Today’s Gospel reading is the story of feeding the Five Thousand. I don’t want to read today because you heard the same story almost a month ago. But I just want to give you a brief information that, in the New Testament, only two miracles are recorded in all four gospels—the resurrection and feeding of the 5,000. Although the four gospels describe the miracle in slightly different ways, all of them represent the outcome similarly – “And they did all eat and were filled.”.
In my previous sermon about feeding five thousand, I spoke about God’s compassion and how people followed Christ.
Today I want to speak about God’s Blessings.
At the end of today’s gospel reading, Mark tells us the following. – “And when He had taken the five loaves and the two fish, He looked up to heaven, blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to His disciples to set before them; and the two fish He divided among them all. So, they all ate and were filled. And they took up twelve baskets full of fragments and of the fish. Now those who had eaten the loaves were about five thousand men.”. From this part of the story, we see how God’s blessing works. In my human logic, it’s hard to imagine 5 thousand people ate. And we read from the other gospels that. – “So, they all ate and were filled, and they took up twelve baskets full of the fragments that remained. Now those who had eaten were about five thousand men, besides women and children.” (Matthew 14.20-21). But my point is that when we do things from the bottom of our hearts and most important think when we do for a good purpose, we will be witnesses of God’s blessing. For example, when you help and needy person in their hard time, be sure that God will bless you and will help you in the time when you need someone’s help. When you give money to someone or make a donation to the church make sure that you will receive in return multiple times that amount or maybe more. And this kind of thing you will not know that feeling when you receive the Blessing unless you experience it in your life. Believe me, when you feel God’s blessing in your life, it will be worth for you more than thousands, billions. The happiness you experience in that moment, you can’t describe in words. In my mind, I can imagine that Jesus maybe was so happy that He fed 5 thousand and more people. The other point that I want to take from this story as a lesson is to surrender our problems to God.
When they arrived at a deserted place the people were already there waiting for Jesus. And after teaching them about God and his kingdom, his disciples came to him and spoke. - “This is a deserted place, and already the hour is late. Send them away, that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy themselves bread; for they have nothing to eat.”. Disciples knew that Jesus only gives a solution for feeding the crowd and they witnessed the miracles that Jesus performed in front of them, so they went to him. This story also teaches us that, when you ask God to help you, you will have the help that you need. It just needed us to give access to God to help us. If we block our access to God, then don’t blame God for your failure. This is our problem in our daily life, we say to God “I don’t need you God”, or we remember God when we are in a problem. But the truth is that God is with us every time, even he is with those, who don’t want him. But God being with us it’s like when someone knows that you need let’s say, a phone, or car and gives you, but if you don’t want their phone or car, it’s not their problem. In the same way, God is doing, He is helping us, and is with us but if we say I don’t need your help, then we face our problems alone. Everything depends on us.
I hope and pray that we will continue our relationship with God strong and work on it. So that during tribulations we will find God next to us helping us to come out and praise the Holy trinity forever and ever amen.
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