If you give a man a fish you feed him for a day, if you teach a man to fish then he will feed himself for a lifetime. I wrote a post on this for the Instagram page a little while ago now and as I had postedit I felt that it was such a good message that I would expand on it here on the website. As I was thinking about what I was going to say and starting to write my initial piece I realised that the point is multifaceted when looked at from a Christian stand point, so I will be doing 3 posts on this, with the first one being feeding.
Feeding is vitally important to life on this plant, everything needs food or fuel to continue no matter whether it is human, animal, plants, fish or whether it is something we have created like cars, laptops businesses. It is crucial that we feed it what it wants to keep it sustained, in the same way we can say this for our faith and walk with God.
As a Christian it can be so easy to be distracted in this life and for us to believe lies, I heard a fact the other day but I cannot remember the percentages, but the fact was - during this time of Coronavirus people are more likely to believe false information than truth about the disease and the measures to deal with it. This is also truth in life now as "fake news", false reports, stories, opinions are shared so prevalently on social media. We have a tendency to look at what our friends have shared and because there is that element of trust between us and our friends, believe what the post says that they have shared without doing any research ourselves. This is dangerous and can be where falsehoods start to come into play.
We must remember that within the Kingdom of Jesus that the enemy will also try to plant falsehoods and mixed messages so that we are taken off the track we are meant to be on and lead into sin. It is therefore important that we learn and know the truth so that when we see stories that are false, when lies are spread either deliberately or by mistake we can spot them and disregard them, or correct them.
Now in life as we chat to people around us whether it be friends, family, co-workers, or strangers and whether this is in person or online if we are to correct or shine a light on what is false then we ultimately give the person a fish and that way they can see the truth and live for that day. Ultimately we need to tell/teach the person to fish and if it is on how to look up news reports and factual information about the topics they look at online line that will help them keep a true perspective of local and global events, but if it is scriptural then this is something slightly different.
The bible is the word of God and the word of God is Jesus, for us to know the real truth and direction in life we must learn to read the word of God and to live a true Christian life according to the scriptures. We must be careful not just to take peoples words for it as there have been many false teachers in past and will still be many out in the world today, it is crucial that we have leaders to help us be guided toward Jesus and to help keep us living a Christian life, especially if we haven't developed that personal relationship with Jesus just yet. However, we must not always rely on the spoken word of the leader, why? Because it may be false, people have been known in history to use the scriptures for their own ends, for them to manipulate the masses in order to support what they wanted, this is falsehood and something which the devil uses to steer us away from living a powerful and righteous life.
Jesus says He is the bread of life! Remember I have just said that Jesus is the word of God, it is shown early on in the beginning that Jesus is the word of God as John 1 v 1 states that in the beginning the word was with God and the word was God. But in John 6 v 25-59 we have a whole passage of Jesus talking about Him being the bread of life, this was important because to the Jews the bread of life they remembered was the manner they ate in the desert when the Israelites left Egypt and were on their 40 year journey to the promised land.
To the Jewish people this is a huge miracle as wandering the desert they naturally wondered where they were going to find food to eat and sustain themselves, but here in the Gospel John records Jesus making a similar but new declaration instead of God providing bread every day (fish) He now advised that He was the bread of life and those who came to Him will never go hungry again. This is the fishing element, for us to find food we have to constantly reach out (cast our rods) to Jesus and get something to sustain ourselves. We can do that in many ways, worship can evoke the emotions or the Holy Spirit inside us bringing us closer to Him and bringing joy into our hearts, or giving away our fears and sadness. Prayer can help us hear Him and His direction for us, or reading the Bible, which will teach us our way of life, bring us hope and remind us of what our God can do.
So cast away your daily fear and reliance's and trust your ability to fish. It isn't always easy in the beginning as any fisher will tell you, but if you have patience and develop your technique things will get easier and you will be able to find the things that will sustain you through all types of events in your life and also bring praises to Jesus.
I trust this helps as an initial guide in how important it is to get to know the scriptures for yourself, to test words that people give you (even me) and help guide you through life, not feeding on handouts but in your own active faith in the name of Jesus.
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