“You Are What You Eat.”
John 6:56-69
Jesus has just fed 5,000 people and then tried to get away a while for a little rest to kick back with his closest friends and regroup, but the crowds kept following him. He knows they just want another free meal.
If we look back in verse 26 in chapter 6, he tells them this to their face.
(Read verses 26 – 55)
Jesus mentions the word “bread” 13 times right here in the passages we’ve read today. (We’re not talking low carb here!)
The crowd just wants physical bread and they are willing to go to great lengths to get it. Jesus is speaking of an eternal spiritual filling that will never leave us empty again.
So they kind of go along with his drift for a few minutes and say something like, “Oh, you mean you can give us bread that lasts forever like Moses gave us the manna?” But Jesus says, “You’ve got that wrong, too. It was my Father who gave the manna to you, not Moses. The bread of God is He who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”
“Well, great, they say, from now on give us this bread.”
But Jesus didn’t say he PROVIDES bread from heaven,
He said he is the bread of heaven. Remember he was born in Bethlehem, which means, “the house of bread” and he was laid in a manger, a feeding trough. In every way God was saying Jesus is heavenly bread!
When Jesus replies, “I AM THE BREAD OF LIFE”, they get lost in the literal translation of it and start to balk at the idea.
Who does he think he is telling us he came down from heaven? We know his father and mother. This is Jesus the son of Joseph.
Oh is he really? Jesus never once called Joseph his father.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, fellows!
At this point they are as confused as Nicodemus was about being born again and the woman at the well was about never having to draw anymore water.
I used to think if someone said they believed every word of the Bible was “literal” they were right. (Now don’t get me wrong here, I still believe every word of the Bible is TRUE in fact as I often say I believe it from cover to cover including the cover because it says its genuine leather!)
But some words Jesus spoke were meant to be interpreted in picture language metaphorically and in a spiritual sense.
Jesus taught by using familiar physical things to help explain spiritual realities. But when they insisted upon stubbornly clinging to their misconceptions, Jesus didn’t take it personally. He just said, “No one can come to me unless my father draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day.
I tell you the truth, he who believes has everlasting life.”
You see in the physical world we say “Seeing is believing.”
But in the spiritual realm, it is reversed “Believing is seeing.”
Jesus went on to emphasize how he was the bread of life.
He said if you eat this bread from heaven you will not die because I am LIVING bread so you can eat this bread and live forever. “This bread is my FLESH which I will give for the life of the world.”
They were still incredulous. “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” What a horrific, cannibalistic idea!
Jesus really went out on a limb this time and said,
“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.”
(refer to verses 54 to 57)
This flew in the face of all their doctrine! They had been taught in every generation since God gave the leviticul laws, not to eat the blood of any animal. This absolutely repulsed them.
They didn’t even try to understand the analogy. Do we?
Jesus was the WORD MADE FLESH. God the Father wanted to give us his word, so he gave it to us in a way we could hear it with our physical ears from the physical mouth of Jesus.
God wanted to save us from eternal death so he took the flesh of Jesus as a human sacrifice in our place for the wages of sin. We need his flesh from his mother’s side and his blood from his father’s side to save us!
They knew it was written, ”Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sin.”
They had taken lambs to the altar over and over and still failed to understand that God was drawing pictures of how he planned to provide the TRUE LAMB.
In their temple worship when they sacrificed an animal it was considered giving it to God and when they ate some of the meat afterwards they felt they had God inside themselves. (That’s why they felt they shouldn’t eat meat that was sacrificed to idols.)
Later Jesus instituted the Lord’s supper sacrament to again show the metaphor of getting his spiritual life into us.
Jesus said, “The one who feeds on me, will live because of me.
The Bible says, “Man cannot live by bread alone but by…. what? Every word that proceeds out of the mouth of the Father.”
Jesus was offered once for all past present and future believers.
His blood is sufficient sacrifice to cover the sins of the whole world, but it is efficient only for those whom the Father draws and who do not refuse to come to him in faith.
Manna was enough for Israel. Jesus is enough for Spiritual Israel…all of God’s children.
God is saying, I’ve got the lamb and his blood will cover you, so you can come on into my presence now and live the way I originally created you in the garden…sinless and innocent, able to live forever by my continually feeding you my word.
They say, “This is a hard teaching, who can accept it?”
The problem is their hard heads and hard hearts!
They understood a lot more than they wanted to accept.
It didn’t fit their idea of what religion was all about.
There is none so blind as they who will not see.
They didn’t want to follow someone who required they believe in him to be saved. They wanted to save themselves by keeping the law and have him just meet their physical needs. Just go ahead and be a political king and give us a welfare program, that’s all we want.
When Jesus asked, “Does this offend you?” He used the same word “skandalon” that Paul used in I Cor 1:23 when he said, “We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.”
Then Jesus sort of twisted the knife in their backs.
He said, “You don’t believe I came from heaven, huh?
Just wait until you see me ascend back into heaven where I came from. That’ll show you!”
Then he reminds himself that everyone will not believe.
There is no need to be on the offensive. He tells them again that no one can come to him unless the father enables them.
What causes some to believe and others to reject Christ?
The Father chooses all who will receive him. He is not willing that any should perish, but to those who receive him he grants eternal life.
No one deserves to be saved. We are all saved by his grace. We either turn to him or away from him.
You resent him or rejoice in him. You reconcile to God or rebel against God. The word does not profit anyone if it is not mixed with faith. (Hebrews 4:2)
Sadly, the scripture tells us that from this time MANY of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.
The materialists turned away, they wanted goodies, not God. The legalists turned away, they wanted rules not a relationship. The sensationalists turned away, they wanted to be wowed not wooed.
So we are talking serious sermon separation here.
Then Jesus asked the twelve if they wanted to leave too.
And good ol’ Peter speaks up for the group and says,
“Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of life and we believe and KNOW that you are the Holy One of God.”
The twelve who knew him best didn’t desert him.
Remember now Jesus had not gone to the cross yet, so they did not fully understand, but they knew he had the words of life and that he said he would “raise them up at the last day.”
(He said this 4 times in this passage, verses 39, 40, 44, 54)
They accepted what they understood along with what they didn’t understand. Some of it was majesty and some of it was mystery. Both the doctrine of their faith and the degree of their faith was sound.
You see, a true disciple is not one who has no doubts,
but he holds to belief, not doubt, and listens to the word, not the world, and lives by the Spirit, not the flesh.
All of today’s diet wisdom tells us we need to eat proper food in the proper proportion sizes to live a healthy life on this earth which is just a short span of about eighty years.
Are we eating the proper spiritual food to ensure we have eternal life?
We need a continuous life-giving food source to live forever.
Remember God put a tree of life in the Garden of Eden?
After Adam and Eve sinned he sent an angel with a flaming sword to block off that tree so that they wouldn’t eat of it and live forever in a sinful state of being.
Our new tree of life is a wooden cross that was erected on Calvary and Jesus is the fruit of it. We must eat it to live!
(That’s enough to make me want to be a tree-hugger!)
Without physical food our bodies cannot live.
Divine life is sustained by divine food.
Without accepting the body and blood of Jesus as our spiritual food, we will die spiritually and experience eternal separation from God.
Life is in the blood. Let the blood of Jesus cover you.
Drink it in to cleanse the defilement of your soul.
Apply it to the doorpost of your heart.
Feed on the flesh of his Word as your daily bread.
Then go from the milk to the meat of the word.
“Oh taste and see that the Lord is good, sweeter also than honey from the honeycomb!”
Jesus has given you: access to the throne of grace
acceptance by God
adoption as sons
assurance of resurrection
He has purchased these privileges and paid the price with his own flesh and blood so that now God sees you as his own flesh and blood.
So, I say again, you are what you eat.
Does anyone have an appetite for Christ now?
Do you hunger and thirst for righteousness?
Believe on him and you shall be saved, filled to the brim with the everlasting life of Christ!
Can you say with Peter, that you believe and are SURE?
Don’t go away today if God is drawing you to accept Christ…
to partake of his sacrifice….to participate in his eternal life.
It is decision time now.
You will either go away FROM Christ today or
go away WITH Christ.
Where can you go but to the Lord?
Will you say, Jesus, I come?
