Where Does Your Hunger Take You? Today's Three-minute Bible Study Print, Study and Apply Title: Where Does Your Hunger Take You?------------------- Date: 4/13/2003 Keywords: “bread” “feed” “fish” “hungry” “multitude” Welcome to eXXit, the web site designed to help you stand strong in the face of sexual temptation. Passage: Mark 8:1-10* 1. In those days, the multitude being very great and having nothing to eat, Jesus called His disciples to Him and said to them, 2. “I have compassion on the multitude, because they have now continued with Me three days and have nothing to eat. 3. And if I send them away hungry to their own houses, they will faint on the way; for some of them have come from afar.” 4. Then His disciples answered Him, “How can one satisfy these people with bread here in the wilderness?” 5. He asked them, “How many loaves do you have?” And they said, “Seven.” 6. So He commanded the multitude to sit down on the ground. And He took the seven loaves and gave thanks, broke them and gave them to His disciples to set before them; and they set them before the multitude. 7. They also had a few small fish; and having blessed them, He said to set them also before them. 8. So they ate and were filled, and they took up seven large baskets of leftover fragments. 9. Now those who had eaten were about four thousand. And He sent them away, 10. immediately got into the boat with His disciples, and came to the region of Dalmanutha. Questions 1. Look up Mark 6:30-44, and compare it to this passage.   2. Put yourself in the shoes of a person who has not eaten in three days. How would that person's perspective deepen the significance of this miracle?   Practical help We live between truth and lies, reality and mirage. And the problem is sometimes we can’t tell the difference. Our feelings don’t help us differentiate facts from spin. In fact our feelings can make the foolish seem logical and right seem wrong. Feeding 4,000 people from a few fish parts and some bread would seem more miraculous if Jesus had not already fed 5,000 a short time earlier. Matthew and Mark each report both events, so this is not a case of the writers having a “senior moment” and forgetting their place in the story. What can we learn from this second feeding of the multitude that can help us with our struggles in life, including pornography? 1. It is not possible to be too in love with God once you understand who Jesus really is and what he has done for you. You can miss a few meals in your pursuit of being close to God, just as this crowd of people did, and he will not condemn you. The truth is just the opposite in fact. He will feed you — over and over. In fact it reminds me of the Beatitude that says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled” (Matthew 5:6). If you don’t think it is worth it to pursue God, then you haven’t yet pursued him as a starving man would seek food. 2. If you are forgetful, and you treat God with an unbelieving heart, he will not dump you. How do we know this? The disciples, who had witnessed Jesus feed a thousand more people than were sitting before them this time, seemed to have no clue that Jesus might feed them again. It is interesting to speculate why. I think we all believe that God is fickle. He won’t do the same thing twice, perhaps because we overlay our own impatient attitudes on him. I imagine myself in Jesus’ sandals becoming exasperated with these people who just don’t get it. “Look disciples,” I'd sternly admonish with god-like authority, “I already fed you once, now get with the program, I have better things to do with my time.” The reality is, he does the same things for us millions of times, without much appreciation from us, and never complains. When was the last day in your life when the sun didn’t show up at dawn? Now you come up with a list of a hundred more routine events of your day that God has provided on your behalf. We complain when there is a draught as if the rains will never ever come again. And we use the difficult moments of our lives (like our entanglement with pornography) as excuses to turn from the only truly reliable person we know, a God who loves us and provides our deepest needs everyday. eXXit homepage Index of three-minute studies Copyright 2003 by eXXit *Scripture taken from the New King James Version (NKJV), © Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. ---