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Women's Conference SMBC 1989 Part 3 By E. Ford

of the feeding of this multitude of people. You remember they were there and Jesus was teaching them and they became weary.
And Jesus took the loaves and the fishes that that little boy had and prayed and broke them and fed the people.
We don't know how many were there. It says 5,000 men. There are probably lots and lots more than that
because where the men are you usually find a lot of women, don't you?
And there would have been a huge crowd of people.
And Jesus in the context of that gives this wonderful, wonderful statement to us.
Now after the feeding of the 5,000 of course plus, he'd gone off across the lake and then had come back again
and the crowds came looking for him. They looked for him not because they realised who he was,
not because they realised as they thought about the miracle that this was a significant thing
and it was a statement pointing to who he was, but they came because of their instinctive materialism and selfishness.
You see they failed to see the significance in the miracle that Jesus performed.
And perhaps we could say it like this, that instead of seeing the sign in the bread, they just simply saw the bread in the sign
because you see this miracle was really a sign and this is one of the things that John uses in his gospel.
He selects seven miracles which he sees as signs pointing to who Jesus was.
And this was a sign which revealed that Jesus was in fact God.
John's been talking to us about that this morning.
And it was a demonstration of his glory and of his power
and it was a demonstration that here before them was God incarnate, God in flesh.
Now the people, the crowds around by and large without exception almost,
just saw him and a sign for what they could get out of him.
And in fact they came to him and they said, couldn't you turn it on again?
Now that's my translation, I tend to translate the Bible, you know,
transliterated in the way that I think it means something to me.
But they came to him and they said, couldn't you do us another sign?
Do another miracle, perform something else and then we'll believe.
We want to know exactly what's going on.
In other words, turn it on again for us.
That's in verse 30.
And I want to read a few verses from John chapter 6 and from verse 25 onwards.
The miracle has taken place, the sign has been performed
and Jesus has come back the next morning and the crowds are gathering around him.
And it says in verse 25, when they found him on the other side of the lake
they asked him, Rabbi, when did you get here?
Jesus answered, I tell you the truth, you're looking for me
not because you saw miraculous signs but because you ate the loaves and had your fill.
Don't work for food that spoils but for food that endures to eternal life
which the Son of Man will give you.
On him God the Father has placed his seal of approval.
Then they asked him, what must we do to do the work God requires?
And Jesus answered, the work of God is this, to believe in the one he has sent.
So they asked him, what miraculous sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you?
Extraordinary isn't it? I mean the day before he just fed this huge multitude
and now they're saying, what can you do so that we can believe in you?
What will you do? Our forefathers ate the manna in the desert.
As it is written, he gave them bread from heaven to eat.
Jesus said to them, I tell you the truth, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven
but it is my Father who 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.
Sir, they said, from now on give us this bread.
Then Jesus declared, I am the bread of life.
He who comes to me will never go hungry and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.
What an absolutely stupendous and magnificent claim isn't it?
I am the bread of life. He who comes to me, she who comes to me will never go hungry.
Now this needs to be seen against the background of the expectation that the Jews had
that when the Messiah came, the one that had been promised for those thousands of years beforehand,
promised right back really in the Garden of Eden,
they had the expectation that when he came he would again provide them with manna.
Now do you remember in the Old Testament when the Israelites were freed from their bondage in Egypt
and they were led out under Moses and they came down through the Sinai Peninsula and there was nothing to eat
and they grumbled and complained and moaned and carried on and the Lord very graciously provided them with food.
Now I've been down there in the Sinai Desert and I have to say that I was tempted to feel very sympathetic
towards them with their grumbling because I wondered how on earth you'd ever get anything to eat.
And God wonderfully provided this food for them and they called it manna.
Now you probably all know that and down through the hundreds of years as the Jews had been expecting the Messiah to come,
they had built up in their minds an understanding of what the Messiah, their great Saviour,
the one that God had promised, Christ, that's what it means, the anointed one of God,
the sort of things that he would do and one of them was that he would again provide this manna for them.
And so this needs to be seen against that background because these crowds came to him
and I guess in a sense they were saying to him,
if you're really who we think you might be claiming to be, why don't you provide us with manna?
Why don't you provide this heavenly food again for us?
And Jesus then goes on to say that he was the true, the real, the authentic bread from heaven.
And I thought that it would be helpful for us as we think about this to quickly have a look and compare on this,
on the overhead, the difference here between the manna that was provided which was an earthly thing
and the true real bread from heaven because you see they saw in this the food that God was going to give them to eat.
They saw this as something miraculous that God would give them.
They saw this as a real sign that God had stepped into history and Jesus is saying got the whole thing wrong.
You've misunderstood the significance. You don't really understand the truth of what God is doing.
You don't understand the nature of the real bread that God gives to eat.
So I've got here, first of all, the miracle or the sign was the feeding of the five thousand
and then we saw that the crowd was motivated by materialism.
They saw the bread in the sign instead of the sign in the bread and then they went on to ask for a sign.
And then Jesus makes this stupendous claim to be the true bread, the real bread that comes down from heaven.
And what I've done here is to just help you to see that in fact the manna in the Old Testament
was a picture or a type of what the true bread would be when it came.
Now you see the manna that God gave in the days when the Israelites were wandering through the wilderness,
the desert, was earthly. But Jesus is the heavenly bread.
That was something that just came down to earth, wasn't it? But Jesus is the very true bread from heaven.
Then it was physical food that just fed their bodies, but Jesus is the spiritual food that feeds us.
The manna perished at the end of the day. It just rotted, you remember? It was gone.
But Jesus, the true bread from heaven, is eternal. And then the last thing is that the Israelites still died.
They ate the manna and they died. But Jesus, the true bread, gives life that is eternal.
Now what then in fact does it really mean? What does it really mean that Jesus is the true bread from heaven?
I mean it sounds lovely, doesn't it? We compare it with the manna and it sounds sort of all beautiful,
but what does it actually mean for us? Well the significance of it, before we look at the significance for us as individuals,
the significance of this sign was first of all that it was an implicit claim that Jesus had made to be God.
The Jews believed and knew and understood that it was only God that could feed them spiritually.
It revealed Christ's glory, but the other thing is that it revealed those who were still in the darkness.
Now John's Gospel has some particular motifs or themes that run through it, and there are contrasts.
And we have the contrast between light and darkness, between life and death, between judgment and life.
And here we see, as it were, this notion that the word of God, that God incarnate,
and in a way you can't separate the written word of God from the living word, Jesus Christ,
but it always, he always, and the written word of God always divides men.
And in this incident here we see that what happens is that those who are still walking in darkness,
those that are still under the judgment of God, as Joan mentioned in the earlier session,
are separated as we look at the response from those who are actually feeding on the bread of life and are in light.
But the other thing is that when Jesus said, I am the bread of life, he who feeds on me will never be hungry,
what he's actually claiming to do is he's claiming to be able to provide all our needs.
You see, God is known through the Old Testament as the great sustainer of his people.
He is the one who provides all that's necessary. And the Israelites, the Jews, look back and they rehearse the great acts of God.
It was their great God who had led them out of Egypt, who had held back the waters of the Red Sea,
who had fed them as they'd gone through the wilderness, who'd given them water out of the rock.
He was the great sustainer of his people. He was the one who fed them with all that was necessary.
And here is Jesus saying, I am the one who was able to provide all your needs. I am God.
But I can give you all that you need.
Now let us look then and see how that relates to us today.
Because I think as we look at this and we think about bread, bread, when I'm talking about bread,
I mean of course when Jesus claimed to be the bread of life.
But that was the staple diet of the people of the day and it represents just our basic food, doesn't it?
Our basic food. And when Jesus said, I am the bread of life,
I believe he was saying basically three things to the people there and three things to us.
And the first thing he was saying, and this is quite clear here when he says,
He who comes to me, verse 35, will never go hungry and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.
And then down in verse 40, for my Father's will is that everyone who looks to the Son,
who is the bread of life and believes in him, shall have eternal life.
The first thing of course is that he gives life or he saves.
Now you think about your staple food, bread, if it is, might be cake these days.
But what does it do? Doesn't it give life? What happens to us if we don't have food?
We die. We die. That's right. We die.
And when Jesus is saying, I am the bread of life, he is saying,
I am the one upon whom you feed and receive life, eternal life, the life that comes from God.
And that of course is our most basic need, isn't it?
What is my basic need above everything else and yours?
Isn't it that we might know forgiveness and new life and cleansing and a fresh start?
Or the Bible calls it salvation. That's what we need.
We need forgiveness. We need to be, in the biblical terminology, saved.
Saved. It's a good word, isn't it? We don't use it so much today.
We need to be saved. And that's what food does for us daily.
That is what the bread of life does for us.
I have a dear friend who's 78. I met her last year when she was 78. She's now 79.
And she came and joined a little Bible study that I had.
She said, could I come and join you? I know nothing.
And as she sat there and listened to God's word and read it herself,
God opened her eyes and she entered into a relationship with Jesus Christ,
a spiritual relationship of feeding on Him.
And she found out at the age of 78 what it is to have life, eternal life.
And a couple of months ago she said to me,
you know next week is the first anniversary of my giving my life to Jesus Christ.
And this last year has been the happiest year of my whole life.
Sad that it didn't start until 78. It's never too late to start.
And that's the basic need of every person.
And Jesus is saying, I am the bread of life if you come to me and feed on me by faith,
with thanksgiving, you will have life.
But there's a second thing that bread does and it's this, it strengthens us.
You know if you don't have enough food, what happens?
You get weak and feeble, don't you?
I've been in hospital on occasions where I've had to go for several days without food
and I tell you I've been very feeble and I've tried to stand up afterwards.
And as we feed on the bread of life, Jesus Christ,
that's where we derive our strength for daily living.
I haven't got the resources within myself and neither have you to live life the way God intends us to.
I did not have the wisdom and the capacity and the understanding and the patience
to bring up four children in a world that is shot through with sin and anomaly and injustice and hatred.
And neither do you.
But the bread of life, Jesus Christ himself is the one who gives us that strength
and enables us to live in the way that God intends.
As we feed on him, as we walk with him, as we talk with him, as we feed on his word,
because this is the written word and he is the living word.
As we feed on him, God gives us the strength to live in the way that he intends.
True? I can't make it on my own.
These people here couldn't make it on their own. Nobody can make it on their own.
But the bread of life is that which strengthens, it's that which sustains us.
And it's wonderful when you look at the history of the Israelites
to realise that God fed them not only in the wilderness when they were going through tough times,
and very often that's when we turn first to the bread of life and ask for strength,
but he also fed them as they were going through the lush pastures.
And in every area of life we need to come to him
and to know the strength and the sustenance that he gives through his word.
We need it, I think, as we're growing up, we need it in sickness, we need it in sorrow and we need it in death.
And one of the things that has enriched my life has been to be with people
who have this close and warm and intimate relationship with Jesus Christ as they are dying.
And even in that, when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
the bread of life gives us the strength to be able to cope in that situation.
But the third thing that bread does is this, it satisfies.
You know that lovely feeling you get when you've had a nice meal and you feel satisfied.
And I want to say this morning that I do not believe that any human being
knows what it means to be satisfied unless they know Jesus who is the bread of life.
We all have basic needs and I believe two of the basic needs that we have,
every one of us is the need for love, total love, and we need significance.
And it is only in Jesus Christ that we can find that totally.
Every one of us wants to be loved, don't we?
We do.
And I want to say that no human being can love us totally and never fails.
Now I have a terrific husband.
I'm sorry for all you ladies that have the second best because I hit the top.
But he can't satisfy my deepest inmost needs because he's a human being.
And it's only Jesus Christ who can do that.
He's the only one who satisfies completely.
Because within each one of us there is that need for satisfaction.
It's been described as a God-shaped vacuum.
And we're only satisfied when it's God himself in the person of Jesus who fills that vacuum.
And nothing and no one else can completely satisfy us.
You know, every one of us tend to look to other things or people to find satisfaction and significance.
True? We do.
I mean, why do we react so violently when little Johnny down the street does better in his exams than our little Billy?
Isn't it because we want to feel significant?
You know, our children have got to be the best and we've got to do this and we become slaves to all sorts of things in our lives.
Because we're looking for satisfaction and significance. Isn't that true?
And so many of us who are married find our sense of significance from our husbands.
And if they don't measure up, it's pretty terrible, isn't it?
And Jesus is really saying to us here, I am the bread of life.
If you come to me and feed on me, you will not only have life,
you will not only have the strength to live that life, but you will know what it means to be satisfied in life completely.
And when we know that his love never fails, and when we know that in his sight we are a unique human being created by him,
he understands our every need, he understands our abilities and the lack of them, he understands us totally and completely.
Then we can rest and relax in him and be satisfied.
And that frees us up, I believe, to be able to be a servant to other people.
Well, it's interesting, I want you to just quickly, in the 30 seconds, to look at this.
Here he is, the true bread who gives life, who sustains and who satisfies.
But it's interesting, if you look in this chapter, you will see that there were various reactions to the claim that Jesus made.
The response to Jesus' claim in verses 41 and 42, they said, began to grumble, of course.
And here we see the division between those who accepted the claim of Jesus Christ and those who didn't.
And they said, isn't this Jesus, the son of Joseph? In other words, he's only a human being.
Then in verse 60, we see that there were those who said, this is a very hard teaching.
Who can accept it? We can't believe this stuff.
And then in verse 66, there were those who said, this is a tough one, let's go away. We can't follow this man.
And then Jesus turned to Simon Peter, and he said, are you going to leave too?
And Peter said, Lord, there's nobody else to go to. You are the one that has eternal life.
We haven't got anyone else to go to. And that's absolutely true.
There is nobody else except Jesus Christ, the living bread, who can give us life, who can save us, who can strengthen us, and who can satisfy us.
We're going to spend the next little while till 5.2, I think it is.
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