Matthew Perry had everything – fame, wealth, recognition, Julia Roberts as his girlfriend, making a million dollars a week. But in his autobiography, he wrote: "I should be dead. I had everything, but I found nothing. You have to get famous to know that it's not the answer. I'm constantly filled with this lurking loneliness, a yearning, a clinging to the notion that something outside of me will fix me."
John 6:35 "Jesus said to them, 'I am the bread of life; he who comes to me will not hunger, and he who believes in me will never thirst.'"
Eleven months before Matthew Perry died, he penned those sobering words. He's not alone. It's very Solomonic in its expression – you have a guy who had everything, and he says, "I'm empty. I'm barren on the inside. You look at me and I make you laugh, but it's only so I can hide the darkness inside my soul."
Why is this? Because, as Augustine said, God has made us for Himself, and our hearts are restless until we find our rest in Him. We look to fill our lives with the gifts rather than the Giver Himself, and people spend their life on an endless hamster wheel chasing what only God can give them.
There is a core emptiness inside the human soul – a longing for what only the Creator of the human soul can provide. And yet they fill it, they stuff it with things that are fleeting and temporary and transient. You reach the top of the mountain and realize you're lower than you've ever been.
It's to people such as Matthew Perry, and people such as you and I, that Jesus says, "I'm the bread of life. I am the only one that can fill your soul. Your soul was hardwired with a hunger for Me, and you're going to try to fill it with the gifts rather than the Giver. And the more gifts you obtain, the more you receive, the more you're going to recognize you don't have anything if you don't have the Savior."
What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? It profits that man nothing.
When Jesus says "I am the bread of life," He's using the Hebrew tetragrammaton – the same "I AM" that God used to identify Himself to Moses at the burning bush. Jesus is claiming to be the self-existent, self-sufficient, eternal God who can satisfy what nothing else can satisfy.
Jesus is claiming to be sufficient for two main things: to satisfy and to save. The only one who can satisfy your soul is the one who created it. Just as physical food is necessary and essential to physical life, spiritual food is necessary for spiritual life.
Blaise Pascal articulated that , "There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of each man which cannot be satisfied by any created thing, but only by God the Creator made known through Jesus Christ."
Every person has an ingrained hunger, and it's not just for the bread they eat every day. It's for that which fills them and satisfies and saves and sustains them at the soul level.
You can spend your entire life battling for bread, just to put food on the table night after night after night, and come to the last night of your life and realize that you die with a filled stomach and an empty, barren, starving soul.
Don't spend your entire life on a hamster wheel chasing what the Joneses have and die apart from the filling of Jesus Christ. Jesus is asking you this morning: Are you hungry for something more? Are you hungry for something that the dinner table can't satisfy?
1. What "gifts" are you tempted to pursue instead of the Giver Himself?
2. How have you seen the emptiness that comes from trying to fill your soul with temporary things?
3. What would it look like to come to Jesus as the bread of life in your current circumstances?
Stay dialed in.