John 6:41-46 “At this the Jews 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’? Stop grumbling among yourselves,’ Jesus answered. ‘No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day. 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”

What do we think we know? Have you ever shared a story you received by email or social media because it seemed sensible, only to find out later it was an urban myth? Those of you who are old enough to remember, were you taken in by the Y2K scare at all? There were all kinds of apocalyptic predictions about the fall of civilization when New Year’s Eve 1999 gave way to New Year’s Day 2000. Computers were supposed to be confused by the year being rendered “00″ in their systems. Would they think that we had gone back to the year 1900 and crash? I don’t remember hearing of a single problem.

Examples of relatively smart people believing relatively dumb things due to incomplete information can be multiplied many times over. The history of science is full of such stories, right up to the present day. Theology and faith are no exceptions. My way of trying to understand Jesus’ two natures as God and man through my teens and early twenties turned out to be an ancient Christian heresy called Apollinarianism. I learned about my error in a college class on the Nicene Creed. I wasn’t trying to be a heretic. I just wasn’t familiar with some of the Biblical material yet that made my idea wrong. I’m not saying we can’t know anything, but, as Donald Rumsfeld once observed, “We don’t know what we don’t know.” A little humility is always in place, no matter how much we think we know.

That was the problem for the people grumbling at Jesus, wasn’t it. You know the answer to their question, “How can he now say, ‘I came down from heaven?’” because you know the Christmas story. Joseph was only his stepfather. Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit. But that wasn’t widely known by most people during his lifetime. Maybe they should have asked. Then their refusal to believe in Jesus wouldn’t have been made worse by their spiritual ignorance.

Jesus hints at this in his response to them. Maybe if these people had looked more carefully at what the prophets wrote about the Messiah; maybe if they had learned what God had told them in the Old Testament Scriptures; maybe if they had come to Jesus with open hearts and minds and asked him, he could have explained it to them, since he is the only one who had actually seen the Father. But they hadn’t been taught by God. They hadn’t listened to the Father. They hadn’t learned from him. They hadn’t come to Jesus. So they lived with their spiritual ignorance and they refused to believe in Jesus.

We aren’t saved by how much we know. Simple little children often have a stronger, healthier faith than their smarter, skeptical parents. But spiritual ignorance and biblical illiteracy still get in the way of faith for many people today. It leads them to take offense at things they only think the Bible teaches. It leads them to see Bible contradictions that don’t really exist. There are too many examples to try to create a list.

But the solution doesn’t start with pointing the finger at them. It starts with listening to what God the Father says in his word ourselves, learning from him, and coming to Jesus in faith. Then we will be prepared to confront spiritual ignorance, in love, for people who refuse to believe.

John 6:37-38 “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away. For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me.’”

If the evidence of Jesus’ power does not convince people. If his words of promise are challenged or ignored, what hope is left? “All that the Father gives me will come to me.”

We like to think of ourselves as free and independent. Like most teens I was in hurry to get my license, and then my own car, so that I could come and go as I wanted. I found the girl of my dreams when I was in high school and married her by the time I was twenty-three. I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do with my life in grade school and pursued my goal until I graduated from the seminary with a masters of divinity. I was senior pastor of a large congregation with a school by the time I was twenty-eight.

No one “made” me do any of this, and it felt like I was behind the steering wheel driving this life the whole way, making my own choices, doing my own work. Maybe your own life feels the same way, or did at one point in time.

But it is all largely an illusion. People were shaping and influencing me. Some doors opened, while others closed. God was at work, guiding and shepherding me on the path that brought me to this very day.

If that is true of the content and features of our external lives, how much more so the inner life of faith. Jesus made it amply clear that none of us comes to God under our own power on our own terms. A few verses later he tells this crowd, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.” It is an interesting word he uses for “draw.” This is not draw in the sense of urging or enticing. In secular Greek, this is the word you use for dragging a boat up on shore. Have you ever tried to handle a boat like that? It doesn’t exactly help or cooperate in the process. It’s awkward and heavy. Although we don’t want to say that God forced us to faith against our will, he was still the one at work forming and shaping that will, working the miracle by which he dragged us to Jesus and his grace.

So Jesus sees our coming to him as the Father’s work, not our own. “All that the Father gives me will come to me.” We may doubt, and challenge, and question, like the skeptics in this crowd. But God the Father still has the final say over our hearts and lives. As a gift of his grace to us, he makes a gift of us to his Son. By directing our lives and exposing us to his word and sacrament he drags us to Jesus and makes us his own by faith.

And Jesus isn’t disappointed or embarrassed by the gift his Father gives him, “And whoever comes to me I will never drive away.” Jesus is nothing but pleased to have us, no matter who we are, no matter how we have come. In the book The Hammer of God there is a scene in which a younger pastor is telling an old pastor, a little too proudly, that he is a believer, and that he has given Jesus his heart. “One does not choose a Redeemer for oneself,” the old pastor tells him, “nor give one’s heart to him. The heart is rusty old can on a junk heap. A fine birthday gift, indeed! But a wonderful Lord passes by, and has mercy on the wretched tin can, sticks his walking cane through it and rescues it from the junk pile and takes it home with him. That’s how it is” (p. 147).

So God’s own intervention has made us to belong to him. He has changed our hearts, which are inclined to refuse to believe.

John 6:34 “‘Sir,’ they said, ‘from now on give us this bread.’ Then Jesus declared, ‘I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.’”

For a moment, a crowd that had been asking Jesus all the wrong questions seemed to get some clarity. They finally ask Jesus for something that made sense.

This was a wholesome and helpful request. Just give us the bread we need from God. Perhaps they didn’t understand yet what it was, but at least they asked for the right thing.

Jesus confirmed rather than confronted the wholesome request. “He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.” I have often said that when I first experienced a hospital devotion on the receiving end, when my son was in the hospital as a baby fighting for his life, having that Word of God was like food. Then my pastor was not teaching me theological truths I had never heard before. He didn’t come and teach a Bible class. He certainly wasn’t there to attempt a miracle and heal my son.

 He brought me and my family Christ. For a few precious minutes he led us to the foot of the cross, where Jesus disposed of all our sins and restored our place in God’s family under his love. He took us to the empty tomb where we could be sure that whether my child lived or died, he would live forever, and we would live forever with him. In those brief words of promise I was not looking for an education, or advice, or proof. I just wanted my Savior. I wanted Jesus. And that is what I found, enough bread to fill my hungry soul and drink to satisfy its thirst.

That is still the reason worth coming to Jesus for. May God give us an appetite always hungry for this Bread of Life, and always satisfied by the Savior who meets our need.

John 6:30-33 “So they asked him, ‘What miraculous sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do? 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 bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.’”

Jesus called for these people to put their faith in him. But before they were ready to do that, they wanted more proof. They wanted a sign. They were seeking wonders, a spectacle to convince them Jesus is the one they should trust.

This crowd says they want a sign. Really? It wasn’t good enough that Jesus just turned five loaves of bread and two fish into a feast for thousands? It wasn’t enough that he had spent the morning and afternoon before that miraculously healing sick people? It wasn’t enough that they had seen him drive out demons in this very synagogue in which they were sitting at this moment? If none of that satisfied them, what sign could possibly be good enough?

The problem was not that Jesus had failed to confirm his claims or his commission with miracles. The problem was that these things can never satisfy the truly skeptical. They aren’t focused on the right thing. They don’t need wonders. They need a relationship. They need love.

They need what a young pastor told an argumentative member of his inquirers class some time ago. “Instead of arguing about all these questions you have, you need to listen like a child for a little while. Just listen like a child. Take it in. Hear the story. Hear what it is saying to you.” And within a few weeks, his argumentative friend didn’t have any questions anymore, at least none he needed to start a fight about. He had gone from skeptic to student, denier to disciple.

As so often, Jesus’ answer did not go where their questions wanted to lead. He takes them away from signs to the thing that can truly feed their faith and nourish the soul. “It is not Moses who has given you bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” Don’t seek signs and wonders. Seek what God himself wants to give you. Seek the One who comes from heaven. Consume his words, his grace, his forgiveness, all freely given.

He can give you life. Listen humbly, simply, and you will find what you are looking for.

John 6: 28-29 “Then they asked him, ‘What must we do to do the works God requires?’ Jesus answered, ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’”

Notice that Jesus’ answer does not line up directly with their question. “Okay, Jesus,” the crowd was saying to him. “We would like to live forever, if that is what you have come to give us. Eternal life sounds good. Tell us what to do. Give us a list. Be our guide. Show us the way.”

The idea that the path back to God and into heaven is a path paved with good deeds and human effort is a foundation stone of fallen human thinking. Essentially, every world religion outside of Christianity adopts this as its core idea. The Judaism of Jesus’ day was infested with it. Even Christians find the concept hard to resist.

This naturally leads to the idea that if Jesus is the Savior, then he is primarily here to show us what to do. His purpose is to show us what to do to make God happy with us again. Again, we Christians easily become infected with this approach. When my wife and I lived in Dallas, a date night often included a couple hours at the flagship store for a chain called Half-Price Books. It has as much square footage as any Walmart Supercenter. When we went, I always made my way over to the Christian book section. There were a few bookcases devoted to what we might call “theology.” But the section that went on for row after row, literally thousands of books? That was called “Christian living.” Much of it might just as well have been titled, “Works Righteousness.”

The futility of this approach was once illustrated by a friend of mine: “You have crashed your car, and you are lying in the driver’s seat unconscious and bleeding, strapped in by your seat belt. The vehicle is on fire and about to explode. Suddenly Jesus comes running down to the car, opens the passenger door, sits next to you, buckles himself in and says, ‘This is how you get out.’ Then he unbuckles his seatbelt, opens his door, and runs away.” That’s no Savior. That’s not even a role model that’s of any use. But that’s essentially what this crowd, and a host of people today, were coming to him for.

So they get the question wrong. And Jesus confronts it like this: “The work of God (note the singular ‘work,’ not the plural ‘works’) is this: to believe in the one he has sent.” It’s not the many things you do. It is the one thing God works in you: faith in Jesus, the Savior he has sent. Jesus was leading them away from a “work-righteous” path to salvation. He was inviting them to trust in him for the things he could do for them: pay for their sins, reconcile them to God, overcome death, and promise eternal life.

Faith isn’t a good work. It is a good gift, worked by the God who sent Jesus to save our souls.

John 6:24-27 “Once the crowd realized that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they got into the boats and went to Capernaum in search of Jesus. When they found him on the other side of the lake, they asked him, ‘Rabbi, when did you get here?’ Jesus answered, “I tell you the truth, you are looking for me, not because you saw miraculous signs but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. 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.’”

A day earlier, Jesus miraculously fed 5000 people with five small loaves of bread and a couple of fish. He wasted no time confronting the motives of those who went looking for him after he and his disciples crossed the Sea of Galilee and went to Capernaum. Did you notice how he threw their question away and went right after their motivations for looking for him? “When did you get here? Well, that isn’t a very interesting topic. It’s not even what they really care about. Let’s not waste time with small talk or chit chat. These people have a spiritual problem and it’s killing their souls.”

That spiritual problem was the worldly reasons they had for coming to Jesus: “You are looking for me, not because you saw miraculous signs but because you ate the loaves and had your fill.” The miracle should have been a spiritual wake up call. All of Jesus’ miracles should have been. They did more than bend the laws of nature. They delivered a message. “This man Jesus is someone worth paying attention to. We should be listening to him and believe what he is teaching. He is obviously more than just another slick salesman trying to get our business. His miracles tell us God the Father has places his seal of approval on him.”

But Jesus understood their real reason for tracking him down. “You ate the loaves and had your fill.” Free food! Think of what we could save on the grocery bill. Free medicine! Think of how healthy we could be, how good we could feel, having this guy around. Free climate control! Think of how much safer we could be having Jesus to put the brakes on dangerous storms around here.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to eat, or having health care, or wanting you and your family to be safe. But Jesus did not come to establish the world’s most successful farm or fairly-priced grocery store chain. He founded no hospitals or clinics, nor did he even visit one himself, so far as we know. After settling down two storms on the Sea of Galilee he never shared with anyone the secret to his meteorological genius. Years later his star missionary Paul reported that he had suffered shipwreck three times.

A not-so-small industry wants to promote Jesus as the secret to a better life now, a higher standard of living, a virtual utopia of ways to improve our lives in this world. That is not merely misinterpreting the man. It is the sin of worldliness, and it threatens to blind us to his real purpose. “Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life.”

Jesus has come to rescue us from life in this world, not to improve it, not to attach us to it more firmly. He came to bring us the grace and mercy of God that guarantees a better life to come. His goal is to get us out of here. His words to this crowd confront our worldly reasons for coming to him.

2 Timothy 4:8 “Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day–and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing.”

The Bible speaks of two kinds of crowns. One is the kind of crown a king wears. It is a symbol of his power and authority. It is usually made of precious metals and crusted with jewels. Jesus wears that kind of crown in heaven. But that is not what Paul is talking about here.

When athletes win a championship or finish first in their event, we give them medals or trophies. The ancients gave them a crown of twigs and leaves. It wasn’t so much a sign of power as a sign of success. That is the kind of crown Paul is talking about here, the kind you might get when you win a race, or perhaps a battle. It’s the crown that says, “You made it! You win!”

The one we get in heaven is made of righteousness. All our life in this world we have had to make do with a borrowed righteousness. Jesus has lent us his. We aren’t righteous because we have stopped sinning, but because Jesus has covered our sins with his blood and dressed us in his own life of love. Today God sees us wrapped and hidden in him. Even when good things come out in my life, it is his life living in me that makes it happen.

But when we get to the finish line, just like Paul, God will say to us, “Here. Have a righteousness of your own. From now on the love you live will be love you produce yourself. The struggle is over. The celebration has begun.” Our crown, the evidence that we live as the victors, will be the righteousness that permeates everything we are and experience. It is the never ending future that will make our Christian life complete.

2 Timothy 4:7 “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”

Don’t misunderstand Paul’s assertions here. He isn’t putting his confidence in himself or boasting about his virtues. He fought the good fight, and it was a fight. You know how he resisted Jesus as a young man. If ever there was an arrogant so-and-so, full of all the wrong kind of self-confidence, it was this same man Paul. Jesus finally had to knock him off his horse in a blaze of light and glory to get his attention, and to show him that in all his self-satisfaction with his own goodness he was just as evil as the most violent or sensuous sinner. “Chief of sinners” he learned to call himself. The fight ended with Paul becoming Jesus’ servant and taking the gospel’s battle for souls to others, fighting inch by inch to reclaim this world of sinners for the Savior who had died to save them all.

We are locked in a fight, a battle for our souls and the souls of others as well. We may share Paul’s weakness for a high opinion of ourselves that doesn’t have much use for a Savior. It’s no secret we Christians have developed a reputation for being a little too pleased with our own goodness. I can’t say the accusation lacks evidence. I think you understand how poisonous to faith such a high regard for self can be.

But there is a ditch on the other side of that road, too. We may be equally as drawn to scratching every itch and satisfying every craving, like the world around us that never met a perverted pleasure it didn’t like. Statistics regarding pornography, premarital sex, and drug and alcohol use make it hard to distinguish Christians from anyone else. These aren’t harmless pastimes. Peter says they wage war on our souls.

Thank God we don’t fight the good fight alone. At the beginning, we don’t fight it at all. Like he did for Paul, Jesus fights to make us his own. He breaks into our lives with his grace. He leads us to the cross where he strips us of our sin and dresses us in his righteousness. He woos and wins our hearts to his side in the struggle between good and evil, heaven and hell. Then he goes with us, he never sends us alone, to fight against temptation and contend to save others, too.   

The picture that follows is similar. “I have finished the race.” First a hard contest, a great struggle, and then a good end. But it all ends this way: “I have kept the faith.” Paul reached the end of his life knowing the truth about Jesus and continuing to trust in it. He not only reached the end, but at the end he still had all he needed to enter the life to come. May Jesus bring us in faith to the end of that race as well.

2 Timothy 4:6 “For I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time has come for my departure.”

Paul’s Second Letter to Timothy has been described as his last will and testament. In a story we know from the end of the book of Acts, Paul had spent two earlier years in prison waiting for a hearing before Nero, the emperor. Paul was released after that stint in prison. Now, five or six years later, Paul was in prison again. After a full and complete life’s journey, this was his last stop.

These words describe his quickly passing final days. Do you understand the picture he paints? When we think about sacrifices and offerings in Bible times, we tend to think about animal sacrifices. You bring a sheep or a calf to the temple. The priests kill it, dress it, and heave it up on an altar with a real fire to cook it.

But not every sacrifice was a blood sacrifice. The Lord also commanded offerings of grain and bread, and oil and wine. The so-called “drink offerings” of wine were poured out in the temple. The whole thing, from a quart to a half gallon, was poured out on the ground. You can picture it, can’t you, the blood red liquid sluicing out of a jar or pitcher, the wide stream narrowing at the end until the last of it leaves the container and falls to the ground? It takes just a few moments and it’s done. And once poured to the ground it is gone and can’t be reclaimed. Any puddle quickly soaks in and disappears.

So Paul pictures his life: going, going, gone. It all passes rather quickly, you can’t stop it, and you can’t get it back. It’s not necessarily a pessimistic picture, but it is a realistic one. It’s a truth with which we all have to come to terms. Our life in this world is pouring out on the ground, it won’t last forever (not this one; not here), and we can’t get it back. What will we do with it in the brief span before its gone?

Too many people treat their time like it is an inexhaustible resource. There will always be tomorrow. It matters little how they fill their time today. We waste our time on mindless distractions, scrolling to the next Facebook post on our phones or clicking on the next YouTube video.

We think we are using it more seriously, that we are adding more value to our lives, when we invest our time to better the quality and comfort of our existence here. We work hard so that we can upgrade our homes, or our cars. We travel to places our parents or grandparents never did. We have things past generations could never even have imagined.

But when the last of our lives comes spilling out of the jar and soaks into the ground, what is the use of all this? Can we trade our possessions or experiences for a place in the life to come? Do they help anyone else get there? Do they make any difference at all in the long view of eternity? “Do not love the world, neither the things that are of the world,” the Apostle John once wrote. “If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world–the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes, and the boasting of what he has and does–comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away…”

You and I have not come to the end yet today. The jar is tipped, the juice is flowing, and the end will come soon enough, maybe sooner than we think. But today we live. Today we can repent of the useless ways we have filled our time and the useless stuff that has filled our lives. Today we can put our faith in God’s grace and receive his pardon. Today, the present, we can concern ourselves with what happens when the last drops of this life disappear, like Paul, so that we can be confident that our departure leads somewhere better—not an empty end, but a new life full of promise.