Feeding God’s Children
There is a wonderful event recorded in Matthew 14 from which we can learn much. There is especially much to learn here for ministers of the gospel.
A great multitude of people had been with the Lord Jesus in a desert place. He had gone there to rest with his disciples, but the multitude had seen Him go there and had followed Him. Even though He needed to rest, He had compassion on the people and ministered to them, healing the sick among them. When evening arrived, His disciples urged Him to send the people away so that they could go into adjoining villages and buy food for themselves.
In Matt. 14:16 Jesus said to His disciples concerning the multitude: “They need not depart; give ye them to eat.” The disciples replied: “We have here but five loaves, and two fishes.” They knew that they did not have nearly enough food with which to feed this multitude. Jesus then said to them, concerning the loaves and fishes:”Bring them hither to me.”
When they had done this, the Lord blessed the loaves and fishes. Then He began to break them and give them to His disciples. The disciples gave the food to the people. This was a great miracle. From the five loaves and two fishes, a great multitude of “five thousand men, beside women and children” was fed. There were enough fragments left over that they needed twelve baskets to contain them.
From this wonderful account of an actual historical event, let us glean some lessons for present day ministers of the gospel.
The Lord Jesus told His disciples to feed the people. Today the same Lord commands His gospel ministers to feed His people. They are not to feed them with literal physical food, but with the food of the word of God. In fact Jesus gave Peter a solemn charge to do this before His ascension into heaven. We read of this in John 21: 15-17. The Lord told Him to feed His lambs and sheep. One of the words translated here for “feed” is boskoo. It means “to feed.” The other word translated “feed” is poimainoo. This word means, “to shepherd.” The Lord charges all His gospel ministers to feed His sheep with the word of God and to lead them according to this word.
The Apostle Paul gave the same charge to the elders in the Ephesian church. We find this in Acts 20: 28: “Take heed therefore unto yourselves and to all the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of God which he hath purchased with his own blood.” What a solemn and sacred charge this is!
To underscore the seriousness of this ministerial obligation, we see that the Apostle Peter gave a practically identical charge. He wrote in 1 Pet. 5: 2 to a group of elders: “Feed the flock of God which is among you, taking the oversight thereof, not by constraint, but willingly; not for filthy lucre, but of a ready mind. . .” We have three witnesses here, the Lord Jesus and two apostles.
The Old Testament also speaks to this subject. Speaking through the prophet, the Lord addresses His people in the Old Testament times in Jeremiah 3: 15: “And I will give you pastors according to mine own heart, which shall feed you with knowledge and understanding.”
The Lord severely rebuked the failure to do this in Jer. 23: 1-4: “Woe be unto the pastors that destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! saith the Lord. Therefore thus saith the Lord God of Israel against the pastors that feed my people; Ye have scattered my flock, and driven them away, and have not visited them: behold, I will visit upon you the evil of your doings, saith the Lord. . .And I will set up shepherds over them which shall feed them. . .”
This is such a serious matter that the Lord also addressed it by His prophet Ezekiel. In Ezekiel 34: 2-4 we read: “Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel, prophesy, and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord God unto the shepherds; Woe be to the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves! Should not the shepherds feed the flocks? Ye eat the wool, ye kill them that are fed; but ye feed not the flock. The diseased have ye not strengthened, neither have you healed that which was sick, neither have ye bound up that which was broken, neither have ye brought again that which was driven away, neither have ye sought that which was lost; but with force and with cruelty have ye ruled them.”
From these considerations we can see what an absolutely serious matter it is for a gospel minister to feed God’s children with the word of God. When a man realizes this he is made to realize how helpless and unable He is without the enabling grace of God. These disciples of Jesus had some realization of their inadequacy when they told Him:
When a minister of the gospel realizes his weakness and inability to do what has been required of him, he readily assents to the truth of what Jesus said in John 15: 5: “Without me ye can do nothing.” David expressed the same truth in Psalm 127: 1: “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.”
This does not mean that a man should not labor in dispensing the word of God. Indeed, he must do this with all his might. What it does mean is that he realizes that as he labors God must bless him if his labors bear any fruit at all. This is a beautiful combination: an extremely humble man who works with all his might. This combination is clearly shown by Paul in 1 Cor. 15: 10: “But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.”
Ironically, when a minister of the gospel realizes how weak he is, he becomes stronger in the Lord. The Lord told Paul, “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.” Paul responded to this by writing: “Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong.” (2 Cor. 12: 9, 10).
We must realize that we serve a jealous God who will not share His glory with any other. He delights in using weak instrumentalities to accomplish His purposes. He does this so that “no flesh should glory in his presence.” “He that glorieth let him glory in the Lord.” (See 1 Cor. 1: 26-31). This realization drives a man of God to seek God’s strength for the work that God has called him to do. He knows that he can do his work, but only with the enabling grace of God. He agrees with what Paul wrote in 2 Cor. 3: 5, 6: “Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God. Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament. . .”
Realizing this the gospel minister is more than ready to take what little he has to offer of his studies and preparations and bring them to God. He is willing to heed the command that Jesus Christ gave His disciples in that desert over 2000 years ago, when they told Him they had only five loaves and two fishes:
The Lord can take weak instruments and do great things with them. The most scholarly and diligent preparation by a preacher will accomplish nothing without the blessing of the Lord. Eloquence and learning are not what makes true preaching effective. It is good to be eloquent if possible. It is good to learn much from the study of God’s word. However, without the blessing of God such sermons will be dry lectures or spiritual pep talks which will move no one.
The minister must bring his preparations to the Lord and beseech Him for blessing. When this is done, our Lord very appropriately gets all the glory. The preacher should desperately desire that his God get all the glory. Paul wanted this very much as he wrote in 1 Cor. 2: 4, 5: “And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power. That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.”
An Old Testament prophet plainly understood the necessity of the blessing of God when he wrote in Zech. 4: 6: “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.” Another prophet also understood this as he wrote in Micah 3: 8: “But truly I am full of power by the spirit of the Lord. . .”
Even the Apostle Paul, as able as he was, was not effective without the blessing of the Lord. He had a very effective ministry in the city of Philippi. When he preached some very important people listened. However, they did not listen because of Paul’s eloquence or learning. One of Paul’s key converts was a sister named Lydia. She provided the gospel minister with a place to lodge while they were establishing a church in Philippi. Paul faithfully brought the word of the Lord to Lydia. She gladly received this word. Why? We find the answer in Acts 16: 14: “And a certain woman, named Lydia, a seller of purple, of the city of Thyatira, which worshipped God, heard us: whose heart the Lord opened, that she attended unto the things which were spoken of Paul.” Ministers of the gospel should constantly pray for themselves and for their hearers: “Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law.”
While we give God all the glory, we must not despise or lightly esteem His ministers. If Jesus Christ had wanted to, He could have directly fed the multitude with His own hands. However, He did not do it this way. He took the loaves and fishes from the disciples. Then He blessed them and broke them. Then “he gave the loaves to his disciples and the disciples to the multitude.” The disciples fed the multitude with the food they had gotten from the Master. That is the way the Lord usually works today. He has called men to preach from his position at the right hand of God (See Eph. 4: 8-11). God’s children must love, respect and support the men that the ascended Jesus Christ has called into the ministry. They should “esteem them very highly in love for their work’s sake.” (1 Thess. 5: 13). They should remember that God’s ordained way is that He usually feeds His children by blessing preachers He has called into this work. God’s people need the ministrations of the gospel ministers. It is often the case with God’s children as it was with the Ethiopian Eunuch. He was reading the Bible. The preacher, Philip, asked him if he understood what he was reading. The eunuch replied “how can I, except some man should guide me?” Then Philip began to feed and guide him in the following way: “Then Philip opened his mouth, and began at the same scripture, and preached unto him Jesus.” (See Acts 8: 26-40).
Surely everything recorded in the sacred Scriptures is there for a purpose. This being so why is it written in Matt. 14: 20 “And they did all eat, and were filled: and they took up of the fragments that remained twelve baskets full?”
This lesson seems very clear. We should be very careful how we esteem and handle the word of God. We should make every effort to remember what we hear preached and what we read. We should take notes; listen carefully while we are under the sound of the preaching. We should use the blessings of modern technology and listen to some of the sermons again. We must remember that Satan tries to render the word of God ineffective in our lives. Listen to this lesson from the Parable of the Sower: “When any one heareth the word of the kingdom, and understandeth it not, then cometh the wicked one, and catcheth away that which was sown in his heart . . . “ (Matt. 13: 19).
Concerning the necessity of not wasting the opportunities we have of hearing the word of God, our Lord has spoken very plainly in Heb. 2: 1: “Therefore, we ought to give the more earnest heed to the things we have heard, lest at any time we should let them slip.”