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He Provides Spiritually
When Jesus fed the 5000 he not only was looking to their physical needs, but he was also concerned about their spiritual needs. He's concerned with your spiritual needs too.
Matthew 14:13-21
Welcome back. I want to take another look at how Jesus feeds the 5000. One of the last videos we talked about how Jesus takes care of us physically. We can trust him to do that. He has the means. He has the power to do that. Jesus fed 5000 people with five loaves of bread and two small fish and had leftovers. (Matthew 14:13-21) It was a lesson for the disciples. It’s a lesson for us today. God can take care of us and He uses us and he uses other people to do that.
But that wasn’t the main point of what Jesus did when he fed the 5000. It wasn’t to show I can and will physically give you food every day. Because that’s what some people wanted the main lesson to be. What happens after this in the Book of John is that people want to make Jesus their king by force. They wanted to make him their bread king. Yes, give us bread like this every day, just like you did, just like God daily provided for his people with Manna when they were in the desert. If you’re really who you say you are, take care of us physically. And Jesus would go on to say, That’s not the point.
The point isn’t to have bread day in and day out and take care of our bodies, I have something so much better for you. He would say, I am the bread of life. I am the bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats and drinks of me will have eternal life and never hunger or thirst again. Sadly, many of the people didn’t want that. They just wanted God to take care of them physically. They just wanted the temporal, the here and now instead of the eternal that Jesus gives life forever.
How often do we do that? We you think about all those times in the Bible where God provides bread for his people and there’s always this question, Will they trust me? Will they trust me with bigger things than that, with their eternal life, too? Back when God provided manna bread from heaven in the desert and on their way to the promised land, he gave them daily bread. Every day. The manna was on the ground and they had to pick it up. And every day they were only supposed to pick up enough for the next day. And if they decided to hoard it and save it up and think, I’m not sure if God’s going to take care of me for the next day, so I’m just going to pile up more. They would go and do you remember what it was like? The bread was moldy and rotten and full of worms and grubs. They just needed to trust God every day to take care of them.
And do we do that sometimes too where we’re not trusting in God, but instead we’re just piling up securities for ourselves. And if we place our trust in them, instead of in the God who gives us spiritual bread from heaven. They will rot and they’ll rot us too, in a spiritual way. If we start to trust in ourselves or in what we can do for eternal life or a real good life, now it rots and it results in death and hunger. But Jesus gives us something that doesn’t rot or spoil or fade away. It’s kept in heaven for you. He is the bread from heaven. He is the bread of life.
God knew that he needed to provide for us and more than just physical bread. So God provided what we actually needed. He provided this baby in the manger at Christmas time that we celebrate. He provided the man Jesus to come and live the perfect life that we could never achieve. He provided Jesus to be the sacrifice for the sins of the world. So we die on the cross and pay for our sins, even our sins of saying, I don’t trust you, God, or I want something physical. And I’m not thinking of the eternal anymore. God provided what we really need. The bread of Life. And now I encourage you to go and eat that bread as you find yourself at worship or regularly studying your Bible. This is where God fills us up with His promises and his life. And as we’ll see in the next video, prepares us to go and distribute that bread to others too.
God be with you.
