John Chapter 6:48-71

Jesus did not come that we might be better people. He came that dead people might have life. You see, we get the mistaken notion sometimes that, you know, Jesus just, oh, he just wants to tune us up a little bit. He just wants to fix us a little bit and then we'll be just fine. No, we're dead spiritually. And we need to be forgiven and saved and born again.

We need to be made alive. And, you know, the preaching where people, you know, it's like a hip hip hooray, come on, let's try harder team kind of stuff. That's just bogus.

It's not that you're not trying hard enough. It's the fact you've been playing for the wrong team. And you need to switch sides.

You need to accept the truth of Jesus and what is proclaimed. Welcome to Cross the Bridge with David McGee. David is a senior pastor of The Bridge in Kernersville, North Carolina. We welcome associate pastor D.A.

Brown to the studio with us today. Bob, God sent his son Jesus not to make us better people, but to give us new life. Today, Pastor Dave is going to remind us and show us what length God went to to give us new life.

It's almost like Jesus didn't come that we might be better people, but that dead people would come to life. That's exactly what it is, Bob. You're going to love this.

Awesome. Let's jump into part two of David McGee's teaching, Rejected. Turn with me to John chapter 6. We're going verse by verse, chapter by chapter, and continuing on in our study of John chapter 6.

And we're going to pick it up at verse 57. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who feeds on me will live because of me. Now, 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.

Now, a couple things are going on here. Jesus is preparing them for his sacrifice. He's also, in a way, preparing them for communion and the Last Supper. But this is not about… And some people have made the mistake in this passage going, Well, Jesus is talking specifically about communion.

No, he's talking about himself. How do I know that? Because if you take it to the next… if you take an inferred truth and take it to the next level, because he's talking about communion, so what? So if you don't have communion, you're not going to heaven, you don't have eternal life?

I have to reject that. Now, I understand there's a whole bunch of churches, and certainly the Catholic Church included in those, who believes that if you don't have communion, you can't go to heaven. Your sins cannot be forgiven. I don't believe that. That's inconsistent with Scripture. Do I think we should have communion?

You betcha. But Jesus is talking about the truth about himself. He's talking about the blood. That may be offensive to some of you. Don't be offended by that.

Don't be offended. Receive what the Lord is telling you this morning. Certainly to the religious Jewish people of that day, when they didn't understand he was talking in spiritual terms, they thought Jesus was talking about cannibalism. Jesus is not talking about them literally drinking his blood or eating his body. He's in spiritual terms here, and we'll see that in a couple of verses. But Leviticus, chapter 17, verse 11, the start of it says, For the life of the flesh is in the blood.

The life of the flesh is in the blood. When we were studying the book of Leviticus, we went through chapter by chapter, went through every verse of it. We referred to it as the gospel of Leviticus. You know why? Because when you understand Leviticus, you understand the gospel.

And if you don't understand Leviticus, then you only have a partial picture of the gospel. You see, somebody had to die. Somebody had to be sacrificed. And many these days, they walk around and they say, Well, I'll pay my own sacrifice. I'll suffer for my own sins.

No, you can't do that. If you do, the price is more than you can imagine. Jesus said, You know what? I'll be the sacrifice. I will lay down my life. I will pour out my blood for you.

Because there was no other way. Jesus gave his life and he shed his blood on the cross that you and I might live, that we might have eternal life. Now, understand, the Roman Catholic Church teaches that what happens in communion is transubstantiation.

It's a long, complicated word. What that means is that during communion, the bread or the matzah somehow supernaturally turns into the literal, literal flesh and body of the Lord Jesus Christ. They believe that the juice or the wine literally turns into the blood of Jesus Christ, that it's not symbolic, that something happens there.

The problem is that, well, there's a lot of problems with that. One of the problems with that is that it breaks Levitical law and Jesus never broke Levitical law. Jesus never told people to break Levitical law. He broke rabbinical law.

What's the difference? Levitical law is the law of the Hebrew Scriptures. Rabbinical law is all these laws and rules and regulations they came up with afterwards that Jesus really didn't care for much. It had to do with a lot of the Sabbath stuff that he seemed to enjoy kind of messing with them all.

I like Jesus, oh, for more reasons than that. But that's just one of the other reasons, right? Now, Zwingli, who was a Swiss reformer, came up and he said, no, no, no, there's none of that. It's just symbolic. And in some terms, I do believe what Zwingli says, but I think if we take it to that point and say, well, you know, it's just symbolic, it's just a ritual, I don't know if I can go with that, to be honest. Because I do believe that something supernatural happens at communion. Now, I do not believe that it turns into the literal blood and literal body of the Lord Jesus Christ. I don't believe that. But if you just go through it as a ritual, you're missing it.

You are missing it. I think one of the saddest things that I heard was that, you know, if you're tying communion in with the forgiveness of sins, what happens to those that can't take communion? They're condemned.

And I heard of a little girl who had a, I guess an amazing amount of wheat, and she had a wheat allergy. So one Catholic church, the priest gave her a rice wafer. And the local leader over that, you know, diocese or whatever, came back and said, you know what, that doesn't count. Thereby saying her sins can't be forgiven.

Boy, there's a reason God did not give that power to a man, isn't there? And again, communion's not necessary for salvation, but it is one of the two, some places have seven sacraments. We don't, we see two things in Scripture that Jesus said very plainly to do. That's baptism and that's communion. We don't have seven.

We've got two. Now, that's not, when I say sacraments, they're sacred things. I'm not, obviously you need to be saved, you need to be born again.

But these are two things that we want to do on a regular basis. Verse 59, these things he said in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaum. Now, Capernaum, Kaphar Nahum, this town is still there. And you can actually, you can see there's a new synagogue that's somewhere between 200 and 400 AD, and that's sitting on top of the synagogue that you can see, you can see the stones, they've excavated part of it, where Jesus actually taught, where this was going on. God, the Bible is a real book. It's historically accurate. It's scientifically accurate.

It's geographically accurate. Verse 60, 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?

I want you to notice something. Jesus, he had a good crowd that day. He had roughly 5,000 men.

What did he do with them? Oh, he could have done a lot of things. He could have said, oh, you know what? This is enough people to make, we could form an army. I could run for office.

I could correct the whole Roman political system. It's not what he did. He proclaimed truth, and proclaiming that truth, he knew beforehand that some people were going to leave. Did that stop him from proclaiming truth? No.

I realized that here. I could water things down. I could skip a couple verses, and some people would be far less offended at what we're doing here, but it's not going to happen. The Lord is bringing people here, and I have a responsibility before God to proclaim the truth, and if the truth is offensive to you, we'll pray for you, but we won't change the truth. See, when you hear these things, then you have a decision. When truth is proclaimed to you, you have a decision to reject it or to accept it. I would highly suggest you accept it, because these aren't my words. These are the words of Jesus.

Send them right on out, didn't He? Verse 62, 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. I think Jesus is very plainly here saying He's not talking about His literal blood or His literal flesh. He's saying these are spirit, but He's also saying, you know what? There is a reality in these words that is more real than what you think reality is.

See, we go through life, and we think everything that's around us is real. Some of it is. Some of it is going to pass pretty quick. You understand that? I mean, we get all absorbed into the buildings and all this stuff as churches, and it's going to, man, it's going to be gone in the twinkling of an eye.

We don't want to use that excuse. We are going to one day finish the building, and we want to have nice chairs in here so you're comfortable during the teaching. We want those things, but we also realize, you know what? One day, those things are all gone. All these things in here are gone. The chairs will be gone. The lights will be gone. All these things will be gone, except these two guitars. These will... I got a word from the Lord. They're going in, so... No, they'll be gone too.

They'll be gone too. And those things are really what's important, those spiritual things, more than the real things of life. Jesus is reality. Jesus defines reality, and all this other stuff will be passing away.

The flesh profits nothing. Man, Jesus is hardcore, isn't He? The life lesson here? Jesus did not come that we might be better people. He came that dead people might have life. Jesus did not come that we might be better people. He came that dead people might have life. You see, we get the mistaken notion sometimes that, you know, Jesus just, oh, He just wants to tune us up a little bit. He just wants to fix us a little bit, and then we'll be just fine. No, we're dead spiritually, and we need to be forgiven and saved and born again.

We need to be made alive. And, you know, the preaching where people, you know, it's like a hip, hip hooray, come on, let's try harder team kind of stuff. That's just bogus. It's not that you're not trying hard enough.

It's the fact you've been playing for the wrong team, and you need to switch sides. You need to accept the truth of Jesus and what is proclaimed. Romans 7 18, for I know that in me, that is in my flesh, nothing good dwells, for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find.

So how we go from these truths to thinking that we just need a little tweaking and, you know, a little self-help and this, I don't know. Sounds like man's wisdom to me. Because Jesus said the flesh profits nothing. Now if you've been walking with the Lord for very long, you realize Jesus was telling the truth. Jesus has a plan for our flesh, that we die to it.

And the reason we need to do that is because if we don't, the flesh will rule us and it will kill us. You're listening to Pastor David McGee on Cross the Bridge. He'll be right back with more in just a moment, but I want to remind you of the free resources available to you on crossthebridge.com. There's a team of hundreds of people that will pray for somebody to be saved. You have a loved one that needs to know Jesus as Savior. You need people to pray for him.

You need someone to present God's word to him. Every day we're presenting God's word to him here on Cross the Bridge with Pastor David McGee. We can pray for them as well just by simply going to crossthebridge.com and click on the Pray for the Lost button. All you need to do is put in the first names of the people you love that need to know Jesus as Savior, click on Submit, and immediately, hundreds of people will begin praying for your lost loved ones. And what an awesome way to bring your loved ones to Jesus. Here's a word from Associate Pastor DA Brown. Hey, Bob, we want to pray for our listeners in these cities in Colorado, Sterling, and Yuma, and some cities in Florida, Eastport, Gulf Breeze, Jacksonville, Key West, and Largo.

God, thank you for everyone listening today. We pray that they would look forward to hearing from you directly through your word. We pray that they would share this word that you give them with others in their life. And, Lord, that they wouldn't fear that they're going to make too many mistakes to follow you, but trust that you're going to do the work in them.

And help them get plugged into a Bible-teaching church. Lord, not one that's going to be full of hate or anger, but of love and compassion. In Jesus' name, amen. Amen. Amen.

Thank you, brother. And now, let's get back to David McGee as he continues teaching verse by verse. Verse 64, 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. Jesus didn't let the fact that one of His disciples were going to betray Him keep Him from ministry. He didn't look and go, Well, you know what? Boy, I'd minister to these guys, but, you know, only 11 of them are going to get it. One of them, he's just going to betray me, so, you know, it's just better off if I don't do it.

He didn't say that. Why do I mention that? It's because so many of us approach ministry like that. Well, you know, I would teach children's ministry, but, you know, those kids, they get a little rambunctious sometimes. Oh, I would share my faith, but, you know, somebody at some point might say something I don't like and hurt my feelings.

Oh, I would serve at the church, but, you know, they're not going to appreciate me. Those are not excuses you see Jesus using. Jesus knowing what Judas was, who Judas was, Jesus chose Judas.

Isn't that amazing? He chose Judas? And then when they're at the upper room at the Last Supper, you know why they were so confused about who was going to betray Him? It's because Jesus treated Judas no differently than the other disciples.

That is convicting. So often we treat somebody differently because of what we think they might do. Oh, I'm not going to be friends with them. Boy, they might hurt my feelings one day.

And Jesus knew. I mean, you know, if you're going to step out in ministry and you're going to do that until you get offended or you get mad or you don't feel appreciated, I mean, go ahead and I can save you some time. You will get offended. You will get mad. People will say things. Don't let that deter you. Guys, if those things could have deterred me, I'd have quit a long time ago.

I can't remember the last time a week went by where I didn't get some weird phone call or weird email or something like that. That's part of the package. And don't sit there and go, well, I was at this other church for 30 years. That never happened to the pastor. Guys, when you have what we had this morning with all these people who just got baptized, where do you think the enemy is going to be focusing on?

If you were in the military, what would you be doing? That's part of the package, guys. Don't write off ministry. And Jesus loved Judas until the very end. Gave him every chance, even in the garden. In Matthew, Jesus said to him, friend, why have you come? Now, Jesus knew. Jesus knew why he was there.

He was not asking him if he was there to betray him or why he was there. Jesus was saying, you know, why did you make this decision? It's scary to think that Judas sat under the teaching of Jesus for three years and then made this decision.

Why? Because Judas was a man. You can sit in here for three years and walk in acts of betrayal and reject Jesus. That's the reality.

There's probably some here this morning are hearing how much Jesus loves them, how much he cares for them, how he gave himself for you. And you will reject that. You won't walk in that. You won't come to Jesus.

That's an amazing thing. And I don't really ever want to be able to understand that. May I always not understand that. How somebody can hear the teaching of the word of God and remain unaffected. Verse 65, 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. And verse 66, From that time many of his disciples went back and walked with him no more. What a sad verse. What a sad verse. I want you also to notice that the address of that verse, John chapter 6 verse 66. This is the way of man.

This is what we act like sometimes. Walking away from Jesus when something gets a little hard, gets a little difficult. See this is the final step. There's murmuring, there's arguing, and then there's leaving. See this starts a downward spiral.

When you start murmuring, when you start complaining, it's only a matter of time until you start arguing. I didn't like this. I didn't like that. I can't believe they do this. I can't believe they do that. I disagree.

I disagree strongly. You know what? I'm growing. I'm hearing the word of God. I'm seeing people get saved. I'm leaving. This is a very real thing.

This is something that a pastor that I experienced that, and may it always crush my heart when I see this. It's a downward spiral. Instead of taking an upward path, it's a downward spiral.

Which do you want to go on? Do you want to go on this downward spiral? Then don't murmur, don't complain, don't argue, don't leave.

You can stop that cycle. Verse 67, 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. There's nowhere else to go.

That's why we're here. See, Jesus, without millions of dollars or thousands of soldiers, conquered the world. Conquered more millions than Alexander and Caesar and Napoleon and Mohammed.

Conquered more people than any of those. Peter here hits a home run. We're not here because we're good people. We're here because in a spiritual sense, we have nowhere else to go other than Jesus. And Jesus says, whoever comes, he will no way cast down. Verse 69, Also we have come to believe and know that you are the Christ, the Christos in the Greek, the anointed one, the son of the living God. Again, people that say Jesus didn't claim to be a deity, Jesus didn't correct Peter here when Peter said, you're the son of God. Obviously, if you're the son of God, you're God.

As Mendels, you know, like produces like. Verse 70, Jesus answered them, Did I not choose you, the twelve, and one of you, as a devil? He spoke of Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon, for it was he who would betray him, being one of the twelve. All the way through those three years, Jesus gave Judas every chance to repent. He gave him every chance to turn from his hard heart and accept the Lord. And before you sit here and accuse Judas, what's in your heart this morning?

Will you accept Jesus or will you reject him? It's interesting to note that, you know, Judas ended up on a tree. Jesus did too. Judas chose the wrong tree. He could have went to Jesus and said, Jesus, forgive me.

I've messed up. We see it was Peter. The grace that Jesus extended. But he decided not to do that.

He decided to be hard hearted and not to respond. And you know what? Friend, you get to choose your tree. I choose the cross.

Which tree will you choose? There's a lot riding on this decision, friend. Choose well.

There's more than you could imagine riding on this one. What will your decision be? Jesus gave himself for you. He gave his life for you. He offers you his righteousness. Don't reject that. But receive it.

How do you receive it? Pray and ask the Lord to forgive you of your sins. Some of you it might be for the first time. Some of you might be coming back to the Lord. But this is a choice. And guys, you don't just choose to follow Jesus one time in your life. You should choose to follow him every day. Friend, do you know for sure that your sins have been forgiven? You can know.

Right now. I want to lead you in a short, simple prayer. Simply telling God you're sorry and asking him to help you to live for him. Now God wants you to pray this prayer so much that he died to give you the opportunity and the ability to ask him to forgive you.

Please pray this prayer with me out loud right now. Dear Jesus, I believe you died for me, that I could be forgiven. And I believe you were raised from the dead, that I could have a new life. And I've done wrong things. I have sinned. And I'm sorry. Please forgive me of all those things. Please give me the power to live for you.

All of my days. In Jesus' name. Amen. Friend, if you prayed that prayer, according to the Bible, you've been forgiven. You've been born again. Jesus said he would not turn anybody away who comes to him. And he came for those people who knew they needed forgiveness.

Those who were sick, not the righteous. So congratulations, friend. You just made the greatest decision that you will ever make. God bless you. If you prayed that prayer with David for the first time, we'd love to hear from you. You can visit CrossTheBridge.com to receive our First Steps package with helpful resources to help you begin your walk with Christ.

Or you can write to Cross The Bridge at P.O. Box 12515, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 27117, and share how God is working in your life. Well, D.A., before we go, what are some ways that we can bless our listeners? Each day, you can wake up with encouragement from Pastor David through the Word of God with his email devotional, life lessons to consider, a daily reading plan, and a thought to meditate on throughout your day from the heart of David McGee.

That sounds good, Pastor D.A., and again, it's been great to have you with us on the program today. But tell us, what else can our listeners find on CrossTheBridge.com? If you're not able to make it to your home church this Sunday, why not join us for our livestream at 10 a.m. Eastern Time, or on Thursday nights at 7 p.m. Eastern Time? Just visit CrossTheBridge.com and click on our livestream link. There, you'll experience a live service from David's home church, The Bridge, in North Carolina. Again, that website is CrossTheBridge.com. Thanks again for listening, and join us next time as David McGee continues teaching verse by verse in the Gospel of John.