Read Matthew 15.
When I was a kid, all the kids in my neighborhood used to gather and play guns. In my memory*, this game was as vague as “play guns” sounds. We all grabbed toy guns and hid, then tried to sneak up on each other and “shoot” everyone else before they sneaked up and shot us. There were no teams and no real object to the game. After you got “shot” you just kept playing.
Looking for a place to hide, I jumped down into the window well of my neighbor’s house. A window well allows some natural light into a basement that would otherwise be totally underground. Click here to see a picture if you don’t know what I’m talking about.
Anyway, I jumped down there to hide but I accidentally broke the window with my foot. When my neighbor, Mrs. Curtis, came out of the house to bust me, she said, “How many times have I told you kids not to jump down into the window well?”
You’ve heard people say, “How many times have I…” before and, probably, you’ve said those words more than once yourself. It gets frustrating to repeat yourself but, the truth is, most of the lessons we really learn are learned because they are repeated.
Yesterday, we read about how Jesus fed (a lot more than) 5000 people and I suggested to you that the lesson of that miracle and Peter’s walking on water was that we can do the impossible in God’s will by Jesus’s power.
Here in Matthew 14, Jesus fed over 4000 people (vv. 29-38). Before he did so, he told the disciples that he did not want to send the people away hungry (v. 32) suggesting more subtly than yesterday that Jesus wanted the disciples to feed them.
In other words, Jesus repeated the same lesson here in Matthew 15 that he taught in Matthew 14. He could have said, “How many times do I have to tell you that, through my power, you can do whatever I want you to do?”
We need lessons repeated for us before we get the message.
So, let me just repeat yesterday’s application question for us all again today, “Where in your life should you be acting in faith–because you believe in Jesus’s power–instead of standing idly by waiting for… something?”
* My memory could very well be wrong. We moved to a new neighborhood when I was 6 so I was very young when this story happened.
