The problem with most unbelievers, and many Christians is not that the Christmas message is powerless, but the problem is that we don’t really want to be changed. “You will seek me and find me (Jeremiah 29:13) when you seek me with all your heart.” When you want with all your heart to rid yourself of what is evil and undesirable, God will give you the Christmas gift of change.

When a person admits that Jesus is God and commits their life to him, that means a change of life is coming, and to many of only want what we want, not really what God wants, unless He changes our heart.

The reality of it is, you and I will do exactly what we want to do, God does not make us do one thing. Unless our wants change, we will continue to do exactly what we want, regardless of any miracle we might see God do.
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John 6:26 Jesus answered them and said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Ye seek me, not because ye saw signs, but because ye ate of the loaves, and were filled. 27Work not for the food which will perish, but for the food which abideth unto eternal life, which the Son of man shall give unto you: for him the Father, even God, hath sealed. 28They said therefore unto him, What must we do, that we may work the works of God?

29Jesus answered and said unto them, This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent.

30They said therefore unto him, What will you do for a sign that we may see, and believe you? what work, what miracle will you do? 31Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, He gave them bread out of heaven to eat.

32Jesus therefore said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, It was not Moses that gave you the bread out of heaven; but my Father giveth you the true bread out of heaven. 33For the bread of God is that which cometh down out of heaven, and giveth life unto the world. 34They said therefore unto him, Lord, evermore give us this bread. 35Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall not hunger, and he that believeth on me shall never thirst. 36But I said unto you, that ye have seen me, and yet believe not.

37All that which the Father giveth me shall come unto me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out. 38For I am come down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me. 39And this is the will of him that sent me, that of all that which he hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up at the last day. 40For this is the will of my Father, that every one that sees the Son, and believes in him, should have eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.

It’s a remarkable thing that in our relatively prosperous, industrialized, urban cities today, we entertain ideas about food that no culture has ever entertained before and which millions in the so-called Two-Thirds World would find very strange.

Ask any 5-year-old in the US, “Where does food come from?” and he or she is likely to say, “Kroger, Publix,” or whatever your local grocery store is and not likely to say, “From plants and animals.” Because we’re so urban, we think food grows in plastic if we’re 5 years old.

Ask someone from a very agrarian part of the Two-Thirds World, “What do you think the staple diet is in many parts of the world the answer is unequivocal. Rice or yams. In some places you reply with two words: rice and fish, rice and beans.

Ask this question, “What happens to our food if there is a catastrophic drought or a ravaging flood?” The prices go up. It depends a bit on where the flood is, perhaps. Maybe our citrus fruits have to be flown in from somewhere else, and as a result, it’s a bit more expensive, but in many parts of the world and throughout most of history, the answer would be, “Well, you starve.”

“Why do we work?” A necessary evil in order to make money. To buy things. Until fairly recent times on the historical scale for the vast majority of humankind, about 70 or 80 percent of your work effort was compensated for in food.

Then, and still in a few places, it took 70 or 80 percent of your income, however paid to you, just to buy the food for you and your family to live. In that kind of world, you say, “Why do you work?” and the answer is, “To eat.” We just don’t even think in those categories today.

What’s your favorite snack food? “Snack food?”

For billions of people today the notion of snack food is totally unfamiliar, and if they understood it, they would think it bizarre. By and large, they’re appropriate to our industrialized society.

In the first century when this was written, there were assumptions about food everywhere that are entirely strange and unheard to us.

There are three different things we have to understand about the background of the culture and about this passage before we’re going to understand what Jesus conceivably meant when he said things like, “You have to eat my flesh and drink my blood.”

Food, in the ancient world, was what you worked for.

Bread was what sustained you. It was the staple diet.

Just before these verses, Jesus has performed a miracle. That is, he has actually provided food for 5,000 or more people miraculously. From their point of view, it doesn’t just mean another meal. From their point of view, it indicates someone who has the power immediately to increase their income. Jesus feeding them, was wealth untold.

Concerning the remarks about mana, there was a part of Jewish history that anybody in the crowd would have understood. When the Jews had first escaped slavery in Egypt and were on the backside of the desert heading for what became their homeland, God, according to the Bible, at one point began to provide them with something called manna. What is it? It was a bread-like thing that sustained them. It provided them with enough to live on while they were traversing this desert.

That went on for a long time, and it was so bound up with their understanding of their origins (God helping them escape from slavery and providing them with enough to eat with this manna) that they envisaged a time again when God would provide them with enough to eat.

Jesus is the one who gives God’s life to us because he is God’s manna.

Jesus has come to the west side of Lake Galilee, and they don’t know how he got there, so they ask him, “Rabbi, teacher, when did you get here?”

“You are looking for me, not because you saw miraculous signs, but because you ate the loaves and had your fill.” Of course, on one level, they did see the miraculous sign (that was the whole point), but they saw it as something which provided them with something that was just too good to be true. They didn’t see the significance. They didn’t see what it pointed to.

They saw it as that which gave them not only full bellies, but if it could be reduplicated and reduplicated and become standard policy, It would just about double their income. It would change the whole purpose of work. It would resolve any fears of famine and poverty, and it would make them amongst the surrounding nations a wonderfully rich culture.

Jesus questions their motives. “You don’t really understand what that miracle signified, what sign was bound up with it, what it pointed to. You just are looking for me because you had your tummies full.” He adds, “Do not 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.”

He is trying to say, “Think through carefully what you saw. What you saw points to who I am.

You have to come to grips with who I am and what I’m claiming.” He’s trying to get away from their filled stomachs and their potential increased income to reflecting on who he is altogether,

but they have just picked up the word work. “Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life.” They pick up that word, and they say, “Okay. What must be do to do the works God requires?”

There are a lot of people who think religion is like that.

They say religion is a question of some leader or other saying, “Do the following things, obey the following rules, submit yourself to the following seat of discipline, do the following works and then you’ll know God or you’ll be enlightened or you’ll be on an inside track to the heavenlies or you will be absorbed into the universe,” or whatever it is in the particular religion that is promised. “Just tell us what to do and we’ll do it.” That is the way a lot of people view religion, and it goes further.

Religion is seen as a kind of balancing act. We all do some negative thing and we all do some nice things. Religion comes along and tells you what nice things to do, and if you do enough of those, then on balance it works out so that on the last day you meet God or you enter nirvana or whatever it is, and it’s going to tilt in your favor. Today we go further and say, “If there’s a God, not only will it tilt in your favor, but if perhaps it doesn’t quite tilt in your favor, God is so kind he’ll make the books balance out in any case.”

“God is good, and he’s bound to forgive us in any case. That’s his job.”

Jesus won’t have any of that thinking, so He corrects it. He says, “This is the work of God: to believe in the one he has sent.” In other words, the work God demands is not having enough brownie points to squeak in. He says, “What God demands is that you believe in the one he has sent, namely Jesus himself.” (Verse 29)

Sooner or later, if you’re going to come to terms with the historical Jesus, you have to come to terms with his extraordinary claims. He’s the sort of man before whom you ultimately bow and say, “Yes, Lord,” or whom you have to write off as a nut case. There really is no in-between ground.

“The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent, namely me,” they say, in effect, “Well, if you demand that we trust you, if you demand that we believe you, you must do something to validate yourself. You must do something to give us confidence that we should trust you.” So they say, “What miraculous sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do? We’ll give you a hint. Our forefathers ate the manna in the desert.”

They’re coming back to their tummies again. “ ‘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 was God himself. Don’t idolize these human heroes. He says, “The real bread from heaven is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”

He’s talking about himself,

One of the things Jesus does as he refers to their Bible, the Bible he shares with them, again and again and again is say that Old Testament institutions and rites and events are not just discrete bits of history, but they have the habit of weaving forward into a story that actually points to him.

Here he’s doing it with respect to manna. He’s saying, “It’s not just a question of God having provided this funny stuff called manna in the Old Testament. If you really understand how that fits in the whole stream of that story, you’ll discover it’s pointing forward to me. I’m the real manna, and I don’t just sustain your physical life on the backside of a desert. I give you real life.” That’s his claim. In other words, his first claim as he interacts with his interlocutors here is that he himself is God’s manna. That’s why he can give eternal life.

Jesus is the one who gives God’s life to us because he does his Father’s will

“I am the bread of life.” In other words, it’s not just that he provided them with some bread the day before; he’s claiming not that he provides bread but that he is the Bread. In other words, the significance of the bread the day before is that it pointed to him, who is the real Bread.

He says, “He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.”

He’s dealing in the metaphorical world. He’s not really suggesting you take a chunk of Jesus and chew him, but when he unpacks what he means by this, he says in effect, “If you come to terms with the fact that I am the Bread of Life, if you receive this life from me, you will come to me as the source of real, eternal life. You will come to me. You will believe in me. You will trust me. You will abandon yourself to me.”

There is a second point he wants to clear up with them. They have said (verse 34), “From now on give us this bread,” because they’re still thinking in terms of yesterday’s miracle, so what they want him to do is to do it again and again and again and again. “Do it nationally. Set this up as a whole campaign for providing bread for the whole nation so that now work can provide a lot of wealth. Do it again and again and again!”

There is a sense in which he gives you the life so dramatically, so tellingly, so conclusively that you pass over from death to life. It transforms your whole orientation. It’s not just that such a person is changed, but changed so decisively that you can’t repeat that change. To use the later term for such a person, the Christian still has to grow, of course.

Nevertheless, the change is so dramatic that it’s not as if you take this eternal life from Jesus today and then you die by tonight. Then you go back to him and get another bite tomorrow and have life again. Then you forget it the next day and go back to him the day after that and get another chunk of spiritual life from Jesus. He’s saying that’s not the way it is.

Even that miracle bread in the Old Testament, It just fed you for today or tomorrow.

It didn’t solve the problem.” He is saying, “But you come to me and it so revolutionizes your life, it so changes things around, you stop being hungry in this arena again. You stop being thirsty.” That has often been the testimony of Christians across the centuries.

Some of you have been on spiritual journeys for a long time, and you’ve tried this or that or the other and it has helped. It has genuinely helped! You found it useful for some period of time. Then it just sort of petered out. It sort of proved empty, either not intellectually satisfying or a bit artificial, ascetic but not fulfilling, or rich but not disciplined. Let me tell you, Jesus provides a kind of life that is transforming. That’s what he’s on about here. When you come to terms with that kind of life you don’t hunger again.

Now he explains the matrix in which he mediates this life. He says, “Look. I told you. You’ve seen me. You’ve seen the sign from yesterday. You still don’t believe,

Now he’s hinting at something, He’s not just an ordinary man. His origins are in heaven itself. He is one with God. He has come to us to do his Father’s will, and his Father’s will is, of all those whom the Father has given him he shouldn’t lose one. Then he repeats the point in he doesn’t view his mission as a failure just because some people don’t believe in him.

Jesus wants these people to raise their horizons beyond more bread and beyond evaluating Jesus into a whole vision of what is really required, and what is required is for God himself to do something spectacular that changes men and women.

Jesus is the one who gives God’s life to us because he reveals God to us.

“They began to grumble about him because he said, ‘I am the bread that came down from heaven.’ They said, ‘Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, “I came down from heaven?”

But if he claims he stands over them or that he has an authority over them or that he reveals something they can’t otherwise know, then they’re affronted, because they can no longer stand in judgment of him; he’s now standing in judgment of them. It is more than they can handle, as far as they’re concerned, they know his background. They know where he was brought up. They know the family background. “How dare he put on such pretensions?”

New Testament Christianity is a revelatory religion. That is, it’s a revelatory historical religion. It depends absolutely on God having disclosed himself in real history, in real time-space history, and because these things take place in real time-space history, you can approach these matters of Christian claims by examining the witnesses and examining the sources and seeing if they make sense and seeing what coherence there is.

The Christian’s response to that must be, “You don’t really understand. This God made you, and you owe him. The very fact that you don’t think so is already a measure of how lost you are. Your whole orientation is so self-focused and so bound up with your own assessment of things that you go and stand over against him and you make your judgments of him when the reality is exactly the reverse. He stands in judgment of you.” That’s the nature of the Christian claim from revelation. It can be examined. It’s in the historical arena.

Now he quotes Scripture, “It is written in the Prophets: ‘They will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who listens to the Father and learns from him comes to me. No one has seen the Father except the one who is from God; only he has seen the Father.” He’s claiming this unique revelatory claim for himself. “I tell you the truth, he who believes has everlasting life. I am the bread of life.”

Jesus is the one who gives God’s life to us because he gives his life on our behalf. He lives so we die. That, in fact, is where the metaphor comes from. When you read these verses from 49 down to the end, they’re pretty grotesque to our way of thinking, aren’t they? All this emphasis on eating my flesh and drinking my blood sounds vaguely cannibalistic, doesn’t it?

Suppose after this meeting you go out and go to McDonald’s, that great icon of American culture, and you order a Big Mac. What will you eat? You will eat, in fact, dead cow, dead barley, dead lettuce, dead tomatoes, and dead pickles. You will eat dead peppers. Everything you eat in there is dead except for a few minerals like salt, of which there is too much. That’s what you will eat.

The person brought up on the farm, the person brought up in an agrarian society knows the only reason we stay alive is because something else living dies. Either the carrots die or I do. If you don’t like carrots, make it cows or rabbits or chickens. Either they die or I do. I can’t live on silicon. I can’t live on sea water. I live on living things. Either they die or I do.

Within this context of the first century, Jews had a staple diet: bread and fish, the very things Jesus multiplied the day before. Now he says, “I am the bread of life.” If my wife hurriedly leaves a note saying, “Don, on your way home today make sure you pick up some bread,” and I go into the store in metro Chicago, I look at these racks of bread (about 200 brands … purple packages and green packages and striped packages).

When Jesus comes in this agrarian, first-century society and he says, “I am the bread of life; you either eat me or you’re dead,” the metaphor has power. Either he dies or we do. We live because he dies. That’s the way it is. In that sense, you see the picture, the fulfillment of the Old Testament manna.

What he’s promising is not simply some kind of immortality beyond death here. He’s claiming in light with the whole sweeping message of the Scripture that, finally, God by Jesus Christ gives us not only eternal life now so that we already begin to partake of the life of the age to come but at the very end, he gives us a new heaven and a new earth, a renovated universe, new bodies, a resurrection life, all because he dies in our place. He takes our death.

We deserve to die, but instead he dies and takes our death. He takes our shame. He takes our punishment.

(1) Is our religion for us or for God? The prophet Zechariah faithfully conveys God’s question to the delegates of the exiles: when across seventy years (i.e., from 587) they faithfully fasted on certain days, thinking those were the “proper” days, did they do so primarily as an act of
devotion to God, or out of some self-centered motivation of wanting to feel good about themselves (7:5–7)? Fasting may be no more than self-pity, or faithfulness to a cultural mandate, or passive acceptance of tradition. How much of the religious practice was offered to God?

(2) Does our religion elevate ritual above morality? That is the burden of Zechariah’s stinging review of earlier Jewish history (7:8–12). Implicitly, Zechariah is asking if their concern for liturgical uniformity is matched by a passionate commitment to “show mercy and compassion to one another,” and to abominate the oppression of the weak and helpless in society (7:9–10). Indeed, a genuinely moral mind extends to inner reflection: “In your hearts do not think evil of each other” (7:10). Implicitly, Zechariah asks us precisely the same questions.

(3) Does our religion prompt us passionately to follow God’s words, or to pursue our own religious agendas? “When I called, they did not listen; so when they called, I would not listen” (7:13), the Lord Almighty announces. Passionate intensity about the details of religion, including liturgical reformation, is worse than useless if it is not accompanied by a holy life. In true religion, nothing, nothing at all, is more important than whole-hearted and unqualified obedience to the words of God.

The message of Christmas from Christ this morning is that what is good and precious in your life need never be lost, and what is evil and undesirable in your life can be changed.

Many words in this script come from D. A. Carson. Thank God for men like him who are gifted and help us understand the difficulties of some of God’s Word.