3. Sent to do God’s will (John 6:38-40) – a mission of salvation
For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will
of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose
none of all those he has given me, but raise them up at the last day. For my
Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall
have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.’
John 6 opens with the only
miracle, other than the resurrection, that is recorded in all four Gospels –
the feeding of more than five thousand hungry people on a hillside beside the
Sea of Galilee. The miracle is a
demonstration both of Jesus’ identity as the Good Shepherd (the act of feeding
people as they rest on green grass, followed by stilling of waters is
reminiscent of Psalm 23) and of His ability to provide for His sheep. It is also an illustration for the disciples
of their Master’s provision for their needs (the 12 leftover baskets are perfectly
sized lunchboxes for each of them) as they distribute His provision to
others. Jesus provides abundantly for
His people and for those who join His work in serving them. There are clear echoes in this passage of
John Chapter 4 (see Part 1 of this series), where Jesus described His food as
doing His Father’s will. Now, however, we
have a dramatic visible demonstration through the miracle of multiplication of
loaves and fishes of Jesus’ ability to ensure that His mission never lacks
provision.
After a further
demonstration of His power to His disciples, as He calms the storm that
threatened to engulf them, Jesus meets up with the people He had fed on the
other side of the lake. He uses their
experience of filled bellies to teach them a lesson about empty souls and the
imperishable food that can sustain their spiritual life. He calls Himself the bread of life and likens
Himself to the manna God had provided in the wilderness in the time of
Moses. Jesus Himself will be made
available to everyone who believes in Him and He is a food that permanently
dispels hunger. Yet there is a
problem. These people were happy to take
the food Jesus provided for their hungry stomachs, but they have not yet
grasped their deeper need of spiritual life in Him. Jesus continues to explain to them that God
is at work and that salvation is found in Him, the One God has sent. Yet they still don’t understand. They are puzzled by His claim to be bread
from Heaven. They are scandalised by His
insistence that eternal life is found by feeding on His flesh, yet Jesus, in a
coded reference to the communion meal He will institute (perhaps because John
records this teaching he does not record the Last Supper as the other Gospels
do), He adds to the scandal by saying they must also drink His blood. It seems as if Jesus is deliberately trying
to confuse them! Many of the images
Jesus uses in the fourth Gospel have the same effect that the parables (absent
from John) recorded in the other Gospels had: they filter out those who are
only interested in what they can get from Jesus (food, entertainment or
healing) from those who are eagerly seeking for God and aware of their need of
forgiveness and restoration through Jesus.
The result of Jesus’ challenging teaching here is that many fair-weather
‘disciples’ desert Him – from this point onwards His popularity declines.
This encounter is a
challenge for those who engage in gospel ministry. We are readily tempted to make the message as
simple as we can – to remove its hard edges to make it easier for people to
accept. We tone down our references to
judgement and big up the blessings to be had.
We risk making the gospel about the needs of people rather than the
glory of God. We can distort the divine
call to rebels to return to relationship with Him through repentance and faith
into the divine offer of healing and fulfilment for people who are really
unfortunate victims of circumstances beyond their control. The gospel of God’s glorious redemption
becomes a therapeutic message for self-centred people. I’m not suggesting that we should find images
that are deliberately offensive or confusing to people, but we must not remove
the unavoidable offense of the gospel that comes from confronting people with
the fact that they simply don’t have within themselves what they need. They need to know that left to themselves
they are empty and dying and that only by dependence on Christ’s provision can
they have fullness and life. Our goal is
not to maximise numbers of get a ‘quick response’, but to faithfully explain
the gospel and trust God to work in the lives of some.
Furthermore, our
ministries of mercy and compassion bring people to gratitude to us for
provision for physical needs, but do not always confront them with the radical
claims of Jesus and their spiritual need of Him. The miracle of loaves and fishes and the
conversation between Jesus and the crowd that follows highlights the holistic
nature of Christian mission. Just as
Jesus met with people in their whole need, so must we. We reach out in compassion from the bounty of
resource God has provided His people, bringing healing and restoration. As we do this, however, we also share the
truth of Jesus’ Lordship and of people’s need of forgiveness through Him. Our desire is not simply that people’s
material and social needs will be met, but that they will enter into the
eternal life that can be theirs through Christ.
It is relatively easy to
plan for ministries of compassion and to measure their results, but we cannot
programme the response of people to the gospel.
Our duty is to faithfully proclaim the truth and to leave the rest to
God. We must have confidence that God is
at work in drawing people to Himself and that those He draws will come. We must realise that the Father has given
people to Christ and they will come to Him.
We hold together the mysterious twin truths of God’s sovereignty in
salvation and of the universal offer of forgiveness to all who will
believe. These twin truths are woven
together by Jesus throughout the second half of John 6 and they give us great
confidence that God has invited us to be His co-workers in proclaiming the
gospel of salvation, but that the results of our mission are not dependent upon
our technique or even our faithfulness, but on Him. Jesus, the Son, was confident that His
Father’s will to save through Him all who would come to Him would be fulfilled
– for this reason He had come. We too
can be confident that as we reach out in mission some will be saved.
In summary, the great
truth for mission seen in this passage is:
· God
provides for physical and spiritual needs – Jesus resources us physically
and spiritually so that we can meet the needs of others, both material and
spiritual, in holistic mission.
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