This morning though, Proverbs 14, I'm gonna read the word of God verses or sorry, Matthew 14. I'm gonna gonna read the word of God for us, verses 13 through 21. Matthew chapter 14 verses 13 through 21. Now when Jesus heard this, speaking of John the Baptist and death, he withdrew from there in a boat to a desolate place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns.

When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd and he had compassion on them and healed their sick. Now when it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, this is a desolate place. The day is now over. Send the crowds away to go into the villages and buy food for themselves. But Jesus said, they don't need to go away, you give them something to eat.

They said to him, but we only have five loaves here and two fish. And he said, bring them to me. He ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass, and taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, said a blessing. Then he broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. They all ate and were satisfied.

They took up 12 baskets full of the broken pieces left over. Those who ate were about 5,000 men, besides women and children. This is the word of God. I pray he seals it in your heart. This is the longest day of Jesus' life.

I know every day has twenty four hours in it, even for Jesus, but you've certainly had the experience of some days being longer than others. This is one of those days. Jesus had just received news of John the Baptist's death. There are those who might argue that the, when Jesus heard of this in verse 13 is a reference back to the end of chapter 13 where he was in Nazareth, but I don't buy that because he said, it says here in verse 13, he withdrew from there in a boat, and you can't withdraw from Nazareth in a boat. It's on top of a hill, there's no boats there.

It's more likely that this is in reference to John the Baptist's death. The messengers from John came to Jesus and told Jesus John was killed. Jesus and John had a special relationship. John was perhaps his closest friend. We know John the apostle described himself as the disciple whom Jesus loved, but Jesus and John the Baptist grew up together.

They were cousins. John worshiped the news of Jesus' birth when John was still in the womb. That's their friendship. They grew up next to each other. John prepared the way for Jesus, preaching about Jesus, directing people to Jesus.

Jesus, for his part, esteemed John and said that John was the greatest person who ever lived. They certainly had an uncommon friendship. John had been taken into prison weeks, if not months earlier. Jesus' ministry kept going. And then seemingly out of nowhere, Jesus gets the message that John's dead.

Makes sense that he would withdraw from there. And a boat to a desolate place, there is probably Capernaum where he he was with his headquarters, he left there. We know from the other gospel accounts he headed up towards Peseta, which is on the the north tip of the Sea Of Galilee, the entrance where the Jordan River enters in. Let's just speak of the area like a clock right now. If Capernaum is like nine or 10:00 or so, Jesus goes up to noon on the clock, the 12:00.

He goes there. Now this miracle is described in all four gospels. It's the only miracle other than the resurrection described in all four gospels by the way. So we can bring the accounts altogether and form a full picture of what happened that day even beyond what's here in Matthew. Jesus heads out towards Bethsaida.

He started the day in isolation mourning John's death. But what's happening during this day is that the 12 apostles who were sent out back in Matthew chapter 10 to go and do signs and wonders and preach repentance, they begin coming back on this day. And Jesus starts meeting up with them two at a time. Luke says that they came back excited, eager to tell Jesus all that they did. Mark makes it sound like they were talking Jesus's ear off.

They were just telling him all the signs and wonders. They were so ecstatic. They were filled with so much joy all they've seen the last few weeks. Jesus is filled with grief for John's death, and he's having a reunion with his 12 friends who don't know anything about John and his death. They're just filled with joy, overwhelmed with joy, and they want to tell Jesus all of it.

They head to Bethsaida, which is the town where at least three of the 12 are from. The crowd keeps growing by the way, because as the 12 are coming to Jesus, they have their own crowds with them. The 12 have been doing their own miracles. And so the numbers are just swelling. Jesus is looking for isolation, and so it makes sense to go to Bethsaida.

It's it's more remote than Capernaum is, it's up at the very, it's the northernmost little village in Israel before you cross into the Decapolis, which is the gentile area there. So Jesus is as far away as he can get. But the crowd keeps growing. So Mark lets us know that Jesus then gets back in the boat to go out to a more desolate place. So on the clock here, he's moving from like 12:00 to 02:00, let's say.

He's now out in the, if you've been to Israel, you know that's the wilderness part out there. It's that side of the Sea Of Galilee. It's still in modern day Israel. Back then it would be more of the Syria area. He's over there.

There's nothing out there. The Decapolis is further away. It's very isolated. It's about three miles to cut the corner of the sea that way. Mark gives you a very funny detail about this.

The crowd doesn't want Jesus to go. So the crowd is following Jesus. Jesus is on a boat, and Mark says that the wind was against Jesus and the the currents from the Jordan River are right there and everything, so it was apparently tough going, and the crowd was able to follow Jesus on the boat. It's kind of a funny scene, I think. Jesus with the 12 trying to get away from the crowd by cutting the corner of the lake and the thousands of people just For about five miles, they followed Jesus.

And I I say Jesus was trying to get away. Obviously, Jesus can do whatever he wants to do. He can walk on the water if he wants to. Spoiler alert, that's how he gets back across the lake next. Jesus is manufacturing this miracle.

He's creating the situation with a desperate crowd in a dark and isolated place for the purposes of this miracle. The disciples don't know that. The crowd doesn't know that. But Jesus knows that, and his day is far from over. He's going to leverage the occasion of the twelve's return to give them a pastoral lesson.

Now this has been seen over and over again in Matthew's gospel, and it will happen a few more times as well. The crowd grows. The crowd does not believe in Jesus in a saving way. The crowd wants miracles, of course, they want healing, but John in John chapter six, Jesus tells them, you're not believing in me in any real way. They just want the miracles.

So the crowd is growing, The disciples are believing. Jesus is trying to prepare the disciples for a life when Jesus is no longer in the world, but the church is in the world. And so he's going to teach them in a way that penetrates their hearts and prepares them for ministry in a way the crowd is oblivious to. This is exactly what he did in Matthew 13, by the way. Remember?

The crowd was huge and hostile, and so he switched to parables to teach the 12 in a way that would prepare them for the church, but the crowd was blinded to it. They didn't understand. He'll do that again in Matthew 16 when he talks about building the church. In Matthew 18 when he talks about the keys of the church being given to the 12. At the end of Matthew's gospel, when he says the kingdom's gonna be taken away from the from all the religious leaders and the Pharisees and the scribes and given to those apostles who will bear fruit in keeping with the kingdom.

So time and time again he is taught like this. This is another example. It doesn't use the word church, but he is preparing these 12 disciples for the world of the church. They don't know that, and you know they don't know that because in Mark's gospel, Jesus comes to him at night, by the way, and says you still don't get it, do you? That's the scene.

The scene begins with a famine in the fields. The famine in the field. The crowds heard of Jesus on the move here in verse 13. And they followed him on foot from all the towns. The crowd is growing.

The towns out there are not big, but remember the 12 had just come back. They brought crowds with them. This is a big number for a desolate place. When Jesus is on the boat is where this starts because Mark says he can see the crowd from the boat. But he goes ashore and he encounters the great crowd there in verse 14 in Matthew's gospel.

He had compassion on them. It was a humorous scene, but Jesus sees through the humor of it to the desperation of these people. And you really need to get to get this miracle, you need to appreciate the absolute desperation of these people. They're bringing sick with them. They're they're so they're spiritually hungry, of course.

They're physically at need. This is a desolate and remote place by design. The people that made it this far out there, these are some desperate, needy people. In Matthew nine, it's a similar scene and it says Jesus in Matthew nine has compassion on them because they looked to him, this is Matthew nine verse 36, they looked at him, they looked at them like sheep without a shepherd. They're desperate people.

In Matthew's gospel, all the physical ailments that Jesus heals all represent spiritual truth. I mean they're real physical ailments, but you understand this. They're all indicative of a spiritual reality. He heals the blind to demonstrate that we are all spiritually blind, but he alone can give spiritual sight. The deaf refuse to hear the word of God in in a very real sense.

And there's physically deaf people who Jesus heals and they then worship him. It's a way of confronting the Pharisees and the the works righteous Jews to show them they refuse to hear the word of God. They have the the law, they have the prophets, they have the covenants, but they don't listen to God. They're deaf. The lepers are being dissolving because of sin.

They're erasing themselves because of their own sin. Jesus can heal it. The religious leaders of Israel cannot heal it, Jesus can. It's a picture that he can heal our sin. He raises the dead because he gives spiritual life.

The blind man who can see but, this is in Mark's gospel, who sees but needs help with his unbelief, that's all of us. God gives us spiritual sight but we need to still help to grow in our faith. This is always true in Matthew's gospel, and it is true here. The crowd has physical needs, and they're so desperate for help, and that is a picture of the fact that they are a lost people. They are lost.

They have no guides but the scribes and the Pharisees who are the blind leading the blind. That's gonna come in the next chapter. They have no spiritual food except man made traditions, man designed rituals that they enact and that they follow, and the scribes and Pharisees put burdens on these people's shoulders, and the people cannot bear them. And Jesus comes and teaches and it penetrates their hearts and they listen to Jesus and they say, He has authority, not like our our religious leaders. And Jesus has such compassion on them, such compassion.

He's filled with pity as these people are crawling along. It's a rocky coast over there. They're following along the coast desperate for an encounter with the Lord. They're wandering like wounded sheep in the wilderness, hunted by wolves, and Jesus's heart breaks for them. And so he gets off the boat and goes Remember earlier in Matthew 13, he got on the boat to get away from them so he could teach and they could hear.

Now he gets off the boat to interact with them, to heal them. Mark six says he was healing and teaching, healing and teaching. These people are desperate. They're harassed by the devil. They're harassed by illness, harassed by sickness, harassed by sin.

That word harassed is coming from Matthew nine thirty six where Jesus says he looked at them as sheep without a shepherd, harassed and haunted, harassed and helpless. Again, harassed by sin, harassed by the devil, harassed by their own religious leaders. It should be their shepherds that are instead slaughtering them. It's a sad scene and our Lord had compassion on them. This is rain to a dry and weary land.

He gets off the boat to come minister to them. That's the famine in the field, and Jesus goes he sets aside his agenda, his so called agenda of being with the 12 to hear about all their wonders and all their signs and all they did. He sets that aside for the moment to go and minister to the crowds. This leads secondly to the dilemma in the disciples. When he went ashore, he saw the great crowd, he had compassion, verse 14 says, and began healing them.

Verse 15, when it was evening, so this is filling out the rest of the day. The hours have gone by. When the day is spent is the language that is the disciples are gonna use here. Mark's gospels say, the sun has gone down. Luke six says, the day is over.

It's done. So Jesus wrapped this up. Now in Mark's gospel, it's very interesting. Jesus told the disciples, don't bring any food or bags with you as we're going out. And Mark says they left in such urgency, they didn't get to eat that morning.

The disciples didn't get to eat as Jesus took them away. So it seems like when you put everything together, the day starts with the messengers getting to Jesus and saying John's dead. It would be about from the Macarius Castle where John was killed, it'd be about, I don't know, a ten hour walk or so to get to Jesus. So they probably walk through a lot of the night. They get to Jesus, tell him in the morning that John's dead.

Jesus isolates himself as the 12 start coming back. He then heads up to Bethsaida. He tells them don't even bring food with you, leave everything in Bethsaida. Let's go out to the wilderness. They don't have bags with them, they don't have food with them, they haven't eaten all day long.

The disciples say, Jesus, it's a desolate place and the day in verse 15 is over. Send the crowds away. It's time for us to eat. Now the crowds, of course, they would stay longer, I'm sure. Some of them are probably getting hungry.

But I'm sure for the most part, they walked all the way out there. They weren't expecting to be fed. It was them that walked out there. They know the area. They know there's no food out there.

They're not expecting food. They're expecting miracles and that's why they're there. They'll skip a meal. But the disciples, they are getting anxious. They have also journeyed long.

I'm not trying to say it's negative on the disciples at all, like they're less spiritual in the crowd or anything. No, but they have been with Jesus all day long and they haven't eaten and they're hungry and the sun is setting. And you know how it's in the back of your head, you're wondering, like, when exactly is church gonna end? Have you ever thought that? This is the 09:30 service, so not so much.

But the 11:00 service, oh my goodness. 12:15, people looking at the clocks, making reservations at mics, doing all kinds of stuff. I can tell. I can see the Resi app in your glasses. Like, come on, the the Spanish service has got to start.

Oh, yeah, like that's what you're concerned about. That's what the disciples are doing here. They go up to Jesus and they say, come on, Jesus. The Aramaic services gotta start soon. The day is over.

Send them away into a village to buy food. I was listening this week to the an old Lyle Lovett song that I love called Church. You know Lyle Lovett? He has a song called Church about the preacher who keeps preaching long is the hour, and the people are getting hungry and hungry. And if you remember the song, the ladies go to the kitchen and start making cornbread and wafting the scent into the worship center to try to get the preacher to wrap up.

He ignores it. A kid crawls into the choir loft and gets the choir to sing the closing song. The preacher ignores it. The preacher, he keeps preaching. And the moral of the story, the closing stanza of the song, children is plain but true.

If the preacher he preaches long enough, maybe he'll get hungry too. Like that's your hope right there. I love that song. I don't know why I like that song. Matthew 14, that's what the disciples are hoping.

Jesus has gotta eat. Let's go Lord. Send them to the villages. Now going to villages is not going to help. That's just more of a polite the disciples are trying to give Jesus an out here.

The closest village is Beseda. It's a village of a couple thousand people. You can't roll in there with 5,000 people at sundown, 5,000 men, and who knows how many women and children. Of course it says at the end here, 5,000 men verse 21, plus women and children. We don't know how many women there were or how many children there were.

Some people guess 20,000 total. That's just a wild guess. You say 5,000 men, as many women as men, and then as many kids, and the kids come in pairs, you're at 20,000 right there. Who knows if that's true? Who knows if there were as many women?

We have no idea. There are 5,000 men and a lot of other people, but the point is, you can't take 5,000, let's go low, 5,000 total. And 5,001, because you know there's at least one kid. 5,001, roll into the seda at sundown and ask for food. You couldn't do we're here in Washington, D.

C. You couldn't do that right now. We couldn't do that with, where there's 600 people in here? I couldn't call mics and say I have 600 people, can we show up in ten minutes? That wouldn't work now.

It's not even about the finances of it, it's about the logistics of it. You can't do that. In Luke's gospel, they pool their money to see how much money they have between the group of them. They have 200 denarii, which is a lot of money. Commentators say it's a couple thousand dollars.

I don't buy that. A dinari is a day's wages for day labor. Maybe it's a couple thousand dollars when the, you know, 1940s when Germans write in their commentaries, but not today. A day laborer today gets what, $200? They got 200 of that, $40,000 or something like that.

The point is not the money. The point is you cannot buy food at sundown for thousands of people when there there's one village with one shop in it. What are you gonna do? Go door to door and buy bread from all the houses? And there's some joking about that among the disciples too.

Like, how much bread could we get with 200 denarii? That's in Luke's gospel. How much bread could we get for $40,000 It's just a funny question. It's just an issue of the logistics of the thing. So they tell Jesus, wrap this up, the people have to go get something to eat.

Jesus in verse 16 says, they don't need to go away. You give them something to eat. And the you in the Greek is redundant. You don't need the word you and it is there in the Greek. Because it's a second person plural imperative.

The you would be implied in the language, give them something to eat. And in Greek there's a way to communicate that, it's to you. By attacking on the pronoun, it makes it redundant. It would be like you yourselves do it. And we have an English idiot for that, don't we?

You tell your kids, would you set the table? And the kid says back to you, why don't you do it yourself? Okay. Why don't you eat in the backyard? But that's that idiom.

You do it yourself. It's a redundant pronoun at the end of it. That's what Jesus does here. Why don't you feed them yourselves? Disciples don't know what Jesus means by that.

They can guess, what do you want us to do? Remember, obviously the crowd's physical hunger is symptomatic of their spiritual hunger. The disciples don't realize that yet. The disciples just got back from doing miracles. And so Jesus tells them, do this one as well.

Do this one as well. In John chapter six, Andrew takes it upon himself to go out into the crowd and he comes back with five loaves and two fish. The word for loaves there, don't picture like a wonder loaf bread or anything, picture like, you know, a little loaf, like those rolls maybe that you get, you know, you buy them a dozen, those like brown and served kind of rolls. That's this kind of roll. So Andrew comes back with five of those and two little pickled fish.

He stole a kid's lunch is what he did. He got a kid, that's what a kid would take for lunch, maybe for lunch for him and his brother or something. So all the people out there, some kid grabbed his lunch on the way out the door. That's what Andrew takes. This is, I believe it's also meant to be funny.

You can read I'm not telling you, you have to read it that way, but as I read John chapter six and Andrew comes back with the five loaves and the two fish for, you know, between 25,000 people, you're supposed to chuckle a little bit at it. Like, I have this, Lord. I suppose it's a start. I suppose it's a start. The disciples don't know what to do.

This leads to solution in the Savior. Solution in the Savior. Jesus says in verse 18, bring him to me. He orders the crowds to sit down on the grass. In Mark's gospel, he sits in by the 50s and the 100s.

This is how Moses did this in the wilderness, a very important story to remember to understand what's happening here. In the wilderness, they had manna, and the the Jews were complaining about it. They didn't like all the manna. They had grown tired of the manna. Manana bread, manana pot pie, they were over it.

They don't like Moses, the way he's leading, and so they rebel. And Moses has them all sit down in their groups of fifties and hundreds by their family, and he appoints new leaders that will oversee every part of Israel. Moses grabs the food, gives thanks, praise to God, and hands Israel over to their new leaders. Jesus is reenacting that scene here. He has them sit down by their fifties and their hundreds.

Matthew just communicates to you. They sat down in their groups on the grass, taking the five loaves and the two fish. The crowd at this point would likely understand what's happening, but not the miracle part of it. The crowd's not involved in logistics. They were not involved with the you feed them.

They wouldn't expect to be fed. But the normal way a meal at an Israelite household would happen is everybody would sit down, and the the person that the male of the house, the the man of the house who's hosting the meal, he would stand up and he would take the bread, he would give thanks to God for the food, he would break the bread and pass the bread. He doesn't break the fish, he breaks the bread, the fish is just passed. And so we have the expression breaking bread, not expression breaking fish. This is why.

An American family, American Christian family would do the same kind of concept. You have dinner at somebody's house, it would be the normal thing for you to sit down, and then for the the man of the house to pray for the food and then you all eat. So even if you went to somebody's house and you weren't expecting food, but they sat you at the table and the guy prayed and then said, let's eat. You would expect you're now being fed. That's this kind of scene.

They weren't expecting it. Jesus sits them down, then stands up, prays for the bread, breaks it, and hands it to the 12. Now how does he hand it to the 12? There's five loaves. You break each one, that you're at 10.

He breaks the first one, that's at 11. He breaks another one, he's at twelve. By breaking these things in half, he's getting them into 12 people's hands, and the 12 people then spread out. The 12 people start dispersing it to the crowds. This is the miracle right here.

When the bread is broken, the two parts that are broken are the same size as the original bread was. The five are breaking theirs. It's the same size as the original five loaves. You now have 12 loaves the size of the first five. They're being passed around.

Everybody is breaking bread off, and the loaf is the same size. In fact, it is not only the same size because at the end you realize in verse 20, there's 12 baskets filled. The loaf is actually growing. They're going to end with more food than they started with. It's unclear what the crowd realizes from this, but the crowd is not the intended audience of this miracle.

The 12 are. This is a crisis manufactured by Jesus to make the point that he can multiply this bread. He's going to give it to the 12. The 12 are gonna give it to the crowd, and everybody is going to be fed. This is obviously a miracle.

There's something called Gamp's law of elemental transfiguration. You can't multiply food. You can add water to the stew, but you can't multiply food. Jesus multiplies food and feeds between five and twenty thousand people. It really is astonishing.

One commentator says, these are crackers made from barley that was never planted and fish are eaten that never swam. The disciples physically hand it out. This leads finally to the mandate in the ministry. The charge here is impossible to miss. You do it, Jesus tells them.

Verse 20, they ate and were satisfied. That word satisfied there is a pretty cool Greek word. It means, gorged. It doesn't mean like, oh no, I no, no, I'm being polite. No, it means everybody ate as much as they wanted to eat.

The word that's used in Greek literature, it's for a horse that eats to the bottom of his feed bag. The horse is done. We've seen this before in Matthew's gospel by the way, really cool usage. Earlier in Matthew's gospel in Matthew five, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. It was used earlier about hunger.

Jesus using it here in the description of it is letting you know there's a real ethical implication of this. These people ate the miraculous food and they were satisfied using the same concept of those that hunger and thirst for righteousness, if they come to the Lord, they will be satisfied. That's the image. Those who ate, 5,000 plus women and children. The end of verse twenty, twelve baskets.

The words for basket there, it's not a massive basket. It's a little basket like a bread basket for a table or like I'm using mics again. The thing they bring you to Aussie rolls in, that little thing. That's this basket. There's a different word for basket that's much bigger.

You're going to see that with the next feeding of the 4,000, which is a different miracle. Uses a different word. We'll talk about why at that message. But for now, each of the 12 guys has their own little basket and it's filled with bread. More than they started with.

It is a message that is impossible to miss. The 12 apostles, there's 12 because they represent the 12 tribes of Israel. These 12 are being in a sense given the keys here to the kingdom. Jesus could have multiplied the fish and loaves without them quite easily. He could have had manna grow up from the ground.

If the point was to make Jesus the second Moses and only that, he could have had manna come up. If he was to be better than Elijah, ravens could have brought food. He could have done all kinds of things. In fact, the phrase that they ate and were satisfied, that is a direct quote from two Kings chapter four. Remember where Elisha had a school of prophets, and one of the prophets made stew for everybody.

They had 200 people there. They made stew and he put a poisonous gourd in the stew, and it made the stew poisonous. I don't expect you to remember this story. It's a very obscure Old Testament story. But they taste the stew and they're like, oh my Lord, there is poison in the stew.

And Elisha grabs some flour, throws it in there, prays for the stew, heals it, and then everybody eats and is satisfied. Jesus could have done it like that. He did not need to rope in the 12. But the 12 is the audience of this miracle. It is for them.

They are supposed to understand the mandate Jesus is giving them. You feed everybody. They're spiritually desperate. They're spiritually lost. You need to take care of them.

Give them what Isaiah describes, wine without cost, bread without money. You give them their food. This is now the mandate of the 12, and this will be very important for them to remember when Jesus leaves the world. Because the the lost sheep of Israel are scattered everywhere, and they do not have a shepherd. They're spiritually lost, and the Lord's compassion is towards them and he is going to go to heaven, and the disciples are gonna be left there and they are to shepherd the sheep.

This is what Jesus's last words in John's gospel to Peter are. Right? Do you love me? Then feed my sheep. Three times, feed my sheep.

Feed my sheep. Feed my sheep. Jesus is going away, the 12 are going to have to care for Jesus's sheep. And it's not just the lost sheep in Israel, He has sheep in other places all around the world. How are they gonna be cared for?

How are they gonna know how to be saved? The world is filled with people that the Lord knows by name, but they don't know him by name. The world is filled with people who are spiritually lost and broken. They're dead in their sins. They're looking for meaning in life.

They're looking for happiness in life. They're looking for some way to deal with their sin that they know they're guilty of and they don't know where to go. With them? And Jesus tells the 12 you feed them. This is he's gonna make this point again in Matthew 16.

Based upon what Peter said, he's gonna build his church. In Matthew 18, he's gonna give the the elders the keys to the church. In Matthew, later on towards the end of Matthew's gospel, the parable of the bloody vineyard, he says, I'm gonna take the vineyard away from these Jewish religious leaders that are only abusing people, and I'm gonna give it to those who bear fruit in keeping with it. That's that's messaging that the kingdom is gonna be transferred from the leadership of the scribes and the Pharisees and the Jewish religious leaders to the kingdom of the Messiah. And he's going to build his church.

And through confession of faith in Christ as Lord, you can enter into his church. You'll be shepherded by elders and pastors, they'll care for you spiritually and how and you're a sheep, how do you eat? You know sheep are the wonkiest animals, you know this. A sheep doesn't have food, it dies. If sheep has too much food, it dies.

A sheep doesn't have water, it dies. A sheep falls into the water, it dies. They need a shepherd that's got eyes on them all the time. And that's the image for us. We are sheep and we need to eat.

Now what do we eat? We eat the word of God. We don't live on bread alone, but from every word that comes from the Lord's mouth, we eat the word of God. This is what we do as we gather together as a church, as we study the word together. We are sheep and we eat the word as we gather together for church.

You know, you'll say so many people say to me, nice sermon. I liked your sermon today. And I always say, thank you. You're being polite. Thank you.

But I didn't make it. I'm the waiter here. The Lord made it. I'm just bringing it to the table. I don't have a lot to contribute to this.

It's just the word of God. The Lord is the one who made it. I'm the waiter. You don't thank the waiter for the meal unless you're just being polite. I understand that.

Don't be mean to the waiter either, please. We recognize it's the Lord's work. It's the Lord's work. Now what do the disciples contribute to this? They're not supposed to be creative with this, the disciples.

They were the the five loaves and two fish are kind of funny. They're not supposed to be creative. They're supposed to be available and then bring what Jesus gives them to the sheep. I can't tell the Lord, oh Lord, I got a great sermon outline idea. Do you want it?

No. No, he doesn't want it. That's where we are. We are desperate sheep. And I hope you see this picture of the entire gospel is wrapped up into this.

The Lord is in heaven, and he looks at people who are lost in their sins, and his heart breaks for them. He's not callous. His heart breaks for people who don't know how to be saved. And he's not content to stay in heaven any more than Jesus is content to stay on the boat watching the desperate crowd on the shore. But the Lord leaves heaven.

He comes from heaven to earth to live among us and to give his own body to us. In fact, in John's gospel after the feeding of 5,000, when he explains to the disciples, he says, this is my body I'm talking about. That's what I'm giving you. Forget the bread for a second. It's me.

It's my body. It's my blood. And unless you eat this and drink this, you have no way for salvation. The Lord did not stay in heaven. He came to earth and gave himself.

So the people who are lost in their sins can receive the wonderful bread of life from the Lord Jesus. They can have their sins forgiven because he died on the cross. They can have confidence in salvation because he rose from the dead. That's what Jesus offers to us. The miracle is yes, it's the multiplication of the fish and loaves.

That's happened. That's true. And that's a miracle. That is not the full miracle. The full miracle is that Jesus has given us his word and it multiplies throughout the world.

Churches in every nation, every language group, the people bringing forward the word of God, They did not design themselves. Jesus says, I'm gonna go away. I'm gonna give you a spirit who reminds you what I said. Write it down and tell others. And that's where we are today.

Lord, we're grateful that you came from heaven to earth to rescue people lost in their sin. You came from the boat to the shore to minister to the crowd. You came from heaven to earth to give yourself as the bread of life. Just as you multiplied the fish and the loaves, you open your arms to the world and invite anyone who turns to their sin to come to you in faith. We're thankful that even the faith itself is a gift from you.

It seems so obvious looking back on it. We know the disciples didn't understand this miracle yet. Took a few more days. Looking back on it though, we see it Lord. You handed your ministry to them.

You've given it to us as well. We're not creative, but we want to be faithful. Help us this week bring the word of God to those that need it. For this morning, Lord, we're gathered here. We are your sheep.

We desire to be fed from your word. We pray that your word this morning would fill us, seal us, and motivate us for holy living this week. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. And now for a parting word from pastor Jesse Johnson.

If you have any questions about what you heard today or if you wanna learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website, ibc.church. If you want more information about the Master's Seminary or our location here in Washington, DC, please go to tms.edu. Now if you're not a member of a local church and you live in the Washington, DC area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emmanuel. I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service. But no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church.

Now may God bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly, serve the Lord faithfully, and share the gospel boldly.