God Still Multiplies

But I am glad that you are all here today. I too love being on this staff. It is an amazing opportunity and amazing place to work. And this is a great church. I love this church so much. And I am really excited today to share with you some aha moments that I had over the last couple of weeks of my life. As with Mark and René, these are all fresh for us. You are getting us in the raw, kind of unedited version of our aha moments.

But as Mark said, a week ago yesterday I landed from some time in Amman, Jordan. And you might think, why in the world did you go to Amman, Jordan? The reason I went is that for some time now, I'm struggling with the best word. But I think the best word to describe it is I've just been disturbed by the refugee crisis that I see with Iraqi and Syrian refugees. Most of this has been precipitated by the rise of ISIS. I just wanted to know what can we do? What can I do? What can this church do? What can the church do to help these amazing people who are suffering so tremendously?

So our global outreach team here at the church was very gracious and said they would send me over there to visit with a couple that we have been working with in Jordan for 41 years. These people have been serving, faithfully, in Amman, Jordan. I was so thrilled to be able to go there and to see what is happening and what's going on. What's really cool is God worked just an amazing miracle because after we had already decided what week worked for them, what week worked for me, and I had bought my ticket, they emailed me and let me know that their church had decided to invite a pastor from Iraq and a couple pastors to come out into Jordan and to share with the Iraqi refugees. Sort of old-fashioned tent meetings were gonna be happening, and it was gonna happen the week that I was there.

So if I wanted to hang out with Iraqi refugees, let me tell ya, I was baptized in it. I got to go to refugee homes, I got to stay in the same guest house as the pastors from Iraq, so I was able to visit with them. I went to church services every night, and these were church services. The time we spent here was just getting the ball rolling for them; it was like three and a half hours every night that I was at church. I was just surrounded by refugees, I was surrounded by the amazing people who work with them, people who are working with NGOs, people who are other missionaries who have been serving in Jordan for decades, Jordanian Christians who are simply responding to the crisis that has landed at their doorstep.

Though I'm gonna tell you stories this morning and I'm gonna explain a lot of things, it would be impossible for me to overstate the level of crisis right now with refugees. There is no amount of time I could spend with you that would give me enough of the English words. This is a horrific crisis, and I barely scratched the surface. I was working mostly with Iraqi refugees; I didn't hardly get near the Syrian refugee crisis. Just as kind of a point of context for you, most of the refugees coming out of Iraq are Christians, most of the refugees coming out of Syria are Muslim. It's interesting how that's working, but that's what's happening.

The Iraqis don't have any standing initially; Syria and Jordan have a different arrangement. If you're a Syrian refugee, you immediately are processed into a camp and set on the UN track of finding a new country. If you're an Iraqi refugee, you have to go through two processes before you can get to the UN track. So the Iraqi refugees are spending a lot of time in Jordan; it's difficult. Jordan has been amazingly generous in opening its borders. Every day the paper publishes how many refugees they've let in. Every single day, hundreds and hundreds, days there are thousands of refugees coming in from Syria and Iraq.

Every Jordanian home now, because Jordan is growing like by double-digit growth because of refugees, gets water delivered once a week. That's all the water you get for the week. There are so many resources that are taxed, and if you run out of water before your next delivery, you run out of water; there's nothing you can do. This little church that I was privileged to be with for the week, it's been a church of about 150 Jordanian Christians, an amazing little church, and it now has over 800 people. Everybody from that 150 up to 800 are Iraqi refugees.

Imagine if you're in church today and then you gotta head out on vacation. You go to Tahoe, do a couple things, family comes into town, and you're gone for a few weeks. You come back to Twin Lakes, and there's 15,000 more people here. 15,000. You can't find your friends in all this mass of people, and perhaps the greatest tragedy of all, someone's in your spot, and you can't sit there anymore. Imagine how you would feel, and then imagine every one of these new people is different than you. Every one of these new people is completely traumatized; they're upset, they have basically the clothes on their back, maybe they have another set of clothes, they have no money, and they are in need. They are immediately in need.

This is a picture of the congregation from one of the meetings. These are just refugees; they're just piled in this little room. In this congregation, I can't point them out exactly, but about six rows back is a man whose brother was buried alive when ISIS invaded Mosul about a year ago. This next family I'm gonna show you, very sweet family. They have fled from ISIS three times within Iraq, and finally they were in Mosul, and when Mosul fell, they just said, forget it, we're leaving, we're going out to Jordan. The oldest of the two boys there, Sameer, oh, Sameer just got my heart; he was so sweet. He didn't speak a lick of English, and I had about four Arabic words, so we just smiled a lot, but we did a lot with our smiles.

He's about 13 years old, which gives you some idea of the nutrition that he's had. Sameer, when his dad was explaining to me through a translator the crisis they've gone through of moving and being chased by ISIS around Iraq, Sameer's face just went blank. You could see the burden of the story that they have. His face just went blank. It was just the saddest thing to see. In this congregation that I showed you, you can't see him in the picture; he's off to the far side, is a 15-year-old boy, sweet as can be with these little geeky glasses. He had been kidnapped by ISIS and forced to serve in their military, and he escaped, got out to Jordan, but he doesn't know where his family is.

There's a lot of that, especially with young girls, because the families don't want their girls to be taken by ISIS, so they'll send a group of girls out to get to Jordan. We went to one house where there were about nine teenage girls basically just fending for themselves because their parents are trying to protect them. There's a woman in this congregation who, when ISIS entered the small village she lived in, they loot right away. It's just like a reign of terror that comes in with a force. They looted her house, and they were taking everything, and they wanted her wedding ring. They couldn't get it off her finger, so they just chopped her finger off to take the ring. She'll tell you she's grateful that they did it with such precision, because she thought they could just have easily taken my hand, and they just took my finger.

These Christians are traumatized. They've been through mayhem, they've been through kidnapping, they've been through rape, and if you are disturbed by what I said, let me just assure you, I am holding back on the worst of it. I am holding it back because it's too disturbing to share when there are kids in the room or some people just couldn't handle it. It is overwhelming. These refugees are shell-shocked. They literally are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorders. The people who work with them are overwhelmed. I just started calling this an abyss of need because that's what it is. Everywhere you turn, somebody needs something, and it's genuine. It's not like this would just make my life easier. They genuinely need something.

The people who are working with them now are changing their whole lives. A lot of these folks have been focused on ministering to Muslims, which is what Jordan predominantly is, and they're shifting their whole ministries over, and they're becoming traumatized because they're listening day after day after day to these just horrific stories from these refugees. So what do we do? There is this little American girl sitting there going, "Oh my goodness. Why did I wanna find this out? This is overwhelming. I don't even know what to do in this moment." How do we respond? How is the church the church? A lot of these folks are our fellow Christians. What do we do in the face of all of this?

Let me tell you, I was happy when Mark asked me if I would be part of this summer series that we're calling aha, because by the generosity of this church, I had a pretty big aha moment over the last week. Today I wanna talk about the truth that God still multiplies. God still multiplies. When I came back from Jordan, which again, it was just a week ago, so you're catching me in the middle of all of this, one of the biggest feelings I felt all week was humbled. I felt so humbled. I felt very overwhelmed. I felt very inadequate. My brain was spinning, and I thought, "What can I really do? What can I really do?"

I think we all hit these crossroads, whether it's because we're seeing something on TV or because we actually go someplace and experience something like I did. We hit these crossroads, these moments, where we just freeze and we're not exactly sure what to do. So go ahead and pull out your notes if you haven't already. I wanna talk first of all about some of the reasons that we hesitate, and particularly some of the things that I've been struggling with and I hesitated on so far. The first one I struggle with is guilt. Oh my goodness. Just an overwhelming sense of guilt. Why? Why do I have it so good? Why, through absolutely no choice of my own, I had nothing to do with this. I was born in America, one of the easiest places to be born in the entire world. If you were born in this country, you have advantages that most of the world cannot even imagine from birth on. I just felt this horrible sense of guilt.

One of the most embarrassing moments I had, you would think it might've come at me trying to speak the language, but I had some of those. The most embarrassing moment I had came one evening when I was sitting in the guest house with four Iraqi refugees. The folks on the couch are all refugees. The two guys on the end are the pastors who came from Iraq. They were showing me pictures of their families and they were showing me pictures of where they live. Then they looked at me and said, "Show us where you live." Oh man. I wish my phone was broken, but it wasn't. I wish I was from the Mojave Desert, but I'm not. I just felt this overwhelming sense of guilt as I showed them pictures of West Cliff Drive. You know, it's just like, and they can't even fathom this. I felt so guilty, and not because they made me feel guilty. They were gracious as could be. I just felt so guilty. Why do I have it so good? That guilt can paralyze us, absolutely paralyze us.

We just freeze in this sense of unworthiness. Or we freeze in the guilt, and we just ask the question why, and we never get past it because we can't find the answer for that. The second thing that I have been struggling with, and I think we commonly struggle with together, is feeling overwhelmed. Just feeling absolutely and completely overwhelmed. As I told you, I just started calling this an abyss of need because that's what it is. It's an abyss of need. For me, I go from overwhelmed to fatalistic pretty fast. I just start going, oh well, I'll even spiritualize it. Oh well, God knows he's bigger than me. Oh well, we're on the wrong side of heaven. This is what happens. Because I just feel paralyzed and overwhelmed by the crisis. This crisis is genuinely huge.

I mean, literally, the Jordanian government, the UN, is completely overwhelmed by this crisis. When I was there, the English language paper ran an article about how the UN is having to reduce the amount of support they give to the refugees. They're going from 20 Jordanian dinars to 10 Jordanian dinars a month. That's about 14 US. So if you're a family of four, you get about $56 US a month. You're not allowed to work. You're not allowed to get medical care. Your children are not allowed to go to school. You have $56 US. Rent's about $250. Remember, Iraqi refugees have to find a place to live. They don't get the camps where the housing is provided.

I'm reading this article, and what's stunning to me is this problem is so overwhelming that they are identifying people that they call moderately vulnerable. Moderately vulnerable as those who live between absolute and abject poverty. I'm thinking, if those are the moderately vulnerable people, who are the vulnerable people? What's their story? Because it's so overwhelming. Again, this can cause us to freeze. We can think, this problem's too large. I can't even make a dent in this problem. Or we think, I don't know who to help. I'm hearing so many different stories. This news company tells me this story. This news company tells me this story. How do I know that organization is legit and they're actually helping? And we just get overwhelmed. So we freeze.

The third thing that I struggle with is fear. I struggle with fear. I just think, I struggle with fear that I'll fail. Fear that I'll come back from this experience and I'll talk to all of you and I'll talk to my friends, and nothing will happen. It'll just be that. I'll talk. Fear that I'll fail. Or I'm afraid that if I care, I'm going to get hurt. That if I let this in, it's going to just slay me, and I'm not going to know what to do. Or fear that if I step out, God's going to ask me to be different. I won't be able to kind of be in my comfortable spot. He's going to turn me into a Jesus freak. Even in a nice room of Christians, even staff people don't necessarily want to be a Jesus freak all the time. I get afraid. What's going to happen? What's God going to do? Again, the fear just stalls me. It stalls me out. It keeps me from stepping out of faith. It keeps me from thinking about doing anything different than what I've been doing at all.

So what do we do? I think these feelings are common feelings. I see people nodding their heads, so I don't feel like I'm totally crazy up here. I bet you can relate to this. So what do we do? Most importantly, actually, what does God do in these situations? When I was flying home last Saturday, I was thinking about all these things. I was thinking about my conversations, the people I met. I was in this pile of unworthiness and chaos and fear and what's going to happen. I looked out the window, and I saw this view. It doesn't even look like our planet, but I promise you I had not left our planet. I was looking out at this incredible view, this expanse, and I flew over things that looked like scenery like this for about 25 or 30 minutes.

I just thought, OK, the God who did this, the God who made this, the God who did all this is big. He's bigger than this. It was in that moment that I feel like God just put this miracle that I'm going to share with you today on my mind. I want to talk with you now about the aha moment that I had last week somewhere over Greenland while I was coming back. Go ahead and open your Bibles to John 6, if you don't mind. I'm going to read a few of the verses there. We'll be in John 6. I'm going to start in verse 1. In verse 1, you see we're setting the scene here. It says, "Sometime after this, Jesus crossed to the far shore of the Sea of Galilee, and a great crowd of people is following him. He had been healing people, doing miracles, and he was it. People were following him." In verse 5, it says, "When Jesus looked up and saw the great crowd coming toward him, he said to Philip, 'Where shall we buy bread for all these people to eat?' He only asked this to test him, for he already had in mind what he was going to do.

Philip answered him, 'It would take more than a half year's wages to buy enough bread for each one to have one bite.' Another of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, spoke up, 'Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish. But how far will these go among so many?' Jesus said, 'Have the people sit down.' There was plenty of grass in that place, and they sat down. About 5,000 men were there. Jesus then took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed to those who were seated as much as they wanted. He did the same with the fish. When they had all had enough to eat, he said to his disciples, 'Gather the pieces that are leftover. Let nothing be wasted.' So they gathered them and filled the 12 baskets with the pieces of the five barley loaves left over by those who had eaten."

This miracle is pretty much well known to all of us. It's considered kind of one of the big ones. It's in all of the gospel accounts, which we don't see in every one of them. You're probably familiar with it already. But it was something that God used to encourage my heart in the last week, and something I'm going to have to keep remembering as I continue to process what I experienced a couple weeks ago now. The first aha moment for me came when I was reading this miracle over again, when I was thinking about the very fact that God calls us. That's the first point there. God calls us. God chooses to work with us humans. Now, he doesn't have to work with us humans. He's God. He doesn't necessarily need us, but he chooses to work with us. We are his plan A. This church is God's plan A for reaching the world. That's a pretty cool thing.

In both the John and the Luke accounts of this, we see that Jesus basically sets his disciples up to be part of this miracle. In John 6, we just read that he actually asks Philip, "Hey, Philip, where are we going to buy all this bread?" But he did it, it says, to test him. It wasn't as though Jesus was looking for new ideas. He already knew what he was going to do, but he wanted to bring Philip in. In John, Jesus simply says to all the disciples, "You give them something to eat. You do it." He's bringing them all right in. Now, he knew—again, God knew—he rained down manna from heaven for all of Israel. He did not need a bunch of fishermen and tax collectors to feed these few thousand people. He could have handled it. But he was bringing the disciples in to the miracle. He knew they were overwhelmed. He knew they were afraid. I mean, have you ever faced down 5,000 hungry men? That's fear right there.

He knew they were all those things, but he gives them a front row seat. He puts them right in the splash zone for what is about to happen. I saw this in our own church. Before I even left to go to Jordan, I had asked you all to pray for me. After one of the services, one of my friends, Janice Focaro, came up to me. She said, "You know what? My two kids have been saving money for refugees. They didn't know how they were going to get it to refugees, but they've been saving money for refugees. Can we send it with you to Jordan?" I said, "Absolutely." So the kids came into the office. This is a picture of Jonathan and Lily and a friend who photobombed the picture. Together, Jonathan and Lily had come up with $50 to give me to bring over there. I did. It was my great joy to do that. I was able to give it to the family I showed you earlier, this dear family, Samira's family. They got $56 from the UN this month, and then Jonathan and Lily basically doubled their income by giving them another $50.

Jonathan and Lily are called by God. Age does not matter. Too young, too old, too this, too that, doesn't matter. You are called by God. God calls us into the miracle. One of the women that I met at the church, the Jordanian Christians have just been mobilized by this. I think about the responses they could have had. These Christians could have just as easily gone, "Get away. You're different than us. Get out of our church." Or "We're going to do this differently. We don't want you." They could have done that, but the Jordanian Christians have been mobilized by this crisis. They are doing everything they can to help. Whenever they go out to visit the Iraqi refugees that are connected to their church, every time they go out, they bring them 50 pounds of food. Every time they sit with them, they pray with them, they listen to them, they do whatever they can to help them.

One woman in the church, just an amazing woman, kind of has a reputation for loving to shop in this church. The church has put it to good use. Whenever they need to buy something in mass for the refugees, like in the winter, they love tracksuits, which just cracked me up. They love tracksuits. This woman took every connection she has, gathered up the funds that the church had, and she managed to buy 200 tracksuits for the refugees. God is calling even the shoppers into this miracle over there. It's amazing. These Jordanian Christians are feeling that sense of calling.

One of the best evenings I had there, I spent talking to the Iraqi pastor and his coworker. By the way, they gave me permission to show you their picture, but I'm not going to tell you their names or what city they're in, because they are in Iraq and they are ministering. The taller of the two there is the lead pastor. We were talking, and he kept saying, "Oh, please, please, would you—and I had told him about our outreach, Pastor Paul—would you and Pastor Paul please come to Iraq and encourage our Christians? They would be so happy to see American Christians, so they would know you're praying for us and that you love us. Would you please come to Iraq?" I was just smiling and nodding, thinking this must be some form of Arab hospitality that I don't understand, because he surely doesn't mean come to Iraq. Finally, I realized, no, he means come to Iraq. Please come. Come and share with our church.

What do you do? I said, "Well, in America, when I watch TV, Iraq does not seem safe to me. Does not seem like a good place to go visit, Christians." He looked at me and said, "Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I live in Iraq. It's very, very safe. It's very, very safe. The nearest ISIS town is one hour away." OK. Our definitions of safe differ strongly right now. In this same conversation, though, I asked him, "Why aren't you leaving? Why aren't you leaving?" I met refugees from the town he ministers in. People are leaving his town. I said, "Why aren't you leaving?" This very sweet man, who I can't hardly look at right now, said, "Who would be salt and light if I left? Who would be salt and light?" He knows he's called. He knows he's called to be part of the miracle that he believes God is going to do in Iraq.

One thing he told me, he asked me, "Are they telling you on the news that Muslims are coming to Jesus in huge numbers?" I said, "No, I don't hear that very much." He said, "No, Muslims are coming to faith in Jesus Christ in big numbers. That's the miracle in Iraq." He knows he is called to be salt and light. We are God's plan A. We are God's plan A for reaching out. He calls us into the miracle before we even see it. He calls us to be part of it. What's really amazing is when he calls us into that miracle, he then provides everything we need for the miracle. That's point two: God provides. God provides.

In Luke 9, and it's also mentioned in Mark, Jesus asked the disciples to have the crowd sit down in groups of 50 or 100. I think this is a really cool fact. First of all, because the organizer in me sees that already Jesus is starting the miracle, because he's making the massive manageable. He's saying, "OK, it's not going to be a line of 5,000 people stretching off the mountain. It's going to be groups of 50, groups of 100." So he's already starting the miracle, and people know something's going to happen. Then he provides the loaves and the fish. How in the world did they find this kid? In 5,000 people, there's no intercom system. "Hey, if anyone has food, come on over here. We need to start taking a collection." In the midst of all of this, he provides the food.

I don't want to say anything derogatory about men, but it is all men in this situation, and nobody had brought one. Nobody had thought ahead about who's going to eat. There's no lasagnas from Costco. There's not a plan right here. But God provides the loaves and the fishes. It's amazing to me because I think this is how grace works. A lot of times we come up to the miracle, and we think, "OK, God, this is what I'm bringing to the miracle. This is what I have to give you." But you know what? It's all grace. Whatever we bring up to God, he's already given to us. We're just offering it back to him. That's the grace we live in.

In John 6, the disciple Andrew says, I think what everybody was probably thinking, "Here's a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish. But how far will they go among so many?" I love that he doesn't even call them barley loaves and fish. He calls them small barley loaves, small fish, nice try, Jesus. It's close, but no cigar. I love that that's how he is recorded in scripture, because again, I think it's just what we're all thinking. We do this all the time in life. I do. I did it on the plane, going, "Well, I mean, what can I do? I only have x amount of dollars in my bank account. I only have x amount of time. I only have x amount of ideas. I only have x amount of hope." It's an abyss, Lord. Have you been to Jordan? I mean, how far is this going to go? This little amount I have.

We do the same thing, but God does not require us to show up in a state of sufficiency. He just wants us to show up with our lunch, whatever that lunch may be, however small it may look to us. He just wants us to show up. No matter what the scale of our lunch is, the really good news in God's provision is that he provides the power also. He provides the power for the miracle. The scripture there says he takes the loaves. He takes the fishes. He gives thanks. He breaks them. He gives them to the disciples. It is all his power. The miracle is powered by him. The disciples simply bring what God has already provided. The miracle is powered by him.

One of the amazing stories I heard last week was of a woman who's working with an NGO, a non-government organization over in Jordan. She is working with Syrian refugees. She goes into this camp. This is the aerial picture of one of the camps. Over a half a million people live in this camp. It's rough. It's really rough. Imagine living with a half a million people who are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. There's chaos in that camp. The women don't feel safe. There are stories of mayhem just in the camps. This woman went to the UN and asked for a tent. She calls her tent the Oasis. The UN even provides a guard. When the women come in the tent, there's a guard standing outside, so no men can get in the tent. It's just for women.

These women started to come, and they just would sit there and talk and be happy to be together, be happy to be safe. She thought, "What can I do?" They need money. They want money to provide for their families because they don't have enough. She thought, "What can I do?" She scoured her home. She has four girls. She found a bandon in a corner in one of the rooms, just this pile of beads. The girls had lost interest in making bracelets, so there's this pile of beads. God gave her an idea. She ran down to the market. There's a lot of scarves in this culture because a lot of the Muslim women cover their heads all the time. She ran down to the market and bought some scarves. Then she brought her beads and her scarves back to the camp.

She gave them to the women, and they started putting the beads on the scarves. She realized that as they were putting the beads on the scarves and focused, they started talking. They started sharing their stories. She found people to come in, and while they're kind of focused on their scarves, she brought in counselors to help them process some of the trauma they've been through. She brings in people to help them with their English so that they feel like they're getting ahead while they're there. They sit and make these scarves. She sells them in a morn. She sells them to people like me. Churches sell them. They're very simple scarves with just a few beads that the women have put on the end. These scarves are giving hope. These scarves are giving courage to hundreds of women who she is working with.

God took her lunch of discarded beads and inexpensive scarves, and he's doing amazing things with it in the lives of these women. That's really the biggest aha moment I had, and that's the third point that God multiplies. God multiplies. If you look in the description in Luke, this multiplication is pretty epic in this situation. It says, "They all ate and were satisfied. The disciples picked up 12 baskets full of broken pieces that were left over." In John, it says, "They all ate as much as they wanted, bread and fish as much as they wanted." Here we see this amazing math that we forget about sometimes. We get so trapped in earthly math and even the crazy new math they're teaching now, and we forget about heaven's math.

In heaven's math, five loaves and two fishes and one savior equals dinner for 5,000 people, equals blessings for 5,000 people. We need to notice, too, this multiplication is generous. This isn't everybody ate and were satisfied, and then magically, there was nothing left. There are a lot of theories about why there were baskets of food left, but I honestly think the reason that there are baskets left over is to show God's power, to show the amazing power of God, to show the amazing grace of God, that when He calls you into the miracle, it's not just enough for the miracle. It's abundant. It's a feast. It's lavish. I think that's how God works. God works in those kinds of ways.

Let me ask you the question that I asked myself flying over Greenland last week. Do I believe God still multiplies? Do I believe God still multiplies? Do I believe that as I looked into this abyss of need with the refugee crisis, just the Iraqi refugee crisis, do I believe God can multiply the loaves and fishes that I have to offer Him? Do you believe that God can multiply what He has given you to help others in ways that maybe you don't? Maybe we all wish we could solve all the problems of the world, but we're not the saviors, so that's not our job. Do you believe that God can take your loaves and fish and multiply them still? Do I believe that God still multiplies?

You know, I have to tell you after the week I had that I think the answer's yes. I believe God still multiplies. I watched dozens and dozens of faithful Christian people offering their lunch to God, not worrying that they couldn't solve the whole problem, but just faithfully offering their lunch to God and trusting Him to do the multiplying. I think frankly, we all watched Mark and René the last couple weeks just share the loaves and fishes of their brokenness and their struggle and their pain, and we all watched God multiply that right in our very midst. So yes, I actually believe God is still the God who multiplies.

I want to introduce you to this man, Jamal, on the screen. He's the guy in the yellow shirt. He's an amazing guy, Jordanian Christian, very successful businessman, loves the Lord, has pretty much totally stopped every other pursuit but caring for Iraqi refugees at this point in his life. He is bringing every resource he has to bear. He's hunting down his friends and turning them upside down to get their money out of their pockets, and he's bringing every resource they have to bear on this Iraqi refugee crisis, just an amazing man. I spent a few hours with him. He showed me the medical clinic that they're working with because, again, Iraqi refugees don't have any standing, so medical care is not available. Jamal's offering a free medical clinic for them.

He is doing all kinds of things, but when we sat down, the first words out of his mouth to me were, "I just wanna quit. This is too hard. This is too hard." The stories that he hears that he then told me, so now I wanna quit too, but they just are overwhelming. It's just every day. While I was sitting in his office, I could see people just filing in, asking for help, looking for help, and his staff, this wonderful staff that you see there, just diligently helping them as much as they could. Jamal turned the corner when we were talking, when he started talking about what he sees God doing. When he started talking about God's multiplying power, he turned the corner in this conversation.

He started talking about the amazing things that are happening, how they're finding fans because it's hot. Oh my word, is it hot in Jordan? I mean, let's face it, we live in Santa Cruz, 10 degrees up or down, and we freak out. But Jordan is way outside my Santa Cruz zone, way outside. It was hot, but now Jamal's buying fans to bring into the Iraqi refugee homes. Because it's hot and they have so few clothes, they need to wash their clothes more frequently. Jamal thought, "They need washing machines." He found washing machines for 150 bucks, turned his friends upside down, rattled some cages in America, and bought 200 washing machines, and just took a flatbed truck around to refugee homes, delivering washing machines. He's solving the problem 200, 150 people at a time, whatever he can. God's multiplying it though. He knows that they need income, but it's illegal to work.

So he started a microloan program. He has loaned many, many people who have skills and trades loans so that they can begin a business and begin to make some kind of living. Then he provides channels outside of Jordan, in Germany, in America, and all kinds of places for these folks to sell their product. Then he gives it back. One woman, he loaned her 100 US, and she bought 100 US worth of yarn. She makes things like this dress that I bought when I was there, just this amazing handiwork dress. This woman has paid Jamal back. He told me that she is earning just a little shy of 300 US a month, knitting these dresses, and then Jamal and his team manage the sales and get the money back to her. God is truly, absolutely multiplying. It's a totally amazing operation.

I a little bit felt like I was meeting the Jordanian mafia, but the Christian mafia. I don't all know that guy's connections, but let me tell you, he's bringing every one of them to bear on behalf of the Iraqi refugees. It's really amazing. I think we don't even actually have to leave our property to see God's multiplying power. When you walk out the door today, you'll see a building out that direction. You may be thinking, "God, why are we building this building? Look at all these trials." Let me just tell you, that building is a multiplier for ministry. The young woman helping us lead worship today, she came through our children's ministry. She went to Twin Lakes Christian School, just graduated from eighth grade last week. That building's gonna multiply. Jonathan and Lily, who gave the $50, they are in our children's ministry. That building is gonna be one of the best multipliers we could have ever put on our campus because God still multiplies.

I'm so excited to see what he does in that way. I know some of you are sitting here today and you're thinking, "Oh, okay, my life is good. This is great. I know I will never complain again. OK, Val, thanks." But you're just feeling broken. When I ask you if you think God still multiplies, your answer is, "Yeah, I think he multiplies. I think he multiplies my sorrows. I think he multiplies my pain. I think he multiplies the consequences of my sin. I think he multiplies, just not in the way you're talking about." I wanna encourage you, if you find yourself in that spot today, to remember that in this miracle, brokenness precedes the miracle. He has to break the bread. He has to break the fish before it's multiplied. Brokenness precedes the miracle.

Jesus himself, not long after this miracle, would offer himself up to be broken on the cross for the ultimate multiplication of all time, the forgiveness of all sin at one time. Brokenness often precedes the miracle. Even if you're not in a place right now to think about reaching out, you're just trying to get through the day. You're just trying to make it. I encourage you to look for the multiplication. Look for the multiplication of just even your small faithfulness or the multiplication of just your little steps towards hope. Look for God's multiplication. I wanna encourage you, I told you the story, some of the stories of these Iraqi Christians that I spent the week with, and I wanna encourage you by showing you what worship looks like for these dear people.

Take a look at the screen.

You know, it's absolutely amazing that high sound that you hear the women making is the sound, they told me, a sound of joy. A sound that they make at weddings and at births. That's the sound that you hear those women making because they know that God is still the God who multiplies. Take a look at the last verse there on your notes. I'll close with this, Hebrews 13:7–8. Remember your leaders who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and forever. I personally feel like the word because should be between verses seven and eight. Imitate their faith because Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and forever.

The disciples weren't perfect. The people I worked with in Jordan aren't perfect. The Iraqi Christians aren't perfect, but Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and forever. The sameness is not dependent on our goodness or our smart ideas or our ingenuity. The sameness of Jesus Christ is guaranteed because of his blood on the cross. His grace demonstrated to all of us guarantees the sameness. No matter where we find ourselves, no matter what lunch we have that God's already provided to bring back to him, Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and forever. The multiplier, praise God, is still multiplying.

Let's pray. Dear Heavenly Father, we are so grateful that you are the same, yesterday, today, and forever. We need the same savior. We need the multiplier. We need the grace. We need the calling. We need the provision that you have provided to the disciples, that you provided to the 5,000, that you're providing to the refugees. We need that too, God. We are so grateful that the multiplier is still multiplying. God, I pray that we would be people who believe we are called by you, who believe that we are called to sit in the splash zone of the miracles that you are going to do. I pray that we would not be afraid to bring you our loaves and our fishes, whatever they look like, that we would not be afraid to bring them back to you and to watch your grace, to watch your power infuse those offerings and multiply them, Lord. May this church be a place that makes a difference in our county and around the world because we believe that you are the God who still multiplies. In Jesus' name, amen.