Daily Scripture
John 6:27-50
27 Don’t work for the food that doesn’t last but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Human One [or Son of Man] will give you. God the Father has confirmed him as his agent to give life.”
28 They asked, “What must we do in order to accomplish what God requires?”
29 Jesus replied, “This is what God requires, that you believe in him whom God sent.”
30 They asked, “What miraculous sign will you do, that we can see and believe you? What will you do? 31 Our ancestors ate manna in the wilderness, just as it is written, He gave them bread from heaven to eat” [Psalm 78:24]. 32 Jesus told them, “I assure you, it wasn’t Moses who gave the bread from heaven to you, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. 33 The bread of God is the one who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”
34 They said, “Sir [or Lord], give us this bread all the time!”
35 Jesus replied, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. 36 But I told you that you have seen me and still don’t believe. 37 Everyone whom the Father gives to me will come to me, and I won’t send away anyone who comes to me. 38 I have come down from heaven not to do my will, but the will of him who sent me. 39 This is the will of the one who sent me, that I won’t lose anything he has given me, but I will raise it up at the last day. 40 This is my Father’s will: that all who see the Son and believe in him will have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.”
41 The Jewish opposition grumbled about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.”
42 They asked, “Isn’t this Jesus, Joseph’s son, whose mother and father we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”
43 Jesus responded, “Don’t grumble among yourselves. 44 No one can come to me unless they are drawn to me by the Father who sent me, and I will raise them up at the last day. 45 It is written in the Prophets, And they will all be taught by God [Isaiah 54:13]. Everyone who has listened to the Father and learned from him comes to me. 46 No one has seen the Father except the one who is from God. He has seen the Father. 47 I assure you, whoever believes has eternal life. 48 I am the bread of life. 49 Your ancestors ate manna in the wilderness and they died. 50 This is the bread that comes down from heaven so that whoever eats from it will never die.
Reflection Questions
Jesus' ministry attracted a lot of attention. A large crowd was positively impressed when Jesus fed them miraculously—but they wanted him to be a political king who changed their circumstances, not a spiritual king who changed their hearts. (If he were ministering today, you might expect the major news outlets to discuss the political or financial impact of his latest miracle or healing.) But the people’s earthbound outlook got in the way of Jesus' desire to share the truth of God’s eternal world. “Believe in him whom God sent,” he pleaded. “I am the bread of life.” Pastor Hamilton wrote, “In his words, ‘I am the bread of life,’ Jesus draws from the Passover seder and the manna by which God sustained the Israelites in the wilderness. He does so to point to the deliverance he will bring by his death, and the way ongoing belief in him sustains his disciples.”*
- Jesus invited his hearers to choose what kind of "food" they valued most: "Don't work for the food that doesn't last but for the food that endures for eternal life" (verse 27). Physical food isn’t bad—he’d just fed the hungry crowd with bread and fish—but it doesn’t give lasting life. How clear is your sense of the two kinds of food Jesus spoke of? Jesus said, “I am the bread of life.” In what ways are you regularly nourishing yourself spiritually on him? Our communion service is about Jesus as the “bread of life.” How can having bread and grape juice be, not just a tiny snack in church, but what Methodism’s founder John Wesley called a “means of grace,” a way of taking in God’s love and life? In what ways does the physical act of eating and drinking, which Jesus used as a symbol, help you to fill your inner self with Jesus' forgiving, strengthening grace and love?
Prayer
Lord Jesus, thank you for offering yourself as the bread of life. Help me to trust you with my heart, my life. Satisfy my inner hunger—fill the God-shaped hole inside me. Amen.
* Adam Hamilton, John: The Gospel of Light and Life. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2015, p. 67.) For a more detailed study of John 6, see pp. 64-68.
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“I am the bread of life” - Leawood - Church of the Resurrection
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