Jesus doesn’t say, “I give you the way,” but “I am the way.”
This is an excerpt from the sixth chapter of Fear Not: How the Gospel Disrupts Our Deepest Anxieties by Luke Kjolhaug (1517 Publishing, 2026).
We draw near because Christ our Mediator has gone where we never could, and he has brought us with him.

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If the feeding of the 5000 invited an emphasis on Jesus’ COMPASSION, this week’s miracle invites a sermon focused on Jesus’ AUTHORITY.
I rededicated my life as many times as I could when the guilt was unbearable. I would read my Bible more and pray more, yet I still struggled. I knew deep down, I was breaking God’s heart with my failure at being his child.
Jesus’ miracle in this sermon, then, is a type of the compassion He has for your hearers. While they certainly have many physical needs, your hearers also (more fundamentally) need Jesus’ mercy and forgiveness.
The lifeblood of Christ is the treasury that defines personal worth – your worth, my worth. Preach that; the price tag on your soul.
This food, already purchased and freely given in our pericope, is a foretaste of the feast to come as well; the marriage feast of the Lamb in His Kingdom which has no end.
To dwell with a Holy God in their camp, Israel lead holy lives. Anything standing in the way of and threatening this holy relationship must be avoided or eliminated.
It is that love, finally, which comes back again and again, not as an afterthought, but as the underlying theme of the entire section.
These parables invite us to consider the mysterious way of the reign of God. The Kingdom of God comes by grace to those who are seeking and not seeking it.
In our attempts to conform the Gospel of Jesus Christ to material, therapeutic, and mystical standards of religion and spirituality we've arrested, inhibited, distorted, and handicapped God's Word and gifts of salvation.
Lack of effort isn’t the sworn enemy of fruit-bearing. Self-sufficiency is.
By basing our assurance on the promises of God, which we not only hope for in the future but live in now, the Christian can finally rest in the comfort that they are both saved and not responsible for their own salvation.
In Christ, God promises to forgive sin and bring about new life: Life after being canceled.