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The Rev. Dr. Dennis E. Morey, Pastor
Scripture: John 6:51-58
Settling For Less
This sixth chapter of John is a description of how Jesus preached, healed many people, and used two fish and five palm-sized loaves of bread to feed five thousand. The people were really impressed and decided to make Jesus their king. Before that could happen, Jesus escaped into the hill country above the lake and the disciples got into a boat and left for Capernaum across the lake.
Later, near daylight, the disciples got caught in a storm. The wind and waves caused them to become disoriented, and suddenly they saw Jesus and thought he was walking out to meet them. Then their boat hit the shore and they were safe.
Jesus and the disciples went into town. The people who had eaten the bread and fish the day before figured out Jesus had left, and many of them got in boats and some walked around the outside of the lake and found Jesus in Capernaum.
Capernaum was the home of Peter, James, Andrew, John, and Matthew. It had a population of fifteen hundred. In the northern part of town, the Roman road went between Damascus and the Mediterranean Sea and was a well traveled trade route. This was the road that separated the areas ruled by Herod Antipas and his brother Philip.
There would have been a small Roman garrison stationed there, and on the road was a customs house in which Matthew had worked collecting taxes on fish caught in the lake and on merchants passing through.
The people who lived there were farmers and fishermen. The ground around that area was very fertile, and of course fishing was made possible by the lake sometimes called the Sea of Galilee just sixteen hundred feet from the edge of town. Capernaum was the headquarters for Jesus and his ministry after he was rejected in Nazareth.
Jesus was no stranger to the Capernaum synagogue. In fact, the locals would have known him well. We might imagine what would happen to a town this size when several thousand other people showed up looking for Jesus.
Jesus said he knew they were looking for another free meal. He told them to quit putting so much effort into satisfying their physical appetite but to pay attention to their spiritual hunger. Jesus told them he was the “bread of life” who had come down from heaven, sent by God the Father, and those who came to him would not only be fed but they would look no further for spiritual nourishment.
Jesus said that he was not there doing his own work, but he was doing the work he had been sent by God to do. Some said, “Wait a minute. We know him. He is the son of Joseph. We knew him back in Nazareth. How can he say he has come down from God?”
Jesus said, “Stop with the whispering. You can’t know who I am unless you live in a relationship to the Father so he can reveal it to you. I am telling you the truth: He who believes in me has eternal life. I don’t give you bread like your ancestors got in the time of Moses, foam that was gathered and baked.”
The Jews in Jesus day always defaulted to their ancestral blood line. Since they were descendents of Abraham, God was obligated to protect them and provide for them as he promised. They often cited the story of God providing manna in the time of Moses as an example of how they expected God to provide for them. Focused on this life, they deserved God’s care because of who they were.
Jesus said, “I give you the living bread, and it is me. If you eat this bread you will live forever. The bread that I give you is my flesh, which I give so the world may live. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood will have eternal life, and I will raise them to life on the last day.”
The people listening that day had settled for a Jesus they had known for years: he was a good guy who did good things. The people who had eaten the fish and bread the day before were going to settle for just another meal. They weren’t even expecting the foam on the bushes that was provided in Moses’ day.
Often in our day we settle for a Jesus who will just get us through today, or the next hour. We have an immediate need and we think, “Help me Jesus, just this one time. If I can just get through this, I can face whatever is next.”
If my child can just get well, I can face the financial troubles and the marriage problems later.
If I can just get this job, I can face the nasty guy that runs the business later.
If I can just get through the third grade, I will be able to do better in the fourth.
If I can just get through high school, I can deal with college.
If I can just get him to marry me, I will be able to deal with his drinking problem later.
If I can just get her to say “Yes,” I can deal with the way she spends money recklessly after we are married.
One more thing, just give me this one thing, God. If I make it through this, then I will be ready to …”
In reading The Shack by William Paul Young these last few weeks, we see Mack, so torn up by the death of his little girl that his desperate prayer is for strength to just get through today. When he does have a moment’s peace he is asking God why God was not there when he needed God most.
He immediately defaults to his own record as somehow the reason for the murder of his little girl. Did God let this happen because he had hated his own father and tried and maybe succeeded at poisoning him?
When we need immediate help we often default to our record as to why we are being punished, which we equate with God letting terrible things happen to us, or our record of purity as to why God should give us what we want.
When we default to our behavior as to why we should or should not get God’s love, we settle for less.
Our God’s love comes to us not because of what we have done, or because of who we are, but because of who God is. We cannot do anything to earn God’s love. We can’t do anything to stop God’s love. It is going to happen. The question has always been, “What will we do with it?”
Jesus was trying to tell the people that they were settling for less. If he took care of their next meal there would be no end to what they wanted him to do next; every demand and request was tied to this life.
Jesus knew there was no end to our appetite for more and better. It is that quest for more and better that motivates us to keep going every day, but when it is fed too much it can overtake our lives.
Time and time again we see the problems of those who let their appetites become addictions. Food, drugs, money, sex, status, control, and the list goes on and on of those appetites that engulf us and smother the Spirit of God out of our lives.
Jesus is telling the people that he is more than the source of their next meal. He is that which satisfies their real hunger. He was sent down from heaven by God the Father for the explicit purpose of meeting the most basic need of every human being, the need to know God.
God made each of us with a particular set of physical needs so that we may come into relationships with others. We were born with needs that could be filled only by another person other than ourselves. It was in having those needs met that we have formed relationships. It is in accepting what is needed that we add joy to the life of another person who is caring for us.
As we grow a little older we begin finding out that we are not only in relationships to have our needs met, but also to meet the needs of someone else. We have something to add to the life of another person that brings that person joy.
We are also made with a particular set of spiritual needs so that we may come into a relationship with God. We were born with needs that can be filled only by God.
Jesus is trying to get the people in today’s scripture to think beyond what they needed physically, more bread, and see that he is really there to provide for their need to live in relationship with God.
It was going to be from their relationship to God that their spiritual hunger would be satisfied. When their spiritual hunger was satisfied they would find that they could actually add to God’s joy by accepting what God offered.
It is the same with us. We let our physical appetites and the pursuit of more and more take over our total energy and time while we starve spiritually. What we eat or consume, or any human relationship we have, cannot feed us the food we need spiritually. That is what Jesus came to do.
He said that believing in him was like bread for the hungry person. Just as surely as that bread can bring life to the hungry person, so he has come to feed us spiritually so we may have life eternal, a relationship with God that lasts beyond the grave.
Here is the Good News. That which governs your life—that hunger you just can’t seem to satisfy that is taking up more of your time and thought and energies—is never going to be satisfied. You are trying to fill a bottomless pit.
We are all made with a spiritual appetite to know the Lord God. We are constantly being told that having more and bigger and better, and newer whatever is going to satisfy us. That is a lie.
If you are hungry for food and you settle for just drinking water, life will slip away from you.
When we try to fill our spiritual hunger with something physical, we settle for less and we not only go on starving spiritually, eternal life will slip away from us.
Last week at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit in Des Moines, we learned of so many good things happening in our world when people are finding Christ and having their lives changed.
We learned of courageous Christians who choose to live in the neighborhood of America’s poorest zip code and how people are discovering the “Bread of Life.” People who are plagued by every addiction imaginable are being fed spiritually and recreated from the inside out.
Yesterday at the Presbytery meeting we heard from a Church of Christ leader from Madagascar about how churches are being called to live across ethnic boundaries, breaking down walls that divide us. God intends to include all of humanity in Christ’s church.
We heard about the explosive growth of the church in Asia and how quickly Christianity is growing in China.
We learned about a Presbyterian church in South Korea just 30 years old with 85,000 members. On weekdays there are three early morning prayer services. On Sundays there are six worship services and each service has 700 in the choir. It has 120 ministers on staff and has started 250 new church developments.
In South Korea one fourth of the total population is Christian and 65-70 percent of the Christians are Presbyterians.
We don’t just look back and say what our God has done in the past. God parted the Red Sea. God fed Moses and the Israelites in the wilderness while they wandered 40 years. God caused the walls of Jericho to fall.
We don’t settle for a God whose greatest accomplishments are in the past. As for the people in today’s scripture, expecting what God did in the past to happen again is really settling for less.
Our God is active in the world today. People are finding the spiritual food, the Christ, for which they are so hungry and the world is being changed for the better.
Did you notice verse 33, “For the bread that God gives is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world”?
Let’s not settle for less.
Amen.
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John 6:51-58 (From the
New Revised Standard Version of the
Bible) |
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