Our Greatest Work

Exploring Jesus’ Mission in Matthew 14

By Joy Dahl – Guest Contributor

As we emerge from a long season of uncertainty and isolation, many of us still struggle with ongoing challenges and lingering questions: 

How do you feel about the future? 

How do we find re-energizing purpose in our everyday life, regardless of circumstances?  

Matthew 14 shares the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000. This is the only miracle besides Christ’s resurrection recorded in all four Gospels (Matthew 14:13-21; Mark 6:30-44; Luke 9:10-17; John 6:1-15), so it represents a pivotal event in the lives of Jesus and His disciples. The crowd is numbered at 5,000 men plus women and children, leading some scholars to estimate that the total crowd could have numbered 20,000 people or more.  

Imagine yourself in the story. Who do you relate to in the passage?

If you were there that day, would you be in the crowd running to meet Jesus? Would you be the young boy with five loaves and two fish (John 6:9)? While we often focus on the actions of Jesus or the crowd, God also gives us insight through the disciples themselves.  

Jesus’ Mission

Mark and Luke tell us that sometime before this day, Jesus had sent out the 12 disciples, two-by-two on a short-term mission trip. Jesus sent them with no money, no food, and no supplies to surrounding towns with His authority to preach repentance, drive out evil spirits, and heal the sick. 

While the disciples were gone, Jesus learned that Herod had beheaded John the Baptist . As Jesus mourned His cousin, the disciples returned and excitedly reported all they had done and taught. Jesus then shepherded the small group to a solitary place where they could spend quality time together.

But God had a divine appointment for Jesus and the disciples on the other side of the sea.

Crowds amassed and Jesus’ compassion poured out through a long day of healing and teaching. The context leaves us to wonder, what were the disciples doing? Were they sitting at Jesus’ feet learning and getting equipped for future ministry? Were they focused on crowd control? Were they stealing away to nap after the “mountaintop high” of their amazing yet exhausting short-term mission trip?

None of the accounts tells us for sure, but as the day neared an end the disciples encouraged Jesus to send the crowd away so the people could find something to eat.

And Jesus shocked His closest friends by saying, “You give them something to eat.”

The disciples had nothing to give. Fresh off their breadless, moneyless, supply-less mission trip, they could not provide for themselves, much less for this enormous crowd. What could they offer? All they could do was bring to Jesus one young boy’s five small loaves of bread and two small fish.

Jesus worshiped God the Father, giving thanks for the provision and the miracle about to unfold. Then He took the five loaves and broke them in half. Creating 12 small offerings (10 bread and two fish), He gave one to each disciple to pass out. The disciples took their one piece and went into the crowd, working as the hands and feet of Christ among the people. 

And after all, 20,000 had eaten and were completely satisfied, 12 basketfuls of leftovers remained: One basketful for each disciple to carry in awe as they celebrated the miracle in which they had just participated.  

This long day concluded with an act of undeniable proof of Christ’s sovereignty and His desire for the disciples to carry out His mission. Their mundane act of service transformed into great work for the glory of God.  

Our Response

As Christ’s disciples today, we too are called, equipped, and invited to join His work in the world in our everyday workplace mission fields. We are: 

• Called to walk with Jesus day-by-day and be transformed in His likeness by the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit. 
• Equipped with “loaves and fish” – our gifts, talents, experiences, resources, positions, and circles of influence that we receive and then offer back to Him through our work and service.  
• Sent with Christ’s authority to join the good works He has prepared specifically for each of us to do (Ephesians 2:10). 

Friends, all of us are created in the image of God, who works. And all of us work, regardless of the type of work and whether or not we’re paid for our work. Jesus invites all believers to live as His disciples and to work as His ambassadors (2 Corinthians 5:17–20) – right where He has strategically placed each one of us in this season.

As you look forward, consider this: What provision of “loaves and fish” has God entrusted to you?

Make a list of gifts, talents, experience, resources, and positions you have. Prayerfully ask Jesus how you can work as His hands and feet in your everyday circles, distributing your “loaves and fish” for His glory. This is our greatest work! Let’s join with Jesus and praise Him each step of the way. Let’s joyfully carry the overflowing basketfuls of blessings which display His continued love, care, and compassion for the lost and hurting people in our world.

Sharing Faith with Family

By Bennett Rolan – BSF Editorial Manager

Erin’s advice to others who want to share the gospel with family is to “Just keep praying. When you keep praying for that person, God will work through that, but He will also work through you. It changes you. For me, there were a lot of times when I would get mad or upset, wondering when Tony would respond to Christ, but praying through it kept me focused and grounded.”

Tony shared, “I think the strongest witness is observing someone. The word that comes to mind is passion. The passion she had for learning and growing her relationship with the Lord was consistent over time. It was a process. Her joy just continued to grow. I wanted that joy, I wanted to know how to get it.”

God Prepares the Soil

As a professional and college football coach for 22 years, Tony’s career moved the Levine family often. In their early years of marriage, Erin’s faith was tepid. But as the Holy Spirit worked, her love of God’s Word grew, along with her commitment to Christ. 

“I always knew God had a plan for Tony, but I began to wonder, ‘When?’ ” she shared. “He was my best friend, and it was so hard that we couldn’t share that. He just didn’t get it.”

From 2003 to 2005, Tony worked as an assistant coach at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. Just outside the city, Erin found a church with a Messianic Jewish community. She was on a mission to find the people who would lead Tony to Christ.  

“I was trying to change him, but God used that time to change me,” Erin said. “I started understanding how the Jewish faith fit with Christianity. When I started learning all of that, my eyes opened, and that’s when I wanted to know the Lord more.”  

Tony smiles when he recalls those Louisville years.   

“I was at the office thinking about how not to get a punt blocked when a man showed up with a bag of Burger King and sat down to talk to me about Jesus,” Tony said. “They had the messianic meetings at our house, and I kept thinking, ‘When are these people going to get out of our basement?’ ”  

Erin remembers, “He was not sold by any means. I’m glad we can laugh about it now, but a lot of those conversations ended in arguments. Sure, he saw my faith, but he also saw me with an attitude. A lot of those days I felt like I messed it up. In the beginning, everybody wanted to save him. Nobody really wanted to get to know him.”

But God met Erin in her longing and taught her to surrender the burden of Tony’s salvation to Him.

“I felt like it was my job to save him. But when you realize that God does the saving it removes that weight,” she shared. “When you don’t have to do the saving, your faith overflows. It takes a lot of prayer. I know it’s hard. I’m not trying to make it sound easy, it’s a discipline and focus. When you realize you’re only supposed to be faithful, and you allow God to do the saving, you can let that go.” 

As the Levine family moved from Kentucky to North Carolina, then to Texas, Erin’s faith grew, and her love for God’s Word ignited. She joined a BSF class in Texas, where she served as a Children’s Leader and a Group Leader. Tony’s career continued to thrive, and in 2011 he was named the head football coach at the University of Houston. That summer, he accepted Christ.

God Plants the Seed

Along the way, God was quietly working. He honored Erin’s faith and softened Tony’s heart. God placed Christian men in his path, and Tony watched as the believers around him handled adversity with grace and fortitude. 

“The Christian coaches I saw were strong. Because of the nature of this profession, when you get fired from a job it’s very public. I watched these men lose their jobs, and I watched how they responded. When the world would tell them to be discouraged or disappointed, they weren’t. I thought, ‘What do they have that other people don’t? And how can I get it?’ ”

When Tony surrendered his life to Christ, it wasn’t the work of a single moment.

“If you have a rock, and you hit it with a hammer 100 times, it may finally break. But it wasn’t just that 100th hit that broke the rock. It was the build-up of the 99 times before it,” Tony said. “For me, it was a combination of seeing Godly men and, in my case, Godly husbands, coaches, and fathers live through faith over time.”

Tony developed a passion for Christ and the roots of his faith ran deep. The Levines were bound together, strengthened by their faith and unknowingly prepared for difficult years to come.

God Grows Our Faith

Three years after becoming the head football coach at the University of Houston, Tony’s career took a difficult turn. The university announced a coaching staff change and for the first time in 22 years, Tony was left wondering about his future. 

Taking a year away from football, the couple prayed, seeking God’s direction for their lives. During that time, they felt called to open a Chick Fil A and Tony began the interview process. Knowing it could take several years before a location in Houston became available, Tony waited and worked as an assistant coach, turning down several major coaching opportunities.

The Levines’ Chick Fil A opened in Houston in 2018. And as the family celebrated the end of one challenge, three months later, Erin was diagnosed with breast cancer.

“Within a three-year period, I was fired for the first time in my coaching career, I made a decision to give up coaching, which was all I had known for 22 years, and then Erin gets cancer,” Tony said. “How do you get through something like that? I was able to trust that the Lord orchestrated all of it.”

Surrounded by familiar doctors and dear friends in Houston, Erin began her treatment. The couple prayed and proclaimed God’s faithfulness through fear and adversity. When the world told them to be discouraged or disappointed, they weren’t. The faith that Tony had questioned years earlier kept him grounded.

Today, Erin is in remission and Tony volunteers as a coach for his sons’ football teams. The couple points to those early years as the days God used to prepare them.

We Pray, We Wait, We Share

For most of us, Erin’s story is familiar. Like the parable of the sower in Matthew 13, we long to plant the seeds of the gospel in the lives of those we love. But waiting for God to prepare the soil is a true test of our faith. We hope, we pray, we share, and we wait. We can’t predict when or how the seed will take root. We are simply called to be faithful.

For Erin, faith meant trusting Jesus with the salvation of the person she loved most.

“I focused on my relationship with Christ,” said Erin. “When I discovered that God was enough to meet my needs, that He would fulfill that longing through His Word, it took the pressure off trying to save Tony. I didn’t have to be perfect or have the perfect family. Jesus was, and is, enough.”

Are you looking to share the gospel with your family? Invite them to try BSF with you for 4 weeks! https://www.bsfinternational.org/trybsf/ 

God’s Word is a ‘Lifeline’ for COVID Chaplain

By Bethany Peterson – BSF Editorial Assistant

“I don’t know if I could do another year of what I just did,” longtime BSF member Kevin Deegan said. “I feel like, especially one year later, we need new words to describe how we feel. We used words like crazy, unprecedented and exhausted way too early in the pandemic.” Now, Kevin and his colleagues are simply out of words to capture the intensity of their experiences this year. 

A little over a year ago, Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Los Angeles, Calif. made the unimaginable decision to close their hospital doors to all visitors. Kevin, a chaplain in the Step-Down Intensive Care Unit at Providence, found himself taking on an unexpected role as his floor was transformed into the COVID unit. 

“I became ‘the COVID chaplain,’” Kevin said simply. “Since then, we’ve had COVID patients on every floor of our hospital, and so every chaplain has become a COVID chaplain. But I like to say I was the first.” 

Before COVID, Providence averaged about 50 deaths in a month, but this January alone, amid the height of the COVID crisis, the hospital reported 127 deaths. A chaplain is required to not only be at every death, but also all other crisis events, including code blues (when a patient’s heart and breathing stop) and trauma cases, to support suffering patients and anxious families. 

This year, to say Kevin and his team of chaplains are stretched thin is an understatement. Their roles have changed drastically, their hours increased, and the emotional toll is exponentially higher.

But through the exhaustion and pain, God’s Word has steadied this team, and Kevin has personally experienced God’s guidance in desperate moments.

Courtesy of Mario Tama, Getty Images

Creating Connections

Early in the pandemic, when a daughter was told that her father would not recover, she immediately drove to the hospital, hoping for a chance to see him. When she arrived, her access to the COVID unit was restricted. Walking to meet her, Kevin spontaneously decided to FaceTime the doctor, who turned the camera to her dad. In that moment, Kevin watched a daughter find healing and closure as she said goodbye to her father. 

“I’ll cherish this,” she told Kevin. 

With this experience in mind, Kevin took an idea to his manager — to purchase iPads for the department. The chaplain team pivoted their ministry to a virtual setting.  

“For almost a year now, I’ve walked the halls with the same iPad every day, and I’ve been inundated with these video requests and keeping families connected. A lot of my job has changed to that,” he explained.  

Chaplaincy, as Kevin views it, is a ministry of presence, meant to embody compassion, empathy and support in times of crisis. “To take that theological foundation of my work as chaplain and translate it to a virtual setting, where I’m not technically in person, is that still going to have the same impact? Is it still going to resonate?” Kevin worried. 

To their surprise, adapting to virtual chaplaincy has opened their eyes to previously unreached patients and family members.  

Providence Holy Cross Medical Center serves a lower socioeconomic, and high immigrant, population. Once Kevin began doing video calls with family members, he realized that many of them lived out of the country or would have been unable to come into the hospital because of other factors such as work schedule or caring for children. 

“So even if we completely go back to normal where visitation is back the way it was, I still think there’s a way for us to keep families connected virtually that we weren’t thinking about before,” Kevin said. “I still want to be able to offer that because I think it’s part of the whole person healing that we’re seeking.” 

Equipped for Innovation

Having been in BSF for 17 years as a class member, Group Leader, Children’s Leader, Class Administrator and, most recently, online group member, Kevin had a head start in translating spiritual support and discussion into a virtual environment.   

“In the same way that BSF has had to translate the intimacy of a group [online], I’ve had to learn the intimacy of connecting with the family virtually,” Kevin said. In fact, Kevin reported that his online group experience has “actually been the deepest group discussion that I’ve been a part of at BSF.”  

Kevin attributes his ability to adapt to new circumstances and lead others spiritually through crisis to the framework he learned throughout his BSF experience.  

When Kevin first joined BSF in a Young Adult group after high school, his life was on a different track. He had never been a great student and was pursuing a career in acting, never expecting to return to any sort of higher education. However, through learning to study God’s Word each week with the daily lesson questions and discussion groups, Kevin had an epiphany:  

“Maybe I’ve just been studying the wrong things. … Maybe I have a passion for God’s Word,” he realized. “That [passion] really evolved through my participation in BSF and certainly my participation in leadership. Through BSF and a few mentors in my life, I discerned a call to ministry and went back to school because of the foundation or the experience of having done some studying with BSF,” Kevin shared.  

For Kevin, BSF was the place where he built a foundation for learning to do ministry well and to be in spiritual leadership. “I feel like I’m equipped well to do this work. Even when we’re going to uncharted territory as we have this last year, because of BSF, because of that strong foundation that was built, I feel confident to continue to meet those needs,” he said. 

Bringing God’s Word to Life

Through this year’s Genesis study, Kevin has seen God’s Word come to life as he minsters to patients, families and medical staff.  

“As a longtime member of BSF, I have come to believe that God’s Word is ‘alive and active.’ So, I expect whatever we are studying in BSF to come up in my week,” he shared. “I have been impacted by all the family and relational dynamics throughout Genesis. Managing family dynamics is part of my work as a chaplain, but I have also been encountering difficult relationships in my personal life. God is in the business of transformation and reconciliation.” 

Secure in God’s Word, Kevin and his team approach each day with confidence in His direction and provision. 

“There is another presence with us, that’s the Spirit of God with us, protecting us,” he said. “We will come out of this whole.” 

Courtesy of Jae Hong, Associated Press

Learn more about BSF at https://www.bsfinternational.org/.