943 Here For a Miracle

Sometimes hearing about God’s provision isn’t enough, you need to experience it for yourself. Sometimes reading about God’s movement, his power, and his presence isn’t enough, you need to feel it for yourself. And unfortunately, experiencing and feeling these things for yourself isn’t the sweet blessed moments you imagined. It’s the hardest times of your life. It’s the space between a rock and a hard place, and you’re being smashed. It’s the week beyond the stretch of your last paycheck. It’s the dark times where you don’t see how it’s ever going to be okay again. It’s the storm, it’s the battle, it’s the odds stacked against you, it’s the outnumbered, outmatched, unprepared and unable moments. This is where you see, feel, and experience God. And maybe that’s exactly where you are today. You’re staring down the impossible and wondering how in the world you’re ever going to get through this. Well, this is where you get a front row seat to the movement of God! This is where you see things that change you forever. This is where you walk away never being the same again. The disciples of Jesus had a moment like this. A moment where they felt the pressure. They faced the impossible, and they were called upon to act in faith. The moment comes when they had a crowd of hungry people all around them, and nothing of significance to offer. But Jesus has the ability to take what is not enough and make it more than enough. He has the ability to use anything offered in availability to him, and work his divine multiplication to create an abundance. Most of us are familiar with the story of the “Feeding of the Multitude.” We fast forward to the miracle so fast in this story, but let’s sit for a bit in the disciples reality before the unfolding of the miracle. The reality was they were pressured to do something they could never do. A crowd of 5,000 men, plus women and children, had gathered to hear Jesus. They had been there all day and now they were getting hungry. Knowing they could never feed them, the disciples remind Jesus of the time and tell him to wrap this shindig up and send them away to get food for themselves. But Jesus wasn’t done here. Sometimes we’re asking God to wrap things up in our own lives. Lord, let this be over. Let this be the end of this struggle. Fix this, and fix it right now please. I’m over it, I’m ready to move on already, but God won’t seem to allow me step out of this. Why is that? Could it be because he has more work planned here? Could it be because he’s been intentionally setting the stage for something bigger than you have planned and moving on now would cause you to miss this miracle? As the disciples are hurrying Jesus along, telling him they can’t feed all these hungry people, Jesus isn’t budging. The disciples are stressing, but Jesus is calm. The disciples feel pressured, but Jesus sits in perfect peace as if to say “you’re not going to believe what I’m about to do next!” God’s timing is perfect. It’s perfect the people have been here all day to hear Jesus. It’s perfect it’s now dinner time and the crowd has no food to eat. It’s perfect the disciples are right where they are and they get to see how little there really is. It’s all so perfect. Just like it’s perfect you’re hearing this today! It’s perfect you’re listening to this just when you feel it’s too late and you have too little to fix this. But it doesn’t look perfect. It sure doesn’t feel perfect. The disciples know this is a mess, but they had no idea the message this mess was about to become. A message we would still read today, thousands of years later. A message you,