Light on the Hill

James Kaddis: Coming up next on Light on the Hill. Every time we find ourselves in a place where we imagine or we think that we are getting to the point where we are resourceless to do the lofty thing that God has called us to do, do not ask how can I get what I think I need in order to do what I believe God wants me to do.

Ask yourself this question: what do I have presently that God can take and multiply and source in my life? If you spend all your time focusing on what you don't have, you will never be good at bringing what you do have into the place that you have called the impossible. Funny how that works.

Guest (Male): The feeding of the 5000 recorded for us in Mark chapter six is so much more than a miracle. It's a miracle with an important message. Pastor James Kaddis believes it contains something you need to hear about bringing God our loaves and fish and then watching him multiply them. We're going through the book of Mark today. We'll be in chapter six on Light on the Hill.

James Kaddis: There are people in my life that I have come to for advice. I've asked them, "Hey, can you give me your idea on this?" And the ones that give me the type of advice that says, "You know, you're doing great," or "Keep doing what you're doing," when I hear input like that, I just think, okay, there's three things going on.

Number one, they're mediocre, and so they don't know any better than the advice that they're giving me, right? Or number two, they're like, James can do no wrong and he's the greatest thing since sliced bread, and I'm not going to tell him anything other than what he's doing because what he's doing is great in my eyes. Or number three, it's just outright lazy advice. And when I say lazy advice, what I mean when I say that means it's mediocre. It's everyday like this is what you would expect from anybody else.

And so when I hear people who give me advice like that, I oftentimes ignore them because I know I'll never grow from the advice that they're giving me. I'll only become more mediocre, I'll only become more lackadaisical, I'll only just sort of float in what I consider to be the world of mediocrity where no needles are moved. But if I have a person who comes up to me and says, "This is broken, that's broken, you're messed up over here, you've got to change this over here, you're looking at this wrong. This looks crazy. You're never going to do anything with yourself under any circumstances unless you do this, this, and that."

Yeah, but this, this, and that seem impossible. And then they come to me and say, "Yeah, it seems impossible to you because you're not cut out to make it happen unless you make big life changes." Whoa, okay, I'm going to pay attention to that person. Because that person is going to push me to a level that I know God wants me to be inside of, and it's going to teach me how to step in a place that I don't know I could even step into while trusting in a God that I know can take me there.

Look, we don't improve and we don't get better by saying let's do what we need to do to survive. We improve and we do what it takes to get better by shooting for things that are beyond our capacity or ability to be able to control. I'm not even asking you to set some lofty goal that you're never going to be able to make. What I'm asking you to do is I'm asking you to aim to take a journey that is completely outside of your capability to even take.

Because when a person says, "I'm going to make a goal to get to this point," most of the time they're selling themselves short of the place God wants to take them because whatever their goal might be, God wants to take them ten times higher. So I'm not going to sell myself short of God doing what he wants to do in my life by creating a goal that's far below whatever lofty thing God has for me. I'm just going to ignore that.

But the one thing that I know that I can do is I can commit myself to a process that seems difficult, that seems hard, that seems overwhelming, that seems like it's something that I cannot accomplish. But I'm going to give myself to that and watch God do what God wants to do. That's what happens when you become better. That's what happens.

You know, it's funny, I know lots of people in my life that have insanely incredible accomplishments. They've done some amazing things. I have a friend, dear friend, he's a sweet man. F-15, F-18 pilot at the top of his game by the time that he retired from the Air Force. As a matter of fact, he retired as a safety officer and much of what he did saved the lives of a lot of people. If he had stopped at the place that he had stopped when he had retired, he would have never moved the needle like he's moving it today.

Now, because he chose to step out in faith and do something far different than any other pilot that may have retired would do, he's making a bigger difference and doing greater things than any of the hundreds of missions that he flew as a combat pilot. He's changing people's lives in ways nobody ever thought possible, including himself. He's making a difference in people's lives. I think every single one of you are in that place in your life right now where God would say don't stick to that which is typical. Let's go out and feed them.

You get the parallel? You get the association? Well, they're not going to be able to eat. Okay, let's feed them then. That's an impossible notion. That's just absolutely nuts. So look what they say, and it's a fair response to Jesus. I do detect a little bit of sarcasm by the way in their response. Within my own mind, I see it as sarcastic. I don't see any grammatical indication that this is happening. You could probably read it either way, but I suspect that there'd be a little bit of sarcasm in this, especially understanding our culture, Middle Eastern world, the way we talk to people. Guaranteed there's some sarcasm in this response.

But look at what they say to Jesus. And they say unto him, "Shall we go and buy two hundred pennyworth of bread and give them to eat?" In other words, what are we going to do? Are we just going to go buy some nominal amount and just feed them? How's that going to work? Show me where that's going to change anything. Look at Jesus's response. Jesus doesn't rebuke them. Jesus doesn't beat them up in a way. I mean, yes, there's a little bit of rebuke in what he's saying and what he's doing here, but he just gets right to it.

He puts his hand to the plow. Look what he says in verse thirty-eight. And he says unto them, "How many loaves have you? Go and see." Well, that's kind of an absurd question to ask in the minds of these disciples. What are you going to do? Buy it all? I'm not interested in us going and buying anything. Do me a favor, just tell me what you have. Just tell me what you got.

I'm in this bin, this phase for a few years now where I'm evaluating things that are in front of me and I'm seeing the things that I believe God wants me to do and I'm recognizing the impossibility behind the notion of the path that God wants me to take. And I find myself on a regular basis saying, "I can't. I don't. I don't have. This is impossible. No, no, no, no." And God is reminding me to do this again and again and again. He's reminding me to say this again and again and again: what do you have? Show me what you do have. Don't tell me what you don't have, show me what you do have.

Look, I'm telling you guys this, success as the world defines it is nothing compared to success as God defines it. Success as the world defines it is a micro part of a journey that involves success as God defines it. God teaches us these principles very early on in the scriptures. We learn of these stories, guys, from the very beginning. You know, this principle that Jesus is bringing to them right now is a principle that we already learned if you read as early on as the book of Genesis. Let's go back and do a little bit of history, shall we? Just so we can get a little bit of understanding under our belts.

In Genesis, we read about God calling Abraham. In the process of calling Abraham, he tells Abraham, "Look, you are going to have a son and from your son there will be descendants like you can't even believe. They're going to populate the whole earth and the whole world is going to be blessed by those descendants." Genesis chapter twelve gives him that promise. So, of course, Abraham's wife thinks it's hilarious. He says, "No way, I'm too old. There's no way I can have a child." She learns her lesson later on that God and his promises are real.

But at one point in her lack of faith, she says, "Well, I believe what God is promising us, but I'm probably not the person to give us the promised son. So Abraham, meet my Egyptian handmaid, her name is Hagar. Why don't you go make a baby together and then that'll be our promised baby?" It's kind of paraphrasing a little bit. Abraham looks at her and says, "Okay, well, you know, I guess I can do that. I'll take one for the team, why not? Let's go." So he does that. He has Ishmael.

Now, keep this in mind. Ishmael raises up a little bit, he gets a little older. At the time, then, Sarah is with child. She has the child, his name is Isaac. Now, what's interesting is tension begins to ensue between Sarah and Hagar and probably a little bit between Isaac and Ishmael and all the people that surround them. So Abraham says, "Uh-uh, Sarah, no way. Ishmael is my son. Hagar is his mother. We're going to make this work." Things get difficult. Hagar has an immensely difficult time with Sarah because Sarah's not treating her the best. It's not a good situation.

Abraham is pretty stuck on his position and God tells Abraham, "Do what your wife wants. Do what Sarah says." So, sure enough, Hagar and Ishmael leave. Now, it's funny because God gives a promise and that promise is clearly known that God would bless Ishmael and that he would also have descendants and that all would go well. This is where the Arab world comes from, by the way. Egyptians also come from Ishmael because if you remember Ishmael's mom was an Egyptian woman. So a little bit of a different story there. I always feel like I have to say that, I don't know why.

But you have a situation that ensues where they leave. They're in the desert. As they're in the desert, Hagar is fearful and feels like in her mind, while ignoring the promises of God, her son is going to die. She can't take it. She separates herself from her son. Her son is sitting a ways away and she sits in the desert crying. And she's confronted by an angel and is asked, "Why are you crying?" Well, come on, the answer to that is pretty obvious. The promise of God's blessing upon her and her son is reiterated. And when all of that gets reiterated, then the angel in essence tells Hagar, "Now go get a drink of water."

Now, mind you, her original fear was that they were going to die of thirst and hunger because there was no water or food. She's sobbing and weeping and sobbing and weeping, and God basically says, "Go, in essence, and get some water." She looks up and there's a water source right in front of her. Now, the Bible doesn't tell us that the water source magically appeared. As a matter of fact, I think the Bible made it very obvious that that was not the case. The lesson that we learn was that Hagar was so busy focusing on what she did not have that she was completely oblivious to what she did have.

She didn't realize it. I think that's what happens. I think for us, we look at the things that we think we need to have and we are distracted by that fact when we forget about the fact that we have the creator of the universe with us. And then the creator of the universe will tell us to do something that feels impossible to us because we are resourceless in the overall picture of what we think we need to have in order to do what we think we're called to do. And we tell God it's impossible, there's no way, how in the world do you expect this to happen? And God says, "What do you have? Tell me what you have. Let's stop and look at it. Let's take inventory."

Okay, here's the thing that we learn from this, and this lesson becomes even more profound in just a minute. Every time we find ourselves in a place where we imagine or we think that we are getting to the point where we are resourceless to do the lofty thing that God has called us to do, ask yourself this question. Do not ask this: do not ask, "How can I get what I think I need in order to do what I believe God wants me to do?"

Ask yourself this question: "What do I have presently that God can take and multiply and source in my life?" If you spend all your time focusing on what you don't have, you will never be good at bringing what you do have into the place that you have called the impossible. Funny how that works. It's in our human nature to focus on what we don't have. When God says, "Take what you do have, use it to the fullest and trust me to multiply it." It's a basic principle, folks, it really is.

I think it's amazing to me how we oftentimes drive ourselves into the slave mindset, the poverty mindset, the broke mindset, the stuck mindset by focusing on all the things that we do not have while blinding ourselves to all the things that God has given us to use for the purpose of the journey that he wants to take us on. Isn't that a pretty heavy thing?

Now, here's where it gets really cool. They go to them and they say, "We have five loaves, in essence, and two fishes." Think about that for a second. It's a few pieces of bread and a few fish. That was enough to feed one person, maybe a couple of kids. It was not a lot of food. It was a small amount of food. But look what it says, look what Jesus says. And he commanded them to make all sit down by companies upon the green grass. And they sat down in ranks by hundreds and fifties.

And when he had taken the five loaves and the two fishes, he looked up to heaven and blessed and brake the loaves and gave them to his disciples to set before them and the two fishes divided he among them all. And they did all eat and were filled. And they took up the twelve baskets full of the fragments and of the fishes. And they that did eat of the loaves were about five thousand men.

If you've got five thousand men in that crowd, at the bare minimum, you're probably talking about a population of twenty-five thousand people. Think about that for just one second. Okay, here's the lesson, and it's a profound one, it's an important one. Many of us today, in the midst of all the things that I talked about earlier, the craziness that's going on in people's lives, the insanity that people are facing, the struggles that people have, the tariffs and the non-tariffs and the taxes and the non-taxes and the food supply and the cost of eggs and all that nonsense that people are facing right now, there's this overwhelming sense of loss that exists in people's hearts as they continue to drag themselves into the world of focusing on what they don't have.

And God is saying, "You as my children have the greatest tool you will ever need to do anything and that is me." So I want you to take inventory of the resources that are in your possession right now and I want you to lift them up to me, to pray, seek me and strategically pursue how I can take what you have, meeting you even a small portion of the way and multiplying it to do the impossible.

So here's the question that I would ask all of you. We represent within this room and with the listening audience on the radio and the people watching online, thousands and thousands and thousands of different stories that represent different needs in different circumstances in different situations. Many of those cases feel and seem as though they're desperate. Many of those situations have a sense of despair tied to them.

And I would tell you that in that circumstance, if you're willing to go to the Lord and to let him reason with you through your process, if you are willing to be honest with the inventory of what you have and give it to him in the moment that he asks for it, you will take all that God has intended for you and put it into its full cycle. The goal or the understanding of how that works is fundamentally predicated upon your willingness to say, "God, I'm going to dialogue with you about it and then I'm going to act based on your word."

Look, the disciples even in their sarcasm went to the Lord and they said, "This is impossible, what do you expect me to do? You're expecting me to go out and buy all this stuff?" And it was said in what I would believe to be a relatively sarcastic way. And Jesus said, "What do you have?" And they honestly answered him, then he instructed them to do what what they had and they were blessed in doing it. But did you notice that Jesus had to take what they had out of their hands and pray over it and bless it and then give it back to them so that they may distribute it as such?

This is the pattern. You ready? If you don't listen to anything in the study, listen to this because this is the pattern. Take whatever difficulty you have in front of you right now and if you're going to do it the biblical way, you go before the Lord and you become very honest about it. "This is the bill I'm facing, God. This is the issue I'm dealing with. This is the problem. This is what's going on." And wait for God to speak to you because he will. He'll give you instruction, he'll give you wisdom.

And in that process, give him everything. Don't hold anything back. Surrender all that you have to the Lord. Say, "God, it's all yours. I no longer want to hold possession of it. I don't want to hold on to something that I know I can't do anything with in the first place." And then let God take it, bless it, give it back to you and give you instruction to change the world. It is within God's capacity, not yours, it's within God's capacity to take your life and transform it in a way that you never thought possible.

And it's within God's capacity to take your transformed life and use it to move the needle in a world that desperately needs it moved. But it starts with you being open, honest and willing before the Lord. And if you're willing to go down that path, not worry about where you end up, but simply worry about walking with God in the journey, knowing that you already have salvation, right? I can make you this promise: you're going to see God do some pretty extraordinary things.

You'll see God do some pretty remarkable things. You know, I look back at the things that I always hoped God would give me at a young age that I never quite got. And now at an older age, God's given me way more than I ever thought I could ever get. I mean way more like beyond what I've ever dreamed of ever wanting or having. I look at it now at the age that I'm in today and in the moment that I'm in today and I could say, "God, thank you so much that you did it the way you did it. Because had you given it to me at the moment that I thought I wanted it, I probably wouldn't even be alive right now because I was not conditioned to be able to understand what it means to meet you with the loaves and with the fishes."

And I don't know about you, but I think there's something to be said about the person who recognizes their inadequacy and uses that recognition as an opportunity to let God do something substantial. And the question that I would ask you today is, are you willing to bring God the loaves and the fishes? I can tell you that right now. Or if you don't like fish, the burgers and the fries, whatever. I don't like fish, but you get the idea. Guys, if you're willing to think on that level, I think God will completely change the way you live. It won't even, look guys, it's not even the same world. You'll be living in a completely different realm. And I would encourage you to start thinking in that direction. Amen?

Guest (Male): This is Light on the Hill with Pastor James Kaddis, and we're currently going through the Gospel of Mark. Listen to this study and more at lightonthehillradio.com. Pastor James's teachings are also available through the Light on the Hill app and at oneplace.com. You can listen to us wherever you get your podcasts as well. When you have a moment sometime today, send us an email. We'd love it. It's encouraging to hear what the Lord is doing in our listeners' lives, and it's an opportunity to thank the Lord for what he's doing. There's a place to contact us at our website, lightonthehillradio.com.

We've been blessed by the feedback we've received thus far regarding Pastor James's new book, *The Last Book*. If you haven't ordered a copy yet, we'd encourage you to do so. This guide to Revelation covers the first half of the book, giving you what you need to know about the rapture and the end times in a clear and concise manner. Request your copy today at lightonthehillradio.com or through Amazon. If God is leading you to support this radio outreach, there's also a place to make a donation at lightonthehillradio.com.

Throughout the week, you can watch our live shows and short videos, many of which relate to Bible prophecy and help you to see current events with a biblical worldview. Look for these at jameskaddis.com. Now, let's finish our time in prayer.

James Kaddis: Father, we thank you, Lord, for your word. And again, Lord, the opportunity that it always brings to transform our lives, Lord, and to bring insight, direction and wisdom, Lord, understanding, discernment. Father, thank you for all you've given us, Lord, and all that you continue to show us, Lord.

I pray, God, that you would fill us with your Spirit, Lord. Give us your awareness, your discernment, your understanding that we might be able to live, Lord, for you in the way, Lord, that you've called us to, Lord, serving you and seeking you, Lord. So Father, we love you. We pray that you'd go before us now. Fill us with your Spirit, Lord. We look to you. We thank you for all that you've done. We ask these things in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

Guest (Male): More from the book of Mark coming up next time on Light on the Hill with Pastor James Kaddis. This listener-supported program is brought to you by Calvary Chapel Signal Hill.