Good Morning Everyone,
Our theme for this month: “The fear of not having enough”
Our Bible verse for today: “The Lord said to him, ‘Who made the human mouth? Who makes him mute or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go! I will help you speak and I will teach you what to say.” Exodus 4:11-12 (HCSB)
Our thought for today: “To accomplish His purposes in our lives God uses the capacity that is within us, but then He multiplies it.”
One of the most profound lessons we can draw from the story of the Loaves and Fish (which we have been considering the last two days), is that of “capacity”. Who would have guessed that those five small loaves of bread and those two fish had the potential capacity to feed twenty thousand people? Of course that capacity didn’t exist just within the five loaves and two fish alone, but when combined with what God wanted to add, their capacity multiplied exponentially.
We see a similar example in the story of Moses. At the time God called Moses to become the leader of the nation of Israel, and to lead them out of captivity in Egypt, Moses had been tending sheep in a remote corner of the desert for forty years. He had little confidence in himself as a leader of anything other than sheep, and evidently he was not a good public speaker either. That’s the argument he was making to God in Exodus chapter four, and that’s what God was responding to in verses 11-12. But when God took Moses’ limited abilities, and added His great capacity to it, the nation of Israel ended up with one of the greatest leaders in world history and they were brought out of captivity.
When God takes our limited capacity and combines it with His unlimited capacity, amazing things can happen. In his book, “The God Guarantee: Finding Freedom from the Fear of Not Having Enough” author Jack Alexander writes of how we as doubting humans tend to live in the land of “what is” rather than in the land of “what could be”. In the land of “what is” we, like Moses, consider what we believe ourselves to be capable of and then we proceed accordingly. But in the land of “what could be”, a person has learned to ask God to add His unlimited capacity to our limited abilities. When that happens, there’s no limit to what can be accomplished.
As Jack points out in his book, it’s easy for us to fall for Satan’s trap of limiting what we believe to be possible by basing our thinking on what we believe we are capable of accomplishing on our own. That’s the problem both Moses and Philip had.
It’s true that within each person God has created great capacity to accomplish wonderful things, but that capacity in and of itself is limited. However, God is also willing to add into the mix varying degrees of His capacity in order to accomplish His purposes in the life of each person. When that happens, there’s no limit to what can be accomplished.
Part of our task this month, as we continue to devotionally consider how we get over the fear of not having enough, will be to learn how to live in the land of “what could be”, if we would only rely on God, rather than in the land of “what is”, when we continue to rely on ourselves.
God Bless,
Pastor Jim
Oak Hill Baptist Church 