John 6 48 thru 71

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1 “Feed on Me and Live,” John 6:48-71 (January 18, 2015) 48

I am the bread of life. 49 Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. 51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” 50

52

The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” 53 So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 54 Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. 55 For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. 56 Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. 57 As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me. 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate, and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” 59 Jesus said these things in the synagogue, as he taught at Capernaum. 60

When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” 61 But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, said to them, “Do you take offense at this? 62 Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? 63 It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. 64 But there are some of you who do not believe.” (For Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe, and who it was who would betray him.) 65 And he said, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.” 66

After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. 67 So Jesus said to the Twelve, “Do you want to go away as well?” 68 Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, 69 and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.” 70 Jesus answered them, “Did I not choose you, the Twelve? And yet one of you is a devil.” 71 He spoke of Judas the son of Simon Iscariot, for he, one of the Twelve, was going to betray him. PRAY We are working our way through the gospel of John this spring, and today in chapter six the big theme John uses is that Jesus is the bread of life. We see it when Jesus feeds the five thousand at the beginning of the chapter, we see it in the middle of the chapter when Jesus says that he is the bread of life, and then again here at the end of the chapter, when Jesus says clearly not just that he is the bread of life in some abstract way, but also that unless you eat of his flesh and drink of his blood – unless you feed on me – you will not have life. In another place Jesus says, “I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” John

© 2015 J.D. Shaw

2 15:5. That’s just another way of saying the same thing – if we want to have life, we must feed on Jesus, the bread of life. If we want to bear much fruit (instead of yielding nothing of value in our lives), we, the branches, must abide in Jesus, the true vine. But what does that mean, and how do we do it? Three things: first, what it means to feed on Jesus. Second, why it’s hard to feed on Jesus. Third, how you can feed on Jesus. First, what it means to feed on Jesus. Think about the analogy. Jesus says that he is the bread of life. So, what happens when you eat bread? And don’t think here of Wonder Bread, they didn’t have that back them. Jesus would have been referring to coarse, dark, unrefined bread, and actually very nourishing bread. When you eat that bread, and it goes into your stomach, your body digests it, and it gives energy to your body. You find yourself nourished when you eat that bread, and in your physical life you will have the energy you need to get out of bed, to do the things you need to do over the course of the day, your body will have the energy and resources it needs to repair itself and fight off sickness and disease. Feed on that bread and you will have physical life. In the same way, Jesus says, you must feed on me, the bread of life, in order to have any kind of spiritual life and health. You must feed on me, you must digest me, you must be energized and powered by me, or you won’t have life. Okay, how do you feed on Jesus? Our Roman Catholic friends think it means the Lord’s Supper. If you’re here today and you come from a Catholic background, it might be helpful for me to say a few things to you at this point: we at Grace Bible Church share all kinds of beliefs with the Roman Catholic Church. We both believe in and pray to the same Trinitarian God, we both believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins, we both believe that salvation is God’s gift to us. But we do have some very significant disagreements, and probably there is no bigger disagreement than our views of the Lord’s Supper. They call the Lord’s Supper “the source and summit of the Christian life,” and they say that when the priest blesses the bread and the wine at mass, it is transformed into the actual body and blood of Jesus. And it is by the faithful going to mass, receiving from the priest the actual body and blood of Jesus, that you feed on him. Jesus says, in verses 53-54: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 54 Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.” Our Roman Catholic friends take those verses very literally: the way you take the bread of life into you, the way you feed on Jesus, is through a Christian’s humble, faithful, repentant, and regular participation in the Roman Catholic mass. You can’t come to mass hypocritically, but if you come sincerely, penitently, and you take the bread and the wine that the priest has blessed and is now the body and blood of Jesus, you will feed on the bread of life and find energy for your souls.

© 2015 J.D. Shaw

3 And you can see why they think that – verses 53-54 seem to support that view. When you read the Catechism of the Catholic Church, like I did last week getting ready for this sermon, you’ll read that they reference those two verses as the primary texts in the Bible that support their view. But that’s not Jesus meant here. He almost certainly was not talking about the sacraments in John 6. Nowhere in John 6 or anywhere else in the gospel of John do we read Jesus teaching about the Lord’s Supper directly. Read verse 54 again: “Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.” Now, look at verse 40: “… everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.” Do you see what happened? These verses are for all intents and purposes identical – Jesus just substitutes a metaphor in verse 54. Jesus says “eat my flesh and drink my blood” to describe what it’s like to look to the Son and believe on him, trust him, place your faith in him. St. Augustine (whom both Roman Catholics and Protestants, like us, claim) wrote, about this passage, “Believe [on Jesus], and you have eaten.” Even St. Augustine doesn’t bring up the Lord’s Supper here. So what does it mean to feed on Jesus? It might be most helpful to look at it from the opposite direction. Friends, in your spiritual and emotional life, you are always feeding on something. We hear sports commentators talk about this during broadcasts, when they talk about a particular athlete and how he “feeds off” the crowd, or he “feeds off” the high-pressure game situation. In the same way, we are all feeding on something to give us the energy and motivation to get out of bed, go to class, go to work, deal with your family, deal with your friends, deal with your problems, do the laundry, do anything. And the question becomes: will you feed off of Jesus, the bread of life, or off of something else? Just as an example, a lot of young men go into the ministry because they feed off the notion that they can, with their teaching and preaching, really help people. And what they really want, what they really feed off of, is to see people changed, to have people come up to them after a sermon or after counseling or a visit and say, “That really helped me – thank you so much.” Now, is there anything wrong with that? Is there anything wrong with wanting to help people? Absolutely not. But if that’s what you feed on, if that’s what gives you energy and motivation instead of Jesus, you won’t last long in the ministry. You may be really effective for a while, but it won’t last. Say you do wind up really helping people in your ministry. If that’s what you feed on, you will start confusing yourself with Jesus. You’ll begin to think you’re the Savior instead of him. And you’ll burn out from trying to save everyone and wreck your family because you’re overworking. Or you will go through times where it doesn’t seem like anyone’s life is changing, you’ll get depressed, discouraged, maybe quit. Guys who confuse themselves with the Savior don’t last long in the ministry – every minister must learn that, at the end of the day, they have to leave their people to Jesus to fix.

© 2015 J.D. Shaw

4 Instead, you must feed on that gospel of Jesus Christ – I was lost, I was in my sins, there was nothing that could commend me to God, and I deservedly sat under his righteous wrath for my sins. But God sent Jesus to die for me, and I believed that. And now, I belong to him. He loves me, he loves me perfectly, he will provide for me, he will never let me go. The only thing I have to do is be faithful to what he’s called me to do. In light of that, I don’t have to be helpful anymore. I don’t have to be successful anymore. All I have to do is be faithful to what God has called me to do as a minister, and He will do with my life what he will. So you remind yourself of what Galatians 2:20 says: 20 I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. And the more you feed on Jesus, the more faithful you’ll be, and the more faithful you are (over time) the more fruitful you’ll be. Now, I just did that with the ministry – but don’t you see that it could apply to any job? If what you’re feeding on is the money you make, or the success you have, or how good you are at it, or how many people you help – if that’s what energizes and motivates you, if that’s what you feed off of more than anything – then you’re not feeding on Jesus. A second example: relationships. We are all tempted to make either idols out of other people (when we crave their acceptance and approval) or to be idols to other people (when we want to be needed by the people around us). But what are we doing when we do that? We are feeding on them, not Jesus. This person is so wonderful, I love being around this person – you’re feeding. This person needs me so much, I feel so important around this person – you’re feeding. It happens all the time – between spouses, between parents and children, between bosses and employees. And it will not end well – the result will, sooner or later, be disillusionment and bitterness. No one can provide you with the energy and motivation you need for living forever. Maybe in short spurts, but not for long. So, what do you do? You say to yourself, “As tempted as I am to feed on this person I can’t – I don’t belong to this person. I belong to Jesus. Jesus has called me to love this person, to serve this person, but not be emotionally enslaved by this person.” You can’t really love others if you have to feed off of them. But if you feed on Jesus, on his love for you, his death for you, his calling on your life, then the less desperately you’ll find you need the people around you, and the more you’ll be able to truly love and serve them. One last example: my mind often wanders, like everyone’s. But when my mind wanders, when I daydream, my mind doesn’t wander to a beach or a happy place where I can relax or some favorite hunting spot. My mind doesn’t wander into relaxation, but into arguments.

© 2015 J.D. Shaw

5 You say, “How does that work?” Well, I’ll read an article on politics or religion that I really disagree with, or maybe I hear story on the news, or maybe it’s someone in my life right now and I disagree with them about something, and I’ll find myself arguing with them. Not out loud, but in my head. I call it my inner lawyer. Without trying to, without meaning to, I find myself in an argument. And these inner arguments may only last for a minute or so, but I imagine all the points I’d make and how I’d completely embarrass whoever was on the other side. Me justifying the decisions I’ve made and destroying the other side with the power of my logic. Now these arguments my mind wanders into – when I get into one I do get energized. I find myself physically agitated when these inner arguments take place, and all of the sudden I’m more able, more motivated, to do certain things than I would otherwise be. But of course the problem is that if I let my inner lawyer run free, I turn into a nasty person. I’m not interested in loving and caring for the people around me; I just want to win the argument. I just want to tear others down and prove I’m right. So I’ve learned: my inner lawyer is a byproduct of my sinful desire to right about everything. I can’t feed on that. That’s taking poison into my soul. Instead, what I must do immediately is repent, and feed on Jesus. If Jesus has died for me, you know what? I don’t have to be right about anything. These arguments don’t really matter at all, if Jesus died for me. I must feed on Jesus, I must partake of his grace. And if I don’t feed on Jesus I won’t live. Verses 58: “This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate, and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” This isn’t optional – if we want life on earth, true, Spirit-filled, gracepowered, joy-producing life, we must feed on Jesus. Feeding on anything else is like slowly poisoning yourself. But more than that – last week Jim read from Isaiah 55. I’ll read it again (Isaiah 55:2): “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.” The NIV has “the richest of fare.” Friends, it’s not just that we’ll survive if we feed on Jesus, and we’ll one day limp into heaven. We will feast if we feed on Jesus. His bread, his life, is the richest of fare. Joy, peace, satisfaction we thought impossible on earth are available if we will only feed on him. And about 150 years ago, Hudson Taylor, missionary to China, meditated on these words, and in a letter to his sister he described what happened as he meditated: “As I thought of the Vine and the branches, what light the blessed Spirit poured direct into my soul! … I saw not only that Jesus will never leave me, but that I am a member of His body, of His flesh and of His bones. The vine is not the root merely, but all – root, stem, branches, leaves, flowers, fruit. And Jesus is not that alone – He is soil and sunshine, air and showers, and ten thousand times more than we have ever dreamed, wished for or needed. Oh, the joy of seeing this truth! I do pray that the eyes of your understanding

© 2015 J.D. Shaw

6 too may be enlightened, that you may know and enjoy the riches freely given us in Christ.” What’s Hudson Taylor doing? He’s feeding on the richest of fare, nourished by abiding in the true vine, and partaking of the true bread, Jesus Christ. Second, why it’s hard to feed on Jesus. In some ways, it’s really easy to be a Christian. We talked about that a lot last week, when we focused on grace. To be a Christian means that God saves you by grace, you don’t lift a finger, it’s the free gift of God, and you accept it. In that sense, Christianity is very easy. But in other ways it’s incredibly hard. Feeding on Jesus in particular is hard, in two ways: first, it’s hard because it means you must make him the absolute center of your life. Verse 60: 60 When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” And when these disciples of Jesus say the teaching is hard, they don’t mean it’s hard to understand – they mean it’s hard to accept. In fact, it’s so hard for them to accept that we read in verse 66: “After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him.” Think about the analogy again: Jesus says, “I am the bread of life. He who feeds on me will live.” Jesus compares himself to food. Food must be, it has to be, the foundation of a healthy physical life. If you want physical health, then it’s a non-negotiable: you must take into your body good, healthy, nourishing food in the right proportions. If you do that, and if you only take in those foods, then you almost have to have good health. If you eat that way it almost doesn’t matter how you exercise or how you sleep – you’ll have health. Likewise, if you have a horrible diet, it just about won’t matter how much you exercise or sleep – you won’t have physical health. And, of course, it’s a lot of work – you must work to get the right foods, and resist temptation to eat the bad foods, and you’ve got to eat regularly, every day, not too much, not too little. It’s hard to put food at the center of your life like that. And feeding on Jesus is no different. It’s hard to feed on Jesus because to do so means you have to make him the absolute, unquestioned center of your spiritual, your emotional, your psychological life. If you don’t do that, if you’re not feeding only on Jesus, then you’re just snacking on Jesus – and no one ever got healthy through snacking. Jesus says, “Eat my flesh and drink my blood.” You must feed on that and nothing else. You can’t let your career or your grades drive you. You can’t let sexual relationships drive you. You can’t let money, or children, or entertainment, or anything else drive you. Jesus says, “I must be your meat and drink. Morning, noon, and night you must feed on me, and nothing else.” Now here’s where the analogy between feeding on Jesus and feeding on food breaks down. If you eat food all the time, you’ll get fat. It’s not good for you. But you can never feed on Jesus too much. Every day, every hour of every day, before you get out of bed in the morning, at the noon hour, and the last thing you do at night, you must feed on me. Your mind must continually come back to me, your heart

© 2015 J.D. Shaw

7 rest in me, you must worship me, you must feed on me or you’ll go wrong. You’ll feed on the poison. You feed on the junk.” Paul in 2 Corinthians 10:5 says something helpful to flesh this out: “We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ … [the NIV says, “we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ”]. That’s what it takes – every thought, all the time, no exceptions, if you would really feed on Christ. And that’s incredibly hard. Second, it’s feeding on Jesus is hard in that it’s to be sure we’re really feeding on Jesus. Over and over again in the gospels, Jesus is constantly warning people against thinking they are Christians when really they are not. 21 “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ 23 And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’ Matthew 7:21-23. It is so easy to be deceived in Christianity. If you’re Jewish, you know, it’s easier – either you’re keeping the law of God, or you’re not. In Islam, either you’re keeping the five pillars, or you’re not. But in Christianity, outwardly you can do all the right things, yet inwardly not trust Christ. You think you’re feeding on Jesus, because, I’m going to church, and praying, and reading my Bible, and serving, and giving, and being kind to others, yet the whole time I was really feeding off this great family and job I have. Or I was feeding on the satisfaction that comes from knowing I can do so much of this on my own. Or feeding on how good it feels to know you’re better than other people. Verses 70-71: “Jesus answered them, “Did I not choose you, the Twelve? And yet one of you is a devil.” 71 He spoke of Judas the son of Simon Iscariot, for he, one of the Twelve, was going to betray him.” Judas had been with him his entire ministry, just as long as Peter, James, John, and all the other disciples. Yet he never fed on Jesus. He fed on the power and status he thought he was getting from being around Jesus. It’s hard to be sure you’re feeding on Jesus. Third, how can we feed on Jesus? I love verses 66-69. Many, maybe most, of the people who had been following Jesus left him, no longer followed him. Now, if all of the sudden, most of the people who have been attending Grace Bible Church quit coming, I’ll be honest – I would be rattled. Even if it were for the “right” reason people were leaving – like I was being faithful to the gospel and standing for the truth and most people couldn’t handle it. Still, I’d be rattled. But Jesus isn’t rattled. He turns to the Twelve, the most committed, and says, “Do you want to leave too? If so, now would be the time.” Jesus knows who he is, and what he’s come to do. Either people will follow him, or they won’t.

© 2015 J.D. Shaw

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But Simon Peter has a great response. 68 Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, 69 and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.” John 6:68-69. Peter – what do we know about him from the Bible? We know he’s very imperfect. We know he puts his foot in his mouth a lot. It’s so bad at one point that Jesus says to him, “Get thee behind me, Satan!” We know that Peter is such a bad follower of Jesus that when Jesus is on trial for his life, Peter abandons him. Denies that he even knows Jesus. But one thing Peter gets right – he’s desperate. He knows there is no hope outside of the man Christ Jesus. He’s desperate – he says, “Jesus, we can’t leave you. We don’t get you either, we think what you’re saying is hard, too. But where else will we go? You and you alone have the words of eternal life.” Friends, you will never perfectly feed on Jesus. You will always, to some extent, feed on the poison. You can’t help it; that’s a consequence of living in a fallen world and having a sinful nature that you’ll battle until the day you die. But what you can know for sure, and what will guarantee that you feed on Jesus in a saving, though not perfect, way, is that you’re desperate. That even though you’re going to blow it over and over and over and over again, even though you may go days or weeks at a time feeding on the poison, Jesus still is your only hope, and he is more than faithful. Years ago I heard about a woman who had up to a certain point an insanely successful life. She’d gone to Harvard, the Yale for graduate school. She married a man who went to Yale, and they both had these very high powered jobs. They had two little girls, and life was perfect. But then her husband was diagnosed with cancer, and before their girls were in their teenage years, he died. And of course, it devastated this woman. But in the course of those horrible events, she learned something. The whole time she thought she was a Christian, and maybe she was (there is a difference between feeding on Jesus and being a Christian – you can be a Christian and not feed on him for a long time). This lady went to church, she read her Bible, she lived a good life – but she wasn’t feeding on Jesus. She was feeding on her life. She was feeding on all the good things that had happened to her and that she’d worked for. But years later she was talking to someone else and her two girls were with her and she said, “You know, we used to cling to all those things – the good jobs, the money, success, but now we cling to Jesus. And more importantly, Jesus is clinging to us isn’t he girls?” She didn’t quit working her high powered job, she didn’t quit making money, she didn’t renounce her Harvard degree and send her diploma back to Cambridge, but she wasn’t feeding on them anymore. She was feeding on Jesus, because she knew she was desperate, and nothing else, no matter how good, could satisfy her.

© 2015 J.D. Shaw

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Friends, at best, you’re going to be Peter. You’re going to think following Jesus is too hard, just like the disciples. Your faith will be very imperfect – you’ll put your foot in your mouth repeatedly, maybe even sometimes denying Jesus. Hiding your faith from others. But so long as you can look at Jesus and say, “Yes, Jesus, following you is hard, but where else can I go? I blow it all the time, but I know only you have the words of eternal life.” So long as you can say that, so long as that’s true in the bottom of your heart, you can be sure that you’re feeding on the bread of life and that Jesus is clinging to you. Friends, ask yourself: what am I feeding on? Is it Jesus, or is it something else? “Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah, Pilgrim through this barren land. I am weak, but Thou art mighty; Hold me with Thy powerful hand. Bread of Heaven, feed me till I want no more.” PRAY

© 2015 J.D. Shaw