Partnering With God

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:19

Hey there. Welcome to another podcast of Legacy of Freedom, where God is our refuge, our present help in time of trouble. Glad you're with us today. Hope you got your pen, your pencil, your Bible. You're ready to open the Word of God and listen to what the Holy Spirit has to say to us today. I believe he has something to speak. I'm ready to hear from him. Are you? So let's get into the word together today. Glad you're here. We're going to be in the Gospel of Mark today. This is one of my favorite passages in the Bible. I've heard it so many different people preach from it or teach from it. And I want to ask you a question. We're focusing on how learning how to partner with God in order to bring the realities of his kingdom into the specific reign of our human experience. How do we bring the kingdom of heaven into our lives? And Mark, there's a moment where Jesus has been preaching to the multitudes, and he's sent uh the disciples said, Let's send them away. But Jesus wants to give them something to eat. And he says in verse thirty-five, When the day was now far spent, his disciples came to him and said, This is this is a desert place, and already the hour is late, send them away that they may go into the surrounding country and villages, and buy themselves bread, for they have nothing to eat. But he answered and said to them, You give them something to eat. And they said to him, Shall we go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread and give them something to eat? But he said to them, How many loaves do you have? Go and see. When they had found out they said, Five and two fish. Then he commanded them to make them all sit down in groups on the green grass. Verse forty. So they sat down in ranks, in hundreds and in fifties. And when he had taken the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to his disciples, to set before them, and the two fish he divided among them all. So they all ate and were filled, and they took up twelve baskets of full of fragments of and of the fish. Now those who had eaten the loaves were about five thousand men, dealing with partnering with God, learning how to partner with God in order to bring the realities of his specific reign into our human experience. You may be asking the question today, how can I partner with God? How can I bring the realities of heaven to earth? If you really focus on the spiritual, you will find sometimes, Lord, I don't have what I need. But when you focus on the material, other times you say, Lord, I don't have what I need there either. And we feel inadequate so often. We see the need and we look at what we have as if the resources come directly from us. But we mustn't forget that we serve the God of all creation who has unlimited resources. There's nothing he can't do. There's nothing beyond his reach. And this example here was dealing with the material need, the physical need that the people were hungry, and Jesus wanted to meet those needs as well. He had been teaching, he'd been preaching, he had been healing, he had done many miracles, but now he's looking at their physical need. Spiritual deals with the human spirit, the soul, as opposed to material things. When Jesus was dealing with the body, the body has needs. If it's sick, it needs healing. If it's hungry, it needs substance, right? If it's thirsty, it needs water to drink. And so when we're dealing with this scripture, they bring Jesus something that is just a small amount. They just have just a little sackline. But when Jesus accepts that, he doesn't criticize it. And I think we need to really focus on that, that a lot of times that's the way it is. We don't have an overflow of everything we need. But God has the overflow. God has the ability that we can live in the overflow because it comes through Christ. Do you understand? They brought what they had to Jesus. They put it in his hands. They placed it in the right hands. Do you ever find yourself putting your lack into a place that doesn't have the resources that God has? Instead of praying, we may talk with a friend about it. We feel a release for a little while, and you know, we feel some maybe some hopefulness, maybe just a release that we got that off of our mind for a while, but it didn't resolve the need. It didn't take the place of the need being met. But when we come to Him and we partner with God, when we partner with heaven in order to bring the real heaven to earth, that's what Jesus says when we pray. Understand who we're praying to. God is reigning over all. And when we come to God, we will not exhaust his resources. You will not deplete God's abilities. We are called to partner with God. Just as they brought these few loaves and fish to Jesus, they partnered with God in order to meet the need. How are you faring today partnering with God? Can I encourage you just to simply give what you have that He is needing to use at that moment? When you're faced with something, don't look at, well, I only have this much. Mother Teresa wanted to go to India and she wanted to help the suffering people. And someone made a remark to her saying, You can't go to India. You don't have any money. She smiled and she said, I have two pennies and I have God. So she got on a plane, she went, and she made a difference because she brought the kingdom of heaven, reality of the kingdom of heaven, into the human experience. Well, I want to encourage you. Give God what you have. Trust in Him and let Him help you today. He will bring His kingdom to earth in power by the Holy Spirit. So let's pray. Father, I thank you for these that have tuned in. I pray you would help them today. Help us all, Lord, to give you what we have, to partner with you in order to bring the reality of the kingdom of God into the earthly realm. Until we meet again, may God bless you. May He cause His face to shine upon you. And may He give you peace. And as you run this race, leave a legacy of freedom for others to follow in your footsteps to Jesus. Until we see you again, God bless you.