Jesus is True Bread - John 6:22-71 (05.24.2026)

And you can stay standing for the reading of God's Word and go ahead and grab

your Bibles and open them up to John chapter 6.

John 6 · chapter mention

And we have a long passage today. I'm not even going to read all of what we're

going to cover, actually, in the sermon, but I'm going to read a large chunk, verses 22,

John chapter 6, verses 22 through 50.

John 6:22–50

On the next day, the crowd that remained on the other side of the sea saw that

there had been only one boat there and that Jesus had not entered the boat with

his disciples, but that his disciples had gone away alone.

Other boats from Tiberias came near the place where they had eaten the bread

after the Lord had given thanks.

So when the crowd saw that Jesus was not there nor his disciples,

they themselves got into the boats and went to Capernaum seeking Jesus.

When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him,

Rabbi, when did you get here?

Jesus answered them, Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me not because

you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.

Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal

life, which the Son of Man will give to you.

For on him God the Father has set his seal.

Then they said to him, What must we do to be doing the works of God?

Jesus answered them, This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.

So they said to him, Then what sign do you do that we may see and believe you?

What work do you perform? Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness,

as it is written. He gave them bread from heaven to eat.

Jesus then said to them, Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave

you the bread from heaven, but my father gives you the true bread from heaven.

For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.

They said to him, Sir, give us this bread always.

Jesus said to them, I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me shall not hunger.

Whoever believes in me shall never thirst.

But I said to you that you have seen me and yet you do not believe.

All that the Father gives me will come to me. And whoever comes to me, I will never cast out.

For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me.

And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that

he has given me, but raise it up on the last day.

For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes

in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.

So the Jews grumbled about him, because he said, I am the bread that came down from heaven.

They said, Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we

know? How does he now say, I have come down from heaven?

Jesus answered them, Do not grumble among yourselves.

No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him,

and I will raise him up on the last day.

It is written in the prophets, and they shall all be taught by God.

Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me,

not that anyone has seen the Father except he who is from God. He has seen the Father.

Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life.

I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness and they died.

This is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat of it and

not die. This is the word of the Lord.

All right, you can be seated. Let me pray for us again. Lord,

we just thank you for this morning, for the chance to worship you and hear testimony

and to hear your word and to be together.

I pray that you would encourage.

Our faith and trust in you today through your word. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right. So this is a big passage.

We're going to do a flyover and take a lot out of it, I hope, in our time together.

Two weeks ago, we looked at the miracle of the feeding of the 5,000.

And in that sermon, if you were here, I said, we're going to get into really

what is the deeper meaning that that sign is pointing to.

And now's the chance for us to do that. That's what this entire section is about.

We're covering it all in one sermon because it's really all one conversation.

It's one back and forth between Jesus and the crowds and then some of the religious

rulers as well as he is in Capernaum at the synagogue. And,

And it's all getting at what his miracle of feeding the 5,000 was pointing to.

So we're going to cover a lot of ground, and I hope that that's going to be okay for us today.

The sign that Jesus performed in feeding the multitudes was meant to point to

the incredible truth that Jesus summarizes in verse 35 when he says, I am the bread of life.

Whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.

What Jesus is saying and what he's going to be saying this entire conversation

is that he's come to be the solution to our greatest problem,

and he's come to satisfy all of our deepest longings.

This is the theme that we're going to see repeated over and over again in the Gospel of John.

And if you've been with us, you already heard this theme come up a handful of times.

In particular, you heard this when we were studying the passage of Jesus interacting

with the woman, the Samaritan woman at the well, and he's telling her that anyone

who drinks of the water that he offers will never thirst.

He's come to satisfy her deepest longings.

Her deepest soul longings. These 49

verses are going to be a little bit different though than that passage because

what we saw when Jesus explains that to the Samaritan woman and then she goes

and she brings out her whole town and they hear this good news as well is that

the Samaritans respond to this with faith.

I mean, there's definitely some initial confusion about it and questions,

follow-up, misunderstanding.

But they eventually, what they do, the Samaritan woman first,

is they leap at the chance to take this amazing offer that's being offered to

them, this incredible gift that's being offered to them.

What we see here is with the crowds, with these religious leaders,

is that this offer is being made to them and they do not take it.

They don't actually want it.

And so that is a big part of the difference in this passage.

And Jesus is going to explain why that is.

And he's going to teach us something really crucial. So.

Let's remember kind of, let's set up the scene again. So he's fed the 5,000.

He dismissed the crowds.

He no doubt had to force them to leave so that he could go up on a mountain

to be by himself alone with the Father and pray.

And so that he could send the disciples off. He sends them off and into the

storm. If you were here last week, we looked at that.

And then he sees them struggling, trying to get across the sea and in the storm.

And he gets to them by walking on the water through the storm and he gets into

the boat and then the boat is teleported.

He transports them the rest of the, something like two miles to the other side

of the shore where they were trying to go.

And so the crowds are frantically looking for him.

And when they find him, eventually they ask him, how did you get here?

And you might notice he didn't tell them.

He doesn't say, well, I walked across the sea, you know, and as if it was concrete.

And he doesn't say, I teleported us. When I got into the boat,

I teleported us. You know, because they were already...

Like chomping at the bit to try and force him to be their earthly king and set

up an earthly kingdom. And he wasn't going to have that, right?

So instead, what does he do?

He says to them that they've come to him with the wrong motives.

And that's our first point. As we just look at what What I want you to do this morning is just,

we need opportunities like this to see our hearts through the crowd,

through the religious leaders.

And yes, we in this room, most of us, many of us have professed faith in Christ and we have a new heart.

And yet our flesh is still the same, is it not?

We still battle against this flesh. Our flesh never gets sanctified.

Just so we all are understanding that our flesh never gets any better than it

was before we were saved.

And so when we see, when we see the intricacies of the darkness and the deception

that our hearts are capable of, it's helpful to us because it helps us to remember

not to toy with that flesh that's in us, right?

And so that's why we need these opportunities.

So he sees that they're coming to him for the wrong reasons.

That, I mean, this is a picture of how, how evil the human heart can be,

that we can even do the right thing.

The best thing, which would be to go to Jesus, to come to Jesus.

We can even do that and do it with the wrong motives.

So let's try and understand why is it that in verse 26, he rebukes them.

You're not coming to me because you saw the signs. In other words,

you're not understanding the purpose of the sign and what it pointed to,

but you're coming to me basically he's saying, because you've got your bellies full.

And in other words, he's saying, he's warning them something that is a great, great warning for us.

You're seeking me and pursuing me because I am convenient to have around.

You're seeking and pursuing me because of what I can do for you,

primarily for the ways that I can be useful to you.

And we, brothers and sisters, we can be guilty of the same thing.

And this is really important that we understand what this rebuke is about and what it's not about.

This rebuke is not about the fact that they would go to Jesus and ask him for

help with something that is temporary, that is, you know, help to them in this life.

That's not, that is not the rebuke. In fact, we should ask him for help in all

the things that we encounter.

This is not Jesus saying, don't come to me and ask for help at work.

Don't come to me and ask for favor with your boss.

Don't come to me and ask that you would start sleeping better at night.

Don't come to me and ask for your daily food and your daily clothing and for

help with whatever it is that you need in this life.

It's not what Jesus is saying, right?

But what is he saying? He's saying, you don't see me for who I am or treasure me for who I am.

That's what he's getting at. He's saying, you're missing the sign.

You're missing the point.

He's saying, when you come to me, you should be seeking me because you want to worship me.

And so the question for us, and I think a good diagnostic for us to help us

discern why are we seeking Jesus today?

Like, I trust that.

We know that he is Lord and that he's worthy of our worship,

but like day in, day out, just as a diagnostic, why am I seeking him primarily?

And I think a good diagnostic is what's occupying my thoughts?

What's occupying my prayer?

Am I starting my prayer the way that he taught us to pray, hallowed be your name?

Do I start there or do I jump past that every time and get straight to give

me my daily bread, right?

Our approach to him first and foremost should be motivated by the fact that he is king.

He is Lord. He is worthy of my life.

He's worthy of my attention and admiration and worship.

And when I come to him, I should start there and make sure that I'm treasuring

him as I pursue help with all the other things that I need. Right?

And so this crowd is not doing that. They're purely occupied by their own interests,

and Jesus calls them out for it.

They're seeking him in a way that doesn't please God.

They're working for the food that perishes, is not for the food that endures to eternal life.

They're completely preoccupied by all the temporal things around them.

And that's so easy to happen, isn't it?

Because this world is assaulting our five senses.

And it's so easy to become so preoccupied with everything that's.

The spiritual. We forget the eternal. We forget the kingdom of God.

And all of this is a picture of fallenness.

It's a picture of what we're very, very capable of even as believers,

seeking him, running after him, but still missing him.

We're seeking him for his gifts and not for himself.

All of this leads to the second point, and that is that Jesus alone satisfies,

but we won't, we can't, and we won't come to him unless God intervenes.

So the crowd asks him, you know, what should we be doing, verse 28,

to be doing the works of God? And what does he say?

This is the work of God that you believe in him whom he has sent.

He tells the crowd, the work that pleases God is really no work at all, right?

We know that we can't work our way into God's favor.

And what he's, you know, turning what they're asking him on its head.

He's saying, no, there's no work that can give you favor with God, but faith.

That's what pleases God, faith in him.

And this is why this is so important for us because,

and you know this, But we don't put our faith in Christ, faith in the gospel,

and then move on from that as though faith was just the entry point into the Christian life.

Faith is the Christian life. Faith is how not only we are saved,

but how we are sanctified.

We are saved by grace through faith. and then we don't move on from that and

move on from grace through faith to be sanctified through our hard work and

determination and discipline.

We are saved by grace through faith and we are sanctified by grace through faith.

And every single thing, Galatians is a great place to go to learn about this.

Every single thing, every work of God in our lives through the Holy Spirit is wrought through faith.

Faith is the conduit for all of his work, all of his power to flow into and through our lives.

It's like a power cord. It doesn't have any power in and of itself.

It's just sitting there in a pile. It's useless.

But when it's plugged into the source, when it's plugged into the outlet,

suddenly electricity can run through it.

Incredible things can happen on the other end. That's what our faith is like.

And so this is so relevant for us that we recognize that.

We've got to continue in the faith day in and day out. This is really the battle.

And the weeks where I have struggled the most, it's because my faith has waned.

The weeks where I have gone through the darkest seasons or the months where

I've gone through the darkest seasons is because my faith was weakened.

And so he's telling this crowd

something that's so incredible incredibly

simple he says this is the work believe and and if you do you'll be given eternal

life you'll be given this amazing gift you'll be raised up on the last day he

says that four times there's so much there's so much in that He's saying, you won't be condemned.

You won't be judged in the end.

You won't be destroyed in the end. You will not taste death.

And he's telling them, look at verse 35, that if they would just come to him,

they won't ever hunger and they won't ever thirst.

They'll have their deepest longings satisfied.

He's, in other words, saying, I have the solution to your greatest need,

and that is that you're a sinner and you will die in your sin if not for me.

And I'm offering you a solution to that. You'll be raised up on the last day.

And I'm offering to you the gift of the greatest, your greatest desires will be satisfied.

And how do they respond? In verse 41, One, John identifies the Jews,

which, as I said earlier, in his gospel refers to the religious leaders.

And so what does it say?

The Jews grumbled about him because he said, I am the bread that came down from heaven.

Interestingly, this is the same sin that if you're familiar with the book of

Exodus, when the Israelites wander in the desert for 40 years,

This is the same sin that their fathers were so guilty of so many times.

They grumbled against God. They couldn't trust him in the midst of their difficulties,

and therefore they grumbled.

And so here are the Jews doing the same thing.

They're grumbling because of this teaching, because he's saying, I came down from heaven.

And they cannot fathom this. They think they know Jesus.

They say, don't we know his father and his mother?

How could he have possibly come down from heaven?

They've put God in a box that they cannot possibly think outside of.

And here is God in the flesh standing in front of them, offering them the most

incredible gift imaginable to mankind, and they cannot take it.

And here is the point I want us to see. Unbelief is utterly foolish.

Utterly blind. Unbelief is wicked.

This is what I was so convicted of personally this week as I was studying this.

Lord, when I don't trust you, when I don't trust you, it is so foolish.

When I don't cling to you, when I don't depend on you, when I think I'm independent and I don't pray.

It is so foolish. It's so blind.

It's so wicked. Hebrews 3.12, take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you

an evil, unbelieving heart leading you to fall away from the living God.

Unbelief is the first step to falling away from the living God.

And so here is my exhortation that I've been preaching to myself this week,

and I hope I am preaching to you that you're getting it is that when we see

unbelief in our hearts, we should fight tooth and nail against it.

Fight for faith, fight for belief.

This is the work of God, that you believe on the Son.

So how does Jesus respond to this insanity, this unbelief displayed by the Jews in the crowds.

Verse 37, he says, very matter of factly, all that the father gives me will come to me.

And whoever comes to me, I will never cast out.

And then in verse 44, no one can come to me unless the father who sent me draws

him and I will raise him up on the last day.

Jesus's response as he looks at the foolishness of unbelief and the blindness of unbelief,

he says, I see you not coming to me, even though I'm offering you eternal life,

but all the father gives to me will come to me and no one can come to me unless the father draws him.

And so this is Jesus's confidence in the midst of witnessing this unbelief. This is his confidence.

And this passage illustrates how utterly corrupted our human hearts can be.

That instead of submitting to and rejoicing in and running to this incredibly

good news, we would reject the offer unless, unless, unless God intervenes.

Unless God intervenes, unless the Father intervenes. That is,

unless He overpowers our darkened, foolish, rebellious, dead hearts and says,

let there be light, let there be life.

And so here's the beauty of this. We see at the same time just how helpless

we are, how corrupted our hearts are, that we will not take the greatest gift

that's being offered to us.

That's how bad the situation is. And yet we see at the same time the beauty

that the Father intervenes, that he draws us, that he awakens us,

that he overpowers that unbelief.

What an incredible thing. What confidence it gave to Jesus. What confidence it should give to us.

So this passage, while, yes,

it is staggering to see the darkness of our hearts,

it is comforting to see what gives us assurance that we have a God who overpowers

and overcomes our blindness, our deadness.

The Father does overpower dark hearts and nothing will be able to keep us from

Christ. That's what he's saying.

And then when we come to him, he will never, never, never, never cast us out.

And he will never lose us. No one can pluck us out of his hand and nothing will

be able to keep him from raising us on the last day.

This is where our assurance comes from.

The work of our salvation and keeping us to the very end is his work, believer.

While we have need of endurance. The Bible holds these things very much in tandem

that we are called to persevere to the end.

We are called to fight the fight of faith.

We are called never to stop fighting that fight. And he's the one holding us.

He's the one enabling that fight. He's the one empowering that fight.

He's the one that continues to draw us back when we wander. He's the one who

chases after us and picks us up and carries us back to the fold.

And how is it that Jesus can promise all of this?

Let's look at point number three. The son became flesh to die and died so we

could live. Verses 51 through 59.

He says, I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of

this bread, he will live forever.

And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.

The Jews then disputed among themselves saying, how can this man give us his flesh to eat?

So Jesus said to them, truly, truly, I say to you, Unless you eat the flesh

of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.

Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life,

and I will raise him up on the last day.

For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever feeds on my flesh

and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.

As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father,

so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me.

This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate and died.

Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever. Jesus said these things in the

synagogue as he taught at Capernaum.

Now, what is Jesus doing here? What's he saying?

I would venture to guess that all of us in this room get our groceries from the grocery store.

Most of us are not homesteaders. Maybe we got a homesteader in here.

I don't know. But we have a different relationship to food than first century Jews, right?

They were very well aware of the fact that whether you were raising or growing

food, something had to die in order for you to eat, right? Right.

And including bread, whether it's wheat or barley, something that once was alive,

had to die in order for you to eat it.

And so in this picture that he's giving them, he's saying, you know, you eat bread.

The fathers ate manna and you eat bread. You take it into your body.

And this thing that once was alive and now dead, when you take it into your body.

It gives you life. It gives you life. It fuels you. It gives you energy.

It allows you to be able to grow.

Those of us who are adults, hopefully we're done growing.

We may be growing in different direction, but it allows you to grow.

It's amazing when you think about it. We feed on dead organisms and we have life because of that.

And Jesus says, you know, this bread that the Israelites ate,

this manna, though it was a miraculous bread, even though it was bread from

heaven, they had to eat it every single day.

They ate it and then they had to eat again the next day. And eventually they still died.

And then he says, I'm the living bread that came down from heaven.

If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever.

And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.

What's he saying? He's saying that he's going to lay his body down.

He's saying he's going to lay his flesh down, give it over so that we could live.

Jesus took on flesh for this very reason, so that he could lay it down as an offering to the father.

Hebrews 10.5 says, when Christ came into the world, he said,

sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body you have prepared for me.

I don't know if you ever think about that. The body that Jesus lived in,

walked around in, that's now

raised and seated on a throne was prepared from day one as an offering.

A sinless, spotless, perfect, acceptable, pleasing offering to the Father in our place.

Jesus is describing faith. He's describing taking this in, taking him in by faith, by trusting him.

And he's doing it in an intentionally visceral and even offensive way.

And we're going to see this in John.

He's not afraid to say things in a way that offends those particularly who are

not genuinely believers.

He does that very, very intentionally. He's not surprised by this.

That brings us to point number four, last point.

How do we, how will we respond when we come to his words that are hard for us?

Let's look at verses 60 through the end of this.

When many of his disciples heard it, they said, this is a hard saying.

Who can listen to it? But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were

grumbling about this, so now his disciples are grumbling, said to them,

do you take offense at this?

Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?

It is the Spirit who gives life. The flesh is no help at all.

The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life, but there are some

of you who do not believe.

For Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe and who

it was who would betray him.

And he said, This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is

granted him by the Father.

After this, many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him.

So Jesus said to the twelve, it's just him and the twelve now,

Do you want to go away as well?

Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go?

You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed and have come to know

that you are the Holy One of God.

Jesus answered them, Did I not choose you, the twelve, and yet one of you is a devil?

He spoke of Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, for he, one of the twelve, was going to betray him.

Here's what I want us to see and take away from the last part of this passage.

In our walk with Christ, there will be times when we come to things where we

too will say, this is hard.

Who can listen to this? Or who can understand this? Or who can bear this trial?

Who can endure this test?

You know this, and we've talked about this and seen this.

Again and again, and we will see it again and again. But the life of following

Christ is not all rainbows and butterflies. It is difficult.

There's tests, there's trials, and it's all part of the design.

And here, Jesus sees that his disciples are struggling with his teaching,

and he still doesn't say, let me make this more palatable for you.

This is a designed test, right? And so he says, will you two walk away?

He looks at him. He doesn't blink. He doesn't flinch. Are you going to leave

too? And there's the test.

Maybe you struggle with something in scripture, maybe some doctrine in scripture.

Maybe it's the doctrine of God's election or man's depravity or a doctrine about

sexuality or gender or whatever it might be.

Maybe there's something in scripture that you just, it really trips you up and

you think, I don't like that.

I don't like that. I don't like that. God chooses some and doesn't choose everyone.

Or I don't like that they're...

That people are so corrupted by sin that they won't even come to him unless he intervenes.

I just don't like that. Maybe that's how you feel.

Maybe you struggle with something like that.

But here's the thing that we can take away from this.

The thing that we gotta take away from this and learn from this is,

how do we respond to that struggle?

Because his disciples are struggling, even grumbling, but they look around and here's the key.

And they don't say, you know, we should go follow. There's this other guy we

could go follow and he doesn't have such hard words.

And the same is true for us, right?

We struggle with a certain doctrine that's clearly in scripture,

but we can find someone who will agree with us and we don't have to wrestle with it anymore.

We can find a teacher on YouTube. We can find another church somewhere maybe,

But here is the right response, what we see from Peter.

Lord, to whom shall we go? Where else could we possibly go?

When we go through dark nights of the soul, or we go through tests of faith

where our faith is struggling, I mean, this is the right answer.

Where else could we possibly go?

We've come to believe that you are, you say you are, you are the Son of God.

You have the words of eternal life.

Like Peter, when we struggle with a hard word or a hard providence,

rather than running away, rather than running away from the church where God's

people are and where we're encouraged and challenged rather than running away

from teaching that's hard for us to understand or grasp or like.

Should be like Peter and say, I have believed that you are the only one, the holy one of God.

And so we cling to him. We depend upon him.

We trust him when things don't make sense,

or we trust him when things hurt, or we trust him when we don't understand how

he's going to get us through because he is true bread from heaven.

And if we feed on him, if we, in other words, if we come back to him and come

back to him and come back to him for fellowship, for communion,

for friendship, and to worship him, to take him in, then he will save us again

and again and again, and he will satisfy us again and again and again.

That's the takeaway for us today, church. Let's come to Jesus again, a new fresh week.

Let's come to him and let's feed on him. Let's pray.

Lord, I thank you that you are reliable, trustworthy, strong.

You're a strong tower for us to run to.

You can handle our struggles and difficulties. and when we have a hard time

believing or trusting, Lord, that you can handle it.

And we run to you and say, where else can I go, Lord?

And you meet us there. Lord, thank you for this truth and this reminder.

And I pray that you would meet us here afresh as we respond in worship,

as we respond in taking communion, would you please just refresh our faith again today?

In Jesus' name, amen.