Matthew 15:29-39 New Living Translation (NLT)
29 Jesus returned to the Sea of Galilee and climbed a hill and sat down. 30 A vast crowd brought to him people who were lame, blind, crippled, those who couldn’t speak, and many others. They laid them before Jesus, and he healed them all. 31 The crowd was amazed! Those who hadn’t been able to speak were talking, the crippled were made well, the lame were walking, and the blind could see again! And they praised the God of Israel.
32 Then Jesus called his disciples and told them, “I feel sorry for these people. They have been here with me for three days, and they have nothing left to eat. I don’t want to send them away hungry, or they will faint along the way.”
33 The disciples replied, “Where would we get enough food here in the wilderness for such a huge crowd?”
34 Jesus asked, “How much bread do you have?”
They replied, “Seven loaves, and a few small fish.”
35 So Jesus told all the people to sit down on the ground. 36 Then he took the seven loaves and the fish, thanked God for them, and broke them into pieces. He gave them to the disciples, who distributed the food to the crowd.
37 They all ate as much as they wanted. Afterward, the disciples picked up seven large baskets of leftover food. 38 There were 4,000 men who were fed that day, in addition to all the women and children. 39 Then Jesus sent the people home, and he got into a boat and crossed over to the region of Magadan.
As we enter into day 4 of 21 days of prayer, I believe the Lord has at least 3 nuggets of truth in this passage.
1) There’s always more to discover.
The disciples had been with Jesus for 3 days. He’s been pouring into them. But after 3 days, He wants them to learn more. When you think you can absorb no more, Jesus says, there’s more to learn here. He wants to and He does teach them by example something new.
No matter how much we think we know, with Jesus – there’s always more to discover. So we persist in faith ready to learn even more.
2) There’s more to display.
As we learn more about Jesus, we not only want to display Him to others, we will display Him to others. When we bump up to Jesus, when we sit at his feet and let Him pour His word into us, we display Him to others. Out of an overflow, like a river flooding, the Holy Spirit oozes out of us and it becomes evident to others that we have been with Jesus.
3) There’s more to distribute.
We live to give Him away to others. One way of giving Jesus to others – is when we decide to give people our time to pray for them. That’s a tangible way of giving Jesus to others. As we discover more, we display more, we learn that there’s just simply no ending in ways to give Jesus away to others.
Today may we just soak in so much of Jesus through the Word and the infilling of the Holy Spirit, that our lives just overflow with evidence an fruit of our time with Him.. and then may we experience the natural result that there is no end in distributing Jesus to others.
