June 27

Multiplying The Bread Of Life

Then Jesus directed them to have all the people sit down in groups on the green grass. So they sat down in groups of hundreds and fifties.

Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to his disciples to set before the people. He also divided the two fish among them all.

They all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces of bread and fish. The number of the men who had eaten was five thousand.

Mark 6:39-44

Ken Taylor, who has become famous for his best-selling paraphrased version of Scripture, The Living Bible, confronted one rejection after another when he initially sought to have his paraphrase of Paul’s epistles published. Finally he and his wife decided that they would finance the project themselves and hire a friend to do the printing. He had been prompted to simplify the Bible at the urging of his ten children as they were growing up and struggling with the meaning of the King James Version. Thus the project had deep personal meaning.

Taylor was in Jerusalem when he received the galley proofs for final checking, and he walked to the Mount of Olives where he read them through. “When I came to the end, I lingered for a time of prayer and reflection,” he writes. “I sat less than 100 miles from where Jesus had fed more than 5,000 people with five loaves of bread and two fish. I held in my hands what would become 2,000 copies of Living Letters, and I thought of these copies as 2,000 loaves for feeding God’s people.”

How many people could his “loaves” feed? “I pondered a simple mathematical equation: If five loaves fed 5,000 people, how many would 2,000 feed? I pulled out a pencil and found the answer: 2 million. An incredible number. Nevertheless, I bowed my head and prayed that someday 2 million copies of Living Letters would be in print.”

The sales were initially very slow. For one four-month period there were no new orders. Soon, however, word spread, and before long the sales were in the hundreds of thousands, and appeals were being made to Taylor to complete the Bible. In 1972 and 1973 The Living Bible was the nation’s best-seller, and by 1988 it had sold more than 33 million copies. The entire volume has been translated into ten languages and The Living New Testament has been translated into fifty.

This had been a dream fulfilled for Taylor who read Borden of Yale while studying at Wheaton. It is the story of a wealthy young man who gave up his inheritance to follow God’s call to Egypt, where he served only a short time before his untimely death. Taylor, at that time, prayed that God would use him in a similar way—never realizing how greatly God would multiply his humble offering of 2,000 loaves. ²⁷