I Am: The Bread of Life (John 6:25-40)

And the gospel lesson comes from John chapter 6, beginning at the 25th verse.

John 6 · chapter mention

When the crowd found Jesus on the other side of the sea, they said to him, Rabbi, when did you come 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, Well, 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 manna in the wilderness, as it is written, he gave them bread from heaven to eat.

Jesus 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, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.

But I said to you that you have seen me and yet 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 every one who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.

The word of the Lord, thanks be to God.

Let us pray.

Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be always pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our Redeemer.

Father, we teach our hearts to seek after that bread which truly satisfies.

We pray in Christ's precious name.

Amen.

So you are what you eat.

That's what they say, isn't it?

We've heard that expression before.

You are what you eat.

It's a general truth, I suppose.

It's not a literal truth, of course.

If it was literally true, then coming out of the Christmas season, I'd be roughly 70% shortbread, 40% or 20% fruitcake, probably about 10% kind of quality street toffees, which I'm particularly partial to.

The toothpaste ones, not so much.

We know it's a general truth.

It's not a literal truth, it's not literally true, but it communicates something that's generally true.

We might have heard it as children, and as we learn about food and nutrition, maybe we've passed that advice along to others.

The general truth is that if we eat well, if we eat healthy food, we're generally going to be healthier for it.

Our bodies are going to be nourished and sustained and strengthened.

If we eat unhealthy food, our bodies are generally going to be unsustained and weaker.

Well, we're generally going to be in poorer health.

The idea that we are what we eat becomes particularly true, perhaps, for those of us who go through Christmas grazing.

Christmas grazing is what happens when all of the baked goods are kind of just left out on the table.

And there's kind of just this timeless dance of going around the table and sampling different kinds of sweets.

And I love Christmas baking.

I love it very much.

But there's something about Christmas baking, or at least a full day of eating Christmas baking, that leaves me longing for the feast.

It leaves me longing for a good turkey or a good meal of ham, something hearty, something that's going to satisfy, something that will truly nourish my body.

Maybe we know that feeling for ourselves.

Baked goods are wonderful, but they leave us feeling unsustained.

They can leave us feeling unsatisfied.

We long for the true feast.

We might see where we're going with this.

Our gospel reading suggests that what's true with our physical bodies is true with our souls, true in our hearts, true at the very center of our being.

We long not for that which gives a temporary relief.

We long for that which truly satisfies.

Perhaps we who are created in the image of God long for eternity.

Perhaps we long for that which will eternally satisfy.

And so our souls require nourishment.

We don't have it within ourselves to provide what it is we need.

We need to look for that which will nourish us, that which will sustain us, that which will truly satisfy us.

Otherwise, we're left with a deep longing, unsatisfied, unsustained.

We have hungry hearts.

We can see this longing, I think, when we look around us, perhaps if we even examine our own hearts.

We can look around at maybe modern spirituality.

We have a way of approaching spirituality that is a little bit like assembling Lego pieces.

We might take a little, a couple of bricks over here and some detachment from Buddhism, and we might turn over here.

And, well, we like the idea of past lives, maybe we can assemble for ourselves this spirituality which we trust will satisfy us.

It'll bring us through life.

It'll speak to the longings of our hearts.

Maybe we see these longings in our quest for an identity.

We want to see ourselves fulfilled and expressed.

Maybe we see these longings, we can look through a darker window, perhaps, and we can see these longings expressed in addictions as we look to fill the void, the unsatiable hunger in our own souls through different substances.

Or perhaps doom scrolling, which is one of the words of the year this year, compulsively flipping through the headlines that perhaps become increasingly apocalyptic, with the idea of trying to find some, well, trying to find something that satisfies, trying to find that sense of control, that sense of equilibrium that's going to restore life to what we long for.

We can see this longing for something that will truly satisfy all around us.

Perhaps we see it even in our own hearts.

That longing is a very human thing.

It's a very good thing.

A longing is something we ought to be honest about.

That longing for something that will truly satisfy us.

The question in front of us, the question that our gospel presents us with is what's it going to take to truly satisfy a hungry heart?

That is, if what the great philosopher Bruce Springsteen has to say is true, that we all have a hungry heart.

What's it going to take to satisfy hungry hearts?

Our gospel reading makes no, leaves no doubt about it.

Jesus has come to satisfy hungry hearts.

Jesus has come to satisfy the longings, the deepest longings of our soul, the longing for eternity and eternal life.

This is what Jesus says in our gospel reading.

Whoever comes to me shall not hunger.

Whoever believes in me shall never thirst.

Jesus has come to satisfy what our hearts most long for.

And the good news for us this morning, for those of us who have hungry hearts, is that Jesus' invitation is for you and me as well.

His invitation is to come and to believe, to find satisfaction in him.

Do you long for the world to be as it should be?

Do you long for a sense of fulfillment, of satisfaction, of true rest and security?

Jesus wants you to know where you can find that satisfaction for the deepest longings in our hearts.

We're going to be spending some time in the Gospel of John over the next couple of weeks.

If you're following along in our Bible reading plan, which we've put out, you'll also be spending time in your personal devotions in the Gospel of John.

You'll see where our texts kind of fit into John's biography of Jesus here.

John is the author of this Gospel.

He's also the author of the pastoral letters we find later in the New Testament, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John.

He's quite possibly the author of Revelation as well.

John is a pretty common name in the 21st century, was a pretty common name in the first century as well.

But John is one of the apostles.

He's one of the twelve.

And he writes this gospel towards the end of the first century.

And if you've read the Gospel of John, especially if you've read the other Gospels as well, you'll know John to be a very unique gospel.

It's a unique approach to a portrayal, a biography, a spirit-inspired biography of Jesus.

And that's because John has a very particular purpose, a Holy Spirit-inspired purpose.

Jesus, or John, writes this book about Jesus, not just to give us some facts, not just to give us some interesting trivia about who Jesus is, but John speaks to our hearts.

He speaks to the hearts of his readers.

He wants us to know deep in our hearts that Jesus is the promised Messiah.

He's the anointed savior of the world.

And he's the exalted Son of God.

He is God made flesh, the Word who was with God and was God, who embodies God among us.

That's John's wonderful prologue in chapter one, how he introduces Jesus.

Well, that was our Christmas Eve reading together.

We meditated on what that's like for the light of the world to break into our gloom.

John doesn't want us to miss the cosmic significance, the saving, redemptive significance of who Jesus is for us.

That's what John's gospel is all about.

That's why when John introduces Jesus in chapter one, he wants us to know that through Jesus, by believing in him, we can become children of God.

We can be invited into the family of faith.

We can know that salvation for ourselves.

And he concludes his gospel by saying, those who believe in Jesus can have life in his name.

That's you and me too.

That's the invitation John wants us to take up in his gospel.

There's many ways John portrays Jesus, or John conveys this idea that Jesus is our Savior and the Word made flesh.

One of those ways is a series of I am statements that John includes in his gospel.

He includes seven of them.

Seven is the biblical number for completion.

He wants us to know that Jesus really is who he claims to be.

And these I am statements are something like, well, it's something like spinning a gem around and seeing the way the light refracts off it.

We can see different beautiful facets of who Jesus is as we see these different I am statements illuminate more and more of his character for us.

We'll spend time meditating on these seven comparative I am statements, that Jesus is the bread of life, the light of the world, the door, the good shepherd, the resurrection and the life, the way, the truth and the life, and finally the good vine, or pardon me, the true vine.

And these I am statements very purposely echo our Old Testament reading this morning from Exodus chapter 3.

Exodus 3 · chapter mention

Did you catch that?

When Moses says, Who am I going to say is sent me?

What does Yahweh say to him?

He says, I am has sent you.

I am who I am.

The Greek translation of that is, egoemi, and that's what Jesus is saying here.

Egoemi, I am the bread of life, the light of the world.

Jesus is leaving no shadow of the doubt of who he claims to be.

He is the embodiment of God Almighty.

He is God incarnate, the word made flesh, revealed for our salvation and the salvation of the world.

So if we want to know who Jesus is, not just who we think Jesus is, but who he really reveals himself to be, we can take up John's invitation and we can pull at the threads of these I am statements, and we will find who Jesus really is.

And we'll discover the saving importance to ourselves.

I am the bread of life.

Jesus says that to us in our gospel text.

This is his first of seven I am statements.

Jesus satisfies our hungry hearts.

So we're kind of dropped in the middle of the action in our gospel reading today.

Jesus has begun his public ministry.

And since chapter five, he's had a mounting opposition to what he's about.

He is the Messiah, he's the Son of God, and he's teaching and proclaiming the kingdom, and this is ruffling the feathers of his opponents, who since chapter five have set themselves against them such that they want to put them six feet under.

They're going to kill them.

That's what they're about.

And so Jesus, in the course of his ministry, has gone out to the wilderness and proclaimed the truths of the kingdom.

Now he's fed the 5,000 plus with a few mere loaves of bread and two fish.

This has been a miraculous sign that points towards the fact that Jesus really is truly the coming Messiah.

The kingdom is breaking into creation.

Things are being renewed.

People are getting caught up in the kingdom.

And now, just a few verses later, Jesus has walked on water and met his disciples.

Now they're on the other side of the Sea of Galilee, and the crowd has followed Jesus.

They followed Jesus because they got a free lunch yesterday, and they're interested in another free lunch today.

Did you catch that in verses 25 and 27?

You've came not because of the signs, you've come because you had your fill of the loaves.

I have to confess, I've definitely been to work meetings, not because I have anything to contribute to a particular lunch meeting, but because I knew they were ordering from that sandwich place.

And that's a good sandwich place.

I want to be at that meeting.

This crowd, I maybe in a way I can identify with, they're interested in a free lunch.

They had a great lunch yesterday.

They want a new one today.

What we see in the crowd is ends up being an enemy to satisfaction.

The crowd is interested in seeing their material needs met.

They've come to Jesus not because they see signs of the kingdom, not because they want to draw near to who Jesus is, but because they're interested in their own self-satisfaction.

They're interested in their own physical needs being met.

Maybe at this point we ought to pause as readers and ask our own hearts the question: why is it that I follow Jesus?

What are my motives?

Is it because I want a free lunch of sorts?

Is it because I'm interested in my material needs or my ambitions or my aspirations being met?

What is it that motivates my following Jesus?

That's why Jesus gives a rebuke to this crowd.

It's funny, he doesn't seem excited to see them.

He seems to call them out for their motives.

Jesus says, verse uh 25 to 27.

Pardon me, 26 to 27.

I say to you, you're seeking me not because you saw signs, but because you ate your full of the loaves.

But this is the imperative.

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

Jesus wants to direct our attention to the real stakes, to the real heart of the matter, why Jesus has come.

So the crowd responds with a sort of tell us what to do and we'll do it.

Tell us what the works are that God demands, and we're going to perform those, you know, so we can get that bread that we're so interested in.

The question is, what qualifies us before God in verse 28?

It reveals a sort of self-sufficiency, a self-trust.

We have what it takes to do what God is asking of us, and if we do that, we know that God is going to be good or provide what we want on his end of the bargain.

It's a little bit of a transaction, isn't it?

It's a little bit of a, if we give a little bit of this, God's going to give us a little bit of that.

Tell us the works that God requires, we're going to go ahead and do that.

Sometimes I confess my prayers sound a lot like that.

God, if I do this good work, maybe you can be real good to me and provide this, oh, this material need or this little ambition of mine, this little thing I want to see come together.

End up setting a transactional relationship with the Lord.

As though we have what it takes to satisfy him, when he is interested so much more in satisfying us.

God, I'll do this if you'll do that.

So Jesus must have surprised them when he told them what the work of God is that God requires.

Verse 29.

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

Not works, not performance, not earning.

The work of God is that you believe in the one that he sent, that you've come to place your trust, your life's commitment in the Messiah, in myself, in Jesus, who has come for your salvation.

This is a complete self-giving, just as Christ has come to completely give himself for our sake.

So the crowd asks for a sign.

Give us a sign, authenticate yourself.

Give us a seal of approval for your message here.

So then they ask, they talk about manna, and the backdrop here is this confirming some messianic expectations they have.

They knew when the they suspected when the Messiah came, he would perform many of the same miraculous signs that Moses did.

He would fulfill that.

And one of the things he'd provide for is manna.

Something that would feed God's people quite miraculously in the wilderness, which, at first reading, I have to say, is just so surprising considering what happened yesterday.

They literally just got fed by bread in the wilderness quite miraculously.

So either this is a very forgetful crowd, or it's a very impertinent crowd, pressing Jesus into their own agenda for him.

And maybe it reveals some self-seeking, which can also be an enemy of finding true satisfaction in who Jesus is.

So Jesus responds, verse 32 and 33, you're confused.

God alone sustains.

Moses didn't provide bread in the wilderness.

My father provided that bread.

And now he's providing the living bread that's from heaven, the true bread from heaven.

You're going to miss it because you're so preoccupied with your own little agenda.

Perhaps he's echoing Deuteronomy chapter 8.

Deuteronomy 8 · chapter mention

A man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.

We long for eternity.

We don't just long for that thing that's going to satisfy our temporal needs.

That might be fun for a time.

But in our deepest selves, we long for that which will truly, eternally satisfy us.

And the risk is that this crowd is going to miss it altogether.

Here he is, right in front of them.

The bread, the bread of life, who has come to completely sustain, satisfy, and secure them.

But they're interested in their own little temporal bread.

I am the bread of life, Jesus says.

He says it again in verses 45, or pardon me, 48 and 51.

You'll never hunger or thirst.

Which is to say that putting your trust in me is a well, it's a metaphor for the human need to know God.

Putting your trust, believing in Him, is appropriating Christ Himself as the source of one's own life.

It's coming to put your trust in Christ such that who he is sustains who I am.

It's a vital kind of faith relationship.

We've seen something like this play out already in John.

On chapter 4, when Jesus meets a Samaritan woman at the well.

Jesus asks this woman to draw some water for her and affirms.

And this woman says, Who are you to ask that of me?

This is a remarkably counter-cultural question to ask, not just because this is a Jew asking it of a Samaritan, which they just simply didn't get along in the first century.

This is a Jewish man asking of a Jewish woman.

But Jesus again wants to direct her attention to the real stakes at hand.

If you knew the gift of God, Jesus says to this woman, and who it is that is saying to you, give me a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you the living water.

Jesus goes on to say, everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again.

That is the water you find in the well, the physical water.

But whoever drinks of the water that I give him will never be thirsty again.

The water that I give him will become in him a spring of water, welling up to eternal life.

Jesus has come to satisfy the deepest longings of our hearts.

This woman has had many relationships, we read in John chapter 4.

John 4 · chapter mention

Perhaps there's dependency, or perhaps there's a seeking for identity there.

Jesus wants her to know that he's come to satisfy the deepest longings of her hearts.

Because it's so easy, isn't it, to substitute those eternal longings for temporal substitutes?

To try and fill that infinite void, that void meant for eternity in our hearts with the distractions around us.

Jesus wants us to know that that longing can be satisfied.

That longing is satisfied in Him.

By putting our trust in Him, we will not hunger, nor will we thirst.

We have only to take up that invitation to come and to believe.

So if it's true that we have hungry hearts, then we desire the eternal.

But perhaps we settled for food that perishes.

That's what our first parents did, wasn't it?

They walked with God in the garden.

And yet they exchanged this vital, beautiful, life-giving relationship for fruit that perishes, that caused them to perish.

They rebelled against the Lord.

And what was true for our first parents is true for us when we substitute the living bread, the bread of heaven, who is Jesus Himself, for our own temporal distractions.

Jesus wants us to know that he is the living bread who came down from heaven.

If anyone eats of this bread, Jesus says in verse 51, they will live forever.

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

Did you catch that?

Jesus wants to give us this bread which is his flesh.

The crowd asks, what work do we have to perform?

What do we have to do to earn and qualify for this bread?

Jesus wants us to know the gospel.

The gospel is that God wants to give us this bread.

And that's what the cross is about.

The cross is Jesus offering his body as the bread from heaven for the life of the world.

It's a gift.

That's why John says in chapter 3, verse 16 that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.

That whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.

Believing in Jesus, appropriating him as the source of our own life, is the source of satisfaction, of being eternally sustained and kept.

This is good news for us, friends.

Jesus willingly, lovingly gives his body for the life of the world, just as God provided men in the wilderness to sustain his people physically.

Jesus has come to nourish our hearts, for us to feast on him by faith.

Perhaps this is what Matthew is getting at.

When Jesus preaches the Sermon on the Mount recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, they will be satisfied.

Why is that?

Is that a striving for our own performative works of righteousness?

No.

That's because our hunger, our thirst for righteousness, leads us to the righteous one, who is Jesus, who gave himself for the life of the world, who in his resurrection offers us that new life.

This is the will of my Father, Jesus, says 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.

Death itself will not break that life-giving relationship we have with the Father.

That's the promise we have in Christ.

That fulfills the eternal longing, the longing of our soul, the longing to be kept and carried and sustained by the gift and grace of our loving Heavenly Father.

Friends, those of us who have hungry hearts, those of us who long to be sustained, can feast on Christ by faith.

This means a couple of things.

This means that Jesus, who is the bread of life, is definitive.

He is definitively the bread of life.

We will not be satisfied if we flit around looking for other distractions, other sources of satisfaction.

When we draw nearer and nearer to Christ and to Christ alone, we will find our heart's true longing, our heart's true desire.

This is true of Peter's confession, because by the way, Jesus' teaching here does not go well according to our own standards or, you know, our own ways of measuring preaching.

If I preached a sermon and everyone left, grumbling, I'd start to have to think about my preaching method, probably.

But here Jesus offers a challenge.

And it's an inspired challenge.

It's the word of God.

And the people aren't ready for it.

The people reject it.

They walk away grumbling.

And so Jesus turns to the twelve who've stayed, and they say, and Jesus says to them, Are you going to leave as well?

And here we see Peter's confession of who Jesus truly is.

This is chapter 6, verses uh.

Isaiah 6 · chapter mention

Let's see.

Verses 68 to 69.

Peter answered Jesus, Lord, to whom shall we go?

You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed.

We have come to know that you are the Holy One of God.

What Peter understands is, come what may, Jesus alone can satisfy the hunger of his heart, the hunger of our hearts, and the ups and downs of life.

Perhaps if we are feeling unsatisfied in our souls, the problem is not on God's end.

Perhaps we need to begin by examining our hearts.

Are our hearts distracted?

Do we look for other sources of satisfaction?

Do we prioritize the perishable bread of success or substance or whatever it is?

For the living bread, the true bread that comes from heaven that wants to satisfy the longings of our hearts.

That's Jesus' imperative in verse 27.

Do not work for bread that perishes, but instead we place our faith, we believe in the one who God has sent to us.

Friends, this is a teaching that leads us to communion, to the Lord's table.

And here we are, gathered on Zoom, not able to come to the Lord's table.

Perhaps our hearts long for that as well.

And I hope that that's the case.

Because our hearts, when they find satisfaction in Jesus, long for more of Jesus.

Friends, the table is where Jesus offers us himself, his grace.

We feast on him by faith in a heavenly and spiritual way.

He satisfies us, not just with wafers and wine, but with the living bread, the true bread that comes from heaven, the very source of our salvation.

When we come to the Lord's Supper, we receive the heavenly feast and we feast on the Word, the Word made flesh by faith.

We come to the table, not as those who have it all figured out, not as those striving to perform the works that God requires of us, but we come as those with hungry hearts.

We come as those ready to be satisfied by Jesus.

So ye are what ye eat, so they say.

What is it that our heart feasts on?

What is it that we go to to try and find true satisfaction?

What does it sustain us?

Or are we left hungrier than before?

Jesus has come that we would know the true bread, the true life, the true satisfaction in Him.

My prayer for us, a new song, and my prayer for you, is that you would know this living bread for yourself, that 2021 would be a year where you find satisfaction in Jesus.

Lord Jesus, you are the bread of life.

Father, we pray, give us this bread always.

Amen.