8/9/20 John 6:35, 41-51 “A Record Amount of Love!”

07 Aug 8/9/20 John 6:35, 41-51 “A Record Amount of Love!”

8/9/20   John 6:35, 41-51    “A Record Amount of Love!”

I was thinking this past week of the year that we have had.  I’m talking about the year from last fall until now.  We started out by having a lot of snow although we didn’t get much the last half of the winter.  Then we had this coronavirus thing upset everything around us.  Nothing is the same as the media has whipped us into a state of being totally scared of our own shadows or the shadows of something we cannot see.  This in turn has caused closings in just about every industry.  Our economy has gone from one of the best ever to one of the worst due to the pandemic.  We have a Congress who does absolutely nothing although that is nothing new!  We have insurgents and terrorists rioting in many of our major cities.  And to make things even worse is that this is an election year.  Therefore, we will have to put up with lie after lie from the candidates.  In my opinion you can either vote to keep America as it has always been with freedoms intact or you can vote for socialism and giving away all of our freedoms.  All in all, we have had a very interesting year.  Today, we are going to look at a passage in the book of John that is very familiar.  Hopefully, we will be able to see that we are not alone in all of this political nothingness!   Many don’t realize it but we have leader who is greater than any leader this world has ever produced who loves you beyond your comprehension.

As we begin, I would like to tell you a little story of a young man who grew up here in the valley.  His youth was pretty normal and, in those days, his mother still baked bread.  He loved the smell of the fresh bread baking and he loved to take a piece of warm bread and put butter or honey on it for a super treat.  Are any of you getting a little craving for homemade bread?  This was a special boyhood treat.  As the lad reached college something strange began to happen.  He started to get sick after eating and he soon discovered that it only happened after he ate bread.  The fresher the bread, the worse he got ill.  So, he quit eating bread and for many years he would rarely eat of his favorite food.  To this day I still will not eat much bread and I am perfectly content not to eat it at all.  This is due to years of not having bread.  This has caused me to wonder if our society is not a little bit like this when it comes to the bread of life.  There are many people who seem to be perfectly content to try to live without it.

We begin this Scripture with Jesus telling us that He is the bread of life.  After all, he has just walked on water, He has just fed the 5000, He has healed a lot of people and He has done many other miracles.  But even after doing so many things and miracles, the people and his disciples still don’t get it.  They are all stuck on the miracles and do not see the big picture.  They cannot seem to grasp that Jesus is God even though He can do all these miraculous wonders.

In those days we find that bread was a true staple for life.  I would have been in big trouble in those days if I got sick from eating bread.  By the way, I am a lot better on this and I do like to eat some bread now but I still won’t eat a lot of fresh bread.  Anyway, the people Jesus is talking to know how important bread is for their very survival.  In those days you really couldn’t live without bread.  They know all of this but they are looking at Jesus as their next king and not as their eternal savior.  These are the people to whom Jesus is talking.

There is something else going on here also.  We need to take a look at the people who are hearing this from John.  This is about 60 years after Jesus died and things have changed a bit.  The people who will read or hear this letter are being persecuted from all sides.  Life is not easy for them.  In many cases, their livelihood has been taken away.  Even though they still considered themselves to be Jewish, the Jews thought differently.  They were no longer allowed in the synagogues.  Jews weren’t allowed to do business with them.  They could only meet with their new friends of this new faith and now they couldn’t even do this openly.  This is a brief outline of what was going on here.

The first thing that the people who heard this did was to start to complain.  They knew Jesus and they knew Joseph.  Jesus was a carpenter and not a prophet.  This was crazy for them.  How could Jesus say he came down from heaven when they had known him all his life and they knew he hadn’t made any trips to heaven?  They seemed not ready to hear what Jesus had to say.

Now let’s look and see if we have any similar situations today.  First let’s see if we can see any of the miracles that Jesus has done for us.  If I am not mistaken, God made all the trees that go into our homes.  We live in a farming community so we can readily see that God has provided food for us.  One of the best things that he has provided is our brains so that we can make the wonderful things that we use and eat.  He has given us doctors and medicine to help us live better lives.  He has given us all the tools to make computers and all that goes into this.  He has even converted a broken down old postal worker so that he can stand here and preach about this wonderful God of ours.  Everywhere we look we can see the miracles of God.

The trouble comes when we try to tell others of this wondrous God who loves us beyond our wildest dreams.  People don’t want to hear about this stuff because they can do it themselves.  They think they don’t need the bread of life.  For years I couldn’t eat bread and I missed it all the time.  But not these people who don’t need the bread of life.  They never stop to realize just what the modern world cannot do.  It cannot make life.  And if you cannot even make the basic structure of our existence, then you really can’t make much.  Oh, we are very smart and can make lots of things but we are very limited because we cannot make life.  We have never made an animal.  We have never made a plant.  We have never even made those little one celled creatures that we used to read about in science books.  But the general public thinks that science can do anything so we could be in trouble.  We need the bread of life and Jesus is the only way to get it.  So just as the ancients were looking for a king, for a Messiah, many people are looking for science to be our Messiah. Even worse yet is all the rioting people and others who think that the government is the bread of life!  This may seem a little harsh but it is true.

We are also being persecuted throughout the world.  In many, many countries in the world we are not allowed to meet in public.  We can be arrested and even put to death for trying to spread the word of Jesus Christ.  Even in this country, where we seem to think that we are free, we have severe limitations on where we can preach the Gospel.  We cannot talk about Jesus in the government, we cannot talk about Jesus in our schools, and it will soon be that I cannot preach from various places in the Bible because it is considered hate speech.  We are even supposed to take down our statutes and images of Jesus.  And it is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.  People are allowed to hate Christians but they are not allowed to hate any other religious groups.  What I am trying to say here is that things are not good in our world either.  We kind of have the same problems that the ancients had and this is not a good thing because we do not have a physical Jesus walking with us to help us out.  And when we do say that we talk to Jesus every day, and I do, then we are labeled as some kind of freak.  The various kinds of persecution just don’t end.

Anyway, I think that I could go on and on about the problems we have today and also the problems facing the ancients.  But let’s move ahead to see what Jesus has to say about this.  First of all, he tells his audience, “I am the bread of life.  He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.”  These are strong and powerful words.  These are words that his audience understands and as we have just seen, they reject Jesus.

This is one of the places where Jesus is telling them that He and God are together.  If you listen to one, then you listen to the other.  And if you listen to Him, then you will be raised up on the last day.  The way to eternal life is through Jesus.  He tells them how their ancestors ate manna in the desert.  One of the widespread beliefs of the day was that Moses had provided the manna for them.  Jesus is reminding them that it wasn’t Moses, but God who did this.  He not only gave them manna; he also gave them quail to eat so they could have meat plus water!  He provided for these people who wandered for 40 years in the desert or wilderness.  This had to be a supernatural feat because some estimate that there were over a million Jews following Moses.  Just think of the logistic nightmare this would cause.  In today’s world, we would have to have 100,000 three rinse sinks so that the dishes could be properly sanitized.  We would need food inspectors everywhere to check out the manna and quail every day.  And just think of how much manna they would need for every meal for a million people!  Then multiply that by 40 years!  This was truly a miracle of God and Jesus is reminding them of this.

Then He goes on to say that they no longer have the manna, but they have something far better.  They have the bread of life standing before them.  Jesus says the He is the living bread who has come down from heaven.  And if anyone eats of this bread then they shall live forever.  Jesus is willing to give this bread, his body for the good of the world.  Jesus is telling them in a roundabout way that He will be going to the cross to die for them.

It is no wonder that these people got a little upset with Jesus.  It looks to them that Jesus is attacking Moses who is the patriarch of the Jewish faith.  But He is telling them that He is far better than Moses.  If someone did something like that today, we would think that they were crazy and these ancients thought along these same lines.

In today’s world, Jesus is telling us the same thing.  He is the bread of life.  Without Jesus there can be no life.  Jesus Christ is our guarantee to eternal life.  He has been this guarantee for all people who have ever lived and He is ours today.  Now some people may say to me that Jesus is only for spiritual things and that we live in a real world.  A few moments ago, I told you of all the things that God has given us.  He has given us everything including life.  We wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for God.

Now we are in troublesome times.  The economy is being devastated by this virus and those idiot rioters.  We think we are pretty well off here and maybe we are but we have rioters here in Fargo ND who make things miserable for all.  Maybe if these people had jobs things might get better but people are hurting everywhere.  We are in a farming area where some places have had too much rain and some places too little.  The shelves in our grocery stores are becoming empty.  People are afraid to work because of this virus.  People are hurting here also.

These are the times when we are hurting that we turn to Jesus Christ and lay ourselves in His open arms.  When things are looking bad, Jesus will help.  When marriages are in trouble, Jesus will help.  When depression hits, Jesus will help.  All you have to do is give it all to Him.  Ask Him to live in your heart and you will never be the same.  You will be a much better person and a happier one.  Ask Him in today.

Here is a little true story I read recently in one of the magazines I get.  It seems that this school needed a new furnace rather badly.  The man in charge of the place felt that he should pray about it and he did.  He prayed well into the night.  The next morning, he gets up and he directs his people to build an area in the basement that had specific dimensions.  The man doing the work asked him what this was going to be.  The superintendent said that this was going to be where the new furnace was going to sit.  The other man thought that they should wait until they got the furnace before they built the enclosure but the superintendent said to keep working.  They finished and that afternoon a man drove up in a pickup truck with a furnace in the back.  He wanted to donate it to the school.  They took it down the basement and it fit perfectly into the space.  God works in our physical world also.

God works for all of us.  This coming week I would like you to try to list 5 things every day that are things that God has given you.  If you do this you will begin to see how God is doing a lot in your life even if you don’t think that he is.  After you have done this, then go to Him in prayer and ask Him for His presence in your life.  Ask Him to help you to feel Him in your life.  Then the next time I ask about God moments, you will have many.

I hope that you have seen a little glimpse of ancient life and how it all ties into our modern world.  We are so blessed that we have a God who loves us this much.  He wants you to be happy and the only way for this to happen is through Jesus.  Let us go to Jesus Christ for anything and everything and at all times.  Thank you, Jesus, for first loving us.  Let’s pray.