Discipleship Devotional, January 27th, 2025
When they had all had enough to eat, he said to his disciples, “Gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted.”
– John 6:12 (NIV)
When we see the miraculous hand of God’s provision, at times we think it implies that we don’t have to apply wisdom in structure and planning anymore. There are those who think it is positive confession to not plan but just claim that the miraculous abundant supplies of God will always be there. The truth is, as much as we would love that to be true, it is not always so. When God showed Joseph seven years of plenty and seven years of scarcity, it would have been foolish for him to just prayerfully reject (as we do today) the seven years of famine.
Once God blesses some of us with financial resources, we think it means we should not save because God will continually send such resources. That is not the way things work. In our anchor text, after Jesus had demonstrated all sufficiency in the provision of bread for the five thousand, He still asked that nothing be wasted and that all the fragments be gathered and kept. Why was it important to follow such natural principles of wisdom? Why did Jesus need to emphasize saving the rest? This is because we must still apply wisdom in our lives.
So in your finances, God does not want you to throw caution to the wind in the name of faith. Though you have faith, you must also not be a waster. The Lord Jesus emphasized that nothing should be wasted. In other words, those leftovers were eaten another time. This is the wisdom of God that we must apply.
The wise man saves for the future, but the foolish man spends whatever he gets.
– Proverbs 21:20 (TLB)
Prayer:
Thank You, Lord, for the wisdom of saving and not wasting resources.
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