Come and Eat

It's not enough to look at a meal when you're starving – you must eat it. Today Jesus confronts us with the most personal invitation in all of Scripture: Come and partake of the bread of life. But many who heard Him couldn't tolerate what He was offering.

John 6:53-54 "So Jesus said to them, '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 yourselves. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.'"

This is graphic language, but Jesus isn't talking about the Eucharist or the Lord's table. He's talking about the reality that it's not enough to agree with the truth – it's not enough to admire who He is. You must come and partake. You must come and experience. You must come and eat.

When the text says His words were "hard," it's the Greek word "skleros," which doesn't mean hard to understand – there's a perfectly good word for that. It means hard to tolerate. They didn't accept the reality of a dying Messiah.

Two things about this eating and partaking:

First, eating is personal. You could go to a French restaurant and know the name of every dish, know all the language, know all the ingredients, but if you're starving, unless you eat that food for yourself, it's not going to matter – you're going to die. You can show up to a feast with twenty of your best friends, and not a single one of them will be able to eat the meal for you. You cannot eat by proxy.

So Jesus is saying, "Come eat my flesh, drink my blood." There is a real element where this is personal. No one is saved because their brother, their sister, their mom, or their dad is saved. It's immensely personal.

Second, it's experiential. To come to Jesus and believe in Him is objective, but it is also subjective in the sense that it is experientially real. We use the language of eating and drinking in our everyday life to represent reality that was experiential to us: "I got a new book – I'm devouring its pages" or "It was such a wonderful time – I was drinking it all in."

It's not just the objective truth that Jesus lived and died – the demons believe and shudder. It's coming to realize He lived and died for you. That's why Jesus says in verse 56, "He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him." This is not just someone we believe in – it's someone who comes and abides, takes residence. You're the dwelling place of God.

Romans 5:5 says the Holy Spirit pours out the love of God into your hearts so that you know you're a home for the living God, and you've come to Him in an experiential, real way. He's more real to you than your lunch sometimes.

But many couldn't tolerate this message. Verse 66 says, "As a result of this, many of his disciples withdrew and were not walking with him anymore."

It's not the things in the Bible that are hard to understand that propel people to leave – it's the things that are easy to understand and hard to tolerate. The truth that people reject is most often the black-and-white truth, not the gray.

When Jesus asked the twelve if they wanted to leave too, Peter responded with profound insight: "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life." Where else are we going to go? Back to the dead-end street of moralism? Back to trying to earn our way to God through another religion? Back to the sacrificial system? No – we've come to know that You are the Holy One of Israel.

But there's a tragedy here. It's very possible for you to be in a place of worship and be a total stranger to the One you're supposed to be worshiping. And there's an even greater tragedy – Judas stayed. He saw nearly every one of Jesus's miracles, heard every single sermon, but never bowed down with a surrendered heart.

Could there be a greater tragedy than to be in church your whole life and never bow down, never humble your heart?

Stay dialed in.