The Church of Eleven22 - S01 E50 - Doubt

Episode Date: July 6, 2020

Hey, church family. It is Devo time. If you got your Bible, we're going to be in John chapter 6, and we're going to talk about doubts. What do you do when you have doubts? And I would say, not if you have doubts, but when you have doubts. Maybe you've heard me say this before, that the opposite of faith is not doubt. The opposite of faith is fear because fear paralyzes and faith produces actions. So the question then is, what do you do when you have unanswered questions, unanswered prayer, when you just can't figure out in your mind how to reconcile a loving, all-powerful God with pain and tragedy in your own world or in the world. And so we'll pick it up in John chapter 6 beginning in verse 22. Now the first 21 verses of John chapter 6, two very

significant things have happened that Jesus has fed 5,000 people. And then he's going to go on the other side of the Sea of Galilee, and instead of walking around the long way or even taking a boat, he walks on water to get from one side to the other side. So two pretty significant miracles. And then we're going to pick it up after he feeds the 5,000 and walks on water. Verse 22. On the next day, the crowd that remained on the other side of the sea saw that there had been only one boat there and that Jesus had not entered the boat with his disciples, but that his disciples had gone away alone. Other boats from Tiberius came near the place where they had eaten the bread after the Lord had given thanks. And so when the crowd saw that Jesus was not there nor his

disciples, they themselves got into the boats and they went to Copernium seeking Jesus. And when they found him on the other side, they said to him, rabbi, when did you come here? And Jesus answered them, truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me not because you saw signs, but because you you ate your fill of the loaves. This is important. I think Jesus is a little, I don't know if he's frustrated, but he is, he's definitely calling these folks out. He's saying that the reason that you're following after me is not because you saw signs. A sign was a miracle that points to Jesus's divinity. But he's saying the reason that you're following me and chasing after me is you were hungry and I gave you something to eat. Like, you are not being a follower of Jesus. You're being a

consumer of the goods and services. And these are fundamentally different things. I mean, ask yourself, when you go to church, whether it's online or in person, do you go to marvel at the signs of Jesus? In other words, do you go to bring glory to God, or do you go so that you, quote, can get something out of it? Jesus is saying, hey, watch yourself. The only reason you're following me right now is because you're not even a follower, you're a consumer, and you're just trying to get something out of it. So he goes on to say, verse 27, do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the son of man will give to you. For on him, God the Father has set his seal. And then they said to him, what must we do to be doing the works of God? And Jesus answered them. This is very

important. They're saying, what does God want us to do? And here's his answer. This is the work of God, that you believe in him who he has sent. The work of God, God in your life, first and foremost, is do you trust that when Jesus died on the cross, that county for you? All the other works that God calls us to do is a result of this fundamental work, which is putting your faith in Jesus. So Jesus is having a salvation conversation with these people. They're all caught up in miracles and what do we need to do? And Jesus is trying to root them in the gospel. And so they said to him, then what signs? do you do that we may see and believe you, which is kind of funny because he just

fed 5,000 people and walked on water, you would think those signs would be enough. But the crazy thing is, people that are always looking for signs of proof will never have proof enough. Because faith and proof are not the same thing. Believe, Pistuo is the word, is trust. And there's always an element of like, well, I don't know, but I'm going to choose to put my faith or put my trust or Pistuo in Jesus that he's. is who he says he is, and when he died, it counted for me.

And so these people searching for signs and wonders and what they can get out of it, they never have enough. Then what sign do you do that we may see and believe you? What work do you perform? Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness as it is written. He gave them bread from heaven to eat. And Jesus said to them, truly, truly I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my father gave you.

gives you the true bread from heaven. Jesus is going to take the direction they want to go, and he's going to use their illustration to unpack the gospel. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. Here's what he's saying. The manna from heaven in the Old Testament only sustained you for a little while and only sustained you physically,

and it was a picture of the greater manna that's going to come, and the greater manna from heaven is Jesus, and he sustains you eternally and he stains you both, sustains you both physically and spiritually. And they said to him, sir, give us this bread always. And Jesus said to them, I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me shall not hunger and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. There are seven times in the book of John where Jesus makes these I am statements. Now, I don't know if you can pick it up in English, but all the,

the way back in the book of Exodus when Moses encounters God at the burning bush and Moses says to God, all right, when I go to Pharaoh and tell him to let your people go, who shall I say sent me? And God gives Moses his covenant name. Yahweh, the tetragram. It's just four letters in Hebrew. It's supposed to sound like breathing, like inhale and exhale, Yahweh. And the English translation of the name Yahweh is I am that I am or I be that I be. Seven times the number of completion in the book of John, Jesus says, I am. I'm the bread of life, I'm the resurrection in the life, I am the way the truth in life.

Seven times I am. He's saying, I am God. And so he says, I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me shall not hunger and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. But I say to you, that you have seen me, and yet you don't believe all that the Father gives me, all that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me, I will never cast out. That means you can never lose your salvation.

For I have come down from heaven not only to do my own will, but the will of Him who sent me, and this is the will of Him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son, and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. Okay, so far so good. Great sermon by Jesus.

They are looking for to have their physical needs met, and he's saying, no, no, no, no, I have come for much more than that. I can meet your eternal needs. He's talking about being raised up on the cross. He is just laying out the gospel. This is great Jesus sermon. But they don't really receive it that well.

Verse 41. So the Jews grumbled 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 does he say, I have come down from heaven? And Jesus answered them, do not grumble among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the father who sent me draws him and I will raise him up on the last day.

It is written in the prophets and they will all be taught by God. everyone who has heard and learned from the father comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the father except he who is from God. He has seen the father. Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. Now, here's what Jesus is saying, okay, to a bunch of first century Jewish people that were followers of Yahweh. He's saying, you cannot reject the son and know the father, because the father and the son are one. So this is not how it works.

If you know the father, you will believe in the son. And then he turns up his teaching quite a bit. He says, I am the bread of life. Your fathers ain't manna in the wilderness and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat of it and not die. Again, he is acquaining himself with God the Father. He is saying that he is the Messiah,

that he came to die to be resurrected, and anybody that trusts in him will live forever. Now see, this sounds like normal stuff for us Christians, because we're post-resurrection believers, so we know all this stuff, okay? And then he says this, I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever,

and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. The Jews then disrupted among themselves, saying, how can this man give us his flesh to eat? And so Jesus said to him, what he could have done in this moment is explain himself he could have been he could have gone on to say look I'm not saying you got to actually eat my flesh I mean there's not even enough of me to go around for all 5,000 of you but he doesn't he doesn't explain he actually doubles down on what he's saying here he says truly truly I say to you unless you eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood

you have no life in you whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life. And I will raise him up on the last day, for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks on my blood abides in me and I in him. As the living father sent me and I live because of the father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven,

not like the bread of the fathers. They ate and died. feeds on this bread will live forever. Jesus said these things in the synagogue as he taught in Copernum. Can you imagine what the disciples are thinking? The disciples, you know, Peter's over there taking notes and he leans over. He's like, did he just say we got to eat his flesh? And Thomas is like, he said it seven times.

We got to feed on his flesh and drink his blood. So then you can imagine what happens. Verse 60, when many of his disciples heard it, they said, This is a hard saying, who can listen to it. But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, said to them, do you take offense at this? You see, in other words, the crowd starts leaving. I mean, right, when Jesus' ministry is booming and thousands of people are showing up

and miracles are happening, and Peter, James, and John are thinking, wow, we made a great career decision to, you know, drop our nets and follow after Jesus, because this thing is booming, and now Jesus gets into the eat the flesh, drink the blood sermon, and people start going away. And I can imagine Peter's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on, Jesus. Can we take a little intermission here during your sermon? Jesus, why don't you sit down and have a little Kool-Aid, you know, something to drink and relax because maybe you've been teaching too long, and I can just imagine, this didn't happen.

But in my mind, I can imagine Peter speaking to the crowds, he's like, hold on, the rabbi, the Messiah is a little tired right now, and he's going to take a break. And so if y'all could just get some leftover snacks from the 12 baskets we have left over from the miracle you just saw and we'll be back for the second half. And then he could go to Jesus and be like, Jesus, what are you talking about?

What are you talking about? What do you mean if people eat your flesh and drink your blood? And Jesus looks at his own disciples and says, do you take offense at this? Then what if you were to see the son of man ascending to where he was before? It is the spirit,

who gives life, the flesh is no help at all, the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life, but there are some of you who do not believe. For Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe and who it was who would betray him. And he said, this is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by my father. And after this, many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. Do you know why? Because they had doubts. They couldn't explain it.

They said, all right, we've seen the miracles, we've heard the stories, but how do you reconcile eating your flesh and drinking your blood? And then Jesus looks at Simon Peter and asks this question, do you want to go away as well? Now, why would Jesus ask him that?

Because Jesus knows his heart. Do you want to go away as well? Now, what Jesus is actually talking about here is the gospel. Unless you put your faith in Jesus who died on a cross, his body was broken and his blood was shed. Unless you consume that, unless you surrender your life to the reality that Jesus is the substitutionary atonement on the cross, the propitiation for our sin, then you have no part with him. And what he's talking about, eating his flesh and blood, is communion. And he could have stepped out at least to the disciples and to all the crowd. And he could have said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

I'm not saying you got to make like a forearm sandwich from me. I'm saying there's going to come a day where we're going to take the Passover meal. And I am the personification of the Passover meal. And when you, you're not actually eating my flesh, you're going to eat a little piece of bread. And then you're not going to drink my blood. You're going to just drink a little grape juice or wine. And in doing so, you're going to remember that I died on the cross for you. It would have been an easy explanation, and yet Jesus chooses not to explain himself.

And he says to Peter, do you want to go away as well? And what Peter does, Peter's answer, is instruction to us on what we do when we have doubts. I mean, when we have theological doubts or scientific doubts or historical doubts, when you, you know, you're having a hard time getting your mind around what you learned in biology and what the book of Genesis said, or a lot of bad things happen to good people, or maybe you feel like you're praying and praying and praying, but your prayers never make it out of the room you're in, or somebody you loved eyes. Like, what do you do when God seems to not explain himself?

Jesus says, Peter, you don't want to leave two, do you? And here's Peter's answer. Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? you have the words of eternal life. And we have believed and have come to know that you are the Holy One of God. So what is Simon Peter saying? Simon Peter is when he's asked, do you want to leave?

He's basically saying, where are we going to go? Because to walk away from you is to walk towards something else. And so this is troubling, and I don't know what you mean. Would this eat the flesh, drink the blood stuff? And I wish you would explain yourself to me. I can tell you what I do, no, you're the only one that offers eternal life. So even though I can't understand my circumstances right now, I choose to continue to believe and trust in you.

So what do you do when you have doubts? You just pick them up and you follow after Jesus. And you pick them up and you follow after Jesus. And you pick them up and you follow after Jesus. And eventually, one day all your doubts go away. Not like in a couple of weeks or months, but one day when you are in heaven glorified, there will be no doubts. Nobody will come up to you in heaven and say, do you believe in Jesus?

You'll be like, he's sitting right there. Faith becomes some. So when you have doubts, when you have unanswered questions, when you find yourself in a circumstance that makes you want to question your faith in Jesus, just come back to this. Where else you're going to go? Jesus is the only one that offers eternal life. And though we may not understand all that is going on in our world right now,

and God may not even explain himself in every detail. We can trust that he sent his son to be the bread of life, to die on a cross, and that one day for all of us who believe, it will make sense. Let's pray. Father in heaven, Lord, we thank you for the gift of faith. And Lord, we pray that you would continuously grow our faith. The more we dive into your word,

the more we lean into the spirit of God, the more we hear the words of Jesus, that our faith would grow and grow and grow and grow. And God, in those moments where our doubts seem to get bigger and bigger and bigger and our faith gets smaller and smaller and smaller, Lord, I thank you that it is not the amount of faith we have, but the object of our faith that matters. Because you said if we had the fate the size of a mustard seed, we could move mountains.

And the reason is because you're the mountain mover, not us. So, Lord, I pray, even in our doubts and even in our troubles, and especially in these crazy times in our world, that we would pick up our doubts and we would continuously follow after Jesus. Amen.