The Bread of Life

The Word of God is the bread of life.

You Can Survive

Review of law of 3s

Seek The Lord

The crowd did not come out to seek Jesus. They came out to get their belly full. Another way to say that is they came out seeking what was in it for them and we live in a culture that has taken that question and put it on steroids.

Are we coming to church to seek relationship with God the Father, through Jesus the Son in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit? Or, are we seeking a relationship to get help pay off our mortgages? To get a healing for our body? Are we want a relationship with God so that our lives will be better?

It was not Moses

Think about all the great and wonderful blessings that have happened in this church. Now ask yourself who was the pastor or leader when that event happened. Can you name a few?

Have the congregation name some of these things.

Those are all wonderful stories and I know God is going to give you some more wonderful stories when Pastor Brian arrives but in the next few weeks I am going to remind you of what Jesus said, “It was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven.”

Every good thing that has happened in this church, in this community of faith, has come because of the grace and mercy of the Father. None of these pastors that you have named gave you these great blessings. It was the Father, mediated by the Son, through the power of the Holy Spirit working in the hearts and lives of you and the pastor you named.

English Standard Version (John 6:32)

it was not Moses

No matter what has happened here in Montezuma or what will happen, the person that is in the pulpit is not the person that is giving you what you need. It is the Lord! And if it is the person and that person alone is supplying you with what you need, you need to be careful because you are only a step away for worshipping that person, that pastor and that is not good. After all this is the same problem that Paul wrote about in 1 Corinthians 3.

1 Corinthians 3:1–9 ESV

But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready, for you are still of the flesh. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way? For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not being merely human? What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God’s fellow workers. You are God’s field, God’s building.

What does it look like when church does this? Well for example, let’s say that you have pastor come and she jumps the attendance up to 200 or more but it is all based on her personality and chrisma. What happens when the conference decides to move her to a new church?

Right the ministry of the church will see a decrease in attendance. The house will crumble to the point that the foundation of the church was based on her and not Christ. The greater the foundation is based on her or anything else for that matter the greater the chance the ministry will “blow up” when they leave.

Montezuma United Methodist Church put Jesus first before anything or anyone. May Jesus be your chief cornerstone that you build the church on. Jesus himself told Peter, “On this rock, I will build my church and gates of hell will not prevail against it.” The rock that Jesus was talking about was Peter’s confession that Jesus was the messiah, the Son of the Living God.

I am the bread of life

Jesus is the one that sustains us in our spiritual lives. We have to come to the table to receive. One way that you can come to the table is through the Word of God. I have encouraged you and I encourage you again to get in the Word.

There are two ways that I believe we can come to know who Jesus is in our lives. One is more objective and one is more subjective.

First that objective one—The Bible. We need to know what the Word of God contains. Reading the Scriptures, studying the Scriptures and even memorizing the Scriptures is the primary way we come to know what God is like.

The Second Way we come to know Jesus is more subjective. It is what we observe and feel. It is times when we feel the love of God. It is when we say things like “I believe that Lord spoke to me.” Let me give you an example, “