Daily Devotional 7/16/26
John 6:51 (NKJV): I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread that I shall give is My flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world.
This is a difficult verse. The people who heard it had a response that was basically “eww”. The thought of being cannibals was repulsive to them, as it is to us today. If we take Jesus words literally, then we have a very problematic view of what it means to have faith in Jesus. The literal interpretation of today’s verse leaves us in a place that we do not want to be: disgusted by Jesus and repulsed by Him. Therefore, if we truly have faith that the Gospel of Jesus is true and worthy, then we have to take these words of today’s verse in a different way. I firmly believe that when Jesus talked like this to others that He did it on purpose. I believe that Jesus put spiritual concepts in words that are more worldly so that the people listening had to make a choice about what they believed about Him and God. If we get stuck in viewing them only in terms that have to be taken literally and materially, then we will miss who Jesus and God truly are. If we learn to take things more spiritually, then we find truths about them that we did not know before. We cannot exist fully if we do not live into our faith that the Gospel of Jesus is true. We cannot grow fully if we do not bring into our lives the power and strength of the Holy Spirit. We cannot be fully who we are if we do worship the Living God. Today, may we fully bring into ourselves the fullness of the agape love of Christ Jesus, so that we can live lives of healing and wholeness.
That passage is a strange one to sit with. I like how you pointed the difficulty back toward trust rather than trying to explain it all away. Sometimes the hard sayings are exactly what keep us honest about who Jesus actually is.