“HOW MANY LOAVES HAVE YE?”
By L. A. Reed
When Christ asked for the loaves, though the disciples said, “What are they among so many?” yet, you will remember, they did not seek to retain the store. It was so small who would think of keeping it back? They gave, wondering what would come of it. But when God asks us for the little fragment of our lives, we not only say, “What is it against so much?” but worse, though it is too small a thing to refuse, yet we will not give it up. We will not let God have the soil in which to fructify the seed of his eternal word. “How many loaves have ye?” It was out of what was given to Christ that he made all that came afterward. And so it is out of your life and mine, given up to him, that he makes the all that is to be. While God’s work is a miracle, and all a miracle, yet there is part of the work God will not cover by miracle. For our sakes, he must have something to start with. He might make children of God, as John said, out of stones, but that would only leave us entirely out; and he will not do that. He loves us, and wants us in his great purpose. Our lives may be called nothing; but they are nothing only in the sense that, if selfishly retained, they will come to nothing. They are something in the same sense that soil is something—something to be turned into living fiber—something to be kindled with the energy of heaven—something to be transfigured and made radiant with the light of God. And God utterly refuses to work his great work until he has at least this much. This is the purpose of our being yielded up to him. For this, Christ hung between earth and heaven, that he might draw you and me to him, and win our submission. And this part God will not work miracles to cover. He may work miracles to get us to do it, but do it we must, before God begins his own exclusive work. Our lives are lost, they are miserable, insignificant, and utterly insufficient, yet they must be given up; and God must wait, and all heaven must wait, till we give them up. And now I come to the most serious truth of all. What we give to God determines what is to be. Had the disciples given the Lord a few baskets of grapes, it would have been grapes that, by miracle, were given to the people. But it was bread and fish that they gave Jesus, and so it was bread and fish that, by miracle, were given to the people; and it was fragments of bread and fish that at the last were gathered up—twelve baskets full. And this teaches a doctrine at once the most hopeless possible for the man determined to be a sinner, and also the most gloriously radiant with hope for the man set Godward. The young man, ignorant of the methods of God, is reckless of the future. He has heard something about a judgment, but that is far in the future, and between now and then he can change. So he reasons. A falling body from the sky accumulates momentum for every atom of space through which it falls, and at any moment its speed depends upon the occurrences of every moment that has gone before. So character perpetuates itself, and gathers momentum in whatever direction it is moving, gathers momentum from every moment of its past. When a man learns that every act has a tendency to repeat itself, and carry a man not only farther but faster in the chosen way,—I say, when a man learns this, he laughs no longer at the future, but takes life as the serious thing it is. Then it may be, seeing his insufficiency, he will give up to God. But even so what he gives determines what he is to be. There will be continuity through all. It was bread and fish that the disciples gave to Jesus; it was fish and bread that Jesus, looking up to heaven, blessed, and broke; it was fish and bread that was given to the disciples, and to the multitude; and it was fish and bread, or remnants of them, that were afterward collected into the baskets. So it is your life that you give to God, and it is your life that he blesses, and it is your life all the way that he makes radiant with his life. It was an act of Jacob’s that made him a fugitive from his father’s house, and wrought all the evil of his life. And it was out of this very act of Jacob’s that God wrought the greatest miracle of all his experience there by the brook Jabbok. Out of this act, overruled by the providence of God, Jacob became the Prevailer with God and man. God did not forget the past of Jacob’s life; God did not ignore it; he took it just as it was, and out of it made what was afterward. And what was afterward was determined, under God, by what had been.