Category Archives: Answers
Supernatural Provision
Matt.17:27 “However, we don’t want to offend them, so go down to the lake and throw in a line. Open the mouth of the first fish you catch, and you will find a large silver coin. Take it and pay the tax for both of us.”
Have you ever experienced supernatural provision? Yes, God wants us to work, to invest, and God wants us to save. We have done several teachings on God’s heart for work and for our finances – earn some, save some, invest some, spend less, no loss, give more, and faith it. Yes, God wants us to be responsible, to generate an income, to sustain our life income, and to multiply our streams of income. However, there comes a time in every life where you need divine intervention, when you need a miracle. God has made it clear that this is going to happen, and He will come through for us. Please read John 6:1-15.
John 6:1 “After this, Jesus crossed over to the far side of the Sea of Galilee, also known as the Sea of Tiberias.” This is so important because John was writing to the people in Ephesus and they knew this sea as the Sea of Tiberias, not the Sea of Galilee. It is so important that as people, we speak the language that our community understands. Otherwise, they will see Christians as strange. Jesus had just finished healing the man that was lame for thirty-eight years and He crossed the Sea of Galilee to have some time away with His disciples. But the Bible said that the people followed Him. When Jesus was crossing the Sea of Galilee, thousands of people were going across Jordan following Jesus. Jesus obviously got to Galilee first and sat down with His disciples, but as He lifted His eyes, He saw five thousand people approaching and the story kicks off from there.
This miracle is recorded as the feeding of five thousand men, not counting women and children. If there are five thousand men, we can expect that there will be between seven and ten thousand women, and between two and three thousand children. There were about fifteen to twenty thousand people coming to Jesus. There are many different miracles distributed across the four gospels but the feeding of the five thousand men was the only one recorded by all four gospels and that is so significant. This miracle is recorded in Matt.14:13-21, Mark 6:30-44, Luke 9:10-17, and John 6:1-15. Please read all the different accounts, you will be amazed at the peculiarities of the writers and what they focused on.
For instance, John did not talk about Jesus distributing the bread to the twelve and the twelve distributing it to the people. John skipped that because of what he was focusing on. Matthew detailed how Jesus broke the bread and distributed to the twelve, but Matthew did not state that Jesus did this for the bread and then the fish. Matthew reported it as though Jesus did both together. But John said He distributed the bread first, then the fish. The purpose of Bible study is for you to get into the Word of God yourself.
Prayer: Father, I ask that according to Your Word, please supply all my needs according to Your riches in glory, in Jesus Name. Amen!
Four of Four
John 5:45-47 “Yet it isn’t I who will accuse you before the Father. Moses will accuse you! Yes, Moses, in whom you put your hopes. If you really believed Moses, you would believe me, because he wrote about me. But since you don’t believe what he wrote, how will you believe what I say?”
Yesterday we looked at the first two of the four-fold witness; Self-testimony and Testimony of Another. However, Jesus chose that these first two are insufficient simply since they are human testimony because He is superior. Read the rest of this entry
Source Principle
John 5:17-18 “But Jesus replied, “My Father is always working, and so am I.” So the Jewish leaders tried all the harder to find a way to kill him. For he not only broke the Sabbath, he called God his Father, thereby making himself equal with God.”
Why would Jesus saying that God is His father make them conclude that He was, “making Himself equal with God”? For people who are educated in the Semitic or Middle Eastern region, they would not struggle with understanding this concept. Read the rest of this entry
Refresh
Isa.55:8-9 “My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,” says the Lord. “And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.”
Please read John 5:16-47; every time we open God’s Word, we must approach it knowing that it is so hugely important. So, my prayer for us is that God will teach us Himself and give us understanding in the Mighty Name of Jesus. Jesus was an enigma. Read the rest of this entry
Saviour
John 5:14 “But afterward Jesus found him in the Temple and told him, “Now you are well; so stop sinning, or something even worse may happen to you.” (emphasis added).
This man had been crippled for thirty-eight years, so what sin was he committing? Lust, greed, anger maybe; bitterness against the people that were supposed to help him but did not help him. Maybe jealousy against the people that got into the water first. Read the rest of this entry
Refocus
Ps.121:1-2 “I will lift up my eyes to the hills [around Jerusalem, to sacred Mount Zion and Mount Moriah]—From whence shall my help come? My help comes from the Lord, Who made heaven and earth.” (AMPC].
We have to be totally unassuming when we are dealing with God. Sometimes, it is a pattern that God has established; the angel stirs the water, the first to get in gets healed. It was God that established it for them, but the man became fixated on it and it became his plan of how his healing would happen. Read the rest of this entry
Question vs. Answer
John 5:6-7 “…So Jesus said to him, “Do you truly long to be healed?” The sick man answered him, “Sir, there’s no way I can get healed, for I have no one who will lower me into the water when the angel comes. As soon as I try to crawl to the edge of the pool, someone else jumps in ahead of me.”
If Jesus was standing in front of you today asking, “Would you like to get well?”, what will your response be? We all need to wrestle with this. The word ‘well’ in today’s scripture reference could mean many things. Read the rest of this entry
Will You?
John 5:4 “For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.” (KJV, emphasis added)
This was God’s way of showing the people that He wants them healed. Some people have argued that there was a spring, an underground supply of water that bubbled up and that is why the pool was bubbling and looked stirred. Read the rest of this entry
The Question, The Answer
Prov.20:12 “Ears to hear and eyes to see—both are gifts from the Lord.”
Our focus over the next few days is on John 5:1-15 [please read]. What was Jesus’ question and what was the man’s response? It would interest you to know that like this man by the pool, most people are not answering the questions they are being asked. Read the rest of this entry
