The New Testament Class

Golden Delicious is taking a New Testament class down at BYU this spring.  As part of her assignment she has to write what she's learning to someone.  So often she writes me a note telling me what she learned that day.  I particularly loved this one:

"Mom-

Today in New Testament we talked about Jesus walking on water, feeding the five thousand, and the bread of life sermon.  I found all of these stories super interesting because they all have super relevant applications in the world today, but I want to talk a little about how people focused on faith in these stories and how they were rewarded for it.  When Jesus feeds the 5000, no one has brought bread and he initially just asks Phillip (?) to feed the people.  There is no way that they’ll have enough money to get that much bread, so eventually Jesus asks what they have.  After searching through all the 5000 people, the apostles find one “lad” who has 5 loaves and 2 fishes.  He was the only one in the crowd who was smart enough to bring something to eat, so I can only imagine what I would’ve thought if I were in his place and the apostles came and asked me to give up my food.  My initial thought would have been something along the lines of “heck no! I was the only one prepared here and I’m not about to give up my meal so that two or three of these 5000 people can have a morsel too.  That’s crazy.”  The cool thing is that the lad gives up everything he has without questioning much.  All of the items together make up 7, a perfect offering.  The lad on his own couldn’t have even dreamed of feeding the 5000 with what he had.  But he was willing to give everything he had to the Lord, and the performed a miracle with it.  I like to think that the lad was able to go home with one or two of the baskets of leftover bread, too, leaving him with more than he started out with.  So often, the Lord works this way with us.  We are asked to give up what we think is all we have to accomplish a task that seems impossible and unrewarding, but in the end a miracle happens and we end up with more than we had in the first place.  I loved looking at it from the perspective of that lad’s faith and sacrifice. 

After Jesus feeds all the people, his popularity skyrockets for all the wrong reasons and we come to the bread of life sermon.  This greatly tested the faith of everyone in attendance, and a ton of people left Jesus because of it, because it essentially sounded like a speech on cannibalism.  So many people let the questions in their mind overpower the truth in their hearts, and they left the church because of it.  People still do that today.  What I love about this story is that Peter probably wondered at the sermon as much as anybody else, but when Jesus asks him if he is going to leave as well, this is his response: “Then Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.  And we believe and are sure that thou art that Christ, the Son of the living God.” (John 6:68-69).  The moral of the story is: Doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith."