A Little Becomes A Lot

Man, it is uh it is awesome to be in his presence, isn't it?

I mean, just all of us together.

I mean, uh the whole week, you know, we have hours and hours and hours that we have to fight sometimes just to be in his presence because there's so many things pulling at us, and it's just so cool to have an hour, an hour and a half here every week just to just sit and just soak it in.

Just be in his presence.

That's awesome.

Father God, we uh we do love to be in your presence.

It's intoxicating, God.

You are you're amazing.

And just to sit and to feel you and to feel your love, it's unlike anything else that this entire world has to offer, and we love it, and we can't get enough of you, God.

And we just ask that this morning you would speak to our hearts, that you would translate every word that's said into something that we need, Father.

That it wouldn't be anything that I'm saying, it just from you, Holy Spirit.

You just speak to our hearts.

Show us what we need so we can walk out of these doors closer to you and ready to live the life that you have for us right now.

And we just ask this all in your name, Jesus.

Amen.

Well, I uh if we've never met, my name's Justin.

I I work with our students here at His Hands.

We have awesome students, uh, all of our elementary kids, junior high kids, high school kids, high school students, sorry, high school, actually not kids, right?

At all.

Um and this morning, I I want to take a page out of something that we we would do in our younger group, in our his kids group, our first through fifth graders.

I want to start with a little bit of participation.

We try to do that with the young ones.

And so before we we start a worship this morning, I found Bryden Parsons and Ashley Stout, and I need you guys to come on the stage really quickly.

Um Ashley.

These are two of our two of our amazing high school students here at the church, and they volunteered this morning having no idea what they were volunteering for.

Which I don't know why you would do that.

That doesn't make any sense.

That's scary.

All right.

What I'm gonna ask them to do is something that's gonna help demonstrate what we're gonna talk about this morning, and it's very simple.

Okay, it's extremely simple.

It's nothing that hasn't been done before.

All I need you guys to do, are you listening?

Yeah.

Okay, I was just making sure, because you know, all right, respect.

I'm sure.

Um, all I need you guys to do is is just feed the thousand or so people in the room right now.

Very simple.

Just feed them.

Catering companies do this like every day, it's not a big deal.

Um, and I know you don't have any food, so I brought some.

So I've got there.

Loaf of bread, loaf of bread, go.

Okay.

It's been done.

Hold on, hold on.

Would you guys would you like more food?

Would that be helpful?

Because I also have a can of sardines, and I can open it, but there aren't front rowers.

You're like, no, please, no.

That's it's splashes.

Um here, give me the bread back.

Give me the bread.

We're good.

I don't uh I don't think this is gonna work.

You guys, well give them a round of applause.

They tried.

You know, I feel like a failure.

I uh that's the second time I've brought people up on a stage and asked them to feed everyone with a few pieces of bread, and I'm 0 for two so far.

And that makes me feel a little bad.

But um you might see where we were going with that.

I did this with the with the young kids, the first through fifth graders, about a year ago.

We were starting a series on Jesus' miracles.

And what was cool, a lot of you guys might have seen, you know, Jesus feeding the the crowd with a few loaves and some fish, and we'll get to that in a second.

But when we did it with the younger kids, a lot of them had never heard that story before.

Some of us may have never heard the story before.

And just as puzzled as Ashley and Bryden looked, you should have seen the look on the faces of the two second graders that I brought up on the stage when I asked them to do that.

You know, I had a girl and a boy, and the boy, when I asked him, I gave him his piece of bread, I said, I need you to feed everybody, and it's really important that they're fed until they're full.

And he looked like he was doing this complex math equation in his head.

I mean, he was just like, he was taking it really seriously.

Like he thought, this is doable, I can handle this, I just gotta figure it out.

The girl, all right, looked at me with a look that I've seen my wife give me so many times.

And I mean, she literally just sat with her piece of bread and she was like, excuse me, you know.

I was actually really intimidated of a second grade girl at that moment, and you know, apologized.

But uh, but man, they got really into it.

And just as a side note, I know I said this, but you guys, you guys have incredible kids.

That working with your kids on Sunday mornings is just a blessing and a joy, and they are awesome kids.

I mean, they really are, and I know that because every morning there's 10 adults and 120 first through fifth graders.

And if they wanted to form some type of uprising and take it over, they totally could.

They're so they could easily overpower us, outnumber us, but they don't.

They sit there and they listen and they learn and they're great, and they're great.

And when we did this with the with the young kids, you know, at first we had the puzzled looks and the confusion, but then we actually told the story of how Jesus fed this incredibly large number of people with just a few loaves of bread and a few fish, and man, they were so in to the story.

In fact, of all the miracles that we talked about, this was the one that resonated with them the most.

This was the one that you could just tell they were eating up.

And I was actually really surprised because of all the miracles we had planned.

I mean, Jesus did some really cool stuff.

And I was banking on walking on water, being the one that they would be really into.

But this was the one that just blew them out of their seats.

This was the one that amazed them.

And it really is an amazing story, an amazing miracle.

And we're gonna take a look at it.

It's in Mark chapter 6, verses 32 through 44.

Mark 6:32–44

Again, we don't have it on the side screen, so I'll just read it.

It says intimacy, remember.

Intimacy.

So the so they left by boat for a quiet place where they could be alone.

But many people recognized them and saw them leaving, and people from many towns ran ahead along the shore and got there ahead of them.

What it's describing is when Jesus would travel, we're talking thousands of people would follow him everywhere he went.

And they're just trying to get away and be by themselves, and they're in this boat and they're crossing the Sea of Galilee, which is a relatively small sea.

But people see them and they figure out where they're going, and they run faster than they can take their boat to the other side, and when they get out of their boat, there's already a huge crowd waiting for them.

And they were just trying to get away, get a little rest before their next their next uh stop.

It says Jesus saw the huge crowd as he stepped from the boat, and he had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd.

So he began teaching them many things.

Late in the afternoon, his disciples came to him and said, This is a remote place, it's already getting late.

Send the crowds away so they can go to the nearby farms and villages and buy something to eat.

But Jesus said, You feed them.

With what?

They asked.

We'd have to work for months to earn enough money to feed all of these people.

How much bread do you have?

He asked.

Go and find out.

They came back and reported, We have five loaves of bread and two fish.

Then Jesus told the disciples to have people sit down in groups on the green grass.

So they sat down in groups of fifty or a hundred.

Jesus took the five loaves and two fish, looked up toward heaven, and blessed them.

Then, breaking the loaves into pieces, he kept giving the bread to the disciples so they could distribute it to the people.

He also divided the fish for everyone to share.

They all ate as much as they wanted, and afterwards the disciples picked up twelve baskets of leftover bread and fish.

A total of five thousand men and their families were fed from those loaves.

So, well over five thousand people get fed from a few loaves of bread, five, and a few fish.

Now, when I was a kid, I got a very vivid picture whenever I would hear about this story, and I always pictured, you know, a lot of times it's it's a little boy that brings the loaves and the fish, and and I would always picture Jesus up on this hill and this huge multitude of people, you know, thousands of people that are sitting, about five thousand about five times rather more, you know, more than we have in the room right now.

So five times more people than we're we've got here, sitting on the grass, eating up every word that Jesus says.

And then when it's time to do the miracle, I picture this boy bringing up these five huge loaves of bread, like garlic bread, you know, these giant loaves, and these two big fish, these trout-sized fish, you know, he just brings them up, and Jesus doesn't.

And if that, I don't know if that's what you pictured when when you heard it, but uh, but that's what I always pictured as a kid.

And if that's what Jesus had done, amazing, incredible miracle.

It takes two big fish and five big loaves of bread, and he he miraculously distributes it, feeds everybody, they're full, they have leftovers.

But Jesus in this story had even less to work with.

In John chapter 6, it also gives an account of this uh this same story, and it tells us that the loaves of bread were barley loaves.

John 6 · chapter mention

And barley loaves back then were the were the bread that the poorest of the poor people could afford.

They were the coarsest of all the different breads, didn't have really much flavor, but they were what the poorest people ate, and they were about the size of dinner loaves, or of dinner rolls, rather.

They weren't these giant loaves of bread, they were very small, basically what we've got here, you know, small dinner roll-sized loaves.

And the fish in the story were likely about the size of sardines.

Galilee, this area that Jesus is in, it was known as the biggest sardine export in the area.

That was the biggest export to come out of Galilee, were these little tiny salted fish.

And what people would do is they would always, they would always use them with the barley loaves as like a relish, which just sounds awesome, um, to give the bread some flavor.

And I know the looks we have in our faces of like, yeah, this doesn't sound good.

You should have seen me this morning at Walmart really early, because I bought this, and I also had to buy some Hershey's chocolate syrup for something totally unrelated.

And the woman at the woman at Walmart just gave me this look, and I just was like, it's just, it's a, it's a family recipe, it's okay.

Um, you know.

But but that's what Jesus had to work with.

And that makes sense.

I don't know where this little boy would have had these five giant rolls and these two huge fish to carry them around.

Hey, I got some, you know, he had these really small bits of food.

And Jesus took these five dinner roll-sized pieces of bread and these two sardines and fed over 5,000 people.

And fed them until they were full and they had leftovers.

I mean, it's an incredible miracle.

And just like the kids and his kids were blown away by it, it had to have this crazy impact on everyone else that experienced it and heard about it too, because this is actually the only miracle that Jesus performed, except for his resurrection from the dead.

This is the only miracle that makes it into all four of the Gospels.

And that's kind of that's kind of big, you know.

I mean, he did so many incredible things, but it wasn't walking on water, it wasn't calming the storm.

This was the only miracle that comes up in every single one of the gospels.

And I imagine that has to do with the fact that it had to spread faster than any miracle.

News of it had to spread quicker than any other miracle Jesus did, because usually when Jesus would perform a miracle, there would be a lot of people that would see it.

But it was usually just a few people experiencing it at a time.

It was one person getting healed, or a group of people getting healed, or a small group.

And when you see a miracle, it excites you.

And you're gonna tell some people about it for a while.

But when you experience a miracle, it's totally different.

It's the most exciting thing that's ever happened to you.

And you can't help but talk about it, and you can't help but talk about it for the rest of your life.

And in this moment, you've got over 5,000 people.

It says 5,000 men and their families that experienced a miracle of Jesus together.

They all ate the food.

They didn't just see it, they ate it, they felt full, they experienced this miracle.

And in one moment, you've got 5,000 plus people that just experienced the most incredible thing they've ever seen.

And then they go home.

And how many people do you think heard about this by the time the sun rose the next day?

I mean, it had to spread like wildfire.

But I think there's another reason that this ends up being the one miracle, except for him raising from the dead, that makes it into all the gospels.

And I think it's that it's one of the most personally relevant miracles to our lives that Jesus performed.

It's a story of a group of people that don't have enough of something that they need, and Jesus provides.

And he takes what they have and he multiplies it to where they don't just have enough, but they have more than enough.

And if we were going to do a show of hands this morning on how many of us feel like we don't have enough of something in our life that we actually need, my guess is that uh we would all raise our hands.

There are a lot of different things that come to our mind, there are a lot of different examples.

An easy one might be money.

That's an easy thing to connect, that we don't have enough of that, that what we've got coming in is not enough to pay for what needs to go out, or what little we do have.

We look at everything that we've got to cover and we just don't see a way.

And this story definitely applies to that.

But there's so much more than just money.

You know, there's time.

I'm sure so many of us in this room right now have a hard time with how little time we have.

I've got one son, and since we've had him, and he's only a year and a half old, I've been amazed at how much less time there is.

I mean, it's incredible.

Between work and stuff that needs to be done at home and spending time with a family, it's it seems like most days there's just not enough time to go around.

And I've only got one kid.

I know there's a lot of us in the room that are like, just wait, just wait.

But we feel like we don't have enough.

We don't have enough to get it all done.

Or we're just exhausted by it.

You know, it might be patience.

We might have a situation or a person in our life, and it's stressful and it's frustrating, and we are just about out of patience.

We can't handle it anymore.

It could be faith.

We've got a situation that's beyond our control, we don't know what to do, we're extremely stressed about it.

And we we need more faith that God can fix it.

We need more faith that it's gonna work out in the end, it's gonna be okay.

Because the faith that we do have, it just doesn't feel like enough.

Or it could be peace.

You know, maybe it's something that already has happened and it's done, and we don't like it.

But it happened, and now all we have to do is deal with it and figure out how to deal with it in a way that's healthy, and it's hard.

We don't have peace about the situation, we don't know why it happened, we don't get why it happened.

Maybe it's a tragic situation, and we need God to give us more peace so we can be okay day to day.

But it could be any of those things and a thousand other things that we just don't feel like we have enough of, and we need more.

And if all we're limited to is what we have, we're not gonna have enough.

But thank God that we are not limited to what we have.

That we have a God who's limitless in his resources, and a God that loves us enough to give us what he can to take what we have and multiply it so that we have enough and more than enough.

You know, this is not an isolated story in the Bible.

There's a theme all through Scripture of God taking a small amount of something that people can offer and then adding his part to it and it multiplying to be more than enough.

It's all through his word.

There's a story of Elijah and this widow, it's kind of a famous story in 1 Kings 17, and I'll just read it.

It's real short.

It says, The Lord said to Elijah, Go and live in the village of Zarephath, near the city of Sidon.

I've instructed a widow there to feed you.

So he went to Zarephath.

As he arrived at the gates of the village, he saw a widow gathering sticks, and he asked her, Would you please bring me a little water in a cup?

As she was going to get it, he called to her, Bring me a bite of bread too.

But she said, I swear by the Lord your God that I don't have a single piece of bread in the house.

I only have a handful of flour left in the jar, and a little cooking oil in the bottom of the jug.

I was gathering a few sticks to cook the last meal, and then my son and I are going to die.

But Elijah said to her, Don't be afraid.

Go ahead and do just what you said, but make a little bread for me first, and then use what's left to prepare a meal for yourself and your son.

For this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says there will always be flour and olive oil left in your containers, until the time when the Lord sends rain and the crops grow again.

So she she did just as Elijah said.

She and Elijah and her son continued to eat for many days, and there was always enough flour and oil left in the containers, just as the Lord had promised through Elijah.

Now this woman is out.

She's spent.

And so he gets an army, 22,000 men show up.

And even 22,000 men, that sounds like a lot, but it would have been, it would have still made them incredible underdogs in the fight because the Midianites had a vast army.

The Bible doesn't tell a number, it just says that they were like locusts, a swarm of locusts.

They were countless.

But then God takes that 22,000 and he whittles it down to 300.

And God tells Gideon, go take these 300 men and march against this army.

And that's not nearly enough.

And I'm sure Gideon was was terrified.

But God came up with this plan that allowed them to defeat the army with 300 men, and they didn't even have to lift a finger.

Because God is limitless.

And it's not it's not about our resources, it's about his.

Instantly, it's a lot.

It may take a while to see it grow.

It may be a faith thing, but a little is always a lot in his hands.

And God still does this stuff.

This is not stuff that's limited to the Bible, to the times of the Bible.

We just had a kind of cool experience like this happen here at His hands in our student area.

You know, we have an incredible group of teens at this church, and we've been talking about them for a while because we're proud of them.

And God's doing amazing things in their lives.

We had this big God breakthrough this summer on their high school road trip.

And on the heels of that, we had this incredible renovation that came about to our student area.

That we it came out of the blue.

We weren't thinking about it.

Uh we wouldn't have planned to do this.

It was just this really cool thing.

And and what happened was we we built an arcade.

You know, I love video games a lot, so I say that like with passion.

Arcade.

All right.

And it was done in this incredible way because it did not, it was entirely donated.

Every piece of it was donated to the church.

Every single part of it.

And it's exceptionally well done.

I mean, it's crazy well done.

We've there's nine 27-inch TVs, and there's nine Xboxes, and these really cool cabinets that hold them, and and and this garage door that we we knocked a hole in a wall, and we put a garage door there, and and and now we can shut it and close it.

And you know what's what's what's cool is that this is not church spending money on things that aren't necessities.

You know, we're a really small budget church.

We're a volunteer church.

We only have two staff members.

So everything that we do, when we use giving on Sundays, we use that for necessities.

We wouldn't plan a project like that because we just, oh, let's spend some money.

We're not like that.

Well, what happened was we had a person that came to us after the road trip, or before the road trip rather, but we didn't even know what to do until afterwards, and he said, Hey, I really feel like God wants me to donate this amount of money, and it needs to be for the students, and it needs to go to something kind of cool and special.

And so we took that and we're like, oh man, we didn't know what to do.

I said, Let me think about it, let me think about something cool we can do.

And when we got back from the road trip, you know we had this idea a few years ago, someone had donated these Xboxes to us.

And and man, it's so cool because we use them and they really bring students together.

I mean, it it's it's people are hanging out that wouldn't normally hang out, and it's a really cool interaction kind of point for our kids.

But we never had a place to put them, we never had a place that would house all that stuff, at least permanently.

So we were lugging them back and forth every week and locking them up and taking them back, and that was fine.

But we're like, oh, let's build a permanent space to put that stuff.

And so we're like, let's knock out a hole in this wall to make this room join our youth lobby.

And then we can put a garage door there and it'll shut and we'll lock it all up.

We don't have to move it around anymore, and it'll just be a cool permanent space.

And the donation that was given was really generous.

It was enough to pay for the garage door, plus uh some smaller TVs that we could put with the systems.

But then we had all these things just happen after another where someone would hear about it, what we were doing, they would get excited, and they would feel God lead them to donate something.

And so we had a person, a couple at this church that helps out a ton, and they're like, hey, I work at a garage door company.

I want to donate the door and all the labor to install it.

And then we had someone that said, Hey, you're gonna need a lot of electrical work done because that room, it can't support all that electrical equipment, and I hadn't even thought of that, but but they ended up donating all of the labor and all of the supplies and all the parts for that.

The TVs were donated.

Those those cabinets that I was talking about, that they're really cool, they're like custom built for that.

Those were donated.

We called up a video game store in in Woodstock called Play and Trade, and I was talking to the guy on the phone, I said, hey, I've seen these things that are in your store, and we're trying to do this, and it's gonna be this cool space that's gonna really bless our students.

And and he goes, Man, I got six in swords, you can just have them.

Those were donated.

All the networking that was done, all the drywalling that needed done, all the painting that was done, all of it was donated, everything, and it was all people here, except for that video game store.

It was all people here that just heard about and were like, hey, I'll do that.

And when we opened up the doors a couple Thursday nights ago, and our our students walked in, I mean, they were just blown away.

They were they were amazed, they felt so blessed by it, they were so excited.

But it was when we told them how it happened that they got really excited.

Because they got to see a situation in their lives, even if it's indirect, where God worked all these things together to do just this really cool thing for them.

And it was a total example of how we are as a church, you know, a volunteer church.

We just we get excited about something, we just do it.

We do it together.

But it was also an example of how God expands our resources.

And here's the thing I want to say as we wrap up this morning.

Okay, it's an arcade.

It's video games.

Great.

And if God cares enough about getting involved with a project like that, how much more does he care about all the deep needs that we have in our lives?

If God cares enough to add his resources to something like that, whatever you've got going on, whatever need you have, he cares desperately about it.

And he is absolutely willing to add his limitless resources to yours.

And so there's a lot of different people in the room right now, we're from different places, and this applies to us in a lot of different ways.

One of the things that blew me away with that whole experience was being reminded that the resources that God chooses to use so often is us.

And so for some of us this morning, maybe the call is for us to become a part of God's resources.

Maybe there's something that he's calling us to do because he needs us to be what gives someone else enough.

Maybe it's getting involved here at the church, maybe it's with a family member, a friend you're close to, or maybe it's in a situation with someone you don't even know, but you feel God calling you to become a part of it and to help.

But we're his resources so much of the time.

We're who he trusts to get it done.

Others of us this morning, we just need to be on the receiving end of his resources.

We just need something.

And I don't know what it is.

It could be money, it could be patience, it could be something in our careers.

We feel God calling us to take a step, and we don't know where to go.

But we know we're supposed to make a change.

It could be, it could be something completely different.

It could be our marriages.

Maybe we feel like we've got this much left.

It's not gonna work.

The point is that it doesn't matter what it is.

It doesn't matter if it's an army, doesn't matter if it's flour, it doesn't matter if it's fish, it doesn't matter if it's video games.

When God gets involved and he adds what he's got to what we have, it's always enough.

And it's more than enough.

And it's awesome.

So whatever you have to give this morning, just know that it's enough.

It always is.

Because a lot, a little is a lot in God's hands.

Always.

Let's pray.

God, you are a uh you're a limitless God.

There is no end to what you can do.

And all these examples this morning, you know, God, I just pray that these are all just reminders to us.

That we can ask for you to add your resources to ours, that we can ask you to help us, to give us more, to give us what we need.

There's never been a need on earth that you've heard about that you didn't know how to help, how to relieve it, or how to just fix it.

There's never been a time that you've seen a problem and thought, I don't have what it takes to fix this.

You're a limitless, powerful God that loves us because we're your kids.

And so this morning, God, we are just praying as your people and asking you to give us what you have, for us to take what we have to you.

Just like the people took their fish to you and their bread, but to take what we have and give it to you and ask you to multiply it.

And we trust that you're gonna do that, and we ask all this in your name, Jesus.

Amen.