Skip to main content

 


John 6:27-33

Jesus said, “But don’t be so concerned about perishable things like food. Spend your energy seeking the eternal life that the Son of Man can give you. For God the Father has given Me the seal of His approval.” They replied, “We want to perform God’s works, too. What should we do?” Jesus told them, “This is the only work God wants from you: Believe in the One He has sent.  They answered, “Show us a miraculous sign if you want us to believe in you. What can you do? After all, our ancestors ate manna while they journeyed through the wilderness! The Scriptures say, ‘Moses gave them bread from heaven to eat.’” Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, Moses didn’t give you bread from heaven. My Father did. And now He offers you the True Bread from heaven. The True Bread of God is the One Who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”

Jesus had just miraculously fed over 5,000 people by multiplying five small loaves of bread and two small, dries fish…with 12 traveling bags filled with leftovers. He had fed the people after having taught them about the Kingdom of God.

Neither having God teach them about true living nor having been fed miraculously could satisfy these people, and they are a type of way too many folks even today. After all this, there is a clamoring for an even greater sign. They had just witnessed first-hand a miracle and yet their flesh wanted something more spectacular, more sensorially overwhelming. The “flesh” always cries out for some visible proof…a last climactic demonstration and argument to wrap it all up to make belief inevitable and unbelief untenable. There was an insistence on being taken care of permanently in the “here-and-now”.

However, the hardened, carnal heart has blind eyes and refuses to understand and accept what can only be grasped by the Holy Spirit’s revelation. Its orientation to security is too “earth-bound”... it's too grounded in the moment and the satisfaction of perceived needs. The crowd of people were enslaved to their temporal appetites and didn’t actually want to understand. They wanted their present, perceived needs met NOW and LATER as well. They might call Him Lord but had no intention of submitting to His authority…BUT…they expected to gain another favor.

Sooner or later, any serious dialogue with Jesus Christ will bring a person to a place where they must deal with Who He is. The revelation of His identity is also an invitation, as He opens His heart and invites us to enter into Life. Anyone who will hear Him and come to Him believing Who He is and what He has already finished will be fed with Living Bread always. That is so different from coming to merely try and satisfy some physical appetite or need, assuming that somehow, we could “earn” this Bread. It’s not, “What must WE do to do the works of God?” It’s believing and receiving what God has already done.

The crowd murmured against the Jesus after this interchange. Murmuring comes when we don’t get what we demand and have determined we “ought” to have from God. We act like spoiled children demanding from God in a way that exposes our lack of trust in Who He is; our doubt that He really does love us. We want our flesh appeased. We want our wants to define God’s will, not God’s will to be our hearts desire.

But…if we will believe Him, receiving what He offers us by grace, we enter into Life that will never end and can finally, truly become truly human again.





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

 THE FOLLY OF IDOLATRY Martin Luther said that the human heart is an idol factory. The truth is that we were created to know and live by the gracious rule of and in the Presence of God who created us. Our peace, our understanding of meaning and purpose can only be truly grounded in God who created us for that meaning and purpose. The rebellion of Adam and Eve, their decision to do the opposite of what God said would make for life, resulted in spiritual and ultimately physical death. They chose to believe they needed something more than what God had provided. Their doomed attempt to try and live life without reference to God as the ground of meaning and purpose did not make life fuller, but emptied it. They wanted to decide what was good and what was evil without God and the disintegration of human life was the consequence. Rather than living in the Presence of God and by the gracious rule of God all around them, they turned from wholeness to brokenness, from fulfilment to scarc...
Post a Comment
Read more
  WORKING AGAINST ALL HUMANITY 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16 “They fail to please God and WORK AGAINST ALL HUMANITY   as they try to keep us from preaching the Good News of salvation to the Gentiles. By doing this, they continue to pile up their sins.” WOW! What a startling statement! St. Paul is making it crystal clear that those who oppose and work to prevent the proclamation of the Gospel are actually “working against ALL HUMANITY.” Why would he write that? It is because the only means of the restoration, reclamation and salvation of humanity is what God has done for all people through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That is the essence of the Gospel: Jesus Christ. To oppose and try to silence the presentation of the Gospel is to work against the reclamation of all humanity. Who would want to work against ALL humanity? Satan is the name by which he is known. He hates ALL humanity because every human being still bears the image of God, albeit that ima...
Post a Comment
Read more
  TIMING Years ago, I head an old preacher say, “The right thing at the wrong time is the wrong thing.” That statement is an offense to the culture being worshipped world-wide today. There is a lust for the immediate, as a line from an old movie stated, “Immediate gratification takes too long!” We want faster internet, immediate responses to our texts, mobile orders at the ready when we walk into Starbucks. What we want, we demand to have NOW. We are masters at justifying ourselves. “Well, we’re engaged already and we’re going to get married anyway, so what’s wrong with us living together and being sexually intimate now?” God’s timing in human relationship is not arbitrary, it is protective and covering. Sad to say, even some who call themselves followers of Jesus Christ choose to justify their living in sexual sin now, because they promise that they will one day get married. The context where sexual intimacy finds its true meaning and purpose is in the covenant of marriage. ...
Post a Comment
Read more