Sacrifice and Sufficiency

Series on Luke

III The Initiation

D The Activities of His Ministry Revealing that the Kingdom Is:

13 Food for the Hungry

Text: 9:10-17

Introduction

When you come to the table of the Lord, if I asked you what the food on the table represented you would undoubtedly answer with the first thing that comes to your mind which is the body and blood of our Savior. But what does this mean to us? I suggest to you that a true understanding of the ordinance involves two concepts, sacrifice and sufficiency. That is, our sufficiency or supply is directly related to His sacrifice. If we try to find our needs met in any other way but through his provision we go hungry. So let us consider these two things and see if we can understand their implications from our text.

I Sacrifice

The real secret of faith in Jesus is understanding that all our gains are from his losses. He came to empty Himself in order that we might be filled. Without His suffering there is no alleviation of our pain. Without His hunger there is no satisfying ours. I want you to notice that He is among us as one who serves and who serves completely. He always takes the lower place. In our text He has drawn His disciples aside for a rest in Bethsaida, but the crowds follow as recorded in verses 10-12, When the apostles returned, they reported to Jesus what they had done. Then he took them with him and they withdrew by themselves to a town called Bethsaida, but the crowds learned about it and followed him. He welcomed them and spoke to them about the kingdom of God, and healed those who needed healing. We read that he welcomed the crowd. Mark tells us that they appeared to Him as sheep without a shepherd. His compassion is limitless in his humiliation. I note too that this is a story of Jesus miraculously feeding the multitude, but what He mercifully gives to them He does not give to Himself. Recall if you will our Savior in the wilderness of temptation. During forty days He ate nothing and at the end He was hungry, but when Satan suggested to Him that he make bread out of the stones, He said man shall not live by bread alone but by every Word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Or consider Jesus at Jacob’s well with the Samaritan woman in John 4. He was tired and hungry and the disciples went into town to obtain food. When they returned they urged Him to eat but He said, I have food to eat that you know nothing about, my food is to do the will of Him who sent me and finish His work. It is not simply that Jesus here gives Himself to us. He gives himself completely. His hunger is the pathway to our being filled. He not only takes our sins upon himself, He takes all our sins. He not only gives us his righteousness He gives us all his righteousness. It is this giving, this sacrifice which we call grace. He is emptied that we might be filled, He is consumed that we might consume Him. We do not simply partake of the elements when we come to the table of the Lord, we partake of Him because he has made himself so utterly available to us. He is the bread of life because he gives his life for the life of the world. We keep looking for sufficiency in all the wrong places, like the people in our story.

II Sufficiency

As you read this account in verses 12-17 you see a group of men confronted with a problem, Late in the afternoon the Twelve came to him and said, “Send the crowd away so they can go to the surrounding villages and countryside and find food and lodging, because we are in a remote place here.” He replied, “You give them something to eat.” They answered, “We have only five loaves of bread and two fish—unless we go and buy food for all this crowd.” (About five thousand men were there.) But he said to his disciples, “Have them sit down in groups of about fifty each.” The disciples did so, and everybody sat down. Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke them. Then he gave them to the disciples to set before the people. They all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over. The disciples have been asked to solve the unsolvable. Jesus says you feed the people. They approach the problem the same way we normally do. They see the need and it is overwhelming so they say send the people away. When commanded to feed them they calculate what it would cost. According to John’s gospel Phillip says eight months wages would not but enough for everyone to have a bite. They appraise their resources, a willing donor of five loaves and two fishes who according to John’s gospel is a young boy. They make the only conclusion that good deacons or trustees could possibly make. It can’t be done. The reason is that they are trying to be sufficient, but as Paul says, Who is sufficient for these things? I looked at the first purchase of land here and said we can’t do it, then we built and we built again and I said to myself we can’t do it, now we are building again and i am still wondering if we can do it. I look at the work of evangelizing the world and count the inflated cost of sending missionaries and I say we can’t do it. I see the children starving in Ethiopia and I say we can’t do it. I note the onslaught of secular humanism in our country and the need for revival and I say we can’t do it. We can do it, but only if we recognize that we have no sufficiency. Everything comes from Christ because He is the one who gave up everything in order to gain everything. Apart from Him I have nothing. So if I will obey him and give him my time and talent and treasure, then He will do it. As long as we disobey and refuse to trust it will not get done. We cannot come to the Lord’s table and claim to truly understand what it means unless we see that nothing else matters except giving ourselves and our possessions to Him. Only he can make it work. The real miracle here is simply that Christ is the only one who can make enough out of our meager resources to do the job and still we think we need to withhold from Him so that we will have enough. I have heard an unending parade of excuses as to why people cannot give Jesus what ironically they know they should. The fact is we still don ‘t understand the exchange that has taken place. All the sufficiency is trapped in Jesus and can only be released by giving to Him. The crowning aspect of this incident is that the disciples who represent us gathered up the fragments into 12 baskets. These baskets were kophinos, that is, baskets that pious Jews took with them on journeys so that they did not need to buy bread from pagans. By filling their baskets as well as feeding the 5000 Jesus made clear that as long as we try to get the resources from the Gentiles, or if you will, the pagans, or the world, our baskets will be empty. But if we give to Him our baskets will be filled.