On Stewardship: Lessons from feeding the 5000 men

Today is Sunday, yet again i was privileged to part of a fellowship, been in a community of believers at life-spring chapel at Embakasi. Today we continued with our series on LIFE Stewardship. This is 3 part of the church's life cycle that aims at equipping the believers to achieve full LIFE in Christ. The other parts of the Life Cycle are LIFE Foundations and LIFE Relationships. More on this can be found on the church's website.


The scripture readings : John 6:1-15, it is the story of the feeding of the 5,000 men by Jesus. It is  quite a well known portion of scripture , i have heard and thought about it in various interpretation, but never in the sense of stewardship. The Wikipedia defines stewardship as an ethic that embodies responsible planning and management of resources, it also refers to the responsibility to take care of something belonging to someone else. To be a steward, and or act in steward to something, is known as stewardship.


The Big Question
The sermon focused on the responses of Jesus' disciples to His question: "Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?"


This question can be expanded to cover the various questions we ask in our life, "where will i get rent, food, clothing, ...?" The questions we ask about our well being, our country's, our families.


The Human Response
The responses of the disciples are typical of how most of us will and do respond to this and such questions: 


⁷ Philip answered him, “It would take more than half a year’s wages to buy enough bread for each one to have a bite!” ---Pessimism, it is impossible, we simply cannot manage, we see what cannot be done, not what can be done. Sort of half full / half empty scenario. 


⁸ Another of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, spoke up, ⁹ “Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?” - Disregard of what we have, poor mentality of who we are, of what God has given us.


Jesus Response
 ¹⁰ Jesus said, “Have the people sit down.” There was plenty of grass in that place, and they sat down (about five thousand men were there). ¹¹ Jesus then took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed to those who were seated as much as they wanted. He did the same with the fish.
In faith took with gratitude what was available and solved the need, i shall be looking more at His response and how all this relates to stewardship in a later post.


Scripture taken from bible gateway, this blog is my personal understanding of the sermons and is not necessarily exact sermon preached,