Some echoes in this room and some sound
things for a couple of weeks and maybe
a little longer, so we're doing the best
we can with it and let's try not
to have it be a distraction to you
as we're working hard for that to be
just right.
John's Gospel, Chapter 6.
And after these things, Jesus went over the
Sea of Galilee, which is the Sea of
Tiberias.
Sea of Galilee is, as you might, you
know, acknowledge from the name of the Sea
of Galilee.
It is in the Galilean region of Israel,
the northern region of Israel, also known as
the Sea of Tiberias, because the major city
that sits on the Sea of Galilee is
the City of Tiberias.
And in this beginning of Chapter 6, the
Lord kind of lays the context for a
miracle number four that Jesus does of eight
miracles in the Gospel, according to John, that
are there by the Holy Spirit in order
that any person might come to believe in
Jesus as the Messiah by virtue of these
miracles.
And so it was this location and a
great multitude, verse 2, followed him because they
saw his signs which he performed on those
who were diseased.
Now, verse 2 is a very important verse.
You have a group of people that before
the chapter is over, Jesus is going to
rebuke with maybe maybe the strongest rebuke toward
those who claim to be his disciples in
the entirety of the Gospels.
And they're going to come to him continually
asking him to do miracles of their choosing
as an evidence that he is the Messiah
and worthy of trusting in and believing in
for salvation.
But here John wants us to know even
before there is the miracle of the five
loaves and the two fishes, the feeding of
the five thousand, even before that, that crowd
is following Jesus because of the multitude of
miracles that they've seen him doing.
Now miracles, and John seems to bring this
up continually through his Gospel, is never the
highest.
Miracles are never the greatest basis for our
faith as we're going to see further developed
in this chapter.
The greatest basis for our faith is to
trust in the Word of God because that
doesn't change.
To base my faith upon Jesus Christ on
the basis of whether he does some miracle
of my choosing, we're all for miracles that
God chooses to do, but that I'm going
to believe in him or trust in him
on any given day or on any given
week based upon whether he does what it
is that I want him to do on
that week, that is no foundation for faith.
There will be no Christian life of any
strength or stability that will come out of
that.
And so there are a group of people
that have seen these signs, and Jesus went
up on the mountain and there he sat
with his disciples.
Now there is this great multitude, and it
is a great multitude that's following him.
We're going to see in a moment of
5,000 men, not counting women and children.
And we know from the other Gospels that
Jesus takes his disciples up on the mountains
there around the Sea of Galilee, and the
Sea of Galilee is ringed by mountains, not
mountains of, you know, rocky mountain caliber.
We'd call them more, you know, some high
hills.
But the whole area is ringed by these
mountains.
And Jesus is, as we know from the
other Gospels, taking the disciples aside to find
some time to get alone with them, to
give them a break from the ministry that
they've been performing and to further minister to
them.
And so they go up in this mountain
area in order to be with the disciples.
He sits with them.
And then in verse 4, we're told, now
the Passover, a feast of the Jews, was
near.
Now verse 4 is critical to the chapter.
I've told you all of the things that
are critical.
You're going to have to trust me that
they're critical.
Because by the time we get to the
end of this chapter, whether tonight or next
week, Jesus is going to be talking to
them about eating his flesh and drinking his
blood and these kinds of things.
And they say, this is a hard thing
to hear, you know.
And Jesus speaks to them of being offended.
But we have to realize that these are
Jews in the northern region of Galilee at
the time of the Passover feast.
In other words, their mind is filled with
images of the Passover.
Eating the Passover lamb, eating the sacrifice of
the Passover lamb, which was a part of
that sacrifice.
Of the blood of the lamb being shed.
And so in their minds, because of the
closeness of their feasts, their minds are filled
with the image of a lamb being sacrificed,
of blood being shed, of the eating of
that sacrifice, and these images.
And he comes in and he's not speaking
to a bunch of Gentiles like you and
I, for the most part, Gentiles in this
room.
He's speaking to people who are deeply steeped
in the Jewish religion.
And he assumes a base of knowledge in
their lives when he speaks to them.
And then Jesus lifted up his eyes and
seeing a great multitude coming toward him, he
said to Philip, where shall we buy bread
that these may eat?
Now this miracle of the feeding of the
5,000 is the only miracle that's recorded
on all four of the gospels, which must
mean that this is a miracle that we
need to be reminded of continually.
Now, each one of the writers of the
gospels, they look at the miracle from a
different vantage point.
John's vantage point is a very interesting one,
because when John looks at the miracle of
the feeding of the 5,000, he's looking
at it from the realization that he is
going to, in a very short order, be
talking about Jesus in terms of eating his
flesh and drinking his blood and these kinds
of imagery.
And that it sets a context now for
introducing Jesus as the lamb or as the
bread of life.
And so they come this multitude and Jesus
turns to Philip and he said, where shall
we buy bread that these may eat?
Now here's his motivation behind the question.
It's not like Jesus is drawing a big
blank at the moment and he's turning to
man.
Wouldn't it be terrible if you know you're
praying to the Lord and all, and then
he said, well, gee, what would you do?
What would you think?
You think it's worse than I thought.
But this, he said, verse six to test
Philip for he himself knew what he would
do.
Now we know from chapter one of the
gospel, according to John, that Philip was Beth
from Bethsaida, which was a city there in
that Galilee region, right near the sea of
Galilee.
So this is Philip's old stomping grounds.
In other words, if anyone among the 12
knew where the bakeries were, then Philip would
have known where the bakeries were there.
I mean, it was, he was the best
hope among the 12 for finding someone who
could solve this need to feed this hungry
crowd in the natural, in our own wisdom,
in our own strength, in our own resources.
And so he asks them the question, but
not that he needed wisdom, but that he
wanted to test Philip.
Of course, the Lord never tests us to
fail, but what he's going to do with
Philip here is he's going to let Philip
come up with the best solution that he
can come up with.
And then God's going to top it.
You ever done that in your life?
What would you do?
Well, I would do this.
And I mean, if I, if, if I
did this, then I'd be perfectly happy.
And then we let the Lord do what
it is that he's going to do.
And he tops it by a hundred miles.
You have to preface the prayer with Lord.
This is what I would do.
But if you've got something better in mind,
you go for it.
I mean, in terms of, and so it's
a test, the ongoing education of the disciples,
the strengthening and the purifying of their faith.
And I think that this is very interesting
because he tests Philip by putting him in
the middle of a situation that is way
beyond his resources.
Have you ever been there?
If you haven't, then you've been a Christian
for less than 48 hours, probably all been
there.
We think it's the end of the world,
you know, but it's very common for him
to put us in a place where we
are way beyond our resources.
And why does he put us there?
Why does he put Philip in that place
there?
So that he might learn what Philip will
do in such a situation?
No, he knows what Philip will do.
So that Philip might realize what his first
tendency is in such a situation.
And Philip's, and when he puts Philip in
this situation, it's to reveal what Philip really
trusts in when push comes to shove.
Not how many verses he knows or all
of these kinds of things, but when you
really get in that place where it's an
impossible situation and he throws it on your
lap, and then we find out what we
really believe in as the solution to the
problem.
And sometimes the revelation isn't that flattering.
It isn't going to be with Philip and
Andrew here.
Now, Philip, of course, none of us know
anything of these tendencies, but Philip answered Jesus
in verse seven and said, 200 denarii worth
of bread is not sufficient for them that
every one of them may have a little.
And this is astonishing.
It may be that Judas, who is the
treasurer at this point, it may be that
Philip went over and find out how much
is in the treasury.
You got 200 denarii in the treasury.
So what does Philip do?
He's a bean counter.
He's an accountant.
God bless you if you're an accountant.
But the first thing that he does, I
mean, there's a lot of work in verse
seven.
He has already counted the crowd.
He's counted the resources.
He knows how much bread the money can
buy.
And he realizes given the size of the
crowd, how much each person would be able
to get as a result of the resources
that he has.
It's his mind.
It works like an accountant here.
And he begins to analyze the whole thing.
And that's the personal tendency of Philip here.
He analyzes everything, but the power of God.
Now, remember, he has been a witness to
all of these miracles that the Lord has
already done.
He's a kind of guy who loves to
calculate, but he forgets to put the Lord
into his calculations.
Now, I know this is completely foreign to
all of us, but the rational response of
Philip in all of this would have been.
As Jesus comes with a question, where will
we buy bread that we may, that these
may eat after all of the miracles that
he's seen, it'd be like do a miracle.
You've done miracles all over the place.
What am I sweating?
Denarii and loaves of bread and what bakeries
are open this time of the day and
whether they've got any of the banana dreams
left there at the 7-Eleven to serve
for dessert or any of these kinds of
things.
Sorry if you don't know what they are,
one for dessert every year in high school,
the cafeteria.
It'll be the one thing that some of
you will remember about the Bible study tonight.
I know what I'm working with here.
But that would have been the thing to
just look and say, why, what are we
even talking about?
You're a miracle worker.
Whatever you do it, you're God.
Yet he doesn't do that.
God's got this long record of faithfulness in
their lives already here.
Jesus has that in their lives and yet
they forget.
If you're in that place tonight and here
you are in an impossible situation.
God's got you there and you're counting your
beans.
You're counting the stocks.
Took a serious hit.
They estimated the value of the stock, the
paper that was lost on that first day
that the stock market opened.
I forget, it was almost a trillion dollars
in worth.
More money than it cost us to fight
the entirety of World War II.
That's how much money went out of people's
portfolios or out of their pockets, out of
their retirement.
And so here we can be in some
kind of a difficult situation.
We begin to think that, okay, this has
got to happen and all this kind of
stuff.
And we begin, and we forget this incredible
track record of God's faithfulness in our lives.
And that when he needs to do a
miracle to accomplish his will and to make
sure that every one of his promises is
yay and amen toward us, he's going to
do that.
And so here is Philip with a great
forgettery that we all know something about.
The children of Israel, of course, in the
Old Testament, every time they ran into a
new pinch, after all those things God had
done to deliver them out of Egypt, every
time they got in a pinch, they went
to Moses and said, we're going to die
out here.
You brought us out here to die.
After all that God had done with all
the promises that he had given to them.
Now, Philip has done all of his calculations.
And then in verse eight, one of Jesus'
other disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, Andrew said
to Jesus, there's a lad here who has
five barley loaves and two small fish, but
what are they among so many?
Now, somehow Andrew, and Andrew's a little bit
different than a Philip.
Andrew somehow begins, as he hears this challenge
that's been put to Philip, he begins to
kind of work the crowd to see what
kind of resources are out there.
And so he finds a little kid out
there that's got five loaves, little barley loaves
and two fish.
And as Jesus has posed the question, where
shall we buy bread that these may eat?
Andrew comes along and in essence says, well,
we really don't need to buy anything.
We've got a kid here with five loaves
and two fish.
And then I think it dawns on him
how stupid it sounds.
And he says, but what are they among
so many?
And that's the second tendency that we feel
when God calls us to do something that's
beyond our resources.
And we count up our resources and see
how feeble they are in the face of
what he's called us to do.
One of the great tendencies is then to
look and to begin to feel stupid that
I ever thought about God using me in
this way or whatever.
I mean, how could I have even thought
in those terms at all?
And, you know, you just kind of kick
the dust and say, well, you know, well,
there's a kid over here with five loaves
and two fishes.
And I wonder that is so amongst so
many, you know, forget I said it.
Then Jesus said, D minus D minus.
Looks like a job for God again.
And Jesus said, make the people sit down.
And there was much grass in the place
again, late spring, the time of the Passover.
And so the men sat down and number
about 5,000.
And Jesus took the loaves.
And when he had given thanks, he distributed
them to the disciples.
And so he gives thanks models saying of
grace, of grace, thanking the father for our
meals.
I love it when I'm in a restaurant.
And I see people bow their heads and
thank the Lord for the meal that he's
provided.
You know, a meal is doubly and triply
and quadruply, if there are such words, when
it is enjoyed.
When it is enjoyed with the knowledge that
it has come from him.
I know that sometimes people are made fun
of in it.
And when somebody asked you to pray for
a meal and you pray for every missionary
known to man.
And the meal's got to be put back
in the oven to, you know, that you
don't want to go there as a badge
of spirituality, get, you know, get to the
point, but, but pray for the meal, you
know.
And you really think about the marvel of
God's creation.
I mean, you think about what you ate
for dinner for lunch tonight.
And I mean, where it came out of
God's creation and all of the places that
it went in order to have it sit
before you on that table.
All that God went through in providing the
means for which it could grow and all
in order that we might enjoy it.
The importance of prayer.
I've seen a lot more people pray these
days since the bombings, so to speak, with
the airplanes and all.
I was listening to the Fresno State game
for a few minutes yesterday, just to see
how they were doing and all.
And I mean, it's a Valley team.
It's okay.
It was sanctified.
And the sports casters, they, they called the
game.
All the way through, at least all of
the halftime show that I heard.
And most of the third quarter without giving
a score, that's criminal.
But that, that's just a peeve of mine.
No, it wasn't the Fresno State game.
It was a Notre Dame game and television.
And the fellow had a seizure on the
sidelines.
And the teams dropped down to their knees
to pray.
And usually a camera is as quick as
can be to move from that scene.
And they showed the scene and the announcer
who usually they don't acknowledge that kind of
thing.
They acknowledged it with a respect.
The people were praying for this need.
Someone told me that attended the second service
that they had watched some of the pregame
shows for the NFL games today.
And I know that he was listening.
He was looking probably for religious programming on
television and not really interested in football.
But he happened to come upon the pregame
show where Terry Bradshaw was on.
Maybe you saw it.
Quick show of hands.
But as he related the story to me
that toward the end of the thing, Terry
Bradshaw pulled his Bible out on national television
and called on Christians to read Psalm 10.
And it's beautiful to see God's people acknowledging
him.
And so Jesus took the loaves and when
he had given thanks, he distributed them to
the disciples.
The disciples were never asked to provide the
multiplication of the bread.
They were just asked to distribute it.
That's what God calls us to do.
He never calls us to produce something just
to distribute what he's already provided.
And he distributed them to the disciples and
the disciples to those sitting down and likewise
of the fish as much as they wanted.
This is called Thanksgiving Day.
Now, when I was growing up as a
kid, the end of the month meant eat
anything left in the cupboards.
And it's amazing the concoctions you can come
up with.
Thanksgiving was always a great day because that
was the day you could stuff yourself.
And a kid, you know, a kid can
eat a lot and then and then not
feel, you know, stuff, but you just would
get stuffed on that.
And that's kind of what happened to them
here.
They ate as much as they wanted.
And remember, as we mentioned this morning, that
was in a day where for you to
go to bed at night full, your belly
full meant that you were a prosperous kind
of person.
And so here is this crowd, 5000 men
plus women, plus children, and they are stuffed
as much as they wanted to eat.
And so verse 12, when they were filled,
literally glutted, he said to his disciples, gather
up the fragments that remain so that nothing
is lost.
And as we've seen in the other gospels,
God's supernatural provision in our lives is not
an excuse to waste any of it.
When he provides over and above what we
need.
It's still never to be wasted.
And therefore, they gathered them up and they
filled 12 baskets with the fragments of the
barley loaves, the five barley loaves, which were
left over by those who had eaten.
Now, the word baskets in verse 13 is
an interesting one because it's the same word
in the original language that is used for
the basket that the apostle Paul was placed
in in Damascus and lowered over the wall.
We're talking about big baskets.
And so here they are, these 12 baskets
with the fragments of the miracle left over.
And then those men, when they had seen
the sign that Jesus did, said, this is
truly the prophet who has come into the
world.
And therefore, when Jesus perceived that they were
about to come and take him by force
to make him king, he departed again to
the mountain by himself alone.
And so they have come to the conclusion
that this is the prophet, that this is
the Messiah who was supposed to come.
They, you know, esteem that he ought to
be the king and they want to make
him a king by force.
And one of the interesting things is Jesus
at this point is at the pinnacle of
his popularity.
In other words, if Jesus came into the
world to merely be an earthly king, could
have accomplished it right here, but he didn't
come into the world just to be a
king and certainly not on the terms that
they were thinking of.
And so as they come and they want
to by force make him a king, he
departs from them to the mountain by himself
alone to get alone.
And when evening came, his disciples went down
to the sea, got into the boat and
went over the sea toward Capernaum.
And it was already dark and Jesus had
not come to them.
Now we know from the other gospels that
Jesus told them to get into the boat
and to go to the other side.
And so they get into this boat and
they begin to make their way across the
Sea of Galilee toward Capernaum under his instructions.
And then Jesus goes up onto the mountain
to continue his prayer.
Time to be alone with the father.
So they're in this boat and thus soon
in the middle of this storm as a
result of obeying the Lord.
Now it's interesting in verse 15 that here
is this crowd that at one moment, at
this moment in time, they're ready to make
him the king of Israel.
In less than 24 hours, they're going to
turn on their heel and walk away from
him.
The fickleness of a crowd when he does
not live up to their expectations but lives
up to the father's expectations concerning what the
Messiah ought to be.
And so the disciples head out onto the
sea heading over to Capernaum.
It's now dark.
Jesus isn't with them.
In verse 18, then the sea arose because
of a great wind that was blowing.
So a tremendous storm comes on the Sea
of Galilee.
And so when they had rowed about three
or four miles and were told from the
other gospels that Jesus comes out to them
on the Sea of Galilee during the fourth
watch of the night between three in the
morning and six in the morning, they were
probably launched out onto the Sea of Galilee
to go to Capernaum early in the evening.
So they have probably been rowing.
And many of these men are skilled fishermen.
They've been rowing for upwards of eight hours.
And all the distance that they've made is
three or four miles.
And they're in real danger out in the
middle of this storm and out in the
middle of the Sea of Galilee.
And as they're in that condition, then they
saw Jesus walking on the sea and drawing
near the boat and they were afraid.
That would be weird.
Here the waves up and down and up
and down.
The wave goes up and you can see
him or you can't see him.
The wave goes down and you can see
him.
And I mean, this, you know, they'd never
seen anybody walk on water before.
And so here he is making his way.
They don't recognize that it's him.
And Jesus said to them, it's I do
not be afraid.
He comforts them in the middle of that
storm with the consciousness of his presence.
To their credit, God has called them to
go from one place to the other, even
in the midst of the storm.
And no matter how bad the storm got,
they continue to obey him.
No matter how hopeless it seemed to them
at that moment in time that they could
ever as tired as they were now, make
it the rest of the way to Capernaum.
But when Jesus came to them, he found
them doing what he had called them to
do.
And when he gets on that boat and
it is another miracle within a miracle, they
find themselves instantly at Capernaum.
And you may be here tonight and God
has called you to do something.
And in obeying what he has called you
to do, to obey him in some situation,
you find yourself in the middle of a
storm.
And you are only halfway to where you
are intending to go.
And you know that in and of yourself,
you don't have what it's going to take
to get to where it is that God
has called you to get.
And it's so easy at that moment in
time to think that I'm going to fail
here.
I am not going to make it.
It is so far away.
God's promise is going to be proven false
to me.
He's given me a command that he has
not coupled with it, the power to obey
the command.
But what they did not know and could
not know, is that if it is necessary
for him to walk on the Sea of
Galilee, to get there in order to cause
what he has called a person to do,
or a group of persons to do, to
be done, then that's what he'll do.
My responsibility is to give myself completely to
what God has called me to do.
And if you're here tonight and you say,
Pastor, my margins are that thin right now.
I'm in the fourth watch of the night,
and I am three or four miles into
an eight-mile journey.
And it's one of the worst storms I've
ever been in my life, and I'm about
to give up hope.
This passage is intended to infuse hope into
your life.
You stay faithful.
God knows what your thresholds are.
It's a good coach, in any form of
athletics, that pushes the athlete beyond the limitations
that they've set upon themselves.
One of the great regrets in my very
mediocre athletic career, was that I did not
have more coaches who pushed me beyond what
I thought were my limitations.
In fact, I only had one.
And half the other guys on the team
hated him so much because he did push
us.
They whined and they minimized what he might
have otherwise done with that team.
We set these very severe limitations upon what
we think can be done and what God
can do through us, and God is always
going to push us past that.
The old saying, God must always push us
beyond our own resources to discover his.
And that's an easy thing to say, isn't
it?
Yes, God must always...
And then it's another thing to be pushed
beyond my resources to discover his, and he'll
always be faithful to do it.
And so to stay faithful in what God
has called us to do and to be.
And even if you look at it and
say, if the last next four miles are
like the last four miles, there's no way
that I'm going to make it.
You don't know when Jesus comes into the
situation.
And takes you the rest of the way.
And he comforts these disciples with his presence.
They were in the middle of a storm,
in the middle of his will, in that
storm.
But they were never out of his sight.
They were never out of his prayers.
And so he said to them, it is
I do not be afraid.
And then they willingly, and the word is
eagerly, and received him into the boat.
I tell you, that's what I do too.
Excitedly get into the boat.
They received him into the boat.
And immediately the boat was at the land
where they were going.
The place that Jesus had commanded them to
go to.