Telling the Truth for Women

Jill Briscoe: As we begin to look at the snapshots that John laid out to put into his Gospel album, the snapshots of Jesus, we're going to look at another snapshot from the Gospel of John today. We looked at the first one and saw that he is a life-changer. That was a snapshot that John put in the first chapter as Jesus welcomed Peter to be his follower. He said, "You are Simon, you will be Peter," a life-changer. He wants to take our Simon-ness and make it his Peter-ness. He wants to change us from the inside out.

And that's why he came. That's why the Word became flesh and moved into the neighborhood, as Eugene Peterson puts it, and moved into our neighborhood and into our hearts and lives that he might change us in a way that nothing else can. We cannot change ourselves as God can change us. We can change and improve our Simon-ness. We can go to courses and become a better and better Simon, but only God can make us a Peter.

And so we looked at the snapshot that John chose to put in his Gospel album, and we saw that Christ is the life-changer. Then we looked at or picked up another snapshot, and we saw that Christ is the one who helps us to be obedient. He is the Master. "Follow me," he said to Philip first of all, and then later to all the men. "Follow me." And to follow Jesus for those men meant to leave everything and follow him. It meant a change of lifestyle. It meant a change of occupation. It meant a change in their financial status. It meant a change in their families and their relationships. It meant a change, for he is the life-changer. To follow him means that as we follow him, as we decrease in order that he may increase in our lives, there will be an effect on everything of which our life consists.

We looked at another snapshot, and that is him of Lord. We looked at the walking on the water and how we have to learn to trust him. When we come to know him and he starts to change our lives, he will build opportunities for faith. He will take us to the middle of a lake and leave us there, and we will be put in situations where we are totally out of our depth literally and soon to be over our head if we are not careful, if we do not practice faith and trust when the storm comes. When we find ourselves in impossible, ridiculous situations and we look around and say, "What am I doing here? How could it be that I got myself into this situation?" And yet, when we keep our eyes on him instead of the situation, then we find ourselves walking on water.

Christ wants us to walk on water. That's the difference between Christianity and every other religion in the world. He gives us power to do what is impossible to do without him. That's Christianity. And so we looked at this snapshot of Christ as Lord. We see him as the Word. We see him as the life-changer moving into the neighborhood of our lives and our being. And then we see him as he is Master, and we follow him with anything that that means, anytime, anyplace, anything. And we follow him and learn obedience. And then we learn to trust him as he allows the storms of life to come. We learn to walk on water. We learn to look back at situations and say, "Before I knew Christ, I sank under that. But now I know Christ, he has given me the power to walk over this, to walk over everything that people are sinking under."

And then with you, I want to look at caring. I want to look at Christ as the great nourisher and provider of the needs of men. And I want you to turn to John chapter six because we're going to look at the feeding of the 5,000 as the incident. We're going to look first of all at the multitude, and then we're going to look at the Master of the multitude, and then we're going to look at the men who were required to feed the multitude, and then we're going to look at the miracle of how that takes place and apply it to our lives.

The disciples had not been long in ministry before they were met by a multitude of need. Once you come to Christ to know him as your savior, you soon realize you have not come for your benefit alone and that we are blessed to be a blessing. We are saved to serve. And that word goes against every little bit of selfishness that we're born with. "What do you mean, serve?" The world is here to serve me. My husband is here to serve me. My children are here to serve me. My church is here to serve me.

I remember Stuart going to visit with a family that wanted to come into Elmbrook years ago. He sat down, and this man said to him—he was the leader of the house, he had all his family arranged in their Sunday best to meet the pastor of the church they were thinking of joining—and the man said to Stuart, "What does your church have to offer my family?" Stuart said, "Well, before I answer that, let me ask you a question. What does your family have to offer my church?" Because the whole mindset of that man was the church is there to meet our needs. So how can they do that?

And yet once you become a Christian, this Simon-ness—that Simon-ness, everybody's here for my benefit—this incredible change to selflessness starts. You mean I am here for their benefit? I am here to serve them. Now the disciples even at the end of Jesus' life hadn't got this. And you remember in the upper room, Jesus washes their feet. You remember that incident in John chapter 13? You don't need to turn to it.

When he'd finished washing their feet, he put on his clothes and returned to his place. "Do you understand what I've done for you?" he said. "You call me teacher and Lord, and rightly so, for so I am. Now that I, your Lord and teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another's feet." There are still branches of the Christian church today that literally wash feet as a symbol of the attitude of the servant spirit that Christ requires in those that follow him. "I've set you an example. You should do as I have done for you. I tell you the truth, no servant is greater than his master, nor a messenger greater than the one who sent him. Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them."

And that's the incredible thing, that the blessing of self-sacrificing and giving and ministering and serving comes back to you. You know, you die to live, you give to get. It's those seemingly opposites that Christianity is just full of. And so the disciples were not long in ministry until they were met by a multitude of need. And so it will be for us. And that was a test, it was only a test, it was an emergency warning system. Christ started to allow them to meet need as soon as they started to follow him.

And this was certainly a new experience for the disciples. You know, I've observed even in church life, even in women's ministry, even in ministry in Sunday School, more and more people want to serve in an advisory capacity. Have you noticed? It's really very interesting. The older you get and the more responsibility you get, not one of us is adverse to bossing everybody else around.

And Jesus said, "I don't want you to serve in an advisory capacity. Maybe that will be just a little part of what I ask you to do. I want you to serve. I want you to strip to the waist." You see, there were three echelons of slaves in Jesus' time, and they all wore different garb. And only one echelon of slave, the very bottom of the pile, ever stripped to the waist. And they were the ones that emptied toilets and washed feet. Slaves and women did those two things in Jesus' day.

And Jesus took the place of a woman. Jesus took the place of a slave and washed feet. And then he put his clothes on again. And then he said, "You want to know what I've just done here? I took the lowest place even though I am Master and Lord. And even though we are given responsibility and even though we are supposed to be in charge of something, we do it with a servant spirit, and we never forget that that's what he's looking for." Now that is going to take the power of Christ because we are at core selfish. We want to serve in an advisory capacity. Certainly, the disciples wanted to.

So let's look first of all at this multitude. Among Jesus' multitude, there would be people that are among our multitude today. There would be the diseased, the lepers. And Jesus started going around to his disciples' amazement touching lepers. When they'd ring their little bell, "Unclean, unclean," and everyone would scatter, Jesus would walk right up to them and get hold of them. They had probably not been touched for years by anybody. It was so incredibly contagious. And Jesus touched the leper.

Well, we have our lepers today. Half of Africa is dying of AIDS. And the AIDS patients and the AIDS children that are born of AIDS mothers, who contact that disease from their own husbands basically in those African countries that are being decimated, I cannot even start to tell you statistics of how much of the population of some African countries will exist no more in 20, 30 years and how many people are touching them.

You know, our World Relief workers who are out there trying to do some dentistry and clinic work are finding it very difficult to get anyone to insure them health-wise for obvious reasons. And so many of our missionaries and many of our missionary doctors, many of our relief and development workers are struggling sometimes with little or inadequate medical insurance touching AIDS patients.

And the challenge is there. And the challenge perhaps will be here in a way that we have pushed under the rug somehow with this whole AIDS problem in the United States and in the West. But it will be here. And what will we do, we that profess the name of Christ? Will we serve in an advisory capacity? Or will we wash their feet literally? It'll be interesting.

But his multitude was not so much different from ours. There was not only the diseased, but the divorced. "I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you," said the man in Jesus' day. The woman had no recourse to bring a divorce action against the man, only the man against the woman if she put too much seasoning in the soup, if she spoke too loud, if she was a noisy woman, a noisy woman being defined if her neighbor could hear her when she talked or yelled at her children, then the man had right to divorce her. If she didn't keep her promises, he could divorce her.

So there would be the divorced who didn't have nearly as good a deal as they do in this day and age in Jesus' multitude. And we, too, have those who have been, despite their wishes, rejected and divorced summarily. And other people have decided where children live and who cares for them.

There would be the destitute. A third of the world is suffering an eternal fast at the moment. A third of the world will never go to bed without feeling hungry. Ever. In their lifetime. Without feeling hungry. So there are the destitute. Jesus' multitude had more than enough of those. And Jesus simply in the story says to the disciples, "Give them something to eat."

Then there would be the demented. Jesus met the demented through mental illness or demon possession. A man chained to the tombs in a graveyard. A boy bent on self-destruction insisting on throwing himself into the fire. A woman, Mary of Magdalene by name, torn to pieces by seven demons. Some demented by epilepsy, others showing signs of satanic oppression.

And today it's the same. I spoke to 2,000 children's pastors from churches across America down in Nashville. And when I was finished, I just flew in for the meeting and then I had to get back for another conference. And I was walking out of the room, and a sweet children's pastor, I don't know, 35, 36, came up to me and said, "Could I have you just five minutes?" And I said, "Yes, I—that's just about what I have."

And so I said, "Walk with me. Come and find my room." I was in the Opryland Hotel. It took me 35 minutes to find my room. And so that was 35 minutes of listening to this lady. And we in the West don't think there's too much of this satanic business going on. She told me a very frightening story. She said, "It was my grandmother that took me along to the witchcraft meetings. And as a baby, I was dedicated to Satan here in the United States. It was my grandmother." That blew me away.

And she said, "I'm now a children's pastor, but I am still haunted with the terrible, terrible, terrible things that happened to me. And I still have nightmares that send me screaming into my husband's arms." And she said, "Is there any help for me?" And it's an incredible thing that even though she knows Christ, what was done to her as a child in satanic ritual here in the West, in this wonderful country of America, is still having an effect on this woman and her life.

And so along with Jesus' multitude, we have our demented for all sorts of reasons and people needing help here, right in our midst. The disinterested. Some of those in the Jesus crowd were out for a lark, along for the show, nominally tipping their hats on the Sabbath to some familiar yet unknown god of their fathers. We have the disinterested, too, don't we?

Because we have the unbelieving. Do you know that the biggest growing block of people in the world are atheists? The biggest growing philosophical group, if you wish, in the world are atheists, second only to Christians and catching up fast at the rate of 8.5 million converts a year.

Now the unbelieving means unbelieving in anything, in anything. In Japan, I met a lady, a girl who said, "I have never met a person till I met you who believed in any god of any kind." She was 23 or 24. "I have never in my life met anybody until I met you in this meeting who believed in a god of any kind." And that girl in another culture where there are many gods, actually, and many philosophies and many religions, had never met anyone. Because this block of people that have been born and raised in our generations are among those who are being influenced by this particular multitude.

And there were those that were deceived in Jesus' multitude, the mixed marriages, those that believed in other gods that had married believing Jews who had been influenced and a syncretism had come in. And we've got plenty of that today. We have a spirituality abroad, and tolerance is the god that they worship. And it's getting harder and harder to be dogmatic, for the dogma of the Christian life says there is only one God and only one way.

So Jesus' multitude was very little different than ours. And the disciples of Jesus find themselves met by this multitude of need. And I don't know about you, but I meet a little piece of that multitude probably every day of my life. And so what do we do when we meet the multitude of need?

Well, let's look at the Master. He's the Master of the multitude. He sees the array of human need and he responds to it. Now what happened in the story if we look back in John chapter six is...

Guest (Male): Jesus crosses the far shore, is met by the multitude. He looks up, sees them, and he says to Philip, "Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?" He asked this only to test him, for he already had in mind what he would do.

Jill Briscoe: That's one of my favorite verses of the scriptures. I have a dilemma in my life at the moment. It seems to be an—I cannot see the answer to this particular dilemma. It's not a terribly serious dilemma, although it could be a very serious dilemma, but I don't see an answer. And I know that God is directing me to figure it out. But he already has in mind what he will do with this.

And that is a hugely comforting thought. So this is a test. This is only a test of Jill. And he says to me, "Now you address this need. You address it." And like Philip, I'm standing here saying, "But..." he already has in mind what he will do with it. And my job is to figure out what he has in mind and cooperate with the Master who alone can meet this need.

And so the Master of the multitude knows already. What he's done with the multitude is teach them and heal them, and now he's going to feed them. For the greatest need of the multitude is always spiritual, but sometimes we have to feed them first if they're going to be able to listen to us. Clive Calver loves to tell people when they challenge him on his work and they say, "Well, shouldn't you be just preaching the Gospel to these people? What's all this social action, what's all this feeding and clothing and medicine? Shouldn't you be just preaching to them?" He said, "Well, it helps if they're alive."

So let's feed them and let's keep them alive so that they can hear about Jesus. And so he does attend to their physical needs, but I do notice that he attends to their spiritual needs first. He sat them down and he taught them first. Their spiritual hunger was the most important thing, and Jesus is going to use this in the same passage when he talks about himself as the bread of life and applies the miracle that was a material miracle of providing real bread for real hunger in real bodies, applies that whole lesson to spiritual things as he talks about himself as the bread of life that the whole world can feed upon.

So Jesus looks at the multitude in a way that we don't. He looks at them—it says here, "a sheep without a shepherd." In another version, in another snapshot of another evangelist that was there, one of the writers of another Gospel album, if you wish, you get other snapshots that John doesn't put in. And one of those snapshots gives us the information that when Jesus saw them coming, his stomach was tied in a knot. I think it was Matthew. He was convulsed with compassion when he saw the multitude of need. He was convulsed with compassion. He couldn't eat. When was the last time you or I couldn't eat when we were met with part of the multitude? Has it ever affected your appetite? It affected Jesus' appetite because they were like sheep without a shepherd.

And there's nothing sadder than a sheep without a shepherd. What you want to see with sheep is them lying down in green pastures, munching away, satisfied. And a sheep only sits or lies down when its stomach's full. But Jesus saw them standing. And it got to him because they weren't being fed spiritually and they weren't being cared for in any way.

And so when he looks at the multitude, he is moved with compassion, and he already has in mind what he will do, but he will not do it without us. Now that is his divine prerogative and a choice apparently he has made, which I will never ever understand. It can only be for our benefit. Because quite obviously, he could feed the multitude without us. He could attend to the need without us and all the hassle he has to go to to get us quitting serving in an advisory capacity and getting on our knees and washing people's feet. He has to go to so much trouble to get us there. Why does he bother? It has to be for our benefit. Because once you know that self-sacrificial giving and serving, the blessing is there. You will be blessed. You will be blessed.

And so the Master of the multitude picks out Philip. Now why did Philip have to take the test? Have you ever wondered that? Well, Philip had to take the test because he was from Bethsaida, and that's where they were. And this was his crowd. And so the Master of the multitude says, "I'm going to hold you responsible for your crowd, not his crowd, not Matthew's crowd. Philip, what are we going to do? It's your crowd. That's your mother, your father, your aunts, your uncles, your grandads there. All your friends, all the people you work with, Philip, all your extended family, they're all here. And I want you to feed your family. I want you to feed your crowd. I want Matthew—I want you to feed this crowd." Jesus made them sit down in little groups and he said, "Now you guys, there are your groups, and Philip, here's your groups, and all the others." He gave them groups, divided it all up.

So what did the men do?

Guest (Male): Philip answered him, "Eight months' wages wouldn't buy enough bread for each one of us to have a bite." And then Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, spoke up. "Here's a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?"

Jill Briscoe: But Jesus already knew what he would do. And so he has the people sit down, and the miracle begins. Now what does Philip do? Overwhelmed with the size of the problem. I can just hear this group talking. Peter: "I don't know about you guys, but I've had it. It's a bit unfair at the end of a day like we've had to have to feed a multitude." John: "Well, we don't want them to start depending on us. We ought to send them away and let them look after themselves." And then Nathaniel: "After all, ours is a spiritual ministry. Jesus said so. What's he doing?" Andrew: "Well, he means it. We'd better get going." And then triumphantly: "Why don't we form a committee?"

Have you ever noticed when people don't know what to do, they form a committee? So a kitchen and budget committee was hastily made, hastily put together, and Philip was the one that figured it out on his abacus. And he found out they came short. A whole year's wages wouldn't even feed all those groups over there. So the idea, Lord, is to send them away. That's the bottom line. Send them away, let them look after themselves. Not our crowd. And Jesus said, "They don't need to go away, you feed them. They don't need to go away. You feed them."

So we mustn't fall into the trap of thinking the almighty committee can solve almighty problems. Even an almighty committee without the presence and participation of the almighty Christ will never meet the needs of a mighty need in the world, and we'll end up in an almighty mess. What they were doing was talking away over here, and Jesus, the answer, was standing over here. And what we do when we face a multitude of need in the church of Jesus Christ is we reckon without the Christ. And we try to organize without the Christ. And we try to do this without the Christ and figure it out and use our little tiny stupid dust minds, forgetting that God dignified dust with divinity. And we have within us the one who already has decided what he will do, and he wants to catch us up in this grand adventure of cooperating with him and getting the job done.

And so Philip failed the test and so did everybody else. But Jesus doesn't mind if you fail a test, he wants you to try on the next one. And so he gets organized and he takes over. And we see the miracle begin. The miracle.

So the problem is Jesus was present but absent. We talk loudly about Jesus being present, but we secretly think of him as being absent in most of our decisions in the church. And what we need to do is start and reckon on him being present because he is and get in tune with him and talk a lot to him and not leave prayer at the end of our committee meetings as a sort of, "Oh, it's time to pray and go home," but remember to consult the one who knows already what he is going to do at the beginning of your planning meeting and all the way through your planning meeting and stay in tune. And you will find an incredible difference in what happens.

Jesus takes charge. We've got to invite him to take charge. We've got to submit to him. And he looks at what he has, not what he has not, which happened to be a small boy with five small barley loaves, barley loaves. Snapshot, a barley loaf. John took the snapshot and put it in the Gospel album. Here's a barley loaf. Why? Why did he take a snapshot of a barley loaf? Why didn't he just say five loaves? Because a barley loaf was the cheapest, coarsest, awful bread you could get. They fed it to prisoners. Not only did he have barley loaves, it was the worst sort of bread. It was nothing. It was horrible. It was barley loaf, just a barley loaf.

And what God does is he'll take barley loaves. He will take anything he's given. And aren't you glad, because I often feel just like a barley loaf, coarse bread, cheap stuff, cheap goods. But he takes barley loaves. Here's this little boy and he gives Jesus his barley loaves and his few small fish. I love it that it's Andrew—Andrew that brings the little boy to him. "Andrew, what are these among so many?" Inadequate Andrew, but Andrew had got this. What he needed was to bring the little to the one who could do something with the little. And so the little boy comes to the great big Christ. And that is the challenge of this story. "Bring them to me," says Jesus. And so the little boy and his loaves and his fishes come and stand in front of Jesus.

And years ago, I wrote a little poem about that.

Guest (Male): Here is a boy, a small boy, an all boy,

Food in his pocket, a spring in his step.

He's off to hear Jesus preach, maybe see a miracle.

Instead, he gets to be a miracle.

"Oh, oh," he says, "I've got a hunch. He wants my lunch.

But I'm hungry, too.

Didn't I hear him say it's all right to pray, 'Give me this day my daily bread'?

Well, this is it.

It's hard to eat it, though, when others are hungry. They'll watch me.

If he wants it, he can have it.

Can't imagine what he'll do with it, though.

I hope he'll eat it himself. Needs to keep up his strength."

And Jesus took the lunch with a big smile.

Was such a small offering from such a small boy.

But he said, "Thank you, I really need you to give me this."

He blessed it then, he gave it to his disciples and told them

It wasn't their job to make the bread, he'd do that.

All they needed to do was hand it out.

When they were through, Peter gave the lad 10 fish and four loaves.

He said Jesus told him to.

Jill Briscoe: Now that's my poetic license at the end of the story. But if Jesus gave each of the disciples a basket full of bread, what do you think he gave to the little boy? No doubt, he never takes things from us without giving us full measure pressed down and running over back. And so the little boy comes and gives his nothing-ness to Jesus' everything-ness. And that's the challenge. As we acknowledge our total inadequacy in the face of the appalling need that we face, we bring what we have to Jesus. We look within and we find the boy in us, and we bring what we can and what we have, not what we can't.

You know the little lady that emptied her box over Jesus' feet? Jesus said, "Leave her alone, she's done what she could." He didn't say she did what she couldn't. And God will never ask you to do what you couldn't. He'll ask you to do what you can. He'll ask you to bring who you are, your small boy-ness, your nothingness, your little barley loaves and your few small fish. They're ideal for what God has in mind, for he already knows what he will do with our little fish and loaves and our childlike faith.

And so Jesus takes it, and he does four things. He looks up to heaven and he blesses it, and then he breaks it, and then he gives it. And that's another snapshot in another Gospel. It's not in John. Another snapshot. Really alerted, I think it was Luke that put that snapshot in this story. He alerted one of the Gospel writers to take a picture of Jesus actually taking the bread from the little boy and thanking God. He blessed the Lord, he didn't bless the bread. He blessed the Lord for it. He thanked God for it. And then he broke it, and then he gave it, and then he fed the multitude.

And I wonder as Jesus was doing that if he was thinking ahead. I think he was because it was still on his mind the next day when the multitude came back. And even though, as Jesus pointed out, they'd stuffed themselves like pigs—and that's what the phrase is, "you stuffed yourself like pigs"—"have you come back for another handout?" he said to them. Even though that was the situation, he used the miracle as an explanation of the fact that he only fed 5,000 people yesterday, but he was going to die in order that the whole world could be fed. For he was the bread of life that came down from heaven.

And was he thinking as he took and blessed and broke and gave of himself? I don't know. Was he thinking and realizing that God would take him and thank Jesus for dying for the redemption of the world and then break him on the cross and then give him in his risen life to a hungry and needy world? I think he probably was. Broken bread, it's our savior, isn't it? And so we give our little to our big God and the multitude, incredibly, gets fed.

And I think, too, for ourselves, the picture is there. First, he takes. First, we have to offer ourselves if we're ever going to be a servant, if we're ever going to know our stomachs tied in a knot with compassion and caring for the people that we're supposed to be caring for and ministering to and giving to. Then first of all, we have to present like the little boy all that we are and all that we have to him. And he will take us and he will thank God for us. He will take us and he will thank God for us. And then he will break us. There is no helping others until there is that brokenness. What am I talking about? A breaking of our self-aggrandizement, not our self-worth, but of our self-absorption. A breaking of our independent spirit. A breaking of our self-dependent, arrogant pride. He will not have it. He will not have it.

And we can never become his true servants, washing other people's feet, until somehow he has broken that self-aggrandizement, that insistence on always having our own way. And I don't know how he'll do it. He could do it through sorrow. He could do it through gratefulness. I have been as broken and overwhelmed through gratefulness as I have through sorrow. I don't know how he will break us, but by giving yourself to him, you have to realize and recognize that that has to happen before you can become a servant that washes other people's feet.

And so he will take what you offer. And so he will break what you offer. But then he'll give you to the multitude. And the multitude of need will be met. He'll give you to the multitude, and the multitude of need will be met.

Now at the end, like I've done in all the others, let me give you a practical acrostic: CARE. C-A-R-E. Care. How is this going to happen? Well, first of all, you come and you give and all of that. C stands for "Care for Christ." Care for the life of Christ within you. It says in Ephesians that he wants to settle down and feel at home in your heart. So whatever it takes to make Christ feel at home and to care for the Christ you have received, do it. Whatever it takes. He will not feel at home if there is known sin, unconfessed and undealt with. Does not mean you have to be perfect before you can serve, but it does mean you have to be working on those things he's pointing out to you. And so care for the Christ you have said you have received. Is he at home in your life? Is he happy there? Care for him and his needs. Care for the Christ. Care for your spiritual life.

A: "Arrange the need you have in groups." Now this is very practical. All of us have all this stuff that we feel responsible to do. Well, break it down. Jesus said, "Get them to sit down in groups." And then figure out which are your groups. Ask him, "Well, which part of the field do you want me in, Lord? All these groups? Couldn't I give one of them to him? No, these are mine?" Now only God and you can figure that out, which are your groups. He does not expect you to feed Andrew's group or Peter's group or Philip's group. He expects you to feed your groups. So that is figured out on your knees, actually, on your face with God. Do you know how to hear God speak to you about these things practically? Well, you have to figure that out. How does that work? How does the Bible speak to my particular need and help me figure out which groups are my responsibility so I can say no to those groups and yes to mine? He does not expect you to feed all the groups, just the groups he gives you. And one of the things that has helped me down the ages as I meet a multitude of need and have opened doors available to me all over the world is to figure out which is the work he's given me to do. Jesus finished the work God gave him to do and went to heaven at the age of 33, and he left a lot of groups for us. He dealt with his groups, and he's left a lot of groups for us. So arrange your need in groups, break it down, figure out which are yours.

R: "Receive the bread from his hands." Receive the bread from his hands. I'm going to speak in the study center course on preaching and just talk about how to get ideas for talks and illustrations and all of that sort of thing. I'm just going to answer questions about being a lady speaker because they just have men speakers mostly come through that preaching class. And one of the things I'm going to do is look in Ecclesiastes where there's a wonderful passage from Solomon, this man of wisdom. And he's talking about words as weapons, how you move people from meaningless-ness—that's what the book of Ecclesiastes is all about—to meaningful-ness. And you use words as weapons. He says words are like goads and nails. You nail it with a word, and you goad people into meaningful-ness. And words are weapons for good or for evil. So how do we use words? How do we find words? How does God invest words with a dynamism that makes a difference in people's lives and all of that? And that's all about receiving the bread from his hands. And in that passage in Ecclesiastes, right at the end of the book, this wisest of all men that used words as nobody in the world has used them since or before him, he said, "These words are given by one Shepherd." These words are given by one Shepherd. You receive the bread from his hands. Okay? Learn how to do that. What is the nourishment for this particular woman that I have to face today, Lord? Well, you go out after you've listened to him, you go out and listen to them. Isaiah 50, verse four: He'll give you a word in season to those that are weary, but you have to wake up early in the morning for that word. You have to receive the bread from his hands, in other words.

And then E: "Enjoy the feast." It'll come back to you. You'll walk down the hillside with your basket full. Jesus made so much bread, he gave one basket full to each disciple. And they'd done all that giving out, and maybe some of you say, "What would be left of me if I gave myself for everybody in my life like you're talking about, Jill, which is what Christ asks us to do?" Then what would be left of me? More than when you began. That's what he does. More of you than when you began. There would be more. There would be more. There's a wonderful verse in Proverbs, and I'm not quite sure where it is, that says, "He that refresheth others shall himself be refreshed." So many people say to me, "Where do you get your nourishment, Jill?" I get it from people. You give back to me a whole big basket full of bread, always more than I started with. And as you refresh others, you will find yourself at the end of the exercise with a basket full of nourishment for yourself because that's how it works.

So don't be tempted to serve in an advisory capacity only. Some serving has to be done in an advisory capacity, but remember what Jesus said: "If I, your Master and Lord, washed your feet, then you go out and find somebody else's feet to wash. And you will be blessed." You'll go away with that basket of bread full and running over.

Pray with me if you will. Dear Lord, thank you for this story, story so familiar to us but perhaps seen in a little different light today, a Gospel snapshot in the Gospel album of John the Apostle. Thank you for this picture of Christ as Master of the multitude, as provider, as nourisher. And thank you for the lesson that the Simon-ness in us that doesn't want to serve but be served can be changed into Peter-ness, who found himself standing in a part of the multitude of need with some groups to feed. And thank you for the picture that he kept going back to Jesus for more bread and more bread and more bread and passing it out, not manufacturing it, taking it from the hands of the Christ who is the bread of life. And Lord, thank you for this wonderful picture because all of us have groups of need. We've got a little group at home, our family. And we've got neighbors, and we've got friends, and we've got church people, and we've got people in need all over the place, a multitude of need. Lord, help us to spend enough time settling you down in our lives and getting to know you that we can hear your voice clearly and understand who and what is our responsibility, our part of it, so we can say no to what isn't and yes to what is. And then teach us how to take the bread from your hands, your nail-pierced hands, and give it that the world may be fed. We ask it for Christ's sake, Amen.