Pop Quiz!

I have a tendency to make improbable things happen, rarely intimated by what others would consider sorely inconvenient or even overwhelming obstacles.  Bob considers it one of the challenging/scary parts of my personality compared to his very ordered/cautious one.  There are several common analogies for this particular trait:

Mover and shaker.

Trailblazer.

He who hesitates is lost.

God can steer a boat easier if it’s not tied to the dock…all that.

Then there’s this one:

Biting off more than you can chew—yep, I know about that one also.  Sometimes, it includes my own foot, if you get my drift.  And things can get messy.

Whereas my husband is quite good at “counting the cost”, I’m the one who feels the need to pray before trying to balance my checkbook.  However, I’m thinking both of us would have been at a stand if put to this test:

“Jesus soon saw a huge crowd of people coming to look for him. Turning to Philip, he asked, ‘Where can we buy bread to feed all these people?’  He was testing Philip, for he already knew what he was going to do.”

POW!  In all fairness to Philip, there was no studying for this pop quiz.

“Philip replied, ‘Even if we worked for months, we wouldn’t have enough money to feed them!’

“Then Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, spoke up.  ‘There’s a young boy here with five barley loaves and two fish. But what good is that with this huge crowd?’”

Jesus wanted them to acknowledge the impossibility of their situation.

It’s certainly responsible and necessary to properly assess our situation.  To the disciples’ credit, they first surveyed what they knew of their available resources.  Money? Nope.  Adequate food? Nope.  Time to work for the money to buy the food?  The people would starve to death waiting.

Thus, Peter’s comment, “what good is that?”, wasn’t a lack of faith; it was reality.  It’s just that, up to this point in their relationship with Jesus, they were overlooking a critical Resource.

Jesus wanted to demonstrate the full sufficiency of Himself.

The Bible underscores time and again that our God specializes in the impossible.  And it’s not merely so that He can get the credit; He knows that He’s the only one who can actually handle getting the credit.  Once I humbly present my insufficiency—relationally, physically, emotionally, spiritually, or in any other way—that’s when the eye-popping stuff starts to happen.

Moreover, I also learn in the process that God gets the credit for ALL of the moving and shaking and making things happen.  In other words, the things that I can get done “because that’s just the way He made me” is because, well…He made me that way.

The end result for myself is humility before God as Almighty, and a greater intimacy with God as my Father.

And the end result for others is a full belly, even while I’m still chewing. 

John 6:5-9 Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved