Our scripture this morning is Matthew 14, 13 through 21. When Jesus heard what had happened, he withdrew by boat privately to a solitary place. Hearing of this, the crowds followed him on foot from the towns. When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them and healed their sick.
As evening approached, the disciples came to him and said, this is a remote place and it's already getting late. Send the crowds away so they can go to the villages and buy themselves some food. Jesus replied, they do not need to go away. You give them something to eat.
We have here only five lives of bread and two fish. They answered, bring them here to me, he said, and he directed the people to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to the disciples and the disciples gave them to the people.
They all ate and were satisfied. And the disciples picked up 12 basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over. The number of those who ate was about 5,000 men besides women and children. So how do you gain trust in your life?
I'll tell you a story about how I lost trust for it. It's a legendary story in my family, but I was going through a phase. And I was about five or six where I like to headbutt people. Well, I would headbutt their stomach, you know, that violent phase that little boys go through.
Why are you looking at Channing right now? But my dad, so I'm four inches taller than my dad. So my dad's about right here on me. And I was five or six.
I was like right there. And you can just visualize the anatomy of where I would end up headbudding him. And my dad decided to break me of this habit. And the house we lived in was a ranch style house.
So it was really, really wide and not that deep. And so he stood in the kitchen one day and said, Chad, come on, give me all you've got. Just headbutt me as hard as you can. And so I backed up.
And one side of this house was the kitchen and the refrigerator. And then one side of the house was a bathroom. And so me and my five, six year old enthusiasm, I back up all the way into the bathroom and I get the fastest running start I can. And I get down and right when I'm two feet away from my dad, my dad steps to the side and I run straight into the refrigerator.
And my mom said the look that he had on his face. I mean, I think my dad, I did a math. My dad was probably 28, 29 when this happened. I had to look on my dad's face as he was doing this move.
It just looked at sheer terror before he was a bad idea. And I just smoked the refrigerator, hit the ground. But my dad will say, he's like, you know what? Chad, you never headbutted me again after that.
You know, trust is a funny thing. My mom said that I stayed away from my dad for two weeks. Like I don't know what's going on anymore. But trust is a funny thing.
And we all deal with trust differently. A lot of times I think that we lead with trust different. We think about how we deal with that. You know, trust is something that we experience.
And it's a thing that when we think about our history with other people, with people we trust, people we don't trust, all of this builds up our story of trust. And I really think trust for many of us, it exists on a spectrum. We either lead with assuming good, assuming the best in people or we lead with assuming the worst in people. And even that is just on a spectrum.
And so depending on where we're disappointed, or where we get disappointed, or where we get frustrated, or where we get happier, excited, or that sort of thing, like I trust it moves back and forth. Have you ever thought about how you handle trust growing or decreasing in your life? We think about the people that we gain trust from. I typically, I've talked about this as a friend of mine.
I normally like lead with a lot of grace with a lot of trust. But when I lose it, it's pretty bad. Or friends of mine say, I don't trust anybody in the beginning. And they have experiences of a lot of growing trust.
Like trust exists on this spectrum. We have it think about it. You know, how do you grow trust? Maybe when someone challenges you and you realize, wow, they're going to have tough conversations with me.
But I see outcomes in my life where I change. And so I'm a trustless person to just be really honest and deliberate with me. Or might be somebody that we know and we find out that there's some clear growth going on. We've had honest, hard conversations.
There's growth that's happening. There's positive outcomes. But all this is active trust versus passive trust. Because here's the thing, trust rarely grows unless we apply pressure.
Right? Now, how many times have you chosen to not act on something hoping it gets better and it actually gets better versus how many times have this needs to grow in my life. And I'm willing to just put the work in, have the conversations, see the growth and move through there. You know, a lot of times we live in a world of passive trust wanting active things to happen.
Last week we started a series of conversations about generosity. And what we really focused in on was the idea that as we lose our generosity, we lose our identity. We talked about the Prophet Malachi and how he was speaking to the Jewish people when they were living during this in-between moment and how generosity was one of the practices that pulled them out of this listlessness and into this place of purpose. And we're going to keep on talking about generosity today.
But we're going to really focus on the idea of trust. If we ask ourselves the question of what happens when we give one of the answers we're going to find is will we see Jesus change things. And the biggest obstacle many times in us seeing this growth point in our life is realizing the power of our active generosity when we think about how trust works and we grow our trust by using our trust. That's where the big thing to think about today.
We grow our trust by using our trust. Matthew 14, Daily Red Force earlier, that's a great Bible story. It's appropriate for the kids. It's full of like super fun, inspiring things.
It's not complicated. Like we don't read that story and leave with questions. Last week we were at the Malachot passage. I think I'd like to have questions after that.
This is kind of rough. This makes me feel bad about myself, like what's going on here. We had to take some time to pull it apart. But in this story we don't have to do that.
And we see very quickly in a very full focus way a fantastic point of growth here. And the disciples and what they saw, we saw what it means to trust Jesus with the resources that we have, but also to see the power of kingdom multiplication and the stories. It's one of the best stories that we have about abundance. That's what we're going to talk about today is how we see trust grow in this story.
To lead into it, it's a thing about trusting when we are tired. Now this story fits in the larger narrative. If you kind of pull this passage out, you find out that right before this story is when Jesus found out that his cousin John the Baptist had been killed. And by killed, Herod chopped his head off during the party and put the head on a platter and kind of brought it out for entertainment.
So imagine how Jesus was feeling. You know, in sorrow or in grief or in fear for some reason, Jesus and disciples, we need to leave this place and go across the Sea of Galilee. What we find to actually go is they leave the place where Herod, the good killed John the Baptist, was in charge. They crossed the lake where his cousin Philip was in charge.
And so there's some escaping going on in some place. But the only problem is they end up getting followed. You know, people know where they're going and they follow them. And this lets us honestly get into the conversation.
It's easy to be generous and gracious when everything's going well, right? I remember when I was a kid, I was 11 years old. I was at Boy Scout camp for the first time and I nearly ran out of money. Mine gave me $20 for the week.
And there's a lot of coax and a lot of sickers bars and I think I bought like a fake pair of moccasins and stupid like that. But I remember the last night I was there. I was having a good time. My parents came on Parent Night.
One more night I came up. I was happy. I was excited and dad gave me $5. And I felt like I was the richest man.
I bought all my little buddies' coaks that night. It was a good night and I had plenty of things. It's easy to be generous when things are going well. It's easy to be generous when things seem to be abundant.
But when things get stressful, when things get worrisome, how often do we descend into more self-focused moments? I think that's what's happening here. Jesus is probably tired. He's sad.
There's all sorts of emotions with this person who he's related to. But it's also played a big part in his own life. Like literally gets his head chopped off. Like what kind of mood would you be in then?
The disciples are probably scared. They're like, listen, that's what happened to this guy. That might be what happened to us. You see them kind of skin out and go to a place where he might seem safer.
And yet again, while this is happening, the people show up and they have to be on again. You know, imagine if you're in a space where your emotions are running rampant, you just kind of want to get away and the reality of your world continues to confront you. That's what happened to them. They're there to get away to go to a remote place and they get followed and they have to be on.
And Jesus is teaching late in the afternoon. He's doing the Jesus stuff and the disciples are doing the disciples stuff. And then the disciples are interrupting Jesus to remind him of the logistics of the situation. They're at a point to where their trust is meeting its limits.
They don't see a way through this. And they're just saying, Jesus, just send them home. Let them take care of themselves because we can't. We don't have the ability to do this right now.
That makes us think about this. What questions do we ask when we see needs? Some of us might ask, well, who or what or how? What exactly needs to happen in this situation or others of us?
Sometimes we put qualifications on things like, well, if this happens, then I will do this. Or if this happens, I'm absolutely, what do we do when we are at these moments of we're almost running out of trust and we're called into a situation where we need to trust some more. In a lot of ways, the pragmatism of the disciples right here, it's right. It's late in the day and it's spring.
Now, to us, it doesn't matter what's over at all because we just got the Brooks Church market. And there's southern right down there. We can just drive into town. No, it's late in the afternoon and they're in the spring.
You know that line, give us this day, our daily bread. That's a real thing back then. Like you bought your bread in the morning. They made it in the morning.
By the afternoon, they might be run out. It's also in the spring. It's an agricultural economy. The harvest had been months before.
They're at the point to where they're getting into the bottom end of their stores. They're getting ready to plant. Scripture also tells us that there's 5,000, but you're the feeding of the 5,000. Then the source is 5,000 men.
It's not counting for the women and children. So you can imagine how many people that might be. The average village of this area at the time was around 500 people. So imagine it's late in the afternoon.
It's spring. So food's kind of a scarce thing right now. And then all of a sudden 10 times your population shows up at 6 o'clock in the evening trying to find something to eat. It was 125,000 people in watchtower parish.
Mayors and I went to West Monroe last night at Logan's Roadhouse. They were slammed beyond belief and they didn't have a half million extra folks drop into town. You know, the disciples' pragmatism, the questions, the qualifications are putting on this. They're real.
They're legitimate. They're not being scared. They're not being worrisome. These are legitimate things to think about.
But when we go to Jesus with needs, he does this funny thing where he challenges us to do something about it. So what happens across the gospels? Because he knows that so much of the answer of the problem that we have is inside of us already. We talked about that a lot last week, but no matter what we have, Jesus can change the world with what we give him.
It's really though about what are we willing to trust him with? That's the thing Scripture talked about bringing our first fruits, our best, our truest things. The things that we are relying on trusting on ourselves the most. Jesus wants to challenge us by asking us to do something about it.
There's a willingness to our release. This is the thing I've been thinking about so much for the last couple of weeks. There's something about the willingness of our release because it changes us. It changes our relationship to the things that we're letting go of.
It multiplies the things that we are willing to let loose. It changes us because so many times it changes our external circumstances because we're allowing Jesus to have power over something that we have placed our trust in internally. The text we read said Jesus had compassion on them. And it's a really unique application of the idea because it's saying that Jesus is offering up his felt mercy to those in need.
That he sees something as the matter and his heart is burning for it. And so he begins offering his heart and there's this gap that's going on, but we don't have food for dinner. And he's going to take an application of Jesus's spiritual power to fill it. And this is something only Jesus can do, but it's only something he can do with the cooperation of others.
So he asked the disciples to do something. They come to him with the problem. He says, well, what do we have? This disciples end up following him and what one commentator I read this week said with reckless obedience because we've not seen this level of trust in them before.
They do stupid stuff normally. They're not known as the most trusting bunch. So them saying yes to him is it's just this recklessness of we don't think he can do. I don't know what's going to happen.
We're going to trust him to do something. Jesus's call in that moment was greater than their need of comfort. Gordon McDonald says that trust follows on the heels of obedience. And the disciples were exercising reckless obedience in this moment.
We grow our trust by using our trusted script. Also says that people were satisfied. We kind of pull into the languages here. It means that they were gorged on what was before them, not just OK yet scratch the itch, but oh my goodness, I am full.
And this thing about satisfaction right now is one of my current fascinations in scripture and you know, satisfaction is a very important thing to us as a culture right now. We're we're living in a very epicurean age where the most important thing to us is our happiness. Charles Taylor is a religious scholar, a sociologist who writes a lot about the role of secularism today and he talks about how in the last 50 years what we've seen is he calls it expressed individualism. How for hundreds and thousands of years to grow as a person meant to always shift outward to find personal value inside of your own contribution to society.
But in the last 50 years in the West and really in the last 10 years now, like we find satisfaction in our own personal quest. Even Christianity is a pastor in Oregon, John Mark Comer. He calls this Jesus project self. Taylor talks about it in ways we're trying to find our identity by thinking we only find it by focusing on our self and getting expression to our feelings and our desires.
And so therefore anything that challenges how we feel and making us feel good, we instantly become combative against it. It's not like we don't think that it's a good idea, but no, this is evil and this is dangerous and this is bad and I must destroy it. This is because we've all satisfaction in the whole and our communal identity and we've also we can't find satisfaction in our own personal ideas. What we do is we just start protecting this idea.
I just didn't come to a couple of people writing in the last 20 years. We find this in scripture, the book of Job chapter 20 verse 22. It says this because he knew no contentment in his belly. He will not let anything in which delights escape him.
There was nothing left after he had eaten. Therefore his prosperity will not endure in the fullness of his sufficiency. He will be in distress. The hand of everyone in misery will come against him saying.
Are you quested in search and consumed every single thing you had and every single thing you thought would make you happy and it just left you less? You continue to be hungry and you weren't satisfied. Project self only leaves us empty, but in Jesus we find a pathway to satisfaction. Psalm 107 nine says this for he fills the thirsty soul and he fills the hungry with good things.
Jesus himself Matthew chapter 16 says this. If anyone wants to keep his life safe, he will lose it. If anyone gives up his life because of me, he will save it. What does a man have if he gets all the world and loses his own soul?
What can a man give to buy back his soul? You all heard me talk about this for this is the most recurring teaching of Jesus in the gospels is that right there. He talked about that no matter more than anything else. First Timothy Paul says this, but godliness with contentment is great gain for we brought nothing into the world and we cannot take anything out of the world.
What we find this multiplication of generosity by Jesus here in this story is a completely filling and satisfying action. Almost every Sunday only that paray for is help us to see that you can do more with what we have than we can do with what we have. That still means our resources are being used. That means we are doing things with the things we call ours, but what Jesus can do when we bring them to him is significantly stronger than what we can do.
And there's stories after stories of their stories and scripture of people having needs someone inviting them to bring what they do have. And then God multiplying those beyond the point of necessity into a point of almost silliness. What lesson does this teach us about trusting and the abundance that happens when we are generous. That's one of the things our faithfulness unlocks doors for us to continue in faithfulness when we invite Jesus into that space of trusting and not just with financial resources, but anything that we try to find safety and security and satisfaction when we invite Jesus into those spaces, we find growth that's beyond our ability.
And we I think whether Jesus talks about money so much as he realizes that's the thing that we're going to try to use to gain ground that's a thing we're going to try to use to manipulate that's the thing we're going to try to use that is secure. That's the thing that we're going to try to use the most to depend on ourself and not depend on anyone or anything else. So if we look at that and we realize that's what Jesus talks about, why do we not realize it's one of the most important things in our life to experience this kingdom release through. And sometimes this isn't necessarily about having a generosity problem.
What it is is we have an obedience problem. In scripture doesn't tell us to do this out of rule or command. But instead, let's see this as an invitation of asking ourselves, where do I struggle with trust? How do I struggle with trust?
Because this is the thing. If this is affecting us here, trust has probably affected you in other areas of your life. If any of us have been able to experience life with 100 100% trust and 100% satisfaction. I think all of us can tell stories of disappointment and frustration brought on by others in our life brought on by ourselves brought on just by situations.
This is an invitation to learn and to grow and trust the home sheet we put these together every single week. It's centered and it's focused on this. There's on the back table. You can grab one of those.
It's also something that you can go online at my family. Life and find that if we want to know how to trust Jesus, we have to learn how to get him know how to get him to go on how to know him more. And if there's something that we struggle with, we will struggle with that until we learn to be generous because this isn't about generosity. It's not about resources.
It's about trust. And we're always going to be stopping at the place where our obedience runs out. If we follow Jesus and we find these places of stopping, it's because we've reached a place where our own experience and our own trust and our own satisfaction ends because this is where we want to start trusting with ourselves. So you might not have a story of generosity in your life.
No, some people in here have these Matthew 14 moments. We have the five thousand moments and we can talk about those. So some people don't. Somebody say, Chad, this is completely off base for my own personal experience in my life.
Looks like, but Jesus used a disciples lunch to do this. He asked for them to organize it. He asked for them to distribute it. Then after this miracle, he asked them to clean it up.
He wasn't doing this because he wanted to get out doing the dishes, but he wanted them to see what abundance looked like not from the perspective of receiving it, but from the perspective of investing in it. He wanted to see what he was able to do with what they offered him. This is a call to get boots on ground, not hands in pocket. You know, if we were to enhance in pocket mode, we would have done that mission and giving talk after the message today.
This story is a call for us to be boots on ground, though. You know, giving without serving is only halfway there and then serving without giving is equally going to just leave us in places of dissatisfaction. You think about this with this scenario had been as powerful to the disciples if they had just sat back and watched. If you said, I'll handle this.
Don't worry about it. Just go hang out. Get your rest done. Instead, he invited them to be part of this to see this happen.
We grow our trust by using our trust. So just finishing up. We just think back about that active trust. Now, what would it mean for you to realize that you need to expand your trust?
And by realizing you need to expand your trust to just be thinking about what are the actions I need to do in my life to set the stage for Jesus to do amazing things through me, but also for me to see the benefit of life as a co participant in Jesus and what he has going on. Friends, I'm going to tell you there's some financial things that we have going on the journey. We're doing this at the end of the year is we prepare for next year. There's some financial things we have to think about, but they're not they're not deficits.
They're not scary places. What they are is there's an invitation saying, hey, we are growing and we're continuing to grow. And in order for us to just keep up with the keep our bridges to be the right size, we need to make sure that every single thing is growing where the place is where Jesus has already laid out invitations of further trust in front of us. And we've got our lunch.
We've got to decide now what to do with it. But what I'll tell you is that life on the other side of generosity and life on the other side of understanding just the multiplication that he wants to bring the multiplication he wants us to see this good. It's good because it grows our trust. It's good because it helps us break those cycles of pragmatism we might have in life.
Helps us break that individual idea of I can control myself and you can't control me. But it's also good because it reorients for us to see the world is Jesus sees this world and Jesus has compassion upon us. He wants to offer his felt mercy to us. Jesus also has compassion on our community.
He wants to offer that that felt mercy to our community. We're coming. We're bringing needs to Jesus and he's doing the exact same thing. Well, what do we have right now that we can begin with?
Like I said, we've got our lunch. It's just us up to us for us to decide how do we want to let Jesus use that much. Let's pray father. There are things that all of us depend on.
Got their stories of trust that we all have, God of healthy trust. God of broken trust. They're the things that we're proud of that we know we have the ability to do. God, there are things that were also just a shame now that we're frustrated with and have seemed to just stay constricted and small.
And when we talk about this, not out of getting stuff or us giving stuff. But it's just another way that you have a conversation with us by the state of our soul, but the state of how we're willing to let you trust God. It's just when we realize that we're our obedience stops our experience with you, and God's from our prayers just for us to learn to grow and trust God and not in the easy things. It got not necessarily in the financial things, God, but just in the entirety of our life.
Well, where are these places where we don't trust you? Where are these places we don't trust anyone? God, where are the places where we only trust ourselves and we've been running that game for long enough and it hasn't worked that well up until now. Well, we're hot.
We open those doors to you right now. God, handing you those little things that we feel like we have that are not enough. God, let us be people that are like the disciples with reckless obedience. God, allowing you to set the stage for the kingdom to unfold before our eyes.
For us to be satisfied. God, for us to be gorged in fact with your goodness. Well, thank you for trusting us. Thank you for loving us.
God, thank you for coming to us and the entirety of our needs and our spirit and who we are. We're so let us simply respond just to acknowledge your.