Matthew 15:32 …I will not send them away fasting.
Be Characterized by Jesus’ Nature
It is interesting to me that we each have a personality. We each have our own natures, and we seem to play our parts flawlessly and consistently. We can guess very accurately what people will do in any given situation because of their character, background, temperament, knowledge, and so on.
Winston Churchill once noted that it is easy to think in retrospect that you would go back and change something you have done if you could. But most of us, if we had the same conditions, knowledge, character, and situation as before, would probably do the same thing all over again. I am not saying we are stuck and can never improve. I am simply saying that we play our parts pretty consistently according to our own character.
That was true both of the disciples and of Jesus, and that is revealed in the story of the feeding of the 4,000. If you didn’t know any better, you would think that the Bible is telling the same story of the feeding of a hungry crowd found in Matthew 14, but it is not. The similarities are many. Both this story and the one found in Matthew 14 speak of Jesus having compassion on the multitude. Both stories are set in a wilderness. Both stories are of people with very limited food supplies. And, in both stories, Jesus multiplied what little food they had in order to feed a multitude!
I love what Jesus says. He said, “I will not send them away fasting.” That is the nature of God. God is not inclined to send anyone away hungry who has come to Him with a heart of acceptance. If I leave church and say, “I am not getting anything out of church anymore,” that is not God’s fault. It is the nature of God to not send you away fasting.
The disciples said, “How are we going to get food for all these people in the wilderness?” How could they have been there when Jesus fed 5,000 people and honestly ask this question of Jesus now? The answer is that we are not any different. They simply forgot what they had seen before. They were worried about the present because they had forgotten about what Jesus had done in the past.
The bottom line is that everyone repeats themselves according to their own natures. We repeat ourselves in our lack of faith, and God repeats Himself in His bounty of provision. Today, it is important to remember how God has taken care of us in the past! We need to be more characterized by Jesus’ nature than by our own. We need to be more dominated by Who Jesus is than who we tend to be: forgetful, impatient, and unfaithful.
The God Who has provided in the past is the God Who can provide tomorrow. We need to remember Who He is and what He has done, and we need to rest in Him and in His nature and character. He will not send anyone away fasting who comes to Him.