First Response

Lifting up his eyes, then, and seeing that a large crowd was coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread, so that these people may eat?” He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he would do. Philip answered him, “Two hundred denarii worth of bread would not be enough for each of them to get a little.” ~ John 6:5-7

Phillip’s first response was practical. Jesus and the disciples had no money to spend on this kind of hospitality. Of course, there was another constraint: “this was a desolate place” – no Walmarts, no grocery stores, no village market to buy food.

Phillip had been with Jesus. He had presumably witnessed the miracles Jesus had accomplished. These miracles were in fact the source of their dilemma – there would be no crowd following Jesus otherwise! Yet, Phillip did not think to ask Jesus. He thought only in terms of his own resources.

I think we often do the same with God. We think practically, we consider what we have, we look to our own meager resources and inevitably come up short.

God, the Father, longs for us to bring our struggles to him. He cares deeply about what is on our hearts. He urges us to cast “all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you” (1 Peter 5:7). And His resources, unlike our own, are overflowing. His solutions to our problems are much greater than we can imagine, if we will only bring them to him in the first place.

Jesus should not be a last resort. He should be our first response. The one who multiplied bread and fish to feed thousands can still help us with our problems today.

Photo by Diane Helentjaris on Unsplash