Stepping Out Of The Boat

Do you really believe that God can do all that His Word says He can do?

Do you have enough faith to believe?

If God told you to lay your hands on a person who just suffered a compound fracture of their tibia & fibula and declare that they are healed would you have any doubt in your mind?

If God told you to go to a place where there was 1000 people and they were all hungry but they had no food and feed them some food, but all you had was a McDonalds value meal, would you bless it and break it and serve it?

If you were out on the paddleboat on the Missouri River and you saw Jesus walking on the shore and Jesus said to you, “Get out of the boat and walk across the water and come to me.” Would you get out of the boat and walk on the water to get to Jesus?

Let’s pray.

Father,

Open my eyes so I can see Your truth.

Open my ears so I can hear Your voice.

Open my mind so I can understand Your Word.

And open my heart so I may receive all that You want me to receive. AMEN

In the book of Matthew chapter 14 we have two accounts of the power of God that was demonstrated through Christ.

The first is the feeding of 5000.

In this account, Jesus was teaching the people but they were out of town, they were in a remote place and it was getting late.

The disciples were getting hungry and so they suggested to Jesus that He wind it up and send the people on their way so they could all get something to eat. Jesus had other plans!

Jesus told His disciples to feed this group of people which most likely caught the 12 disciples by surprise.

The disciples could only see the problem that this situation presented, which was they did not have enough money or enough food to feed this large group of people. There were 5000 men at this event plus women and children. It was more like 10000 people in attendance and all they had was 5 loaves of bread and two fish that had been cooked up.

They confronted Jesus with this problem and they let Him know that all they had was some bread and fish. They didn’t feel that they had enough resources to get the job done.

Jesus said, “You give them something to eat.”

God wanted them to get their eyes off of what they had and He wanted them to focus on what He could do. He did not want them to be concerned about how it was going to be done, He just wanted them to obey and watch a miracle.

We all know what happens after that. Jesus instructs everyone to sit down and He takes the five loaves of bread and the two fish in His hands, He looks up to the Father and He gives thanks for this meal.

He starts breaking the bread and giving it to His disciples and every time He breaks a piece off a piece grows back and the same thing happened with the fish and they were able to feed the people that were there that day and when they were done there was 12 baskets of food left over.

This was the second time that Jesus had performed a miracle like this. The disciples had a memory problem!

Sometimes we forget what God can do and sometimes we forget what God has done. In Mark 6:52 we learn that the disciples had a hard time understanding because their hearts were hardened.

Their hearts were hard because they had not completely accepted Christ. They had not opened up all of their lives to Him.

Most of the time, we look at a person with a hard heart as a person who hates God. The word hardened, as it is used here, means to make calloused, unyielding, or cold in spirit.

The disciples were not God haters, but rather they were so use to the natural world and its limitations that they were overwhelmed to see Jesus supersede the laws of nature.

In other words their hard hearts were a result of the disciples not yielding their minds to the things of God.

We have the same problem today when we don’t completely yield our lives to Him we run the risk of becoming insensitive to Him.

Our hearts become hardened when we think upon, study, or ponder on anything other than God and His ways.

The disciples were not thinking about sin they were thinking about how they could help the situation themselves.

They were still thinking this way when they got into the boat after Jesus fed the multitudes.