Use What You Got

​Exodus 14:13-25
Matthew 14:16-21
Acts 3:1-7
Let’s look at the analogy of receiving $84,600 in a bank account every day.  Imagine that every morning you would have access to that amount in your account. Now if you don’t spend it all by the end of the day it goes dead – whatever you didn’t spend is gone, forever.
For a lot of us, if we had access to that kind of money we would buy all kinds of things. 
Now convert that to 84,600 seconds a day. It represents the number of seconds in a day, which is what God gives us.  Every day, each morning, God gives us the gift of time. What we do with it is left up to us. It is left up to us if we use it for God’s glory or just to benefit ourselves.
Every day we are given an opportunity to use those seconds and we decide how.

Moses has thousands of people with him that Pharaoh allowed him to bring up out of Egypt, but now they are at the Red Sea. They have the Red Sea in front of them and there is Pharaoh’s army behind them. Now Moses’ people they were not fighters; they were not warriors.  The people down there had been enslaved - they had had no type of military training.
God speaks to Moses, and tells Moses to take his rod and stretch it out over the Red Sea. God is telling Moses you may not have a rocket launcher, you may not have a tank, and you may not have a military platoon, but use what you got. You have a rod in your hand.
Verse 21  ” .... the Lord opened up a path through the water with a strong east wind.”
We read that Moses stretched out his rod over the Red Sea as God had told him to do. God then allowed an east wind to blow all night and the Red Sea began to part. It blew until it dried the ground. So the Israelites were able to cross the Red Sea. God did some awesome things with what he had.

We know that there are several instances where God used people to do some things, to do some things with what they had.
God used a shepherd boy (David), a stone, and a sling to slay a giant.
God even gave Samson tremendous strength to take a jawbone and slay thousands of Philistines.
Jesus himself took five loaves of bread and two fish and fed five thousand, not counting women and children. He took water in the water pots and turned it into wine.
 
My point is even Jesus himself used what he had. From Moses and Aaron’s rod to David and the sling and Samson used the jawbone of an ass. There are so many things that God has used. He has a purpose and a plan for us. He wants to use us, and we must be willing to use what we have.
We might not have all of the things that so many other people have, but we all have talents, we all have the ability to do things, and we all have time.

God gives us time, those 86,400 seconds in the run of a day. The bottom line is this: what are we going to do with it?

A Story
This preacher went to this farmer and asked him some questions.
He asked, If you had $200 would you give the Lord $100? The farmer replied, Yes, I’ll give the Lord a hundred dollars.
If you have two cows would you give Him one?  Yeah, I’ll give Him one.
Two pigs, would you give Him one?
The farmer said, That’s not fair! You know I have two pigs -  and you want me to give the Lord my pig!
As long as he knew that he didn’t have those things he would say, Yeah I’ll give it to the Lord - the answer was yes. But when he came to something that he really did have, he said that wasn’t fair.

Whatever we have, we need to use it for the glory of God. The Lord has blessed all of us with gifts, abilities, ....... and time.

​Use what you got.
~J.T.