February 23

Great Needs Great Miracles

Leviticus 14:1-57 Mark 6:30-56 Psalm 40:1-10 Proverbs 10:11-12

God meets great needs with great miracles. I hope we can all look back in our lives at times of great need and celebrate God's miraculous intervention in meeting those needs. I believe the past couple of weeks at Hillcrest Church have been like that. The need was great and the provision to meet that need was even greater. We needed a financial breakthrough and it came as the people of the church united and brought forth an offering great enough that it had God's fingerprints on it.

In today's reading from the Gospel of Mark we have a story of great need and miraculous provision. It is the story also recorded in Matthew 14 and Luke 9. Mark brings the two accounts together, and if you read carefully, you will see the details from each of the other two gospel accounts included in this one. In fact, as you read through Mark's gospel in these days, you may well notice that Mark is always pulling together the other two gospels, including a few words here and a few there from each of them to form a sort of Readers Digest condensed version of the gospel. Mark eliminates most of what Matthew and Luke do not have in common, but he includes both of the accounts of Jesus' miraculous feeding of the crowds. God wants us to get this message. When the need is great, if we turn to Him, the opportunity for a miracle is there. We should not fear the need, we should not turn away from the opportunity to let God intervene through us to meet that need.

Notice how, as in the remarkable offerings that met the ministry needs of Hillcrest Church in the past weeks, the miracle here happens in the hands of the disciples. It is God's power, flowing through Jesus to the disciples to meet the needs: "Taking the the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, Jesus gave thanks and broke the loaves. The he gave them to his disciples to set before the people. He also divided the two fish among them all. They all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of the broken pieces of bread and fish. The number of the men who had eaten was five thousand." (Mark 6:41-44)

We, as Jesus' disciples, are to let God's miracles happen in our hands! If we shrink from great need, we will miss the opportunity. Our readings today resound with the message that God wants to meet needs, whether for healing--like the skin diseases detailed in today's reading from Leviticus, or for personal freedom from quicksand-like sin evidenced in Psalm 40 with reference to the slimy pit and the mud and the mire. We can cry out to God and receive his miraculous help at our time of need, and we can be the ones through whom God works His miracles. In our own lives, our families, our church, our city, our nation, our world, we can see God meet great needs for salvation, for healing, for deliverance, for financial provision, for the feeding of the hungry--no need is too great for God!

Let me end with a song for us all to be singing as we celebrate God's miraculous supply for all of our needs. Psalm 40 inspired this popular old Southern Gospel chorus: "He brought me out of the miry clay. He set my feet on the Rock to stay. He put a song in my soul today. A song of praise, hallelujah!"

Pastor Paul