Buying Bread

Well, today we begin our revival. It’s been a long, hard time during COVID, but this is the day we begin to take back the world for Jesus Christ. This is the day when we reach out to the sad, the lonely, the people who have been stuck in their homes with no one to visit except Netflix, Disney, and the other television services, their Facebook friends, and the UPS and postal delivery people. Today is the day when we remind people how much fun it is to gather with other people to learn about Jesus, to praise God, and to feel the power of the Holy Spirit flowing from one person to another.

We will have congregational singing, gospel music from excellent musicians, and two great speakers each evening. This evening we begin with Jessica Simons, a young mother who has worked long hours in fast food, but also discovered that she can speak to people about how Jesus has always been there for her. After Jessica, we’ll have my son Pastor Andy Boley, a young pastor based at Beverly and Mill Creek, just south of Elkins. Andy is 23 years old and is starting his 5^th year in the pulpit – but he also is an Eagle scout and well-known to many of the scouts who went through Camp Kootaga over the last ten years as their wilderness survival instructor.

Tomorrow evening, we’ll have my wife Pastor Saundra Boley from 7^th Street UMC – she’ll tell it like it is about God’s love and what God asks of us. Pastor Rick Haught of Kanawha UMC will then speak, reminding people why they need Jesus in their lives.

Tuesday evening, I’ll speak with a fact-based sermon explaining why we trust the New Testament accounts of Jesus, ideal for that science or engineering skeptic you know, and then Pastor Andy will be back with another passionate sermon.

Wednesday evening is the Kid’s Revival, starting at 5:30 with spaghetti and hotdog dinner for children and parents, a game for the children and parents, and then while the children have further activities, I’ll lead the parents in a time together.

By the way, if you are worried about driving after dark, we should finish up around 8 pm each evening – and sunset isn’t scheduled until about 8:45 pm, so you’ll have time to drive home in the daylight.

What does Jesus ask of you during this revival time?

Let’s take a look at our scripture and see…

In our first reading today from 2 Kings4, about 700 years before Christ, Elijah the prophet has already been taken to heaven in a fiery chariot. He left his mantle of leadership to Elisha, another great prophet who did even more than Elijah. There was a group of a hundred men. A man brought twenty barley loaves and some grain. The barley loaves were apparently small loaves, not nearly the size of our standard bread loaves. Elisha said to give it to the people and let them eat. But Elisha’s servant questioned this, asking how he could set just twenty loaves before a hundred men. But Elisha replied that the Lord said, “They shall eat and have some left.” And that is what happened.

Why is this important for us today? Why are the catering arrangements of a meal 2700 years ago worth including in scripture and teaching today? Perhaps it is because, even in the church, we often think that our efforts are all that matter. We forget that God and the Holy Spirit are with us.

I once led a church that had forgotten this. We had planned a community meal – notice it was not a “fellowship meal”, but a community meal. Yet, the women heading the meal came to me, upset that I had advertised the meal broadly throughout the community. “We can’t handle more than about ten extra people!” they said to me. “We wish you hadn’t advertised.” They needn’t have worried. No one from outside the church showed up. God does not bless those who don’t want to be blessed and believe that God can bless them.

On the other hand, I once was involved in a funeral dinner at Saundra’s church. They only had three women – including Saundra – who were physically capable of preparing the food and serving it. The funeral was for the matriarch of a large family – The family was large in numbers, plus most of the members, male and female, were 6 foot tall and 300 pounds in size. The three women all made several dishes, but it was not going to be enough. In fact, Saundra, who was leading the funeral, had prepared a couple of extra deserts the morning of the funeral before getting ready to rush out. We struggled to get a plan to deliver the food to the church. Just as Saundra was about to leave, one of the other women called to say that a large restaurant in town had called her to ask where they could deliver the catered food for 50 people that the owner was donating. God had the meal completely under control. There were leftovers – but not many. You see, that particular church had the idea that they would do what they could to serve the family – loving others was what was important to them – and to God.

They are the same church that received a $9500 grant for a new roof after struggling to raise $2000 over the previous 6 months through fundraisers, since their average weekly donations only totaled about $300 per week. God is more concerned with our attempt than with our capacity.

700 years later, the episode of Elisha and the 20 barley loaves was repeated for a much larger group of people who were following Jesus. There was a large crowd that followed Jesus around because of the healings that He performed. According to the Apostle John, Jesus looked up and saw the large crowd coming toward Him. He turned to Philip and asked, “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?” There were about five thousand people. And John says that Jesus asked Philip to test him even though He knew what He was going to do. God still tests us.

Philip responded with a quick calculation. “We’d need over six month’s wages to buy enough food.” It was sort of a statement of how impossible it was. They’d need about $10,000 – way too much.

Andrew pipes up, helpfully, “This boy has five barley loaves and two fish. But they won’t go very far in this crowd!”

And imagine that I turned to you right now and said, “You have three hours. Please prepare food for five thousand people.” It was that sort of request. So let’s do some quick calculations, and put together a McDonald’s fish sandwich, with two slices of bread and a quarter pound of fish. So that means we’ll need 10,000 slices of bread – at 20 slices per loaf, that’s 500 loaves of bread, and 1250 pounds of fish. I suspect that even today, you couldn’t round up that much food from all the grocery stores in Parkersburg on 3 hours notice.

Jesus just says, “Make them sit down.” The disciples had no idea what Jesus was going to do, nor how He would feed the people, but they trusted Him. They had faith in Jesus. So they did what He asked.

He took the loaves and the fish, gave thanks, and distributed them. Twelve baskets of fragments were leftover. And because of this, the people thought back to Elisha and the miracle where twenty loaves had fed a hundred people. Barley loaves. And in front of their eyes, five barley loaves had stretched to feed five thousand people. For most of these people, Jesus had established His credentials as a prophet who was even more powerful than Elisha. In fact, a group was about to come and make him king by force, so He left them and went off by Himself.

If we have faith, if we want to accomplish a mission that is acceptable to God, God will provide the resources, stretch the resources, accomplish the mission. For God created an entire planet – surely God can find some Bibles, some registration forms, enough money to pay for another broadcast. Where so many churches go wrong is assuming that it is all up to us. No, it is up to us to do the right thing, even to just attempt the right thing. God will accomplish the mission through us – and the people he sends to help us, like the owner of that restaurant who donated the food for that dinner, even without being asked, and without knowing about the tremendous shortage of help at that little church.

As many of you know, I once owned a small business where we bought inkjet ink in five gallon barrels, repackaged it into pint bottles, and sold it on the Internet. People could buy our ink for $34.95 a pint and refill their cartridge about 10 to 15 times, using a simple squeeze bottle with a blunt needle. Our business grew quickly. I challenged my 17-year-old warehouse guy – how will you operate when this business grows from a half dozen orders a day to 60 orders a day? It eventually grew to 80 orders a day, many of those orders being multiple pints, w, 4 or even 8 pints in an order. He kept up because he also could dream. He reorganized the shelves; he rearranged the packing table. He began coming into work two hours earlier so he could work faster in cooler temperatures. And he kept up with the work as we grew by dreaming about how to handle more and more orders. Eventually, this high school kid left us – he decided to go to college. And we missed him – but he had learned to dream big with us.

We each need to be thinking about our part of this church dream we have. How will we have church when our attendance doubles, quadruples, grows to be ten times what we have today? How many services will we need? How many people will need to be helping with children? How many people will need to teach Sunday school? How many people trained in the audiovisual booth? God will provide if we are looking forward to the dream, a dream where more and more people understand the love of Jesus and become regular followers of Him, and lead more and more people to Jesus.

The feeding of the five thousand was not the only miracle that would happen to the disciples that evening. They got back into the boat and set sail for the opposite shore of the lake. A strong wind came up – they rowed about 3-4 miles in the dark. Suddenly, they saw a figure walking toward them – it was Jesus walking on the water, headed toward the boat. They were terrified! But Jesus said to them, “It is I; do not be afraid.” They wanted to help Him into the boat, but suddenly the boat reached the land on the other side of the lake.

When the disciples followed Jesus, it was one amazing thing after another. They had all heard about Elisha feeding the hundred with twenty loaves, so they knew that prophets could stretch food. And so, they probably thought that the five loaves and fish could be stretched a bit, perhaps feeding fifty men. But Jesus far exceeded what they expected.

When they traveled across the lake, they probably figured that Jesus would catch up to them the next day after walking around the lake. After all, the lake was only about 6 miles by 9 miles, an oval. Many people walked around it. But Jesus exceed what they expected by walking across the lake. When Jesus was arrested, beaten, and executed, the disciples knew He was dead. They probably expected to take some of His teachings and perhaps become rabbis, teachers, themselves. It would be a living; a couple of them may actually have planned to create a movement that might grow to a few hundred people.

But Jesus far exceeded what they expected when He came back to them alive again. There were even two disciples who walked with Him, not knowing who He was, to the village of Emmaus, 6 miles outside of Jerusalem. When they went into an inn to get supper, Jesus indicated that He would have traveled further, but stopped with them. Isn’t that always the way it is with Jesus? Jesus’ plans and dreams for us go further than we want, than we dare, than we plan for. And, of course, isn’t that because He can tap directly into the power that created the Universe?

Yes! We just need to be reminded that Jesus has that power and then we aren’t surprised when He does miracles when He is present.

But, you know, the Holy Spirit can tap into that same power that the Holy Trinity has. Remember God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit? That’s why Jesus told the disciples that “wherever two or three are gathered in my name”, we can ask anything in Jesus’ name and it will be done. With, of course, the requirement that this be something that God deems good and wise.

The Apostle Paul understood this and tried to explain it to the Ephesians in Chapter 3 of his letter to them. He prayed that the Ephesians – and us who are reading the letter – “being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” Then Paul wrote: “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.”

There are three requirements for Christ or the Holy Spirit to do something for us. Let’s take the example of growing this church and leading other people to come to the saving grace of Jesus. First, He must have the power. Clearly Jesus and the Holy Spirit, as part of the Holy Trinity, have the power to lead people to Jesus, just as Jesus had the power to multiply the bread and fish to provide enough for five thousand people. The people are all around us – can Jesus and the Holy Spirit lead them to us? Of course.

The second requirement is that Jesus loves us and the people enough to lead those people to us. The love that Jesus has is far deeper and wider than the love we have for other people – we see that daily when people we have great difficulty loving are led to Christ, accepting Him into their hearts, and turning their lives around to follow Him. So does Jesus have the power? Yes. Does Jesus have the love for people to lead them to Him? Yes, of course. And if you are not currently a follower of Jesus, does He have the love to accept you as a follower and the power to turn your life around. Yes. There are so many examples of men and women whose lives have been turned around by Jesus after the most terrible crimes, the most horrible sins, after being so distant from God they could never find their way back alone, that the issue is never really at doubt. I personally know a man who used drugs, sold drugs, beat up people, stole, and yet Jesus and him found each other, and he is now a pastor, a successful pastor, leading others to the Jesus who found him and loved him. So, yes. Jesus has both the power and the love to turn your life around.

And so the third requirement remains. We must give permission, and we must want, we must desire Jesus to come to us and Jesus to lead others into our church. Whenever Jesus and the Holy Spirit deny a prayer, if we will think carefully, we’ll recognize that either our prayer was for something that would not be good for us – or it was a half-hearted prayer. What’s an example of a half-hearted prayer?

“Lord, help me to lose weight!” Oh, we want to lose weight, but there are only so many ways to lose weight – we either have to stop eating the ice cream and mashed potatoes and cheeseburgers and steak and drinking the soda and sweet tea – or we have to vastly increase our exercise in stead of sitting on the couch – or we will need to become sick. Jesus always works through the natural processes and Jesus always asks permission. If we don’t want to cut back on the eating, or exercise more or get sick – or if we really don’t want to become a smaller person because we feel powerful when we weigh more – then Jesus knows we don’t really want to lose weight. And the same thing applies to prayers to remove an addiction, we need to actually walk away from the good feelings that led to the addiction in the first place. It applies to prayers to get out of debt – we need to stop spending or we need to work more to get out of debt, and few people want to do that. Jesus will not grant a half-hearted prayer – only a sincere prayer.

And with churches who want to grow, there are often people in the church who don’t care about the people dying without Christ in the neighborhood, there are often people who are more concerned with their comfort than the comfort of visitors, people who want new visitors but who never greet visitors, people who want everything in the church to stay the same, people who want other people in the church to do the outreach. I knew a man who said he didn’t want his church to grow, he just wanted the church to hang on, barely surviving until his funeral. I knew an entire church whose idea of outreach was to send 20 or 30 letters each September to people who had left the church 20 years earlier, inviting them back, but who would not even speak to the neighbors who lived beside the church, yet they wanted the church to grow. Really?

The third requirement for Jesus and Holy Spirit to grant a prayer, you see, is that the prayer both be good for us and we actually are willing to do our part working toward the prayer’s success. We have to passionately want the prayer to be granted. And then it will be granted.

And so, this morning, as we start the process of trying to grow back this church to recover after the long year of COVID, I ask you – are you willing to do your part in growing this church? Will you contribute the funds that are needed? Will you greet the visitors that arrive, help them feel comfortable, become their trustworthy friends? Will you teach children, will you help the mothers feel good about their children and the burdens of family life, will you demonstrate how fathers should become the spiritual leaders in their families? Will you step forward and give of your time and skills and special gifts and witness to what Jesus has done for you? In short, will you be a good Christian to all who come near us in this church and in the community?

Tonight, as well as Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday evenings, we will have Revival speakers and revival music. The kid’s ministry is restarting – we could still use a couple of more volunteers to help. The first weekend of September we’ll have the big rummage sale. Assuming God keeps the COVID virus away, we’ll continue to reach out – every week, many, many people hear us on V96.9 FM and online through the Facebook page and the website. We are beginning to truly reach out to people. We are at the beginning of a great work of the Holy Spirit in our community. Each of us can be a part of this great work. You have a flyer in your hands – call or speak to several friends, family, and neighbors, inviting them to the Revival, offering to pick them up, offering to help them with their children, do whatever it takes to bring them here over the next few evenings.

Today, I’m going to ask for your deep, passionate prayers to support this outreach. No half-hearted prayers, please! Pray strongly. Tonight and tomorrow, I’ll ask you to continue praying, and to work hard to make new friends of all who visit us.

I’d like everyone here today to come forward to the altar rail. You don’t need to kneel – you can stand if you need to. But when we all come to the rail, I’d like to hear everyone saying a prayer for the success of the revival. May many people and children come to Jesus. May some of them choose to come back and attend this church regularly to learn what it really means to become a Christian. May others be healed from the spiritual wounds that have happened to them over the years, particularly the year of COVID. May new, deep friendships be made. Pray for whatever and whoever you think needs a prayer. You can make the same prayers at home listening or in your car.

On Sunday, August 1, we will break bread together for Holy Communion, joining together with our new friends. Pray that there will be many of them.

And if you’re already here, come forward to the altar rail to pray for your peace, your rest, your healing – or pray for the peace, the rest, the healing of another person, a friend, a relative, a neighbor. Come forward to support another person and help them with their burdens. Come to the altar rail as we sing.

Amen!

Post-Sermon Song: Let us BreakBread Together 618

Benediction: May God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit fill you and guide you this week, that you may do the will of God. Be blessed!

5 Closing Song  - To God be the Glory 98

Go and Praise God all week long!