Who's In Charge?

Do not work for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you, for on Him the Father, God, has set His seal. (John 6:27)

This verse is the pivot point in this chapter where the focus is being shifted by Jesus. He wants us, just as He wanted the people around Him that day, to get the main point for why He came to this earth and why He ever performs any signs and miracles on our behalf. Many of the people then missed the point Jesus was trying to get across, but that does not mean I have to miss it too. I want to really get it as deeply as possible for this is the primary reason I am immersing myself in the book of John.

Jesus is exposing our mistaken focus, our obsession with earning a living and seeking to meet our needs and provide for ourselves at the expense of receiving what will produce the life that we were designed to enjoy for eternity. It is very easy to allow priorities to orient into making our own physical needs at the top while our spiritual life sinks lower and lower on the scale. It takes deliberate decisions to reverse that natural tendency and Jesus is addressing that issue right here.

What Jesus is not suggesting is that we should simply quit our jobs and sit back and expect God to dump all of our provisions into our laps while we do nothing to cooperate with His appointed channels. God intends for each of us to participate both in His spiritual body and in caring for our families and ourselves. The real problem comes when we think it is our responsibility to provide for ourselves because we are afraid that God does not care for us enough to provide. We secretly or even openly doubt that God really is as good and generous and kind and resourceful enough and has our best interest at heart to have channels of provision available by which we can have our needs met.

As I said, this verse is a pivot point, not only in this chapter but in my own life as well. I am currently facing financial challenges that press me to become anxious and to begin to cast around for additional means of making more money to meet my needs. Many times I feel depression pressing in hard on my emotions and scenarios of failure and disaster try to emerge. Sometimes I feel that there is no hope of finding sufficient income to meet all the bills we have. I feel intense pressure to work even harder for the bread that perishes or else my family is very likely to go hungry if I don't.

I am starting to see a great deal of instruction and potential reality adjustment in these verses already. And it is coming at a time when I need exactly what God is showing me here. Everyday I again face the choices as to how I am going to perceive my circumstances, what I am going to believe about how God feels about me and how I am going to interpret the facts that surround me currently.

This is the key factor that is almost more important than anything else as far as belief is concerned. What I believe is totally contingent on how I interpret the facts and what is going on around me. And belief is the fundamental issue here in the book of John. What do I really believe about how God treats me, feels about me and His plans for me? What I believe about God is going to totally determine and control all the other decisions about reality and what I do in all the other areas of my life. This is not just a theological exercise or mental gymnastics, this is the crux of what it means to live as a genuine Christian verses living a pseudo-life pretending to be religious while in reality looking out for myself from motives of fear.

In this verse Jesus is exposing the very center of my being, asking me where my focus is as far as survival is concerned. My natural instincts are to look out for myself first, then care for those who are important to me (generally those who make me feel good), and finally see how I might keep God happy so someday He will take me home to live with Him for eternity. I know this sounds terribly blatant and irreverent possibly, but when I am brutally honest that is what comes into the open as to how my fallen nature perceives life. If I analyze how I feel like acting many times the evidence is there to support this.

But Jesus is here challenging me to step over into His view of life and reality. He is warning me that if my highest priorities are devoted to taking care of myself and spending most of my best energies working and grasping and calculating how to get things for myself that do not last very long, then all I am going to end up with is a life that doesn't last much longer than the things I seek to own or even the perishable food that I try to stock up for my own survival.

I have rather interesting evidence right around me to remind me of this truth. Just a few days ago I discovered cans of food stashed away in our pantry, placed there years ago by my parents and that is now so old they are leaking and molding all over the shelves. We continue to find cans of old food there that are now totally useless which means that the money invested in them originally was wasted. Many other conclusions might be drawn from this, but the point cannot be missed that the food we work so hard for really does not last all that long. If we don't seek a better kind of food that doesn't degenerate and has more value than the food we are familiar with, we are going to go the way of the kind of physical food that we eat each day with little hope of living more than just a few short years.

Yet the compulsion to keep working and grasping and storing and managing our finances and our food stashes still seems to be the most important thing in life. We reason that if we don't look out for where our food is going to come from we will starve to death soon. We are aware that there is not much chance that someone else is simply going to bring us all the food we need without us doing something about it, and that may be quite true in some respects. But in our increasingly desperate attempts to store up for our physical needs we find that our priorities almost always condense along those lines at the expense of our relationship with God and believing what He has promised in caring for us.

I have been holding up a question for several years now that I intently want to know the answer to, for I feel it is vital to both my future destiny and my current circumstances. In this book it keeps talking about believing and in this verse it is again the focal point. Repeatedly Jesus urged people to believe in Him, yet since I was very young I have asked questions of people as to what this belief thing really means. Almost no one has given me any satisfactory or sensible responses and so I have continued to ask the question and to gather clues as to what this involves in practical and applicable ways.

I still have a ways to go in my search for this answer but I feel that God is responding and is opening my understanding of what it really involves as my bigger picture of reality continues to expand and fill in. It goes right back to the issues I have just brought up, the moments in my life when I can't see where my provisions are going to come from and I feel urges to take things into my own hands as I become frantic and anxious. In fact, every time I start to feel anxious feelings welling up inside of me now I am reminded that it is a symptom of unbelief as Jesus labeled it.

So long as I fail to believe that God has both the capacity and the desire to take care of all of my needs, to the degree that I do not trust Him I am going to feel anxious and start to figure out ways of my own to get my needs met. This is the very spirit that Jesus is confronting in this verse and is the spirit that I want to become free from by His grace. It is not a one-time choice or victory but is something that I keep meeting on a regular basis. But each time I have to remind myself of what is supposed to be where in my priority system. Who is really in charge here and how much do I really believe that?