This is one of those scriptures that convicted me as soon as I read it. I read it when I was with the youth last week and immediately thought of the young people that we are working with. We are constantly dealing with a certain group of youth that come to Citychurch who are not interested in the spiritual aspect of God, but only what we can do for them as an agency. As usual it is easer to pin a convicting verse on someone other than myself. After reading this verse several more times I realized that it had tremendous application in the the way I, like many Christians, treat the works of God in my day to day life.
In this verse we find a group of followers tracking down Jesus the day after He had fed the multitude. Jesus pointed out that they were not seeking Him for spiritual reasons but the physical hunger that He had relieved the day before had returned. When I read this part of the verse I can hear Jesus' frustration. Just one day earlier he had taken a very small amount of food and miraculously provided a meal for the large crowd. He was also preforming, miracle after miracle, and all that this group was focused on was the food that He had provided the day before. I feel like Jesus is saying to us “look you just don't get it.” Each day we see Gods direction; we see His provision. Each day he shows me something miraculous and I choose to stop at the the physical aspect of the act. As Christians He has given us The Gospel Of Jesus Christ and pointed to it in Romans as “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.” But as soon as we accept that gift we as Christians tend to shelve what The Gospel can do for us beyond our initial salvation and start looking deeper into scripture for something with “more meat.”
At Citychurch we see God's provision for our daily physical welfare. We can easily make lists of these acts and focus on the physical aspect of the miracle, looking again the next day for His provisions. We can see His Gospel work in the life of a child or young person and focus only on the changes in his or her lifestyle. But when I read the end of this verse I realize that focusing on those things causes our vision, of the work that Jesus is doing, to be blurred.
The physical act, that might or might not take place, is a side effect of what we should seek to know about God. Instead of trying to figure out how to manifest more provision we should seek out the Provider. We should not marvel at what we can hold in our hands, but in the fact that we can know the ONE who it all belongs to. Like those who finally received the message that day, I say "Sir, give us this bread always."
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