The Road of Life - Part 3

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been learning a method for evangelism that I am calling “The Road of Life”. This method uses the Gospel of John as our evangelism tract, and I’ve been teaching you passages that you can use to share the Gospel. First, we wrote three questions on the title page: Purpose? Meaning? Truth? Then, we started with John 1:1-5 and underlined that, double-underlining four words: Word, Made, Light, and Life. At the bottom of that page, we wrote our next passage: John 3:16-19. We underlined that one, too, focusing on six words: Love, Gave, Believe, Perish, Condemn, and Darkness. We want to explain those words in reverse order by telling the reasons for Jesus’s life and death. That is, because of the fall of Adam and Eve and our own sins, we live in darkness and cannot find truth, meaning, or purpose. The darkness of sin means that we are condemned by God, who is the judge of all things, and that condemnation brings death - both physical and spiritual death. But, God gave his son to live the perfect life that we could not live and die the death that we deserved. He did this because of his great love for us, not because we were worthy.

It’s often said that John 3:16 is the summary of the Gospel, and for good reason. But, I want to suggest that, if we were to just stop there, we would have presented an incomplete Gospel. After all, someone might raise a couple of simple questions to this Gospel summary. For one, so you are saying that all I have to do is believe - to pray the sinners prayer, walk the aisle, fill out a card, maybe get baptized, and that’s it? Are you saying that I just have to know that Jesus died for my sins and believe that it’s true? Another question might be: So, it’s great that Jesus saves me from death and condemnation, but is that all he saves from? I would say that these two questions are fair, and that’s why we need the rest of the Gospel of John. So, this morning, we continue down the road of life with John 6:35, 47-51. But before we do that, go back to the page containing John 3:16, and at the bottom, write John 6:35, 47-51 so that you will know to go there after you share that passage. Now, I will read John 6:35, 47-51, and you underline as I read. There are four words that we want to focus on in this passage, so double underline them: Bread, Hunger, Forever, Flesh.

In this passage, Jesus gives the crowd a metaphor. A metaphor is a way of speaking that uses an everyday example to connect to something complex.  Often, a metaphor connects on multiple levels. Jesus loved to use metaphors, and the Gospel of John is full of them. In our passage, Jesus makes a connection between the everyday need that all humans have for food and the life that he gives us. But, to understand fully what he means, we need to consider the backstory. At the beginning of Chapter  6, Jesus does something amazing - he feeds 5000 men with 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish. The people who received this meal were so amazed that they followed him to his next destination and demanded another meal. They recognized that Jesus had a supernatural power unlike any other prophet they’d known, and they wanted to stick close to him for their daily needs. Jesus sees through their hypocrisy, though, recognizing that they have no desire to sincerely follow him. They just want the benefits of being near him. So, he gives this metaphor to confound them, and also to explain what true belief and dependence on him look like.

So, that leads us to our first word, “Bread”. Jesus says, in verse 35, “I am the bread of life.” Obviously, Jesus is not bread. He is not physically made of wheat. It’s also obvious, despite what our Catholic friends say, that bread is not made of Jesus, or that the bread that he served in the feeding of the 5000 was actually his flesh. Rather, he is drawing a connection between our daily need and his sufficiency. This answers one of the questions that we raised earlier: Is Jesus only good for escaping death? Well, what benefit does bread have for our physical bodies? Certainly, if someone is starving to death, then bread is necessary to save them, but that is not the only time that bread is necessary. Bread is also needed to sustain life. We all eat bread (or some sort of food), at least three times a day, to sustain our energy, build muscle, and bring us joy. We don’t just need bread to avoid death. We need it to truly live. In a similar way, we need Jesus not just to escape death and hell. We need him to truly live.

That brings us to the second word: “Hunger”. Hunger is a natural function of the body. You become hungry when your body begins to run low on glucose and believes it is necessary to either eat something or start pulling reserves from your liver and muscles. It would rather not pull from reserves, so, it sends a signal to your brain that you need more food, your stomach growls, and you oblige with the next meal. Now, there are good ways to meet that hunger and there are bad ways. If you are starving at 10 am and all you have is a Snickers and coke, you might be tempted to meet your immediate need with those. But, speaking as a man who married a dietitian, that is a terrible way to meet that need. For one, even though it doesn’t seem like a lot, it is way too much glucose for the energy you need, and it is way too easily digested because it is refined sugar. So, your body will use about 5 grams of that sugar to run on till lunch, and the other 55 grams it will store as fat in your liver or around your other organs. Also, by the time lunch comes around, you’ll be starving again because your body will signal that it needs more glucose. Or, you could tough it out till lunch and eat a six-ounce chicken breast, some broccoli and rice, and that will last you until supper. In a similar way, there are real, spiritual needs that you have. You need purpose and meaning. You need truth. You need love and beauty and goodness and faithfulness and creativity and wisdom. As with food, we can pursue fulfillment of those spiritual needs in good ways or bad. Unfortunately, because we are born into the darkness of sin, we pursue spiritual fulfillment through corrupt and sinful ways. We pursue lust instead of love, greed instead of goodness, deceitfulness rather than faithfulness. There is only one way to find true spiritual fulfillment, and that is through life in Jesus. This is what Jesus means, in verse 47, when he says that whoever believes has eternal life. So, in the same way that we keep coming back to food to meet our daily hunger, we keep on believing in Jesus - not as a one-time transaction but as a life of faith.

That brings me to our third word: “Forever”. In verses 49-51, Jesus draws on a familiar story from Israel’s history. In the book of Exodus, we read of how God delivered the Israelites from captivity in Egypt and leads them out into the wilderness to receive his commandments. While they were in the wilderness, they ran out of food and began to grumble to their leader, Moses. Moses prayed to God, and God delivered manna from heaven. This was a supernatural food that had no relation to anything on earth. Moses doesn’t even know how to describe it. But, from manna, they could make bread, and God provided it for them every day. Jesus points out that all who ate manna in the wilderness still died. Even though God met their physical needs, they still couldn’t overcome death with that food. They needed a spiritual food for a spiritual problem. Jesus says that he is that spiritual food, and anyone who partakes of him will live forever. Those who follow Jesus have life now and life forever through his resurrection.

Finally, we have the word, “Flesh”. This is where the metaphor gets weird, and Jesus has a good reason for it. Remember, people have pursued him because he fed them, not out of sincere faith. So, part of the reason for this metaphor is to distinguish between those who really believe and those who want to use Jesus for a quick fix. To make this distinction, Jesus gives a hard saying: “The bread that I give for the life of the world is my flesh.” He even goes further in the broader text to say that if you would have any part with him, you must eat his flesh. What in the world?! That is exactly the reaction that many of his fair-weather disciples had. Verse 66 says that after this teaching, many of his disciples left him. So, why does Jesus say such a hard saying, and what does he mean? He says this hard saying because there were many who claimed to believe in him, but their faith was only as deep as their stomachs. There are many who still do that today. The church roles are full of such names - people who are emotionally moved by a revival sermon and walk the aisle, never to darken the door of the church again. There are those who beg for prayer requests when facing a bad diagnosis or who start attending church when life gets hard, only to fall away once the cancer is gone or things turn easy again. The point that Jesus is making with this metaphor is that true saving faith is not a fair-weather belief or a belief that is only motivated by hunger pangs. True saving faith is a belief that finds daily fulfillment in Christ. It is a belief that feeds on Jesus like we feed on bread.

So, in closing, how to we feed on the flesh of Jesus? Well, the most obvious connection is with a ritual that we keep as a church, which we will be observing next week. Jesus gave his disciples a simple meal of bread and wine and said, “This bread is my body, and this cup is the new covenant in my blood.” When we take the Lord’s supper, Jesus meets with us there and feeds us. He also feeds us through His Word. He gives us living water through the waters of baptism. When we sit under the preaching of the Word, Christ feeds us. When we gather as his people to pray and sing, Jesus is with us and feeds us. All of these and more are what we call “means of grace”. They are God-ordained ways that we feed on Jesus. So, when we are witnessing to someone and using this passage, we want them to understand that they need to be a part of a church family and to walk in faithfulness with other believers, because it is in that fellowship that they are fed by Christ.

Today, I want to ask you, are you feeding on Christ, or are you a fair-weather believer? Did you come to Jesus for some immediate need, only to use him and forget him, or do you daily feed on him?