Is Jesus Enough

Not A Fan : is Jesus Enough? Part 6

February 11th Psalm 27:4-14 John 6:60-69

Some of the ideas in this sermon came from Kyle Idleman’s series Fan or Follower which we did at our church.

We are coming to the end of our series Not A Fan. We have looked at the topics of 1) Fan or Follower, 2) Open Invitation, 3) Intimacy, 4) Comfortable Cross and 5) More Than Rules .The whole premise of the series has been are you a fan of Jesus or a follower of Jesus. Fans are willing to cheer for you and encourage you but they keep you secondary in their lives. Followers are willing to go, where you go or where you want them to go, and to pray the price to get there. Today we are going to look at, “Is Jesus Enough.”

Have you ever been in a situation in which no matter how much you did, it just wasn’t enough to please somebody. You didn’t clean well enough. You didn’t give as much money as they wanted. You didn’t give them as much time as they wanted. Your grades were not good enough. How did it make you feel ? I think part of our feelings of frustration has more to do with the feeling that in rejecting what we had offered, they were really rejecting us. Not only was our efforts not good enough, we were not good enough for them.

In John chapter six, Jesus is probably the most popular person in the entire country. Huge crowds of people are all around him and traveling wherever he goes. He is undoubtedly the biggest name celebrity that is on the lips of the most people. People knew everywhere of the miracles he had performed. He had turned water into wine. He had healed a man lame for 38 years. He had opened a blind man’s eyes. He had raised a 12 year old girl from the dead. He had messages that you wanted to hear again and again. He was teaching about the love of God in ways that people had never quite understood before. He was even accepting the worst of sinners and telling them, God would welcome them home as well.

Then one day, there was exceptionally large crowd. The Scriptures tell us that there were 5000 men there besides the women and children. So if you count in the women and children, that probably would put the number at about 15,000 people. The average attendance for an NBA game is 17,000. So just as many people showed up to hear Jesus preach as we would be going to see a professional basketball game.

I don’t know what the message was, but the crowd was allowing Jesus to go into overtime with his sermon. They stayed there all day listening to what he had to say. Jesus knew that they were getting hungry. I don’t care how much you like watching the Cavs or Golden State, or whoever your favorite team is, most of you would not be willing to watch them all day long, if they did not have any food at the arena and you hadn’t brought any food with you and the nearest food was miles away and the stores would be closed when you got there. How many of you would have been leaving early.—That’s because you were fans, not followers.

Jesus knew the crowd was getting hungry. Where do you get enough food to feed 15,000 people. The disciples had an answer to that. The disciples told Jesus, “you went kind of long, you need to dismiss the crowd so that they can go to the villages and buy them something to eat. Jesus told them, “there is no need for that, you give them something to eat. Phillip thought Jesus did not understand the size of the problem, so he told him it would take eight months of wages just for everybody to get a bite, and that’s assuming some food was available which it was not.

Now Andrew knew that Jesus could do the impossible, even when it seemed impossible, so he informed Jesus that he had gotten a lunch from a boy that had five loaves of bread and two fish. Too everyone’s astonishment, Jesus said bring them here to me. Jesus then had the disciples organize the crowds into groups of fifties and hundreds and the food and fish multiplied so that not only did everyone eat until they were full, they had twelve basketfuls of broken pieces left over. Can you imagine having been at that basketball game all day long, hungry and then hearing the words, the concession stands are now open, eat anything you want, all you want, and we will pick up the tab. Most of us would have forgotten about the game the Cavs were playing and go home and talk about all the free food we ate until we were full.