DYING FOR THE BREAD OF LIFE

[John 6:48-59]

Prayer for Illumination - Gracious God, in the remainder of this hour, as we prepare to come to your table to share this holy meal, we ask that you would inform our minds and inspire our spirits, quicken the life which you have placed within us that we may become the people you have created us to be. Give me your words. May your Spirit move powerfully in our midst, for we are in your presence that you might sustain and nourish our lives through Christ Jesus, the Living Word, through your Spirit who moves among us. We pray all this in your name, AMEN.

Message

          Have you ever been hungry? I mean really hungry? Maybe most of us can remember a day when we missed lunch, then maybe had to work late besides, and finally got around to eating dinner around 8:00 that evening, and we didn't mind telling everyone we were famished!  . . . We are a people prone to exaggeration.

          But I'm talking about truly hungry which most of us, I think, have not experienced – but which over a billion people in the world experience as they try to live on less than a dollar a day. Now I know those figures don’t mean a lot to you – you think, well a dollar doesn't go very far here; maybe it goes further elsewhere. Let me tell you, a dollar doesn’t go very far anywhere in the world. Besides, you will need to divide it between some sort of shelter, at least minimal clothing, some basic necessities, and if you are even going to try to work you’ll need some tools or supplies or trans-portation. At the very best you may have 40 or 50 cents left over for food, providing you do without nearly everything else. That will be about a tablespoon of rice and maybe an occasional cup of tea. After that, you are on your own. I think you’ll be hungry. You might find a few edible weeds, but since many of the poorest nations are affected drastically by drought, even the weeds will be pretty well picked over.

          Can you even begin to imagine the feeling of not having enough, or perhaps anything, to eat? The gnawing pain in your belly does not really go away. You become too weak after awhile to make much of an effort to even search for food. And you and your children become susceptible to any number of horrid diseases. One, called kwashiorkor, causes the skin to flake off and soon open sores cover the body. The hair turns reddish and starts to fall out. The stomach swells because of fluid. Brain damage will likely result. Kwashiorkor particularly strikes malnourished children!

          Other diseases caused by malnutrition and lack of essential elements in the diet cause blindness, muscle deterioration, growth retardation, gastro-intestinal problems, severe dermatitis, heart trouble, paralysis, and anemia. Even a simple cold can kill you when you are this weak and susceptible.

          It's not a pretty picture, is it? Hunger is a very serious problem in our world. And it is not a problem of too many people and too little food. Our planet is rich and the technology is available to make every country in the world self-sufficient in terms of food production. The problem is more one of apathy on the part of those who are in a position to do something about it, including, I am afraid, most of us. We need to be challenged to pursue the political and personal solutions to world hunger that are available to us.

          But I confess to you that I have gotten off the point in trying to make my point about hunger. For as wide-spread and as devastating as the problem of world hunger is – I do want you to see the dimensions of it – I am deadly serious when I say that there is an even more severe and more crippling famine in our world today, and it is a famine of the Word and the Spirit of God. Please understand, I believe with all my heart that every Christian should be deeply concerned and involved in resolving the problems of physical hunger in our world. We are called to it by Jesus himself, and in Matthew 25 he even goes so far as to suggest that if we ignore it, he will number us with those slated for eternal damnation in the final judgment. That is how seriously God takes our physical care for one another. But as harsh and compelling as these warnings are, it is a simple fact that Christ was even more concerned about the need to meet people's spiritual hunger.

          In fact, the real drama which underlies our text this morning is the contrast Jesus draws between physical and spiritual hunger. Perhaps you saw it as we read. He took advantage of the opportunity, as I am taking advantage of the opportunity today, to place the question of our spiritual hunger in the context of the acute reality of our physical hunger. He had just fed over 5000 people with a spectacular miracle, multiplying a few loaves and fishes. The people's response was to attempt to draft him as president of a new welfare state. (We know that temptation, don’t we!) But Jesus responds in verse 26, You've got to get your priorities straight – “I tell you the truth, you are looking for me . . . because you ate the loaves and had your fill.” He is saying: Look, I’m not naive. I understand why I am so popular here. I have just satisfied your physical appetite about which you are so concerned. But my concern goes much deeper. “Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.”

          Are you with me here? It seems rather obvious does it not? Do you realize that spiritual malnutrition is every bit as serious as physical malnutrition, and all those awful symptoms we just described that apply to physical hunger apply in a very real sense to spiritual hunger as well – except it will likely lead to eternal death! Not just physical, eternal death. Its symptoms parallel those of physical hunger and there is much we can learn from the comparison between the two. At the very outset, you feel the spiritual hunger acutely as well, but in a short while it begins to be replaced by a feeling of lethargy and spiritual weakness. Spiritual muscles deteriorate. Growth is retarded. Mental ability, in terms of recognizing spiritual realities, is distorted. And one becomes susceptible to a growing list of spiritual ailments like blindness, paralysis, or spiritual anemia, all of which are debilitating, and some of which may be fatal. We do not have the resistance to fight off temptation and sin, the moral diseases we face in our culture today, nor the strength or energy to practice our spiritual gifts. Do you see how serious this issues of spiritual hunger is?

          Understand, this is not an analogy. This is a reality. This is what you and I experience when we starve ourselves spiritually. And these are the symptoms prevalent in the Christian community today. Far too many of us have such a meager and unbalanced spiritual diet that these spiritual distortions and ailments are inevitable. The church in America is not at all strong today because we are spiritually anemic; the poverty of our spiritual diet is one of the major reasons for the church’s ineffectiveness.

          Perhaps even more to the point, we are not particularly aware of our spiritual deficiencies. It seems like we have plenty to eat. But one particularly serious form of the hunger problem occurs among people who do have something to eat, but whose diet does not contain the balance of ingredients the body needs to grow and to function. Perhaps here in the church in America we have been filling our bellies with spiritual powdered sugar and religious “twinkies” at the expense of a substantial and balanced spiritual diet – it is a more subtle problem but with equally devastating spiritual implications. Of course kwashiorkor, the disease I mentioned, often has to do not with the fact that you have nothing to eat, but that you don’t have the right things to eat; you don’t have the right ingredients in your diet.

          Well then, if you understand that spiritual hunger is a very real thing that we need to address, what do we need to do to begin to nurture and strengthen our spirits? I hope you feel some of the effects of that spiritual hunger because we are here to pursue a resolution to that problem. If you realize you are in serious jeopardy of starving your spirit, you will want to know specifically what you can do about it. The key is in John 6:48 where we began our text today; the rest of the passage is an elaboration on the point. The first thing we need to know is that Jesus himself is “the bread of life.”

          Listen to your prayers sometime.  Most of you will find that you are constantly asking God for various things you feel you need or desire. Some of them are really rather shallow and unnecessary, like success, or any number of material things you think might make you happy. Others seem like much more worthwhile things, spiritual energy perhaps, or insight, or wisdom, or discernment, or patience, or compassion. It must be good to pray for those things, right? But if you look closely, all those things are really only by-products of the one thing God wishes to give you and wants you to ask for. He wants to give you Jesus. I love that spiritual, “Give Me Jesus.” Whatever else is happening in my life, give me Jesus. He wants to give you himself, and he, he tells us here, is the bread of life. When you finally accept and pursue Jesus Christ instead of all the by-products, you will find that all those good things come to you as well. It is why Jesus said, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these [other] things [that you desire and that you need] will be yours as well.” [vs. 33]

          But as we shall see in a moment, the life of Jesus flowing through us is the one, essential, indispensable thing that every person must have. Without this, everything else counts as nothing. And one reason for our failure to grow spiritually, which troubles every sensitive soul here, is that we keep asking for and searching for the wrong things – even good things, but not what God is telling us to pray for. God can't give us any of the other good things we desire without this prior gift – and He wouldn't if He could, since we would think we had what we needed and stop searching before we received the true bread of life – Jesus himself and His life-giving spirit.

          Listen carefully to what Jesus says about this offer of himself in John 6. We read that he said he was the bread of life in verse 48, and Jesus contrasts this to the physical bread, the manna that their forefathers had in the desert, that miracle which they always bragged about and always returned to, a bread that sustained them in the desert. But he points out, did it sustain them forever? No, as a matter of fact, they all died. Verse 50,

But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which a man may eat and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.

          He is talking of course about His crucifixion. They didn't understand it at the time, but what He says is, I'm going to give my life so that you may have life.

            Then the Jews began to argue . . . among themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat? [This doesn’t make any sense to us].”

[And] Jesus said to them, “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”

          That had to sound ridiculous to them. They were alive, they are listening to him. In any case they weren’t going to be “eating” him. But he says, no, you actually do not have in you the life you are seeking. We will look at that again in a moment. But He goes on to say in verse 54,

Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your forefathers [remember] ate [this physical food, the] manna [that came down from heaven] and [they] died, but he who feeds on this bread [myself] will live forever.

          Now while this language sounds like a reference to the Lord's Supper, technically it is not. This took place before Christ had initiated the sacrament, though, as we shall see, communion is definitely a part of it.

          What Jesus is describing here is the fact that you and I must have his life flowing through us if we are to live eternally and enjoy his blessings. Later on he talked about the branch abiding in the vine. Remember, we come back to that illustration often. Unless we have his life in us, we cannot truly live. It is the heart of Christian theology. Whatever else you may or may not understand, if you grasp this, you will be well on your way to becoming an effective Christian – “as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me,” he says.

          Periodically we have come back to this, and it is an important part of understanding what he is saying here – the difference between Jesus being the Son of God and you and I being “sons” or “daughters” or “children of God.” There is a difference. The Bible says that Jesus is “the only begotten Son of God,” while it suggests that you and I may be made sons and daughters of God. The Nicene Creed, determining the uniqueness of Jesus, stressed that He was “begotten, not made.” We, by contrast, are made not begotten. There is a crucial difference. What is it? Just this: When you beget, you beget something of the same kind as yourself. A man or a woman begets human babies, a beaver begets little beavers, and a bird begets little birds. But when you make something, you make something of a different kind from yourself; it does not share your essence. A bird makes a nest and doesn’t share its essence; a beaver builds a dam, and a human builds or makes a house, or a computer, or maybe a painting or a sculpture. If he is very highly skilled, like Michelangelo, he may make a statue which looks very like a man, complete with apparent muscles and veins seeming to lift the skin. But of course it is not a real man. It is something different from himself; it doesn’t share his essence. It cannot breathe or think. It is not alive.

          Now that is the first thing to get clear. What God begets is God; it shares His essence, just as what man begets is man. What God creates, on the other hand, is not God; just as what a man or a woman makes is not human. That is why men and women are not Sons of God in the same way that Jesus is the only begotten Son of God. We may be like God in some ways, but we are not things of the same kind. Jesus is of the same kind as God. That is a theological truth on which we build an understanding of what Jesus is saying here.

          The next thing to get clear is the difference between two Greek words, both of which are translated “life.” This is obviously the key to what Jesus is saying here. You cannot see this in the English text, but let me explain because it is very important. There are two Greek words that translate life. The first of these words is bios. We know that word because from it we get words like biology, the study of living things. One of the wonderful things which God made on this earth was biological life. God made bios. We have been fascinated ever since with the mystery of why and how the basic elements of the earth, the material universe, can come to life. How can the dust of the earth breathe? What a remarkable thing! You and I, created beings, have this bios, which God created in us. When we beget children, we pass this bios life along to them. All right, we know that is true about life.

          But there is a second word for “life” in the Scriptures, and it is the word zoe. In the first chapter of John where we find the writer going all the way back to creation to lay his foundation for understand who God is and what He’s doing, he tells us about the Word which became flesh, speaking of course about Jesus, and he says a very important thing. He says, “In him [that is in Jesus] was life,” and the word he uses here is not bios. It is zoe. Zoe in the Greek is a word which means life as a principle, life in the absolute sense, life as God, the Source of the universe, has life. It is quite unlike bios which, as you and I know and experience every day, is constantly running down. Bios runs down. It has to be renewed with food and water and oxygen. Zoe, on the other hand, is the life principle which has always existed in God. It is eternal because it always was and it always will be. It expresses life as it is, as it always has been in God himself. He made bios which suffers the restrictions of the decaying material world. He begets zoe in human form, John tells us, in the person of Jesus Christ, His only begotten Son. Now, if you understand that, where do you think is our access to zoe? It is not in having been begotten by human parents. Our only access to zoe is its source in Jesus Christ himself.

          The point of all this then begins to become clear in John 6, in Jesus’ discussion with both followers and skeptics. He explains that he himself is the bread of zoe, and goes on to explain that unless in some way you can ingest or assimilate the zoe, or life of Jesus into ourselves, all we are ever going to experience is that limited bios, or physical life, which is eventually going to end in death. That is the fate all of us will suffer. We have bios, life, in ourselves, which is running down, and one day it is going to die. If you want anything more than that, you need zoe which is only begotten by God; it is found only in Jesus, and unless you participate in some way in the life of Jesus you will not have life, zoe, in you.

          That is a radical concept. When he is talking to them, he is using words so they can understand the difference, and you and I need to see them as well or we don’t understand what he is saying. He was proposing a revolutionary approach to life, and as verses 60 and following go on to say, many people complained that his teaching was too difficult and decided they would simply abandon the whole thing and go on with their bios lives. Like most of us, they had only been interested in the physical bread he had provided to sustain their biological life. Now he’s getting off into something esoteric – forget about it. Most people today are equally short sighted, spending their time and their energy for physical bread to sustain that bios for a few more months or years, neglecting zoe that lasts eternally.

          The spiritual life, or zoe was more than they could grasp and they left. Peter, however, spoke for most of the rest of the disciples as he determined that although they did not fully understand what Jesus was saying, nevertheless they would stay with him and pursue it, for they believed that he alone had the words of zoe, of eternal life. He alone had the word that could put them in touch with real life.

          Now if you understand all that, the practical question for us becomes, how may you and I assimilate this zoe? How do we get that zoe, life, in us? We love the picture and we’ve come back to it often of the branch abiding in the vine, the life of the vine flowing through the branch. How do we do that? Well, he says, you and I must be drawn into Christ – that is why he wants to give us himself. We need to be drawn into Christ in order to enjoy his life, and with it all those thing we thought we were seeking: the energy, the insight, the wisdom, discernment, patience, compassion, the joy. Whatever it is that we desire from life, all of it exists in Christ, but it has escaped us unless we find it in Christ.

          The method is really not all that difficult for us to comprehend. Since Jesus is a person, we are drawn into his life in many of the same ways we might be drawn into the life of any person we admire and wish to emulate. Men and women who have studied the Scriptures and given their lives to becoming like Christ, developing within themselves the mind of Christ, have described seven ways in which we are drawn into the life of Jesus Christ. Six of those ways are quite familiar to us, but the seventh perhaps takes us beyond our normal, everyday experience, and I want to just mention these seven ways to you today.

          They are not going to sound profound to you. You are going to say, “I’ve heard that before.” And while they may not seem profound, we need to know that they are at least essential. That is the reason they’ve been around so long. That is the reason every potential disciple of Jesus has come back to them. Without them we suffer from spiritual malnutrition and will ultimately suffer from eternal death. So let’s look at these seven things briefly.

          The first is WORSHIP - No Christian in the two millennia of the Christian faith has come to the conclusion that we can live and experience the zoe of Christ without consistent worship. It is simply coming consistently into Christ's presence, recognizing Him for who He is, offering Him our praise and our thanksgiving, drawing from Him anything He desires to give us. That is what we are doing here today. We are coming into Christ's presence to recognize Him for who He is. The form of worship of course is irrelevant. We get caught up in questions of the formality or informality, the type of music, or the order of service. But whatever the form of worship, it is our responsibility to seek Christ in this place, to let our spirits draw close to Him. You look for Christ in this place above all else. Don’t let any other interest keep you from coming into His presence. Let His Spirit wash over you as you come into His presence in worship. There is no way you can be absorbed into the life of Christ if you are not consistently worshiping. All of us know this experience. If you don’t worship consistently, you simply drift away from Christ and His desire to give you life.

          The second is the study of His word, BIBLE STUDY - simply listening to Christ. We want to have the mind of Christ, we sing about having the mind of Christ; the only way we know the mind of Christ is as is it has been revealed in His word. If you were to apprentice yourself to any great artist, or craftsman, you would want to know everything they could tell you about their trade. To settle for a few tidbits, a little superficial knowledge of what they are talking about would make a mockery of your apprenticeship. If you are going to be a disciple of Christ, you need to know in depth what it is He is telling us, the wisdom He shares in His word. That is what Bible Study is about, and if you want to be absorbed into the life of Jesus Christ, have His zoe in you, you must commit to that as a high priority – to know His word.

          The third way in which we assimilate Christ's life into ourselves is through MEDITATION. We cannot be content with the knowledge of scripture, with being able to be the one who can answer the Bible quiz questions, but we need to meditate on His word. That means reflect on it, focus on it until we understand it and it becomes a part of our thinking, and we have considered how it will apply, how we will live it out in our lives. Christian meditation is altogether different from the sort of mystical meditation so popular these days as a substitute for real faith. That sort of meditation consists of emptying your mind, relaxing your body. The Bible says it is a dangerous thing to empty your mind. (Heaven knows it’s empty enough without our consciously trying to empty it further.) Christian meditation is an intensive focusing on the person and word of Jesus Christ – let me absorb the richness of that word.

          The fourth step is simply PRAYER - which is actually conversing directly with God through Christ. It is a conversation. The Bible has much to say about the proper objects of our prayer and our proper attitude toward it. Certainly, it must always involve submitting ourselves to the will of Christ as we come to understand it. But it is a constant conversation that pervades our lives. We learn to just be talking with God all the time, to be submitting ourselves to Him, to be saying, “What do you want me to know about this? What do you want me to learn about this? How can I be helpful in this experience? How can I deal with this situation I am facing at the moment?”

          Step number five is FELLOWSHIP - It was the most natural thing in the world for the early church, after the great conversion on the day of Pentecost, to enter into fellowship with each other. Nobody told them they had to do it; they just did it spontaneously. Fellowship is simply participating in God’s family. It was that spontaneous first response. They repented of their sins, you will remember, they were baptized in the name of Jesus, they received the Holy Spirit, and what did they do? They said, “Let’s get together and celebrate! They celebrated in each other’s homes, they celebrated in worship together, they shared hospitality with each other, they shared good times, they talked, they prayed, they grew together. It was a natural response to having been touched by Christ’s life. And if you are going to be a part of Christ’s family, having been reconciled to God, you are put into a relationship with every other believer. We are truly brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ, a far deeper connection than we might have imagined. The person who holds himself or herself aloof from this celebration of our oneness in Jesus Christ has not understood the fundamental spirit of Christ’s salvation. It is a great privilege to be drawn into His family, to become brothers and sisters together, the offspring of God himself.

          The sixth step in coming to participate in the life of Christ is OBEDIENCE. This is simply a matter of grasping His vision and beginning to participate in it. We cannot just have it in our heads or our hearts; it has to become a part of who we are what we do. That vision involves you in becoming a new man or a new woman. It will require you to put away your sin and your selfishness. But immediately it turns you out away from a preoccupation with yourself, which is so natural to us, to serve others and to share that good news and that delight with them.

          The final way in which our spirits are nourished and we are drawn into the life of Christ is a bit different I think from the first six. The first six we have just mentioned are so basic and practical. We might almost begin to wonder if anything can really be accomplished through them: Sure, I can talk to God; I can read His word. So what’s going to happen? I need something deeper. They seem so simple. Is there not some special, profound way that we can really become a part of Christ’s life? Be assured that much can be accomplished in all these practical ways. In fact, Christ practiced all of these things we have mentioned as He sought daily to sustain that zoe life that He had received from the God who had begotten in Him.

          But the last step goes beyond anything we can really analyze or understand. And somehow that is encouraging to my spirit. And it is what we are about to do, to celebrate at the Lord’s Table, the sacrament of COMMUNION. Christ initiated this sacrament, and we don’t really know what all He is doing here. Any sacrament is a mystery, for our action is simply a recognition that God is doing something beyond our imagining. We have particular objects which help us to imagine, but God is working beyond that. In the sacraments we are saying, I know you are doing something like this God; I don’t completely understand it, but I want to be a part of it. That is essentially what a sacrament is. In baptism, God is actually birthing us into His family. Now we can’t see how He does that. We don’t understand that. We simply accept that is what He is doing, and we acknowledge that in baptism. In communion, God is directly touching and nourishing our spirits. He is investing His zoe, life, in us. I do not know how He does it, I just know He does and He has invited us to participate. It is beyond my comprehension. But he states consistently in His word that this is what He is doing. It goes beyond the simple act of ingesting bread and wine. The bread and wine themselves are in some sense an analogy, if you will, which helps us to understand what God is doing, for as bread and wine nourish and sustain the bios, life, in us, the body and blood of Jesus Christ nourish and sustain the zoe, life, in us. That is what he was trying to tell his followers in John 6.

          So here we are. We are in worship, we have been looking at God’s word, we’ve been praying, we’ve been sharing fellowship, we have been participating in all those ways in which God might share His zoe, life, with us. Now we come to His table. I confess that I really don’t know what all is happening here. But something is happening here, something so special that Christ said I want you to do this until I return; don’t neglect it. Whatever you think you see, whatever you think you feel, whatever you think you taste, understand that God is using His table to build up your spirit as you participate in this act, provided you come in the right spirit. And the right spirit of course, as God word says, is a genuine attitude of repentance, an acknowledgment that we have neglected the nurture of the Christ life within us and therefore failed to reflect it. He also asks us to come with a genuine commitment to nurture that Christ-life in the future, to live it fully as Christ’s Spirit fills and renews us. If you will do that, more than you will ever know will be taking place this morning at the Lord’s table. For at His table, Christ promises to pass along to us this zoe, life, which will sustain you for all eternity. So let’s pray and then we will feed at His table.

Closing prayer - Gracious God, we have been examining your word, and we understand some of it, we believe we do. There is much we do not understand, but we are coming here and we are coming to your table because we need that zoe, life, which is found only in you. We want to learn to abide in you. We want to be filled and nourished by your Spirit in us. Father, come, fill us with your life, through Jesus Christ our Lord, AMEN.