Are We Manufacturers or Distributors?
(Acts 3:1-9, Luke 9:10-17)
Introduction:
“A little nun was on a much desired mission assignment to the Apache Indians. She was so excited that she drove past the last gas station without noticing that she needed gas. She ran out of gas about a mile down the road, and had to walk back to the station. The attendant told her that he would like to help her, but he had no container to hold the gas.
“Sympathetic to her plight, he agreed to search through an old shed in the back for something that might suffice. The only container that would hold fuel was an old bedpan. The grateful nun told him that the bedpan would work just fine. She carried the gasoline back to her car, taking care not to drop an ounce. When she got to her car, she carefully poured the contents of the bed pan into the tank.
A truck driver pulled alongside the care as the nun was emptying the container into the tank. He rolled down his window and yelled to her, ‘I wish I had your faith, Sister’” (Michael Hodgin, 1001 Humorous Illustrations for Public Speaking (Zondervan: Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1994), 226-227).
Faith is central to Christianity. Not faith in just anything, but faith in the fact that God is real, and that he came to earth as a man named Jesus, that he lived a perfect life, died on our behalf, and that he rose from the dead three days later. And it’s this type of faith that we rest all our assurance.
But for many, it’s hard to believe. It’s hard to believe that God is able to do the miraculous, even though there are records of it in the Bible. It’s hard for us to believe that God works and moves in those same ways these days, and so we try to manufacture our faith, we try to manufacture miracles, we try to manufacture hope. But manufacturing isn’t what God called us to do. He called us to be distributors.
We’re going to be focusing for the next few weeks on Act 3:1-10, and try to understand what it means to be distributors of divine resources. We’re going to learn what it means to meet human needs through loving channels. And most importantly, we’re going to learn what it means to do this all to the glory of God.
So let’s take a look…
Acts 3:1-10 (NLT)
Peter and John went to the Temple one afternoon to take part in the three o’clock prayer service. [2] As they approached the Temple, a man lame from birth was being carried in. Each day he was put beside the Temple gate, the one called the Beautiful Gate, so he could beg from the people going into the Temple. [3] When he saw Peter and John about to enter, he asked them for some money.
[4] Peter and John looked at him intently, and Peter said, "Look at us!" [5] The lame man looked at them eagerly, expecting a gift. [6] But Peter said, "I don’t have any money for you. But I’ll give you what I have. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, get up and walk!"
[7] Then Peter took the lame man by the right hand and helped him up. And as he did, the man’s feet and anklebones were healed and strengthened. [8] He jumped up, stood on his feet, and began to walk! Then, walking, leaping, and praising God, he went into the Temple with them.
[9] All the people saw him walking and heard him praising God. [10] When they realized he was the lame beggar they had seen so often at the Beautiful Gate, they were absolutely astounded!
What we learn from this passage of Scripture is that:
"Ministry takes place when divine resources meet human needs through loving channels to the glory of God" (Warren W. Wiersbe, On Being a Servant of God (Baker Books: Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1993), 4).
As we look at today’s passage of Scripture in Acts, we see that Peter and John had come a long way. By this time, Jesus had been crucified, had risen from the dead, and had ascended to the Father. The disciples had already received the Holy Spirit that Jesus had promised would come to them as they waited in Jerusalem, and here we find them going about the daily routine of praying in the Temple – as was the Jewish custom of the day. And as they enter through the Gate of the Temple called Beautiful, they notice a man – a mere beggar who was lame from birth – asking for alms from the passers by. Now, there would have been a time when Peter and John would have probably passed this man up because they honestly had no monetary means by which to bless him, but because of their faith in God and their belief in Jesus, God made them distributors of the Faith by miraculous means.
You see, they had come to learn that though they were poor, they had great riches to offer. Though they were poor, they had something beyond material things to give to this man. But this wasn’t the case before! They had once tried to manufacture their faith; they had once tried to manufacture the ministry that Jesus had given them charge of. One very familiar story that we can read in all four Gospels is The Feeding of the Five Thousand.
As we talked last week in Matthew 10, Jesus had trained up the disciples and began to send them out two by two into the surrounding communities to do ministry. And as they return they meet up with Jesus once again they quietly made their way to Bethsaida, but the crowds found out where they were and followed them there.
Let’s read what happens…
Luke 9:10-17 (NLT)
When the apostles returned, they told Jesus everything they had done. Then he slipped quietly away with them toward the town of Bethsaida. [11] But the crowds found out where he was going, and they followed him. And he welcomed them, teaching them about the Kingdom of God and curing those who were ill. [12] Late in the afternoon the twelve disciples came to him and said, "Send the crowds away to the nearby villages and farms, so they can find food and lodging for the night. There is nothing to eat here in this deserted place."
[13] But Jesus said, "You feed them."
"Impossible!" they protested. "We have only five loaves of bread and two fish. Or are you expecting us to go and buy enough food for this whole crowd?" [14] For there were about five thousand men there.
"Just tell them to sit down on the ground in groups of about fifty each," Jesus replied. [15] So the people all sat down. [16] Jesus took the five loaves and two fish, looked up toward heaven, and asked God’s blessing on the food. Breaking the loaves into pieces, he kept giving the bread and fish to the disciples to give to the people. [17] They all ate as much as they wanted, and they picked up twelve baskets of leftovers!
The first thing we can learn from this passage of Scripture is that:
1. There was an ensuing problem:
You see, the problem was that there were over five thousand people that needed food because they had journeyed so far to see and hear Jesus. Taking into account that women and children aren’t counted in this number, there were probably thousands more who were hungry too.
So the disciples get this bright idea to fix the problem. They want Jesus to send the crowds away into the nearby villages for food and lodging. They didn’t personally want to take care of the situation; they wanted Jesus to take care of it.
Warren Wiersbe in his book entitled, On Being a Servant of God, asks the question, “Where was their compassion? The Lord knew that the people were hungry and could never make the journey, so He rejected that plan. But, aren’t we often tempted in ministry to get rid of the very people God wants us to help?” (p. 6).
At the surface level, it’s so much easier to avoid a problem altogether, to pretend that it doesn’t exist, to let dead dogs lie; but is this the right thing to do? The reality is, life is fraught with problems and dilemmas. Though we climb to the mountain tops we see the valleys that stretch out before us in the path of life. So truly, though we may try to avoid problems, we can never fully do this.
There may be times when we’re faced with a moral dilemma of standing up for our faith, and we have to make the tough decision to stand firm in the face of certain ridicule and persecution. We may at times be faced with issues of tough love with our families or friends; to speak the truth in love though it may not be easy. Whatever the case, we will be faced with problems, but it’s how we deal with these problems that makes all the difference in the world.
The second thing we can learn from this passage of Scripture is that:
2. Jesus entrusted the problem to the disciples to fix:
When the disciples approached Jesus with the problem, what does he say to them? He says, “You feed them.”
Now, Jesus wasn’t trying to be a “smart-alec”, he wasn’t trying to be rude or obnoxious, however, he wasn’t going to do all the work for them.
How many times to we come to God with a problem, and we beg and plead, “Please God, do something.” We say, “God, you fix the problem!” And this is all well and good, but there are many times that God is saying to us, “Okay, I’ll help you, but I want you to make the first step in the solution to the problem.” He says, “Take the divine resources I’ve given you and put them to use. Take your time, your talents, your giftedness, and your abilities, and step up to the plate. Don’t set on the sidelines waiting for me to do all the work for you. Join me in the work!”
There may be times that God entrusts us with a task to complete, a problem to overcome, and it’s our responsibility to connect with Him in such a way that we become part of the solution.
The third thing we can learn from this passage of Scripture is that:
3. The disciples protested because they couldn’t come up with a solution to the problem:
Though they had walked with Jesus for some time now, and had seen the miraculous happen even before their very eyes, they tell Jesus that this task is too big; that this task is an impossibility! And then they start complaining about their lack of resources, “We have only five loaves of bread and two fish. Or are you expecting us to go and buy enough food for this whole crowd?” They start justifying to Jesus why they can’t do this. In their avoidance of the problem, they wanted to send the people away. They didn’t want to deal with them.
“Phillip admitted that there wasn’t enough money on hand to buy food to feed such a big crowd, so a bigger budget wasn’t the answer. (Most people think that having more money to spend is the solution to every problem.) Then Andrew found a boy with a small lunch of five barley loaves and two fish, a food supply totally inadequate to meet the need” (On Being a Servant of God, 6).
What we find through all of this is that, “The disciples were trying to be manufacturers. They thought it was their responsibility to come up with the money or the food or some clever way to solve the problem” (On Being a Servant of God, 6).
Being part of the solution doesn’t mean that we become manufacturers, it means that we become distributors of the divine resources that God gives us so freely.
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….
“But the young student nurse decided that she could not treat this person like the others had treated her. She talked to Eileen, sang to her, encouraged her, and even brought her little gifts. One day when things were especially difficult and it would have been easy for the young nurse to take out her frustrations on the patient, she was especially kind. It was Thanksgiving Day and the nurse said to the patient, ‘I was in a cruddy mood this morning, Eileen, because it was supposed to be my day off. But now that I’m here, I’m glad. I wouldn’t have wanted to miss seeing you on Thanksgiving. Do you know this is Thanksgiving?’
“Just then the telephone rang, and as the nurse turned to answer it, she looked quickly back at Eileen. ‘Suddenly,’ she writes, Eileen was ‘looking at me… crying. Big damp circles stained her pillow, and she was shaking all over.
“That was the only human emotion that Eileen ever showed any of them, but it was enough to change the whole attitude of the hospital staff toward her. Not long afterward, Eileen died. The young nurse closes her story, saying, ‘I keep thinking about her… It occurred to me that I owe her an awful lot. Except for Eileen, I might never have known what it’s like to give my self to someone who can’t give back’” (Rebecca Manley Pippert, Stories from the Heart (Multnomah Books: Sisters, Oregon, 1996), 31-32).
What have you been confronted with that seems impossible to overcome? How are you allowing God to use you to meet the needs of others through the divine resources he has?
“I am only one, but I am one.
I cannot do everything, but I can do something.
What I can do, I should do and,
With the help of God, I will do!” (Everett Hale, Stories from the Heart (Multnomah Books: Sisters, Oregon, 1996), 32).
