Sermon Tone Analysis

Bookmarks & Needs:

B: John 6:1-15

N:

Welcome

Good morning to those of you who are here in the room and those who are online today, and welcome to our Family Worship service here at Eastern Hills Baptist Church.

I’m Bill Connors, and I’m the senior pastor here, and it’s a blessing to be together this morning to worship the Lord together.

Thank you, praise band, for leading us in our musical praise and worship time this morning.

This might come as a shock to you, but I’m not going to make any announcements.

We’re going to jump right in to our study this morning.

Opening

We’re in our fourth message in our series called “Signs”, where we are looking at the seven signs recorded in the Gospel of John that point to Jesus’ identity as God and Messiah.

So far, we have looked at the Wedding at Cana, where Jesus turned the water into wine; the healing of the official’s son in Capernaum; and the healing of the paralytic at the pool of Bethesda (Thanks, Joe, for preaching a great message on that passage last week while I was gone).

This morning, we are going to consider the only miracle (besides the resurrection itself) that is recorded in all four Gospel accounts: the feeding of the 5000 by the Sea of Galilee.

This miracle is recorded in Matthew 14, Mark 6, and Luke 9. John’s account of this miraculous sign is found in John chapter 6.

As we are able, let’s stand in honor of God’s holy Word as we read verses 1-15 of that chapter.

PRAYER (including primary election and Cerrillos Community Church and Pastor Eric Tiger, ministering to the Native American people of Cerrillos)

This is a great passage, isn’t it?

For many of us, this passage is really familiar.

We’ve heard it and read it so much that it might have started to lose its wonder for us.

This is an absolutely incredible display of Jesus’ power and authority.

I don’t know about you, but I’d like to think that if I saw Jesus take 5 small loaves and a couple of small fish and feed 20 people with them, I would be amazed and shocked.

But the crowd of people following Jesus that day was 5,000 men, besides women and children according to Matthew.

So there could have been 15,000 or 20,000 people there that day.

Jesus was teaching His disciples and the people, but as evening approached, there was no food, and the place was remote.

Andrew was able to rustle up a young boy’s lunch of 5 small barley loaves (the poor man’s grain at the time) and 2 small fish.

Jesus gave thanks and blessed the meager meal, broke them, and had them distributed by His disciples.

Everyone ate, and 12 baskets full of leftovers were collected when it was all said and done.

This was truly miraculous.

Certainly, for the Jewish people who were there, they were reminded of the miracles of Elisha in 2 Kings 4, where the widow’s little jar of oil was used to fill container after container, never running out.

And where later in that same chapter, God multiplied 20 barley loaves to feed 100 men:

But 5 barley loaves and 2 small fish feeding 15,000-20,000 people?

Incredible!

This wasn’t the first time that Jesus had done something amazing.

Just like the leader from Capernaum that we considered back in chapter 4 (the second sign), the people had either seen or heard of the miraculous things that Jesus did.

Verse 2 even says that this is exactly why the crowd was following Him.

John 6:2 (CSB)

2 A huge crowd was following him because they saw the signs that he was performing by healing the sick.

For perhaps 20,000 people to go and follow Jesus out into the wilderness shows how popular He had become.

And why had He become so popular?

Because of the incredible things that He did.

At first blush in this passage, especially if we just stop at verse 14, the people really seem to get it.

Miracle happens, they declare that Jesus is a prophet.

But the truth is that they understood the miracle in one sense, but didn’t really grasp what it truly meant:

1) The people understood the miracle, but misinterpreted its meaning.

The people certainly understood Jesus’ miracles themselves: These signs were exceedingly practical in nature: rescuing a groom from a social disaster; healing a child; delivering a man from 38 years of paralysis.

Now, they’ve received full bellies without cost from a very small supply of food.

They understood the nature of the miracle.

And they even thought they correctly interpreted its meaning:

For the people there that day, this miracle recalled to mind something from Deuteronomy:

To be honest, they weren’t too far off.

This entire narrative brings recollection of Moses to mind, especially when we add the next sign of Jesus walking on the water (which we will look at in two weeks) and the passage telling about the next day: their response to the miraculous feeding.

Notice in the whole passage how it has echoes of Moses:

Moses led a great crowd in the wilderness; Jesus had a great crowd (not quite as large) in the wilderness;

Moses led the people at the time of the Passover; Jesus was leading the people at the time of the Passover;

In Moses’ time, God fed the people with miraculous bread, in fact as much as they wanted each day; Jesus fed the people with as much bread and fish as they wanted;

The context of the passage from Deuteronomy was in fact Moses; and now they were applying it to Jesus;

Moses walked through the sea; Jesus walked on the sea;

Moses had been approved by God to lead the people; Jesus had God’s seal of approval on Him.

Manna from Moses’ time was “bread from heaven;” but Jesus now said that the true bread from heaven had been given by the Father, Jesus Himself: the bread of life.

They interpreted the miracle as being that one like Moses had come.

But instead, Jesus’ miraculous sign showed that He was greater than Moses.

He didn’t just come to satisfy physical hunger, but to deliver the people from spiritual starvation.

The people who ate manna got hungry again.

Since Jesus is the bread of life, the one who comes to Him will never hunger again, because He meets their spiritual hunger with Himself.

This is because He is not only the Bread of Life, but He is also the Living Water and the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world through His substitutionary death.

His death paid the price for sin, my sin and your sin, so that we can be right with God again.

And Jesus rose from the grave, beating death.

And He said that the only thing that God wants from us is our trusting faith.

That’s how we’re made right with Him: we surrender to Him in faith, turning from our sin, trusting Him to save us because He is both our Savior and Lord.

This is the hope of the Gospel.

But they misinterpreted this sign and the hope that accompanied it.

The people were so excited about what they perceived to be the arrival of one like Moses that they wanted to force Jesus to become their political king right then and there.

But Jesus didn’t do the sign so that they would make Him their earthly king.

He did it to prove that He was the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the Almighty Maker of Heaven and Earth, and the Christ, the Messiah.

He didn’t come to merely fix Israel’s political state.

He came to provide the means to fix everyone’s spiritual state.

So knowing what they were thinking, Jesus withdrew up onto a mountain by himself until nightfall.

Remember in the first week, I said that it’s important that we interpret Jesus’ signs correctly: they always point to His identity as Messiah and God.

This is how they should have interpreted Jesus’ mighty work.

We’re going to mostly be looking at the responses the next day for the rest of our message this morning.

2) The people didn’t want to follow Jesus: they just wanted Jesus to provide for their wants.

Example of Danny Kelley (don’t say the last name).

When I lived in Silver City, Danny moved in when I was probably in the 8th grade.

He was a couple of years younger than I was.

But he had some really cool stuff.

He had a pool table.

He had an actual pinball machine.

The thing was (and I take no pleasure in saying this) that I wasn’t really interested in hanging out with Danny himself (we didn’t really have much in common), but I really liked the things that hanging out with Danny got me.

So I would hang out with him, but usually only on my terms, which almost always included being at his house.

I admit it, it wasn’t nice.

Was I the only person who had a friend like this?

The reality for the people who were fed at this miraculous sign was that they really didn’t want Jesus Himself, they wanted what He could give them.

They had hung around the night before long enough to know that Jesus had gone off by Himself and that His disciples had left in the boat.

They probably expected to find Jesus on the shore at some point the next day.

When they didn’t find Him, they went searching for Him, finding Him over near or in Capernaum.

Oddly enough, even though they had made incredible declarations the day before, the reference to Him as prophet or king are both gone, replaced with “rabbi:”

Jesus isn’t messing around.

He sees right through them to the truth of why they were pursuing Him: they want more free food.

The problem with the people was that they wanted to be around Jesus, but they wanted to be around Jesus on their terms.

They wanted the free food, the blessings that Jesus brought with Him, but they didn’t actually want Him.