The Bread of Life

Bread and hunger are everyday occurrences for people around the world. Jesus uses these commonplace and ordinary things to explain the extraordinary Kingdom of God. He reveals to those gathered to Him that HE is in fact the bread of life.

Prayer: “Lord thank you for sending the true bread, your Son, Jesus. He took on our sin and satisfied the deep cravings of our hearts. Help us turn aside from false teachers and idols in our lives and give us the true bread, always.”

Scripture: John 6:25-35, Ephesians 2:8-9

He reveals to those gathered to Him that HE is in fact the bread of life.

Introduction

When’s the last time you were really hungry? And I mean really hungry… To the point that you couldn’t think about anything else. That’s when you know you’re really hungry, and for some of you here today there’s another level to it that you experience called hangry. We’ve all got those people in our lives who turn into primordial beasts when they miss a meal, that’s hangry and hangry people can be scary.

But the thing about hunger that we can agree on is that we’ve all felt it to one extent or another. We recognize that hunger is an incredibly motivating force in a person’s life, and it’s been this way all throughout human history. Even back in 400 B.C. the ancient Greek poet Aristophanes said, “Hunger knows no friend but it’s feeder.”

Hunger is indiscriminate and unyielding in its single-minded focus. It will not rest until it’s been satisfied… Which is why something like bread is as common and ordinary as hunger pains in the belly. Bread as we know it, or tortillas, or naan, or rice is as commonplace around the world as any other food you’ll find. Any one of these foods would be considered basic staples in the diets of their respective cultures. Bread, or any of its derivatives, is a universally simple answer for hunger.

Bread is ordinary and feeling hungry is commonplace.

Amazingly, in our passage today from John 6:25-35, Jesus uses these ordinary things to explain the extraordinary Kingdom of Heaven to his followers. Simple bread, common hunger, and the eternal kingdom of God. It’s quite a story.

Main Teaching

Read John 6:25-35

For context’s sake, it’s important to understand how this group started talking about bread in the first place. We’ve got to look just a little further back in John 6 to the story of Jesus feeding the 5000. In this story, Jesus is out with His disciples at a remote location when a huge group of people come to Him. Upon seeing them coming Jesus says, “Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?” (John 6:5) He was saying this as a way to test the disciples…Where was their faith? Had they seen enough up to this point to believe that God would come through again?

Of course we know on this end of things that Jesus did come through and that He miraculously fed 5000 people that day. He met them with bread, and He satisfied their hunger.

Essentially, this is the same lesson we learn from our passage today; Jesus meets us with bread, and he alone satisfies our hunger.

Jesus Meets Us with Bread

Take a quick look back at the beginning of our passage, John 6:25-26.

Read John 6:25-26

Here we learn that “the people” find Jesus on the other side of the lake ... View this full sermon with PRO Premium