My robe, my refuge, and my peace
is thy blood and thy righteousness, O Lord, my God. Thank you, Tom. Let's open our Bibles together
to John chapter six. John chapter six. We'll begin reading in verse
48. We're going to observe the Lord's
table this morning, and I wanted to bring a message that will
call our attention to what we're doing, and I pray the Lord will
be pleased to bless us by it. Verse 48 in John chapter 6, I
am the bread of life. Just as the word bread in the
Bible doesn't always refer to what we would call a loaf of
bread, it refers to food and all the things necessary to sustain
the body. And so just as food sustains
our physical body, the Lord Jesus is telling us that he is the
sustenance of our souls, the sustenance of our spiritual life.
And we can't have life without food, and we can't have life
without Christ. And so he says, I am. Not, I'm going to give you the
bread of life. Not, I'll show you where to find the bread of
life. I am myself the bread of life. Your fathers did eat manna
in the wilderness and are dead. I gave them bread from heaven. But that was but a picture of
who I am and what I would do. It sustained their physical bodies
for 40 years in the wilderness, but it did nothing. That bread
by itself did nothing to save their souls. This is the bread which cometh
down from heaven that a man may eat thereof and not die, speaking
of himself, I am the Living bread now take notice of that the Lord
Jesus is calling himself the living bread Which came down
from heaven if any man eat of this bread He shall live forever
and the bread that I will give is my flesh which I will give
for the life of the world God's people All over the world
and all throughout the ages of the world have found the sustenance
of their souls in Christ as the bread of life, the living bread.
The Jews therefore strove among themselves saying, how can this
man give us his flesh to eat? They were thinking that he was
suggesting cannibalism. Then Jesus said unto them, verily,
verily, I say unto you, except you eat the flesh of the Son
of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoso eateth
my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life, and I will
raise him up at the last day." How many allegories there are
in God's Word. How many parables Lord, why do
you speak to them in parables? Because it's not for them to
know the mystery of the kingdom of God. The mystery of this message
has to be unveiled. That's what mystery means. Mystery
means it's hidden. It has to be uncovered. It has
to be revealed. And that the Lord does for his
people. It is for you to know. the mystery
of the kingdom of God. What's the Lord talking about
eating his flesh and drinking his blood? Verse 55, for my flesh is meat
indeed and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh
and drinketh my blood dwelleth in me and I in him. As the living
Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father, so he that eateth
me, even he shall live by me." Some observe what they would call communion
and call it a sacrament, as if there was something very mysterious
happening with the bread and the wine and that a blessing
would come as a result of them physically taking the bread and
the wine into their body. The blessing is not by eating
the bread and the wine. The blessing is the revelation
that God gives to the heart when we're able to understand what
the bread and the wine represent. The blessing is when the heart
is turned not to look on outward appearances. We don't look at
those things which are seen. We look at those things which
are not seen. For the things which are seen
are temporal, but those things which are not seen are eternal. We must have our hearts turned. We must have the mystery of the
gospel revealed to us This Lord's table is a very special thing. I'm not denying that. But the
elements themselves are very common and carry with them no
special blessing. The blessing is spiritual. The
blessing comes as a result of being able to understand what
it is we're doing. And it must be revealed. Verse 58, this is the bread which
came down from heaven, not as your fathers did eat man and
are dead. He that eateth this bread shall live forever. These
things said he in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaum. if you'll turn back with me to
Exodus chapter 16. Children of Israel are in the
wilderness. They've been delivered from Egypt.
They are no longer under the taskmasters. They're no longer
slaves. They're free. But where they
are requires complete provisions made for them by God Almighty. There's no bread in the desert. There's no water in the desert.
You and I live in a dry and thirsty land. And most of the oases that
promise water in the desert in which we live are mirages. And those dying in the desert
crawl to that mirage only to find that it's still somewhere
out there in the distance and it never can be quite achieved. God has to lead us to that water
of life. God has to open up a rock. Moses took his rod, the rod of
justice, Moses the picture of the law, and he struck the rock.
And out of the rock flowed rivers of living water, and the people's
thirst was quenched in the desert. What a picture. The rod of God's wrath fell from
heaven on our sin bearer, our substitute, as he hung on Calvary's
cross. And only as God's wrath was satisfied,
only as his justice was fulfilled, could the water of life flow
from him. He's that rock. He's that rock. Now they're without food, and
they're murmuring, and they want to go back to Egypt. Most of
them were unbelievers. They will die in the desert as
unbelievers, though they're eating bread that God will give them
from heaven. They will not make the connection. They will not
see what this bread represents. They will just eat the provisions
to sustain them physically, but they'll never be saved, and they'll
die in that desert. The writer of Hebrews says, for
they did not mix these things with faith. Without faith, it
is impossible to please God. For he that cometh to him must
believe that he is and that he's the rewarder of those who diligently
seek him. This faith is a gift of God. This faith is the eye that enables
us to look beyond the natural and the physical and the obvious
that all men can see. and to understand in whom we have life. Who is
the living bread? Who is the one that came down
from heaven? We have plenty of food in this
world to sustain us physically, but oh, that God would feed our
souls. And so they took their journey,
chapter 16, verse 1, from Elam. Elam translated means palm trees. It's an oasis. It is an oasis
in the desert. And it's a picture of another
place we call paradise, Edom, that was filled with trees that
are good for food, from which our father Adam was cast. And here we are. Here we are. We've fallen out
of Edom. And all the congregation of the
children of Israel came into the wilderness of sin. The wilderness of sin, that's
where we are. We're sinners. We can do nothing to get back
to paradise or to restore paradise. We've been shut out. The angel
with a flaming sword is standing at the east gate, guarding the
tree of life. We can't get back to where we
came from. We're in the wilderness. of sin, which is between Elam and Sinai. Elam is a oasis. It is a paradise. It's a place
of palm trees and rest and comfort and peace and grace. Sinai translated means thorny. Thorny. It's the mountain of
the law. It's the mountain that we cannot touch. If we go to
the law in order to try to earn favor with God, in order to try
to get back to Edom or Elam or Edom, the law can't get us
there. The only thing the law can do
is kill us. The only thing the law can do,
the people of Israel could not get near the mountains of Sinai. The Lord said, if an animal touches
it, kill the animal. Nobody can touch the mountain
of the law. The mountain of the law has one
message, guilty. The mountain of the law has one
message, death, judgment, wrath. One like unto Moses, I will raise
up, this is what the Lord told Moses, I will raise up another
prophet like unto thee. Moses going up on that mountain
is a picture of Christ. Christ's going up on the mountain.
He's the only one that could go to the mountain of God's law
and not be destroyed by it. Here's what this is all a picture
of. Eating of his flesh is looking
through the eye of faith to the perfect righteousness of the
Lord Jesus Christ for my life before God. If I'm going to be
alive, if I'm going to be saved, if my soul is going to be fed,
it's going to have to be by the living bread, the Lord Jesus. on the 15th day of the second
month after their departing out of the land of Egypt and the
whole congregation of the children of Israel murmured against Moses
and Aaron in the wilderness. How easy it is for us in our
unbelief, in our unbelief, to murmur against our circumstances. And oh, we may accuse another
person, we may We may accuse whatever, but in fact, we're
shaking our fist to heaven. If we believe that God is sovereign,
that he reigns over the armies of heaven and all the inhabitants
of the earth, then when we murmur, we're complaining against his
providence, aren't we? And we do so often. We live in
this wilderness of sin and how desperate we are that in our
murmuring, the Lord would show mercy and cause bread to come
down from heaven. We can't get to him. The Tower
of Babel will never reach up into heaven. The law will never
get us there. He's gonna have to open the windows
of heaven and he's gonna have to come down as the living bread
and feed our souls. And so the Lord does that for
them. Skip over with me to verse 14. Verse 11. And the Lord spake
unto Moses, saying, I have heard the murmuring of the children
of Israel. Speak unto them, saying, at even
you shall eat flesh, and in the morning you shall be filled with
bread. And you shall know that I am
the Lord your God. And here's, he said, I'm going
to try the children of Israel, but here's what's going to be
proven in their trial, that they will come to this conclusion
that I am the Lord, their God. And it came to pass at the Eden
that the quail came up and covered the camp. And in the morning,
the dew lay around about the host. And when the dew that lay
was gone up, behold, upon the face of the wilderness, there
lay a small round thing, as small as the hoarfrost on the ground.
And when the children of Israel saw it, they said one to another,
it is manna. And notice the word is in italics. The literal translation here
is, what is it? What is it? That's what the word
manna means. What is it? We've never seen
anything like this before in our life. When God opens the
windows of heaven and the gospel of his grace is preached, And
we begin to see what this bread of life, this living bread really
is. And that we are ourselves in
the wilderness of sin and that we can't get back. We cannot
get back to where we came from. And we
can't go to the wall to save us. It's a message of salvation.
that is contrary to everything that we ever thought was true. We come into this world fashioning
in the darkness of our own imagination a little idol that we call God
who looks altogether such as ourselves. We make him to be
dependent upon us. We put ourselves on the throne
of God. We fashion in our imagination
a God who needs us to do something in order for him to be able to
save us. He's got to have us pray a prayer, accept him, perform
a work, make a decision, come to a certain degree of knowledge.
He needs me to do something. And now the windows of heaven
have been opened, and God has come down. And he reveals to us something
that we've never seen before. And we say with Brother Job,
behold. Behold, I see something I never
saw before. I am vile. In me, that is in my flesh, dwelleth
no good thing. Woe is me, I am undone, I am
a man of unclean lips. There's nothing that I can do
to obligate God to save me. I've never seen that before.
What is it? What is it? It's manna. It's strange to the natural man. It's different from anything
that we ever thought was true. You see, the gospel is not just
tweaking our understanding about God or about ourselves or about
how it is that God saves sinners. It's a 180 degree difference. We're going in this direction.
And when the windows of heaven are open and the living bread
comes down, we realize that repentance is a change of mind. It is a
turning on one's heels from going that way to going that way. We're
not just a little off course. We can't just kind of tweak the
steering wheel a little bit and get back in the lane. No, we're
headed the wrong way. What is it? It's manna, it's
living bread. Our thoughts about God, our thoughts
about God, we robbed him of his glory. We stripped him of his
sovereignty. We thought that he couldn't really
do anything unless we let him. Oh, how wrong we were. Truth is we can do nothing unless
he enables us. We can't even desire to be saved
until he saves us. We can't desire Christ until
we have him. You say, well, I can't make sense
of that. Well, that's it. We can't repent until he gives
us the mind of Christ, until he changes our minds about things. It is manna. The gospel of God's
free grace in the glorious person and accomplished work of the
Lord Jesus Christ is a strange thing to the natural man. Your religious friends and family
members hear what you believe, and they try to reconcile it
to what they always thought was true. And it can't be reconciled. They can't make sense of it.
And they try to find some common ground, and there is no common
ground. There's no common ground. There's nothing that the gospel
of God's grace in Christ has anything to do with the works
gospel. They are diametrically opposed to one another. What
is it? What is it? It's manna. It's the complete opposite of
what you ever thought. It goes contrary to everything
the world believes about themselves and about God and about how it
is that God saves sinners. And it's a work of grace in the
heart that God must do. You remember in Luke chapter
24, the scripture says that two of the disciples were walking
with the risen Christ on the road to Emmaus from Jerusalem. And the Lord begins to speak
with them and said, why are you so downcast? And they were astonished
that this man coming from Jerusalem had not heard of Jesus of Nazareth
who had just been crucified. And we thought that he was the
prophet of God. And he began to expound to them
those things concerning himself, beginning with Moses and the
Psalms and the prophets. And they get to Emmaus, and he
acted as if, see you fellas, nice talking to you, I'm gonna
continue my journey. And they pleaded with him to
stay. Lord, don't leave me. Lord, stay. And he went into their home,
and in the breaking of bread, he opened their understanding
that they might understand the scriptures. If we're to ever see the gospel,
if we're to ever have any hunger and thirst after righteousness,
if we're to ever feast on the bread of life, He must open our
understanding. They said, did our hearts not
burn within us as He spake with us upon the way? We knew there
was something that He was saying that was needful, that was profitable,
that was necessary, but we couldn't figure out what it was until
He opened our eyes in the breaking of bread. Oh, that the Lord in
the breaking of this bread would break open the windows of heaven,
and the bread of life, living bread, would come down and feed
our souls. It is manna. And in verse 18, look at verse
18 of our text. And when they did meet it with
an Omar, he that gathered much had nothing over, and he that
gathered little had no lack. They gathered every man according
to his eating. There was nothing left over,
and there was no one lacking. And that's the way the Lord Jesus
feeds the souls of his children. He satisfies their hunger, each
one of them, in exactly the way that they need it. He knows where
they are. He knows their every thought.
He knows their circumstances. He ordained them. And each one
is a little different from the other, but when he feeds them,
there's nothing left over and there's no one lacking anything. Notice back up in verse 14, that
this manna was small. It was small. The flesh does not take notice
of things that are small. The flesh is always impressed
with big things. Big houses, big churches, big
bank accounts, big people. We overlook the little things,
don't we? The flesh is never drawn to the
little things. But the Lord's not going to be
glorified in the flesh. That which is of the flesh is
flesh, and the flesh profiteth nothing." What the Lord does
is never recognized in the world. No one knows we're here, what
we're doing. A little band of believers that
the world takes no notice of us. Oh, but the big gatherings and
the big denominations and the big Influencers, that's a new
word I just learned recently. I didn't know that was a word
until just a couple weeks ago. There's influencers in the world.
We're not influencers, not much, are we? My ways are not your ways. God's ways He said in the book
of Zechariah chapter 4, he said, despise not the day of small
things, of small things. The churches in the New Testament,
most of them were house churches. They were just small gatherings.
You know, we read about the Pentecost and what happened when 3,000
Jews were saved, but they were soon scattered, and they went
all over, and the church, the believers that gathered together
were small gatherings. They weren't influencers in the
culture. But little by little, Line upon
line, precept upon precept, growth and grace is a very gradual,
small, imperceptible thing. But in time, in time, God glorifies
himself and accomplishes his purpose in such a way as that
no flesh could glory in his presence. He will not share his glory with
another. That same passage in Zechariah
chapter four says, the hand of Zerubbabel hath laid the foundation
of this house and his hand shall finish it. Zerubbabel is a picture
of Christ in that story. And his hand laid the foundation. When he died on Calvary's cross,
he said, upon this rock, I will build my church and the gates
of hell shall not prevail against it. And everyone that the father
chose and everyone for whom I died will be brought one by one, little
by little, into my church. And my kingdom will be a great
kingdom, but only in the end. Only in the end. Yeah, eventually
I'll demonstrate my glory. When the eastern sky splits and
the trump of God is sound, sounds, and the Lord Jesus returns riding
upon a white horse with the name King of Kings and Lord of Lords
on his thigh and his tongue is like a sword and his eyes are
like fire, all, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess.
But between now and then, Not only in establishing his
kingdom, but in the lives of each one of his children. It's
going to be imperceptible by the flesh. By the flesh. It's not going to be impressive. Oh, child of God, you want to
just grow up, don't you? what, probably an eight-year-old
that wants to be 16, you know, and then a 16-year-old who wants
to be 21, you know, that's the flesh, isn't it? We just, we
want to get grown, we want to get big, we want to get old.
No, it's not going to happen that way. No, that baby's got
to struggle with the things that it struggles with in order for
it to learn how to walk. And it's got to struggle with
those things in order to learn how to take the next stage in
life and growth and grace is like that and the kindergartners
got to experience the trials of troubles of being a kindergartner
before they'll be we insulate our children too much from this
world I was talking to a brother about this recently you know
some parents they just want to want to insulate their children
from the war from the evils of the world the evils in our heart
And if we don't introduce them little by little, allow them
little by little, yeah, we've got a lot of deprogramming to
do when they get home. But they're growing up. You're
the biggest influencer for them. And though they may be exposed
to some worldly things out there in the public domain, you direct
them. You raise up a child in the way
he should go. And then when he's old, he won't
depart from it. You teach them and deprogram them and show them
the difference between grace and Babylon and Jerusalem. But don't try to insulate them
from it. They've got to deal with those things little by little.
Otherwise, they're gonna grow up and be completely, they're
not gonna know how to deal with this world. And they're either
gonna They're either going to insulate themselves from it just
like you did with them, or they're going to become absolute total
rebels and dive into it headlong. That's the way our growth is.
I'm just using that as an illustration to say this is the way our growth
in grace is. The Lord told the children of
Israel, I didn't save you because you were the greatest of nations.
To the contrary, you were the least of the nations. You were
the least of them. He brought down the greatest
nation of the world with dust and flies and lice and frogs. And then an angel that couldn't
be seen, an invisible angel came, the death angel. and broke the
backs of Egypt and delivered his people with things that the
flesh thought, this is nothing? That's the way our God works. The Lord Jesus came into this
world. Yes, he was conceived of the Holy Spirit, but he was
a, single cell egg in the womb of Mary before that conception
took place. Born in Bethlehem? Grew up in Nazareth? What good
thing ever came from Nazareth? That's what they said. carpenter and then he calls to
himself fishermen nobody's uneducated man but when they were brought
before the Sanhedrin they took notice of them because they had
been with Jesus the world is the manna is a small
thing it's a small thing no one's going to be impressed with it no one's The Lord said, if you have faith
as a mustard seed, a mustard seed, a very small thing. And this manna, go back with
me. Look, this is why the children
of Israel said, what is it? What is it? It's something we've
never seen before. It's something we've never heard
before. It's contrary to everything that we believe and everything
that we've ever experienced. And it's very small. And it's
round. Now, when I first looked at that
word, I thought immediately about eternality, and that which is
round has no beginning, has no end. And what's said about the
Lord Jesus Christ as the Melchizedek, he had no father, he had no mother,
without beginning and without end. He calls himself the I Am,
which means he's self-existent. He's independent, he's the creator,
the uncreated creator. He's eternal. But then I looked up the word
round. And you would think that that word would be an adjective. You would think that it would
be something describing the shape of something. But in fact, it's
not an adjective, it's the form of a verb. And it's a verb that's in continual
action. Round is not describing necessarily
the shape of the manna. It is describing the nature of
the manna. Let me illustrate it like this.
We've only recently come to realize what processed food is doing
to us. And just bear with me for a moment.
When we process food for the purpose of giving it a long shelf
life, we destroy the nutrients in it, we destroy the enzymes
in it, we destroy all the beneficial, even the
bacteria, the good bacteria. So now we have stores called
whole food, and we encourage to eat whole foods. What is whole
food? It's living food. It's food that is alive. It's
food that has living organisms in it. And we're just now beginning
to realize how beneficial whole food is to our bodies and how
destructive processed food is. And the purpose of processed
food is for one reason, to give it a long shelf life. Whole food
is very perishable. It doesn't last long. This manna didn't last long. It came down. And this word round
describes the nature of the manna. It is telling us exactly what
the Lord Jesus said when he said, I am the living bread. And you live your life eating
junk food of this world or junk food of man's religion, and it'll
be just like The guy that, what he ate at
McDonald's for 30 days or something, you know, no, no, we need whole
food. And the only whole food, you
know, they say if you're gonna eat just one food, maybe eat
sweet potatoes because that's, you know, it's got everything
you need in it, but it doesn't. You eat just sweet potato, you'll
look like a sweet potato. And you won't live very long
either. We've got to have a variety of food, don't we? These children
of Israel spent 40 years in the wilderness. The only thing they
ate was manna. That's all they ate. Manna for
breakfast, manna for lunch, manna for dinner, manna, manna, manna. Why? Because it's the only whole
food that there's ever been. Every nutrient, every enzyme,
every good bacteria, everything needed was in this small round. Remember, round's not an adjective,
it's a verb. It's an action word. This manna was alive. It was
living bread. And it provided for the children
of Israel every single thing their body needed. The Lord Jesus Christ said, I
am the living bread. And just as that man has sustained
every physical part of their body, so the Lord Jesus Christ
sustains everything that we need to stand before a holy God. We dare not add anything to him. We don't need a variety of food
when it comes to our salvation. We don't need to diversify our
diet. We don't need to try to think,
well, I gotta have certain things here and vitamins here. No, the
manna's got everything in it that we need. Everything. It's the only whole food there's
ever been. And the Lord Jesus said, I am the living bread that
came down from heaven. And we add to him, we take away
from him. We can't add our works, can't
add our wisdom, can't add our feelings or our experiences or
our thoughts or our, no. That's why Paul said in Colossians,
Christ is all and he is in all. Everything. Small, round thing. And they said, we've never seen
this before. When do I eat it? Right now. Right now. The sun's coming up. It's going to be over 100 degrees
today. And we go out in the sun. What happens to the manna? It
melted. It had a very short shelf life.
You had to gather it every day. And if you tried to gather enough
to get you over to tomorrow, you woke up in the morning and
the scripture says it stank and it was full of worms. You can't
live off of yesterday's manna. You gotta have manna every day.
That's why the Lord said, Lord, give us this day our daily bread. We're gonna take of this unleavened
bread as a symbol, as a sign, as a picture of what we must
do every day. Feed on that bread of life that
comes down from heaven. Drink his blood for our justification
before God. Now these people, these children
of Israel, the unbelievers, you know what they finally said?
They came to Moses and they said, we want to go back to Egypt.
Because in Egypt we had leeks and we had garlics and we had
melons and onions. Well, those things
are all under the ground. Those things grow on the ground
and under the ground. This was food that was coming
from heaven. And they said, we loathe this light bread. We're
tired of eating manna. We want things of the earth.
Now that's just the flesh. The soul that God renews, The
soul that God gives life to cannot be satisfied with the leeks and
the melons and the garlics of this world. They've got to have
the manna that comes down from heaven. They've got to have Christ.
They've got to have that living bread. They'll die without him. Give
me Christ, lest I die. The small round thing. It came
every day. God proved them. He proved them
to come to this conclusion. Salvation is of the Lord. It's
of the Lord. Our Heavenly Father, we thank
you for the revelation that you've given us in your word of thy
dear Son. Lord, we pray you bless these
words to our hearts and that you would enable us to look through
the eye of faith. Lord, you're going to have to
give us that eye. We don't have it. You're going to have to unveil.
You're going to have to reveal. You're going to have to show
us Christ. Give us hope in him as the living
bread. We might have life. Everlasting. For it's in Christ's name we
pray. Amen. Let's start with 126. 126 in
the heart, back to him. Now let's stand together.