Joh 6:24-35 – Lord, Your Bread and Water Are Enough

Fellow redeemed in Christ,

I don’t know about you, but I don’t think that I would like to be on a bread and water diet. Isn’t that what prisoners got when they misbehaved? On the other hand, we’ve all seen pictures of starving kids on the television. I bet they would love to have bread and water.

When everything is going well for us, it’s hard to think about subsisting on bread and water. That’s the case for us here today. Compared to many in the world, we have everything and it shows in the way we take everything for granted. But just ask someone who went through the Great Depression 85 years ago. When there’s no food, it would be pure joy to have just some bread and water.

Jesus was talking to people in the second group, people who felt the need for food, people who had known a little starvation, who had to work hard just to have daily bread and water. When Jesus compared mankind’s need for Him to the need for food, he compared it to the need for food when you’re starving and the need for water when you’re parched and thirsty, and some of those people listened.

But Jesus was also talking to us. And even though it’s unlikely that any of us will suffer from poverty so deep that we can’t afford bread and water, there will come a time when we all will feel the need for Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

You see, our bread and water, our supermarket groceries, our restaurant food, all this stuff we pile up around ourselves during our lives, will all be for nothing in just a little while. Some day when you are on your deathbed, remember this little sermon, because you will be feeling the need for Jesus.

Most of you came here today for this Bread of Life. Some of you came for social reasons, because you have friends here or because you grew up coming to church on Sunday or because you think it’s doing the works that God requires. I hope that you will enjoy this day that the Lord has made; it is a day for going to church, but it is more than just coming to this place. It is a day for receiving the righteousness that is from God, not for offering up some failed righteousness of our own. So I hope that you will listen to Jesus when He calls Himself the Bread of Life, and I hope that you will hear these words today and remember them.

We need something more than these earthly things around us. All this is spoiling, Jesus says, including us. Once there was a Tree of Life in the midst of the Garden of Eden, but there is nothing earthly anymore that truly has life in it, so that when we eat it we will live.

That’s because there is sin in the world, and where there is sin, there is separation and selfishness and death. Sin causes the spiritual hunger that only Jesus can fill, because it separates us from life and from God. Sin is more than just disobedience. Sin is passed down to us when we are born. It has been in our race since Adam and Eve, and it continues in us. We are born enemies of God. Even the newborn is completely contrary in his heart toward God, and we might be tempted to wonder, “How could such a little one be sinful? She hasn’t done anything,” or “Look at how innocent he is.” But the proof is in the future. Will she die? Will I die? Will you?

God is angry about sin. He doesn’t want anyone to die, but rather, every one of us to have everlasting life. But He also does not overlook sin, and He hates the wicked. We have a spiritual need, don’t we? If you think otherwise, you might as well stop listening now to me and to Jesus. Only the sick need a doctor.

But for those of us who know in our hearts that we need help and that it can’t come from us and that it’s not found in anything earthly, Jesus has the answer. He has the answer for sin. He has the food that will sustain us to eternal life. It’s not the manna from heaven, the physical food that God gave from heaven every day to sustain the Israelites for the years of their wandering. It is spiritual food. It is food that cannot be seen with the eye or understood with the mind. It is food that fills that void in the sinful, starved heart of man.

“The work of God is this: to believe in the one He has sent.” Listen to Jesus, God wants to put faith in your heart if you don’t already have it. It is completely His work. You and I cannot dream up faith on our own or go and get it. Believe. That is God’s command, and it has the power to give you faith. Believe and be baptized. There, too, God works through His Word on the heart, so even the smallest child might be saved. The mind and awareness of all this can come later.

God’s bread and water are Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, because, you see, Jesus took care of our sins. He is God’s own son, and because God so loved the world, He sent His Son to take upon His own shoulders every one of our sins and to receive in His body the punishment for those sins. God the Father poured out all His wrath and anger over sin on His own Son, and Jesus, who is God, took it all to the grave; but then He rose up after three days, for death could not hold God down. So now there is no condemnation for them that are in Christ Jesus. There is your bread, dear Christians, bread for eternal life.

And then Jesus sent the Holy Spirit, the living water that wells up in us to eternal life. He sent the Spirit to come and work in our hearts through His Word and through the Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, so that we are constantly refreshed, so that our faith is renewed unto eternal life.

Lord, your bread and water are enough. Christians, our prayer today is that we would hear, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the bread and water that are from God, so that we would be strengthened and ready for eternity, and so that we can be like the disciples who took the bread from the five loaves that Jesus broke and distributed to the thousands who sat on that grassy hilltop to listen to Jesus’ Word. Today let us rejoice that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit have given us our daily bread and water. Amen.