I Corinthians 10:14-22 John 6:43-59

A little old lady got on an airplane to go visit her grandchildren. Though she had done this many times, flying always made her nervous. So she took her Bible with her. As the pilots would fire up the engines, she would pull out her Bible and begin to read. As she did this on this particular day, the man sitting next to her was a non-believer and he thought that he would make fun of her. So as they took off, he said to her, “Do you really believe that stuff in that book?” And she said, “Oh yes. I do. Absolutely!” He said, “Well, what about the Jonah story? Do you really think a fish could eat a person and regurgitate him back up on the shore?” She said, “Oh yes. I believe that.” He said, “How could that happen? Why wasn't he totally destroyed by gastric juices and those kinds of things?” She said, “I don't know. But when I get to heaven, I'll ask Jonah how that happened.” The man said, “What if he doesn't get to heaven?” She said, “Well then, you'll have to ask him.”

The Bible does have some interesting stories like that that we can't explain in human terms. The I AM passage that we are studying this morning is one like that, I AM the Bread of Life. The Jews took Jesus' words literally and had a picture in their mind of cannibalism it seems. Actually, it was understandable. The Greek word for eating my flesh is trogon which literally means chew. So Jesus is saying in this passage  if you do not chew my flesh, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever chews my flesh will have eternal life. The Bible reports then that this was the time when many of His followers left Him.

There were three types of followers that left. The first were materialists. These were the ones who were expecting Jesus to supply material abundance. They challenged Jesus by saying, “Moses had manna. How are you going to feed us? Are you going to give us bread daily like Moses did?” Jesus said, “No. My food is spiritual food.” But their minds couldn't make that transition that His kingdom was not of this world. And yet it existed in this world. They couldn't understand that. So the materialist left. Today, we have materialists, too, who are extremely upset about the economy. Perhaps their income and their investments have dropped. They are in trouble. They pray to God to correct this trouble. But Jesus has always provided enough. The question is, what is enough? Do we keep our house over our head? Do we keep the food on our table? But again, Jesus is talking about spiritual feeding here. He will take care of us as you recall. He says that even the hairs on your head are numbered and the birds of the air are taken care of and the lilies of the valley are taken care of. So why wouldn't He take care of us as well? But the focus shouldn't be on the material gain. The focus is on spiritual gain.

The second group of people that left Jesus at this time are the legalists. The legalists are those who were looking for a charismatic leader who would come out with a kind of cookbook recipe that you could follow of works. That is when I do these good works, then I will be guaranteed of my salvation. But Jesus is not catering to the legalists. In fact, He condemned legalists. What He said was, “What I give you is freedom&freedom from the law, freedom from judgment, and I don't like those who would have you follow a cookbook recipe to get into heaven. They understood this and decided it would be easier to follow a list of do's and don'ts and a charismatic leader who gave me do's and don'ts than it would be for me to have a relationship with Jesus, to take Jesus in somehow, to have the spiritual relationship in faith as a source of salvation.

The last group of people to leave Jesus at this time is the group that I would call the sensationalists. These are the ones who want constant miracles and constant signs. This I AM passage where He says, “I AM the Bread of Life” comes right after having fed 5000. Now in those days, they only counted the men so there was a good possibility that women and children were present, too. So the number may have been 8  10 thousand people that he fed. That was a huge sign! But isn't it amazing that it was not enough for the sensationalists? They asked for more signs and continual signs. So there are people in church today who are materialists or people in church today who are legalists or people in church today who are sensationalists, who still leave Jesus. Jesus makes it a little more complicated than that but more beautiful.

When He was with the woman at the well, the apostles came back from purchasing food in town and saw Him speaking to the woman. They said, “Master, You've got to leave this place and come eat with us.” His answer was, “My food is more than physical. I am fed by spiritual food which you cannot see.” We are fed by His spiritual food as well.

In this I AM passage where He is describing I AM the Bread of Life, He was foreshadowing the communion service. It had not yet been instituted as that took place at the Last Supper. In His mind, He was saying, “There will be a way where I request you to frequently call to mind the spiritual food which I give you. And that spiritual food is connection with me.” Last week, we talked about the I AM passage, I AM the True Vine, where Jesus made the point that we are to abide in Him. Continuing that idea with I AM the Bread of Life, we hear Jesus say, “My flesh is food indeed. My blood is drink indeed. Unless a person eat my flesh and drink my blood, they shall not have life within them.” He was saying that we come to the communion table to be filled with Him, to have Him abide in us, to be within us. This is a spiritual event that we experience. We are not cannibals. We are not eating His physical flesh here but we are taking in His spiritual presence. This is one of the greatest gifts that He could give us, that we unite with Him; we become one with Him. We are fed spiritually by Him. He makes this so important that we are to repeat the Lord's supper often and we are to approach it with great dignity.

In the Corinthian reading that Jill Parsons read a few minutes ago, we discovered the importance of the Lord's Supper. It is interesting that the Corinthian community was quite carnal. In fact, they had turned the Lord's Supper into a travesty. This group of people, people like you and like me, had made it kind of a potluck supper. They had done something that was absolutely the reverse of what communion should be. The wealthy people were excluding people who were impoverished. The wealthy people would bring food, great dishes, to be served but they weren't allowing the poor to partake of it. Paul was outraged with this and says so in his letter to the Corinthians. He also says that there are other problems with taking communion or participating in the Lord's Supper that none of us like the Corinthian community should be guilty of. First, becoming too ritualistic. If we make it something that is just a ritual that we do and don't understand the spiritual benefit of uniting with Christ in communion, then we have totally missed the essence of the Lord's Supper. He says the Corinthian community would be indifferent to it. They were more about having a potluck supper with fellowship than they were about registering the fact that Christ was once again making Himself spiritually available to the people, to reside in their hearts, to dwell in their bodies. He said the second thing that the Corinthian community was guilty of was holding on to a spirit of bitterness. He said that when we partake of communion, it is supposed to be a love fellowship that unites all people, that brings people together. If we have any bitterness in our heart, we are to let go of that bitterness before we approach the Lord's Table.

Jesus had said on another occasion that “I want mercy, not sacrifice.” So as we approach the Lord's Table, we are approaching the meal of mercy, not the meal of sacrifice. Yes, it does recall His sacrifice where He gave up His blood for us on the cross. But it is all about God's mercy for us. It is all about how we should have mercy for one another and remove any spirit of bitterness that we might have within us towards people who have harmed us in the past. Forgiveness is one of the great messages of the Bible and God makes forgiveness a part of our salvation. He says that you will be forgiven to the degree that you forgive others. So we cannot approach the Lord's Table without forgiving others. We have to have that spirit of mercy and forgiveness within us.

Then Paul confronted the Corinthians for holding on to a spirit of sin, that they thought that the freedom from the law, the freedom that Christ gave was license. No. It is not license. The freedom that Christ gives is the freedom to choose righteousness, right-ness, the freedom to choose what is good, what is holy, what is respectable. So we are to be giving up sin, discovering it in our lives, moving towards being more and more free of it in our lives as we approach the communion table. No one is perfect. We all sin frequently. There is no doubt about it. We may sin in thought. We may sin in word. We sin in deed. But non-the-less, we are to be moving out of that way of being and working, on becoming more and more pure of heart as we come to the communion table.

Jan and I had an interesting experience yesterday. We attended the funeral of the mother of one of her playmates. It was a fascinating funeral. The crowd was enormous. I have never been to a funeral where there were so many people. I bet there were 600 to 1000 people who came. The line of people waiting to greet the family went on and on and on. The funeral was supposed to start at 12:00 noon and it didn't start until 1:10 pm because the line just wouldn't quit. People kept coming to see this woman and give their condolences to her family. Her name was Joan Crawford. Joan Crawford was remembered by Jan as one of the mothers on her block that made life enjoyable as she took care of her children and invited others to play with them. She became one of the community mothers that everybody loved. She had five children of her own, fourteen grandchildren and three great grandchildren. She was 77 and had been killed in a car accident previously in the week. As the funeral began, the minister said, “Now we will have the grandchildren eulogize her.” I thought, “Oh no.” All fourteen of the grandchildren came up. I thought it would last forever. And it did. And all fourteen grandchildren had something to say. Some of them repeated the things that they said but it was fascinating how they praised their grandmother. They said she was always available for them, that she attended every religious service. She was an extremely spiritual person. She taught them to be spiritual. She clearly was fed by the body of Christ. They also said that she attended every football game or basketball game that the children were in and every dance recital or award dinner that the kid's were involved in. She had sleepovers for the children. She invited them to go on trips with her. She had visited seventeen nations in fifteen countries and had taken some of the grandchildren with her on these trips. They raved on and on about the things that this woman had done. She clearly was a woman filled with life, filled with the life of Christ.

Her husband had died in the eighties so she went on twenty or thirty more years without him. She took over her husband's insurance business. In fact, she has been our insurance representative for as long as Jan and I have been married. She ran a huge insurance company (probably the largest in Northern Kentucky) and did it with absolute integrity and honesty. So a lot of the people that showed up at the funeral were probably her loyal customers as well. The woman was just literally astounding. She was remarkable in all the great things that people said about her. What a fantastic witness of Christendom. How can we follow and emulate something like that? All the grandchildren as they spoke said that they wanted to follow her example, that they wanted to be like she was, that they wanted to be excellent in their businesses when they grew up. They wanted to be kind and generous like she was. So we find examples like that in the Christian community. But not often enough. When we find people who are outstanding in living out their faith, you simply know they have been fed by Christ. These people you know took seriously the communion service when they attended. When they approached the Lord's Supper, they approached that Lord's Supper with the thought that “I am going to allow Christ to dwell within me, to live within me. I am going to make myself one with Him.” This morning, I want to invite you to do that as we continue the service now and we participate in the Lord's Supper. For this is a moment of intimacy with Jesus our Lord, our Savior.