I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Mark 6-7.

    I know I am not original in noting this, but there is a key lesson for us in the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand. The disciples came to Jesus and asked Him to send the crowd away so that the crowd could go and get food. I believe that the disciples were genuinely concerned about the people in the crowd. They were all a long way from anywhere and if they went too long without eating, some of them might not be able to make it back home. They were expecting Jesus to hear their concern and concur with them. They were not expecting Jesus to tell them to address the issue:

“You feed them.”

There are lessons here about how God expects us to address the problems that He reveals to us. The first thing He asks is that we identify what resources we have to deal with the problem:

“How much bread do you have? Go and find out.”

Once they had returned with the information about what resources they had, then Jesus told them to act. He did this even though the resources were clearly insufficient to the task at hand. I just realized that this points out the two mistakes we make in the Church. Sometimes we believe that God is calling us to address a problem so we just get started working on it without taking the time to see what resources we have and what resources we need. The other mistake we make is that when we do take the time to marshal our resources and we find that they are insufficient, we give up and say that we cannot address this need because we don’t have what it takes. In this story, Jesus has the disciples gather their resources, get the people organized to be helped, and then Jesus blessed their resources. If God has called us to a task, He will see to it that our resources are more than adequate to the task He has assigned us.