Christ Satisfies

I don’t know about you, but I think one of the greatest inventions in the world is the all you can eat buffet. Growing up in a family of eight, we lived off of buffets. I’m sure when the manager of CiCi’s Pizza saw us coming across the parking lot, he knew he was losing money that day! You know when you go to a buffet, it is your duty to overeat. When you have finally cleaned off your thirteenth plate, and you feel like one more bite would mean sudden doom, you swear to yourself you will never eat again.

But the interesting thing is you wake up the next day, and maybe you are still recovering, so you skip breakfast. But by lunchtime, you know you are going to eat again. That’s the problem with food. No matter how much you eat, even if you eat all the right things, you will be hungry again. Well, a crowd of people experienced exactly that in John chapter six.

The chapter begins with the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000. Jesus had been teaching on the side of a mountain. It was getting late, and he turns to Philip and says, “Where are we going to buy bread so everyone can eat?” Philip says, “Two hundred denarii (200 days worth of wages) isn’t enough to feed all these people!” Then Andrew comes along with the five loaves of bread and two fish a little boy had. Jesus has everyone sit down in groups, prays over the bread and fish, and everyone experienced the largest buffet probably ever recorded in history. It was a miracle! It was so impressive, there were those in the crowd who were ready to take Jesus and make him king by force.

Jesus slips away, sends his disciples in a boat back to Capernaum, and he goes to a mountain alone to pray. As the disciples are rowing back to Capernaum, a storm picks up, and Jesus comes to them walking on water. He joins them in the boat, and everyone makes it to Capernaum.

The next day, the crowd present at the largest buffet ever woke up and went to find Jesus. When he was nowhere to be found, they got in a boat and went to Capernaum in search of Jesus. They find him there, and what happens next is a very interesting exchange.

John 6:25–27 NASB95

When they found Him on the other side of the sea, they said to Him, “Rabbi, when did You get here?” Jesus answered them and said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you seek Me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate of the loaves and were filled. “Do not work for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you, for on Him the Father, God, has set His seal.”

Notice what Jesus does here. He has a way of getting straight to the point. He did so with Nicodemus in chapter three and he did so with the woman at the well in chapter four. Instead we see two things here. First, Jesus understands their motive. They weren’t interested in Jesus; they were interested in what he could give them.

There is a movie called The Holiday starring Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet. Kate Winslet’s character is in love with a coworker who doesn’t love her back, but he uses her and manipulates her into getting what he wants from her without having to give much of anything to the relationship. It is extremely manipulative, but this is how many of us treat Christ.

You see, often times we are more in love with what Christ can give us than we are with him. We are more in love with the blessing than we are the blesser. When we love the stuff God gives us more than God, we have created an idol, and this is what the people who followed Jesus to Capernaum did.

The second thing Jesus does is he turns their focus from temporary provisions to a spiritual hunger only he can satisfy.

Jesus turns our attention from temporary provisions to a spiritual hunger only he can satisfy.

Food that endures to eternal life? That sounds an awful lot like the living water he was talking about when he met the woman at the well. Naturally, they are interested. Food that allows us to live forever?

John 6:28–31 NASB95

Therefore they said to Him, “What shall we do, so that we may work the works of God?” Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent.” So they said to Him, “What then do You do for a sign, so that we may see, and believe You? What work do You perform? “Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread out of heaven to eat.’ ”

Really? Were they asleep yesterday when they ate all they wanted? They quote Nehemiah 9:15. What are they doing here? They saw the sign. They knew they had witnessed a miracle. But look closer. What sign are you going to perform? Doesn’t this sound manipulative, like maybe they are trying to get Jesus to do it again just so they can get what they want from him?

Jesus reminds them that the bread didn’t come from Moses, but God. And the bread that Jesus offers is not really bread at all, but himself. Failing to understand this figure of speech, they ask that he give them this bread always. That’s when Jesus says his famous I AM statement:

John 6:35–40 NASB95

Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; he who comes to Me will not hunger, and he who believes in Me will never thirst. “But I said to you that you have seen Me, and yet do not believe. “All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will certainly not cast out. “For I have come down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me. “This is the will of Him who sent Me, that of all that He has given Me I lose nothing, but raise it up on the last day. “For this is the will of My Father, that everyone who beholds the Son and believes in Him will have eternal life, and I Myself will raise him up on the last day.”

The problem with the people seeking Jesus that day was that they were not seeking him. They had seen him, yet didn’t believe. In several places Jesus emphasized that no one comes to him unless God the Father draws him. There is an important point to note here. Left to our own devices, mankind does not seek God. Anyone who comes to faith in Christ does so because of the illuminating work of the Holy Spirit. God provides enough evidences for us to be awakened to the fact that he exists and something is not right in the world. Then he proceeds to give us more until we are either led to Christ, or we come across something we reject and cannot move forward until we accept the truth.

Notice in verse 41 the Jews started grumbling and the focus shifted from bread to a claim Jesus made about himself. “How can he say he came from heaven? Isn’t this the son of Joseph? We know them. God isn’t this guy’s dad.” They either didn’t know about the nature of Jesus’ birth or they didn’t believe it. But notice the rejection of Jesus’ divinity. He didn’t explain it to them. He kept emphasizing the fact that nobody comes to him without the Father’s draw, that he is the ticket to eternal life, and anyone who believes in him will be raised to life on the last day.

In verse 50 and verse 58, he says, “This is the bread that comes down from heaven” and I wonder if he was pointing to himself as he said it. The focus kept coming back to bread. Jesus uses the terms eat, drink, and feed in verses 52-56 not to advocate cannibalism, but a call to satisfy our spiritual longing with spiritual nourishment.

Everyone on the planet has a longing for the eternal, but our senses are deadened due to the sinful nature we are all born with. Though we are spiritually darkened, there is an acute awareness of this eternal longing in all of us. We look to satisfy this longing through temporal means. Some of us seek satisfaction in a career, or our family, through materialism, sex, drugs, alcohol, and more. The problem is those things never give us the satisfaction we are looking for. There is always more we are striving for and we can never quite satisfy our appetite for it because none of those things are eternal. But when we come to Jesus, the eternal Son of God, he satisfies our deepest hunger.

I recently heard of a story of a woman who grew up in the faith, but left it in pursuit of satisfying the deep longings in her life through temporal means. She was the daughter of a pastor turned internet adult content creator. She became one of the top creators on a site called Only Fans (If you don’t know what that is, good). She made millions producing adult content online. She met a guy who is a believer. He began praying over her and sending her Bible verses. The Lord used that to call her back to himself and she has since repented, given her life back to Christ, and closed her Only Fans account. Why would she choose to lose out on millions a year? Because the thing she was chasing was found in Jesus.

To see Jesus as the bread of life is to embrace him as the ultimate source of satisfaction for my hungry soul.

Jesus calls us to embrace him as the ultimate source of satisfaction for our hungry souls.

This invitation is not just to receive Jesus as the Savior of our lives. We have to remember that coming to faith in Jesus is not the finish line, but the starting line. Day by day, we have the temptation to look for satisfaction in the same things Christ called us from. We must remember that Jesus is the bread of life.

APPLICATION

There are those of you who are here today who have been looking for something to satisfy this deep longing you know you have, but nothing has seemed to work. I get it. I was there once. I turned to sex, drugs, and alcohol until one night I was high at a party and I looked around the room and thought this couldn’t be all there is to life. Then the things I was feeding myself no longer satisfied. I knew I needed more. That’s when Christ showed up. When I gave my life to Christ in 2005, something crazy happened. I wasn’t hungry or thirsty anymore. Jesus had satisfied my soul.

Many of us have been believers in Jesus for a long time, but some of you are still hungry. You have been coming to church and doing church things, but you still are not experiencing the satisfaction of your soul. Could it be that you have stopped looking to Jesus for the satisfaction he promises? Have you bought into the idea that something else will satisfy you? Have you been keeping up appearances here while chasing after a career, your spouse, your kids, grand kids, sex, drugs, alcohol, a car, a house, hoping that when you get that thing, you will finally be happy? Let me tell you what you already know: it won’t. You are hoping that something temporary will satisfy an eternal longing. At some point you traded the blesser for the blessing. You’re more in love with the things Jesus can give you than Jesus himself. My friend, that is only going to end in frustration and despair.

The solution is to embrace Jesus as the ultimate source of satisfaction for a hungry soul.