When demands out strip Supply!

Sermon Notes: When demands out strip Supply! John 6:1-15.

1: The Compassionate heart of Jesus.

Jesus had every reason to be frustrated with the crowd who won’t give Him a minute’s peace, but we get an insight into Jesus’ heart and feelings. We’re told in the other Gospel accounts regarding the same event, that He had ‘compassion’ on them, because He saw them as sheep without a shepherd.

There are people in this crowd in John 6 with broken hearts, broken homes, broken hopes, broken dreams, and so when Jesus saw these people, it stirred such strong feelings and passion within Him. His heart flows out to them and He does something in response, He teaches them a miracle, what He and His Father are truly like.

2: The short sightedness of the disciples.

Matthew in his account in Matthew 14 shares a conversation that Jesus had with the disciples and he gives us a little flavour of it in verse 15, ‘As evening approached the disciples came to Jesus and said, ‘this is a remote place and it is already getting late, send the crowds away, so that they can go to the villages and buy themselves some food.’

Philip is from this area, so Jesus asks him a direct question! ‘where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?’

Philip’s answer is one of just complete despair and desperation, ‘buy something to eat, Jesus – feed these people – like look at the numbers, well eight months wages wouldn’t be enough to give them a bite, never mine a full meal.’

You and I can be overwhelmed by the needs of people around our world. Everywhere you look in our world today, there are huge crowds of people, so many needs, so much pain. Sometimes if we’re honest we feel like the disciples, because their reaction can often be our reaction, they just want Jesus to take the problem off their hands.

Immediately the disciples are faced with such enormous needs, they feel they are totally inadequate to do anything, and their resources are totally inadequate to meet such a need as this.

3 The willingness of Jesus to use the little that we offer to Him.

In the face of such need we often feel totally overwhelmed, totally incapable of doing anything that will make any difference in people’s lives at all. The disciples here are saying we can’t do anything we simply don’t have what it takes.

Andrew comes along and speaks up in verse 9, ‘here is a boy with five small loaves and two small fish.’

We often think of the miracle taking place in Jesus’ hands, but something else happened, because Jesus divided the five small loaves and two fish between the twelve disciples. He says, ‘Now you go and feed them.’ As they go and began to give out the little that they had in their hands, they found that there was always more to give away.

You may think that what you can do for God is very little, but the more you do those little things, take those little opportunities, the more God will increase and multiply the ways in which He will use YOU!

The results: ‘All of them ate and were full, their stomachs were full. God provided all that they needed, with a little extra left over.’

Who can satisfy the emptiness that people feel inside them today? Only JESUS! Verse 35, ‘I am the bread of LIFE.’