Jane Evans - You Just Don’t Get It
The second session on Thursday was really really good and it was a shame that more people weren’t there to hear it. I think that it was something to do with a prophet being without honour in their own country.
Jane Evans was talking about the disciples missing the point during the feeding of the 5000 from Mark 6. The disciples had just been sent out by Jesus and seen many miraculous things happen (the sick healed, demons driven out) and yet when the feeding of the 5000 happened they missed the point of what Jesus was doing and the miracle he had done. This goes to show that you can be involved in the miraculous and still get a calloused and insensitive heart.
Jesus gave them 3 instructions when they went out to help their hearts stay soft:
- Take Nothing With You: Rely only on God
- Stay in Only One House: Don’t get caught up in people’s politics and stay focussed.
- Shake the Dust Off Your Feet: Get rid of bad experiences as they happen.
Then they get back and Jesus ignores their needs, teaches all day and then asks them to feed 5000 people. The first question he asks them is how much food do they have? These are the resources that God has given us to accomplish the task that is at hand. What they didn’t realise is that everything that they needed to do the miracle was already there - God had already been doing the miraculous through them. All that the disciples were doing was handing out food, did they even appreciate what was happening?
God does supernatural stuff in our lives every day and we need learn to understand and appreciate what God is doing in order to keep our hearts soft.
2 chapters later Jesus did the miracle again and they still didn’t get it - more proof that they missed it the first time. This was an exact repeat so you think that the disciples would have figured out what was going on but they didn’t. We need to remember the great things that God has done in the past. Then Jesus does Q and A with the disciples to try and drive home the point, going over the deatils trying to make the point and get them to see what happened (and they think that he is chastising them for forgetting the bread, the disciples crack me up sometimes). Jesus needed the disciples to know that they had received power and authority to be able to deal with the situation.
Pastor Jane made 3 final points:
- Jesus always leaves enough to give us what he promised
- Jesus also meets our needs although not necessarily in the way we would expect
- Jesus cares about us, he wants us to get that and remember that fact.
