Bread of Life

JOHN 6:26-58

On the eve of Memorial Day when we honor those who have given their lives for this one nation under God, let’s look beyond political boundaries to focus on our King, God’s Son, who gave His life for the holy international nation to which we, by God’s grace, now belong. In 1 Peter 2:9, we read that we are “a holy nation, a people belonging to God.” Citizens of God’s holy nation, adopted sons and daughters of the ultimate King, that is our eternal identity and deepest allegiance, and our Savior instituted a graphic, symbolic way to memorialize the price He paid to purchase our freedom from the terrible tyranny of sin and death.

In our text, Jesus said that He is the ‘Bread of Life’ given by God to the spiritually starving people of the world. He said that everyone who feasts on Him will find true satisfaction and nourishment for their souls. So, how do we spiritually ingest the Bread of Life and have Him become an integral part of us? Or, as the original audience asked it when Jesus told them to stop working for perishable bread, “How do we do the work of God?” Jesus’ answer is the ‘work’ of God is to believe in, and thus receive the benefits of, the finished work of Christ. Jesus, the Bread of Life that we die without, is the priceless free gift of God that we could never earn and cannot possibly repay. All we can do from our position as spiritually bankrupt beggars with “no life in ourselves” is hold out our empty hands and ask to receive Him. Thankfully, God is glad to give Him to everyone who turns from trying to work their way into His favor in order to get favors from Him to instead trust in Jesus’ finished work in order to find saving satisfaction in God Himself.

Lest our relentless pride find a way to convince us that we deserve some credit for receiving God’s gift of God, Jesus then explains that even our coming to and believing in Him is a work of God that can not rightly be credited to our account. While this God-honoring reality is humbling, it is a source of great assurance to those who feed on it by exercising their God-given faith in it. I think this is a reason Jesus emphasized it during this conversation. He described a secure gift cycle in which God the Father gives helpless sinners to His Son, who gladly receives every one of them as a precious gift from His Father. The Son, in turn, gives His life for the people His Father has given Him and gives them His word that He will raise every one them up on the last day. The security that comes from resting in the irrevocable acceptance we have in Christ and the hope that comes from treasuring our absolutely secure inheritance in God’s Promised Land gives us fresh supplies of spiritual nourishment to strengthen us as we walk with God through the wilderness of this world. We may have 40 years or 40 seconds before God takes us home, but we can trust Him to use whatever wilderness time we have to nourish our faith in His faithfulness and to grow us together toward maturity as we feast on His fresh mercy every day.