Psalm 23; Mark 6:30-44
May 28, 2017
preached by Doug Cooper
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Time of Reflection Quotations

“God never pursues His glory at the expense of the good of His people, nor does He ever seek our good at the expense of His glory. He has designed His eternal purpose so that His glory and our good are inextricably bound together. What comfort and encouragement this should be to us. If we are going to learn to trust God in adversity, we must believe that just as certainly as God will allow nothing to subvert His glory, so He will allow nothing to spoil the good He is working out in us and for us.”

~ Jerry Bridges (1929-2016), Christian author and speaker

“Glory is the beauty of God unveiled! Glory is the resplendent radiance of His power and His personality. Glory is all of God that makes God, God, and shows Him to be worthy of our praise and our boasting and our trust and our hope and our confidence and our joy! Glory is the external elegance of the internal excellencies of God. Glory is what you see and experience and feel when God goes public with His beauty!”

~ Sam Storms (1951-present), current pastor and author

“Feelings of anxiety are closely connected to an inability to handle uncertainty. What might make human beings less anxious, it seems, is having a firmer sense of what in the world is happening and what’s likely to happen next. We seem temporarily short on both.”

~ Nitsuh Abebe, journalist; an excerpt from New York Times article “America’s New ‘Anxiety’ Disorder”

“The past holds for him no missed opportunity. The present holds for him no anxiety. The future holds for him no uncertainty. He was, and is, and is to come.”

“The truth of God’s limitless power would be absolutely terrifying were it not paired with the truth of his limitless goodness.”

~ Jen Wilkin (1969-present), Christian author and speaker

“God can give us nothing greater than Himself in all His glory, so it’s to our advantage for God to glorify Himself above all.”

~ Donald S. Whitney, author and professor of Biblical Spirituality

Sermon Passage

Psalm 23

¹   The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing. ²   He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, ³   he refreshes my soul. He guides me along the right paths for his name’s sake. ⁴ Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. ⁵ You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. ⁶  Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Mark 6

³⁰ The apostles gathered around Jesus and reported to him all they had done and taught. ³¹ Then, because so many people were coming and going that they did not even have a chance to eat, he said to them, “Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.”

³² So they went away by themselves in a boat to a solitary place. ³³ But many who saw them leaving recognized them and ran on foot from all the towns and got there ahead of them. ³⁴ When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd. So he began teaching them many things.

³⁵ By this time it was late in the day, so his disciples came to him. “This is a remote place,” they said, “and it’s already very late. ³⁶ Send the people away so that they can go to the surrounding countryside and villages and buy themselves something to eat.”

³⁷ But he answered, “You give them something to eat.”

They said to him, “That would take more than half a year’s wages! Are we to go and spend that much on bread and give it to them to eat?”

³⁸ “How many loaves do you have?” he asked. “Go and see.”

When they found out, they said, “Five—and two fish.”

³⁹ Then Jesus directed them to have all the people sit down in groups on the green grass.⁴⁰ So they sat down in groups of hundreds and fifties. ⁴¹ Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to his disciples to distribute to the people. He also divided the two fish among them all. ⁴² They all ate and were satisfied, ⁴³ and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces of bread and fish. ⁴⁴ The number of the men who had eaten was five thousand.