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And thank you for the privilege of being here today to open the book of God, with the people of God. Let’s open our Bibles to John six, the passage that the president read just a moment ago, and let me add my welcome to especially those of you who are new students. You know, I look back over the decades of my Christian experience this morning, and I can look back to some defining moments in my life. I mean, moments that really set the course of the trajectory of the ministry that I’d received from the Lord, and at least a couple of those happened in this room as a student.
I came here as an MDiv student a few years ago, 1970, 56 years ago. I sat here. I was probably the only eight-year-old MDiv student that ever attended the school, but I sat here in 1970, and I made it a point to come to every single chapel they had. Jack Graham, my pastor friend, who was there the day I was saved, and I were partners together all our lives, and we were students together here, and we challenged each other to make sure we were in chapel every day. I remember being in this room over 50 years ago, hearing a message on Amos and the plumb line that I could spit back to you today that changed the way I thought about certain things in my life. So I pray today that this might be one of those times for you, a defining moment in life that maybe someday, years later, you’ll look back and say, “God spoke to me at a specific point in my life, right there in Truett Chapel.”
You know, this is back to school week. We just sent two more grandkids off as freshmen to college this week. I know many of you are here for your first time to be here in college. Your first week of college. I’ll never forget my first day at college. I had just come to know Christ a few months earlier in a church over here on the east side. In fact, there are several people from that church who are here today. They were there the day I was saved. I hadn’t been called to preach, so I always wanted to be a lawyer. I went to TCU, and I’ll never forget my first day at TCU, first class economics 101. I was in. I went through the business school, and economics 101. And the professor came to the board behind his lectern, Dr. Perkins, and he wrote down this on the board. He wrote down the law of supply. I think we wrote it down. There it is. He wrote down the law of supply and demand, and then you know what he said. He said everything you do and everything we do in this class, this entire semester is going to be based on this law. And he said, “In fact, as you go out from here and you leave college and you go out into the workplace, you go out into life, you build your family, you build your business, whatever you do in life, everything in your whole life is going to be affected by this law of supply and demand.”
And then he explained to us that it has two parts to it, and the first one is this. He said, “When demand exceeds supply, prices go up.” You know, we’re seeing that right now. Gasoline prices. There’s a demand. We haven’t stopped driving our cars. We’re still going places, but internationally the supply of oil is down. So when demand is exceeding supply, prices go up. And then he said the other part of that equation is this: when supply exceeds demand, prices go down. I want to leave that there. I want you to think about that for a moment, because it has everything to do with what happened on this Galilean hillside 2000 years ago, when Jesus took a little boy’s sack lunch and fed a multitude of people. You know, just to illustrate it, so everybody put a handle on it.
Just say you had a little mom and pop grocery store in a neighborhood somewhere, and you own that store, and you go to the store to open up one day, and you look outside, but you’re going in the back door to open up, and out in front there’s a whole line of people waiting for you to open the front door to get into the store, and you get in there and you ask your stock boys and go, you say, “Go out there and see what’s going on out there. Why those people lined up? What do they want?” He comes back in there and he tells you, “You’re not going to believe this, but everybody in that line got here. They want to be here as soon as the store’s open because they every single one of them want apples.”
Well, you go back in your little produce section. You got a bushel barrel of apples here, and maybe you got a couple of dozen of them in there with a sign on it that says apples $1. Well, what do you do before you open the door of the store that day? You take that sign off because everybody out there wants apples. You don’t have a lot of them, and you put a sign on it that says apples $2, and they all come in and they buy them.
And here’s another day that’s going along, and nobody wants the apples. Nobody’s interested in buying an apple. And you go back, you look, and there’s a big bushel basket back in your little produce section, and it’s full of apples that are going to rot. And so, what do you do? You take that sign off that says apples $1, and you put one on that says apples 25 cents, and you move it up close to the cash register, so there’ll be some impulse buying, and people come through there and they don’t even want anything. They see that they say, “Well, I think I’ll take a few apples,” and they buy them. It’s the law of supply and demand.
You say, “What does that have to do with John Chapter six, it’s all about this law of supply and demand. Because what happened was there were a bunch of people gathered together on that Galilean hillside, and in that passage we read a moment ago, verse one says, “This big crowd came and followed Jesus because they had seen the signs that he had done.” You know, not everybody that follows Christ follows him for the right motives. Something for us to do to check out our motives when we’re following Christ. But here were all these people; they came, they’d seen and heard of his miracles. They flocked by the 1000s out to that Galilee region, on the side of that mountain, and they got out there. All of them got out there, having made no preparation, and they got hungry. And there was a demand. They were hungry. They had needed food. There was a demand for which there was no apparent supply. And then what happened? Christ got factored into the equation of life.
Jesus got in on the situation. He took those little loaves of bread and fish, and he multiplied it miraculously. Everybody ate until they were filled. The Bible says, and then Jesus said to the disciples, “Pick up the pieces, take up the leftover fragments that remain, so that nothing is lost or wasted.” And they took up all of that excess and surplus that was out there because what had happened now? Supply had exceeded demand. So the whole issue is whether we live our lives in the first part of that passage or in the second part of that passage. Many of us live our lives in the whole first part of that passage, without ever factoring Christ into the equations of life, we make our decisions, we go our way without ever saying, “Lord, what would you have me to do? Without ever inviting Christ to get in on your experience and factor Him into the equation of life. So, two brief points in this message this morning.
The first one is this: without Christ, factored in the equation of life, without Christ demand is always going to exceed supply, and your cry is going to be, “Not enough.” Now that’s what took place in the first nine verses, because when you live your life without Christ, I don’t mean without Him as your personal Savior necessarily. I mean if you live your life making your decisions, going about your life every day without the conscious awareness that Christ in me is the hope of glory, and that He wants to lead us. That He said, “Come and follow Me,”without saying what Paul said. Lord, what would You have Me to do if You just live Your life without factoring Christ into the equation of life? Then demand is always going to exceed supply, just like it did there, and your cry is going to be, “Not enough.”
On this hillside, there was a need for which there was no apparent supply. Demand was exceeding supply. Some of you are sitting in this room today. You have a need, and there’s no apparent supply. Maybe it’s money, maybe it’s friendships, maybe it’s something. But many of us are here this morning, and we’re sitting on the side of our own hillside. There’s a demand in life. Maybe we haven’t factored Christ into the equation of that experience, but we have a demand for which there is no apparent supply.
So what do we try to do? We try to fill this void of life with all these other things. I was a pastor for decades. I remember down in Fort Lauderdale one time talking to a man, father, a husband, who was addicted to pornography. I’ll never forget what he told me. He was confessing it to me. He was telling me about it. He was wanting deliverance from it, and a I said, “Well, well, how much is enough of that stuff?” And you know what his answer was? “Just a little bit more.”
Just a little more. Just another click. Just a little bit more. Whatever it is that we try to fill the void of life with, without Christ factored in the equation, the cry is going to be, “Not enough.” Just a little bit more. How much recognition is enough? Some people try to fill the void of life with recognition. Pat on the back, attaboy, some more praise. How much recognition is enough? You know, just a little bit more, just a little more applause, just a little bit more. Say, “Oh, that was a great sermon, preacher.” Just a little bit more, another pat on the back, another attaboy. You see, if you try to fill this void of life with anything else besides Him, your cry is going to be not enough.
I know people that try to fill that void of life with money, who have large amounts of money in stock portfolios, and you know every night they look at their portfolio, and they may have made a lot of money that day. But you know what they say before they close that computer? I wish I’d made just a little bit more. Just, just a little bit more. Just a little more is what is said on so many other things. You know, some people try to fill the void of life with Amazon same day delivery. I live with somebody Like that, and you know how much is enough to order on Amazon? You know what the answer is? Just a little bit more, just another pair of shoes, just another little thing. Free, it’s free, free delivery. When you try to fill the void of life with anything besides Him, your cry is always going to be, “not enough.”
Now, there are three groups that take center stage in John chapter six. First of all, there’s the crowd. Then there’s the disciples come on center stage for a while, and then there’s this little lad with a little lunch that comes on stage. So, what was going on with each of these groups?
First of all, look at that crowd. You see, that crowd got into their circumstances, situation, because they had no sense of planning. They had no sense of planning. They had gotten out there away from the away from the from home, not made preparation, had no plans for doing. Their kids went out crying. They were hungry. They were thirsty, and they got out there away because they had no sense of planning. They didn’t think ahead. They had a problem. They were hungry. Do you know that Jesus in the Bible never performed a miracle that didn’t begin at the platform of a problem? Everybody he healed had a problem. Every miracle he performed was because somebody had a problem.
Some of you here today with something you may think is insurmountable in your life, a problem. What it really is is an opportunity for God to get involved in your life, for God to perform a miracle in your life. Do you know that sometimes a problem is nothing more than an indication from God that He has a blessing for you that you’ve been too blind to ask Him for, so that circumstance came along to get you to the place where you’d ask Him to give you what He’s been wanting to give you all along.
Did you write that down? Now I can’t repeat it, so don’t even try.
But Jesus never performed a miracle that didn’t begin at the platform of a problem. Look down at verse 14, what we read a moment ago. When the people saw the sign that he had done, when you take when you take Greek, you’re going to understand that that word for sign there means a sign with or something beyond it besides the multiplication of the loaves, besides the miracle. This was a sign with significance. This was a miracle with a message behind it.
Do you think Jesus performed that miracle because those folks were hungry and needed to eat something? Some of you are going to eat lunch. You know what’s going to happen about 6 o’clock this afternoon? You’re going to be hungry again, aren’t you? That wasn’t going to solve anything. He didn’t perform this miracle on a Galilean hillside to feed some hungry people. This was a miracle with a message for you. This was recorded for all posterity by the Holy Spirit for you, because it is a sign with significance.
Maybe you find yourself in a certain circumstance and situation like this crowd. You got there because you just had no sense of planning, and your cry is, “Not enough.” I hadn’t put Christ into this.
Well, look at the disciples. Now the disciples’ issue was this: they had no sense of purpose. Think of everything they had already seen, and yet they didn’t see a purpose in what was taking place there. They were blind to it. Even though he was with them, they didn’t factor Christ into the equation. They should have said, “Man, I don’t know what we’re going to do,” when he said, “What are we going to do?” They should have said, “I don’t know what we’re going to do. I saw you turn water into wine. I saw you raise the dead. I’ve seen you walk on water. I’ve seen you do all these things. I don’t know, but it’s not going to be any problem for you.”
But like some of us, they never factored Christ into the equation of life. They had no sense of purpose. In verse six, it says Jesus asked them this: “What are we going to do to feed these people?” He didn’t need their information. It says he asked them that to test them, and then he said because he already knew what he was going to do. He already knew what he’s going to do.
Read your New Testament till you’re blue in the face, and you will never come across a time in the Gospels where Jesus came upon a situation and said, “Whoa, that was a surprise.” Then never going to happen. He’s never came across a situation said, “Whoa, where’d that come? That came out of left field. I didn’t see that one coming.” No, because like here, he always knew what he was going to do. He said this to test them, so Philip spoke up.
Philip said, “Lord, if we had 200 denarii—” that’s one day’s wages was a denarii in that world. Take off the weekends and the holidays. So this is about a year’s salary. Philip said, “Lord, if we had a year’s salary, we wouldn’t have enough money to buy bread for all these people to eat.” You see, Philip had a cash register for mind. His first thought was not the glory of God. His first thought was not, “What’s he going to do now?” His first thought was this: How much you gonna cost?
Now I want to tell you something. You go out there in the pastorate. I don’t care how many deacons you have in your church. One of them’s gonna be named Phillip. Because about the time you get a vision from God and you’re so excited about coming back and doing something for God, and you come in, there’s gonna be some deacon saying, “Well, how much is that going to cost, Pastor? If we had a year’s salary worth of people we couldn’t do that.”
Give Philip an F; he flunks. Well, Andrew comes up now. Andrew is my favorite disciple because he only has center stage three times in the Bible, and you know what Andrew’s doing every time? He’s bringing somebody to Jesus. He’s bringing, first in John one. What did he do? The first thing he did was go out and find his own brother, tell him about Jesus. He sought him and he brought him and he brought him to Jesus. Here in John six, he’s bringing a little lad with fish. He’s bringing him to Jesus. Later, we’ll see some inquiring Greeks come into the presence of God. He’ll bring them into the presence. Every time Andrew is mentioned in Scripture he’s bringing somebody to Jesus.
So Andrew comes up and look what he says. He said, “Lord, there’s a there’s a lad here who’s got five barley loaves and two small fish.” Man, he’s doing good. “But, what are they among so many?” You ever known anybody like that? You’re in a conversation where you think, “Boy, this is going good. They’re about to say something really funny,” but give Andrew an F. He flunked also. Jesus was testing them, hoping they would say, “We don’t know, Lord, but we know when you are factored in the equation of life, nothing is too hard for you.”
Philip and Andrew are still around today, always looking over the scene for human solutions to divine issues and challenges. Well, there’s one other person has center stage here. It’s a little boy. It’s a lad, verse nine, with a little sack lunch. Now his wasn’t a problem. It wasn’t that he had no sense of planning. He brought his lunch. Listen, he had no sense of potential. That little boy. I want you to think about something. That little boy left home that morning with the potential to feed 1000s of people in that little sack lunch, and he didn’t even know it. He wasn’t even aware of it.
When I hear that, I think about you.
Some of you who got up this morning, got dressed, came to school, went to class, came in here and sat down in this chapel with the potential to do something so glorious for God, and you don’t even know it. You’ve never even thought about it. You’re like a little lad with a little lunch. It’s not the size of your lunch that matters. It’s what you do with it. It’s who has it. It’s not your ability. It’s your availability. There are 1000s of people who’ve sat in this room before you across this 100 plus years. Some with incredible ability, but they didn’t have any availability, and God was never able to use them.
There are others who came in here, and they didn’t have a lot of ability. You go through preaching lab, you’d think, well, that that guy’s not going to make it. But they were available. They gave Jesus their lunch, and they went out and did great things for God. Listen, if you live your life without Christ factored in the equation of life, demand is going to exceed supply, and your cry is going to be, “Not enough.” Just not enough. It’s just never enough.
But I want you to see what happens.
The last part of our text, when Christ gets into it, when we bring Him into the equation of our life, when we factor Him into the experience of our life, when Christ comes in, then what happens? Supply exceeds demand.
With Christ, supply always exceeds demand, and the cry is, “More than enough.” You see what happened when Christ got into it. The supply exceeded the demand. It’s a miracle. Always, when Christ is factored in the equation of your life, your cry is, “More than enough.” Now, how did it happen?
First of all, I want you to see the boy gave. He didn’t have to, but he did. The boy gave his lunch. He could have clutched that brown paper sack. Said, “God, no, Lord, you’re not going to get my lunch. Not me. I made plans.” He didn’t. He planted a seed that day, and he gave. But secondly, I want you to see something else. The boy gave all. Jesus could have performed that with one loaf and one fish, but that little boy gave his whole lunch to Jesus. He gave all, and that exchange between that little lad and our Lord tapped the eternal riches of heaven and brought them right down here into the bankrupt affairs of men.
Give him your lunch. Stop clutching onto your paper sack. You came in here today with the potential to feed 1000s of people, and some of you, like him, didn’t even know it. But there’s more. There’s a third thing. He gave. He gave all, and guess what? He got to give again. He gave again. They all ate. They all ate until full. They passed the plates. He was sitting out there with them, and he never gave anything and lost it. Nor do we. He got to give again.
Note what verse 12 says. A blessing, and now everybody, because Christ was factored in, everybody got blessed, and everybody became a blessing, and everybody started giving and giving and giving. Listen, the Lord Jesus in this story wants you to know. Listen to what He said: “Pick up those leftover fragments that remain, so that nothing is lost.” In fact, it specifically says he said to the disciples, “Pick up the pieces, so that nothing be lost.”
That word is sometimes translated “wasted,” as it was in the translation we read a moment ago. In my English Standard Version, it’s translated lost. It’s the same word also that’s translated in in Matthew nine of the of the wineskins that were ruined. Another place in the Bible, it’s translated “spoiled.” Another place, it’s translated in John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, He gave His only son, that whoever believed Him should not perish.” Jesus is telling us here that He’s still in the business of picking up the pieces of lost, Wasted, ruined, spoiled, perishing lives, and using them again.
And he didn’t pick up those pieces. He says he said to the disciples, pick up those pieces, that’s what he called you and me today. With those around us, those people we come in contact with every day, who are lost, who’ve wasted their life, who’ve ruined their lives, who spoil their relationships, who are perishing, and pick up the pieces. Oh, the potential that’s in you to do that today, of lost, wasted, ruined lives. He’s gathering the pieces today, and listen. It’s not the size of your lunch that matters; it’s who possesses it. It’s not your ability; it’s your availability to God.
So, would you start factoring Christ into the equation? Would you give Him your lunch today? Some of you came into this room today with the potential to go out from this place and make an incredible difference in the world, picking up the pieces, and you don’t even know it. Awaken to that fact today, and as long as you live your life without bringing Christ into the equation of life, as long as you do that, your cry is going to be, “Not enough.” Demand is always going to exceed supply. You’re never going to be satisfied.
I don’t care how many degrees you get, but when you start putting Christ into the center, factoring Christ into your decision making, factoring Christ into every equation of your life, you will live your life, and supply will always exceed demand, and your cry will be what theirs was: “More than enough.” It’s not the size of your lunch; it’s who possesses it. Give your lunch to Jesus. He’ll make something beautiful of your life. He first saw Simon Peter, and he said, “You’re a little bitty pebble, but you’re going to be a great rock.” He didn’t see him for what he was; he saw him for the potential that was in his life. And when he looks at us this morning, in this first week of school, he doesn’t see you for what you are right now. Our Lord, looks at you and sees what you can do for him. Don’t leave home with the potential to do great things for God and not know it. It’s not your ability; it’s your availability. Give Him your lunch.
