Dennis Tuuri

We return today to John chapter 6 for the sermon text. We’ll begin reading at verse 22. Please stand. We’ll be reading John 6 beginning at verse 22. On the following day, when the people who were standing on the other side of the sea saw that there was no other boat there except that one which his disciples had entered, and that Jesus had not entered the boat with his disciples, but his disciples had gone away alone.

However, other boats came from Tiberias near the place where they ate bread after the Lord had given thanks. When the people therefore saw that Jesus was not there, nor his disciples, forgive my delay. Nor his disciples. They also got into boats and came to Capernaum seeking Jesus. And when they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, “Rabbi, where did you come? How did when did you come here?” Jesus answered them and said, “Most assuredly I say to you, you seek me not because you saw the signs, but because you ate of the loaves and were filled.

Do not labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to everlasting life, which the Son of Man will give you, because God the Father has set his seal on him. What shall we do that we may work the works of God?” Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God that you believe in him whom he sent.” Therefore, they said to him, “What sign will you perform then, that we may see it and believe you?

What work will you do? Our fathers ate the manna in the desert. As it is written, he gave them bread from heaven to eat. And then Jesus said to them, most assuredly I say to you, Moses did not give you the bread from heaven, but my father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. Then they said to him, Lord, give us this bread always.

And Jesus said to them, I am the bread of life. He who comes to me shall never hunger. He who believes in me shall never thirst. But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe. All that the Father gives me will come to me. And the one who comes to me I will by no means cast out. For I have come down from heaven not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me. This is the will of the Father who sent me that of all he has given me I should lose nothing but should raise it up at the last day.

And this is the will of him who sent me that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him may have everlasting life. And I will raise him up at the last day. The Jews then complained about him because he said, “I am the bread which came down from heaven.” And they said, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How is it then that he says, I have come down from heaven?” Jesus therefore answered and said to them, “Do not murmur among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day.

It is written in the prophets, and they shall all be taught by God. Therefore, everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except he who is from God. He has seen the Father. Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in me has everlasting life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness and are dead. This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that one may eat of it and not die.

I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I shall give is my flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world.” The Jews therefore quarreled among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” Then Jesus said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.

Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread which came down from heaven, not as your fathers ate the manna and are dead.

He who eats this bread will live forever. These things he said in the synagogue, as he taught in Capernaum. Therefore, many of his disciples when they heard this said, “This is a hard saying. Who can understand it?” When Jesus knew in himself that his disciples complained about this, he said to them, “Does this offend you? What then if you should see the Son of Man ascend where he was before? It is the spirit who gives life.

The flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit and they are life. But there are some of you who do not believe. For Jesus knew from the beginning who they were who did not believe and who would betray him. And he said, “Therefore, I have said to you that no one can come to me unless it has been granted to him by my Father.” From that time many of his disciples went back and walked with him no more.

And then Jesus said to the twelve, “Do you also want to go away?” But Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. Also, we have come to believe.” Jesus answered them, “Did I not choose you the twelve, and one of you is a devil?” He spoke of Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon, for it was he who would betray him, being one of the 12. After these things Jesus walked in Galilee for he did not want to walk in Judea because the Jews sought to kill him.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for the pure light of your word. We pray that it would shine upon us now, Lord God. May your spirit brighten our understanding of this text. Help us, Father, to understand the true meaning of life and what it means to abide in our savior. Help us, Father, to blow away the cobwebs by your spirit, the darkness, illuminate the text to understanding that we might rejoice in it, that we might worship you for this word.

Lord God, and that we might be transformed by it in Jesus name we ask it. Amen. Please be seated.

Many years ago, I saw Richard John Neuhaus who I think has since converted to Catholicism at that time. I think he was still Lutheran. He was on with William Buckley on Firing Line and he had just come from a liturgical conference. Richard John Neuhaus has written a number of books about the implications of Christianity in the public arena. I won’t comment further on Neuhaus’s work, but what Neuhaus said was interesting.

He said, “Well, you know, I just went to this liturgical conference and we talked about the Eucharist and all that sort of stuff, but and then Buckley said something about that.” And Neuhaus said, “Well, let’s talk about real life now, though,” by which he meant they were going to transition to talking about politics. And I always thought that was so ironic that Neuhaus said that from one perspective we can understand what he’s saying, that sometimes discussion of the liturgy of the church, the worship of the church, the sacrament can be pretty detached from life.

But the ironic thing is that this text of course blends these two things very firmly together. The partaking of the Eucharist, the flesh and blood of our savior, and life are all about. This text has us ponder and consider several things. What is life? What is it to have eternal life? How can we possess it now? How is it that we’ll never die if we have this life and if we eat the flesh of the savior? What’s life anyway?

What is it? The nature of belief? And I think that the text shows us the nature of belief in Christ is an abiding in him and him in us. What does that mean? What does it mean to be satisfied with food? All these things are all kind of wrapped up together in this famous bread of life discourse, or saying, or sermon I suppose we could call it, although it’s a dialogue back and forth between Jesus and a number of people.

This is a famous discourse and we want to conclude our discussions of it today and next week in the providence of God and Lord willing we’ll move on to chapter seven and what occurs there. But today we want to consider one last time the nature of this discourse and I want to go through it very specifically.

Now first, before we start that, I wanted to mention to the children last week I apologize for not discussing the last question of last week’s sermon outline for them. The last question was why do you think that unborn children are human? And the answer to that was supposed to be the Bible tells me so. A very simple answer. The Bible tells me so. Ultimately, when we have whatever the current model of philosophy or science of the day is on this side and the scriptures asserting something over here, this is what we must believe. The basis for everything that we know is the word of God.

And really that relates to this discussion of the bread of life as well. How do we know what life is? It’s determined for us by a definition from the word of God. The word of God will instruct us on what life is. So it is central.

Let me also apologize to the children for not getting out the children’s outline today early. There is one back there. If you’re here early and didn’t get one, feel free to, if your parents will allow you to go back and get a children’s outline for today right now.

And I also need to apologize to the adults because the outline is always on the back, toward the back of the order of worship. The thinking on that was you could pull them off along with the announcements and take them home. But I think it might be a little easier to put them right in the order of worship where the sermon will occur, and we’ll do that next week.

Also, on the inside of the pews, there’s a lavender colored sheet with a new outline on it. My daughter went with a number of other people from RCC to Moscow, Idaho this weekend. They had to leave very early Thursday and so I did my outline earlier in the week than normal. And Wednesday night, I had some diet Coke on the way home from the Wednesday night study and it had caffeine in it so I couldn’t get to sleep. So, you know, I don’t like to just waste my time. So I got up from bed and couldn’t sleep and went up to the computer and brought up the bread of life discourse again and decided to keep working at it.

And the lavender sheet is the result of in the middle of the night my labors and cogitations on that. So, better outline through caffeine. Better living through caffeine. I do think that the outline on the lavender sheet will be more useful to us and I find it more interesting.

You know by now if you’ve been at this church very long that I have a love for structural analysis of texts, for knowing how they’re structured in a literary way. I think it’s important for us and tells us some things that we wouldn’t see otherwise. Having said that, this is my first shot at it, the lavender sheet, of a chiastic structure of this particular text. Other people, this text is much discussed among literary analysts of the scriptures. What is it? How should it be? Diagrams, what is it all about? The one outline I gave you originally provided three short dialogues and then three long discourses back and forth. And so there are other ways to outline this.

I’m not saying that my outline is the way it should be done, but it’s one way among many.

We read in the text that the people fairly early on in the bread of life discourse say to Jesus, “As it is written, he gave us bread from heaven to eat.” And some people have outlined the discourse along that line. Signs. Who gave the bread? Jesus corrects them. It wasn’t Moses. It was God who gave them bread in the wilderness, who gives the bread from heaven.

Now Moses was a conduit just like they had misinterpreted and we could misinterpret Moses’ law as something different from God’s law. Moses gave the law but it was God’s law. Moses was there in terms of administration of the manna. But God provided the bread from heaven. What is bread from heaven ultimately? What did it symbolize? What is it really? And so the second part of Jesus’s discourse talks about what bread from heaven is and he’s the true bread from heaven.

And then finally, how do you eat this bread? You know, how do you eat the bread from heaven? And so this part of the discourse could be outlined in that way. So that’s another way to outline it. Many outlines possible. We’re going to use the chiastic structure on the lavender outline instead of the outline provided in your stapled orders of worship, although we’ll hit the same application points.

One other comment about this before we begin the actual text, and that is that I provided you in addition to another outline of John, the bread of life discourse of course, the next page, the next to last page on your orders of worship, the backing page for the announcements, provides the context of John chapter 6.

So you’ve seen this before at the top, but there are eight miracles in John’s gospel. And I think that they can be arranged in this particular fashion that I’ve given you here. Obviously, the feeding of the 5,000 and the crossing of the water are connected here in our text. And after the crossing of the water is a discourse on the feeding of the 5,000. So, you know, it seems like those miracles are linked together and what they seem to be is these obvious references to the wilderness and then crossing into the promised land, entrance into salvation into Capernaum, the village of comfort, which is what the name means.

So I think they lie at the center of this gospel is recreation by picture of a new deliverance, a new exodus, a greater exodus, going through the wilderness and some people die off in that wilderness as we see in today’s text. On either side of those two miracles have a lame man healed and a blind man healed. We’ll talk this up when we get to chapter nine and talk about the blind man. But obviously the ministry of our savior is one of healing. He restores us to vocation and to the ability to walk in the worship of God and he opens our eyes.

On either side of those two points, the C point, the B points rather, you have a nearly dead son who was raised and then Lazarus who was stinking dead. He had been there several days until his body actually stank. And so those kind of correlate together as well. The resurrection of the nearly dead boy and the completely dead Lazarus.

And so as the gospel progresses, it progresses in intensity. In other words, the last miracle is greater than the first. And of course, the very last miracle, the resurrection of the savior, is what really transforms humanity and brings about this new creation and changes us from water into wine. And so the finished work of our savior is pictured there in the resurrection.

I’ve also provided for you a synopsis here of the feeding of the 5,000. The way we look at that particular text in terms of its structure, seeing that at the middle of that is that Jesus calls us together for the purposes of causing us to recline before him, to setting us down in order that he might feed us as the good shepherd. There’s much grass and we lie in that grass as it were every Lord’s day for the feeding by our savior. And then I provided you an outline of the crossing of the sea.

And the way I looked at that was that there’s a couple of different chiasms. Four and a half, and then in the middle the problem is really sort of portrayed. The first set of structure is in A, the situation trial at C, and it seems to me that the way that text wants us to think about it is there’s a correlation between evening and darkness and the absence of the savior. So throughout the scriptures darkness is the picture of the absence of the Shekinah glory of God, the absence of the presence of the savior.

And so that’s their situation and we find in the middle of that text that God has caused a great wind to blow and they’re rowing for all their worth and just can’t.

Now, you know, I thought about this again last evening that there’s a sense in which this kind of correlates to the first miracle. There had been a great wind blowing as it were upon the people of God. The judgment of God was upon Israel. That’s why people were starving to death and why they needed bread so badly. And people struggled for all they were worth and couldn’t come up with enough bread to make themselves satisfied. And so the savior feeds them with his presence at the feeding of the 5,000. So there’s a, I guess we could say that there’s a relationship between the Savior’s epiphany on the sea and his epiphany in the feeding of the 5,000 as well. They kind of are corollaries to one another.

And then the crossing of the Red Sea completes itself by seeing at the center of their deliverance the Savior getting upon the boat. The boat had been without him. Now with him, it gets across the sea. And in the middle of all that is the declaration of Jesus that it is I, or we could translate it properly, I AM, identifying himself as Yahweh, I AM. And so the Jesus’s epiphany of himself at the crossing of the sea, I’ve given you an outline for that as the context for what we’re going to talk about today in John chapter 6.

Now the lavender outlines have on one side a chiastic structure and on the other the actual verses of the discourse itself for you. And so you can kind of flip back and forth if you’d like or you can just follow along in your Bibles as we work our way through this outline.

We have the setting first of all as Capernaum. In verse 24 we read that they came to Capernaum and at the end of this discourse we find that at some point in time the discourse has changed from being there beside the sea to being in the synagogue at Capernaum. So this seemed to me in the middle of the night at least a good way to look at a pericope. A pericope is a particular portion of scripture that has a unifying theme and it has definite markers to mark itself off for study. The continental reformers have a particular way of analyzing scripture that really stresses this idea of capita, the particular text of scripture that is kind of a unit, and when we have a reference to Capernaum at the beginning and a reference to Capernaum at the end it seems like those can be seen as bookmarks to a particular section.

So the whole bread of life discourse is set in the context of Capernaum, beginning and end, the village of comfort.

Now another thing that is sometimes important to see and easy to see—let’s put it that way, a little easier to see in a long text like this that may or may not be chiastically oriented. Another way to kind of look at the thing is to look at the center verses. And frequently at the center, we’ll find something quite obvious. You’ll remember that when we look at the first part of chapter 6 at the feeding of the 5,000, the much grass was very obviously the center, at least of a little chiasm, even if the rest of the text wouldn’t match up necessarily, which I think it did, but still it was easy to see in those middle verses. Well, I think it’s fairly easy to see in the middle verses of this particular text as well. A fairly obvious chiasm at work and I’ve given you that on your outlines as points K through K prime, verses 41 through 43.

So as we do our studies, sometimes things will kind of jump off the page at us. And that gives us an indication that we should begin maybe to think about the possibility of this text being structured in a chiastic fashion. And what we read in 41 is:

“The Jews then complained about him because he said, ‘I am the bread which came down from heaven.’ And they said, ‘Is not this Jesus the son of Joseph whose father and mother we know? How is it then that he says, I have come down from heaven.’” Jesus therefore said to them, “Do not murmur or complain amongst yourselves.”

So you see the way those couple of verses are structured is quite obviously a repetition around a hinge point. The Jews complain because he said, then they say this is really the son of Joseph and how could he say I’ve come down from heaven—exact repetition of the same phrase on the other side of that middle point. And then Jesus tells him not to complain. So you know, I looked at the beginning and end, looked at the midpoints and said well there seems to be something to this. And well we won’t spend a great deal of time comparing the parts, you can in your family worship or in your personal reading today or into the week, and I think that this text really is meant to be understood at least in part in this particular way.

Okay. So let’s go through these various points then one by one and point A. As I said, the context for all of this is Capernaum, the village of comfort. Where did Jesus give the bread of life discourse? He gives it at Capernaum. And what does Capernaum mean? We talked about this before. Capernaum means the village of comfort.

Now, on the children’s outlines, I’ve got Capernaum and I am the bread of life listed for you here because Jesus, after we read that they’re at Jesus at Capernaum, we then read in the next verse that Jesus says that he is the bread of life. Not in the very next verse, but in the context of that, he’s the bread of life. Twice in this discourse, Jesus says the exact same words, I am the bread of life. First after the first initial part and then later in the outline. So by way of kind of helping the children to think through this, or to see what I’m talking about, Jesus at Capernaum said, “I am the bread of life.” And then they grumble in dispute and then he says, “I am the bread of life.” And the text says he was at Capernaum.

So if you draw a line on the children’s outlines from Capernaum to Capernaum and then draw a line from I am the bread of life to I am the bread of life, what you do is you make an X on the paper. Right? So if you look at the text structured that way, it makes an X. Now the Greek letter for X is chi. CHI or chi can be pronounced either way. Chiasm or a chiasm is a way of looking at a text and saying you know God has a structure here where it kind of starts one place, ends one place, and in the middle it sort of repeats itself. And so it originally derives from that X fashion.

Now our outlines never look like X’s. It’s confusing to us. If it’s a chiastic outline and chi is X, why doesn’t it look like X? Well, continuing on the children’s outlines, the way the text actually reads on our page, we go down—not like this and like this. He’s at Capernaum. He says, “I am the bread of life.” Some other stuff happens and he says, “I am the bread of life.” And then it says he’s at Capernaum. So it looks like an X if we diagram it one way, a simple four-term view. But if we write it out sequentially with each term listed in this fashion vertically, then it looks like the caret, c-a-r-e-t, on the computer keyboard, or a V on its side.

So that’s why we call these chiastic outlines, and that’s why this particular text is from my perspective at least fairly clearly, at least portions of it, should be looked at in terms of that way.

Now the interesting thing about looking at text this way is it helps us to focus on something we might not necessarily catch otherwise. This is a long discourse. I’ve meditated on this thing for a month now. You know that’s how long I’ve been on this particular section of scripture. And it’s, you know, for me I always try to get a handle on a text of scripture by thinking through what is the flow. This is a difficult one. There’s a lot of repetition. We see that there’s some basic themes that predominate through it. But its structure is a little difficult. And sometimes if we look at things in this chiastic fashion, it draws our attention to something that it might not otherwise.

And if I’m correct that this text is structured around the central hinge point that I just described, those verses in 41 through 43—very center of the text, the pivot point for the discourse—is the rejection of the Jews of Christ’s divinity, or his deity. They say they grumble. Why are they grumbling? Why are they just like their fathers in the wilderness who grumbled and died? Right? I mean, this is real obvious. We got manna. We got wilderness allusions. Here we got grumbling by the people. And anybody that knows his Bible will make the associations that these people are like the fathers who grumbled in the wilderness and died.

And this is what Jesus is telling him. Your fathers might have eaten the manna, but they’re dead in the wilderness. Not all of the fathers, but most of that generation died off because of unbelief. They refused to believe the promises of God that they would conquer the land. And they grumbled against God because he wouldn’t give them what they wanted to eat. They didn’t like the food he provided. So here you got people grumbling.

Well, what is their central basis for their grumbling? They grumble because how can he say he came down from heaven? This is the guy who’s like us. He’s claiming divine origins. He’s claiming to have come from the throne room of God. He’s claiming to be God incarnate. You see, and indeed, this very use of the savior of this term flesh takes us back to verse 14 of the prologue. The word became flesh. The word who was eternally part of the triune God became flesh in verse 14. And Jesus returns us now as we read this gospel to his incarnation, his flesh given for the life of the world.

Well, the Jews grumble because he says he came down from heaven. And how could he have possibly come down from heaven when he is the son of Joseph? We know who his mom and dad are. You see, it is a rejection of the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ. It seems to me at least to be at the heart of the unbelief, the death, the inability to come to satisfaction, trying to relieve their hunger, all that stuff that we can talk about personally.

The whole reason why they’re not really in the village of comfort—well, they’re not in paradise. They remain in the wilderness just like that guy out there at the sheep gate healed, maybe he doesn’t physically stay there anymore, but he’s still in the wilderness if he doesn’t come to faith in Christ. No matter what Jesus does for him, these people have been fed miraculous bread. But they grumble about the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ. And as a result, they’re in the wilderness and they die. They don’t have everlasting life. They have everlasting death.

Now, that’s how important the doctrine of the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ is. As you look through a study of the early church heresies, heresy after heresy attempted to deny the divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ. And what the Orthodox faith has said from the beginning, from this gospel on, is that Jesus Christ is fully God as well as fully man.

Now that is an essential element of our faith and it’s something that we must understand, we must assent to, we must rejoice in. What do the cults nearly all of them try to do? What’s the problem with Islam or Judaism or the Jehovah’s Witnesses? What do they all have in common? It’s a rejection of the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ. Yeah, he might have been a good prophet. He might have been a guy that gives us moral teachings. He might have been a great example of death and suffering for others and all that, but that gives us nothing if we do not accept the divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ.

If that’s what the Jesus is that we seek today, then we remain in our sins and trespasses and we’ve rejected Christ and we are dead in the wilderness and the recipients of everlasting death. No matter how many times we come to this table, the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ is essential.

You know, it’s wonderful those windows that were opened up back there—if you, the three at the top—because from up here at least, what it does is it completes the trinity emphasis of the windows in the rear. On either side of the foyer back there, there are sets of three windows. Three here and three here, the doors in the middle. But the three windows on either side, that’s one set. And now above them, there’s three windows above. Emphasis there and evidence built into the architectural structure of this church to remind us of the necessity of the trinity as one of our essential doctrines. Absolutely essential.

Now you know the middle window is taller and I suppose you could think of that as the Father. And in terms of the Son coming to reflect the Father’s will, to do the Father’s will, there is a functional subordination of the Son to the Father. But in terms of their essence, who they are, there are equal, one with the other. Equal in essence. The Lord Jesus Christ is fully God. He is not less God than the Father. He is not less God than the Spirit. There is one God existing in these three persons.

So this structure, this particular outline that I came up with Wednesday evening late, stresses that this is central to understanding the bread of life discourse. Without that, without an understanding of the divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ, we really don’t have a correct view of what the sacrament is about. And the sacrament is immediately tied to what our definition of life is in the text to us. And all of that goes away if we somehow reject the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so this outline kind of helps us to focus on that. It kind of helps us to see that’s a very important hinge point in the context of this discourse.

All right, let’s go through the outline then. So we’ve talked about A and Capernaum and we’ve talked about the center. Just to show you kind of how the whole thing flows, the next thing that happens in verse 26 and 27, Jesus says:

“Most assuredly I say to you, you seek me not because you saw the signs, but because you ate of the loaves and were filled. Do not labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to everlasting life which the Son of Man will give you.”

So he says there’s two foods out there, okay? There’s food that does not give you everlasting life, and there’s food which, if you eat that food, you perish. Now the manna was the same, right? I mean it was one food, but to those who ate it in belief it was the grace of God into salvation. To those who ate it not in belief, and to them it was simply bread given them so that they would perish.

So Jesus, the first thing he does here as they come seeking him is he kind of tells them why they’re seeking him. He gets to the motivation of what they’re doing. And we have to ask ourselves, you know, what’s our motivation as we come to church today? You came to, gay among other things, to take the sacrament. You came to seek Jesus. Why do you seek Jesus? You remember this is what Jesus asked Andrew in chapter one of this gospel, the very first of John’s disciples who come to Jesus after John the Baptist points him out. Jesus says, “What do you seek? What do you seek?” And the answer is, “Well, where are you staying?” And implicitly there the answer is you. We seek you. We seek to be where you, who are. You see, we seek you as a person. We seek you as Messiah.

Well, these guys were coming and Jesus didn’t answer their irrelevant question how did you get here, but instead Jesus gets to the heart of the matter and he tells them why they’re seeking him and he says you don’t even seek me because of the signs. You remember again in John chapter 2 that Jesus wasn’t entrusting himself to people that all they sought was signs, entertainment, marvels, bread and circuses, the circus part of that, the entertainment part. No, he wasn’t going to entrust himself. These people aren’t even doing that. These people, the only reason they’re seeking Jesus is physical food. They’re hungry. And he says, “That’s not enough. He has compassion. He feeds the hungry.” But he says, “If that’s all you’re doing is seeking me because of what I can give you, you’ve not understood the basis of what this is all about.

If you come here today because you’re looking for some little moral precept to make your life better, and you come seeking what you want from Jesus is, you know, more money or what you want from Jesus is a better car or if what you want from Jesus today is a better relationship with your wife or friends, anything that we place there apart from seeking Jesus for himself is can become and may well be a potential source of idolatry for you.

See, Jesus says, “If what you want ultimately is the bread, it is an idol to you and will cause your death. But if what you want ultimately is me in communion with that bread, then you’re the recipient of eternal life. Then you have saving faith in me. Then you’re abiding in me and I in you.”

We have to ask ourselves, you know, what is the reason why we do what we do? What is the reason we seek out the Lord Jesus Christ today? Why do we seek Jesus? You have to ask yourself that. And if you come here today for some kind of purpose other than knowing who the Lord Jesus Christ is and having relationship with him, you come for some other purpose. If you want to use Jesus as a means to some other end other than fellowship with him, then you have, you know, you’ve got it all wrong. You got it all wrong.

Now, you know, we don’t want to abstract relationship with Jesus apart from what we do, apart from our relationships and our cars and the sort of things we eat. That’s the very point of what he’s saying here is that we should see these things together. But everything in the world that’s given to us, the good gifts of God are given as a picture of our relationship to the Lord Jesus Christ, as a way to enhance union and communion with him. It’s all to be received with thanksgiving from him for his particular purposes.

So why do we seek the Lord Jesus Christ?

This text contains then both an encouragement to us as well as a warning to us, like most texts do. The encouragement is there’s great messages of assurance given in this in the bread of life discourse. Jesus promises that all those that come to me, all that the Father has given to him, all that the Father has drawn or called to himself, that he calls them to himself, he draws them to himself. All of you that have come to that saving faith, union, communion with him, he won’t cast you out. He wants you to be assured at this table of that relationship. He wants you to know that you have presently eternal life. It’s not something way off in the future. You’ve got it now. He redefines what ultimately death means and says you will no longer participate in it. You will participate in life. Even our physical death is part of the process whereby God is causing this everlasting life to become manifest in who we are. It’s not something off in the by and by.

The text has tremendous encouragements for our present state. But the text, just like the table, has great warnings to us. If we attempt to use what’s in this text for some purpose other than ultimately the purposes of the Father in heaven, then Jesus warns us that we’re perishing, not living. So tremendous warnings.

Jesus asked Andrew, “What do you seek?” And there are different reasons why people seek Jesus today. You know, lots of people talk about Jesus. They seek him out for moral instruction. They seek him out as an object lesson. They seek out pictures of him by way of meditation on what spiritual reality is as opposed to listen to his word. It’s amazing to me. Yesterday I read the Oregonian and there’s a Buddhist who is going to go in Clatsop where Judge Beers used to live, a very important man in the life of our church, going to be a Buddhist seminary and stuff. They’re going to rent a school and so there’s a great deal of controversy about this. But you know the Buddhists say you like Jesus, he’s a great guy. You like the teachings of Jesus, you know, he’s okay. There’s a group coming this weekend I believe of singers and lecturers, interesting concert. They’ll be performing Friday night on Gregorian chants and the Episcopalians and they’re going to be talking about the collects, the different prayers of the day and praying through the hours. Medieval habit.

And that part would be interesting. But the other odd thing they’re doing on Saturday is they’re apparently going to be taking creations. They have these elaborate prayer books drawn up in the medieval period of time. You know, people that could afford to have the time to pray all day would commission great artists to make these fonts of these books of collects of prayers. And so they’re going to be showing slides of some of that kind of stuff and other pictures and images, I suppose, icons.

And they’re going to be leading a worship workshop rather on how to look at these images and then kind of go into the image as a way to worship and get in a meditative state to punch through and have this relationship, you know, with deity, with God. And so, you know, it’s idolatry. I mean, it seems—I be careful what I say here—but if what they’re going to do is take one of these stained glass windows and use it as a device whereby we are to go through that to worship God in a fuller sense, that is plain idolatry. Jesus is not used in that way and images of him are not to be used in that way.

Jesus is not a moral philosopher ultimately. He’s not some icon that will help us to get to the great beyond and come in contact with the worship of God in some kind of pantheistic transcendent state. If we seek Jesus today, it must be for who he has declared himself to be for the word to be. He is fully human and he is fully divine and he demands our allegiance. He is king of kings and lord of lords. So we have to come here seeking relationship with Christ first and foremost in the context of our lives.

The next thing that happens in the text is that Jesus says that God the Father has set his seal on him. Jesus is the one they must seek. He says, and Jesus says, that he is the one that the Father has set his seal upon. And later in the text the part that correlates with that in the chiastic structure is when we read that Jesus says the Father has sent him into the world.

If we understand who Jesus is, he’s a reflection of the Father and he tells us in the text here that he comes to do the will of the Father in heaven. And this is the will of the Father in heaven: that of all the Father has given to him he will receive them, he will not cast them out. And so Jesus comes in relationship to the Father. The Father has set his seal on him. The Father has sent the Lord Jesus Christ.

Next in verse 28 we read:

“Then they said to him, ‘What shall we do that we may work the works of God?’ Jesus answered and said to them, ‘This is the work of God that you believe in him whom he sent.’ Therefore, they said to him, ‘What sign do you perform then that we may see it and believe you? What work will you do?’”

So Jesus tells us here—we remember we said that one way to look at this is he’s describing who gave the bread from heaven. God the Father does. What is the bread from heaven? Jesus says it’s me. And he’ll expand that as the discourse goes on. And how do we eat that bread from heaven? Well, here he tells us how and he’ll tell us again later: that the key to eating the bread from heaven is believing in the Lord Jesus Christ, to believe in him.

Now, belief is not easy work. Our savior calls belief here work. The work you’re to do is to believe. It is labor. And it seems easy to us. You know, we read about, we think about it. If we had a religion of works, of good works to do, could please God, or if we had a religion that stresses belief, we think we’d always rather go for belief. It sounds much simpler. But is belief really all that simple? I don’t think so.

Belief is certainly the way the text tells us we are to receive the Lord Jesus Christ. It is what he tells us we are to do. This is the work of God that we believe in him. But belief can be very difficult work.

Bishop Ryle wrote of belief or faith as the hand by which we lay hold of Christ. And from that he gets that from Hebrews 6:18, the eye by which we look to him, from John 3 and Hebrews 12, the mouth by which we feed on him, John 6 here, and the foot by which we run to him, Proverbs 18:10. So faith is the hand, the eye, the mouth, the foot of the soul. Belief throughout is the way that we encounter and have relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ is by belief in him. And belief that he is fully divine as well as coming in and becoming incarnate to die on the cross for the life of the world.

Belief is the means by which the soul commits itself to the Lord Jesus Christ. But belief is not necessarily easy. I want to read a quote here from Rob Rayburn. He gave a sermon in part on the bread of life discourse on the difficulty of belief and I want to read from what he had to say. He says:

“We should apprehend here how impossibly high the demand of faith really is, and how little even as Christians they meet that demand. How much and how well do you, even you Christians of many years and much experience, really believe in Jesus Christ? How much faith do you put in Jesus in a day? For example, how present to your mind is the knowledge of what he has told you? Does the scriptures come to your mind frequently in the day? In other words, do you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and his revelation of the word enough to understand that word and to put some time every day into trying to figure out what it says? How present to your mind is the knowledge of what he has told you? How convinced are you of what he said? How much credit do you place in what he has promised to you?

You live moment by moment conscious of his presence, of his love. Now, I know it’s very difficult for us to believe that the Lord Jesus Christ loves us. Probably the toughest thing for us to believe because we know who we are. We know how sinful we are. But you see, whenever we walk around feeling unloved, feeling like we don’t know what our life is all about, feeling like something’s gone wrong somehow, ultimately it seems like it’s a statement of a lack of belief that the Lord God loves us and Jesus loves us as the Bible tells me so clearly.

How much credit do you place in what he has promised to you? Do you live moment by moment, as I said, conscious of his presence? He told you that he would never leave you nor forsake you. He does tell and so he never has left you or forsaken you. And yet you feel so all alone and forsaken at times. Is it obvious from your life that you are absolutely convinced that the Lord Jesus will never leave you nor forsake you?

Do you live every day in the light of the fact that he has told you that you must appear before him at the end of days to give an account of the deeds done in your body, whether good or evil?

Last Wednesday night we’ve been for months now going through the spiritual disciplines of the church for the first half hour or so of our Wednesday night study. And the last two weeks have been stewardship of time and money. And we read the simple verse that God owns all things. We know the scriptures assert that. But do you believe that whatever possessions you have are ultimately God’s possessions? And he will, as this Mr. Rayburn says, require an accounting from you of your time and your possessions upon your death and your appearance before him. He will. He says he will. Do you believe it? Well, sometimes we do and sometimes many times we don’t. Many times we have no confidence of God’s either blessing or not looking favorably on what we end up doing with our time and what we do with our money.

It’s belief that’s difficult for us.

Is there a spring in your step and joy in your heart day after day because of the unsearchable riches of Christ’s grace to you? Now, the Bible doesn’t say we shouldn’t suffer and feel bad. The Psalms are full of that. But do we work that through to resolution and even in the midst of that give God thanks in everything, knowing that he is most sovereign and he is most loving to you? And as a result, whatever happened yesterday to you was a ministration of his love to you. Plain and simple. We believe that. Well, sometimes we do and sometimes we don’t.

Is it obvious? So obvious that you know full well that with Christ rather you can do anything or that his strength is made perfect in your weakness or that he ever lives to intercede for you or that he is coming to judge the living and the dead?

How wonderfully different Rayburn says our lives would be if we just had more faith. If we lived in the conviction that Christ was with us as he promised to be. That God loves us as he has told us he does. That he will reward obedience, punish disobedience, that we can do all things through him and soon. But we have little faith most of our times. And we are Christians. Nay, Rayburn says, “You and I would scarcely recognize ourselves if we really live by faith every day.”

That seems rather obviously to be the case, doesn’t it?

It is work. It is labor. Jesus says it’s work and labor to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. That is the labor we’re called to do. And that is the labor that God empowers us to do by the word and sacrament. He demands that we accept his grace through these means of grace put up in, built up in our faith.

G.K. Chesterton once said this: “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and not tried as a result.”

And all too often that’s our approach as well. Sad to say, you know, if nothing else we take away from the bread of life discourse, we should remember that our work, our labor should be to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and have our lives reflect that belief. What do you labor for? What do you hunger for and work for today?

See, these people hungered for the wrong thing. Bread in and of itself or even bread as some kind of spiritual teaching, you know, but not ultimately bread as union and communion with God the Father through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ who is divine. They hungered for the wrong thing. They were idolatrous and they labored for what they hungered for and as a result they could never come to satisfaction for what they wanted.

Jesus is the only bread and drink by which eating and drinking we hunger and thirst no more. In other words, by way of picture, the idea is that Jesus is the only way to bring to people that otherwise have really no ultimate satisfaction. We go through life, we eat things and we do things and what can we do next? And we feel this need for something to bring joy and fun into our lives and we want to be satisfied. And Jesus says in this discourse that the only way satisfaction comes is if in all those good gifts that he gives you, in the food and wine that he gives you and the work he gives you to do and the relationships he gives you to do, if in all of them you consecrate their use for the purposes of the kingdom, if you see in each of those things union and communion with Christ, then they bring satisfaction. But if you don’t do that, then there’s no satisfaction. You go for bigger and bigger kicks, bigger and bigger thrills, more and more ways to achieve satisfaction that never comes.

Jesus says that the answer to our need as we hunger and as we work for things that we hunger for is belief in him.

Is it easy or hard to believe in Jesus? It’s hard. Jesus calls it work. Jesus says what it means to believe in him. This again is an advantage of a chiastic structure. It links things together that we might not otherwise. If we look on the lavender outline that we’re to labor to believe in verses 28 and 29, what that seems to correlate with down in verse 56 is that those that eat abide in Christ and he in them.

And so if we see these things paired up, we’re not getting any new truth here that we wouldn’t know otherwise, but it brings it home to us, doesn’t it? Belief in the Lord Jesus Christ is not something that’s somehow irrelevant to the rest of our lives.

This is the bread of life discourse. What is life as opposed to death? Life is to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. What work must we do to have eternal life? To eat this bread from heaven, you must believe in the Father, but rather life, in the Lord Jesus Christ, the one the Father has sent.

Well, that belief is paired here with abiding in the Lord Jesus Christ. Those that eat in the right way, those that believe, do the work of God by believing in Christ, abide in him and he in them. In other words, apart from the Lord Jesus Christ, there ain’t no life nowhere. As Jimi Hendrix once said in one of his songs, apart from the Lord Jesus Christ, he is absolutely correct. Everywhere you go there is death, not life. It’s an image of life. It’s the phosphorescence of decay. Bob Dylan said it again in a psalm. He walks through streets that are dead, filled with people that are dead. That’s the truth of the matter. Apart from the Lord Jesus Christ, there’s no life.

Jesus is life and the world is in death apart from him.

Now, the wondrous news of the bread of life discourse is also sort of revealed in the way this outline is structured, you know. At the very center, what do we have? We’ve got the denial of Jesus’s deity. And we’ve got it by the use of the term son of Joseph. Now, the gospels, and John is no exception—John is even more this way. Are filled with things that have two meanings. You know, this is what is bread. They don’t understand what bread is. He tells them what true bread is. Same with the water and the woman at the well, the new birth with Nicodemus in chapter three and all that. You know, this is going on forever in this gospel and will continue to go on this way. The temple, double meaning. So the people say here, how can this be God come down from heaven when we know as mother and father this is the son of Joseph?

Now the term son of Joseph was a formal title used by Jews at this particular time in history of the Messiah. They were waiting for the one who would bring total salvation and all the blessings of the presence of God with him. And one of the terms for that one was son of David, of course, but the other was son of Joseph. And the son of Joseph is even a more pregnant title for the wondrous salvation Messiah would effect because you see Joseph—yeah, it’s the gospel of Genesis. The end of the book of Genesis brings all the world to salvation. It begins with the world falling away, Adam and Eve, and ends with Pharaoh being receiving blessing from Joseph’s father, an indication of his belief. Right? And it seems that the whole world is converted.

And what does Joseph do at the end of Genesis for the world? What does he do for the world? He brings them bread, right? There’s a famine all over the world. And Joseph, with the wisdom from God on high, creates enough wealth in Egypt, stores up enough grain so that all the nations have to come to buy grain from Joseph. Joseph was given by God to the world at the end of Genesis to bring bread to the whole world.

Well, what does Jesus say he does here? And he says it twice, before and after the pivot point. It’s on your outlines here in F and F prime: he says that he is the one who gives life to the world. And then in verse 51 that he gives his flesh and his flesh is for the life of the world. So you see Jesus comes as the greater Joseph.

Now I don’t think this is what the people had in mind when they said this term. But as we read this term at the center of this discourse is a reference to the son of Joseph. We must see that what we have given in this bread of life discourse is an account of the greater Joseph who would come, not just for a few people, but who would come and give his flesh for the life of the world, just as Joseph ministered to the whole world at the end of the book of Genesis. So the Lord Jesus Christ now comes to affect salvation for all the world.

How does the world receive this wondrous gift that Jesus brings? They receive it through belief. How will the world move in terms of moving away from death and a movement in terms of life? It will do so by means of belief in the Lord Jesus Christ, which is defined in the text as abiding in Jesus.

Abiding in Jesus—in verse, Jesus says that the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven. He identifies himself now as that bread that comes down from heaven. And the purpose of this is to give life to the world. In the end of that verse he is the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. Then they said to him, “Lord, give us this bread always.” And he goes on to say, “I am the bread of life.” And he gets more and more intense about identifying himself as the source of this life of the world.

In verse 35, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me shall never hunger. He who believes in me shall never thirst.”

Satisfaction is achieved only through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. If the Father gives you faith in Jesus, when do you get eternal life? And as I said, Jesus says that he comes to give this life to the world. He who comes to me shall never hunger and he who believes in me shall never thirst. Our savior says he brings satisfaction. He brings eternal life in the present to those who believe in him.

But he tells them then in verse 36 that they do not believe. “I said to you that you have seen me and yet you don’t believe.” Now the pair to this on the outline is that those that do believe have eternal life, have everlasting life. So the Lord Jesus confronts them with their lack of belief and as a result their lack of life as well.

Verse 37: “All that the Father gives me will come to me.”

Now we have in kind of the around this middle section declaring the divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ, we have these verses that talk about the sovereignty of God and the relationship of the Son and the Father. And here in verse 37, this discussion begins. All that the Father gives me will come to me. So there is this eternal relationship of the trinity and the Father has declared that he has given particular people to Christ. This is a statement of election. This is a statement that the Father has elected some people to salvation in the work of the savior and he has given these people to the Lord Jesus Christ.

And it is those people that the Father has given to the Son, those are the ones who in response to the sovereignty of God will move in the context of coming to Jesus. All that the Father gives me will come to me. And the one who comes to me, I will by no means cast out. You see, the sovereignty of God here is placed in the context of the assurance of our salvation. It’s not given as a doctrine that is mean, or is given as a doctrine apart from comfort. It’s the doctrine of the sovereignty of God set here in the context of bringing you comfort from the Father that he has given you to the Son and the Son will by no means cast you out. It is given in the context of assurance. The sovereignty of God is the basis for the assurance that we have of eternal life.

Later in this gospel, Jesus will say that no man can pluck them out of my hand, all that the Father has given to me. And so we are given the assurances here that as we have come to saving faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, being given as a gift to the Father, that he will by no means cast us out.

And then verse 39: “This is the will of him who sent me that of all he has given me I should lose nothing but should raise it up at the last day.”

More assurance given. This is the will of him who sent me that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him may have everlasting life. And I will raise him up at the last day. Again, the sovereignty of God, the will of the sovereign Father is declared in the context of giving us assurance of our resurrection.

And then we have the central section which we’ve talked about already where the Jews complain and grumble and Jesus tells them not to grumble. And on the other side of that in verse 44: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him up at the last day.”

Again, a strong statement of the sovereignty of God. This is the same term used later when Peter will draw a great net full of fish out of the ocean, the Savior telling him where to put in his net. It’s a picture obviously of the evangelization of the nations. But that evangelization of the nations is described as drawing these fish in this net to the shore. And here we have the description of those who come to the Lord Jesus Christ. They are those who the Father draws to Jesus. No one can come to Jesus unless the Father who sent him draws him to Jesus. And again here though, this idea of the sovereignty of God, his election, the irresistible grace that’s portrayed here by Jesus, is put in the context of assurance and “I will raise him up at the last day.”

So the sovereignty of God is obviously placed both before and after this middle section in the context of assurance and resurrection and life.

Verse 45: “It’s written in the prophets, they shall all be taught by God. Therefore, everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me.”

See, now this again helps us to understand its corollary that preceded it in verses 37 and 38. All that the Father gives me will come to me. How do they come? How does the Father give them to the Son? What’s the operative mechanism here? And it says that they shall be taught by God. Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. How does God draw his people to himself? By means of the word of God. The manna represents the word come down from heaven. We feast upon that word and it is the word itself that draws us to the Father.

And then in verse 47: “Most assuredly I say to you, he who believes in me has everlasting life.”

Belief in the Lord Jesus Christ indicates that you have everlasting life. “I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness and are dead. This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven.”

Your fathers ate this in the wilderness. Your fathers grumbled and disputed. Your fathers never got into the promised land. Your fathers did not have faith in God in the context of going in to conquer the land and died in the wilderness. But those who are united to the Lord Jesus Christ, our Father is in heaven. Our Father leads us victorious into the promised land and gives us the eternal possession of life everlasting.

“If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I shall give is my flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world.”

Now here we get to the incarnation, the flesh of the Lord Jesus Christ. And this phrase which I shall give for the life of the world is pregnant with meaning. This term for, translated for in our English translations, is used at least five or six times in the context of go—in John’s gospel in the context of sacrificial language. What our Lord Jesus Christ is saying here is that his flesh will be given sacrificially for the life of the world. And so all of this relates to the sacraments. All of this relates to the work of the savior pictured for us in the sacraments and the sacrament is a picture of what Jesus has done in giving himself for the life of the world.

And here we are back to the theme of John the Baptist again saying behold the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Behold the flesh of God here who gives his life for the life of the world, who gives his flesh rather for the life of the world, takes away the sin of the world, gives life to the world.

Jesus’s claim is that the world will move increasingly in communion, abiding in him.

“The Jews therefore quarreled amongst themselves, saying, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’”

Jesus then ups the ante and he says: “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. My flesh is food indeed, my blood is drink indeed.”

Repeating once more that life comes through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him.”

He’ll tell his disciples after this, the flesh profits nothing. Just because you take the elements of the Lord’s supper, that doesn’t mean anything ultimately. But certainly what it does mean is that if we’re abiding in him and that’s why we take the Lord’s supper, then that’s the indication that we have eternal life.

You know, this abiding in the work of the Lord Jesus Christ is central to this text. It’s central to belief. It’s central to life, what life is defined as. How can we do that? How can we abide in the Lord Jesus Christ apart from what we do on the Lord’s day?

Well, the action of the supper has been seen by people—getting back to Neuhaus’s comment about liturgics and real life—as being very much related to the work that Jesus gives us to do to stay in union and communion with him.

Earlier we read as the people were looking for Jesus in Capernaum, it mentions that this was after Jesus had given thanks for the food and fed them. And so when we come to the table, it is described as a thanksgiving. Why? Because the most essential aspect of what we do when we take the cup and we take the bread is to give God thanks for it. It’s a picture of the work we do throughout the week.

You’re going to get up tomorrow morning. You’re going to grab a hold of the day. You’re going to do things in the context of your day. You’re going to make some food in the morning. You’re going to separate things. You’re going to take some water out of the tap. You’re going to take some bread off from the loaf. Just the way we take things, we grab a hold of the elements, we work them. And then we distribute those elements and we say, “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” You’re going to do work tomorrow, whether it’s school work, work at the office, work at the home, work teaching your children. And at the end of the day, there’s going to be an evaluation, maybe not formal, but at least informally, of what you did that day.

You distribute your work so that people can taste of your work and see whether it’s good or bad. Well, everybody does that. Everybody does basically what we do at the sacrament. Take things, grab a hold of them, take them apart and work them, distribute them, evaluate them. Whether you’re Christian or not, those who abide in Jesus tomorrow will do that. Those who don’t abide in Jesus will do it. The difference between the two groups is that the ones who abide in Jesus will thank God in every step of the process.

As we grab a hold of that day, we do so with thanksgiving to him at the beginning, hopefully formal, maybe informal, but at least in some way we thank him for whatever comes in that day. No matter what the bread tastes like or the wine tastes like, we thank him for it. And as we thank God for those things, we consecrate ourselves to using those things that he gives us, to participating in that labor, to doing that work in the context of belief in the Lord Jesus Christ, consecrating all that we do to him.

You see, believing in the Lord Jesus Christ and abiding in him doesn’t mean meditating and getting away from the bread and the wine or getting away from the work that we’re called to do or getting away from the leaky faucet or whatever it might be. No, abiding in the Lord Jesus Christ recognizes that this sovereign Father is causing all things to be mediated to us through the work of the Savior and to understand that we as priests take a hold of all that he gives us, consecrate it to his use, and in every one of those actions—whether it’s fixing the leaky faucet, teaching our children, driving through the snow, conversations we might have tomorrow during our lunch break or our morning break with our other employees. All things that we engage with, having been received with thanksgiving from the Father, are part of the mechanism of union and communion, abiding in the Lord Jesus Christ and he in us.

The Lord Jesus Christ has come as the greater son of Joseph. He’s come to bring us into the village of comfort, Capernaum. And he says the village of comfort is no matter where you’re at, he is there with you. He abides with you if you believe in him and receive him and understand that your life is consecrated to the use of the Father in heaven.

As we abide in him and he abides in us, the Lord Jesus says that we experience then the fact that he is the greater Joseph. He has come to bring life to the world in every aspect of our being. We have union and communion with the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s what life is. That is all that life is. Life is taking what God gives us at work, at play, at home, seeing it mediated to us through the Lord Jesus Christ, and abiding in him in the context of that.

Now it’s as simple as that, but it’s also as joyous as that, because if we recognize that in all these things the great sovereign God who loves us more than we can imagine is mediating everything to us through the work of the Savior for life, then we have great joy even in the midst of the difficulties we have. We have a solid sense of peace and joy through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. He’s come to give life to the world by restoring to us a proper sense of what it is, what it should be, not just when we eat here but when we eat anything we eat in the rest of our lives, when we partake of any activity for the rest of our lives, the Lord Jesus Christ is part of abiding in him and he in you. It is part and it is the eternal life he gives.

Let’s give him thanks for that.

Forgive us, Lord God, for seeing things apart from the work of the Savior so often. Forgive us for our failure of belief. We thank you that the Lord Jesus Christ came to give himself sacrificially for the life of the world. Help us, Father, to embrace that life today, to embrace the relationships that we have and the difficulties we have as well this week, to embrace all these things as part of the mediation of your good will toward us.

Help us, Father, then to rejoice. Help us to recognize that we are present possessors of everlasting life. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.