@RED_IN_PA Regarding this. 1 Timothy 5:8
But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
@BlondBomber1979@AboutPediatrics@CommissionerJP Back in the day our parents sent us to a home where a child has measles so we would come down with it. No vaccine then and I don’t recall “thousands of deaths” over this either.
@RED_IN_PA I have spent many days with my baby bro in a setting such as this and we find the Lord in these settings. No distractions; just His presence in His creation. Be blessed today bro; prayers up for strength today ❤️🙏
@DanielvsBabylon He is healing him. His anger has drastically improved; his sleep is regular now with way fewer nightmares. We see the Holy Spirit working in him. He has become kinder and gentler and his language has improved dramatically. Praise God.
@DanielvsBabylon 🎯 This describes my wife and I. At 66 we turned our life over to the Lord and now are guardians of our grandson that needs Jesus to heal him from 15 years of misery. Praise Him for He is so so good.
Jesus performed roughly three dozen recorded miracles. Only one of them appears in all four Gospels. Not the raising of Lazarus. Not walking on water. Not even the healing of the blind. The one miracle that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all insisted on telling is the feeding of the five thousand. When four independent accounts of Jesus' life, written for different audiences with different emphases, all refuse to leave out the same event, it is worth asking why.
Start with the setting. Jesus has just received devastating news: John the Baptist, His cousin and forerunner, has been beheaded by Herod. He withdraws by boat to a remote place, seeking solitude to grieve. But the crowds see where He is going and run ahead on foot around the shore of the Sea of Galilee. When Jesus lands, expecting emptiness, He finds thousands waiting. And the Gospel says He looked at them and was moved with compassion, for they were like sheep without a shepherd. He does not send them away. He heals their sick and teaches them until the day is nearly gone.
Then the practical crisis arrives. The disciples come to Him with the obvious solution: send the people away to buy food in the villages. It is late, the place is remote, and the crowd is enormous. Matthew records five thousand men, besides women and children, meaning the real number may have been ten to fifteen thousand people. Jesus' answer is one of the most quietly staggering sentences in the Gospels: "They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat."
John's account adds a detail the others leave out. Jesus turns to Philip and asks where bread could be bought for so many, and John notes that He said this to test him, for He Himself knew what He would do. Philip does the math and despairs: two hundred denarii, roughly eight months of a laborer's wages, would not buy even a mouthful for each person. The need is beyond any reasonable resource. That is precisely the point of the test, and Philip, like most of us, sees only the arithmetic.
Then Andrew brings forward the most unimpressive offering in Scripture: a boy with five barley loaves and two small fish. Barley was the grain of the poor, the cheap bread, and the fish were likely small dried or pickled fish, a peasant's lunch. Andrew himself seems embarrassed by it: "but what are they for so many?" Everything about the offering is insufficient. A child. Poor man's bread. A portion for one. Set against fifteen thousand hungry people, it is almost a joke.
And this is what Jesus takes. He does not conjure food from nothing, though He could have. He takes what is offered, blesses it, breaks it, and begins to give. The verbs matter: He took, He blessed, He broke, He gave. These are the exact four verbs the Gospels will use again at the Last Supper, when He takes bread, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it, saying, "This is my body." The feeding on the hillside is a deliberate foreshadowing of the cross, written in the grammar of the text itself.
The people eat. All of them. The Gospels say they were satisfied, the Greek word implying they were filled completely, not given a polite taste. And then comes the detail all four writers preserve: twelve baskets of broken pieces left over. Twelve, one for each tribe of Israel, one for each disciple who had doubted. The God who fed Israel with manna in the wilderness is feeding a new multitude in a desolate place, and the abundance is so great that the leftovers exceed the original supply many times over. With Jesus, the surplus after the miracle is greater than the total before it.
The crowd understands exactly what they have witnessed. John records that the people begin saying, "This is indeed the Prophet who is to come into the world," a reference to Moses' promise in Deuteronomy that God would raise up a prophet like him. Moses gave manna in the wilderness; here is One doing the same. They are so certain that they move to take Him by force and make Him king. And Jesus, refusing the crown offered on their terms, withdraws alone to the mountain. He will be made King, but by way of a cross, not a coronation.
The story has a sobering final act that most retellings skip. The next day, in the synagogue at Capernaum, Jesus confronts the same crowd that chased Him around the lake: "You are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves." Then He preaches the sermon the miracle was pointing to all along: "I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger." The teaching is so hard, so demanding, that John records the outcome bluntly: from that time many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. The crowd that wanted a bread king by the thousands dwindled to twelve men, and Jesus asks even them, "Do you want to go away as well?" Peter's answer still stands as the confession of every believer since: "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life."
To the world, this is a charming story about sharing, and some modern skeptics have even tried to reduce it to exactly that, a crowd inspired to open their picnic baskets. But that is not what any of the four accounts describe, and it is not why thousands tried to seize Him and crown Him by force. Something happened on that hillside that fifteen thousand eyewitnesses could not explain away. Bread multiplied in His hands.
Here is what it means for you. The need in front of you may be beyond any reasonable resource. The math may be hopeless, as it was for Philip. And what you have to offer may look like five barley loaves, small, poor, laughably insufficient. Bring it anyway. The miracle never depended on the size of the offering, only on the hands it was placed into. He took the lunch of a child and fed a city with it, and there were twelve baskets left over.
He is not a Savior of scarcity. He fills until they are satisfied, and then keeps going.
Jesus is the Bread of Life, broken so that you would never go hungry. Thank You, Jesus.
@SignalQverNoise 🎯 Well done 🫡 We add in devotional, scripture reading, breakfast then small group 6 days a week. Sets the tone for the entire day when you enjoy His presence before dealing with our broken world.