Bogdanowitz. For those of you who thought I was a guest, since I’ve been gone so long—let’s go right to it.
This morning, we want to look to the Lord in John Chapter 6 and read about the bread of life. Let’s begin with a few verses.
Romans 14:17:
For the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.
Matthew 4:4:
But He answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.
Isaiah 55:1-2:
Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters,
and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat;
yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.
Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread?
and your labor for that which satisfieth not?
Hearken diligently unto Me, and eat ye that which is good,
and let your soul delight itself in fatness.
John 6:27:
Work not for the food which perisheth, but for the food which abideth unto eternal life, which the Son of man shall give unto you.
Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, we want to thank You—yes, first, for the wonderful word this morning, a reminder that You are saving us by Your grace. Oh, Lord, we thank You. We worship You for Your great grace to us.
And, Lord, we need that grace even more now. We ask, Lord, that we can stand into who You are, stand into You, that You might speak and be heard. We stand in You for our listening, for our speaking. Hide ourselves in Thee, and we ask, Lord, that we would see Thee as we hide in You.
Open Your word to us, we pray, by the Holy Spirit, and make it alive. May we hear You calling us, Lord, as You speak Your word to us. We entrust ourselves. We entrust this time. We entrust Your words into the hands of Your Holy Spirit. In Jesus Christ’s name, amen.
It’s been a while since I’ve been here, but, as you know, I’ve been wanting to go through the Gospel of John, and we’re up to Chapter 6 now. I’ve made a little change, as I told you last time. Instead of going kind of verse by verse, we want to take some things out of it, take the gist of some things, and bring them out into the open.
Now, while I was preparing yesterday, one of my daughters—which I won’t name which one—said, “Oh, you’re speaking tomorrow?” I said, “Yes.” She said, “You know, a half hour is a good time for a message. Forty-five minutes is okay. But by an hour, we’re thinking of something else.”
Okay, so I’ll try to be true to the admonition and encouragement from my daughter.
This morning, what I’d like to deal with is a tale of two breads. I know, it’s written by Dickens, right? That was his sequel to A Tale of Two Cities.
We have to give a background before we bring out what I think the Lord has spoken to me through this. The first thing I want to say is this: when Scripture talks about bread, it is not necessarily talking about a loaf of bread or the actual bread that we eat.
Bread can also mean anything needed to sustain life. Today, our bread can include money to buy bread, because all of those things are included in bread. It is not just the eating thing; it is whatever it takes to sustain life. Really, that is what is going to be talked about here: sustaining life. What sustains our life?
John Chapter 6 is about a miracle. We have the feeding of the five thousand. If you remember, this is one of the things that is in all four Gospels. Not many things are in all four Gospels, but this is one miracle—one sign, as John would say—that is in all four Gospels.
We have the feeding of the multitude: five thousand men, plus their wives and children, if they were married, with five small loaves and two small fishes. Also in this chapter is Jesus walking on the sea as He went to the disciples after He sent the multitudes away.
But what we are really concerned with is the discourse that came out of the feeding of the five thousand. What was the effect of that miracle? What is the Lord saying to us through this?
This is the first time that Jesus says, “I am” something. In the Gospel of John, we have, “I am the light of the world,” “I am the good shepherd,” “I am the resurrection,” and “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Here He says, “I am the bread of life.”
This is the first time He bears witness to Himself in this way. The commentators use the idea of “I am” as the name God used to introduce and reveal Himself to Moses: “I AM THAT I AM.” Jesus says, “I am the bread of life.” He is making a statement about Himself.
Through the rest of the Gospel of John, we move from teachings into declarations: “I am,” and then proofs of those declarations.
Another thing about the Lord here is that, from this time forward, He begins to lose popular support because He starts to testify of who He is. The crowd had been following because of His miracles. As we find out at the end of this chapter, many of His disciples stopped following Him because of what He said. They said it was a hard saying.
There are many things in this chapter that we are not going to touch on. You should read the chapter itself and meditate on the things that are in it. But, for the purposes of today, we want to look at the effects of this miracle.
Because of this feeding, the crowd suddenly says, “This is not just some guy who is going around healing. This is the Prophet.” Remember, when they asked John the Baptist, “Are you the Prophet?” they meant the prophet Moses said would come after him—the one whom they were to hear.
Because of this feeding, they wanted to make Jesus king right there on the spot. They said, “This is it. This is what we want. We want this One who will feed us forever.”
What a wonderful king this would be. We would no longer have to worry about our sustenance anymore if He were king, because look what He did with two fish and five loaves. This is an amazing thing.
But Jesus refused their offer. He did not say anything, but He sent His disciples away first, and then He sent the crowds away. You can imagine how bewildered they must have been. They were ready to make Him king and declare that He was Messiah, and yet He seemed to say, “I don’t want it.”
Can this be the Messiah?
As the multitudes come to the Lord Jesus, they come with two things in mind. John 6:15 says:
Jesus therefore perceiving that they were about to come and take Him by force, to make Him king, withdrew again into the mountain Himself alone.
Then John 6:26 says:
Jesus answered them and said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Ye seek Me, not because ye saw signs, but because ye ate of the loaves, and were filled.
What does this tell us about the people—about mankind in general? We want a Messiah. We want to be saved.
There is a coming time when people will so cry out to be fed and to be safe that they will crown the Antichrist, because he offers them what Jesus did for them: he feeds them and fills their stomachs.
These people desired bread, but they desired a bread that would not change them. They desired a bread that would leave them unchanged forever. They did not mind having their stomachs filled.
But when the Lord said, in effect, “I don’t want to be your king in this way,” they were shocked. At the beginning of the Gospel of John, John the Baptist preached, “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” Repent means change.
There are many Christians in the United States, in Europe, and all over the world who have an imperfect understanding of the Messiah, just as these Jews did. They have an imperfect understanding of the gospel.
Many of us will accept His death for our sins, but we will not accept our death with Him on the cross. Think about that. We will not accept that.
We accept the Lord for the forgiveness of our sins, and here we are as a result—no change. We want the forgiveness of our sins. We want that security. We want the idea that we are not going to hell. But we still want control of our lives. We still want to live as we would live.
We want the peace of knowing that we are not going to be judged for it.
We love this part of the verse:
But far be it from me to glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.
That is one of the songs we sing. In Isaac Watts’s hymn, “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” the last verse says, “Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast, save in the death of Christ, my God.”
But there is a second part to that verse:
Through which the world hath been crucified unto me, and I unto the world.
You see, it goes together. We would separate it. These people, because they had an imperfect understanding of the Messiah, looked at this and said, “I only see what is in the blue letters. I don’t see the red.”
I am not faulting them. All I am saying is that this is what they saw, and sometimes this is what is preached. When we preach the gospel, we only preach the top half and not the full salvation.
The full salvation is that we have also been separated from this world. The full salvation is that we have entered into the kingdom of God. They desired a bread that would not change them. After all, that is only natural.
Brothers and sisters, we are not after a natural king.
That verse is Galatians 6:14, for those of you who do not know.
The bread that Jesus offers is Himself. He says, “I am the bread.” The bread is everything that He is—everything that He is to God, everything that He is to man. All that He is, is the bread.
This is not an ersatz bread. For those who do not know what ersatz bread is, it is bread that has no nutrients. One of the things I learned in teaching history is that, toward the end of World War I, when the Germans were having trouble feeding their army, German soldiers were eating bread made out of coffee grounds. It had no nutritional value, but it filled their stomachs.
The bread that the Lord Jesus is full of value and full of those things that give life, because the bread is life in itself.
What makes us desire this bread? This is not like natural bread. People heard about this bread and said, “I don’t know about this. I know about the other one, but I don’t know about this bread.”
John 6:44 says:
No man can come to Me, except the Father that sent Me draw him.
How, then, are we drawn to desire this bread that is offered? Remember, this bread is offered to us.
Have you ever been offered something and refused it? We have, haven’t we? It could have been a meal, a gift, or an arranged marriage. Whatever it is, we have the right, because we have free will, to refuse.
We do not always eat what is put before us. I remember embarrassing my folks when we were guests at someone’s dinner and I refused to eat what they put before me. Spoiled little kid that I was, I said, “I’m not going to eat this. I don’t know what it is. I’ve never seen it before.” My parents were aghast.
But how does God draw us to this bread? This is what we want to look at.
John 6:28 reads:
They said therefore unto Him, What must we do, that we may work the works of God?
It is interesting. They did not ask what the works of God were; they asked, “What shall we do to work the works of God?” What do you do?
I think, in trying to do these things, you find this: in the desert, the Lord gave manna through Moses. Brothers and sisters, sometimes we have to find out that inside us, we are desolate. We are barren. There is nothing in us that can be drummed up to do the works of God.
There is nothing in us that can please God, no matter what our efforts might be. We have to come to a place of saying that we are desolate and barren. There is no going around it.
As Steve was sharing this morning, there is nothing we can do to win God’s favor. We have to understand that. That is the truth.
We are barren. There is nothing that can come out of us. We are fruitless. We cannot produce anything. This is a good picture of a desert. If you go to some of the deserts in California, except for Death Valley, you see yucca trees and things like that. No, this is a desert. There is nothing here. I do not see a palm tree; all I see are rocks.
Brothers and sisters, that is us. We have to understand that, and we have to see that. My telling you this does not make you see it. This is something you are going to experience, if you have not already.
Some of you younger ones are going to have to find out that there is nothing you can do to please God. What are you going to do? You have to see that we have a need.
Secondly, aroma. Can you smell it? Some of us can; just the picture makes us think, “Ah, coffee.” Some of us have wonderful wives who might make a pot of coffee in the morning before we get downstairs or before we get to the kitchen, and the smell draws us.
Really, what I am saying is that it is not an aroma so much as an awakening of our spiritual senses. There must be an awakening of our spiritual senses.
There is a nice little cartoon about aftershave called Pied Piper. You can see all the rats following the man because they are drawn to that aroma. That is the truth: we are drawn to an aroma.
2 Corinthians 2:14-16 says:
But thanks be unto God, who always leadeth us in triumph in Christ,
and maketh manifest through us the savor of His knowledge in every place.
For we are a sweet savor of Christ unto God,
in them that are being saved, and in them that are perishing;
to the one a savor from death unto death;
to the other a savor from life unto life.
And who is sufficient for these things?
Brothers and sisters, sometimes there is a person who exudes Christ, and you smell it. You see something in them and say, “What is that? I want that. I desire that.”
When I am around this person, or this group of people, there is something there, and I am drawn to that something. But really, it is not that we are drawn to a something; we are drawn to a Someone.
There is a hymn called “I’m Pressing on the Upward Way,” though people got it mixed up with the Stevie Wonder song. In the third verse, the last part says:
For faith has caught the joyful sound,
The song of saints on higher ground.
Have you ever been in a place where you are alone, and all of a sudden you hear the sound of laughing or the sound of people enjoying themselves? Does that not draw you? Do you not want to see what is going on? Do you not want to know?
This is what the Lord uses to draw us to Himself—to eat this bread. We hear others who have eaten it. We see others who have eaten it. We look at them and say, “What is it they have? What is it that they are eating? What is it that they are drinking?” And we are drawn to it.
Hunger. The Lord lets us hunger. There are many times when the Lord calls for famines and things of this nature, but it is not a hunger for physical food.
It is the hunger that says, “The bread that this world provides does not satisfy me. There is something missing. There is something else that I need, and I do not know what it is.”
Ecclesiastes 3:11 tells us what it is that we are missing:
He hath set eternity in their heart.
When the pleasures of the world and the things of the world cannot fill us, we notice the emptiness. We are drawn to the attention of what God has put in us in the first place. He has put that eternity—that place for Him—in our hearts. It cannot be filled by anything else.
There is another hymn, number 360 in the book. In verse two it says:
Feeding on the husks around me,
Till my strength was almost gone;
Longed my soul for something better,
Only still to hunger on.
This is the story of the prodigal, is it not? He said, “Father, give me my inheritance,” and then he went out and wasted it all. We know that, in the end, he was feeding the pigs. He longed to eat the things he was feeding the pigs with. Then it says that he came to his senses.
The song goes to the chorus and says, “Hallelujah, I have found Him.” I have found Him, not it. Remember, in the 1980s we had that evangelism thing, “I found it. Ask me what it is.” It is not an it.
Hallelujah! I have found Him
Whom my soul so long has craved;
Jesus satisfies my longings;
Through His blood I now am saved.
It is a person. He is the bread. I think that is one of the things we need to get clear. We are not looking for things. Things are not going to satisfy us. Things are not living.
We are looking for a person. We are looking for a personality—One who is alive. He is the answer to our need. He is the answer to our deepest longing. Fellowship with Him is what we seek.
It is almost like when we were seeking to get married. We were not seeking a wife; we were seeking a person to be a wife. That is an important thing. I was not looking for a position.
I fell in love with my wife. I did not fall in love with a wife. I fell in love with Barb Hendrix. In the same way, we need to find out that we need Jesus Christ. He is the One we are looking for.
We are not looking for a spiritual experience. We are not looking for spiritual knowledge. We are not looking for a ministry. We are not looking for a good church. We are looking for a person. We are looking for very God—the person of God as we see Him in Jesus Christ.
If you look at Ecclesiastes 3:11, where it says that He has set eternity in our hearts, then go to the previous chapter, Ecclesiastes 2:17:
Therefore I hated life, because the work that is wrought under the sun was grievous unto me: for all is vanity and a striving after wind.
Then the next verse says:
And I hated all my labor wherein I labored under the sun.
All of a sudden, there is this sense that it is like eating sawdust. This world has its ersatz bread—no value to me, no satisfaction in it. It looks good, and then I taste it and it is nothing.
Have you ever looked at something that looked great, and then you bit into it and found that most of it was air? Some of the breads they have today are very airy. I was raised on Wonder Bread, even though it had twelve needed nutrients.
You buy some of those breads today, and you bite into them—it is like air. Is that not a Texas sandwich? Two pieces of bread with air in between. But that is it: we are looking for Someone.
John 6:53 and John 6:55 say:
Jesus therefore said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink His blood, ye have not life in yourselves.
For My flesh is meat indeed, and My blood is drink indeed.
I want to look at these two words: eat and drink. Since we eat automatically, we do not really think about what eating is. So let us take a look at eating.
Eating is a wonderful process. I know it is wonderful because we all like to do it. It starts in the mouth. We chew the food, and it is like information coming into our outer court. We have it there for a while, and then we swallow it.
All these muscles contract and bring it down into the inner court. There it gets churned around, digested, and assimilated as it goes through the intestines. What cannot be used is thrown out—ejected, so to speak.
We are to eat, but eating is not an end in itself. There is a purpose to eating. It is not just for total enjoyment. “Why do you eat?” “Because I enjoy it.”
If you ever go on a cruise, you get to eat. It is wonderful. You go to a family reunion, and you get to eat all sorts of things. You go to the Polish festival, and you have to eat all sorts of Polish food. It is wonderful.
But eating has a purpose to it. Our chewing, swallowing, and the food going down into our stomach all have a purpose: that what is in the food can be assimilated. The food becomes us.
Remember in the 1960s we had that saying, “You are what you eat”? Which means most of us are hamburgers. But spiritually speaking, it is true: you are what you eat.
Eating is not an end in itself. It leads to something. Energy is given to you so that you can move. Life is given to you so that it can be lived. That is the whole point of eating.
Some of us are spiritual gluttons. Let me make this clear: all we want to do is eat. We only want to do the chewing part and the swallowing part, but we do not want the exercising or the assimilating.
We are not moved by what we hear or by what we ingest. There is a problem with that, because if a person does not exercise, what happens? You start to get wider.
Remember the Pixar movie WALL-E? The people in WALL-E were like big hot dogs—big bratwurst, since we are talking about food. Their arms and legs were really little.
There is one scene where the captain of the spaceship gets up, walks, and does something with his hands. He says, “That’s what those are for,” because they had never used them. You do not know what they are for if you never use them.
It is almost like babies when they are first born. They are eating blobs. All they do is eat and eliminate. That is it.
In the same way, those of us who are spiritual gluttons get to the point where all we want to do is eat. Then we become particular about what we eat. We begin judging all sorts of ministries because they are not deep.
Our taste changes, and we start looking for other things. We leave out the things that are good because those are the things that need to be carried out. We become merely mental Christians. We become theologians without a practical part to us.
But we are meant to exercise. That is why it says in 2 Peter 1:4-8 that we have been given all these promises. Some of us can recite the promises that have been given to us.
It says that we can be partakers of the divine nature. In other words, what has been given to us can be assimilated. Then Peter goes on: “With all diligence, add to your faith,” and he starts giving virtues—character traits that have to be worked out.
The divine nature is growing in us. This bread that we are eating is becoming us. But it cannot become us if there is no exercise as part of the eating.
Remember this: exercise is included as part of eating. It is the purpose for eating. You do not just end with eating as a thing in itself. There is a purpose to it, and that purpose is that what is being eaten is worked out in us.
That is what the Lord is after: Christ in us, who is the hope of glory.
So the question is: how do we eat? Eating is not just listening to sermons or reading books. How do we eat Christ?
I am going to give four ways. The first is prayer.
I know we always list things: read the Word, pray, and so forth. But I am not talking about a prayer list. I am not talking about praying for things, even if they are personal things.
I think what the Lord is really after here is the prayer in which one surrenders himself to God for His will to be done. We see that His will is better than ours, and we submit to that. We get the value of who He is.
I did not eat a salad until 1975. I think it was November. Now, you are laughing, but you know it is true. In 1975, I was twenty-two years old. I had never eaten a piece of lettuce.
I had never eaten a tomato except as it was in ketchup—never a real tomato. But there came a time in my life when I happened to be on this basketball tour, where all we did was sit in restaurants and eat. We ate, and we played, and you can only eat so many hamburgers.
When I ordered a hamburger, I never put the garnish on it—just the meat and the bread, maybe some ketchup. It was terrible for people going out with me. “What are you going to have?” “I want a hamburger, but don’t put anything on it.” I loved Burger King: hold the pickle, hold the lettuce.
Finally, I went to a restaurant—I think it was in Florida—and ordered a dinner. The lady said, “What will you have with your salad?” I said, “Well, I don’t want a salad.” She gave me a list of dressings, and I had to ask what they looked like.
I think I had Italian dressing on it. It was the first time I had eaten a salad. I had to come to the place where I submitted to another food. That sounds kind of dumb, but I had to surrender to eating something other than what I was used to or wanted.
I found out that I liked it. So I began ordering salads all the time with my meal. But that is the whole thing: once you submit, once you surrender, you find that Christ is available to you—not merely a teaching, but the person of Christ.
The person of Christ is available to you in amazing ways.
It is like the prodigal’s prayer. When the prodigal was there with the pigs, he said, “I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned.” He was saying, “I am no longer fit to be your son. Let me be your slave.”
That is surrender. What did he find as a result? He found his father—maybe for the first time. He had lived with his father for years and years, but now he found his father for the first time. He was overwhelmed by who his father was.
Secondly, there is an obedience of faith. When we talk about obedience, remember that the Israelites were told to march around Jericho once a day for six days, then seven times on the seventh day, then blow a horn and shout, and the walls would come down.
Any other general would say, “Well, this is really stupid.” But there was an obedience: just do it. Just do these things and trust Me.
When we talk about the obedience of faith, it is appropriating that word that is quickened to us. I want to make a distinction regarding the word that is quickened to us.
There are words in Greek: logos, graphe, and rhema. It is not graphe—not merely the written word, because we can say, “I am going to obey the things that are written in the Scriptures.” That is not what He is talking about.
It is the rhema. It is the word that is quickened to me, made alive to me. It says, “Turn here.”
For example, I used to smoke. I do not have a problem with anybody who smokes, so please do not think I am judging people who smoke. I am just saying this is what happened to me.
This is 2009, and I had not smoked for thirty-five years. I quit when I was twenty-one. You might say that is not long, but I had smoked since I was twelve. I liked smoking. I just did.
One day I saw something where my brother was wearing a little badge saying, “Well, I’m claiming the blood of Christ over my smoking.” To me, that was a crock. I am just being honest.
But this is what happened. The Lord spoke into my heart: “Give it to Me. Give Me your smoking.”
Oh man, I was so convicted. I went the whole night doing terrible things to my brother—blowing smoke at him and trying to make him break—because I did not want to say it did not work. But I was getting so convicted.
Finally, I came to the place of saying, “Okay. Here they are.” And then I stopped. I just stopped.
What I found was that I did not have the willpower to do it. I was not doing it because my health was telling me to. But I found out that the life of the Lord in you overcomes.
I found out it was a life in me that said, “Give this to Me and take My life instead.” I did not even know it at the time, but looking back, I say, “That is the life of Christ that overcomes.”
Some of us are so bound by things and say, “I can’t do it.” We think, “I’ll get around to it.” But when you hear that word that He is giving you, respond to it. When you hear that word and respond to it, you will find the power of the life of Christ.
That is what the bread of life is: the life of Christ in us.
Thirdly, fellowship. How many times have you been with another brother or sister and been fed? I am talking spiritually.
They shared with you something Christ had done for them, or simply because they have a life with the Lord, it exudes out of them. You are able to eat Christ.
Think of Aquila and Priscilla. They had fellowship with Apollos, and they gave him more of Christ so that he knew Him in a more perfect way.
Or think of the servants of Naaman the leper in 2 Kings 5. He would have left because he was upset and offended by what Elisha told him to do to cure his leprosy. But his servants came alongside and encouraged him to do these things.
Their encouragement led him to the place where he found the power of the Lord for his life to overcome his leprosy.
Fellowship.
The last way to eat is worship. How many of us heard something in the worship today because someone had experienced something real of Christ in their lives? Were we not fed by that? Did we not take it up and chew it?
Have we read a hymn that, because of what the hymn writer had gone through, encouraged us and showed us Christ in a way we did not know? All these are ways that we eat Him.
I have to hurry because I am at the forty-five-minute mark.
And drink of His blood. “My blood is drink indeed.”
There is a picture of Peter denying Christ. Brothers and sisters, I can only tell you this: as we go on in life, we are going to sin, because the sin nature is around with us, and we fall to temptation. That is a given. I am sorry, but it is a given.
Because that is a given, we find how deep and powerful the blood of Christ is—not just to cleanse and forgive our sins, but to relieve us of guilt.
Oh, how precious is the blood of Jesus Christ for us. The deeper we get to know Him and walk with Him, the more we see how rebellious we are in our own nature, how other we are.
Praise the Lord: the blood of Christ is not just for conversion, but it is to drink. It is always there, and it does take away our guilt.
Sometimes it is not easy to drink the blood of Christ. It is not easy to apply the blood of Christ because we are so self-righteous in ourselves—or perhaps self-sufficient is a better term. We think we can do it. We can do it.
Sometimes it is like quinine. Quinine cures malaria, but have you ever tasted quinine water? It is the lousiest-tasting stuff. But in it is the very thing that cures.
The blood of Christ does not always sit well with our flesh. Even these people, when Jesus said, “Is this a hard saying unto you? What then if ye should behold the Son of man ascending where He was before?” were troubled.
He was not saying merely that He would suddenly be beamed up to Heaven. He was saying, “You know My way back there? You know My way back to the throne? Through the cross.” What if you were to see that?
Most people did not want to see the Messiah suffering. Even Peter said, “Be it far from Thee, Lord.” Jesus had to say to Peter, “Get thee behind Me, Satan,” because Peter was not seeking the things of God.
Oh, precious is the blood of Christ for us. How precious it is. What a cleansing fountain. What a salve to our sinful conscience. Oh, praise the Lord for that blood.
What is so hard about this saying? Many of them left because they said it was a hard saying. What is so hard about it?
First of all, it is hard because it is spiritual. 1 Corinthians 2:14 says:
Now the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him; and he cannot know them, because they are spiritually judged.
This is a hard saying because it does not jibe with our logic. It does not go with what the natural man thinks. Look at all the other religions. How do you get to God? You do things.
Christ says, “No, you eat Me. You take Me in. I am the bread. There is nothing about you. I am the bread of life.”
It calls for radical change—from wanting our own will. “I want the king who forgives my sins and leaves me alone.”
Radical change means not only do I want the King, but I want His rule in my life.
But those who have been drawn by Him are not offended. Because they have been taught by God, because their life has gone on with the Lord, and because the Holy Spirit has been teaching them who Christ is and who God is, they know they have to be satisfied.
These other things do not satisfy them. Because they have to be satisfied, they know there is no other bread. They have been hooked. They have been captured. They have been caught. Nothing else can satisfy now. They have been caught for life.
In closing, I want to close with a question. It is not the obvious question, “Am I eating the bread of life?” My question is this: Am I hungry?
Do I have an appetite for the spiritual bread? That is really the question. Do I have an appetite for it?
For those of us—like me—whose appetite ebbs and flows, what about us when we say, “Lord, I really don’t desire that right now”? What about us? Is there hope for us?
Brothers and sisters, whatever it is, we come to Him as we are, simply saying, “Lord, this is what I am. This is the way I am.” Not stubbornly saying, “This is the way I am; You have to live with it,” but humbly coming to Him and saying, “Lord, this is the way I am. I don’t know what else to do.”
If we come in that way, we find out that He says:
Him that cometh to Me I will in no wise cast out.
That is grace. It is wonderful grace offered to us—that no one would be held out from Him, that no one would be held from having this bread.
You might think, “Well, I’m just not spiritual,” or, “I’m just crummy.” But I want to leave you with these verses from the Sermon on the Mount.
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.
Is this you? Cry out to the Lord, because you need the bread, and the bread is offered.
Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters.
Come without money and without price.
That is right.
Heavenly Father, as we learned today at the table, You are so full of grace. We bow before Thee, O gracious One, O gracious God, Lord and Master. We bow to You.
We cannot believe—and sometimes, Lord, we just have to confess—we feel that we cannot even take Your grace because we are so ashamed of ourselves.
But how I thank You that even the prodigal came to his senses and came back, saying, “Lord, I’m not fit to be Your son. Let me be a servant.”
How we thank You that, in that story, the Father welcomed back his son and brought him back to his heart and to his bosom. Oh, Lord, we thank You.
Lord, for those of us who are in a situation where we are dead, we ask that we might know Christ as the resurrection in us, and that You would raise us up afresh.
For those of us, Lord, who are in a place where we are sleeping, we pray that we would hear Your voice calling to us, and that there would be like the light in the morning that comes through our window and wakes us up.
And, Lord, those of us who are mired in some type of sin, I pray that we might see the blood offered to us and might be washed clean.
Oh, Lord, we thank You that we do not just have to ask for this bread. This bread is being offered to us. It has come down from Heaven to us, saying, “Here it is.”
O every one that thirsts, it is for us. Oh God, help us avail ourselves of You and Your offer, and find You, Lord, as the One we are really looking for. Find You as able to complete us.
We ask this in Jesus’ name.