I Am the Bread of Life

John 6:30-36

Introduction

Who’s hungry for lunch yet? Do you know what you’re having for lunch? Maybe Sofia’s or El Sombrero? Or are you going over to someone’s house after church?

Whatever your plans are, we all have plans to eat somewhere. Why? Because our bodies need food and sustenance to keep us going. So now that I’ve got you hungry thinking about lunch, we are in the same frame of mind that the audience Jesus is speaking to is in. The day before, Jesus was teaching a large crowd of over 5,000 people and in the middle of his teaching they got hungry. So Jesus provided something for everyone to eat by taking a small boy’s lunch. The disciples didn’t know how Jesus was going to feed such a large crowd with such a small amount of food, two fish and five loaves of bread. But as Jesus prayed blessings over it, He began to break it apart and it multiplied so much it fed everyone til they were full with twelve baskets left over. The boy had a lot more food to take home to his mom than what she sent him out with. This was a huge miracle Jesus performed for them and was one of the signs He performed to show who He truly was. Now a day has passed and the people are thinking, it’s time to eat again, I’m hungry, and Jesus has already provided a miraculous meal for us, so surely He can do it again. So they start looking for him. They finally found him on the other side of the sea. And this is where we pick up in verse 26:

Read John 6:26-36

John 6:26–36 CSB

Jesus answered, “Truly I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs, but because you ate the loaves and were filled. Don’t work for the food that perishes but for the food that lasts for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you, because God the Father has set his seal of approval on him.” “What can we do to perform the works of God?” they asked. Jesus replied, “This is the work of God—that you believe in the one he has sent.” “What sign, then, are you going to do so that we may see and believe you?” they asked. “What are you going to perform? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, just as it is written: He gave them bread from heaven to eat.” Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, Moses didn’t give you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is the one who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” Then they said, “Sir, give us this bread always.” “I am the bread of life,” Jesus told them. “No one who comes to me will ever be hungry, and no one who believes in me will ever be thirsty again. But as I told you, you’ve seen me, and yet you do not believe.

In John’s account of the Gospel, you have seven of these recorded statements of Jesus where Jesus begins with this phrase, “I am”. These are going to be profound statements that John is going to use to help show who Jesus was and why He came. As we enter into this Easter season, we are going to take a look at these seven statements as we come to Christ in worship and trust.

To give a background for these “I Am” statements and to understand their impact, we have to understand where these words are actually coming from. When Jesus says the words “I Am” in the Greek, He is actually using two Greek words that become a clumsy grouping. Ἐγώ εἰμι – Ego Eimi. Ego means “I” and Eimi means “I Am”. So He’s not just saying “I am”. He’s saying “I, I am.” People would not use these two words together for it is clumsily redundant. They would just say Eimi to communicate “I am.” However, there’s something deeper going on here.

In Exodus 3:13, when Moses encounters God at the burning bush, God tells Moses to go to Pharoah as His emissary to tell him to let the Israelites go. Moses begins to protest and then asks God, if people ask me what your name is, what should I tell them?

In v. 14, God tells Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” In Hebrew, this name is Yahweh. It’s where we get the Germanic form of the name Jehovah from. However, when the Hebrew Old Testament was translated into the Greek language for the Greek speaking Jews, Yahweh was translated into Ego Eimi, the “I, I Am.”

This is not an accidental usage by Jesus or by John as he is recording Jesus’ teaching. This is a very intentional statement by Jesus to show who He is. And we understand this all the more when we understand why John is writing his account of the gospel from John 20:31 – “These are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His name.”

So as we go through these seven statements, keep this in mind that Jesus is making a clear statement about Himself and He is fully identifying Himself as Yahweh, the Great I Am and He is giving us images to understand who He is and what He has come to do.

As we come into this passage, we pick up with Jesus having performed the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand at the beginning of chapter six. There was a great crowd Jesus was teaching and everyone was getting hungry. And suddenly there’s this boy with his small lunch. Jesus takes the bread and the fish from his lunch, begins to break it and with this food feeds well over 5 thousand people.

Needless to say, the next day, the people come looking for Jesus again, hoping for another meal. Jesus tells them He knows exactly what they want from Him. They aren’t looking for the Savior, they’re looking for their physical needs to be met and tells them they need to change their focus from food that perishes to food that lasts forever. And then He tells them to find the food that lasts forever they need to believe in the One God has sent as Savior.

This is where we pick up in verse 30. They have the audacity to ask him for a sign. As if the sign of feeding the 5,000 wasn’t already enough. And here’s the truth of the matter, if we are coming to God simply to get stuff from Him, to be blessed, God will never be able to do enough to satisfy us, because the stuff that He gives us in this world was not meant to ever satisfy us. His good gifts were meant to point us back to Him, not to allow us to place all our trust and desire in the gifts alone.

So they try to manipulate Him into giving them more bread because surely He can do what Moses did by giving them bread from heaven, the manna, in the wilderness.

However, even here, Jesus has to correct their improper view of what was going on there for it wasn’t Moses who gave them that bread. It was God Himself who sent the bread. But even with that bread, people would grow hungry again and they would all eventually died. That bread was not meant to save or satisfy. It was meant to point their attention back to God and see that their needs could only be met in Him.

In v. 33 – Jesus tells them, the true bread from heaven is the One whom God has sent and brings life to the world, life that never ends. So in v. 34, they ask Jesus to give them this bread. And His answer is simple, “I am the bread of life.” Jesus is the only One who can give true life and satisfaction, not the stuff of this world. Yes, God cares about our physical needs, but there’s a greater need that Jesus has come to fill for us. It is our spiritual need. So what are some things we learn about Jesus as we consider Him being the bread of life?

I. The Bread Must Be Received

In order for bread to do any good, it’s gotta be received. God sent the manna to the Israelites in the wilderness, but the people had to trust God and be obedient to go out and receive the manna. Bread can be offered to you on a plate, but you’ve got to receive the bread and eat it. Until you receive and eat, it has no part of you.

This is also what Jesus meant when He says later in John 6:53

John 6:53 CSB

So Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life in yourselves.

He is not speaking of literally eating His flesh and drinking His blood. But He is talking about the act of receiving Him and trusting in His work on the cross and forsaking our own ways of trying to satisfy God on our own or seeking to simply satisfy our own worldly desires. We must receive Christ as the one whom our soul alone needs.

II. The Bread Gives Us Life

Second, not only do we need to receive Christ as we would bread to nourish our bodies, the effect of receiving Christ is life. Christ just as much says so in v. 35, “I am the bread of life.”

The food we receive does keep us alive, however temporarily it might be. But we cannot live long without food. In the same way, Christ provides us life.

However, the life He provides is so much more than the life we get from food, for one day, no matter how much food we eat, we will still one day perish, if Christ doesn’t come first. However, when we receive Christ, we receive the life that never ends. When Jesus says we will never be hungry or thirsty again, He is not speaking about our temporary hunger and thirst, but about our spiritual hunger and thirst for the life we were all created to enjoy. God intended for us to live forever in His presence and we know this. This is why we fight so hard against aging and death. Death, though it happens to all of us, is still so unnatural because we were made for life. Jesus says, when we receive Him, we receive the life that we are all craving deep within, the life that will be spent in the presence of God for all eternity and will see no end.

The life that as the song says, “When we’ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we first begun.”

III. The Bread Gives Us Strength

A third thing we need to see about Christ is that as the Bread of Life He gives us strength.

Bread is the source of the energy our bodies need to complete the job we need to do day in and day out. We will quickly run out of energy without the proper source of bread and food our bodies need to keep going.

Here is why we as believers never outgrow our need for the Gospel. Many times we see the Gospel as something unbelievers need, but once we believe we think now I need to move beyond it and get to work. However, even as believers, we will always need to go back to the Gospel because in it we find the strength we need in order to do what God has called us to do.

When the people asked Jesus in v. 28 “What can we do to perform the works of God?” Jesus replied in v. 29 “This is the work of God - that you believe in the one He has sent.” Our purpose, our work is to believe. As we believe in Him, the good works God wants us to do will flow out of our belief in Christ, not in addition to our belief in Christ. We will never grow and mature as believers if our Christianity simply become a list of dos and don’ts instead of living by faith and trust in the One God has sent.

This means, we must daily remind ourselves of the Gospel. We do this by daily coming back to the Word of God. How do we know the Gospel? Romans 10:17

Romans 10:17 CSB

So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the message about Christ.

We must daily partake of Christ as He is revealed to us in God’s Word, as we must daily partake in the food that is provided for us at the table. Only then will we have the strength that comes only from God to fulfill the purpose He has for us.

IV. The Bread Gives Satisfaction

Last, as food brings satisfaction to our bodies, so Christ gives us true and lasting satisfaction in life.

Our bodies go through cycles of hunger and thirst that are constantly in need of fulfillment. So we take in food and water in order to bring satisfaction to our bodies.

Likewise, our souls are hungering and thirsting for something, whether we realize it or not. We will attempt to find satisfaction in different ways.

Our accomplishments or purpose

Power and position

Pleasure / Entertainment

Relationships

Religion

However, none of these will truly satisfy, no matter how long we pursue these. If you want to see a picture of a man who truly had it all and experienced it all, look to King Solomon who wrote the book of Ecclesiastes. Even after all that he had, none of it meant anything to him. It was all vanity.

In 2005, in an interview with 60 minutes, Tom Brady was pondering the question, is this all life has to offer? He had just won his third super bowl ring and he felt the emptiness and lack of satisfaction those things had. The interviewer asked him if he knew the answer for the meaning of life and Tom Brady simply replied, “I wish I knew.” And yet Brady would keep going on collecting more Super Bowl rings.

C.S. Lewis also wrote, ““If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”

We will continue to try to satisfy our souls with lesser things. This is what the crowds were doing. They weren’t satisfied with the sign and miracle that Jesus had done the day before, so they came back for another meal, thinking another blessing will satisfy them. They missed the point of the miracle was not simply to satisfy their bodies, but to show them the One who could satisfy their souls.

Jesus alone can satisfy our needs and desires. We often come to Him looking for His blessings to satisfy us, when it should simply be Christ that we are longing for. Be thankful for the good gifts that God gives, but do not be satisfied with what He gives, but let those gifts point you to the all satisfying joy that is found in Christ Himself. Until we receive Him for who He is alone, we will never truly be satisfied.

Conclusion

we are being invited today to Psalm 34:8

Psalm 34:8 CSB

Taste and see that the Lord is good. How happy is the person who takes refuge in him!

Jesus is far better than anything this world has to offer and His gift of life in Himself is offered to us freely because of the cross. Will you receive Him today?