnesses to the power of God. Yes, Jesus’s teaching was glorious, but the incredible way He did the work of God was even more glorious.
But Jesus did more than just meet their need.
“They all ate and were satisfied” (Matt. 15:37).
Satisfied. They didn’t just nibble. They were filled. Fattened. The word carries the idea of abundance. Lazarus was a poor man, who “longed to be filled [satisfied] with what fell from the rich man’s table” (Luke 16:21). The rich man was so rich that even the crumbs from his table were more than enough to fill and satisfy Lazarus.
We can be thankful that, as we trust Jesus, He steps in to provide. He meets our needs, but He does so in a way that goes beyond what we expect. There is goodness and abundance in what He does when we look to Him. Please don’t read any prosperity gospel in that. Jesus’s goal is not to fill our lives with all sorts of physical ad material prosperity. His desire is for something far greater—and better.
Satisfaction. Contentment. And it’s all grounded in Him.
You may never see a kid’s small lunch transformed into baskets of leftovers, but it is no less miraculous to find yourself satisfied and content with all Jesus provides and does for you. Jesus doesn’t just meet your need. He does it with abundance, you find contentment in Him, and God gets the glory.
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