Are We Manufacturers Or Distributors? Series

The fourth thing we can learn from this passage of Scripture is that:

4. Jesus made the disciples distributors rather than manufacturers of his divine resources:

“Because we have a manufacturer mentality, we’re prone to depend on our own resources, things like experience, training, money, talent, and education” (On Being a Servant of God, 7). Many times, when we’re posed with a problem too big for us to fix – too big for us to manufacture – we tend to pass it off and miss an opportunity to join God in his work.

How many times have we passed up opportunity after opportunity all because something was too great for us to accomplish by our own means? How many times have we sat down in self-defeat all because a task was overwhelming, like the feeding of the five thousand? If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that God is a God of the impossible. You can’t read the Bible and not see this; you can’t be in a relationship with him and not realize how miraculously he works day in and day out to bring about good throughout the world in the lives of others. You can’t be in close relationship to God for too long without realizing that it’s from him that we receive the divine resources necessary to tackle even the most impossible tasks that come our way.

In last week’s message we learned that as Jesus sent the disciples out into the surrounding communities, among the instructions he gave to them he said, “Give as freely as you have received!” They were to give of the divine resources which they had freely received. And so must we give of the divine resources that God has so abundantly, and freely, given to us.

But what are the divine resources that God makes available to us for ministry? Wiersbe writes, “The word that best summarizes it is the familiar word grace: ‘And of His fullness we have all received, and grace for grace’ (John 1:16). The image here seems to be that of an ocean, with wave after wave coming in to shore in unending fullness. I’m reminded of the poor woman who had her first view of the ocean and stood on the shore weeping. When asked why she was weeping, she replied, ‘It’s so good to see something that there’s plenty of!’

“You don’t earn grace, and you don’t deserve grace; you simply receive it as God’s loving gift and then share it with others. In ministry we are channels of God’s resources, not reservoirs: ‘Give, and it will be given to you: good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over will be put into your bosom. For with the same measure that you use, it will be measured back to you’ (Luke 6:38). It’s a basic law of the kingdom of God that the servants who know how poor they are become the richest, and those who give the most receive the most and therefore have the most to give” (On Being a Servant of God, 7).

Conclusion:

“In an article in Campus Life a young nurse writes of her pilgrimage in learning to see in a patient the image of God beneath a very ‘distressing disguise.’

Eileen was one of her first patients, a person who was totally helpless. ‘A cerebral aneurysm (broken blood vessels in the brain) had left her with no conscious control over her body,’ the nurse writes. As near as the doctors could tell Eileen was totally unconscious, unable to feel pain and unaware of anything going on around her. It was the job of the hospital staff to turn her every hour to prevent bedsores and to feed her twice a day ‘what looked like a thin mush through a stomach tube.’ Caring for her was a thankless task. ‘When it’s this bad,’ an older student nurse told her, ‘you have to detach yourself emotionally from the whole situation….’ As a result, more and more she came to be treated as a thing, a vegetable….