Bread
There is nothing like the smell of fresh bread. Taking some directly from the oven (or bread making machine) smothering it with butter and eating it immediately is divine!
There are so many varieties of bread too. Just take a look in the bread aisle in your local supermarket and you will see a feast of loaves!
All over the world, bread is considered a staple food, in other words a basic dietary item. A person can survive a long time on only bread and water.
Bread appears a lot in the Bible. It played an integral part in the Jewish Passover meal (and still does today). In the Old Testament after Israel left Egypt, they wandered the desert for 40 years, and in that time, God provided ‘bread from heaven’ in the form of manna.
In the New Testament, Jesus did two amazing miracles when he fed 1000s of people with just a few loaves of bread. The crowd were amazed…
“Then Jesus declared, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.’”
There’s a lot going on in this sentence:
When Jesus said, ‘I am’, he made a claim to deity (i.e. to be God), as these words were used in the Old Testament for the covenant name of God.
When Jesus said he was, ‘the bread of life’, he equated himself to bread, meaning that he was essential for life. In other words, without him, there is no life!
This life Jesus referred to was not physical, but spiritual. Physical bread will perish, but his spiritual bread brings eternal life.
Jesus made an invitation to anyone and everyone to ‘come’ and ‘believe’. This involved making a choice to follow Jesus.
Finally, Jesus said that by choosing and believing in him, it means that people will not go hungry or thirsty. In other words, he offers a deeper, spiritual satisfaction.
Let me encourage you to dwell on these five points and choose this bread. As the Lord’s Prayer reminds us: ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ (Matthew 6:11).
God bless
Gary Bastin - Hope Community Church leader