Use What's in Your Hand

This past Sunday I shared one of the things I learned at the Pastors Conference: a metaphor about how worship leaders are like the Sno-cone man, they bring sweet things and everyone loves them!  All humor aside, we did learn quite a lot at the conference.  One of the neat things I heard was:

Use whats in your hand.

Often we look at others, the gifts they have, the resources they have, and we think "I could be successful if I had that..."  While that might be true, the fact is that if God wanted you to have that gift/ability/resource, He would have given it to you!   See, God often uses what we perceive to be a lack of gift/ability/resources to a way to grow our faith, and glorify Him.

In John 6, Jesus is being pursued by the masses who were following Him.  He climbed to the top of a hill, and asked John how they could get bread to feed all those people.  John's response was practical, "Even if we worked for months we wouldn't have enough money to feed all these people."  True, but what John didn't count on was the "God Factor." Some kid comes up and says "Hey, I have a few fish and some bread," so Jesus takes that small amount of food, and uses it to feed five thousand people. In other words, that kid offered what was in his hand, and when Jesus got involved, it was enough!

Sometimes I feel like John, "Lord if we only had more money, or a bigger building, etc, etc, we could be more successful!"  But I am now reminded that God doesn't need any of those things, all we have to do is take what's in our hand, offer it to the Lord, and let Him multiply it - it will be enough!  And when the work is successful, what happens?  My faith is increased, and God is glorified.

Pastor Clay