I Am the Bread of Life

Well, one surefire way to embarrass yourself in a social situation is when someone is talking and they use a figure of speech and you interpret them to literally. When someone uses an idiom or a metaphor to convey a certain meaning and everyone else in the group that you're with gets what they're saying except for you. This is very embarrassing. In most cultures, ours included, people of a certain age and intelligence are supposed to be able to recognize figurative speech. It's a requirement to be able to communicate. And if you don't pick up when one of these figures of speech is used, you can end up looking pretty foolish. So a couple of examples. If I said that it was raining cats and dogs, hopefully you'd all understand that there weren't actually furry animals falling from the sky. Or if I said, this is a true story, if I said, my washing machine kicked the bucket last week, you'd probably realize that I was now in the market to buy a new one, not wondering how or why a household appliance had grown legs and was taking out its aggression on an innocent bucket. Sometimes though, the way we use metaphors in our everyday speech can actually get in the way of having effective communication. For instance, someone who's here visiting from another culture, another country, who's just learning our language, they might not pick up on the sayings and figures of speech we use. Also, when older and younger generations are gathered together. Sometimes one of those generations might use a figure of speech that is not familiar to the other one. This morning, as we continue our sermon series on the I Am Sayings of Jesus, we run into a crowd of people who are having a difficult time understanding a metaphor that Jesus uses to describe himself. This passage is quite different from the passage that Ben walked us through last week. In that passage, Jesus made the statement that before Abraham was, I am. And the Jewish audience who heard Jesus make this statement, though they were very angry, they didn't like what Jesus was saying, there was no question that they understood what Jesus meant. Jesus was calling himself God. And today, we're looking at Jesus speaking to another group of Jews, and he says to them, I am the bread of life. And this time around, the crowd doesn't get what he's talking about. They're very slow on the uptake. They almost comically miss the point. In the passage that Brianne just read for us, Jesus takes three paragraphs to explain what he meant by this statement. And by the end, his hearers still don't quite grasp the significance of what he's talking about. And before we delve into those paragraphs, I want us to back up a bit, still in John 6, but to look at what happened before this conversation took place. So if we turn back to the beginning of John 6, starting in verse 1, we see the event that sets up the conversation that Jesus and these people will have. And this event ought to be a familiar one to many of us. It's the biblical account most commonly referred to as the feeding of the 5,000. You'll find an account of this event in all four gospels, but John's gospel is the only one that includes this extended section that we just heard read that includes Jesus explaining and teaching what this event means about himself. As I said before, the story is likely familiar to many of us. There's a large group of people who have heard of the great things Jesus has been doing. He's been healing the sick, and they wanna check this out. They wanna see what Jesus is all about. So they find him at the place where he is, and as more and more people are coming, Jesus and the disciples realize we're gonna need to feed these people something. There are lots of people here. They're gonna get hungry. and there's not any food around. The only food that they can find is a boy who's there has five barley loaves and two fish. So how are all these people going to eat? Well, Jesus takes the loaves and he gives thanks to God and he starts distributing them. And people start to take the bread and eat. And before anyone realizes that a miracle has happened, Everyone eats the bread, and the disciples gather up the leftovers, and they fill 12 baskets of leftovers. Everyone there had their complete fill of bread, even though there were only five loaves to begin with. Jesus has miraculously multiplied this bread and turned it into enough to feed 5,000 people. And chapter six, verse 14 shows us the people's reaction when they realize what has happened. When the people saw the sign that Jesus had done, they said, this is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world. Perceiving then that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself. So this miracle has just occurred, and the people have reacted to it. They've just declared Jesus to be a prophet, and they want to make him king. But while Jesus rightly holds both of those titles, he detects that the crowd has actually misunderstood why he's there and what he's actually doing. And we'll look at that understanding a little bit more in just a bit. For now, we just know that the situation is bad enough, the people are wrong enough about Jesus, that Jesus himself decides to sneak away. And overnight, he crosses over to another town on the other side of the sea. So we pick up in verse 22, that's where Breanne started reading for us, and we're at the next morning. The crowd is looking for Jesus, he's disappeared, they don't know where he's gone. They managed to realize he's gone across to the other side of the sea, and they go over there and they catch up with him. And here's where a conversation takes place where we actually see what the people are thinking. We learn what their motivations were for seeking after Jesus and why they got so excited about the bread. Now on the surface, they say the right thing about Jesus. They say that he's a prophet. But there's a major underlying problem to their thinking here. And it's this problem that forms the first major section of our sermon this morning. That problem is the people seek an imperfect gift. The people seek an imperfect gift. We don't need to speculate what it is that the people are actually after because Jesus actually tells it to us. In verse 26, he calls them out. He says, truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. The people are drawn to Jesus simply because he gave them lots of free food. They're seeking to fill their stomachs again. And yes, I recognize the irony of looking at this passage on Donut Sunday. Now, throughout the subsequent conversation, we see the people's constant fixation with the literal bread that Jesus gave them, as well as their blindness to the spiritual reality behind it. We see a lot of their misguidedness and their misunderstanding here in this latter part of the chapter, but their misunderstanding can actually be traced back all the way to the beginning of the story, starting in verse two. Here, John explains the reason that the people have started to seek after Jesus. He says, a large crowd was following him because they saw the signs that he was doing on the sick. Now, there's nothing wrong with this, per se. It was good for these people to be drawn to Jesus. It was even good and fine and okay for those people to be drawn in by the outward signs that Jesus was working, like healing the sick. But the point here, and this is the point that the people miss, the point is that these things were meant to be signs. That is, they were supposed to point to the truth of who Jesus was. And this crowd here is merely attracted to the surface level of these signs. They're disinterested and unaware of who or what these signs point to. And we see that play out later in the passage in verse 14, when the people declare that Jesus is the prophet. Again, there's nothing wrong with this statement on its face. Jesus actually was the prophet, the capital P prophet that the people of Israel had been waiting for. But the problem is these people don't actually have the right basis for discerning that Jesus is a prophet. What do I mean by that? It's likely that the people had in view the words of Deuteronomy 18, 15 when they made this declaration that Jesus was the prophet. And here we have a promise given from Moses on behalf of God. He says, the Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you. Now at this point in history, the Lord had raised up many prophets for Israel. These were the writers of much of the Old Testament. But this promise wasn't ultimately fulfilled until the arrival of Jesus, who was God's final and perfect prophet. So the people are right in their declaration that Jesus is the prophet. They come very close to being really insightful at interpreting scripture here. But there's actually a great irony at work in their declaration of Jesus as the prophet because the people show no signs of applying God's own prescribed test for identifying a prophet. They don't have any basis for labeling Jesus as a prophet, at least not the right basis. And the guidelines from God for how to determine whether someone's a prophet, they're right here also in Deuteronomy 18, the same passage that the people were likely referencing. So if we look at that chapter, later on in verse 18, it says, I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers, and I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him. And later in verse 20, but the prophet who presumes to speak a word in my name that I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that same prophet shall die. And if you say in your heart, how may we know the word that the Lord has not spoken? When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the Lord has not spoken. You see, God tells us that a prophet is defined chiefly by his words, whether or not those words are the true words of God. Now, the people here call Jesus a prophet. Jesus is speaking the true words of God, but the people give no indication at all that they consider Jesus' words of any importance. They declare him as the prophet simply because they ate their fill of the bread. They're caught up in the spectacle of the signs that they experience and the experience of walking away with full bellies that they pay no heed to the truth speaking by Jesus that those signs actually point to. And even as Jesus starts to correct them, the people still aren't diverted from their efforts to get Jesus to give them more actual bread. In verse 31 of John 6, they quote Exodus 16, which David read for us earlier, saying, our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness. As it is written, he gave them bread from heaven to eat. They bring this up to Jesus as a not-so-subtle nudge-nudge that, hey, Jesus, you've got a legacy of free bread that you need to live up to. Where is it? Give it to us. Give us more. Jesus responds by starting to explain to them that the manna described in Exodus was actually pointing to a truer bread of heaven that the Father would later send down, but these words go right through them because they respond again by asking for more bread. They say, sir, give us this bread always. As far as I can tell, they still think that Jesus is talking about giving them literal bread to eat. So we've built a case against these people for being thick-headed. They don't get what Jesus is saying. They're obsessed with food. But I think it's a reasonable question to ask, is that really so bad? What's wrong with what these people are doing? Yeah, they do seem to be missing out on some greater lesson from Jesus. But eating and wanting food isn't a sin. In fact, it's something that we all have to do. We all need to eat. So what's the problem with these people hoping that Jesus would stick around to give them more food? After all, it was his idea in the first place to multiply the loaves. The problem is that the food these people craved was an imperfect gift. Food is certainly something to be thankful for. Jesus himself shows this to us here in this chapter as he says a prayer of thanks before he distributes the loaves. But even the finest food and the nicest meal is limited in its value. As Jesus says in verse 27, do not labor for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the son of man will give you. When it comes to food, there are only two possible outcomes. If you keep food around for too long without cooking it or eating it, eventually it's going to go bad. Now, modern food preservation techniques might mean that this happens less often than it did in Jesus' day, but it does still happen. We can't keep our food around forever. The other possibility is that you eat the food before it spoils. Well, then what happens is eventually you get hungry again. So whether you hang on to food or consume it, food is not something that lasts. And even the manna in Exodus that God sent down carried with it this same limitation. That's why God had to send it down afresh every morning. Now the manna was also limited in one other significant way. As Jesus tells us in verse 49, the Israelite fathers who ate the manna in the wilderness, they still ultimately died. Now, it's true that all food works this way. We need to eat it in order to stay alive, but there's no food on earth that turns someone into an immortal. Even well-fed people, like the Israelites were in the day of Moses, eventually die. So the bread that the people want so badly is an imperfect gift of limited value. Now, if we're honest, we all think this way. We're all prone to do the same thing, chasing after things of limited value. Anytime our sights get too set, too focused on the temporary earthly blessings of God and not enough on our relationship with God himself, we fall into this. Now it may not be literally food that we hunger after, but everyone has something or maybe several things that are lesser than God that they crave and devote themselves to chasing. So how can we tell whether we're doing this? How can we tell if we are like the crowds in this chapter seeking imperfect gifts from Jesus, things that won't ultimately satisfy? I have a couple questions that we can ask ourselves to help discern whether we are doing this. The first of those questions is, how do I talk about Jesus to other people? When you talk about Jesus to other people, are you casting him merely as the means to receive earthly blessings? I think we're all often predisposed to treating Jesus like a Santa Claus figure whose job it is to distribute us the gifts we want so long as we take the right steps to please him. This is a temptation for all of us. So I urge you, be careful not to add to this temptation for other people in the way that you speak about Jesus. Don't talk about him just as one who gives out temporary blessing. I think this can be especially risky to happen to us in our evangelism when we frame Christianity merely as a means of living a happy and fulfilled life. It's true that there is a great joy that comes in this life when we know the peace of Christ. But the real hope of Jesus is pointed at the next life, not this one. We need to be careful not to lead people to Jesus on false pretenses. We'll only set them up for disappointment, leading them to chase after fleeting comforts and temporary fulfillment, none of which Jesus actually promises his followers to begin with. And if we do this, we actually risk endangering the internal state of people's souls. This message is dangerous. It nudges people toward insincere conversions that won't stick once they see that Jesus doesn't actually cater to our every demand and our temporary hungers. The second question we can ask ourselves to evaluate whether we're doing this or not is to ask, what are my prayers like? We can evaluate our own heart attitude towards earthly gifts versus the attitude we have towards eternal ones by examining our prayer life. Are we taking as much or more time in prayer to praise God, confess our sin to him and thank him for the hope of eternal life? As we are spending time asking him to give us blessings here on earth. Now the way to put this is, do your prayers more closely resemble what you see in the Psalms? Or do they more look like your Amazon wish list? Again, I'm not saying that we shouldn't ask God for things. The Bible teaches that it is right for us to take our concerns to God and to ask him for what we need. We're dependent on him. And God the Father doesn't withhold good gifts from his children. We know that he hears us if we ask those gifts according to his will. But these prayers of supplication, these prayers where we ask God to do things for us, are not the only kinds of prayers that a Christian should pray. If this is all that we pray, we're just like these people who are seeking after Jesus to give them free food. Taking time in our prayers to just simply praise God and thank him for our salvation in Jesus is both an indicator that we've got the right perspective on his gifts and what he's done for us, But it's also a great habit to get into just to cultivate that perspective in ourselves. As I said, we're all tempted to chase after these fleeting pleasures, but we can shape our prayer lives in such a way such that we start to focus more on the things that are lasting. So those are two ways that we can examine ourselves to determine whether we're doing this or not. We're all doing it some, but let us continually think, are we focusing truly on the eternal things of God or just these temporary things that don't ultimately satisfy? So now let us transition into the second main part of our sermon. We've looked at the problem. We've seen how people chase after imperfect gifts. So now let us look at the solution. The solution is we are to seek after the perfect gift, which is Jesus, the bread of life. Seek after the perfect gift, Jesus, the bread of life. Now, just as Jesus is abundantly clear about what we should not seek after, he's clear in pointing out what we should seek in order to be completely fulfilled. And that source of fulfillment is Jesus himself. As Jesus says in verse 35, I am the bread of life. Jesus has a lot to then later say about what this means. In fact, from verse 35 through verse 58, he explains it to the people three separate times. In part, that's due to the people's repeated refusal to hear him, to hear what he's saying. It also shows us a bit about Jesus' patience, that he's willing to explain it to these people three times. But each of the three explanations is not identical. As Jesus gives each subsequent explanation, it gets more pointed and more complete than the last. And by the time he's done, Jesus has given us this very comprehensive picture of why he is superior to the physical bread that the people sought after. And I think we can see three main reasons in this text that Jesus gives. Why is Jesus superior to the physical bread? Why is he the perfect gift? Well, number one, he's the bread of life that lasts forever. Number two, the bread of life saves from death. And number three, the bread of life is paid for by Jesus. So let's take a look at each of these, starting with the first reason, which is the bread of life lasts forever. Now, as we said before, unlike the loaves or the manna from Moses's day, the bread of life that Jesus promises in himself is eternally satisfying. Its effects do not fade like bread does once it is digested. As Jesus says, whoever comes to me shall not hunger and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. Now, Jesus's bread of life doesn't consist of a literal food, but it's actually a term that Jesus uses to refer to himself. And that means that the bread of life that Jesus is talking about, it's not food, it's actually a relationship. It's a relationship with Jesus. It's not just a relationship with another human being, because human beings, like food, fade away. Humans eventually grow old and die. But the relationship we can have with Jesus is one with an eternal being who has always existed and who always will. This is what Jesus promises when he says he's the bread of life. Now the only being who could promise such eternal benefit is God because God is the only being who is eternal. So when Jesus claims to be the bread of life, it's another way of saying that he is God. It may not be as overt a claim as the one we looked at last week, and no one here in this scene picks up a stone to throw at him for saying it like they did in the passage last week, but it is another instance in the Gospel of John where Jesus is completely clear to assert his identity as God. We also see that the gift of the bread of life comes with a guarantee, and that guarantee is rooted in the character of God himself. In verse 38, Jesus says, 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. God never lies and he never changes his mind on a whim. So when he promises that Jesus will lose none of us who have been given to him, it's a truth we can rely on. This infinite fulfilling relationship that we can enjoy with Jesus Christ will not and cannot be broken. The bread of life is superior to the bread that these people are seeking after because it lasts. Second reason, the bread of life saves from death. Jesus has previously made the case that everyone who eats physical bread will still one day die. That's what happened to the Israelites who ate the manna in the wilderness. And this is obviously a true statement. It's one we can actually observe ourselves. We can see that people who live and eat food eventually die. But that's only part of the story about why this physical bread is deficient. There's actually a reality about life and death that we can't plainly see. And Jesus explains that to us in verse 53. He says, 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. Jesus here is talking about something different than simply people who have eaten food today and will eventually die. He's talking about people who though they actually appear to be alive on the outside, are really dead on the inside. Now Jesus isn't talking about biological death here, but he's talking about a spiritual deadness. And this is something that Jesus says, not only about the crowd he's addressing directly, but about every single person who hasn't put their trust and faith in him. The reason for that, the reason that Jesus can call us all dead inside is because every human being is tainted from their birth with sin. We all harbor desires for things that go against what God has prescribed as righteous for our lives. And though we may not always in every instance give in to the temptations that these desires bring about, none of us, except for Jesus, has prevailed against temptation completely. And if we're honest with ourselves, we've probably given in to temptation more often than we've successfully resisted it. And that's why Jesus says that we have no life in us apart from him. Our capacity for doing what is right has been fatally wounded by sin. And that inner death that we carry with us in our physical earthly life will translate into a permanent physical and spiritual death on the day that our bodies give out and we must answer to God for how we've lived our life. Every single person is born into this desperate state. But here in the Bible, we have the words of Jesus offering us hope in the form of himself, the bread of life. As he says in verse 51, I am the living bread that came from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. It's through Jesus that people who are born into sin with no life in them can be transformed into people who will live forever. And that should lead us to ask, How does this transformation take place? How can this be? And we find the answer to that in our third reason why Jesus is the superior gift. And that third reason is that the bread of life is paid for by Jesus. As we read Jesus' words here, we get further into his explanations of what it means for him to be the bread of life. His analogy transforms into something fairly gruesome. At the end of verse 51, he says, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. And he goes on to say in verse 54, whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and I will raise him up on the last day. Jesus has gone from talking about eating bread, which is a pretty attractive option, to talking about us eating his flesh and drinking his blood. Now, understandably, his audience was a bit taken aback by this. In verse 52, the Jews then disputed amongst themselves saying, how can this man give us his flesh to eat? I think what they might really be asking here, aside from perhaps being grossed out a bit, is simply, how can Jesus do this for us? How can he give us his flesh to eat? Wouldn't that kill him? Well, the answer to that is yes, it would. Now, this might be slightly less shocking imagery for those of us who are familiar with the practices of the Christian church, familiar with the ordinance of the Lord's Supper, which is the practice by which Christians eat bread and drink from a cup as symbols of Jesus's body and blood given for us. The statements we see here from Jesus are similar to the statements he'll make to the disciples later when he introduces the concept of the Lord's Supper to them. And the similarities are no coincidence. Both the Lord's Supper and the analogy that Jesus is giving here in John 6 are symbols pointing to the same thing, which is the death of Jesus on the cross. See, bringing to life those who are dead in sin comes at a great cost, and that's because it requires a great payment to atone for a person's sin against God. Jesus tells us that it is the will of God his Father that people who believe in Jesus the Son should have eternal life and be raised up on the last day. However, scripture also teaches us that God loves justice and righteousness. And those attributes of God, justice and righteousness, require that he punish sin. Otherwise, God wouldn't love justice. If he let people get away with sin, he wouldn't be just. So the solution that God has devised in our favor is one that requires a great sacrifice on the part of Jesus. Jesus is the Son of God, and he's the only man who never sinned. And he willingly gives up his life on the cross to take on himself the punishment for sin in the place of all who would believe in him. And because of this transaction, those who have no life in them can end up with eternal life. It's a gift paid for completely by Jesus with no work required on our part, except to simply trust that his work alone was sufficient to earn salvation on our behalf. This is the bread of life that Jesus offers. Some takeaways for you this morning. If you're here today and you're not a Christian, That is, you haven't yet put your faith in Jesus and received this free gift of the bread of life. Your takeaway this morning should be simply to consider how the bread of life offered by Jesus is actually the most important thing you could possibly seek after. You too are a sinner with no life in you unless you put your trust in the great sacrifice Jesus made for sinners and in the free gift of salvation offered to all. Now, if you are a Christian, I would encourage you to consider how you can more fully find your satisfaction in Jesus Christ as the bread of life, instead of continuing to chase after whatever other imperfect temporary gifts that will only lead to your disappointment. Let me give you three suggestions for how you can do this. Three things to meditate on, to focus on, that will lead you to a greater appreciation of the gift that Jesus gives over these smaller things we would seek after on our own. First, meditate on the great cost Jesus paid to give us the gift of eternal life. As we just looked at, Jesus' identity as the bread of life is intertwined with his own death, a death that was completely undeserved but was undertaking willingly out of love for us and out of service to the Father. We would do well to think about this frequently. Not because we should guilt trip ourselves over it or because we can somehow repay Jesus for this gift. We could never possibly repay Jesus. But as we keep present in our minds the price that he paid for our sake, it should lead us to value him more and to be distracted less by those cheaper things that don't carry with them such ultimate significance. Second, we can meditate on how little we deserve the gift of eternal life. The more highly we think of ourselves, the more we'll start to think that we deserve from God. And that means the less satisfied we'll be with what he actually gives us. Contentment is never achieved by getting more things. It's only ever gained by cultivating an appreciation for what we have, especially the things we have that we didn't deserve. And good news for us, Jesus has given us unlimited opportunities to do this. That's because if we add up the blessings we've received from Jesus and compare them to the things we actually deserve, the blessings that we actually deserve from Jesus, we can't compute that ratio. It can't be computed mathematically because he's given us everything. So you got infinity on one side of the equation and we deserve none of it, so we've got zero on the other side. So let us meditate on how little we deserve what Jesus has given us. Lastly, let us meditate on the great value of an eternal life spent with Jesus. Too often, I think we're prone to view our gift of eternal life as merely the escape from punishment for our sins, or some kind of endless continuation of the version of life we know today. But it's actually much more than that. Because of Jesus, we'll live eternity in perfect resurrection bodies that never get sick, never get tired, and never wear down. And joining us in one of those resurrection bodies will be Jesus himself. We will get to interact personally and tangibly with the one through whom the universe was created. The one who, as John writes at the end of his gospel, has accomplished so much that the world couldn't possibly contain all the books that could possibly be written about him. This is the future we have in store if we receive the bread of life. Let's let this future hope sink in and watch as it transforms every area of our present lives. Again, making a better present life for ourselves is not the ultimate goal. But if we spend our time focusing on this great future hope that Jesus has provided for us, we can't help but let it spill over into our lives now. It will give us confidence and boldness in our evangelism, driving us to want to seek to share Jesus with others. It will give us the strength to persevere through trials, no matter how difficult. And it will also bring great glory to God as the way others see us live our lives with the hope he gives us, directs many to follow after him. Let's go to the Lord in prayer. Heavenly Father, through Jesus, you have given us much. You have given us the bread of life. You know, Father, we know that we are prone to grumbling and complaining and not being satisfied with this great and perfect gift. And so we concoct needs for smaller things that you haven't given us. We, like the people in this chapter, chase after things that ultimately don't matter, ignoring the one thing you've given us that does matter. So God, we ask that you would loosen our hold on such things and you would direct our thoughts to Jesus, the perfect gift we have from you. In him we have the forgiveness of sins and the hope of eternal life. It's in his name we pray, amen.