Blog In Audio:
Greetings,
Well, it is officially spring! There was a real sense of new life in church yesterday. We were blessed to have Andrew Shearman with us and he brought an encouraging word concerning speaking to the dry bones of our lives. It is time to live again! God is a God of hope and the future is always life. God is life and we ae meant to be life to our world.
When God became flesh and moved into our world, it was God’s means of enabling us to return to our heavenly Father as sons and daughters of God. We were not merely humanity with a need for God’s salvation. We were humanity with a need of reconnection to our heavenly Father. Only by knowing God as our Father can we know who we are. We are sons and daughters of God. To be a child of God is to be the substance of the life of God. God wants us to know that our lives were destined in Him to be for seed and bread in our world. That seed is the seed of the life of God beyond our days and that bread is the life of God for the world of our today. What Jesus was in His fullness as a man is something of what we are meant to be as sons of God and sons of men. Knowing Jesus is knowing God and knowing God is knowing Jesus. God gives life, breath, and all things. Jesus was a man who lived fully on the life that God His Father gave Him. He was the brightness of the Father’s glory and the express image of Him in all things. His testimony was that of being the bread of life for all of mankind. He fulfilled His purpose in being bread to the world through a partnership with His heavenly Father in all that He did.
John 6:35 And Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst. 36 But I said to you that you have seen Me and yet do not believe. 37 All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will by no means cast out. 38 For I have come down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me. 39 This is the will of the Father who sent Me, that of all He has given Me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up at the last day. 40 And this is the will of Him who sent Me, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in Him may have everlasting life; and I will raise him up at the last day.”
Jesus is our life and in knowing Him we become life to our world. We have the ever increasing promise of eternal life. Life in Christ is eternal and it is for this world and for all that is beyond this life. It is not just life to feel good about ourselves in this world. It is life to bring life to our world as Jesus gave all that He was for the life of the whole world.
John 6:48 I am the bread of life. 49 Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and are dead. 50 This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that one may eat of it and not die. 51 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.”
Jesus wants us to know the destiny of being sons and daughters of God. We have each been given a life to give life to our world. The life that we have been given is who we are as unique sons and daughters of God for His glory in all things. We have not been given a life to live for the will of ourselves. We have been given a life to live for the will of our Father. Our world needs life, but only God gives true life. His life is eternal life. Jesus told a story of a man needing bread. That man was willing to knock on the door of his friend until he woke in the night and gave him three loaves. In the Scripture the number three is symbolic for God. I believe that the story told by Jesus applies to us all in that each of us needs a personal relationship with God as our Father so we can also be life to others in our world. We are meant to be God bread to our world. We are not the bread of self, but bread as a testimony of God’s life to our world. It is the life of the Holy Spirit within each of us that empowers us to be life to others.
Luke 11:5 And He said to them, “Which of you shall have a friend, and go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves; 6 for a friend of mine has come to me on his journey, and I have nothing to set before him’; 7 and he will answer from within and say, ‘Do not trouble me; the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot rise and give to you’? 8 I say to you, though he will not rise and give to him because he is his friend, yet because of his persistence he will rise and give him as many as he needs.
Even though this story told by Jesus directly applies to our need for a personal relationship with God in our lives, it also gives us a testimony of that life that comes from us when we know God in our own lives. Without Christ in us we can never really offer true life to our world. It is Christ in us that is the hope of glory. That hope is the glory of eternal life in this world and in heaven to come. That glory is also the ability to live as sons and daughters of God who can offer true life to our world. Each of us are meant to be bread in and to our God-given measure of the world as Jesus is the bread of life to us all and to all of the world.
Blessings,
Ted J. Hanson
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