The text of this morning's message deals with one of the most well-known miracles by the Lord Jesus. It's known as the miracle of feeding the 5,000. I wanna, before we read the text, just offer a couple of preliminary thoughts. First, this is important. I don't think it's particularly helpful to pit one portion of scripture against another in order to judge their relative value. That's not what I'm suggesting here, but I would challenge you to think of the importance of this in this way. Go through all four gospel accounts, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and find another miracle of Jesus that all of them record. Start at chapter one, verse one of each of those gospels, and until you get to the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, this is the miracle that all four of them record together. They find it necessary for understanding their story. Now, I'll give you those references, you don't have to bookmark them or anything, but if you are a note taker, this account can be found in Mark chapter six, verse 30 through 44, Luke chapter nine, verse 10 through 17, and John chapter six, verse one through 13. It's important. Second, This is not the only time Jesus performed such a miracle. As we go through Matthew, we're gonna find a very similar account in the next chapter. You could actually glance over at Matthew chapter 15, verses 29 through 39, and find there that instead of feeding a group of 5,000 men along with women and children, Jesus does the same thing again with a group of 4,000. plus women and children. In Matthew 14, he uses five loaves and two fish. In Matthew 15, he uses seven loaves and a few fish. In Matthew 14, our text this morning, the leftovers are 12 baskets or small baskets. In Matthew 15, the leftovers are seven large baskets. Lord willing, we'll deal with why Matthew records such similar miracles twice when we get to chapter 15. Actually, why hold you in suspense? A lot of it has to do with the fact that here, Jesus is in Jewish territory. In Matthew 15, he is in Gentile territory. And the duplication of this miracle proves that Jesus's compassion draws him to provide for and sustain Jew and Gentile alike. So, as we dig into the text this morning, It's natural that Matthew of the four gospels, Matthew has a shorter account of this miracle than the others because he's the one who's gonna circle back around and tell about the next time Jesus does this in detail. Matthew chapter 14, our text will be verses 13 through 21. When Jesus heard it, He departed from there by boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the multitudes heard it, they followed him on foot from the cities. And when Jesus went out, he saw a great multitude and he was moved with compassion for them and healed their sick. When it was evening, his disciples came to him saying, This is a deserted place. And the hour is already late. Send the multitudes away that they may go into the villages and buy themselves food. But Jesus said to them, they do not need to go away. You give them something to eat. And they said to him, we have here only five loaves and two fish. And he said, bring them here to me. Then he commanded the multitude to sit down on the grass and he took the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he blessed and broke and gave the loaves to the disciples and the disciples gave to the multitudes. So they all ate and were filled and they took up 12 baskets full of the fragments that remained. Now those who had eaten were about 5,000 men besides women and children. Immediately, Jesus made his disciples get into the boat and go before him to the other side while he sent the multitudes away. Let me start by asking you a question this morning. What we just read in the text, that Jesus took five small pieces of bread and two little fish and using that as the starting material, he proceeded to provide a spontaneous yet fulfilling meal to at least 5,000 hungry people. Did that happen or not? Did it happen? It's important that we begin there, I think, because what is the point in bringing a lesson from a text if the text is recounting a fictional story? If there's anything worth learning from these verses, it can only be because these verses are telling us the truth. You've likely come to church, or most of you have come to Sunday school, heard this story a dozen times, at least, in your life. Have you ever stopped to question, did it really happen? And if it did, why does it matter? There are a lot of people who would give an account of Jesus's life and leave this story out. One of the nation's founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, kept a copy of the gospels for himself where he used a razor blade to cut out the moral teachings of Jesus and collect them together, but excluded the vast majority of the miracles of Jesus, even the resurrection and ascension. Apparently, he felt like this didn't belong in the story of Jesus' life, even though Matthew and Mark and Luke and John all tell us different. Liberal theologians who deny virtually all supernatural events, they claim, well, Jesus is a great moral teacher, but that the miraculous accounts like this are nothing more than myths created through the years by Jesus's followers after his death. The disciples conspired together to concoct an elaborate legend. Others have attempted to reconcile this account by saying that essentially Jesus and his disciples perpetrated a clever fraud. They say that Jesus intentionally went away into the deserted place. He drew a crowd after him so that they would be hungry. But before he went, he must have had some of his followers go and buy a gigantic storehouse of bread and smoked fish and hid it in a nearby cave or something. So all he had to do was have the crowd's attention, say this blessing as if it was a magical incantation, and then the disciples would go through with the food. And as they're at the back of the crowd, they would sneak through and grab some more from the cave. You don't like that one? Listen, if the man at the center of this story is being duplicitous, if he's committing an act of deception, then he is no great moral teacher. We have nothing to learn from him except to follow in his treacherous example, if that's the case. There is another explanation people offer, which is kinder to Jesus. We could call it the miraculous inspiration concept. And it suggests this, it says, well, Jesus really did go out into the wilderness. A crowd really did follow him. There really was a moment when everyone was hungry, but many of them, not all, but many of them had brought nothing to eat. And yet Jesus was teaching in such an inspirational way that a little boy stepped forward and offered to share his meager meal and the crowds having witnessed that moment were themselves inspired so that everyone who brought some of their own food pulls it out and starts sharing with their neighbor and suddenly everybody gets fed. Isn't that nice? It's not deception, it's not fraud, it's also not a miracle. It's certainly not what the text tells us. I'm gonna propose to you what is seemingly the most unlikely explanation of this event. Are you ready? Jesus, having taken five little loaves and two small fish, asked his father's blessing on the meal, and then using his perfect divine hands, he continued to break up those loaves and fish into enough pieces to feed over 5,000 people. Or in other words, it happened just like the gospel said it happened. And since it happened, it is a matter of supreme importance. Each of the four gospel writers, though they have different audiences and different perspective and different purposes as they write, they uniformly dedicate space to this story because it matters. This is an event which defies any natural explanation, so only a supernatural explanation will do. This is an event which proves that Jesus can provide for you, even when you can't provide for yourself. This is an event which proves that Jesus can provide for others through you, using you in ways that you couldn't begin to imagine. This is an event which should reassure you that Jesus, who provided for and sustained those people in the wilderness that day, can provide for and sustain you today. We're gonna primarily go through Matthew's account of this story, but I do intend to sort of draw in and mention some of the things that the other gospels tell us about this day. First, I want you to take note of the purposeful plan of Jesus. The occasion for this event is not to be missed. Matthew tells us it is the death of John the Baptist and the increasing attention on Jesus' own ministry by Herod Antipas. If you remember from our study last week, the story of John's death, in the first part of this chapter is a historical flashback. The chronology would tell us in verse 13, where our text starts when it says, when Jesus heard it, that is referring up to verse one. Look at verse one. It says, at that time, Herod the Tetrarch heard the report about Jesus and said to his servants, This is John the Baptist. He is risen from the dead and therefore these powers are at work in him. And then verse three through 12 is a flashback telling us what happened when Herod had murdered John the Baptist, right? The story of Herod and his niece slash sister-in-law slash wife Herodias and her dancing daughter and the whole event there. This is an explanation of what's on Herod's mind so that when he hears about Jesus, he concludes This is John the Baptist risen from the dead. That's why this power is at work in him. Now, why would Herod think that? It's easy to conclude that he's just crazy, irrational, he's guilt-ridden, and those are all reasonable and I think correct assumptions. But there's more than that. Remember the connection between John the Baptist and Jesus and it will be helpful. I don't know when the last time is you heard a message that talked about John the Baptist and Jesus and the connection they had. For you guys who were here in the first service, it was a couple hours ago. Malachi chapter three. Can I just say I love the way the Lord works through his word that way. It never ceases to provide like teachable moments for me and then hopefully for you as a result. In this case, when we ask ourself, well, why would Herod think that Jesus is John returned from the dead? There is the reason I've always assumed, and then there's the additional reason that almost literally smacked me upside the head this week while I was reading these chapters. The reason I've always assumed is Herod could see how similar John and Jesus were. That was obvious to everyone, by the way. If you remember, when Jesus asked some of his disciples, who do men say that I am? One of the answers the disciples gave was, some say you're John the Baptist. When John preached, his message was repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. For King Herod, that's exactly what caused the frustration. That's why he hated John. John called him to repentance, telling him, it's not lawful for you to have your brother's wife. I'm pretty sure Herod hears about Jesus and his ministry, and his thought is, with what I keep hearing about Jesus, if he showed up here, I think he would say, repent, it's not lawful for you to have your brother's wife. In other words, the message of repentance for Jesus and John was so similar that Herod could easily assume Jesus was John. Now, that's what I've always assumed is the case, and again, I think there's truth to that, but here's what smacked me upside the head this week while studying these texts. What if every time Herod hears about Jesus, it reminds him of John the Baptist because that's precisely what Jesus intended to have happen to him? Follow the logic with me here for a second. John's ministry was to prepare the way for Messiah King Jesus. In fact, this is another of those things that's so important that all four gospel writers pointed out. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all record John the Baptist preaching ministry as fulfilling, they all quote Isaiah chapter 40 verse three. He's the voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make his pathway straight. So John spent his ministry not in the busy city center, not in the crowded temple, but out in deserted places, having the people flock to him out there in the wilderness. Now, put yourself into Herod's mind for a second, thinking about John and his ministry at the forefront of your brain, and read verse 13 with me again. When Jesus heard it, he departed there by boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the multitudes heard it, they followed him on foot from the cities. So Jesus goes out into the desert. Don't think desert like sand and tumbleweed. This is just describing deserted countryside, a place away from cities, away from villages with no population to speak of. And the crowds flock to him as he ministers to them there. If you're Herod, you have sent soldiers out in the wilderness to arrest John the Baptist. You've kept him in prison. You have ordered him to be executed. You have delivered his head on a plate to your daughter-in-law or your stepdaughter. The next thing you know, You're getting word that there is some itinerant preacher out in the wilderness with people flocking to him, preaching about repent for the kingdom of heaven in a hint, is it a hint? He's sounding a whole lot like John. Should Herod have assumed Jesus is John risen from the dead? Well, no. And in fact, it's ironic that later when Jesus does raise from the dead, very few people wanna believe it. But what Herod should have learned from this lesson is probably exactly what Jesus intended to teach him in this process. You can kill God's messengers, but you're never going to silence God's message. If God wants the gospel of the kingdom ringing off the hilltops in the countryside, he's going to make that happen, and King Herod can't stop it. Second. In this story, I want you to see the loving compassion of Jesus. Before having compassion on the crowds, which Matthew talks about, Jesus had compassion on his own disciples. When we harmonize all four of the gospel accounts, we'll find that Jesus has already sent the 12 apostles out two by two through villages in the region, preaching the good news of Jesus. Their ministry appeared to be a rousing success. I mean, we know Herod has heard about Jesus and their teaching. And on their return, Mark describes the apostles telling Jesus about all that they had done and all that they'd taught. And as a result, there are huge crowds coming and going, following them to Jesus. They had no time for rest, no time to eat or private teaching. So Matthew tells us in verse 13, Jesus's intention is to leave by boat, by himself away from the cities into a deserted place. That is not to say he was planning to go completely alone, just to get away from the crowds. It is implied that the disciples accompany him. This was a time alone for him and them. Here's how Mark records it in Mark chapter six. It says, he said to them, come aside by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while. For there were many coming and going and they did not have time even to eat. So they departed to a deserted place in a boat by themselves. The principle here is that every servant of Jesus needs to be in communion with him if they're going to serve others. Burnout can be a real issue. It has been said there are times where you have to come apart or you're going to fall apart. Jesus addresses that here by giving his disciples a time for rest. They travel to the other side of the sea by boat. But, I don't know if you've ever experienced this, your time off doesn't always go the way you planned it to. By the time they reached the opposite seaside, many in the crowd had noticed that they'd left, had seen how they left by boat, they'd seen where they were headed, and they took off on foot to hoof it around the coastline so that they're there at land when the boat reaches the seashore. Verse 13 says, when Jesus heard it, he departed from there by boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the multitudes heard it, they followed him on foot from the cities. They did not walk on water. That's what Jesus is about to do next. But they walked around the water. And so Jesus went out. He went out from the boat and saw this great multitude and he was moved with compassion on them and healed their sick. A great multitude. It's hard to say how many people are there, so let's just get the math out of the way for a second. According to verse 21, Jesus feeds 5,000 men besides women and children. So how many people were there? I don't know. Just the men are about, Matthew says, 5,000. But it's not just men. There are women and children there. It's hard to estimate sort of the distribution. Some commentators say it's equal amounts. So maybe you have 10,000 people because, you know, mostly men would have followed. Women and children wouldn't be expected to follow a rabbi out into the desert. Others say, well, men would be busy working. So the crowd was mostly women and children. So you probably had 20 or 25,000 people. Y'all, it is impossible to guess. It doesn't matter in that sense. There is, at the minimum, a crowd of about 5,000, or if you want to take that number, that estimated 5,000 as an exact number, then you would say, well, there was at least 5,004 people, right? 5,000 men and at least two women and two children to make the plural words make sense, right? But this is not a math problem, this is a spiritual issue. The compassionate heart of Jesus is seen through his reaction to the spiritual condition of the people. Verse 14 describes Jesus looking over the crowd and having compassion on them and healing the ones who were sick. Some of you, I'm sure, are already bracing yourself for me to explain this word compassion, since I am pretty open about the fact that it might be one of my favorite Greek words in the New Testament. It's the word splagchnizomai. It just sounds great, right? This is the single deepest word for emotion available that the writers could use. Oddly, it comes from the Greek word splachnon, meaning bowels. So literally, it's describing the kind of emotional reaction, the visceral reaction you feel in your guts, the deepest core of your being. It is a feeling that has to be acted on. It's the same word that describes the good Samaritan as he saw this beaten, helpless man. Something has to be done. Jesus, as he sees the crowd and he has this compassionate urge towards them, he's not going to let it go. He's gonna meet their needs. This was especially important for first century readers who would have been familiar with pagan practices, which told them, first off, there were many gods, and second, none of those gods care about you. They are indifferent, they don't care. In fact, it was called Stoic philosophy. We have the word Stoicism around now, it's still. which was the popular thought of the day that said to be the most like the gods, you should also care about nothing. You need to be indifferent. You need to be not feeling, certainly not emotional. Yet look at our Lord Jesus here as he reacts with deepest emotion toward the needs of those people around them. Gentlemen, we need to find a different idea of what it is to be a man. Be sure to consider his compassion on these people come at exactly the time when they were the most frustrating. I mean the goal here was to get away and be alone and instead they get to the seashore and the crowd has hoofed it and they're already there. And yet he did not see them as a nuisance, he saw them with compassion. Mark says Jesus looked on them like sheep not having a shepherd. It's an Old Testament simile for they're starving. They have no leadership. Sheep can't protect themselves. They can't think for themselves. They can't provide for themselves. They can't find direction for themselves. The best that they can do is eat some grass if you put it right in front of them. Jesus sees us like we are. He sees we are in need of provision and sustenance and guidance and care and leadership. These people followed him into the wilderness because they were desperately seeking what was missing. The Pharisees and Sadducees had been doing nothing but but fleecing the flock, not providing for them. So they hear the ministry of Jesus, either directly from him or through the apostles that he'd sent out, and they flock to him. And in response, Jesus meets their needs. He does three things. He heals them at the end of verse 14. He spent the day teaching them. And then he, in the main focus of this story, he feeds them. The healing came first. It was the most desperate need. but before feeding them actual food, Jesus feeds them spiritual food. Matthew, in his account, he does not specify Jesus' teaching, but that's just because Matthew doesn't have to. If you go back and you read Matthew up to chapter 14, you will have read several chapters of Jesus' teaching. You'll have read the Sermon on the Mount. You will know what Jesus does when he has time and opportunity and an audience. So Matthew just has to describe the passage of time for us to know what Jesus is doing. Verse 15, it was evening, right? A full day had passed. The teaching is implied there. The other Gospels are more specific about it. For example, Luke says in Luke 9, 11, the multitudes knew it and they followed him and he received them and spoke to them about the kingdom of God and healed those who had need of healing. the guidance these shepherdless sheep needed was guidance in the truth. That is the single most important need they had was knowledge of God. Real feeding is spiritual. That's one of the lessons here. Think about the men who are here for this story and what they're learning about the compassionate leadership of Jesus. You know, Peter's there. He's learning about how to be a shepherd from watching Jesus. At the end of Jesus's ministry, before he ascends into heaven three times, he tells Peter, feed my sheep, and then Peter's writing a letter to other elders saying, feed the flock of God which is among you. All of it rooted here just like Jesus in the compassionate care for others. Everything that happens here is because Jesus was moved with compassion toward the crowd. Third, I want you to note the difficult command of Jesus. Verse 15, when it was evening, His disciples came to him saying, this is a deserted place and the hour is already late. Send the multitudes away that they may go into the villages and buy themselves food. But Jesus said to them, they do not need to go away. You give them something to eat. You'll note the disciples hardly have the compassion of Jesus here. They recognize there is a physical need, but their solution to it is to suspend teaching, send them out, let them fend for themselves. There's actually a bit of presumptuousness here on the disciples' parts, issuing commands to Jesus, arrogantly. Maybe you haven't noticed, but it's getting dark, the villages aren't closed. Rabbi, you've gotta send these people away so they can go get food for themselves. And Jesus' reply is stunning. He issues a difficult, seemingly impossible command. They do not need to leave. You need to feed them. What's happening here, unbeknownst to the disciples, is the Lord Jesus is embracing a teachable moment. He's been teaching the crowds all day, but now it's time for a lesson for the closest of his disciples. You feed them and sit back and watch their heads spin. Spoiler alert for future sermons, later on Jesus is even gonna ask them, do you remember that day? Did you learn anything from that? They're being asked to do what they are not capable of doing, and as a result, their brains are starting to smoke, and it's coming out their ears. John and Mark tell us that the apostle Philip, who is apparently the accountant, the bean counter of the group, Starts to run the math. He proposes the possibility that they had 200 denarii coins, which is about eight months wages for a single person. He says that wouldn't be enough to buy food for everybody. But the problems are even greater than that. Let's say that 200 denarii was sufficient. It wasn't. And let's say they had that money available. But even if it would have been enough and they had it, they are in the wilderness. It's a deserted place. That is not a place covered with desserts. That is a place without any towns or villages near it. If you can go back to first century Galilee and find two big billboards in the region that say you're now entering nowhere, they are located equal distance in between. I'm saying they're in the middle of nowhere. Door dash, grub hub are not options. Chick-fil-A catering is not gonna be able to bring them some Southern Baptist chicken. This is the difficulty of Jesus's command. Even if they had the money, they still wouldn't have had the ability. Jesus has taken them and 5,000 plus people out into the middle of nowhere by themselves so he could give them this order, you feed them. And it's a teachable moment designed to show the apostles that they have no ability to provide anything in ministry in and of themselves. Or as Jesus says in John 15 verse five, apart from me, you can do nothing. The disciples did everything they could do. They showed Jesus, here's what we've got. In verse 17, they come to him. We have here only five loaves and two fish. Now we don't know the size of the loaves or the fish from Matthew's account. Here's what John tells us in John 6. Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, said to him, there is a lad here who has five barley loaves and two small fish, but what are they among so many? These barley loaves or barley cakes, is it cake? Yes. Typically about the size of a roll or a large cracker, usually would have been eaten by poor people. And the too small fish, the emphasis is on the word small. It's probably dried or smoked fish, so you've got Philip the bean counter whose brain is ringing like an empty cash register. He knows this is impossible. You've got Andrew saying, oh, we've got five crackers and a couple of sardines. This is not gonna do it. This is not enough. Again, this underscores that what they have is very little. It is not adequate. We find ourselves sometimes in situations like this when we serve the Lord, we look at the budget and we figure out what we have to offer or rather how much we don't have to offer. And all the while we can forget that we are the servants of the Lord of creation. What do you do when what you have to offer doesn't seem like it could possibly be enough to provide what people need? The answer is you put it in the hands of Jesus and watch him work. Verse 18, he said, bring them here to me. Matthew says in verse 19, Jesus commanded the multitudes to sit down on the grass. The other gospels show how he gave this command through the disciples. Luke records that the command is make them sit down in groups of 50. Mark says they assembled the crowd in ranks and hundreds and fifties. This is organized, which, by the way, is why it was easy to come up with 5,000 as an estimate. They're grouped up in 50s and 100, and Phillip's bean-counting brain must have loved that. But you can imagine the trust that is involved in this process. What the disciples have to do is they have to go out to this massive crowd and say, okay, everybody, we know it's getting dark. We know that you're hungry. We don't have money. We don't have enough food. So if you just sit down in the green grass like good little sheep, you'll be taken care of. In the meantime, the apostles looking at each other going, how are we gonna take care of them? I have no idea. And that's when Jesus goes to work. Notice fourthly, he provides this miraculous mealtime. Verse 19. He commanded the multitude to sit down on the grass and he took the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he blessed and broke and gave the loaves to the disciples and the disciples gave to the multitudes. So they all ate and were filled, and they took up 12 baskets full of the fragments that remained. Let me just ask how you should start your mealtime. It was the practice of Jesus to say a blessing before the meal. This would not be any different. It is unlikely he prayed the modern Baptist prayer. Father, please bless this food to the nourishment of our bodies. That's not to say he wouldn't have used common words, he probably did. The common prayer in this case would have been fitting. It says Jesus looked up to heaven and he blessed. The common prayer at that time would have been, blessed are you, oh Lord our God, king of the universe, who causes bread to come from the earth. We can't say for sure, but Jesus likely employed those words or something similar. Since the goal of blessing the food is not about the food, it is blessing and praising the Lord God who provides it. Praising and blessing God for our food is a common act, but do not let the common nature of it allow you to overlook. We bless the Lord because every meal comes from him. I know some of you are already thinking about lunch today. If you weren't, you are now. Whatever you eat for lunch today comes to you from God's miraculous providence just as much as if it was bread broken by the hands of Jesus himself and handed to you out here on the seashore. There seems to be nothing extraordinary about the bread and fish themselves at this point. We know that from John that what was available was only a young boy's meal. Maybe it was prepared by his mother and sent along with him. The bread was barley. It was far from the best thing. The fish were small and yet Jesus blessed and gave thanks and started distributing the bread and fish. And that's when the miracle starts to happen in the hands of Jesus. The verbs here are continual action. They kept coming to him and taking and taking the bread and fish, and he kept breaking and breaking and making and making more bread and fish. Primarily, this is a physical miracle, and that shouldn't be forgotten. The creative work of God is seen in the hands of Jesus, by whom and for whom all things were created. Listen, before he made this bread and fish into a miraculous meal, it is the Lord Jesus who made the barley in the field and put the fish in the water. He made the field and he made the water. His perfect hands created the vines for the lunch basket. He made the mother who sent the lunch with her little boy. He formed in her the child as he was being grown and delivered. He makes this little boy who carries it. He's woven the intricate molecules into every blade of grass that he prepared for this crowd to sit on out there in the wilderness. This is all orderly and planned, and the distribution probably took some time. The disciples going down the rows and the aisles, like a reverse collection plate, right? Taking the bread and the fish, these little baskets, and everybody could take some, and they ate their fill. Verse 20 says they all ate, so nobody was left out. And it says they were all filled. The word for filled there is actually a word used in Greek outside of scripture to describe the way you would give fodder to an animal to fatten it up. The way my grandfather would say this was they strapped on a feed bag. They were completely satisfied. The physical miracle here has spiritual application as well. John's gospel proves this by following it with a sermon of Jesus expounding on this idea where he says, I am the bread of life and whoever comes to me will never hunger and whoever believes in me will never thirst. Yet Matthew doesn't tell us about that. Matthew is focused on the teachable moment for the disciples. Matthew is one of those disciples. So listen to verses 20 through 22. So they all ate and were filled and they took up 12 baskets full of the fragments that remained. Now those who had eaten were about 5,000 men, besides women and children. Immediately, Jesus made his disciples get into the boat and go before him to the other side while he sent the multitudes away. there is significance to the fact that 12 baskets of leftovers remained. After everyone had eaten, the disciples apparently went back through and collected what was not eaten. It filled 12 baskets. Now don't picture bushel baskets of food like you'd set up on your shoulder in order to carry because it's super heavy. The Greek word here describes a wicker basket. It's something small. It's probably a kind of basket that would have been similar to what the little boy brought the bread and fish with him with. We know these leftovers are significant because a couple of chapters over in Matthew 16, verse nine, he's going to remind them and say, don't you remember the five loaves and the 5,000 and how many baskets you took up? Some have suggested these 12 baskets represent the 12 tribes of Israel. Maybe so, this is Jewish territory. It will be different when Jesus duplicates this miracle in Gentile territory. But how about we get as complicated as this? There's 12 little baskets for 12 little disciples who have a whole lot to learn. In verse 20, they collected the leftovers into 12 little baskets. Verse 22 says, Jesus ordered them immediately onto the boat, each of them carrying some food in their hands and surely some more food for thought. They are being called to a ministry of giving in which they cannot out-give God. You cannot out-perform the Lord Jesus. If you give everything you have, even if it seems like it's not enough for the people they're ministering to, you find out in the loving hands of your master Jesus, it's not only enough for them, but he's still got enough for you too. Take your lunch and get on the boat, boys. and think about this for a while. Gonna ask you about it later. This miracle is a lesson for the disciples that Jesus and only Jesus is sufficient. If we learn that lesson, then we can feel this with them. We can feel the words of the Apostle Paul in Philippians 4.19, that my God shall supply all your needs according to his riches and glory in Christ Jesus. We will know this is true. Not only will Jesus supply your needs, he even cares about things that don't necessarily quite qualify as needs. This is one thing that always amazes me when I think about it in the story is this is not really what we would consider a miracle of necessity. Right, when Jesus heals the deaf or the blind or the mute folks, that's a miracle of necessity. When he raises the dead, that's a miracle of necessity. There are some times when Jesus cares about things that aren't even on that level of this is what you've got to have. He turned water into wine in order to help some newlyweds avoid embarrassment. In the Old Testament, in 2 Kings 6, God miraculously causes an ax head to float because it was borrowed and they needed to return it. Listen, nobody is gonna die by missing this meal. But Jesus is the good shepherd who takes care of us. He cares about us. He cares about our spiritual condition primarily. He fed them wisdom and truth, and then he fed them bread and fish. Y'all, this happened, and it matters. It proves Jesus can provide for you what you can't provide for yourself. It proves that Jesus can provide for others through you in ways you couldn't begin to imagine for yourself. It proves that the Lord Jesus who provided for and sustained those people in the wilderness that day can provide for and sustain us today. And we praise him for it.