A Difficult Feeding

5 min read

35 By this time it was late in the day, so his disciples came to him. “This is a remote place,” they said, “and it’s already very late. 36 Send the people away so that they can go to the surrounding countryside and villages and buy themselves something to eat.”
—Mark 6:35-36

Here is a difficult teaching too.

Many people read the Bible asking, “What does this tell me about Jesus?” And for sure, that should be the first question we ask. And the feeding of the 5,000 points to the truth that Jesus is the Christ. We must not miss that main point.

And knowing who Jesus is, the obvious application is that we can trust Jesus with all of our needs when we devote our lives to be His disciples. And that is a good understanding and application.

But what we often miss is what the Bible says about us and the application we are to draw from that understanding in light of what is being said about Jesus.

Jesus and His disciples were in a remote place so that they could rest after a very fruitful season of ministry. Surely the disciples deserved a reward of rest after all the demons they cast out, all the people they healed, and after proclaiming the gospel here, there, and everywhere.

But then the crowds came and ruined their plan for rest.

Jesus, for His part, had great compassion on them. The disciples’ response to the crowds was basically, “Send them away!”

When we consider that the Gospels were written for the first generation of disciples, Jesus’s next statement reveals the actual application of this episode in light of who Jesus is: “You give them something to eat.”

It’s easy to trust in Jesus when Jesus is giving me what I want, but is it easy to trust in Jesus when He wants us to give others what they need?

Because Jesus’s consistent message throughout the Scriptures to His disciples is to trust in Him fully and deeply so that we can put the needs of others before our own. Trusting in Jesus fully and deeply brings our lives into a clear focus.

Personally, this is an extremely difficult teaching. I confess that I often cannot differentiate my wants from my true needs. But the true need of mine that governs all the others has been completely satisfied by Christ and Him crucified, resurrected, and returning.

Father, I pray that our ultimate need, satisfied by Your grace, will be powerfully satisfied in our hearts daily through faith. So I pray that out of Your glorious riches, You will strengthen us with power through the Holy Spirit in our inner being, so that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith. And that we, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the holy saints, to grasp how long and wide and high and deep is the love of Christ—and that we may know this love that surpasses all knowledge—that we may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God—His mercy, grace, power, and love. In Jesus’s name. Amen.