Today, here where I live it is ‘Australia Day’ and I heard a great devotion this morning from a minister in Botswana (Africa) on the ‘Miracles in the Fragments’ taken from John 6:12 in the Bible. Encouraging us to step up with God this 2023 year and allow Him (our Heavenly Father) to take the fragments of our lives and by giving them to Him, seeing what miracles He will do with them – if we allow Him too!
12-13 When the people had eaten their fill, he said to his disciples, “Gather the leftovers so nothing is wasted.” They went to work and filled twelve large baskets with leftovers from the five barley loaves. – John 6:12-13 MSG
I was very encouraged by this but what he shared also got me thinking of the reason behind Jesus asking them to ‘gather the leftovers so nothing is wasted’.
In MacLaren’s Exposition (Concordance commentary) on this same verse, he shares….
…Jesus Christ always gets ready for His people something over and above the exact limits of their bare need at the moment, that He prepares for His poor and hungry dependants in royal fashion, leaving ever a wide margin of difference between what would be just enough to keep the life in them, and His liberal housekeeping…
…when we say that the abundance far beyond what the eaters could make use of at the moment really represented the large surplus of inexhaustible resources and unused grace which is treasured for us all in Christ Jesus…
…for He is ‘able to do exceeding abundantly above that which we ask or think,’ and neither our conceptions, nor our petitions, nor our present powers of receiving, are the real limits of the illimitable grace that is laid up for us in Christ…
Wow, if God is wanting us to grasp his abundance for us and what he has in store for us, how then can we get that TRUTH into us?
As mentioned above, today is a national public holiday here for us and in understanding what God prepares for us the writer from ‘MacLaren’s Exposition’ goes on to say…
…Oh, dear friends! what you and I have ever had and felt of Christ’s power, sweetness, preciousness, and love is as nothing compared with the infinite depths of all those which lie in Him.… all the present experience of all Christian people, of what Christ is, is like the experience of the first settlers in some great undiscovered continent; who timidly plant a little fringe of population round its edge and grow their scanty crops there, whilst the great prairies of miles and miles, with all their wealth and fertility, are lying untrodden and unknown in the heart of the untraversed continent….
... ‘Gather up the broken pieces’; and see that nothing of that infinite preciousness of His be lost by us…
Our country has had its turbulent ups and downs over its brief history (read my Australia Day Blog from 2021) but the name BEHIND our Country is even more astounding! The Great South Land of the Holy Spirit!
I do believe we were selected by God to be a nation set apart so that He could use us in his perfect time.
(1978) At sixteen, my family all flew to Perth for the first time for my brother’s wedding –
this is when I first fell in love with Western Australia! Also, when attending a
church meeting in the same year in NSW, there was a prophetic word given that
“God was going to move across our nation in a sovereign wave of revival, starting
from the bottom left-hand corner.” Which, of course, is Perth, in WA, so from then
on, I was going to do everything possible to be a part of what God had planned for
sure!
Extract from ‘Door of Hope’ by Kim Stanfield
If the Lord is then encouraging us to step forward this year, and give to him the fragments (leftovers) of what we still have available for him to use – then I am going to do that with as much enthusiasm as I can muster and hand it all over to be part of what God has in store for us/me this year!
Come join me 😊