Lunch with Jesus | God's Faithfulness and Reliability

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Learn more and sign up at harvest.org. You forget everything and you think this is the end. Here's the problem. We forget what we ought to remember and we remember what we ought to forget. How many of us are up in the wee hours of the morning worrying if the sun will rise? Didn't it rise yesterday and the day before? Has it not risen every day in all of human history?

When something has been that reliable in the past, we can trust it will be reliable in the future. Well, today on A New Beginning, Pastor Greg Laurie helps us pause and consider the faithfulness and reliability of the Lord. In addition to making the sun rise each morning, we'll see just how well God takes care of His own. Turn in your Bibles to John chapter 6.

John chapter 6. And the title of my message is Lunch with Jesus. How many of you like to eat? Raise your hand.

Ah, nice. You're my people. You're a very gluttonous bunch, I might add. How many of you don't really care much about food at all? Food, who cares about food?

Nobody's raising their hand. Alright, so, hey, I love to eat and you can set a clock by my stomach. I don't have to look at my watch and say, is it almost lunchtime? My stomach tells me.

About an hour out, 10 o'clock. I eat at 11, by the way. I'm an early eater. I eat dinner at 5. I eat breakfast early, early.

My stomach says, it's coming, it's coming, let's go, you know. And my favorite meal of the day is lunch, followed by breakfast and dinner. But I love to eat. Guess who else loved to eat?

Jesus Christ. When He walked this earth, we always are reading in the Gospels of Him eating with His disciples. Because a meal back in those days was sort of the main event of the day. You would relax, see, you would take time to enjoy the meal. They didn't have fast food back then.

They didn't have, you know, McDavid's you need right through in your chariot. Order a falafel, something like that. You know, no, they enjoyed a meal. It was a time to talk.

It was a time to communicate. Even after Jesus rose again from the dead, one of the first things He does is He eats a piece of fish. He was waiting for the disciples by the Sea of Galilee with a fire going. And He said, bring some of the fish that you have caught. And He cooked it up for them. And He said, come and have breakfast. Eating a meal with Jesus, how amazing would that be? And He even used this metaphor of eating to describe His desire to have a relationship with us. He says in Revelation 3.20, behold I stand at the door and I knock. If any men will hear my voice and open the door, I will come in and dine with Him. King James says, sup with Him. Some translations say have fellowship with Him. But the idea is He wants to have a long leisurely meal with you.

Or to put it more directly, He wants a relationship with you. Well this miracle that we're going to look at is the only miracle found in all four Gospels. It's a story of the feeding of the 5,000. Now this is a series we're doing called The Seven Signs of Jesus. We've already looked at Jesus turning water into wine. That was sign number one. Cleansing the temple, sign number two. Healing the centurion's son, that's number three. Healing the layman in Jerusalem, that's number four.

Now we're at number five, the feeding of the 5,000. The author of this Gospel, John, uses these signs like building blocks, the seven signs crescendo, and the final seventh sign where Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. So it starts with a wedding and it ends with a funeral. And more specifically, a resurrection. Because that was the ultimate sign.

Everything is pointing to the ultimate sign. What is the most significant sign that Jesus gave? It wasn't the raising of Lazarus. It wasn't the restoration of sight.

It wasn't feeding the 5,000. It was His death and resurrection again. He said, A wicked and an adulterous generation seeks after a sign, and no sign will be given to them but that of the prophet Jonah. And as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the fish, so I, the son of man, will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. This paraphrase, Jesus is saying, you want a sign?

Here it is. I'm going to die on the cross through your sin and rise again from the dead. So with that in mind, let's look at this very familiar and powerful story of the feeding of the 5,000. We're going to read about 14 verses together. And I'm reading from the New Living Translation. John chapter 6, starting in verse 1. And turning to Philip, he asked, where can we buy bread to feed all of these people? Verse 6, this is very important.

You might underline it. He was testing Philip for he already knew what he was going to do. Philip replied, even if we worked for months, we wouldn't have enough money to feed them. Then Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, spoke, well, there's a young boy here with five barley loaves and two fish. But what good is that with such a huge crowd? Jesus said, tell everyone to sit down. They all sat down on the grassy slopes. The men alone numbered about 5,000. Then Jesus took the loaves, gave thanks to God, and distributed them to the people. Afterwards, he did the same with the fish, and they all ate as much as they wanted. After everyone was full, Jesus told his disciples, now gather the leftovers so nothing is wasted.

So they picked up the pieces and filled 12 baskets with scraps left by the people who had eaten from the five barley loaves. When the people saw this miraculous sign, they exclaimed, surely he is a prophet we've been expecting. We'll stop there. Heard a story about a little boy that was asked, what is your favorite miracle in the Bible?

The little guy answered, I like the one where everyone loaves and fishes. So that's a great way to look at it, but here's something that is happening before us now. Jesus, his ministry is building. Looking back chronologically, you could say he was sort of on a roll. His fame was growing. The crowds were growing. Everyone followed him everywhere to see what he would say or do next. But why were they following him?

The answer is clear. Verse two of John six, a huge crowd kept following him wherever he went because they saw his miraculous signs as he healed the sick. Unfortunately, they were not following him because they understood this is the Messiah, this is the Savior. They were following him because, hey, he does amazing stuff.

What's he going to do next? They were dazzled. They were entertained. But they were missing the point. They were into the signs, but they weren't looking at where the signs were pointing. These things were written, according to John 20, that we might believe.

So there was a purpose for these signs. You know, sometimes we want the benefits of the Christian life, but we don't want to make the commitment. We want the healings, we just don't want the healer. We want the benefits, but we don't want the cure.

And Jesus could have dismissed these people because he knew what was going on in the human heart and mind. He could have said, you know you guys, you're just a bunch of thrill seekers. You're waiting for me to do my next trick in your estimation. You're not following me for the right reason. And besides, I know all you all are going to eventually turn on me, so I'm not going to feed you today. In fact, I'm going to eat in front of you. That's what I would have done.

I would have pulled out an In-N-Out Burger. Where did you get that? It's from the future. Can we have one?

No, it's mine, because you're going to turn on me. God, but Jesus, he cared about the people. In fact, we read that he had a heart of compassion toward them. Pastor Greg Laurie will have the second half of his message in just a moment. More and more people are sharing how Pastor Greg's movie, Jesus Revolution, has impacted them. Pastor Greg, I just watched Jesus Revolution and wow, I'm touched and stirred up.

I'm literally on fire and desperate for a move of God in this generation. Thank you for sharing your story. After watching Jesus Revolution, I've rededicated my life to Jesus. I'm all the way in, Pastor Greg.

Thank you for sharing your life with us. Praying for you and your ministry and that more people will find Jesus. Would you like to share a comment with Pastor Greg?

If so, email him. Well, we're considering the first 14 verses of John 6 in Pastor Greg's message today titled Lunch with Jesus. Let's continue. So there are three primary characters that stand out in this story. Phillip, Andrew, and the little boy.

We don't know his name, but he's a big part of the story. Let's start with Phillip. Understand that every one of the disciples had a distinct personality, just like people you know. They were just like you.

There was Peter. Brash, outspoken, dominated conversations, said things when things shouldn't be said. Do you know someone like that? You invite them over, they're going to dominate the whole conversation.

Nobody gets a word in edgewise. Or maybe you are that person. The problem is when you are that person, you usually don't know it.

Someone else needs to tell you. So if they're that person, kind of nudge them and say, that's you. Right? So that was Peter. But then there's James and John. These guys are fiery. You know people that get all worked up? They love to argue. They love to debate. They're always worked up about something. That's James and John. They're worked up guys. They were passionate guys. You don't get the nickname Sons of Thunder for nothing. They're alive today.

They'd probably be in an outlaw motorcycle gang. And then there's Philip. Now Philip is more quiet, more perceptive, a deep thinker. And it is worth noting that Jesus turns to Philip with a question.

His first test. And by the way, Jesus never asked anyone else for advice ever. Except on this occasion, when he turns to Philip and asks, John 6, 5. Turning to Philip, he asks, where can we buy bread to feed all these people? He was testing Philip for he knew what he was going to do.

Seems like a no-brainer. Philip could have said, well, considering the fact that you've already done all these amazing miracles, starting with turning water into wine, I would think this is pretty easy for you. You could just speak the word and everyone would be fed. But instead, Philip is perplexed and he says, well, even if we worked for months, we wouldn't have enough money to pay for the food to get to all of these people. I mean, despite two years at this point of walking personally with Jesus and seeing him do miracle after miracle, Philip is like, I don't know what to do with this.

And we can criticize Philip, but isn't that just like us? Haven't you ever had a moment where you've had doubt in your mind? A crisis hits, an unexpected problem comes and you freak out. You have a complete meltdown. Wait, has God not been faithful to you up to this point? Has he not met your needs?

Has he not taken care of you? Somehow you have a case of spiritual amnesia. You forget everything and you think this is the end. Well, that happens all the time. It happened to the disciples. They didn't simply see that God could do something in this set of circumstances.

We often forget how faithful God has been. Here's the problem. We forget what we ought to remember and we remember what we ought to forget. I have a lot of useless information in my brain.

I don't even know how some of it got there. I know the words to stupid songs going back 40 years. Some of them, songs I wish I never knew. Going back to my childhood.

One, eight, seven, seven cars for kids. Okay, that's just. You ever heard that song?

Let's make them stop now. Or other songs. I remember really old jingles. I don't consciously remember. I will now memorize these lyrics but they're in there. And then I forget stuff I should remember. Oh wait, what was that verse again?

How did that go again? So we need to be reminded over and over of certain spiritual truths. Because sometimes we forget things that we've learned. When I was in school, I would get called out by teachers all the time. Because I disrupted class. I was disrespectful toward teachers. I would say stupid things. I'd be sent to the principal's office constantly.

And a teacher would say to me, Greg, Lori, will you just grow up? And I think sometimes some of us need to grow up spiritually. We still act like little babies in our spiritual life. We need to be spoon fed spiritual truths.

We still need to be dazzled. Hey, it's time to grow up. Become a mature believer. Some of us have known the Lord 10, 15, 20 years. And we don't know the basics of Christian theology. We need everything cut up in little pieces and spoon fed to us. We haven't learned to just open up the Bible and read it and study it and learn for ourselves. We're still like little babies. In fact, the author of Hebrews says in Hebrews 5-12, you've been Christians a long time now. You ought to be teaching others. Instead you need someone to teach you again and again the basic things a beginner must learn about the Scriptures.

You're like babies who drink only milk and you can't eat solid food. So don't forget God's faithfulness to you. He's been faithful in the past. He'll be faithful in your present.

And He'll be faithful to you in your future as well. Now it's Andrew's turn. Philip didn't do too well. If we were grading him, I don't know what grade we would give him.

It wouldn't be very high. But Andrew chimes in. Interestingly, Jesus doesn't ask Andrew for his opinion.

But he has one nonetheless. And Andrew is a really interesting guy. He was more of a behind the scenes person. He was a person who liked to connect people to Jesus. His brother was Simon Peter.

That meant that he was overshadowed for his whole life. Because Peter dominated the conversation. Peter was the one that always sort of take control. Andrew was kind of in the shadows a little bit. But Andrew had this great gift of pointing others to Christ. And in fact it was Andrew that brought his brother, Peter, to Jesus. And here we have Andrew showing up with a little boy. And he's really close to the answer, but not quite. Well, he says to Jesus, there's this little kid here. He has five loaves of bread and two little fish.

But then he quickly says, but what good is that with such a huge crowd? That brings us to the little boy. Who was this little dude anyway? We don't know his name. But what an amazing kid he is. Here's all these adults perplexed by this problem. And here's a little kid that says, well, I've got this.

If this could be of any help, I'd like to offer it to you, Jesus. So what do we know about this little boy? We know he was poor. And the reason we know that his barley bread was the cheapest of all bread. And in fact it was held in contempt. It was thought of as food for animals, not people.

And he had two small fish, not big fish, small fish. It's like having crackers and stale crackers at that. Crackers and sardines or maybe Spam and Wonder Bread.

Now some people love Spam, right? In Hawaii it's kind of a delicacy, but Spam, Wonder Bread, crackers and sardines, whatever you want to use as an illustration, it wasn't a gourmet lunch. It wasn't a lot. But that little boy gave his lunch as poor as he was to Jesus. The lunch was as insignificant as it could be.

The little boy was as insignificant as he could be. But here's the point of the story. That which was insufficient and insignificant became sufficient and significant when placed in the hands of Jesus. Let me say it again.

That which was insufficient from the hands of the insignificant became sufficient and significant when placed in the hands of Jesus. I think sometimes we feel like, well, I don't have much to offer. I'm not talented like that person over there. I'm not gifted.

I have nothing to bring to the table. You have more than you think. Why?

Because God can do a lot with a little. Okay? So here's a guitar in the stage. I could walk over, plug that guitar into the amp, turn it up all the way, and hit maybe five chords. And you would say, that guitar is a piece of junk.

Why? Because I really have no skills playing guitars. But if I were to take that same guitar and place it into the hands of Eric Clapton, who's one of the greatest guitar players of all time, if he did a few riffs on it, you would say, I want that guitar.

In fact, if he signs it, it will be a collectible. See, it's not about the guitar. It's about who is playing the guitar. And in the same way for us, it's not the magnitude of the gift. It's into whose hands the gift is given. So you say, Lord, okay, here I am.

I don't have a lot to offer. But I do give it to you. And I give it all to you. And I ask you to take what I've given and use it for your glory. So I encourage you, bring your loaves and fish to Jesus. Bring your Spam and Wonder Bread.

Bring your crackers and sardines and watch what God will do. Pastor Greg Laurie, with great encouragement today on the blessing of placing our trust in the Lord. Well, Pastor Greg and his wife Kathy are here with a special guest today. Pastor Greg? Yeah, I'm in studio with my friend Shannon Breen, who you probably know as a newscaster. You're a journalist.

That's what you do. But you're also a Bible student. You've written all these books. Tell me the titles of some of your books that you've written about people of the Bible. So Women of the Bible Speak, Mothers and Daughters of the Bible Speak, and now Love Stories of the Bible Speak.

So in your new book, Love Stories of the Bible Speak, you talk about Adam and Eve, Mary and Joseph, Jonathan and David. But you also talk about God's love for us. And so I just wanted to make sure people got that, whether you know the Lord or you've been walking with him.

And sometimes you get distracted by the world or thinking that I've got to perform or live up to this. When you know at your core, it's not about that because, you know, as in the New Testament, you hear that rarely would someone die for a good man. But God had so much love for us that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. So the Old and the New Testament show us a God that he was always making a plan for us, that he was always loving us and looking for a way to draw us back to community with him by sacrificing his own son. And we know that Christ struggled with that. I mean, we see in the New Testament how he goes off to pray and, you know, he's sweating drops of blood and saying, Lord, if you will take this cup from me, but not my will, yours.

He willingly walks into what he knows will be a complete betrayal, a physical, excruciating execution for him. But it's all because he loves us with abandon. And so he is willing and waiting for us, wherever we are in our spiritual walk, to come to him in salvation and to be covered in his love that is unconditional.

You know, it's not, as Christ said, you know, he never condemned the sinner. He would say, turn from your sin, go and sin no more. But what he wants is a relationship with us. And his love for us is that agape, perfect love that is never ending. So someone's listening right now and they're thinking, OK, I hear Shannon Breen, who is obviously very successful in her career, and she's telling me how to have a relationship with God. But I don't know how to do that.

Like, what step do I need to take? How does a person enter into this relationship with the Lord that you're talking about? I think that there are so many good places to start. A lot of people will say, John, even if you haven't read the Bible, pick up in the New Testament the book of John that tells us so much about God's love and his plan. And the more you learn about Christ as the Son of God and what he came here to do, what we are then given is this opportunity to give him all of our worst stuff and get all of the very best stuff from him to say, Christ, I see what you did in this sacrifice. You died an innocent man who was also fully God for our sins, and I accept that as the covering.

I want to be in relationship and fellowship with you, not just get, as we used to say when I was a kid, fire insurance, something that I think will keep me from eternal damnation, but to really walk with Christ, to give our lives to him and to trust him with a plan. And how old were you when you did that, Shannon? I was in junior high school. I grew up in church, so I knew all of this. And there just came a point where I realized I have to make this personal.

Yes, I know these Bible stories and I believe in Jesus, but I have to say, I'm committing my life to you and accepting the sacrifice you made for me as my way to salvation. And I think once I understood that around 12 years old, it became a very personal relationship then. I love that, personal relationship. I was thinking about, we all read books, we all read love stories, we all read examples, and these are certainly examples that you cite in the book of what to do and what not to do sometimes. But I think the most beautiful thing to know is that we can enter into the story ourselves, that Christ invites us into this beautiful relationship with him, and that as we read through these stories, so many times we see them pointing to Jesus and his love for us, whether it's Solomon's, you know, a lover who loves us completely and thoroughly and knows us so well in the Song of Solomon, or we have David, who is our champion, the one who would be willing to sacrifice and lay his life on the line to defend and conquer our enemies. We see it in Boaz, who is our kinsman redeemer. We see that story of Jesus in all of these stories, and that love story is for us. It is God's love for us, as you said. The Gospel of John is God's, you know, so much of God's love is represented there, especially John 3.16. God so loved the world. So, you know, we don't just need to read about other people's love stories or friendships, but actually God's love for us. And hopefully as people do buy this book, they will see God wooing them and calling them to himself, as Hosea did with Gomer, going after us. We don't deserve it, but he loves us unconditionally, and if we will come to him on his terms, we can enter into that love story ourselves. I think when people read that story, we all want to be Hosea, but we're really Gomer. We have to remember that.

He's there to pick us up, even in our state of being a Gomer. So these are some of the things that Shannon writes about in a brand new book that we're offering to you this month for your gift of any size. And the title of Shannon Bream's new book is The Love Stories of the Bible Speak, subtitled Biblical Lessons of Romance, Friendship, and Faith. And we're offering it to you this month for your gift of any size.

Yeah, that's right. Not only would this be a great addition to your own resource collection, what a great gift. It's a brand new book, and we'll be glad to send it to you to thank you for partnering with us to bring these daily studies your way. We're completely listener-supported.

Our support comes solely from listeners who appreciate Pastor Greg's insights and want to see them continue. So as you send a donation today, be sure to ask for The Love Stories of the Bible Speak by Shannon Bream. You can call us at 1-800-821-3300. That's a 24-7 phone number, again 1-800-821-3300. Or write us at A New Beginning, Box 4000, Riverside, CA 92514.

Or go online to Harvest.org. Well, next time, more insight from the story of the feeding of the 5,000. It's part of Pastor Greg's series, The Seven Signs of Jesus. Join us here on A New Beginning with pastor and Bible teacher, Greg Laurie. This is the day, the day when life begins Hey everybody, thanks for listening to A New Beginning. This is a podcast made possible by Harvest Partners. So for more content that can help you know God and equip you to make Him known to others or to learn more about how you can become a Harvest Partner, just go to Harvest.org.