The Five Loaves and Two Fish Life
Lisa Cooke

Do you ever feel like the little boy in the midst of the huge crowd from John 6:9, offering Jesus your “five loaves and two fish”? You know in your heart that what you are giving up for the sake of others is not enough in natural measurements of sufficiency. Yet you feel compelled to give what you have, in eager, or possibly nervous anticipation of what Jesus will do with what you hand over to Him.

Most of us are very aware of our shortcomings, our weaknesses, our insufficiencies. The enemy of our souls takes every opportunity to accuse us of our “not-enoughness” while we are endeavoring to fulfill the will of God with our lives. He tries to get us to focus on what we lack as we survey the immediate situation instead of focusing on the miraculous capabilities of God.

There is often the thought that lurks in the back of our minds that our insufficiency will prove to be the determining factor of the outcome. And yet, experience proves that Jesus multiplies our quantities and qualities with His supernatural grace. He meets the need with His own provisions that manifest through our offerings. He has chosen to work through His people, and our cooperation with His methods always proves to be the right choice.

We must give Him whatever we have so that He may take it and make it benefit His purposes.

He asks us to be risk takers. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained” is a common saying. To gain anything we must dare to do something. Another phrase I found came from the back of my breakfast bar wrapper: “Great things never came from comfort zones.” For many of us, it’s not usually comfortable to be a risk taker, yet even natural wisdom knows that it takes some courage, some bravery to achieve any progress. That little boy may have risked being ridiculed by onlookers as he handed over his lunch, but he did it anyway, and we see the results in Scripture, over 5,000 people were fed. (John 6:9-14)

Accounts like this one encourage us to find the inner strength to offer our seemingly inadequate giftings, or provisions, even our very selves to God for Him to multiply as He sees fit to meet the need of the moment. I love it that our God is not in the least put off from using what we hand over to Him, but instead deems the contribution as worthy of His use. The woman giving the widow’s two mites in Luke 21:1-4 gives us another example of one who gives all she has, even if its natural value is not very much. Jesus said she gave “more than all of them.”

We absolutely must see things the way God sees them. To Him, “nothing is too difficult” (Jeremiah 32:17). This is how our faith is strengthened, when we accept God’s judgment of a matter as our own. If He declares our offering as acceptable, we are to assess the same value to it.

And just as God accepts what we offer to Him, we must also accept what others offer to God. We quickly judge not only what we have to give, but we are susceptible to judging what others may be giving to God. The Bible says in Matthew 7:2 (NLT), “For you will be treated as you treat others. The standard you use in judging is the standard by which you will be judged.” If we become harsh judges of others, we ourselves will be judged harshly, often by our own conscience because we’ve developed an attitude of finding fault. That attitude never enhances the work of God in our lives, it only short-circuits what God intended.

Freely and without hesitation we can bring to God all of our possessions, all of our giftings, and all of our lives for Him to do with as He will because we trust that by our participation, He is pleased to bring about His kingdom. Let us be brave enough to believe that He is “able, through His mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think” (Ephesians 3:20, NLT). Our five loaves and two fish lives are His to bless and multiply!