07-29-18
Sunday Morning Sermon
John 6:1-15
There was a young couple
who lived in North Carolina and they were trying to open their own very first
little restaurant.
·
They have done all of the hard work
·
And now, All that was needed was to have the final health
inspection walk through and the issuing of their business permit.
·
And they were scheduled to receive the permit the very
next day.
·
This all occurred in
September of 1989.
The couple named their
little restaurant
“Our Place”
And
they were super excited—
As
one could imagine—
That they were finally
ready to open their doors, and their dream was finally ready to
happen.
But early on that morning,
the winds and rains of Hurricane Hugo
hit the Atlantic coast.
Unexpectedly, this vicious
storm
Made
its way 200 miles inland,
All
the way to their small town.
·
Trees were uprooted!
·
Power lines were blown down!
·
And Homes and Stores were destroyed.
The young couple frantically
hurried down to their restaurant to see if it was still standing.
·
And Fortunately, everything was still intact.
Shortly after they had
arrived,
A deputy sheriff pulled up
to the couple’s restaurant and informed them that:
1. Their restaurant,
2. The fire station next door
3. And a service station down
the road
They were the only
buildings that still had electricity.
The young couple
immediately
·
Called the health inspector and begged for him to come so they could
open,
·
But because of the power outage, the inspector couldn’t
get into his office to issue the permit.
·
And No permit,
o Equaled - No Grand
Opening.
With their small refrigerator
filled with
·
300 pounds of bacon and beef
·
And bushels of tomatoes, lettuce and bread,
·
There was only one logical thing to do.
They decided to give the
food away.
They told the deputy to,
·
“Tell your coworkers
·
And all of the other emergency people
·
To come by because they will have FREE BLT’s and coffee
·
For everyone who wants to drop in.”
“Soon Firemen, Policemen,
Linemen and other rescue workers were stopping by “Our Place” to get refueled.
Soon afterwards, the
couple heard of another restaurant which was down the road and because of the
storm, they had raised their prices.
·
They were charging $10 for 2 eggs, 1 toast and 1 piece of bacon.
So what did this couple do?
·
They placed a Huge Sign in their store front window which read:
o FREE BLT’S‑‑FREE COFFEE.
o Families, Travelers and Homeless
o All Are Welcomed.
And that is when God
showed up.
The people who sitting and
visiting at their little restaurant:
·
Got up out of their chairs and started cleaning counters and
sweeping floors.
·
Volunteers took over the dish washing.
·
People from a neighboring town that had not been hit too badly by the storm
heard what was happening and they brought food from their freezers.
·
Nearby merchants also heard and they responded with bring over all types of foodstuffs
of all kinds.
And somehow – on that day
of the storm,
·
Through those first few free cups of coffee and BLT’s
·
That day’s feeding stretched to cover over 16,000 meals.
And that little
restaurant’s small stock of supplies actually increased by:
·
500 loaves of bread,
·
350 pots of coffee
·
And bushels and bushels of produce.
On That Day,
·
Through the Love and Concern for their neighbors
·
Which Started with only 2 people
·
Encouraged and allowed others to join in.
That is when God Shows Up!
That is when Miracles occur!
Does that story sound kind
of familiar?
(End Story)
When just a dab of food,
·
Is changed to be the best
·
And it stretches out to become such a huge amount more.
Today, we are going to be reading of such a story.
Beginning in the Book of John, Chapter 6, beginning in verse 1.
John’s writing picks up after Jesus has
·
Performed some rather Remarkable
·
And very public healings
·
Which has stirred up a great
amount of
·
Controversy and Curiosity within the people.
John spends a whole chapter in this “one snap shot of Jesus’ life” but he gives us a marvelous insight into who Jesus really is.
John shows us how Jesus connects the work which He is
doing in which is in total harmony with the Father’s Will.
In fact, Jesus is working so closely to His Father’s Will
that He says that He is here actually to Do the Father’s Work.
And the Works themselves testify of Jesus being the one
who was Prophesied within the Word of the Old Testament.
He is the Christ, the Son of the Living God.
And I hope you can come back
tonight because within that discussion, we will uncover the link of that
prophesy.
John starts in chapter 6 when Jesus is crossing the Sea of
Galilee.
John 6:1-2 “After this Jesus went away
to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, which is the Sea of Tiberias. And a
large crowd was following him, because they saw the signs that he was doing on
the sick.”
I think it is important for us to understand that the Sea of
Galilee isn’t that huge of a body of water.
·
It is only 13 miles long and at
its widest point, it is only 8 miles across.
So we find Jesus, wanting to have some quiet time for himself
and for his disciples.
So Jesus had crossed over to the other side of the body of
water.
But the problem is that the crowds followed him.
2) And a large crowd was following him, because they saw the
signs that he was doing on the sick.
3) Jesus went up on the mountain, and there he sat down with his
disciples.
4) Now the Passover, the feast of the Jews, was at hand.
5) Lifting up his eyes, then, and seeing that a large crowd was
coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread, so that
these people may eat?”
What a Great Question to ask.
·
How can we feed ALL of them?
There isn’t any McDonalds, Pizza Huts or Burger Kings around
there.
But here He is, Jesus was asking a very logical and practical
and important question.
But Philip answer isn’t much help at all.
7) Philip answered him, “Two hundred denarii worth of bread
would not be enough for each of them to get a little.”
Like as if they had 200 denarii even in their treasury, which
they didn’t.
But: 8) One of his disciples, Andrew,
Simon Peter’s brother, said to him,
9) “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish,
but what are they for so many?”
Jesus ask Philip the question and he didn’t come up with any
answer at all.
But when Andrew spoke up.
Maybe Andrew had more of an answer than Philip did But Really -
did he really have the answer?
Hey Lord, ah, 9) “There is a boy here who
has five barley loaves and two fish, but what are they for so many?”
Maybe Jesus was asking Philip to really get Andrew to speak up
with a solution.
I think the key here lied with Andrew but he didn’t know it.
See, I feel there was no other disciple but Andrew, who would
have even noticed this young boy among the mast crowd.
Now - Remember, the count was 5000 men.
The Women and Children did not count.
Here is an example of the real world thinking and this was some
1800+ years after Jesus.
On my Dad’s side of the family, they came across the Atlantic to
the New World during the late 1800s. There was women and a child who came over
with my Great Grandfather and on the ship manifest, it lists the women and
child as ‘CARGO’. They were nothing more than pieces of luggage which remained
in the hull of the ship for that entire voyage.
Cargo, Pieces of Property. Nothing of value and most certainly,
nothing to count.
So when the Bible reads of 5000 men, that most certainly does
not include all of the women and their children.
But as we know, Christ Challenged that way of thinking and He
also tried to change it.
For your own research, study the story about:
·
The woman and the well,
·
The stoning of the adulterous
woman,
·
The woman who said, “Yes Lord,
but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the table.”
And that is just
to name a few.
But back to our
reading for today,
What was so
special about this young, small, poor boy for Andrew to take notice him?
Do you struggle
with seeing it?
I feel we may
need to shift our way of thinking. Within our world of today,
·
Usually when we think of someone being
special, someone who stands out, we think of them as being strong and mighty
and they are usually always big, tall and dark.
·
They are like the Super Heroes
from our Big Screens.
·
Handsome or Attractive and most
of the time, Bigger than Life!
o Superman
o Wonder Woman
o Spiderman
o Batman, just to name a few.
But Andrew saw
this young – poor – boy. Who wasn’t even worthy to count within the 5000.
When Jesus seeks
out His Workers,
·
Who does He usually find to be
his heroes?
·
Who did He seek out to do his
work?
Let’s just look
at a few:
·
Saint Paul wasn’t tall at all but
on the contrary, he was bald and rather short in height.
·
David, he was but a small boy
when he sleighed the Giant and still a boy when he was anointed to be King by
God.
·
Moses was most certainly not a
great speaker but rather he suffered terribly with a stuttering problem.
·
And even Gideon was from the
smallest of the clans and he was the shortest, the smallest within his clan.
The Least of the Least!
Way too often, we forget how important our children really are.
One of the “old day’s” says was the phrase, “Children are to be seen and not heard!”
But I hope we understand that it is within our children where
our Hope rests. They are truly our future!
Samuel
Wesley was a devoted priest in the Church of England.
In
Mr. Wesley’s heart there burned a desire to see the church renewed and revived.
One
day he was studying and praying while his two small children, John and Charles,
were playing on the stairway.
They
were quite noisy as young boys tend to be.
Finally,
Samuel Wesley became so distracted by their noise that he rushed out of his
study and shouted at them:
“Go
play elsewhere.
I
am trying to pray for a great revival to come upon the church, and your noise
is disturbing me.”
Little
did Mr. Samuel Wesley know that the great awakening for which he was praying
was running up and down those stairs, in the persons of his own small boys,
Charles and John Wesley, who would one day become key figures in that awakening
and a key player within our church.
E. T. Sullivan has written, “When God wants a great work done
in the world or a great wrong righted, he goes about it in a very unusual way.
He doesn’t stir up his earthquakes or send for his
thunderbolts. Instead, he has a helpless baby born, perhaps in a simple home
and of obscure [parents].
And then God puts the idea into [a mother or father’s heart
and they] put it into the baby’s mind.
And then God waits.
[Besides God], the greatest forces in the world are not the
earthquakes and the thunderbolts. The greatest forces in the world are [our
young children].”
In the ancient world, children counted for very little.
However in God’s World as it should be in ours, Boys and
Girls matter so much to the church.
We need to do everything we can to help them grow in the
knowledge and love of Jesus Christ.
“Here is a boy…” says Andrew.
There is someone – a - here who has something to offer to the
Master.
Jesus took the young boy’s
·
Five barley loaves and
·
Two small fish and
·
Blessed them and
·
Asked his disciples to distribute them to the
multitudes,
·
And thousands of people were fed
·
And when they gathered up the leftovers,
·
They filled twelve baskets.
The effect of this miracle was electrifying upon the crowd.
14b) “They said, ‘This is indeed the Prophet who is to come
into the world!’”
15) Perceiving then that they were about to come and take him
by force to make him king, Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself.”
Jesus didn’t want to be a mere earthly king, however, He
wanted to be king of their hearts.
He wanted to find other young men and young women and aging
men and aging women with 5 barley loaves and 2 small fish to offer and help
them see miracles in their lives as well.
That was his plan then. That is his plan now.
Jesus is looking for people
whose influences he can magnify and multiply.
That is how he has
always worked.
That is Jesus’ plan
for the redemption of this world.
Each one of us—
·
Young and old—
·
Through the offering of
ourselves to Christ—
·
Finding that one gift
which we have to offer him
·
And seeing it through
until the day comes when we see his victory.
·
Then we can give
thanks for having played a small part within that victory.
As it has been noted,
·
“The story of the
feeding of the 5000 appears in all four gospels,
·
But it is only within
John’s gospel that it says the loaves and the fishes came from a boy.
Much Like the New
Testament story of
·
The widow who puts her
last two small coins in the treasury,
Just Like the Old
Testament story of
·
The widow who used the
last of her meal and oil to make bread for Elijah,
And In our story of
today, this young boy gave all he had.
These 3 people are
nameless, yet their acts of faith, trust and generosity are still remembered.
I want to ask you this
morning,
·
“What’s in you that
you can offer to Jesus?”
·
And Giving to his
kingdom isn’t just about giving of material gifts.
·
Giving to his kingdom is
All About the Giving of Yourself.
·
Have you a specific
skill that Christ can use for the betterment of the world?
·
What’s in your gift
that you can offer Jesus?
A young poor boy had
five barley loaves and two small fish that he offered up to the Master.
And then look at what
happened.
·
Can you imagine how
that young man felt when he got home?
·
Can you imagine of his
excitement as he tried to tell others?
·
You and I can know
that kind of excitement.
·
All we have to do is
to give to Jesus the gifts which He has already given to us.
