using you

i read matthew 14 today and in it, there is the familiar account of Jesus feeding the five thousand. as i read through it and recalled other accounts of Jesus feeding large crowds, i thought of the many times these passages have been preached on throughout my life. the familiar point being made that with the little that we bring to God (five loaves and two fish), God is able to use that abundantly for the purpose of something greater. while this idea may be encouraging to hear, it can lead to erroneous thinking about how faith works. we learn in john 6 that the same crowd that saw Jesus perform the miracle of multiplying the bread and the fish seeks Him again the next day and their true intentions are revealed in the words of Jesus. they followed Him because they saw results in the past and they continued to follow Him because of their empty stomachs. Jesus then claims to be the Bread of Life and that those who eat of His flesh and drink of His blood (speaking of having genuine faith) will be satisfied. the crowds do not understand this claim, because they can only think of their physical hunger and they are blind to who Jesus is. to be able to multiply bread was analogous to being the author of life itself. the way i see it, these passages are not there to tell us of what God can do through the little that we bring, but rather to simply tell us who He is.
yes, pour into your ministry, pray for things to happen, offer everything you can and have faith that God is using you for the purposes of His kingdom. but ask yourself before all of that, are you satisfied in Him? would your answer be the same if you sacrificed everything for a ministry and He chose to take that away from you? would it be the same if you spent hours in prayer, but you were kicked out of school with no income and no way to get fed? the problem i have with the popular interpretation of this miracle is that it may teach us to expect blessings from God and it does not deal with the heart issue of whether or not we see our relationship with God as the highest blessing of all. is He your source of joy, comfort, contentment, peace, and rest? i pray that it would be so.