I am not a politician, yet I love politics; governmental politics, that is, not church politics. I love political campaigns, and so, like a lot of Americans, I’ve been paying close attention to this year’s contest for the White House. As one candidate put it, this is “the silly season” of American politics. The entire nation has been caught in the clutches of the campaign season, intrigued by the ups and downs, the unpredictability, the energy, and the excitement of the race this year for the presidency of the United States of America.

Earlier this primary season, one of the candidates, whose name I will not mention, was encouraged to drop out of the race because he was so woefully behind in the delegate count that the odds of him ever catching up with the front runner were slim. The candidate, however, slugged on, stubbornly refusing to drop out until, he said, he was mathematically ruled out. Pressed to give a reason as to why he would not quit the race, he stated that in Seminary (there’s a clue as to who I’m talking about) he had majored not in math but in miracles and that he still believed in miracles. Today, he’s no longer in the race. The math did catch up with him.

Math or miracles. As a church leader, which do you put more stock in? When the numbers don’t quite add up, do you go with the math and quit, or do you press on, praying for a miracle? When the odds are against you, when the chances of success are slim, what do you do? I believe the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000 with a miserable meal of a few loaves and a couple of fishes is a word for church leaders today who may sometimes wonder what to do when the odds say no. The title of our message is, “Against All Odds.” Let us pray.

A defining feature of the ministry of Jesus was his people-pulling prowess or power. Even a cursory reading of the gospels reveals that wherever Jesus went, huge crowds flocked to Him. “Yet the news about him spread all the more, so that crowds of people came to hear him and to be healed of their sicknesses” (Luke 5:15). The Messiah was a magnet for the multitudes.

The reasons why a parade of people often followed Jesus are many and varied. On the one hand, people flocked to Jesus because of the love and compassion He showed them. In setting people free from the thralldom of sin, and in entertaining and welcoming their company, Jesus consistently demonstrated an unconditional love, a love that was as irresistible as it was powerful. On the other hand, there were those who followed Jesus because of the miraculous feats He performed, as well as some who followed Him because they simply wanted to check him out. Issue may be made concerning the reasons people thronged to Jesus, but not with the fact that they did. Jesus drew people toward Him.

In our passage of Scripture for today, we find a crowd pursuing Jesus yet again. After a day of mission and ministry, Jesus and his disciples had attempted to get some much-needed rest by retiring to the eastern, north-eastern side of the Sea of Tiberias, to an area near Bethsaida. Truly, Jesus was one with us, verily God as though He were not man, and verily man as though he were not God. As man, Jesus needed rest and refreshment and respite. On this occasion the people, their numbers swollen by a Passover caravan, followed, yea pursued, Jesus This seemingly insensitive pursuit of Jesus did not turn Jesus off, for as Jesus beheld the people picking their way up the hill, as He watched mothers with babies in their arms and with children clinging to their clothes, His first thought was of the people’s welfare, their physical welfare. Ellen G. White, picking up on an insight of Mark’s rendering of this incident, says the people who pursued Jesus were like sheep without a shepherd.

Do I need to interject here that people still need the Lord? Do I need to say that in spite of what the pundits and the pollsters are saying, there is still a hunger and a thirst for righteousness in our world? And do I need to say that Jesus is still the hope of the world?

        According to Matthew’s account of the incident, after Jesus had ministered to the spiritual needs of the crowd, the disciples of Jesus wanted to send the people away. In so doing, the disciples represent those of us who are comfortable with the masses as long as the people do not get into our pocketbooks or inconvenience us. Give them good theology, give them solid, sound doctrine, give them the fundamentals, give them good teaching, but when it comes to advancing and responding to their physical and social needs, “Lord, send them away.”

Jesus would not send the people away. One of the laudable characteristics of our Lord is that He took, and continues to take, a deep and abiding interest in all the affairs of our lives. Because He cares about our physical as well as our spiritual needs, Jesus would not send the people away with empty stomachs. As often as He could, Jesus addressed the physical needs of people while He was here on earth. His was a wholistic ministry. And so, turning to Philip, perhaps because Philip was from that region, Jesus asked about food for the crowd. Scorning, or perhaps sadly blind to the resources and power of Jesus, Philip cast his eyes over the crowd and concluded that half a year’s wages could not buy enough food to assuage the hunger of the crowd. I like the way the Living Bible renders Philip’s response. “It would cost a fortune to begin to do it.” Elsewhere, his response reads, “It would take a small fortune.”

Philip was one who could process quickly on his feet. He was a statistical genius with the ability to do the math in a second. Can you hear the numbers clicking in his head? And he comes up with an answer that, according to the laws of mathematics, says that the feat is improbable, if not impossible. Notice, though, that he does not necessarily give the wrong answer. No, no. Philip answers the wrong question? You see, Jesus asked, “Where do we go?” The answer Philip gives is to the “How much?” question. He got it wrong. And I’m constrained to ask, “Are we ever guilty of answering questions people aren’t asking?” Do we ever scratch where people aren’t itching?

Relax: Jesus is Only Testing You

What do you, as a church leader, do when the odds say no? First, you relax because Jesus is only testing you. In the narrative, we are told that the question was posed by Jesus to test Philip. Jesus already knew what He was going to do. He knew, and He knows. That’s a word of hope for somebody this morning. Jesus had a plan the disciples knew nothing of.

Obviously, Jesus asked the question not out of ignorance. We need to understand that Jesus asks questions not so that we may inform Him, for He knows everything. Jesus asks to make us more aware of His knowledge and power. “Adam, where art thou?” “Cain, where is your brother?” “Isaiah, whom shall I send and who will go for us?” “Son of Man, can these bones live?” “Elizabeth, is there anything too hard for the Lord?” In each case God already knew the answer. And so these questions were not for God’s benefit. The questions were to prove the one to whom the question was addressed.

If Philip had prayerfully focused on the question, “Where shall we buy bread for these people?”, maybe he would have answered the way Simon Peter did later in this chapter. Responding to Jesus’ query, “Will ye also go away?”, Simon Peter replied: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). Five chapters earlier, in John 1, Philip finds Nathaniel and tells him about Jesus. When Nathaniel learns that Jesus is from Nazareth, he asks, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”, to which Philip responds, “Come and see.” On that mountainside, though, Philip is crunching the numbers. Philip recognized how humanly impossible the challenge before them was.

2000 years later, it’s easy to pass judgement on Philip. It’s easy for us to say, “If it were me, I would have acted differently.” But there is a lot of Philip in most of us. Whenever we say things like, “We can’t do this. I don’t know; it seems so impossible. Do you have any idea how much that would cost?” we’re being like Philip. And like Philip, we must learn that ministry is not just about numbers. More than anything else, it is about God and putting our faith in God.

George Knight says that “the worse thing that ever happened to Adventists was learning how to count.” He continues, “We count numbers, churches, institutions, money, and everything else. While numbers may have their place, they have very little to do with the reality of a finished work.” (Adventist Review, January 2001, 13). (Though used in a different context, the words apply here.)

We are numbed by numbers. We are in a stupor over statistics. We are overwhelmed by the odds. Our resources are meager, paltry, inconsequential, insignificant. Many of us have succumbed to what the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the paralysis of analysis.”

Take, for example, the challenge of reaching Muslims. Some of us have been stumped by the enormity of the task. In our world today, there are over a billion people who call themselves Muslims. Think about it. One sixth of humanity is Muslim, and Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the West. They tell me that if the growth rate continues, soon there’ll be more Muslims in the United States than Jews and Presbyterians. How do we reach these people?

Reaching Muslims is not our only challenge. In late February of this year, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released the findings of its survey of 35,000 American adults. The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey shows that even though 82% of Americans claim religion is either somewhat or very important in their lives, Protestantism is about to become a minority in America and the fastest growing religious group in America is the “nones.” (“Nones” are people with no religious affiliation, though they are by no means not religious.) According to USA Today, “The story behind the numbers of this latest survey is not that religion is in trouble. It is that religion is morphing into something new. Faith is becoming more political. But it is becoming more personal at the same time.” (USA Today, Monday, March 10, 2008, 11A).

May I interject here, that in the reckoning of humankind, there’s always a deficit. The earthly mind always miscalculates. The carnal mind finds it difficult to move beyond the seen, the heard, the felt, and the experienced. Being humans, we have a tendency to misjudge, to focus on the liabilities, not the assets.

Release: Jesus Needs What You Have

What else do you do when the odds say no. First you relax, because it’s only a test. Next, you release, because Jesus needs what you have. What we have, is what He needs.

In the biblical story, Andrew, the other disciple from Bethsaida, found a boy with a packed lunch whom he brought to Christ. You’ve got to like Andrew. He was always bringing people to Jesus. First, he brought his own brother. Here, he brings the boy to Jesus. Later, he would bring some Greeks to Jesus. He was always finding and bringing people to Jesus. I find it interesting that Andrew did not take away the boy’s lunch and bring it to Jesus. No, he brought the boy with the lunch to Jesus. “There’s a lad here with five loaves and two fishes.” There’s a lad here. One person, but he’s a child. Five loaves, but they’re of barley, the fare of the poor. Two fishes, but they’re small.

Five loaves. They were not your top-of-the-line variety. They were barley loaves, of the cheapest kind. Barley was the staple of the poor. And the fishes? Matthew, Mark and Luke say fish, but John uses a word that would be better translated relish. The fishes weren’t tuna or salmon. They were more like dried, salted, and pickled sardines. The boy’s lunch wasn’t much in terms of quantity or quality. It wasn’t much. It wasn’t fare you would want to see at the church’s fellowship meal. Small wonder Andrew asked, “But what are these among so many?”

Once again, the wrong issue is being addressed; the wrong question is being answered. Jesus had not asked, “What do we have?” He had asked, “Where?” And even if Jesus had asked, “What do we have?” the issue still would not have been “What do I have?” The issue would have been, “Is God in it? Is God in this situation? Is God in my plans? Is God in my actions?”

The statements of Philip and Andrew say that as far as they were concerned the task they were facing was humanly impossible. In their defense, we have so say that at least they had a handle on the gravity of the situation. The prospects of success were slim. Yet, had they not already seen the mighty power of Christ at work? Had they not already begun to experience His grace? They were right. The task was humanly impossible. Yet, God’s not human.

Why must we release what we have to Jesus? Because Jesus needs what we have. Because ministry is a partnership with God. Because without God, we can do nothing. Because in mission and ministry, we are nothing but links in the chain, the weakest links, I might add.

Releasing what we have into the hands of Jesus means more that turning over to Him our meagerness, our littleness, our insignificance. It also means turning over to Jesus our plans, our goals, and our objectives. Plans that never reach the lap of Jesus, plans that are never prayed over by Christ, plans that are never broken by Him will never multiply. Such plans will never meet the needs of the multitudes, the needs of the hour. Such plans are destined to come up short.

But it takes faith and trust to let go and let God, doesn’t it? The human spirit wants so very much to remain in control. How we like to hold on to what we have, especially if it isn’t much? Seems like the more paltry our supply, the greater our desire not to let it go. Some of us may even believe that what we release will be lost. May I remind you of what Martin Luther, the German reformer, is reported to have said on one occasion? “I have held many things in my hand, and I lost them all. But those things which I place in the hands of God I still possess.”

Rely: Jesus is About to Perform a Miracle

The third thing you do when the odds say no is you rely. You rely on Jesus, because Jesus has a miracle waiting. You rely on Jesus; because it’s all about JESUS.

The time for the demonstration of the supernatural ability of Jesus had arrived. Have you noticed that Jesus was calm and composed. Why? “He already had in mind what he was going to do” (John 6:6). “For I know the plans I have for you, plans for your welfare and not for calamity, to give you a future and a hope.” Jesus commanded the disciples to arrange the whole crowd into groups of hundreds and fifties. Taking the loaves and fishes in His hands, Christ first gave thanks, then broke the loaves and fishes. Afterwards, through His disciples, He distributed the food to the multitude. You know the story. The people ate to their heart’s content, and of the fragments, they picked up 12 baskets full.

However many know that whenever Jesus provides, He does not offer limited quantities. That whenever Jesus performs a miracle, He goes all the way. That whenever Jesus meets our needs, He often provides a surplus. Anne Johnson Flint wrote, “When we reach the end of our hoarded resources, our Father’s full giving is only begun.” That with Jesus it is usually a gush of blessings, seldom a spigot of stinginess or scarcity.

What are these among so many? Our world is denied miracle after miracle and triumph after triumph because so often we refuse or fail to bring to Jesus what we have and who we are. We think that what we have is not much. Allow me to say this. When the world presents itself with a myriad of needs, our part in meeting those needs is giving our all; Jesus’s part is taking what we offer and working miracles with it so as to meet the needs of the hour. I would remind you that we’re condemned not for having one talent, but for hiding it. The one talent, brought to God in utter consecration, will multiply.

What are these among so many? Often, we underestimate what we have in our possession. We compare what we have against the vastness of the clamoring throng. We compare what we have to what other denominations have. They have more money. They have bigger budgets. They have more people resources. They have more equipment/technology. They have greater know-how, etc. We don’t have enough. Yet we have. We have the truth. We have the Sabbath. We have the gift of the Holy Spirit. We have a worldwide brotherhood.      In a sense, we’ve come a long way. We’ve grown from a small, disparate group of homogenous individuals from the northeastern United States to an almost 20 million world-wide group of heterogenous people. We have grown and we have increased in goods, and I say that in all humility. And yes, we have Jesus. And when Jesus is all you have, Jesus is all you need.           We shall overcome against all odds. This church militant will become the church triumphant. And to say that we shall ultimately succeed is not to embrace or give in to a vain triumphalism that negates or nullifies nagging negatives. It is, rather, to lay hold on the promises of God, the power of God, and the presence of God. You see, our triumph will be due not to who we are, not to what we have, but because of Jesus, His intervention, and His miracle-working power. You see, in the end, even our best is but a remnant. In the end, it will be divine intervention that will make the difference.

What are these among so many? I would remind you that Jesus said that the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that grows. “Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree” (Matt. 13:32). What are these among so many? I would remind you that it was little David armed with nothing but a slingshot and five small stones that felled massive Goliath. (See 1 Sam. 17). What are these among so many? I would remind you that it was a little stone that struck the feet of the huge and imposing image that Nebuchadnezzar saw in vision. (See Daniel 2). What are these among so many? I would remind you that Jesus was born in the little town of Bethlehem, in fulfillment of the prophecy of Micah. “But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel.” (See Micah 5:2). What are these among so many? I would remind you that the apostle Paul said, “But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things–and the things that are not–to nullify the things that are”(1 Cor. 1:27-28). What are these among so many? I would inform you that the hope of the world lies in the wonderful power of God to multiply the little things that we have and use them for His purpose.

Ellen G. White says, “In our work for God there is danger of relying too largely upon what man with his talents and ability can do. Thus we lose sight of the one Master Worker. Too often the worker for Christ fails to realize his personal responsibility. He is in danger of shifting his burden upon organizations, instead of relying upon Him who is the source of all strength. It is a great mistake to trust in human wisdom or numbers in the work of God. . . . The means in our possession may not seem to be sufficient for the work; but if we will move forward in faith, believing in the all-sufficient power of God, abundant resources will open before us. . . . The little that is wisely and economically used in the service of the Lord of heaven will increase in the very act of imparting.” (The Desire of Ages, pp. 370-371).

What are these among so many? I can imagine Jesus saying, “We’ve got five loaves and two fishes. That’s more than I started this world with.”

*          I didn’t have anything when I called the world into existence. I started with nothing.

*          I didn’t have anything when I called forth light out of darkness. I started with nothing.

*          I didn’t have dirt when I heaped up the mountains and chiseled in the valleys. I started with nothing.

*          I didn’t have a seed when I spoke the trees into existence. I started with nothing.

*          I didn’t have a drop of water when I spat the oceans and springs and oceans. I started with nothing.

*          I didn’t even have a bone when I formed and shaped man. I started with nothing.

*          If we have some loaves and a couple of fishes, we have more than I need to start.

So Give me what you have. And that is the call of Jesus today. Give me what you have and I will bless it and break it and multiply it.

*          Give me your time and I will change it into opportunity.

*          Give me your opportunity and I will change it into purpose.

*          Give me your purpose and I will change it into service.

*          Give me your service and I will change it into mission.

*          Give me your mission and I will change it into achievement.

*          Give me your achievement and I change it into community outreach.

*          Give me your community outreach and I change it into a church.

*          Give me your church and I will change it into worship.

*          Give me your worship and I will change it into praise.

*          Give me your praise and I will change it into life and love.

Let us remember that with God in the equation, little things have accomplished huge feats. In His hands, little becomes much.

*          In His hands, the ordinary becomes extraordinary

*          In His hands, the sorry becomes significant

*          In His hands, the paltry and becomes substantial

*          In His hands, the puny becomes plentiful

*          In His hands, scarcity becomes abundance,

*          In His hands, the meager becomes magnificent.