Good day friends! I hope all is well in your world today and that the Lord is blessing your steps with enough joy and peace that you can afford to share the abundance with others!
Margie and I continue to sort out the house and are still on the hunt for furniture...the house still echoes...ha! Our last year in Maui, our place was a whopping 560 sq ft so we're blessed to be in something that echoes! Well, what do you really need anyway? Just a chair, some tunes and some Little Debbies right? (Mmmm, Nutty Buddies!)
Margie & I got up early this morning and had a nice quiet 3 mile walk around the neighborhood. What a beautiful morning for a walk! Being active is an important part of life, I try to make my daily walk a priority along with my 5MC in God's Word so that I can excercise my heart 2 different ways.
After our walk, I made some tasty coffee (I LOVE COFFEE!) and sat down for my daily 5MC. This morning I got through most of John chapter 6 in my 5 minutes. Jesus feeds the 5,000, walks on water and explains Himself being the Bread of Life. Jesus' ministry was only about 3 years long...man, was He a busy guy during those 3 years!
The feeding of the 5,000 is always a fascinating study for me. First of all notice that it says it was 5,000 MEN. If you figure that each man had a wife & a few kids that number would easaily be much closer to 15,000! That is quite a large group of people! I love that as it got be dinner time and Jesus saw that they were hungry, He didn't just perform the miracle & feed them. He saw it as a teaching moment & test Phillip with a question, "where are we gonna buy enough bread to feed all these people?" Phillip answers quickly with "not even 200 denarii would be enough to give them all one bite!"
What? 200 Denarii? Why is he limited to 200 Denarii? Where did he even come up with that amount? I read in my McGee commentary that it was more than likely how much was in the disciple's treasury at that time. Ahhh, that would make sense. Phillip would have known how much money they had and what he could have gotten his hands on to feed these people. How ironic that Phillip was standing there talking with Jesus, the Son of God, the savior of the world, who created everything that ever existed and he feels limited to what he has on hand...200 Denarii. He was thinking only of what HE HAD and not WHO HE WAS WALKING WITH. I can't fault Phillip on this, I've been guilty of this so many times in my life, looking at the problem and not looking at Jesus. Oh yeah, by the way...a denarii was a Roman penny and it was a day's wage for a common laborer. So Phillip was saying it would take approximately 7 months pay to give them all just a bit of bread. No small amount.
There's so many life lessons in this story but the one that speaks to me today is the one of God's provision in our lives. Phillip was walking with Jesus everyday and had already seen Him do miracles, but in the heat of the moment he only thought of what he had available as an answer to the problem. He had his eyes on the problem, not on Jesus. I continue to struggle with this, I focus on the problem in front of me & how I can solve it using my own resources & I don't think of calling upon Jesus and His unlimited resources. He has the power to feed the masses, He is the bread of life.
In our last few years of ministry Margie & I have had to rely greatly on God and His provision. As we've gone from jobs to no jobs, house to no house & lots to little, God has been teaching us the hard lessons of full reliance on Him. As Jesus asks us to feed the 5,000 in our daily walk, we realize we are not enough, but He is. Rely on Him to be your bread.
Thanks for reading along & sharing time with me in God's Word everyday. I hope you are enjoying your personal 5 minutes in God's Word everyday as well. If you'd like to share your thoughts on what you read, please do. I know I as well as others would love to tag along!
As a side note, I've been posting my daily 5MC's on Captain Aloha's FB page & will start sharing today on our main page as well. If you're looking for 5MC posts from the last month, just ckeck out Captain Aloha's page.
Blessings.
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