This week’s message, “From Scarcity to Abundance,” explores Matthew 14:13–21 and reminds us that Jesus meets us in our moments of insufficiency. Through the miracle of feeding the five thousand, we discover that God is not limited by our resources. When we place what little we have into Christ’s hands, He delights in multiplying it for His glory and the good of others.
Whether you’re watching from home or on the go, we’re glad you’re here.
Key Takeaways
- God specializes in abundance.
- Faith begins with surrender.
- Jesus multiplies surrendered resources.
- Prayer is bringing people to Christ.
- God often works through ordinary people with ordinary gifts.
Reflection Questions
- What feels insufficient in your life?
- How have you seen God provide before?
- What keeps you from trusting Him now?
- Who can you bring before Jesus in prayer?
- Where is God calling you to take one faithful step?
PRAYER
Lord Jesus, I confess that I often focus on what I lack instead of who You are. Take whatever I have—my gifts, my weaknesses, my fears, and my hopes—and use them for Your kingdom. Help me trust that You are a God of abundance. Give me courage to bring others to You and faith to believe You can do more than I imagine. Amen.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
From Scarcity to Abundance
Matthew 14:13–21
This miracle may be, literally, the most important in the Bible beyond the resurrection — and that’s a bold claim to make, but here’s the reason I say it. When God was inspiring people to write down the events of Jesus’ life, when God was inspiring the retention of the most important stories about him, this is the one miracle, beyond the resurrection, that every single Gospel author wrote down. It’s the only miracle other than the resurrection that all four Gospels retained. To me, that says it’s important. God didn’t want it left out of any one of the recorded Gospels, and each Gospel brings its own richness to the details.
The version we’re looking at today, in Matthew, matters not just because it shows up in every Gospel, but because, at the end of the day, I don’t think this story is really about feeding people. That’s what it is on the surface. But as we go through it, I think we’ll discover it’s really about the identity of who Jesus is. It isn’t so much that he pulled off an amazing thing — it’s that the way it’s told, and what’s done, points to a deep truth about Jesus that God wanted retained in the Gospels. It’s more than the surface of the miracle. It’s not just about fish.
So what is it about? Let’s dive in.
They’re out in a desolate place, and I don’t think that’s happenstance. It’s intentional — Jesus was trying to get away from everyone. He was worn out. You can’t blame him. He said, essentially, “I’m going to go get away,” and he went somewhere to be alone and recharge. He’d probably gotten what I call “peopled out.” I’m a pastor, and I’ll be honest, I get peopled out sometimes. By the end of a Sunday, I go home and I’m just done, because I’m peopled out. I’m sure it happens to everybody at some point, and Jesus was probably peopled out too.
So he goes to a desolate place, and I think that’s an important detail, because so many important stories in the Bible happen in a desolate place. The Exodus takes place in a desolate place. Jesus’ temptation takes place in a desolate place. It’s in the wilderness that people often come to their most profound experiences of God. There’s an old saying that everybody in a foxhole has faith, because a foxhole is a desolate place to be. When we’re down and out, that’s when and where we find God. It’s easy to forget about God when things are good. So he’s in a desolate place — a rich place for encounters and miracles, as we see again and again in Scripture.
As the story goes, the disciples were peopled out too. They were ready to send everybody home: “All right, people, that’s enough. Jesus has left the building. Y’all go home.” And Jesus is having none of it. It’s a practical suggestion — they’ve done the math, looked around, and concluded the crowd needs to go. Jesus’ response is essentially, “They’re not going anywhere. You feed them.” Can you imagine being one of those disciples, looking at that crowd, and having Jesus say, “You feed them. You do it. Go for it”?
I fully expect Jesus knew exactly what was going to happen. He wasn’t clueless — there was no way they could do this on their own. This was a teaching moment. In fact, in one of the other Gospels, we’re told that Jesus went and sat down before this happened, and that detail matters, because that’s what rabbis did. That’s how they taught. Rabbis didn’t stand at a pulpit or lectern; they would walk, their disciples would follow, and when the rabbi was ready to teach, he would sit down, and his disciples would gather around him. So the detail that he was seated isn’t insignificant — this is a teaching moment as much as a miracle.
We know it’s about more than the miracle itself because, in another Gospel, Jesus goes back to this moment later. After the miracle, when the disciples are complaining about lacking food again, Jesus essentially says, “You didn’t get it, did you?” He calls them stubborn — they didn’t understand that the miracle was about God’s ability to provide, not just about the bread. It was about the power, the authority, and the identity of Jesus. It was more than the miracle.
So they’re in this desert place, lacking what they need, and Jesus calls them to bring him the food. One of the most striking elements of this story to me is how simply he says it: “Bring it to me. Bring what you have to me.” He doesn’t form a committee. He doesn’t call for a study. He doesn’t launch a program looking for a silver bullet. He simply says, “Come to me with what you have” — and sometimes what we have can feel like nothing. Life can hit us hard enough that it feels like we have nothing. I doubt that’s ever really true. I think we always have a little something, and we need to look for and identify that little something.
I’m sure the disciples’ first response wasn’t “we’ve got this.” Probably eleven of the twelve — aside from the one who spoke up — were thinking, “We don’t have anything. We don’t have any food.” Somebody scrounged around and found what was there. And it’s worth pointing out that what they found wasn’t just small in quantity — it was modest in quality too. Specific words are used for the bread and fish in the Gospels, and they’re not generic. When I hear “fish,” I picture a salmon filet out of my air fryer. But the word used here refers to dried, salted fish — the kind you preserved to carry with you into the field or on the road. It was almost like jerky: cheap, common, more of a condiment than a meal, something you’d slap onto a piece of bread. And that bread wasn’t just bread — one Gospel tells us it was barley bread, the cheapest bread there was, about half the cost of wheat bread.
That detail tells us something about this crowd — these were likely common, even poor, people, bringing very modest resources into the hands of Jesus. Not just limited in quantity, but modest in quality. And still, Jesus says, “Bring it to me.”
This story looks both backward and forward, which is part of why I think it’s such an important miracle. It echoes the story of Elisha in the Old Testament, where he’s asked to feed a hundred people with twenty loaves. A servant brings him the bread, and Elisha says, “Give it to the people, feed them.” The servant protests that it isn’t enough, and Elisha insists — the Lord has said they will eat, and there will be plenty. So they start distributing it, and everyone is fed, with leftovers besides. The parallels are striking, and I think people hearing this story about Jesus would have recognized it — “That’s like Elisha” — but on a far greater scale. A hundred people with twenty loaves, split evenly, gets you a decent chunk each. But two fish and five loaves among five thousand — really closer to ten thousand with women and children — that’s nothing. At best, a pinch. Matthew is showing us that where Elisha’s miracle was remarkable, Jesus’ is far greater still.
It also hearkens back to Moses — the wilderness, the people grumbling because there wasn’t enough, called to trust God, and God providing manna and quail, with baskets left over that they couldn’t hoard because it would spoil, so they had to trust him again the next day. God always showed up in that desolate place. Early listeners of this story could hardly have missed it: this is a greater Moses, a greater Elisha.
But there’s also something in the language here that we recognize from another table. When the disciples hand Jesus their resources, he blesses it, breaks it, and distributes it, and all are fed. This story doesn’t just point to a greater Moses or a greater Elisha — it prefigures Jesus as the bread of life himself, looking up to God, blessing what’s given to him, and feeding those who receive it.
That’s what struck me most this time through the story — I couldn’t help but think of us as loaves of bread and fish. There’s a hungry world out there, and it’s easy for a church our size to say, “All we’ve got is fifty-five or sixty people on a Sunday morning. All we’ve got is…” and start filling in the blanks. But Jesus looks at us and says, “Come to me.” He looks to the Father and intercedes for us. He takes us into his hands, and if we could watch him do it, he’d look at us, almost with a wink, and say, “Now watch what happens. Watch what comes from what you think is only a little — because I am not a God of scarcity, but of abundance.”
And when he blesses us, in a good way, he also breaks us. He intervenes and breaks the bonds of sin in our lives. He breaks our stubbornness. That day on the hillside in Galilee, the disciples’ stubbornness got broken. Their unbelief got broken. But God didn’t leave a void where he broke it — he filled it with something better. So God blesses us, breaks what needs breaking, and then sends us out.
At first, I thought that meant “go and feed my sheep” — and there’s truth in that; each of us, having received God’s love, is called to go and love others. But honestly, that can feel intimidating. It’s actually simpler than that. He doesn’t ask us to go fix people. We’re not called to be Jesus, to heal people, or to feed them for eternity the way he does. All he asks, once he’s blessed us and broken what needs breaking, is that we bring people to him. Because he’s the only one who can bless. He’s the only one who can multiply. Bring them to me — it’s that simple, and sometimes that hard.
It isn’t always easy to bring someone into the presence of God, but we can do it at any moment, in prayer. If there’s someone in your life facing a place of scarcity, and you don’t have what it takes to help, start with prayer. Bring that person to God in prayer, trust him, and then step back and watch what he does. He will work a wonder.
I’ll close with this. I couldn’t help but think of a story about Mother Teresa — a real loaves-and-fishes moment. When the vision for the Sisters of Charity was laid on her heart, she was looking at masses of poverty in India that seemed bottomless, resources that seemed hopelessly inadequate. She went to someone seeking permission and said, “I have three cents and God, and this is what I want to do.” They told her, “You cannot do anything with three cents.” Her response: “I didn’t say I only have three cents. I have three cents and God.” That changes the math fast, doesn’t it?
Let us have trusting hearts. I invite you to examine your own heart and ask what feels, right now, like a place where you’re thinking, “I only have this.” What’s the “I only” in your life right now? Whatever it is, no matter how meager it seems, my invitation this morning is to say, “Here you go,” and place it in the hands of Jesus. And then watch what God does — and be grateful. We have a God of abundance.
Amen.