Problems = Opportunities in Disguise to Trust Jesus

There is well known story that appears in each of the four gospels. It is the feeding of the 5000. Jesus had been teaching a crowd for many hours, and as it was getting late the disciples approached Jesus and asked him to send the crowd away to the nearby villages so the crowd could get some food.  It was a group of 5000 men (Matthew 14:21) plus women and children. So, there could have been upwards of 15 thousand! Then Jesus said to his disciples, “They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat” (Matthew 14:16).
 
Suddenly, the disciples were faced with a problem. How would they feed so many people? One of the disciples, Philip, calculated that it would require a year’s worth of wages to feed them! (John 6:7). He calculated the cost of feeding the people, but he left Jesus out of the equation.
 
I wonder if we’re guilty of that too. We can be facing a problem and we don’t look to Jesus. We try and handle it on our own.
 
Let me give you a definition of a problem that I heard from Dr. David Jeremiah: “Problems are situations engineered by God to help us recognize our weakness so that we will learn to depend on His strength!”
 
How would our outlook be transformed if we saw our problems in that light, as God’s teaching tool to help us recognize our inadequacy and weakness so that we would learn to depend on his sufficiency and strength?
 
What problems do you have in your life these days? What if you saw those problems not as insurmountable obstacles, but rather opportunities to trust Jesus?