My greatest problem as a disciple is thinking naturally. I am bent that way from birth, and all my education reinforces it. But, Lord, how ceaselessly You try to teach me to think spiritually!
How many loaves of bread does it take to feed a hundred men? Twenty, of course (2 Kings 4:42–44). How many loaves of bread does it take to feed five thousand men plus others? Five, of course (John 6:9). But the answer does not lie in the amount of bread but in the amount of stretching it takes to get the crowd fed. God is the great stretcher who takes our meager gifts and makes them reach the maximum. That is why when I was a student and my income was meager, my needs were met. Now that I am older and my income is much larger, my needs are still being met. If I gather too much I have no surplus, and if I gather little I still suffer no lack (Exodus 16:18), This is because God operates on spiritual laws, not mathematical, and He tries to get me to think on those same higher laws. I look at the scarcity; God looks at the oversufficiency.
I look at the usual, the customary, while God looks at the miraculous. If I sit down and count the cost, I will never reach the correct figure. If I wait until the moment is ripe, it never will be! If I expand only to the limits of the known, I will fail. God wants me to “launch out into the deep,” where I am abandoned to the laws of the spiritual. He wants me free enough from the restraints of the natural to enable Him to deal with me from His vantage point, the reservoir of the spiritual where there is never a lack or a shortfall. This is the God who challenges (and comforts) me with that easiest of all questions: “Is any thing too difficult for the Lord?” (Genesis 18:14).
“Now to Him who is able to do exceeding abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us” (Ephesians 3:20).
Daily with the King 