I Am the Bread of Life

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. Some of you think, well, if Jesus would just give me this, if He would just heal my body, or if Jesus would just fix my marriage, if He would just do this or do that for me. But I'm telling you, there is nothing in creation that can satisfy the emptiness in your soul because what you crave is the Creator Himself. He is the bread of life. Welcome back to Summit Life with Pastor J.D.

Greer. I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch, and we're so glad that you're back with us today as we kick off a brand new, never before aired teaching series here on the program. We all know what it's like to feel hungry. When we go without food, we get tired, irritable, even weak. But what about our spiritual hunger? Too often we ignore it or try to fill it with things that will never actually satisfy. Today's teaching series, The I Am Statements of Jesus, Pastor J.D. takes us to John 6, where Jesus begins with, I am the bread of life. It's a truth we desperately need in a world searching for satisfaction. But what exactly does it mean? Let's join Pastor J.D.

right now in the Gospel of John. A handful of you. It's kind of awesome, isn't it? I mean, you can't send it back. It's already out, so you don't have any guilt about it, but you didn't pay for it. It's like a free meal on somebody else.

It's something you don't even know. You can nibble on it. You can throw it away. I'm always like, oh, will they order?

And then you can just toss it. True story. This happened one night to a man named Kevin Stonehouse. Grubhub rang his doorbell and dropped off some chicken tenders and cheese fries. At first, he was pleased, thinking, God loves me. But that was followed by three more orders within the next 10 minutes, all addressed to him.

And they just kept coming. He could not figure out what was going on until he remembered that earlier he had seen his son, Mason, six years old, walking around the house with his phone. Apparently, Mason had gotten onto the Grubhub app and just started ordering whatever looked good to him.

After the fifth order showed up, Kevin went looking for Mason and found him hiding under the bed. He said, son, what have you done? To which Mason said, I was hungry. I was hungry. Kevin started to explain why this was not okay when the doorbell rang and his son said, oh, that must be my pizza. And evidently, he had put in a $439 pizza order. True story, all told, his son had ordered $1,500 worth of food.

So Kevin and his wife packed out their freezers, they made emergency calls to all their neighbors to come and take whatever food they wanted, and then they immediately put new passcodes on their phones. Hunger, hunger can drive you to all kinds of bad decisions. Hunger, hunger, they say, is one of the worst feelings that a human being can experience. When you're hungry, one of the first things that happens is your mood changes. How many of you have a spouse or a roommate that is unbearable when they are hangry?

Raise your hand right now, all right? Yeah, you get hangry. It changes your moods. After a few days without food, you lose your ability to concentrate. Eventually, they say you have trouble sleeping, which is the worst part of the process because you can't even turn this hunger pang off.

And then, of course, your muscles start breaking down and your immune system is compromised, and then eventually your body just stops working. Well, see, I share that because the same thing is true spiritually. And today we're gonna see how Jesus satisfies the deep spiritual hunger that we all have. In fact, if I could be so bold this morning, the core of many, if not most, of your spiritual problems is spiritual hunger.

If we were to trace some of your worst choices that you've ever made in your life, some of your bad habits, your addictions, even some of your emotional dysfunctions like anxiety disorder or OCD, if we were to trace them back to their source, for a lot of them, not all of them, but for a lot of them, what you're going to find is a deep and unsatisfied spiritual hunger. John 6, if you got your Bibles this morning, open them up. This, this morning, is the first of a seven-part series through Jesus' seven I Am statements in the Gospel of John. You see, the Apostle John structures his Gospel around seven times that Jesus labels himself with an I Am claim. And the first of those occurs in John 6, 35, when Jesus claims, I am the bread of life. Now, as you're finding your place there in John 6, let me give you a little background here. I Am was the name that God identified himself by when he first appeared to Moses in the burning bush. In that encounter, which took place several thousand years before John 6, God told Moses that Moses was supposed to lead Israel out of captivity. And Moses had responded to that encounter by saying, well, but who should I tell Israel is coming to deliver them?

How do they know that you're going to, you know, who is this? What is your name? You see, names in those days were a big deal.

Somebody's name identified where they came from, identified what family they were a part of, what kind of person they were, what kind of resources they brought to the relationship. So Moses, in essence, basically your name was like your resume. So Moses, in essence, was asking, how can we be sure that you're going to be able to keep your promise to us, God?

What is your name? God's answer to Moses was simply, you tell them I am who I am. Tell them I am, said you. That was an odd thing to say. You see, in Hebrew, just like in English, you would normally follow I am with some kind of adjective.

I guess technically a predicate adjective. I am strong. I am victorious. But God left it as just I am, meaning I'm not like you, Moses. I don't come from anywhere. I don't have a beginning or an ending. I depend on no one.

I am fully self-sufficient. And that means that whatever you need in this journey, whatever you lack in yourself, whatever Israel feels like they lack in themselves, I am. I am in Hebrew is Yahweh. Yahweh, that's how you say that.

I am is Yahweh. Or if you use the Latin transliteration of it, which we do, Jehovah. Jehovah and Yahweh are the same word. And so from that point onward, whenever Israel had a need, God would invoke the name I am, the name Jehovah, Yahweh, and then he would attach to it whatever attribute met Israel's need in that particular moment. So when Israel was hungry and afraid, for example, they called God Jehovah Jireh, meaning I am your provider. In Exodus 14, when the Israelites were sick because they drunk from a poisoned well, God called himself Jehovah Rapha, meaning I am your healer. When they were afraid, God called himself Jehovah Shammah, which meant I am the God who is ever present with you. And that brings us to the Gospel of John. You see, in the Gospel of John, Jesus takes the name I am, and then he applies it to the seven greatest areas of human brokenness and need.

Now, make no mistake about it. In using this name, in invoking this name, Jesus is claiming to be God. And even further, he is claiming to be the God that we crave, the God who is the missing piece in our lives. He's identifying himself with the one who was in the burning bush in the Old Testament, and he's also saying, I'm what you are looking for.

I have whatever it is that you need. Like I said, the first of those I am claims here occurs in John 6, when Jesus says, verse 35, I am the bread of life. There is no more primal feeling of need than hunger and no more universal satisfaction to hunger than bread. A relationship with God through Jesus is to our souls what bread is to our bodies. To get our minds around what's going on in this chapter, we're going to talk about a sign, a sandwich, a satisfaction, and a supper. You see a lot of food themes today, JD. Yep, I get the feeling that local restaurants are going to be packed with some of the people when this is over.

Okay, so make sure to tip well. All right, first, let's look at a sign. Let's look at the sign. Jesus made this audacious claim right after performing one of his most famous miracles, the feeding of the 5,000, the only miracle that's recorded in all four gospels. In fact, the miracle was the setup for the claim.

So let's just walk through this miracle together. Verse four, if you look at it in your Bible. Now the Passover, the feast of the Jews was at hand, lifting up his eyes then and seeing that a large crowd was coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, where are we to buy bread so that these people may eat? He said this to test him because he himself already knew what he was going to do. He said this to test them. He wants to prove something to them. He wants them to see, to feel how utterly unable they are in themselves to meet this need that is right in front of them. So the first thing he does is he tested, hey, what are you going to do to meet this need?

Can you meet this need? Philip responds, verse seven, 200 denarii. It's not enough to buy food for these people.

200 denarii was about eight months wages. So Philip basically is being sarcastic. In essence, he's saying this assignment is way beyond us. By the time Jesus, we raised enough money to buy all these people food, they'd all be dead. Then another one of the disciples speaks up, verse eight, Andrew. And he says, hey, well, I found a little boy here whose mama packed him a lunch, five loaves and two fish, otherwise known as a Hebrew happy meal. And this little boy says he's willing to share with us, but what is one piddly little happy meal among thousands of people? So now having sufficiently made his point, Jesus says, well, give them to me.

Give these five, five loaves and two fish to me. And then Jesus prays over them. And then the disciples start to distribute them, which by the way, had to be a gutsy thing for those disciples to do, to take five loaves of bread and two small fish and start to try to feed a crowd of thousands. But as they do, the bread and the fish start multiplying and they can't give it away fast enough. And after everybody has eaten all they can eat, Jesus basically took a Hebrew happy meal and turned it to a golden corral, all you can eat buffet in the middle of the desert.

And after they're done, they take up what's left and there are 12 basket fulls of leftovers. Now watch this, verse 14, when the people saw the sign that he had done, the sign, they said, this is indeed the prophet, not a prophet, the prophet who has come into the world. Why did they react that way? What did they see? What was it in this miracle that they recognized?

Okay, following. Everybody then in that crowd knew the story that I'm about to tell you. During the Exodus, after God had appeared to Moses at the burning bush, when God delivered Israel from Egypt, as they were passing through the wilderness, Israel found themselves in a place without food, a desert place. So every morning, every week, except for the Sabbath, six mornings a week, God covered the ground with a little bread-like substance.

The best I can describe it would be like a little Ritz crackers glazed in honey. Supposedly it was delicious. Every morning, every morning, this covered the ground and the children of Israel didn't know what to call it.

They'd never seen it before. So they called it manha, which in Hebrew literally meant, what is it? And this is what they ate every single day as they passed through the wilderness. You say, well, that sounds like a pretty boring diet. Well, like I said, supposedly it was delicious and I'm sure they got really creative with it.

They made manha wafers, manha pudding, manha khati, manha bread, you name it, okay? You're like, man, that's a lot of puns. Okay, I'll stop.

I promise. You're listening to Summit Life with J.D. Greer.

You can always find more resources online free of charge by visiting jdgreer.com. We'll return to our teaching in just a moment. You know, our mission here at Summit Life is very simple, to help people dive deeper into the gospel message every day. And then once they've embraced it, to then spread it far and wide into the world, deep and wide.

Just remember those two words. You can join us in that mission today with a one time gift or by joining with us as a monthly gospel partner. Gospel partners are an integral part of our team, helping us boldly proclaim the gospel through our radio and TV ministry, as well as our online and print resources. They commit to a regular ongoing monthly gift, which helps immensely as we seek the Lord's direction for the future and plan accordingly. If you sign up today as a monthly gospel partner for the first time, we'd like to send you a special welcome gift as well. It's Pastor JD's book titled Gospel.

You can become a partner today when you make your first ongoing monthly donation at jdgreer.com or by giving us a call at 866-335-5220. Thanks for joining with us to be ambassadors of the good news in a world with great needs. Now let's return to our teaching. Once again, here's Pastor JD. So here we are now, John 6, couple thousand years later. And Israel, listen, is again under the thumb of an oppressor. This time it's not the Egyptians like in Moses's day.

This time it's the Romans. And so again, Israel is waiting for another deliverer who is similar to Moses who can deliver them from the Romans, their generation from the Romans, like Moses delivered that generation from the Egyptians. And now here you've got Jesus showing the same kind of miraculous power with the bread that Moses showed in the wilderness. And to top it all off, Jesus does this during the Passover. Remember that detail I pointed out at the beginning of verse four? John wants you to know this happens at the time of the Passover.

The Passover was the feast that the Jews celebrated to mark the date that God had freed them from slavery to Egypt. So here you've got a new prophet providing a new manna and instituting a new Passover meal. And at the end, there are 12 baskets left over, which clearly represent the 12 tribes of Israel.

Everybody knew exactly what those 12 baskets were pointing to. So they concluded quite logically, this is the prophet, the deliverer. This is the one we've been waiting for. Hence the statement, verse 14. When the people saw the sign that he had done, they said, this is indeed the prophet. The prophet, not just a prophet, but the prophet. This is the deliverer that we have been waiting on. This is the Messiah. This is the Messiah. This is the one the whole Old Testament's been pointing to. But verse 15, watch this, perceiving then that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, to make him the new Moses, to make him the new deliverer, Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself. They understood the sign, but they also completely misunderstood it. They thought the point was Jesus' ability to put bread in their stomachs and to overthrow Rome. But that was not the point, at least not yet. Jesus' point was, verse 35, I am the bread of life.

He says to them, see, you got a deeper problem than Roman oppression. You got a deeper problem than an empty stomach, and that is your soul is starving. And just being delivered from your oppressors is not going to fix that. And just getting food in your belly is not going to fix that.

Or just getting healing from your body is not going to fix that. What you most need, what you crave, what you crave deep in the soul of who you are is a relationship with me. I am the bread of life. It's not that I'm going to give you the bread of life.

I am the bread of true life. And my guess this morning is that many of you may have come in here thinking that you need something from Jesus. A job, help with your marriage, help with your kids. Maybe you want to get pregnant. Maybe you need new friends.

Maybe you need a community. Maybe you need a miracle in your health. And hear me, friend, Jesus is not insensitive to those needs, as we see here in the story. He cares about your empty stomach.

He fed these people. But what you most need is not the miracle itself. What you most need is the maker of those miracles. See, some of you think, well, if Jesus would just give me this, if he would just heal my body.

Or if Jesus would just fix my marriage, if he would just do this or do that for me. But I'm telling you, there is nothing in creation that can satisfy the emptiness in your soul because what you crave is the creator himself. He is the bread of life. So the Jews understood the sign, but they also completely misunderstood it.

Which brings us to the sandwich. How does Jesus teach them the real meaning of what he has just done? Well, you know, you would expect the heading over the next verses to be, Jesus explains to the dull, dumb crowds the true meaning of the miracle. But if you look at the heading in your Bible, if you've got your Bible open, look at the heading over verse 16.

That's not what it says, is it? There's a heading over verse 16 that says, Jesus walks on water. Instead of teaching them the meaning of the miracle he's just done, he does a seemingly random miracle. Here's how it breaks down. This is the sandwich. He sends the disciples, immediately after the 5,000 are fed, he sends the disciples on ahead of him across to a place called Capernaum.

That's going to be important here in a minute. And as they're going across the Sea of Galilee, quite a big sea, they're experienced fishermen, right? So they're very familiar with this. They get into a storm which scares them out of their minds.

They think they're going to die. And then out in the middle of that storm, in the middle of the night, Jesus comes out calmly, strutting across the water like it's no big deal. He climbs into the boat with them and immediately two things happen. First of all, the storm calms immediately, then verse 21. Secondly, immediately the boat goes to the place where they're going. This to me is probably the coolest part of the miracle. The moment he steps into the boat, shazam, the storm ceases and now they're on the shore.

The whole point of this ordeal, the whole point of this miracle had been to show them that he had power over whatever storm that threatened them. But now they're in Capernaum. Verse 16 tells us that's where Jesus had sent them. You see that in verse 16? Capernaum was the part of Palestine where a lot of Gentiles lived.

Now follow this. It's where the ancient Gentile cities of Tyre and Sidon were. And Jesus does a couple of important things there.

John does not record this next part of the story, but Matthew does in Matthew 14 and 15 if you want to read it later. Matthew says that right after Jesus feeds the 5,000 and he walks on water, the first thing he does when he arrives in Capernaum after feeding the 5,000 is he heals a Canaanite woman's daughter. Canaanite means Gentile. To the Jews, she's one of the impure people. She's an outsider. She's an enemy of God. And when Jesus heals her daughter, nobody can believe it. The disciples are like, what are you doing healing a Gentile? At one point in the story, Jesus even calls her a dog, which I've always thought was one of the most un-PC things that Jesus ever said.

But in saying that, Jesus was not making a racial slur. He was giving an accurate assessment of her spiritual condition. She was separated from God.

She was spiritually impure. But Jesus says, I'll heal anybody with faith. And then get this, immediately after that healing, Matthew says, Jesus repeats the miracle of the feeding of the 5,000, except this time it's with only 4,000 people.

It's a nearly identical scene. Jesus is teaching the masses in a remote valley. It's late in the day. He's got only a few loaves and some fish for food. And Jesus multiplies the loaves and the fish so that there's baskets full of leftovers. But in this second miracle, he does it with only 4,000 people, a lot of whom are Gentiles. And this time they only take up seven baskets of leftovers instead of 12. Which makes you ask, I mean, only seven baskets this time? Are Jesus' superpowers wearing off?

Are his batteries running low? No, that is not what is happening. During the first miracle of the manna, watch this. During the first miracle of the manna, back when Moses was doing it, the book of Deuteronomy, that records the miracle, the book of Deuteronomy says that Israel was surrounded by seven Canaanite nations. These seven baskets are for them. The seven baskets mean that Jesus is the bread of life for Gentiles too. So what we have here is a miracle sandwich. On either side of the sandwich, the pieces of bread, so to speak, are Jesus feeding a large multitude.

The first one consists of Jews, the other of Gentiles. And in between these two nearly identical miracles or two other miracles, the meat of the sandwich, so to speak, and one of those is Jesus walking on water, and the second is him healing a Gentile woman's daughter. Do you see what's being taught?

Follow me here. First, Jesus' point is not his ability to put physical bread in our stomachs or to overthrow whatever Rome is oppressing us. The point is that whatever need we face, whatever storm we are in, wherever it seems like the waves of life might overtake us, whether that is a storm in our marriage or a storm with our kids or it is a storm of addiction that we cannot shake, Jesus can step into our sinking boat and he can bring us peace. It means that what we most need is not some kind of physical bread in our stomachs, even some kind of physical healing in our bodies.

What we most need is him. He says, I am the bread of life. Again, maybe you come in here this morning looking for a miracle.

I want you to come up as soon as the service is over, and we're going to lay hands on you and pray for that miracle together, but I am telling you what you most need, what you've always craved, is a relationship with Jesus, the great I am, the maker of all miracles. The second thing this sandwich is teaching us is that Jesus came for everybody who would receive him. He didn't come just for the pure or for the churched or for the morally upright. He came for those separated from God. He came for those separated from the church. He came for those across the sea from him. Whoever has faith, even people like this poor Canaanite woman, a spiritual dog, if you will, they can have Jesus if they want him. He came for as many, John says, as would receive him. To any who would receive him, he gave them the right, the power, the ability to become the children of God. Listen, you may think this morning that you are miles away from the profile of a Christian, miles away from Jesus.

I got good news for you this morning. Jesus has just shown up in your Capernaum with the same miraculous power to multiply bread in your life. He's the bread of life for you. Jesus isn't just offering us bread. He's offering himself the only one who can truly satisfy our deepest hunger. This is Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. This month, our featured resource is a companion Bible study that walks alongside our brand new teaching series we just began in the Gospel of John. So, J.D., what's the biggest takeaway from these I Am statements? Yeah, if I had to sum it up in one sentence, I would say Jesus plus nothing equals everything, and everything minus Jesus equals nothing. The I Am statements show us that whatever's lacking in our life, the answer is found in him. He's our bread of life when we're hungry. He's the light to our path when we're lost. Here's the thing, Jesus doesn't just give us these things. He is these things to us.

When you know him, you have all these things. And so what John shows you is that regardless of what brings you to Jesus in need, Jesus himself is the answer. If you are a Gospel partner, we are going to be shipping this new Bible study out to you this month as a thank you for your ongoing support. If you're not a Gospel partner, I'd love to challenge and invite you to consider becoming one.

If this ministry is benefiting you, it's a way of enabling it to benefit somebody else. We'd love to get you either the print or digital version of this I Am Bible study when you give today at jdgrier.com. Ask for the I Am study guide when you donate today or when you commit to being a monthly Gospel partner.

The suggested giving level is $45 or more. Call 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220.

Or you can give and request the new resource online at jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Vidovitch. Next week we'll finish this message on the bread of life. So have a great weekend worshiping with your local church family and be sure to come back next time for Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.