All right. Have we got this microphone going? Can you all hear? Okay. You'll open your Bibles now to
John Chapter 6. I want to look at a portion of
scripture that caused many of the followers
of our Lord Jesus Christ to turn back and no longer follow him. It's also a truth that misunderstood
by the, particularly the Gentile world, as the gospel was being
preached, they accused the Christians of being cannibals and persecuted
them for it. and it has reference to what
we shall do after the sermon this morning as we
observe the Lord's Table. John 6 is one of the, shall we say, meatiest portions
of Scripture. It seems that at this point in
our Lord's ministry, He had been speaking to people in parables,
illustrations, but now he gets very plain with them. And it's not as though our Lord
was not preaching appropriately before and decides now that he's
gonna have to get plain. He said that one reason he spoke
in parables was so that people seeing would not see. And hearing,
they wouldn't really hear, they wouldn't understand. People think
that the parables were used in order to make the Lord's message
understandable to children and common folk, no. They were designed
specifically to hide the truth from those who were hardened
in heart and had no desire for it in the first place. Now, you
and I, we read the parables, and we can see in them wonderful
illustrations of the truth of the gospel that we believe, and
we delight in them. But the world of our Lord's day,
they heard them, what? Or they hear them such as the
parable of the good Samaritan, and they say, yes, we should
help the downtrodden, and that's all they get out of it. But now here in John 6, the Lord
begins to do, I remember Henry used to put it this way, he says,
we need to hoe some corn. And that meant he was about to
start a message that had some things which were going to be
hard to hear. I don't mean difficult to understand
it, I mean that once his meaning is understood, it will confront
natural thinking. and create what psychiatrists
today call cognitive dissonance, it will clash with human thinking. In particular, it will clash
with human thinking about religion, about God, and about how we as
sinners are made right with God. And it clashes so much that even
many of this, many of them who have been following him, if you
look in verse 60 of John chapter 6, it says, on hearing it, many
of the disciples said, this is a hard teaching. Who can accept
it? Lord, that's hard. Who can take
that? And then it says in verse 66,
from this time, many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed
him. Now, brethren, it is our heart's
desire and prayer to God, is it not, that people be saved.
We've been here a lot of years and most churches would expect,
most church plants would be expected to be a good deal larger than
we are right now. And when you consider that when
it comes to bodies in the pew, there are less of us now than
when we started. And we pray and ask God to add,
to bring people here, to listen to the gospel being preached.
And we pray that God will save them. And when he gives us opportunity
to speak to our friends and families about the gospel and it's our
desire that they'll hear what we say, Believe it and be saved. That's what we desire. But here's
what we should expect. The clearer we preach, the less
people are gonna be interested in what we have to say. Now, we do all we can to avoid
personal offense. We conduct ourselves decently
in the sight of men. We hope over the years, and I'm
using the we to mean simply me, I hope that over the years I've
learned that a gentle answer turns away wrath, that God doesn't
need us to act like bullies, that the preaching of the gospel
is not primarily a ministry of pointing out who's wrong, but
just telling what's right, speaking the truth in love. So we do all we can not to bring
unnecessary offense in the preaching of the gospel, but there is simply
no way to make the gospel inoffensive. You take away the offense of
the gospel, you've robbed it of its power. And so there's simply no reason
to try to take, shall we say, the corners off of the gospel,
the edges off the gospel, hoping, well, you know, that way they
won't get so offended and they'll stick around. That's true. But what they'll stick around
is goats. Paul, in speaking about tongues,
He says, if a trumpet gives an uncertain sound, an indistinguishable
sound, who will know what to do? Well, some have tried to,
shall we say, speak in tongues by taking the gospel and changing
it. It's another language, as it
were. Well, who can react to that uncertain
sound? How can they believe a gospel
that they're not hearing. If we take the edges off of the
gospel in the hope of retaining church members, what we have
done is condemned people to eternal death. The Lord said to one of the prophets,
he says, if you don't warn them, their blood will be on your hands. And so we tell it plainly, even
if we know that the result will be, even some who may have walked
with us for a while, or heard, you know, came and visited a
while and thought it was good, but then all at once, something
becomes awful clear to them, and we see them no more. It doesn't mean we don't care,
but we're not going to change what God has said, simply to
keep from offending the ears of natural men. Now what did
our Lord say that was so offensive? Verse 53, Jesus said to them,
I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son
of Man and drink His blood, You have no life in you. Whoever
eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and I will raise
him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and
my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks
my blood remains in me and I in him. Just as the living Father
sent me, and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds
on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down
from heaven. Your forefathers ate manna and
died, but he who feeds on this bread will live forever. All right, you young folk, listen
to me for just a minute. The Lord says, unless you eat
the flesh of the Son of Man, and Jesus is the Son of Man,
so He's talking about Himself. He says, unless you eat the flesh
of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. Doesn't that sound kind of gross? Eat the flesh, the body, the
muscles of the Lord? and drink his blood? Well, that
sounds like something satanic, doesn't it? That's the kind of things that
you hear about in religions utterly opposed to God. Sacrifices are made, and people
quite literally are called on to drink the blood. And even
the priests in the old tabernacle, the Old Testament temple. Some
of the sacrifices brought there. The meat was given to them for
food. But here our Lord speaks of himself,
a human being, God in human form. He says, unless you eat my flesh
and drink my blood, you have no life in you. No wonder the
Gentiles, when they heard about the way that the Christians worshipped,
not when they went there and observed them. They just heard
that whether they did it every week or once a month like us,
they had a ceremony in which they would, quote, eat the flesh
and drink the blood of Jesus. No wonder they thought they were
cannibals. But our Lord is not speaking
literally here. We are never called upon to eat
human flesh or drink human blood. Never. But these words were shocking
to those that heard it. And they were shocking inasmuch
as no one had ever spoken to them like that before. And it
seemed, does it not, contrary to what he'd said before, the
things he mentioned before, it seems like he's such a gentle,
sweet person. And he says, if you don't eat
my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you. And
so some were offended because they didn't understand. Some
were offended because they did understand. Because what our
Lord is saying in this passage of Scripture, no matter what
else He may be saying, it's simply this, apart from me there is
no life. And he that has me has life. The article that I wrote for
the bulletin this week, the idea that Jesus Christ is necessary
for salvation. You can't have it without him. And then what's more, if you
have him and only him, you have it all. That is foreign. Maybe that's
not the right word. That is offensive to the religious
world. That's offensive to natural man.
To tell a natural man, a person who's not been born of the Spirit
of God, that it's absolutely necessary that you have Christ
in order to be in favor with God, or in God's good graces. They'll say, what do you mean?
You mean you're telling me that you Christians are the only ones
that have the truth? Yeah. That's really not what I'm saying,
but it comes down to that. The Lord Jesus said it rather
plainly a few chapters later, I am the way, the truth, and
the life. No man comes to the Father except by me. And you
can look at the religious leaders and the philosophers of this
world, and many of them had great things to say about how to live
this life. And the things that they said
will work for this life. Some of the things they said
are the same things that the Lord Jesus said. I don't know of any of them,
though, that said, you can't get to God without me. Maybe Mohammed did, I don't know.
I haven't paid that much attention. So here the Lord is saying, without
me, you cannot have eternal spiritual life. Well, that's bad enough. But he adds something. If you
have me, You have eternal life. You need nothing more. Well, that insults a religious
man who thinks he has something to contribute, something to give,
something to add, which will improve upon that which is gained
simply by having Christ. One of the songs I want to put
in our chorus book, I've wanted to for years, just haven't got
around to it, but that song, In Christ Alone. It's that word
alone that irritates people. In Christ alone, my hope is found. Nothing more, nothing less. You cannot have salvation without
Him, nor can you have salvation if you try to add something to
Him. I know I've got to have Christ, but you know I've got
to have this too. I've got to be baptized too.
I've got to take the Lord's table too. I've got to belong to this
certain church too. I've got to do this. As soon
as you say, I know I need Christ, but you've
already said too many words. It should start with, I know
I need Christ, period. That's it. Peter says, we have through
the knowledge of him all we need for life and godliness. And unfortunately, in broader
Christendom, and including everybody that claims to be Christians,
the problem is not that they do not deny, or excuse me, the
problem is not that they deny the need for Christ. They don't
think he's enough. because they've always got something
to add to it. And according to Paul, the moment
you add to Christ, you don't have Christ anymore. The gospel
is a solo. God sings it. And anybody that
tries to join their voice with him, anybody that takes the stage
and tries to sing a duet with him, he'll step off the stage
and you can sing it on your own. Be all you. And then our Lord did present
this truth in what sounds like a very gruesome way. Eating the
flesh and drinking the blood of Christ. Now some have tried
to give this a semi-literal interpretation. They don't think that actually
we are required to find the body of the Lord Jesus Christ and
feast on it as you would the meat or flesh of any other animal
or drink the blood, but they actually believe that the elements
of the Lord's table are somehow magically turned
in to the body and blood of the Lord Jesus. And by participating
in the Lord's table, we eat his flesh and drink his blood. Well, when we observe the Lord's
table here in a few minutes, we're going to be illustrating
what it is to eat the flesh and drink the blood of Christ. But
you can eat that, you can drink that, and be as dead as when
you started. And if you are a believer in
the Lord Jesus Christ, it might be for whatever reason you never
get to participate in the Lord's table. It will not rob you of any of
the life that comes through Christ. Our Lord is speaking figuratively.
This is an illustration of the same truth. What does he mean
to eat his flesh and drink his blood? Well, the first thing
it tells us is this, and we touched on this in the Sunday School
lesson, this business of salvation is a business of life. It is not a matter of simply
changing our present life, altering its course, making it better,
It is to come into possession of a life we weren't born with. Now, when we were born into this
world, we, as it were, were given a life. It was a life from our
parents, who got their life from their parents and so on, all
the way back to Adam and Eve. But what do we know about that
life? It comes to an end. Nothing your parents give you.
will last forever. It says, by one man's sin, or
one man's transgression, sin of the world and death by sin. And all of us have that curse
upon us. And we can live carefully, healthfully,
we can be of the best genetic stock that humanity has known,
we're still going to die. I remember listening to some
fellow, he's a famous country singer, probably more in the
70s, but he and a bunch of the other old-timers got together
and made an album, and one of the songs, I got a kick out of
it. It was talking about, you know, people And this started
with us baby boomers, you know. We decided this is healthy and
this isn't healthy to eat. And young people, I realize you
aren't exposed to it as much as us, but when I was a kid,
the majority of people smoked. I mean, you go by the teacher's
lounge in my school, You'd think they had a bar in there or something.
I mean, it's just the way it was. But then all at once, oh,
that'll kill you. It's unhealthy. And when this
guy answered in his song, he said, you can eat this, but you're
still going to die. You can quit smoking, but you're
still going to die. You can live right, but you're
still going to die. Most people don't live as though
they're going to die. You're young, some of you. You're
still going to die. Might not be for a lot of years,
but it's coming. Why? Because the life your parents
gave you is not eternal life. Jesus Christ said, I have come
that they might have life. What do you mean? I've got life.
You don't have the life. You didn't get from your parents
the kind of life that Christ is speaking of. He said, I've
come that they might have life and have it to the full. A life
from a different source. Life brought about by a different
power. And a life that is forever. Now that sounds good to me. You know, when I was young, I
didn't have much problem with my life. I liked it. Vigorous. I told my wife yesterday, I said,
you know, when we were young, we could treat ourselves like
a garbage disposal. We could throw anything in there.
It didn't make us feel bad. And if you've ever seen pictures
of me when I was a teenager, I was skinny as could be. I never felt, you know, I never
said, well, you know, man, I've been packing on the pounds. I've
got to lose some weight. I graduated high school 125 pounds
and a little bit taller than I am right now. Pretty thin fella. Not so easy anymore. Oh, life
feels good when you're young. And you young people, I'm telling
you this, enjoy it. I'm not trying to take any of
your joy of your youth away, but understand this. that the
things that you like so much of your life at present, the
years are going to take it away. Why? Because the life you have
is not eternal life. It's decaying life. You spin something up, doesn't
matter how hard you spin it, eventually it runs down. And
when you were born, your parents kind of spun you up. and eventually
you'll wear down. You'll slow down and stop and
topple over. The Lord Jesus Christ brings
a life that's not just spun up and then
left alone. It is a life from God himself. How is it obtained? Well, evidently,
by eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Christ. That's how
it is obtained and sustained. As I said, that sounds kind of
gross. What does he mean? It is simply that the truth regarding
Christ's body broken for sinners, his blood shed as an atonement,
that these things are not just looked at, not just understood
as doctrines, but we take them in as one takes in food. and that we look on these things
as necessary to us, but not only necessary to our spiritual lives,
but as the full diet of the children of God. When the Jews were crossing the
wilderness to the promised land, they got hungry, and the Lord
said, all right, you get up tomorrow morning, and we'll cause bread
to fall from heaven. And sure enough, they got up
the next morning, and there was this white stuff all over the ground. And
they were able to gather it. They called it manna, which as
I was told that that's Hebrew basically for, what's this? They
weren't saying, oh, this is such and such. What's this? It's food. And our Lord, he says, I am that
bread that came down from heaven. He said, your fathers, your forefathers,
they ate that bread. Miraculous though it was, it
came from God. It was a miracle, no question
there. But still, they ate it and died. Why? Natural bread. He said, I'm the
bread, the real bread that came down from heaven. I'm the bread
that is a spiritual bread. I am the bread that has within
me the life of God and His blood. One of the laws
of the old covenant was that they were not permitted to eat
animals that had not been drained of their blood. And that's why
even Jews today have their kosher markets. Because over time, they
took that law and they developed ways to ensure that animals were
properly butchered, you know, and that's to make sure to get
all the blood out of it that you can. And even now, I remember
somebody telling me that, about packing plants, that they will
hire a rabbi who will come in and kill the animals according
to Jewish law, there's nothing written about it in the Bible,
but it's laws they made up, to ensure that it's kosher, to ensure
that there's no blood in it. And those were set aside to be,
you know, they could be labeled as kosher, and Jews would feel
free to buy it. But it says here in Leviticus
17, verse 11, well, verse 10, any Israelite or any alien living
among them who eats any blood, I will set my face against that
person who eats blood and will cut him off from his people. For the life of a creature is
in the blood. And I have given it to you to
make atonement for yourselves on the altar. It's the blood
that makes atonement for one's life. It's the blood that makes atonement
for the soul. Therefore I say to the Israelites,
none of you may eat blood, nor may any alien living among you
eat blood. And yet our Lord comes in, he
says here in John 6, unless you drink my blood. Well, here's one reason we see
that they were not allowed to drink blood. Just as they were
not allowed to make human sacrifices, why? because God already had
his human sacrifice chosen and ordained. They could do sacrifices
that were illustrations of other animals, not humans. But here's
the point. The atonement, the sacrifice
that puts away the offense of sins, that's what atonement is.
It removes the offense. Puts away the anger and the wrath. That came by the blood, in the
Old Covenant economy, that came by the blood of those animals. And it was not for them. That is, the blood was offered
as an atonement, but it was not their food. But then comes the
New Covenant, in which all the things of the Old Covenant are
fulfilled, they're made real in Jesus Christ. And He is not
the sacrifice that the people bring to the altar. He is the
sacrifice that God has brought to the altar. Here people say, you know, you've
got to accept the sacrifice of Jesus. He was never offered to
me. He was offered by God to God. You think about that. It says in Isaiah 53, in prophesying
of our Lord's coming, He, that is God, shall make His soul,
Christ's soul, an offering for sin. His life. The word translated
soul, soul was the seed of life. So he wasn't talking about when
it says he was to make his soul an offering for sin. He wasn't
speaking there of some immaterial existence within the Lord. What
it's saying there, the whole of his person is made an offering
for sin. God provided this sacrifice. Abraham said to his son Isaac,
the Lord himself will provide a lamb for the burnt offering,
and that provision is Christ. And not only did God provide it, God slew
the sacrifice, shed the blood of the sacrifice, His own Son
laid the sacrifice on the coals of His wrath and burn it to dust. But now it is said to us, and
only figuratively, This broken body, beaten, bruised, this blood
shed is food for your souls. It's food for this life that
Christ brings. It's the only food that can create
it. It's the only food that can sustain
it. His body. Oh, what a blessed person was
the Lord Jesus. And we can say that only because
the Spirit of God has enabled us to see him in his beauty. The natural man, it's written
of him, there is no beauty or majesty that when we would see
him, we would desire him. But boy, don't you desire him
now? That means the work of grace has been done in you and for
you. Because he's beautiful only to
those to whom God has made him beautiful.
And yet to think that that precious person was treated like they
treated our Lord Jesus. Lied about, beaten, punched,
beard pulled out, crown of thorns crammed into his scalp, forced to carry a heavy beam
to his own crucifixion, nailed to a cross, suspended between
heaven and earth in agonies that you and I can barely maybe conceive
of, and then added to all of that. You take all that abuse
of men that you could see and realize they are but a tiny window
through which we can look and see what God did to him. What did God do to the Lord Jesus
as He hung there on Calvary's tree? Everything that He does
to any sinner that appears before Him bearing sin. Whatever hell
is, and I don't know. There's no literal descriptions
of it in the Bible. and the figurative descriptions
they give of it are too horrible to think about. What must the
reality be? But whatever hell is, we can define it as all that
an infinite and holy God can do in response to the sin against
him. And our Lord Jesus bore that. His body was broken. And again,
it's just an illustration. You know, the animals offered
His Old Testament sacrifices. All that there was to them was
body and blood. And so when it talks about the
body and blood of our Lord, it's saying the whole of Him, all
that He was as a human being, was consumed as a sacrifice for
our sin. And we, Through the hearing of
the gospel and through God-given faith, we take that in. We take it in
willingly. We're not like children, you
know, who, there's foods they like and they don't like, and
mama fixes something, and says, come to dinner, what we have?
She says, whatever, you know, we go, oh, I don't like any of
that, you know. They say, well, this is it, you know. That's
what they said when I was a kid, you know, you got, there's two
things on the menu, what I fixed or nothing, you know. That's
the only choices we had. But the people of God see the
body and blood of our Lord as a feast. of the finest foods that can
be made. And we eat, and we're satisfied. You know, there's people that,
they hear the gospel, and they say, yeah, it's good, I like
that. But having been fed on the gospel, they're not satisfied. There's something more they want. Can I have a slice of this kind
of music? Can I have a helping of this
ceremony? Can I have this, that? They weren't
satisfied. I know that I've said many times
we shouldn't look at ourselves to find evidence of a work of
grace. And I would not have you begin
doing that as a matter of practice, but there is one thing that I
think is indicative of the presence of grace in the soul, a satisfaction
with Jesus Christ and Him crucified. That's enough for me. The one who's looking for something
more thinks there's something that he can improve upon, the
body and blood of our Lord. Sacrificed by God, for God, to
God, in our behalf. If that doesn't satisfy you,
may I ask, what can you add to that? What more can your soul
derive benefit from beyond that? There's nothing wrong with liking
certain styles of music, but don't ever think that, you know,
well, my soul would certainly feel a whole lot better if, you
know, I'd be in better shape if we'd sing this kind of song
instead of that kind, or, you know, I don't, I feel like I'm
a diminished Christian because I don't have this, that, or the
other. Brethren, if you have Christ, if you have Him at all,
you have all of Him, and if you have all of Him, you have everything
needful and useful. Verse 57, just as the living
Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who
feeds on me will live because of me. I like it, because of
me, he says. Not because of anything they've
done. Not because anything their parents
gave them or their church gave them or their preacher or their
priest gave them. They will live because of me.
Our Lord said the father has life in himself and he has given
to the son to have life in himself and he can give it to whoever
he is pleased to give it. Well, after our Lord said that,
man that's tough. We liked the miracles you did,
Jesus. That was great, you know, because the same people listening
to him on John 6 were the ones who in John 5 had been in that
crowd of 5,000 men, plus their wives and children, who had eaten
of the five loaves and two fishes. They said, we liked that. That
was cool. Could you do that for us every day? I'm tired of fishing.
I'm tired of baking bread. Could you just kind of send some
of that to me every day? That's what he told him. He said,
you followed me across the Sea of Galilee because you ate the
bread and got your fill. They were interested in fleshly
things. He did not come to bring fleshly things, but spiritual
things. And when he said, look, this is the reality. This is
what I've come for. I am the life. I am the source
of the life you need. And the only way to have that
life is through receiving me inwardly and feeding upon me
solely. I said, we like the bread, the
fish and the bread better. Flesh and blood. Get me a fish
sandwich, I like that. I said, we liked it better when
you said, blessed are the poor, because we're poor, you know,
so. Oh, he didn't understand he's talking about spiritually
poor. And he says, in verse 61, does
this offend you? He said, what are you going to
do when you see the Son of Man, me, exalted to the right hand
of God? If you think I've exalted myself
by saying I'm the only way to obtain eternal life, you need
me and I'm all you need, what are you going to do when God
himself exalts me to his right hand? It says, sit here at my
right hand till I make your enemies a footstool for your feet. It
says, as I have sworn, every knee shall bow and every tongue
confess that he is Lord, to the glory of Father. What are you
gonna do then? If you think this is hard? But child of God, don't you love
that you need him and he's all you need? And does your heart
not fill with joy at the realization that despite all of the God-hating
rebellion going on in our world, Jesus Christ is at the right
hand of the Father, ruling everything and everyone for our eternal
welfare? Somebody's on the throne, I can't
think of anybody else I'd want there, least of all me. Well, the Lord challenged his
disciples about, you know, a bunch of them left. And he looked at
the ones that remained and he says, you don't want to leave
me too, do you? Simon Peter. Now, Simon was one
of these guys in the brain, out the mouth. And sometimes that
got him in trouble. Sometimes the grace given him,
he gave the right answer immediately. Verse 68, Lord, to whom shall
we go? You have the words of eternal
life. We believe and know that you
are the Holy One of God. You know, the expressions of
faith given by the disciples, I love them because They sound
like expressions of the faith that I have. They aren't these
big glowing things. You know, one time Peter did
say something big and glowing about himself. He said, well,
if everybody else betrays you, I won't leave you. Lord said,
before the rooster crows, you will have denied me three times.
But notice how he describes his faith here. He said, where else
are we going to go? We stick with you because there's
nowhere else to go. And brethren, I wish I had a more lively, confident
faith than that. But I am so glad to know Peter,
the spokesman of the apostles, when he honestly expressed what
his faith was, it's like this. We got nowhere else to go. We
believe you're the Holy One of God. We know there's nothing out there. I've shared with you before,
sometimes my thoughts on spiritual things, they just get reduced. If this
God that we worship is not God, there is no God. If this gospel
we believe is not the gospel, there is no gospel. If Jesus
Christ is not the Savior, there is no Savior. There's nowhere
else to go. But you know, while that may
sound like a very weak and feeble faith, it's the best faith. It's certainly a level to which
every one of the children of God are brought, because God
teaches them, you've got nowhere else to go. There's nothing else
but me. Well, this is a theme I love,
and I could keep going on about it, but that's enough verses.