Pray With Us “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” — Philippians 4:6 (ESV) Paniba PANIBA is a Christian ministry committed to feeding the hungry, sharing the love of Jesus, and strengthening vulnerable communities in the Dominican Republic. Their heart is especially for children and families living in economically disadvantaged areas, where access to nutritious food is limited and basic needs often go unmet. Through weekly feeding programs, PANIBA provides nutritious meals to children to help them grow, learn, and thrive physically, mentally, and spiritually. These gatherings aren’t just about food — they include worship, Bible teaching, games, and intentional time to share the hope of Christ with young lives. In addition to nourishing children, PANIBA extends care to elderly and disadvantaged adults, offering monthly grocery support for those who otherwise have no safety net. The ministry partners with local churches and volunteers to meet both practical needs and spiritual hunger, demonstrating God’s love with compassion, dignity, and respect. Update Tracie Pratt September 15, 2026 Update Please continue to pray for Tracie and Lyle Pratt as they walk through this very difficult season. Tracie has decided not to pursue further treatment and is trusting the Lord to sustain her in the days ahead. Please pray for peace, strength, comfort, and a deep sense of Christ’s presence for Tracie, Lyle, and their family. Update On Cora August 21, 2026 Update Praise God for a good report for Cora Brummel! Her procedure went very well, her leg was properly aligned, and she did well under sedation. Please thank God with us and continue to pray for good healing as Cora adjusts to her new bright pink cast. Mona DeKam's Surgery August 20, 2026 Surgery Please pray for Mona DeKam as she undergoes back surgery today. Pray that the surgery goes smoothly, that God would guide her medical team, and that Mona would experience peace, relief, and a good recovery. Cora Brummel's Leg Reduction August 19, 2026 Surgery Please pray for Carla Brummel’s 4-year-old daughter, Cora, as she undergoes a closed reduction on her leg today at DeVos Children’s Hospital. Pray that the procedure goes smoothly, that her leg is properly aligned and heals well, and that this would prevent the need for surgery. Expectant Mom August 19, 2026 Baby Pray for excellent health for our expectant mothers, Sarah DeKam , Carrie Dick, and Cora Dick and give thanks for this blessing. Tracie Pratt Surgery Update August 7, 2026 Update Please continue praying for Tracie Pratt following an unsuccessful surgery to remove the cancer from her liver. She is recovering well and in good spirits, and we ask for prayer for her recovery, wisdom for her doctors as they pursue new medications, and for God’s peace and sustaining grace for Tracie and her family in the days ahead. Marilyn Tacoma Surgery August 6, 2026 Surgery Please be in prayer for Marilyn Tacoma as she will be having surgery next week Wednesday, Aug 12. Pray for guidance for the surgeon and strength for Marilyn in the recovery. Tracie's Surgery July 28, 2026 Surgery Please be in prayer for Tracie Pratt as she will be heading to Ann Arbor for surgery on Wednesday, August 6th, to hopefully remove all of the cancer that remains after her chemo treatments. Pray for guidance for the surgeon and strength for Tracie, Lyle, and their family. Claire Sullivan U.S. Army Training July 27, 2026 Support, Military Please be in prayer for Claire Sullivan who is back on base and is in the midst of 10 weeks Advanced Training for the Military Police of the U.S. Army. She asks for your prayers for strength and perseverance and she would love a note of encouragement: PFC Sullivan, Claire A Co. 795th MP BN Bldg. 901 Plt. 2 7676 Loyalty Loop Ft. Leonard Wood, MO 65473 Keith DeRuiter Update July 6, 2026 Update Please be in prayer for Keith & Phylla DeRuiter and the DeRuiter family as Keith will begin immuno-therapy treatments next week. They would appreciate prayers for comfort as they navigate treatments long term. Gary Brinks New Treatment June 29, 2026 Therapy Please be in prayer for Gary Brinks, and for Dale & Bonnie as well, while Gary is in a treatment program in Mount Pleasant. Keith DeRuiter Melanoma Cancer June 22, 2026 Cancer Please be in prayer for Keith & Phylla DeRuiter and the DeRuiter family as Keith has been diagnosed with a stage 4 melanoma cancer. They would appreciate prayers for comfort as they navigate treatments in the next few weeks.

Keep the Fire Burning Prosper Christian Reformed Church Keep the Fire Burning 2 Timothy Mitchell Leach Sunday, September 13, 2026 Audio Keep the Fire Burning Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 01:04 Sermon Transcript 2 Timothy 1:1-7 As we start a new series on 2 Timothy, this book is going to ask us a question that has been helpful for the church throughout the ages: what is a pastor supposed to be? I think this is a good question, and it's a question I ask myself. Oftentimes I get asked what I do during the week. Being a pastor is kind of a weird job — you know what I do on Sunday mornings, but what happens during the week? I've had people at other churches ask their lead pastors, "You seem like you've got the best job in the world, you only have to work one day a week — what do you do the rest of the time?" It's hard to know exactly what a pastor does day to day. Unlike other jobs — when you meet a teacher, you kind of know what they do day to day — there is a wide variety of what pastors do, and the expectations can be all over the place. I asked a bunch of my pastor friends about the expectations they've felt placed on them by their congregations, and I got some good responses. I want to lay some of these out, because I think if you ask ten different people, you'll probably get twelve different explanations of what a pastor should be. Here's what they texted me back: a pastor should be a great public speaker, a skilled biblical counselor, a great manager of staff and volunteers, a strategic planner, able to navigate a board or council, an expert communicator, someone who can handle difficult conversations well, someone who can manage budgets and build systems and processes, someone who is available in crisis and emotionally intelligent, someone who protects the church from false teaching, someone who can handle criticism graciously, someone who visits the sick and dying, someone who has a healthy family life. And this is one of my favorites — one of my best friends sent me this — all of those things above, and someone who never appears tired of any of it. Some of these things are crucial and important. Some of them are very good. But the question is, who gets to decide which ones are the most important, or important at all? The good news is the Bible gives us a great answer. 2 Timothy is going to show us what it is that we look for in pastors. Big Question What is a pastor supposed to be? So keep your Bibles open with me as we open up this passage. We're going to see two main sections in these seven verses: a letter the church needs, and a gospel worth dying for. Outline A Letter the Church Needs A Gospel Worth Dying For A Letter the Church Needs As we start this new series on 2 Timothy, it's good to understand some basics about this letter. This is a pastoral letter, or a pastoral epistle. There are three pastoral letters in the New Testament — 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus. These three are written primarily to pastors, to encourage them and challenge them on what they need to be. This letter is the last letter Paul will ever write. He writes it to his friend, someone he calls his beloved child in verse 2 — a young pastor in Ephesus, the same church the book of Ephesians was written to. Timothy is probably twenty to twenty-five years old. Paul and Timothy did a lot of ministry together; they knew each other, they had traveled together, they had preached the gospel together, and now they are apart. Paul was his mentor, but more than that, he was his spiritual father. As we lay out this groundwork, a question that might come up in our minds is this: why are we looking into this? Why would we spend weeks on end in a pastoral letter when there's only one pastor in this church? I think first and foremost, you are called to participate in faithful gospel ministry. But the second part of that is you have a pastor. It's important for you to understand what a pastor needs to be. You need to know what the Bible says I must be doing. You need to hold me accountable to what Scripture tells me, and never allow me to be less than that. This is important because we've seen in our culture too many pastors walk away from ministry for reasons that shouldn't be, too many pastors wander away from what they were called to be. There are two major errors we see in our culture. There are pastors who are more pragmatic — concerned with shaping what a pastor means into their own vision, becoming a CEO of a corporation to change and grow it. These pastors often put too much on themselves; they burn out and fall into sin, or they leave ministry entirely. The other error is pastors, more on the theologically liberal side, who change what it means to be a pastor, forgetting what it means to preach the Word, saying instead that the primary job of a pastor is to embody justice in the world. Both of these spectrums fail to see Scripture and preaching the Word as the primary goal of what the Bible calls pastors to be. To stray from what's important is something I'm asking you to help me and keep me accountable never to do. Paul knows he's about to die. He has one chance to write one final letter to his people, to the church. He writes it to Timothy, and he doesn't give Timothy a job description on how to become a better executive. He gives him a charge: guard the gospel, endure suffering, and preach the word. This isn't a call for everyone to be a pastor, but we must know the kind of preaching that we need — that you should demand, that you should receive, that you should pray for, protect, and refuse to trade in for anything else. This is why the global church has needed this book throughout the centuries. Whenever the church goes awry, whenever pastors go awry — when the Roman Catholic Church needed a Reformation in the 1500s, the Reformers loved 1 and 2 Timothy. It was a ripcord for the church to bring pastors back to what they were called to be. This is why Paul says in verse 5, "I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice, and now I am sure dwells in you as well." Paul's point isn't just to thank God that Timothy had a grandmother and mother who loved Jesus. His point is that Timothy's faith isn't his own — he received it from others. This is something we know to be true about us as Reformed people: we are not the ones who start our own salvation. There is a spiritual lineage — people who shared the gospel with you, and the people who shared the gospel with them, tracing all the way back to the apostles, all the way back to Christ himself. We don't receive the gospel through osmosis, or through a bloodline, or because we were born into the right family. We are Christians because someone loved us enough to teach us the gospel. God changed our hearts first and allowed us to love him, but it was through someone else proclaiming the word to us. This is why we practice infant, covenantal baptism here — because we believe it isn't our choice as individuals, it isn't our own ability. Someone else started it for us: God primarily, and then the people around us. That's why Paul says in verse 6, "For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God." It's the job of pastors to make sure the church understands the gospel, the power of what we have, that we have to guard it, not walk away when it's hard, and that we must pass it along to the next generation. The language of "fanning into flame" isn't about starting a fire anew — it's about taking a coal that was already burning and giving it oxygen. Timothy is that coal. Paul is writing because Timothy is discouraged. He's questioning whether it's worth it to continue on in Ephesus to preach the word. A Gospel Worth Dying For Why should Timothy continue at all? Paul is in Rome, under house arrest, in prison. This is his last letter to the church. He won't return to his earthly home; in a couple of months he will be beheaded. Imagine you're Timothy for a moment — you're already discouraged about what's happening in your own church, and your mentor, your spiritual father, is in prison for the very gospel you are proclaiming. He's about to be beheaded. Here's a man on death row, probably in his sixties or seventies, whose life will end because of his love for Christ and his refusal to remain quiet about the gospel. Why should Timothy keep going? Why should he endure the very suffering that might land him in the same spot Paul is in now? This letter is Paul declaring that it is worth it — that all Paul has gone through, and all Timothy will go through, is worth it. The glory of the gospel outshines any momentary affliction Timothy might go through. If there were a letter where Paul could be honest about any trepidation, any hesitation, any wavering at all, this would be it. It would make sense for Paul to say the gospel is worth dying for, and to go to his execution willingly — but it would also make sense for him to tell Timothy to be strategic, to avoid the trials Paul has gone through, to have a longer ministry career. That's not what he says. Instead, one verse further, Paul writes: "Therefore do not be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord, nor of me his prisoner, but share in suffering for the gospel by the power of God." He's saying, join me in suffering. What kind of thing must you possess to call someone to join you in suffering? You have to be holding something so worthwhile that you can say: I know this will be painful, this will be excruciating, but join me in it, because the gospel is worth it. What kind of message would make a man on death row say that? It's only this: the glorious reality that God came to us, that God became a man — not just to be a good example, not to be a new teacher, not to be our own comfort — but to suffer and die. He came to make it possible for wretched sinners to become saints, and he did it in the most painful way possible: enduring the cross, the Roman crucifixion, maybe the most anguishing, excruciating torture humanity has ever known. Later, in the pinnacle of this book, in chapter 4, verse 2, Paul gives us three words — the culmination of what he is building toward: "Preach the word." Essentially, Paul's dying words to the church, to Timothy, are: preach the word. What Paul gives us is this: guard, endure, and preach the gospel without shame. That's the main idea of this entire letter — the melody that plays throughout it. Timothy has received the faith; he must guard the gospel now, and he must be willing to suffer for the faith he has and proclaim the gospel to the ends of the earth. Why? Because the gospel does not belong to Timothy — it has been entrusted to him by the risen Christ. Because Christ has conquered death and entrusted us with the gospel, we must guard it faithfully, endure suffering without shame, and proclaim it until the next generation receives it. This is a command, a demand — not an add-on, not something we get if we pay a surcharge and upgrade our subscription. This is the bare minimum. This is what makes a church a church. If we do not have the gospel, what we're doing here is just an expensive country club, and it's a waste of our time. We can have the greatest Christian fellowship, decent ministry — but if we do not have the gospel, we are wasting our time. Because the gospel, when it is preached, is the most powerful thing. The church, when it has the gospel, becomes the most powerful institution on the face of the earth. It is not through us that we get to change people's hearts of stone into hearts of flesh, but through proclaiming the gospel. Every one of our lives is short. Paul will die, Timothy will die, Lois dies, Eunice dies, every pastor dies, every generation in the church will come to an end. But Christ, risen from the dead, and his gospel cannot be chained. So the call to us in this letter is to guard it, to suffer for it, to preach it, and to hand it to someone before our race is finished. When you're in heaven looking back at your life, you will not care whether your pastor was cool or a nerd, clever or dull, elegant or clumsy. But you will care deeply whether he preached the Word, whether he proclaimed the gospel regularly to you. That leads us to our first point of application: hold your pastor accountable. We're coming up on one year of me being here, and I need your help. Just like Timothy needed Paul's help, I need you to know what a pastor must be so that I can be that. Prosper does not ultimately need me to be more impressive, the funniest preacher, or to have all the newest ideas. You don't need me to build my own kingdom here. What you need, what God's word commands me to be, is to preach the gospel — because I need it too, and because that's what God says his bride needs. This church and every church needs the word of God opened faithfully, clearly, courageously, week after week. We need to hear about our sin, the holiness of God, the grace of God, that Jesus Christ lived, died, and rose again for sinners. We need to be called to repentance, and we need to be reminded there is no condemnation for those who are in Jesus Christ. If I ever avoid difficult truths because I am afraid of what people think, do not accept that from me. If I ever become more concerned with being liked than being faithful, do not accept that from me. If I start preaching my own opinions rather than the Word of God, do not accept that from me or any other man who fills this pulpit. I need you to hold me accountable, and I need you to pray for me — that in ten years, in twenty years, in thirty years, however long we have together at this church, I will still be standing here proclaiming the same gospel that Paul died for. Church trends will change, churches will change, pastors will change, but Prosper Christian Reformed Church will always need the gospel. That leads us into our next point of application: read 2 Timothy this week. Don't let me be the only person reading this letter. Sit down and read all four chapters — it doesn't take long. As you read it, notice the urgency in it; Paul knows his life is over, so pay attention to what a dying apostle believes is most important to say one last time. Underline the commands. Circle the places where Paul talks about suffering. Notice how often he talks about guarding, remembering, teaching, preaching, and passing on the gospel. Then ask yourself: if these were some of Paul's last words, do I care about the same things Paul cares about? Over the next several weeks, I don't want you merely hearing sermons on 2 Timothy — I want 2 Timothy to be placed inside you, something you embody, something you know. That leads us to our final point of application: pray about your calling during this series. Some of you may be called to pastoral ministry, and I mean that — there may be young men, or older men, in this church whom God has gifted and whom the church should eventually recognize and send into pastoral ministry. Don't dismiss this simply because ministry looks hard. Timothy had reasons to be afraid; pastoral ministry isn't easy. But Paul doesn't tell him to go find something easier — he tells him to fan into flame the gift God has given him. And pastoral ministry isn't the only calling in view here. Some of you should seriously consider whether God is calling you to serve as an elder or a deacon. Some of you may be called to mission work, to teach children, to disciple young believers, or simply to start having serious spiritual conversations in your own home. The question is not, am I called to full-time ministry? The truth is we're all called to full-time ministry. The question is, where has God placed me, and how can I faithfully hand this gospel to someone else? Every Christian is entrusted with the gospel and charged to hand it off to someone else. So during this series, pray — not "Lord, give me something impressive to do," but "Lord, where have you called me to be faithful? Who have you put in front of me? What gifts have you given me that I have left unused? Where am I allowing fear or comfort or busyness to keep me from serving?" And after you pray those things, be willing to obey where God calls you. None of us, as disciples, get to keep the gospel for ourselves — a disciple who doesn't make disciples isn't a disciple. We received the gospel from someone else, and, Lord willing, we will hand it off to someone else as well. Paul dies, and his final letter to Timothy is about guarding the gospel, about proclaiming the gospel. So here it is, plainly: God is a holy God who created us in his image. In the beginning, he created man and woman to be image bearers, little kings and queens on the earth, to reflect his glory. In Genesis 3, they sinned, they fell, and because of their sin there was an infinite gap between humanity and God. God had every right to leave us, every right to let us follow through on the consequences of our actions, to be separated from him forever. But God, being rich in mercy, while we were still sinners, while we were enemies, loved us enough to send his Son to die for us. Jesus Christ, the eternal second person of the Trinity, came to earth, born of a virgin — grace clothed in skin — lived a perfect life, fulfilled the entire law, not only obeying everything God said we should do but resisting everything God said we shouldn't. And because of his good works, he deserved glory and power and a throne that lasted forever. Instead, he received a crown of thorns and a cross — an excruciating death. On that cross, Jesus Christ took the wrath we deserved, all the punishment we should have gotten because of our own sinfulness. Jesus was treated like us, so that we could be treated like Jesus. He died, and three days later he rose from the grave, proclaimed victory over sin and death, and ascended into heaven, where he will judge the living and the dead. This is the gospel, and it is ours for anyone who has faith, who will believe in it. This is the coal, the ember burning inside of us — all we need to do is give it oxygen, and it will be aflame, it will be powerful. We need this gospel. The world needs this gospel. The church needs this gospel. And this is what Paul told Timothy, and this is what we need to remember: guard, endure, and preach the gospel without shame. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

Watch, Listen, and Read the sermons from Prosper Christian Reformed Church. Transcripts of every sermon are available here to read. Sermon Transcripts Sermon Series 2 Timothy September 13, 2026 Guard, endure, and preach the gospel without shame. To: November 8, 2026 From: 2 Timothy Come And Be Free August 30, 2026 Jesus is the Light of the World who exposes the slavery his own listeners refuse to see — and only those who abide in his word will know the truth and be set free by the Son. To: September 6, 2026 From: Come And Be Free Come And Drink August 16, 2026 At the Feast of Booths, Jesus exposes every shallow judgment about his identity and offers the Spirit to anyone who will stop arguing about him and come to him thirsty. To: August 23, 2026 From: Come And Drink Come And Eat July 5, 2026 Jesus is the true Bread from heaven who gives his flesh for the life of the world — and true disciples remain with him not because his words are easy but because his words are life. To: August 9, 2026 From: Come And Eat Come And Live June 7, 2026 Jesus is the Father's life-giving Son who heals the helpless, raises the dead, and fulfills the Scriptures — and the only fitting response is to come to him and live. To: June 28, 2026 From: Come And Live Consider Your Ways May 17, 2026 Because God calls his people to prioritize his presence and glory, we must repent of self-centered delay and trust that he will fill his house with a glory greater than we can imagine. To: May 31, 2026 From: Consider Your Ways Latest Sermons Filter by Clear Filters Filter By Scripture Select Scripture Book & Chapter Filter By Topic Select Topic Keep the Fire Burning September 13, 2026 Mitchell Leach 2 Timothy 1 The Pillar August 30, 2026 Mitchell Leach John 8 Rivers August 23, 2026 Mitchell Leach John 7 His Own Party August 16, 2026 Mitchell Leach John 7 Where Else Would We Go? August 9, 2026 Mitchell Leach John 6 Flesh and Blood August 2, 2026 Mitchell Leach John 6 The Bread You Can't Buy July 12, 2026 Mitchell Leach John 6 From This Day May 31, 2026 Mitchell Leach Haggai 2 Greater Than You Know May 24, 2026 Mitchell Leach Haggai 2 First Prev 1 Page 1 Next Last

2 Timothy Sermon Series Description Second Timothy is a dying man’s final letter to the son he trained. Paul is imprisoned in Rome and awaiting execution. Churches he helped establish are being unsettled by false teachers. Former companions have deserted him. And Timothy—the man Paul is counting on to carry the gospel forward—appears tempted to shrink back in fear, shame, and discouragement. So Paul writes a final charge to his beloved son in the faith: Guard what you have been given. Entrust it to people who will pass it on to others. Expect suffering as part of faithfulness rather than as proof that something has gone wrong. Continue in the Scriptures. Preach the Word even when people no longer want to hear it. Fulfill the ministry Christ has given you. Second Timothy therefore gives the church more than a picture of Paul’s final days. It gives the church a biblical vision of pastoral ministry. A faithful pastor is not defined primarily by personality, popularity, charisma, novelty, institutional success, or how closely he matches a congregation’s preferences. He is a man called to guard the gospel, depend on grace, endure hardship, handle Scripture accurately, pursue holiness, correct gently, preach faithfully, and finish his course. This series is not intended to persuade the congregation to like or affirm its pastor. It is intended to place both pastor and congregation under the authority of Scripture. The congregation should learn how to recognize faithful ministry, how to encourage it, and how to sharpen its pastor when he falls short of the biblical standard. Guard, endure, and preach the gospel without shame.

Rivers Prosper Christian Reformed Church Rivers Come And Drink Mitchell Leach Sunday, August 23, 2026 Audio Rivers Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 01:04 Sermon Transcript John 7:37-53 Solomon is one of my favorite characters in Scripture. Just the study of his person is so interesting. He's not my favorite because of what he does — he does some wildly moronic things throughout Scripture — but he's a fascinating person for us to see, especially in our modern era. Solomon is a character who seemingly God never says no to. He has almost anything he could ever ask for. He had elaborate parties that signified how much people respected him. He had opulent wealth — it's recorded throughout that time period in other countries just how wealthy Solomon was. He had a huge family; he was known as the father of a huge generation. He also had 700 wives and 300 concubines. Everything he could desire to have, to experience, Solomon could — which makes him my favorite, because at the end of his life he says this: "I said in my heart, come now, I will test you with pleasure and joy, enjoy yourself. But behold, this also was vanity." He gets to the end of his life, after chasing after everything he wanted, having the excess of whatever he wanted, and he says this was vanity, this was meaningless — this never fulfilled me. Which leads us to our big question for this morning. Big Question What makes us feel like we have enough? There's a reality that we understand deeply, and it's maybe hard for us to admit or to say out loud: there's a part of us that's always unhappy, that's always searching for something new, that always wants more. Scientifically, this is conclusive — there are countless studies in psychology and medicine that show us there is something we long for, that we're always unsatisfied with. That doesn't stop us, especially culturally, from trying to explain how we can be satisfied. There's an author named Tara Parker-Pope, a writer for the New York Times, who says this in one of her books: "Writing about oneself and personal experiences and then rewriting your story can lead to behavioral changes and improve happiness. We all have a personal narrative that shapes our view of the world and ourselves, but sometimes our inner voice doesn't get it right. By writing and then editing our own stories, we can change our perceptions of ourselves and identify obstacles that stand in the way of our personal well-being." Essentially what she's saying is, yes, we aren't happy, but a way we can become happy is by telling ourselves that we are — editing your own story, rewriting your own story to tell yourself that you are satisfied. But that really doesn't work. As much as you try to tell yourself something is true that isn't, it doesn't make it any less true. That might be the academic answer, the philosophical one, but there's an easier answer that's maybe more damaging but more popular. There are things we run to in our lives that take this place, that try to fulfill us, that try to bring us satisfaction — things like alcohol, money, power, drugs, popularity, social media, whatever it is. We try to fill ourselves with things we know can't sustain us. And when we know we're supposed to be satisfied — when we have this understanding that there is satisfaction to be had, but we can't find anything on earth that satisfies us — I think it points us to something bigger. That's what C.S. Lewis says: "If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world." There's something bigger than us, something outside of what we can create, that is supposed to fulfill this desire. What makes us feel like we have enough? Fortunately, the Bible has an answer for us, and that's what we're going to see in this passage in John chapter 7. So keep your Bibles open with me. We're going to see three questions work themselves out in this text: what is being promised, how does this work, and why can this satisfy us. Outline What Is Being Promised? (John 7:37-39) How Does This Work? Why Can This Satisfy Us? (The Cross) What Is Being Promised? (John 7:37-39) As you keep your Bibles open, I want to give us some context for what's happening as Jesus says this. Remember last week we talked about the Festival of Booths, or Tabernacles. This was a lamp-lighting and water-pouring festival that remembered the time in Israel's history when they were wandering through the wilderness, living in tents. Everyone would come together, bring their tents, and camp around Jerusalem. There was a water-pouring element to this festival that matters a great deal for our text today: a priest would take an empty pitcher in the morning and lead a parade of people, singing psalms and shaking branches, out of the temple down to a pool in the lower part of Jerusalem. Then they would walk back up to the temple and pour out this water on the altar, and it would spill out. This looked forward to a prophecy Ezekiel had seen — an outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Ezekiel wrote: "Then he brought me back to the door of the temple, and behold, water was issuing from below the threshold of the temple toward the east, for the temple faced east. The water was flowing down from below the south end of the threshold of the temple, south of the altar. Then he brought me out by the way of the north gate and led me around the outside to the outer gate that faces toward the east. And behold, the water was trickling out on the south side." This prophecy shows water spilling out of the altar, out of the temple, all the way down out of Jerusalem, all the way to the Dead Sea. When they poured water out at the festival, it was a way for them to anticipate God's Holy Spirit coming and restoring everything that was broken. That's what we see in this passage. Let's look at verses 37 through 39: "On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out, 'If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.' Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified." So Jesus calls these people at the Feast of Booths to drink living water, and to receive the Holy Spirit. In the Old Testament, water was always synonymous with the Holy Spirit and life itself. Isaiah 44 says: "I will pour water on thirsty land and streams on dry ground; I will pour my Spirit upon your offspring and my blessing upon your descendants." God had promised in Ezekiel's vision that water would spill out and flow — and as it flowed from the temple all the way to the Dead Sea, the river got wider and wider, deeper and deeper, until it transformed the Dead Sea from a sea so salty that there's no life in it into a sea teeming with fish. I had a professor who would lead trips to Israel and every year would bring a fishing pole down to the Dead Sea and throw in a lure, and the local people would look at him bewildered — there are no fish in the Dead Sea; it's so salty that salt pools on the shore in perfect cubed crystals. But he'd say, one day there's going to be fish in here — one day the Holy Spirit will transform and make everything new again. There's some confusion about this passage — a question about whose heart flows living water. Is it the believer's heart, or is it Jesus's? There are theories both ways, but I believe the correct way to understand this is that it is Christ's heart — that it is out of his heart that flows rivers of living water. I believe that because Jesus has to be the source of life. The Holy Spirit can change our hearts; we can be sensitive to how the Spirit moves and respond and do things for him, but we do not produce life. I believe this passage is saying that the Holy Spirit binds us both in union with Christ and in communion with him — two different things. Union speaks of how we are bound together in Christ Jesus; communion is the benefits we reap from that union with him. As people heard this from Jesus, they would have understood this context — this is not just a one-off thing Jesus says. This was so ingrained in Hebrew history and culture that they wouldn't have just thought about Isaiah or Ezekiel, but about the Exodus. Remember in John chapter 6, Jesus calls himself the bread of life — the manna in the wilderness, a better version of that. Now he's claiming to be, spiritually, for the world what the water from the rock was during the Exodus. Jesus is not just saying, I am a new Moses, a new prophet. What he's saying is, I am the Moses — I am the better Moses. I am what history has been pointing toward and anticipating and desiring since Genesis 3. How Does This Work? To understand how this works, we need to understand the nature of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is so complex, so, I think, even foreign for us as Protestants — we can lose track of this third person of the Trinity. There are some helpful things I want to point us to, starting with the Nicene Creed, which says this about the Holy Spirit: "We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and Son, who with the Father and Son is worshiped and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets." We could have a whole sermon series on the Holy Spirit — there's so much there — but let me condense it into a few points. The Holy Spirit is God. The Holy Spirit is not the Father or the Son — this is not some manifestation of either of those two persons in the Trinity, but another person, sharing the same nature with them, rightly called God the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is someone, not something — not the Force from Star Wars, not some underlying vibration, but a person. The Holy Spirit was there in creation. The Holy Spirit convicts us of our sin and applies to us the redemption purchased by Jesus by working faith in us. We have to understand who the Holy Spirit is and what he has come to do, because as Jesus promises this, he's promising himself — he's promising God himself to be there with us, to dwell with us. Jesus is promising that the third member of the Trinity will come to all who believe in him. But rather than saying it plainly, he uses the image of rivers of living water. He's not doing this to be confusing or merely poetic — the people who heard this wouldn't have been confused about what he meant. This was so ingrained in the Old Testament — the Holy Spirit as water imagery — that the people understood exactly what he was saying. Water has always been what Israel longed for — not just in the desert, but for this true life-giving water that only comes through the Holy Spirit. What they had also been desiring was the healing of the land, a land where God would dwell with them. That's what they wanted in the wilderness: a land where God could be with them. The ultimate hope for us as believers is that God will dwell with his people, that we would be a magnificent temple, a temple city, needing no holy buildings, because God himself is in our midst, and Jesus is with us when two or three gather. Jesus is standing at the end of this great festival, on the last day, the most magnificent day, after they had poured out pitchers of water for seven days, and he stands up and essentially says: everything you have been celebrating, everything you've been longing for, is here. I am he. Come to me and you will have rivers of living water flowing from you. The prophecy Ezekiel had been looking forward to was not a greater temple, but a greater people — a people who would have the Holy Spirit dwelling with them, so that we wouldn't have to go to a Holy of Holies, but would have the Holy Spirit dwelling within us. Why Can This Satisfy Us? (The Cross) Jesus says, come to me — I will satisfy you. Jesus can say this because on the cross, Jesus did what he came to do: he satisfied the wrath of God. On the cross, Jesus traded places with all who would believe in him. Jesus gets what we deserve — the punishment we deserve, the wrath of God poured out on evil and sinful people, which we describe as hell. That is what Jesus took on himself on the cross. He bore all the wrath of God. Jesus was sinless and yet was treated like a sinner. Jesus, the eternal second person of the Trinity, took hell on himself — which we should have received — so we wouldn't have to. That's love. When we say God is love, this should be the place our mind goes: a God who would come to us, who didn't need to bear our suffering, who didn't need to take on the wrath of God. So many people would die for a good man, as Paul says, but how many of us would be willing to suffer eternal torment, the full wrath of God, for someone else? That's what our Savior did. Before the foundations of the world, he said yes. He looked at you, a sinful person, and said, I will die for you. I love you. That's the love of Christ, the love of God for us. It means on judgment day you will not be seen as yourself but as Christ — as the one the Father said, "This is my Son in whom I am well pleased." There is a trade that happens not just on the cross but into eternity future as well. Our sins are great, but even greater is his grace toward us. So going back to our main question — what makes us feel like we have enough? There will be nothing in this world that can satisfy us, and that's why we need something from outside this world. Drink from the river of life. We'll try to fill our hearts with things we can manufacture, things that have been given to us as a gift, but until we drink from the river of life, we will not feel that peace, that shalom, that rest that Christ has for us. We need to drink from Christ. This prophecy, this water pouring, this festival, was all pointing toward something. Jesus is here at the moment they're anticipating the Holy Spirit being poured out, that water would flow and transform the people. A lot of people thought this was a literal prophecy — that there would be a literal spring, a water feature coming out of the temple. But this was pointing directly to Christ. What happened to Christ on the cross after he died? He was pierced in the side, and what came out? Water. Water flowed from the side of Christ. This prophecy, this festival, was all pointing to one moment where the Holy Spirit would pour out — not of the temple, but of God himself dwelling in our midst, out of Jesus himself. Jesus is the fulfillment of everything we've been longing for. The eternal thirst we have in us can only be met by the Holy Spirit himself and him dwelling with us. What we see on the cross is more than an escape route for us — the cross is more than fire insurance. The cross is our way to have God with us. Psalm 63 says this: "O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory. Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you. So I will bless you as long as I live; in your name I will lift up my hands." The psalmist understands what has escaped humanity for thousands of years — that just looking upon God, seeing his power and glory, is better than our life. Seeing his steadfast love for us is better than living. God is good enough; seeing him is good enough. Having the Holy Spirit dwell in us is better than anything this life has to offer. Because we have access to the Holy Spirit, to God himself, we don't have to travel, we don't have to pilgrimage anywhere — we can gather together every Sunday here, of all places, and worship him as if we were standing there seeing the Holy of Holies, seeing his power and glory, because we get the chance to every single week, through what God has done in us. But I need to warn you — we cannot leave here today hearing this as a "Jesus is better" self-help message, as if grabbing enough of Jesus, listening to him, buying what he's selling, will be good enough to apply to our lives and make things better. It doesn't work that way. I don't want you to leave thinking that Jesus is the thing that's going to make your life better, that's going to make whatever you're going through instantly resolved. He will make our lives better because he brings us a peace that passes understanding — he is with us, and he's our comforter. But he's not a magic balm we put on our life that makes the problems in our marriage go away, that makes the problems with our health go away, that makes our sin suddenly less enticing. To gain this kind of satisfaction means losing ourselves in the process. To be united with Christ through the Spirit means that you, like Christ, must die, and that you must come back to the newness of life that only he has to offer. When you've tasted and seen the living water, when it's more than a guess, when we've tasted and seen that he is good, we can't go back — we'll be transformed so much that we will not care what happens to us in this life. And that leads us to our one point of application: do not hedge your bets. You cannot access this kind of satisfaction, this kind of fulfillment, by also seeking fulfillment in other things. When you've tasted that the living water is sweet, is good enough, you'll be transformed so that what you see in this life — the trials and tribulations, the things life entices you with — are nothing in comparison. You can say to God: take my life, my money, my health, my family, my power, my popularity, my comfort — take it all, you can have it. If you take those things away from me, I will still follow you. Pursuit of fulfillment in anything created in this life is idolatry. That's why we talk about our hearts as idol factories — we love taking God, dethroning him from his position, and putting anything else we can on that throne, because it feels like we have control over that, like a shortcut to success. But what we're doing is building a house out of balsa wood — we're putting things up as the supporting poles of our life that we know are going to crumble, that can't hold the weight only God is supposed to hold. The apostle Paul is a great example of this. He's a man who cannot be governed — told over and over to stop preaching the gospel, and he says, I will not submit to that. He's thrown in jail so they think that will shut him up — instead he converts half the people in jail. So they put him under house arrest, and what does he do? He writes half the New Testament. Finally they say, fine, we'll take your life. What is his response? "To live is Christ, to die is gain." There isn't anything you could take away from the apostle Paul, because his true treasure, the thing he loved most, was Christ. If you kill me, he's saying, you're just giving me the thing I love most — I will be face to face with my Savior. When we try to prop ourselves up with idols, with things we can create or manufacture, it doesn't just give us anxiety because we know the thing we're worshiping is temporary and can be lost at any time — when we lose it, our life falls apart; it destroys us. When we worship God truly, when we seat him on the throne, it protects our hearts. We can go through immeasurable suffering and say, this is but a light and momentary affliction, because we know what we have. So don't hedge your bets. Why can we have this? Why can we be united with Christ? Why can we have the Holy Spirit dwelling in us, the thing Jesus promised here — that out of his heart, and out of ours, would flow rivers of living water? It's because on the cross, Jesus was forsaken. Why can we dwell with him? Because Jesus was cut off, no longer in communion with the Father. He became the rock that was struck in the wilderness, and he became spiritually parched. As Jesus died, this records: "After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said, to fulfill Scripture, 'I thirst.' A jar of sour wine stood there, so they put a sponge of sour wine on a hyssop branch and held it to his mouth. When Jesus received the sour wine, he said, 'It is finished.' He bowed his head and gave up his spirit." On the cross, why can we be satisfied? Because on the cross, Jesus wasn't. When Jesus needed water, when he was parched, when he thirsted, he was given sour wine, vinegar. Jesus traded places with us on the cross. Everything we receive is because Jesus was deprived on the cross. Jesus went to the cross not just to give us a better life, or the desires of our heart — he came and spilled his blood so that out of his heart could flow the Holy Spirit, so we could be united with him and have him. He went to the cross to give us himself. So church, drink from the river of life. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

The Pillar Prosper Christian Reformed Church The Pillar Come And Be Free Mitchell Leach Sunday, August 30, 2026 Audio The Pillar Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 01:04 Sermon Transcript John 8:12-20 I am not a pilot, nor do I claim to be one. In fact, I know there are a couple of pilots in this congregation who can probably correct me on this, but there's a phenomenon called spatial disorientation. Essentially, from what I understand, it is a feeling that you are going in a direction that you actually aren't. You can be going straight, or you can feel like you're going straight, and yet be turning. Or you can feel like you are maintaining the same altitude, or even going up, when you're actually descending. There's danger in this, and that's why, as a pilot, there are so many instruments — and there's actually a lot of regulations on the instruments you need to have in your instrument panel. Pilots will tell you that you shouldn't take off if any of those are malfunctioning, because at some point you're going to have feelings while you're in the airplane that aren't true based on what you're seeing on your instruments. And in that moment, you have to ask yourself this question: do I trust what I feel, or do I trust something outside of myself? Because when you're in the middle of flying, especially over water, the horizon and the water can blend into one. Sincerity doesn't mean anything when you crash into the water. And I wonder if that's a good picture for us as Christians, as people. Our hearts tell us things contrary to what's actually true. We hear this all the time in our lives — follow your heart, make your own path, trust yourself. But almost no one in our world will stop you to ask a question like this: What if my heart doesn't know the way? Big Question How do you know you're headed in the right direction? Oftentimes we make kind of arbitrary metrics for our lives — things that can serve as a compass showing us that we're headed in the right direction. For kids it might be a little easier: you can look at your report card and ask, do I have all A's? Maybe it's popularity — how many friends you have, or what people think about you. As an adult it's harder. We make metrics like: am I succeeding in my job? Do I have enough money in my bank account? Is my marriage successful? Do I have the right kind of friends? Are people saying the right things about me? Maybe it's whether or not you're happy enough, or how your family is doing, or whether you're healthy enough. But the more and more I talk with people, the more and more I'm convinced there is no metric that we can manufacture that actually gives us a compass, that actually points us or helps us answer this question. We can say things about ourselves — I took this vacation, I got this promotion — but at the end of the day, none of us really know if we're headed in the right direction. I used to look at people more advanced in age than me and think they'd gotten everything figured out, until I started talking to them about this question and realized: nobody knows. Nobody has a good compass on this. This can even be dangerous when it becomes spiritual — when we try to apply emotionalism to our own spirituality. A lot of churches will say things like, you need to experience God; have you felt God in your life recently? I'm not against having mountaintop experiences with him, but I am against saying that feeling is the metric for our spiritual journey. What that becomes is a kind of spiritual works righteousness: I feel that God loves me, I can sense his presence, and so therefore I'm a good Christian. That's not how it works. Nowhere in Scripture does it promise you that every day you're going to feel God, or that feeling is a metric of how spiritually healthy you are. There are times I pray and don't feel brought to my knees before our heavenly Father. There are times I read Scripture and I'm not moved the way I've been moved before. So what do we do when even our emotions can't be our compass spiritually? How do we know we're headed in the right direction? Well, fortunately, this passage has a great answer for us. So would you keep your Bibles open to John chapter 8 with me? Because we're going to see our compass, the way in which we're supposed to be led, and how we know that we're headed in the right direction. We're going to see three sections in this passage: the pillar that stands in the temple, the Pharisees argue with the light, and to reject the Son is to confess you do not know the Father. Outline The Pillar Stands in the Temple (John 8:12) The Pharisees Argue with the Light (John 8:13-18) To Reject the Son Is to Confess You Do Not Know the Father (John 8:19-20) The Pillar Stands in the Temple (John 8:12) To understand what we're talking about today, we have to come back to the festival Jesus is at. He's still at the Festival of Booths, or Tabernacles. This is a festival where people would pour water during the day to symbolize the Holy Spirit coming, but at night they would light enormous lamps — lamps that would be three or four to five stories tall. These lamps would be so luminous, so grand, that they would actually illuminate all of Jerusalem. They were there to represent and remember the pillar of fire that led Israel in the wilderness, that led them to the Promised Land. At night there was this pillar of fire that would lead Israel. It's at this moment, when the lamps are lit, when people are singing and dancing around these giant lamps — oil-based lamps that would be lit all night — that the pillar stands in the temple. And Jesus stands up and says the second "I am" statement in his ministry in the Gospel of John. Previously he had said, "I am the bread of life," and now he's going to be talking about how he is the light. Verse 12 says this: "Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, I am the light of the world; whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life." Jesus is talking about the light at a festival, at a feast where there are lamps lit. It's about lighting; it's about remembering a pillar in the wilderness. Remember, that's what they're celebrating — this moment where Israel was led by God himself. In the Old Testament it talks about how God went before them and led them; wherever this pillar of fire went, so went Israel. Jesus is standing there, and he says, "I am the light of the world." When he says that, they would have known exactly what he was talking about — that he's the pillar of fire. He's saying something audacious if he were just a man. The light in which you're celebrating, the lamps that you're dancing around, represents this pillar of fire — but it's only a shadow of what it truly was, centuries ago. Jesus was essentially telling them it's like holding up a candle to the sun. The Son of God is standing in the midst of them. The pillar of fire is standing in the midst of them, and they're dancing around lamps. And Jesus stands up and says, "I am this light." Not only is he this light — the pillar of fire led Israel — he's saying, I am the light, not of Israel, not of your fathers, but the light of the world. When Jesus comes, he's not only saying, I'm here to replace this festival you've been celebrating, that you've been waiting for, that you've been anticipating — I am he. I fulfill all of that. Not only does he fulfill it, but he fulfills it in abundance. He is the light, not just of Israel, but the light of the world — the light that would redeem all kinds of people, not just for one nation, but for everyone. When Jesus says, I am the light of the world, I am the pillar of fire that led you through the wilderness, what he's saying is, I am your right and true leader. You've been looking for the Messiah, this king who would come and lead you, and I am that king. Just as you were led in the wilderness, I will be the one to lead you from now on. He's saying: I am the glory and the power of the pillar of fire made flesh. I am God. All throughout the Old Testament, light was associated with God himself — as in Isaiah 49:6: "I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach the ends of the earth." Everything they're celebrating — the water pouring, the lamp lighting — is all pointing to him. Every part of the Old Testament, everything the prophets had prophesied about, was here, standing in their midst. Not only is he the light, but he's calling them to do something. Look at the last part of verse 12: "Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life." Jesus tells the people to follow him, just as their forefathers did wandering through the desert. He does not ask the people to weigh their options — if you like the light I'm providing, go with that one, or if you find a better deal, go with that one. He's not saying try your best to follow this light, or that if you just aim at the light and miss, you'll be close. He's saying follow, because there wasn't another option for Israel. When they wandered through the desert, when they were being led at night, there wasn't another option — to miss, to go in a different direction than the pillar of fire in front of them, meant death. This is a time before flashlights, before headlights, before streetlights. To wander at night without the light meant that you were vulnerable, that you were not going to have much life left. And that's true for us today: if we do not follow, we will also die. This call to follow, against our own hearts, is something we naturally want to revolt against. Our base desire is to say, follow your own heart, go after the things you want; you don't need to follow Jesus. But the truth is, when we revolt against our Creator, we revolt against ourselves. We choose to follow our own heart rather than submitting to someone else, and we're leading ourselves to our own destruction. That desire to follow our own heart is exactly the opposite of what Jesus is calling us to do in this passage. Jesus is calling us to follow him because he knows we have no light within us. We cannot manufacture it; we cannot make light. We physically cannot become luminous in the middle of the night when there is no light — we don't produce it. And spiritually, we do the same. We often forget that Jesus does not call us to himself because he wants to take life from us, but because he is where life is found. That's what the pillar of fire did in the wilderness — Israel wasn't being led somewhere aimlessly; they were going to the Promised Land. The pillar didn't just illuminate the desert; it showed them the way. That's what Jesus is saying here: whoever follows me will have the light of life. This light leads to life. To follow him doesn't just mean that you're no longer lost — to follow Christ means that you are on your way back to your true home. The Pharisees Argue with the Light (John 8:13-18) That's what we see in this next section — the Pharisees cannot accept that Jesus would be the way, that he would be the light himself. The Pharisees object to Jesus saying that he is the light. They understand the claim he's making, and they object to it, saying: you haven't met the Old Testament requirements — the Old Testament says you need to have two or three witnesses, especially to make a claim like this. On the surface, this looks like a pretty good rebuttal. But this is their way of trying to call him out of order — to say, your motion doesn't follow the right format — rather than looking at whether it's true or not. So Jesus answers in verse 14: "Even if I do bear witness about myself, my testimony is true, for I know where I came from and where I am going, but you do not know where I came from or where I am going." Jesus says: you want a witness? I will produce a witness. I was there — I was there when your fathers followed me through the desert. I was the pillar of fire. But also, light itself does not need a witness. You don't need someone to tell you that a light is on; you know because you can see it. Light attests to itself. No one needs to tell you whether it's day or night. Light attests to itself, and that's what Jesus is saying: I can say that I am the light of the world because I was there. He can bear witness because no one else was there except the Father — the Father who had received their offerings, who had heard their prayers, who had delivered them out of exile, who had led them through the wilderness with a pillar of fire. He bears witness about Jesus. But the problem was never the number of witnesses. No one ever really has that objection about Christianity, about our faith — that there isn't enough evidence, that there aren't enough witnesses. It's about the hardness of our own heart; it's about the numbness of the jurors themselves. I see this a lot in some of the apologetic content I consume, especially with Muslim apologetics — they'll say our Bible isn't true, or that our faith isn't true, because Jesus never claims to be God. Show me, they say, where in the Bible Jesus says, "I am God, worship me." The answer is, obviously, there isn't a passage in the New Testament or Old Testament where those five words are strung together in that order. And yet that doesn't mean it's any less true. All throughout the New Testament, Jesus is proving, saying, and showing that he is God. We don't need more evidence. What we need is a new heart. To Reject the Son Is to Confess You Do Not Know the Father (John 8:19-20) Their hardness of heart shows this next point: to reject the Son is to confess that you do not know the Father. These Pharisees come to Jesus and totally reject him, and by doing so, Jesus says, they are rejecting the Father himself. I love how this section starts off — in verse 19, they ask a question so moronic, so stupid, that it shows they don't understand what is going on. Verse 19 says: "They said to him therefore, where is your Father?" Jesus has just said, my Father bears witness about me, and they say, you have a dad? Show us your dad! They've totally missed it. And Jesus says: "You know neither me nor my Father. If you knew me, you would know my Father also." These are the religious experts — people who have spent their entire lives getting to know the Scriptures, going through every line, memorizing the first five books of the Bible, able to recite it from memory. They knew what God's word said, and they cannot recognize the one it is about when he's standing right in front of them. They ask a question so moronic, so beyond explanation, that it shows they don't understand the overall picture — where Scripture is pointing, the movement and trajectory in which God has set Scripture to go. It's like a mechanic going into an auto parts store asking for blinker fluid — you're supposed to be an expert in this, and you clearly don't understand what you're talking about. They have missed it entirely. It's why Bible memory, why fun facts about our faith, aren't enough. We need to understand what God's word says as a whole, where Scripture is pointing us. They'd spent their whole lives trying to understand God, and here he is standing in their midst, and they're completely befuddled. They had gone to this festival year after year, decade after decade, celebrating the light, dancing around it, anticipating a leader who would come and lead them to their true home. They'd spent decades dancing around the light in order to miss the light of the world. So coming back to our big question — how do you know you're headed in the right direction? Jesus' answer here is remarkably simple: don't look within yourself, look to him. We have no answer within ourselves; we have no metric, no compass, nothing we can manufacture that shows us we're moving in the right direction. The only way to know is to follow the pillar that led his people through the wilderness — the light of the world that leads us now. Our feelings will change, our circumstances will change, our sense of direction will feel uncertain more often than not. We can try to manufacture it with emotions, but nothing manufactured will lead us. The light doesn't change, and we don't need to see the whole road ahead — we need to follow the one who knows the way. And that leads us to our main idea: receive the light that exposes and leads everything, and follow him — or stay in the dark. This call to follow is one that goes against what we want. So many of us want to command our own destiny, but Jesus is saying we were never meant to make our own light, we were never meant to manufacture our own way. We need the source of light — not just the light, but the one who said, "Let there be light." Otherwise we will wander aimlessly, we will stumble again and again in the darkness, and the darkness that comes with following the desires of our own heart will lead us to our own destruction and despair. The beautiful part about the light is that it does not promise to show us the entire landscape, or the next mile ahead. God's Word says he is a light unto our feet and a lamp unto our path. John Henry Newman, in his poem "Lead, Kindly Light," writes: "Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom, lead thou me on. The night is dark, and I am far from home, lead thou me on. Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see the distant scene — one step enough for me." I hope that would be our prayer: Father, lead me today. I'm far from home; I feel despair; I feel alone. God, lead me. Show me how to be faithful today — I don't need to see next week or next year, just how to be faithful today. I had a football coach who used to say, do the little things right and the scoreboard will take care of itself. I think oftentimes we're so worried about the legacy we'll leave, so worried about the endgame, that we miss being faithful today — knowing that the path we are on, if we are following his light, leads us home. It's a trust that goes beyond ourselves, a trust that he will show us, step by step, the way to be faithful. And if we are faithful today, and tomorrow, and every day, we will find ourselves looking back at a path that led directly to him and his presence. That leads us to our one point of application for today: let the light expose the brokenness. We need God to shed light into our souls and to expose the sin in our hearts. And yet we often revolt against this, we cower away from it, we run from it. I think about people I've known who have had red flags of different illnesses in their life — dementia, cancer — and they've chosen not to go to the doctor because they don't want to know the results. They believe that if they forgo the screening, they can pretend everything's fine, that they're healthy. But we understand that logic doesn't work — knowing or not knowing doesn't make us healthy, it just keeps us living as though nothing's wrong. And the truth is, we do the same thing spiritually. There are places in our lives where we would rather stay in the dark, because we believe the darkness would be more comfortable. We don't want Jesus to shed light on our marriage, because we might have to admit we've become selfish. We don't want the light shed on our anger, because we like the feeling of righteous indignation. We don't want God to shine his light on our finances, because it might expose something off in what our spending says about what we love. We don't want the light shone on our private thoughts, our bitterness, our lust, our pride — because once the light comes, we have to see what's actually there. But the beauty in all of this — the beauty in Jesus being the light and exposing the darkness — is that he doesn't come in to expose in order to destroy you; he comes to expose because he was already destroyed for you. He exposes what's killing you. Jesus never exposes our sin in order to destroy us. He says: son or daughter, look at how you've been stumbling around in the darkness, look at how it's been destroying you, look at how your own sin has broken you. I hate that sin has run in your life — let's bring this to the light, let's kill this. Son or daughter, I love you. I went to the cross. I, the light, was extinguished. I, the light, was broken, so that you could be made whole. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, will not be banished into the darkness, but will possess the light of life. He doesn't expose you and leave you there — he leads you. He leads you home. He leads sinners out of darkness, out of death, into light. Which raises our final question: how can a holy God give us this light, when we know the inside of our soul is riddled with sin? How can we still be called home? How can the light be with us? It's because the light went to the cross to be extinguished. This light is not temporary — it's not a light just meant for Jesus' time on earth, or until Jesus calls us home. This light is eternal. Revelation 21 says: "And the city has no need for sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light the nations will walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day, and there will be no night." God himself will be the light for all eternity, the light that will lead us home. We can possess this light only through the power of the gospel. On the cross, Jesus was exiled — the light of the world was exiled into darkness. The light became extinguished. The Gospel of Mark records: "When the sixth hour had come, while Jesus is hanging on the cross, there was darkness over the whole land. And in the ninth hour, Jesus cried with a loud voice, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? — which means, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" The darkness Jesus experienced on the cross was not just physical; the physical darkness was there to represent something even greater that was happening. Jesus went through the greatest darkness known to any human ever — the love of the Father totally withdrawn, and all the hate, all the wrath toward sin and evil, poured out. Not only was his life extinguished, not only was he put to death, but he was damned. He was cursed in our place. Jesus took our darkness so we would not have to experience it, so we could experience his light. He extinguished our night so we could be led into his day. And he entered the tomb, and three days later he rose again from the dead, because death could not hold him. Death could not hold him, because the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. We need this light. We need this light to expose us, we need this light to lead us, and we need this light to save us and keep us. So church, hear this: receive the light that exposes and leads everything, and follow him — or stay in the dark. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

Wrong House Prosper Christian Reformed Church Wrong House Consider Your Ways Mitchell Leach Sunday, May 17, 2026 Audio Wrong House Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 01:04 Sermon Transcript Scripture Reading Haggai 1:1-15 In the second year of Darius the king, the word of the Lord came by the hand of Haggai the prophet to Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua the son of Jehozadak, the high priest. Thus says the Lord of hosts: These people say the time has not yet come to rebuild the house of the Lord. Then the word of the Lord came by the hand of Haggai the prophet: Is it a time for you yourselves to dwell in your paneled houses while this house lies in ruins? Now therefore, thus says the Lord of hosts: Consider your ways. You have sown much and harvested little. You eat, but you never have enough. You drink, but you never have your fill. You clothe yourselves, but no one is warm. And he who earns wages does so to put them into a bag with holes. Thus says the Lord of hosts, consider your ways. Go up to the hills and bring wood and build the house that I may take pleasure in it and that I may be glorified, says the Lord. You looked for much, and behold, it came to little. And when you brought it home, I blew it away. Why? Declares the Lord of hosts. Because of my house that lies in ruins, while each of you busies himself with his own house. Therefore the heavens above you have withheld the dew, and the earth has withheld its produce. And I have called for a drought on the land and the hills, on the grain, the new wine, the oil, on what the ground brings forth, on man and beast, and on all their labors. Then Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel and Joshua the son of Jehozadak the high priest, with all the remnant of the people, obeyed the voice of the Lord their God and the words of Haggai the prophet, as the Lord their God had sent him. And the people feared the Lord. Then Haggai the messenger of the Lord spoke to the people with the Lord's message: I am with you, declares the Lord. And the Lord stirred up the spirit of Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and the spirit of Joshua the son of Jehozadak the high priest, and the spirit of all the remnant of the people. And they came and worked on the house of the Lord of hosts their God. This is the word of the Lord. There's a play written in 1948 by a man named Arthur Miller about a traveling salesman named Willy Loman. Willy does what he's told. He provides for his family, builds a name for himself, gets the house. And at the end of his life, he stands at the house he had worked so hard to pay off — and it's empty. Not because he failed. Because he succeeded. He succeeded at the wrong things. And at his funeral, a friend says one line. One line that should give us chills a little bit as we hear it. “He had all the wrong dreams. All, all the wrong dreams.” Not no dreams. The wrong goals. He had built the life he imagined — and it wasn’t the life he thought it would be. Big Question Why does the life you’ve built feel emptier than you imagined? Maybe you’re younger and you’re thinking, what if the life I’m building doesn’t measure up to what I’ve imagined? We’ve all asked this question — maybe not out loud, but we’ve felt it. And when we feel it, we usually reach for one of three things. We try to optimize. Culture says if you’ve built it wrong, you need a better system, a better strategy, a better morning routine, a better budget. The emptiness isn’t a spiritual problem — it’s a productivity problem. If you could just get the right framework, the right tools, the right software, then everything would click. Or we run for escape. If you’ve built it wrong, quit the job, book the trip, start over somewhere new. The emptiness isn’t inside you — it’s your environment. Change your scenery and you’ll feel changed. Or — and maybe this is the most dangerous — we medicate. If optimization doesn’t work and escaping isn’t an option, then usually numbing it is. Scrolling, binging, drinking, shopping, staying busy enough that you never have to sit with the quietness of this question. Every one of these assumes an answer. Wrong system. Wrong environment. Wrong feelings. Haggai is here to tell us none of those are right. It’s not a productivity problem. It’s not your environment. It’s not your feelings. This is a covenantal problem. Fortunately, the Bible has an answer. Keep your Bibles open to Haggai 1. We’re going to see three major movements in this chapter. Outline God Exposes Hollow Religion (Haggai 1:1-4) God Frustrates False Priorities (Haggai 1:5-11) God Revives Who He Rebukes (Haggai 1:12-15) God Exposes Hollow Religion (Haggai 1:1-4) The scene being set in Haggai 1:1 tells us a lot. It’s the second year of Darius — and that matters because Darius is not a king in Israel. He’s a foreign king. He’s the king of Persia. What we learn here is that Israel has no Davidic king. It has a governor — Zerubbabel, a man from the line of David. Which sounds nice, except “governor” is a Persian title. We have an illusion of a king. There’s a priest — Joshua — but there’s no temple. The structure is there. We have a Davidic ruler, we have a priest. But the substance isn’t there. And then Haggai continues. Haggai 1:2 says this: “Thus says the Lord of hosts, these people say the time has not yet come to rebuild the house of the Lord.” Look at how God starts. He doesn’t say my people. He doesn’t say my chosen ones. He says these people. He’s talking to them as if they are so distant from him. And they say, “We’ll build a place for you — but it’s not right now.” This isn’t an ancient problem. We do this. We often look at people who rush into decisions as unwise — reckless, haphazard. And so we tell ourselves that wisdom is the opposite of that. But Haggai says otherwise. Sometimes saying “not yet” isn’t wisdom. Sometimes saying “not yet” is disobedience dressed up with better vocabulary. It’s the person who says, “I know I need to be in church, it’s just not the season for me right now.” Or, “I believe in God, I’m just trying to figure out what that looks like for me.” The intent sounds reasonable. And yet that heart posture keeps Christ at arm’s length. God presses further in Haggai 1:4: “Is it a time for you yourselves to dwell in your paneled houses while this house lies in ruin?” That word “yourselves” — God is stacking prepositions to press his finger on the contradiction. They live in paneled houses while his house is in shambles. And that word for paneled houses is the same word used for the interior of Solomon’s temple. This isn’t a call-out against wealthy people who have nice things. This is a call-out against people whose priorities are messed up — people who found resources for themselves and said that their leftovers were unavailable for God. These first four verses are not fundamentally about trying harder to get your priorities straight. Haggai 1:1-4 show us and point us to see the God whose house we’ve neglected. That same God has not neglected you. He sent his Son, and Jesus has built at the cost of his own life a temple that we could never rebuild. God Frustrates False Priorities (Haggai 1:5-11) Haggai 1:5-6 say this: “Now therefore, thus says the Lord of hosts, consider your ways. You have sown much and harvested little. You eat, but you never have enough. You drink, but you never have your fill. You clothe yourselves, but no one is warm. And he who earns wages does so to put them into a bag with holes.” “Consider your ways” — that phrase is the heart of this series, the heart of this passage, the heart of this book. It means to look at the path in front of you. To look where you’re walking. To look where this path actually takes you. Another way to say it: stop looking everywhere else and look at your own life. Kids do this all the time, right? Something gets broken and — “It wasn’t my fault. So-and-so bumped me, this circumstance was out of my control.” But it’s not just an attitude that belongs to children. I’ve sat across from people in counseling who go jumping through hoops trying to convince me that the situation they’re in is really no fault of their own. Avoiding owning any part of their story. Owning any part of the responsibility. Augustine has this wonderful quote: “Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars — and they pass by themselves without wondering.” It’s our nature to look everywhere but inward. A philosopher named Philip Rieff wrote a book called The Triumph of the Therapeutic and he says that in a therapeutic culture, we never ask the question, “Have I disobeyed? Have I sinned? Have I done something wrong?” We ask, “Am I flourishing?” And if the answer is no, the diagnosis is always something like, “It’s my environment. Bad luck. A bad system. Bad chemistry.” It’s never covenantal. It’s never looking at our relationship with God as being broken. Haggai says the problem here isn’t bad time management. They don’t need a better calendar system. The problem is covenantal. And the only response is to repent. Haggai then points out that they have enough. They have a harvest, they eat, they drink, they clothe, they earn — but it’s never enough. Each of those things is worth sitting with. To harvest is to achieve. Today, that’s the person who has the career, hit the metrics, earned the promotion — and at the end of it feels a strange hollowness on the other side of those achievements. To eat is to consume. It’s the person who upgrades the kitchen, renovates the house, fills the Amazon cart, books the vacation — and still feels a low-grade hunger underneath it all. To drink is to experience. To clothe is to present — the curated image, the filtered feed, the outward life that looks warm but doesn’t feel warm. And he who earns wages does so to put it into a bag with holes. Everything is leaking out. That’s not a problem of effort. That’s a covenantal problem. Haggai 1:11 does something clever with language. The word “ruin” shows up in Haggai 1:4 and Haggai 1:9. The word “drought” in Haggai 1:11 is the same word. God is saying, if you think it’s okay to leave my house in ruin — watch what I do to your land. Everything in this section actually comes back to the covenantal curses in Deuteronomy where God tells Israel, if you disobey me, this is the curse you will see. This is not random misfortune. This is a father grabbing his children by the shoulders and saying, turn around. Look to me. God Revives Who He Rebukes (Haggai 1:12-15) Experiencing this for the first time would have been absolutely crazy. The temple is in shambles. The people have taken the cedar that was supposed to be used for the temple and built their own houses with it. The kingdom has an illusion of a king. There’s a priest but no temple. And then Haggai bursts on the scene and says, get your heads screwed on right. Consider your ways. He goes to Zerubbabel, the governor, essentially and says, you’re a joke. He goes to Joshua the priest and says, you let everyone steal from God. Fix it. Could you imagine being in that room? The odds of Haggai walking out alive were awful. Look at every other prophet who does something like this. Ezekiel ends up dead. Jeremiah ends up dead. Amos is told to go home. Isaiah is told by God that no one will listen to him. And then this happens. Haggai 1:12: “Then Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel and Joshua the son of Jehozadak, the high priest, with all the remnant of the people, obeyed the voice of the Lord their God and the words of Haggai the prophet, as the Lord their God had sent him. And the people feared the Lord.” Can you imagine this? This is the theological equivalent of watching a middle schooler make a full-court shot. Not only did they not kill him. Not only did they not cast him out. They listened. They obeyed. And they feared the Lord. And this isn’t fear like we often talk about it — some vague awe or reverence. When the Bible says someone feared the Lord, it means they had a subjective feeling of terror towards Yahweh. Seeing his power and recognizing his might. This is the right response. A savior is only as valuable as the thing he saves you from. If the gospel is preached without seriously accounting for how evil our sin is, then the gospel cannot be comfort. Haggai 1:13: “Then Haggai the messenger of the Lord spoke to the people with the Lord’s message: ‘I am with you, declares the Lord.’” The solution to the fear they have is not simply, “Do not be afraid.” It’s “I am with you.” If you know your Bible, you know that this sentence carries the weight of the whole story. “I am with you” is what Jacob heard fleeing from Esau. What God said to Moses at the burning bush. What was spoken to Joshua as he entered the Promised Land. What Jeremiah heard in his call. What Isaiah declared to the exiles. It’s because it is the promise of the gospel. God finally puts on flesh and enters himself into the world. What do we call him at Christmas? Pleased as man with men to dwell, Jesus our Emmanuel — God with us. And when he leaves at the Ascension, what does he say? “I will be with you until the end of the age.” Not a promise that everything will be easy. A promise that he will be with us. Haggai 1:14: “And the Lord stirred up the spirit of Zerubbabel.” Watch what this text is doing. We see two viewpoints of how this plays out. Haggai 1:12 is a look from earth — the people obeyed, the people feared. It looks like a human decision. Haggai 1:14 is a look from heaven. That word for spirit being stirred up is a person’s will, their motivation, their disposition. God did not merely command obedience — he moved their wills. Haggai 1:14 insists that even the obedience of Haggai 1:12 was a gift from God. I want to make sure you hear this. Don’t leave today believing that if you just get your act together, God will bless you. That’s not what this passage says. It is God’s sovereignty that allows us even to be obedient to him. John Owen, the great Puritan, says in his book The Holy Spirit: “The Spirit of God so works in and upon the wills of his people as not to destroy their liberty but to make their wills work freely according to their nature. He does not work upon them as upon dead instruments but as on living agents in the recovery of their true freedom.” When God works his sovereign will, it doesn’t trump what we want. It releases us to our true freedom. It doesn’t override human freedom. It restores human freedom. These people had been enslaved — not to Persia, but to their own paneled houses, to their misplaced priorities, to endless cycles of sowing much and harvesting little. The Holy Spirit was not manipulating them into being obedient. He was liberating them from that slavery. Main Idea The God whose house we left in ruins does not leave us in ours That’s this whole sermon. That’s this whole book. Actually — that’s the whole story of the Bible. God does not leave us in our ruin. In the garden, when Adam and Eve sinned, he didn’t leave. He came to them. In Egypt, he came to his people in slavery and rescued them. In exile, his temple was in ruin, his name was dishonored — and he sent prophets. He stirred up spirits. He said, “I am with you.” And when none of that was enough, when we had proven over and over again that we would keep building our own houses and leaving his in rubble — he came down himself. He took on human flesh and he built, at the cost of his own life, a temple that we could never build. He could have left us in our ruin. We deserved it. He had every right to say, “You wanted those paneled houses? Keep them. You wanted those misshapen priorities? Live with them.” But Jesus came as our rescuer — to free us from our true enslaver: sin and death. Application Stop saying “not yet” Consider your ways. Consider the path in front of you. What are you saying “not yet” to — and calling it wisdom? Maybe you’re saying “not yet” to consistent worship because the weekends are your only time for rest. Maybe “not yet” to joining a small group because your schedule is already full. Maybe “not yet” to a hard conversation because the timing isn’t right. Maybe “not yet” to generosity because things are tight right now. Haggai says saying “not yet” to the things God commands isn’t wisdom — it’s dressing disobedience up in comfortable clothing. What would it look like this week to stop saying “not yet” to one thing God has been pressing on your heart? Be the house As people of the new covenant, the house isn’t a building. It’s this — right here. It’s you. It’s what happens every Sunday when we gather. It’s the people of God. So what does it look like to stop leaving God’s house in ruin? The house is only as strong as our care for one another. You can’t build a house alone in your living room. You build it by showing up for each other. That looks like making the phone call you’ve been putting off. Sitting with someone after service instead of rushing to the parking lot. Noticing who hasn’t been here and caring enough to ask why — not to be judgmental, but because you love them and you miss seeing them. Building the house doesn’t start with a committee or a program. It starts with one person paying attention to another person, embodying what it means to be a little Christ. In the garden, God walked with his people — no temple needed. Heaven and earth overlapped. Then they sinned, and they hid. The house was in ruins. But God did not leave. He came walking through the garden calling, Where are you? He’s been building his way back ever since. A tabernacle in the wilderness. A temple under Solomon. Then exile, the temple destroyed, silence, ruins — and that’s where we stand in the book of Haggai. In the rubble, telling the remnant to build because God says: I want to dwell with you again. And they build. And God makes a promise — the latter glory of this house shall be greater than the former. How could this modest structure exceed the splendor of Solomon’s temple? Because one day a carpenter from Nazareth would walk through its courts and say, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will rebuild it.” He wasn’t talking about a building. He was talking about his body. Jesus is the true temple. On the cross, the temple was destroyed. On the third day, he rose. At Pentecost, the Spirit was poured out — and we became the temple. Revelation 21 tells us that in the new creation, there is no temple in the city. Not because God is absent, but because God is everywhere. No more separation. No more ruin. No more “not yet.” The God whose house we left in ruins does not leave us in ours. He never has. Closing Prayer Father God, we praise you — that you do not leave us in our ruin, in our destruction. That you condescended, that you came to us. You sent your Son to take on human flesh, to dwell among us, to die the death we never could, to live the life we never could have lived, so that we could have a life in you we would never have been able to have without you. Father God, transform us by your word. Help us to respond. It’s in your name we pray. Amen. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

His Own Party Prosper Christian Reformed Church His Own Party Come And Drink Mitchell Leach Sunday, August 16, 2026 Audio His Own Party Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 01:04 Sermon Transcript John 7:1-24 I realize going to the circus is something that doesn't happen as much as it did maybe when I was growing up, but if you've gone to a circus recently, or if you know the concept, you may have seen trapeze artists. And what they do totally defies everything within our human nature — to be able to swing from one, to let go and to be caught by another. I was watching a video of these people doing it, and they say they've done it hundreds and hundreds of times, but every time they do it, there's something inside of them that makes them revolt against it and tries to hold on to the bar longer than they should. Even if they know the catcher's there, even if they've seen it happen, even if they've studied it, even if they've done it multiple times, there's something within them that wants to still hold on. And that's the strange thing about trust. We can't experience being caught while insisting on holding on. There are some things that we can know from a distance, that we can study, that we can observe and understand what's going on. But some truths require us to put our full weight on them, which raises our big question this morning: Can I really know something is true without ever putting my weight on it? We make this distinction all the time. We can know a lot about things by observing them and yet not put our full weight on them. You can know that an airplane is safe — you can look at the statistics but still be terrified and not go on one. You can know the surgeon is a great surgeon who's done great things and that the surgery will go well, and still not consent to go under. We, as people, like knowledge when knowledge leads us to a certain level of control. But trust changes our relationship. Trust requires something of us. At some point the question becomes: am I willing to put my weight on this? Am I willing to trust? The same is true with Jesus. You might have grown up around Jesus — you might know all the doctrine, you might know all the stories, you might have opinions about Jesus, you can even believe that he's done remarkable things — and still have not put your weight on him. Big Question Can I really know something is true without ever putting my weight on it? That's our big question, and fortunately the Bible has answers for us. So keep your Bibles open to John chapter 7. As we look at this section of Scripture, we'll see three major movements in this passage: strategy without faith, opinions without encounter, and knowledge without submission. Outline Strategy Without Faith (John 7:1-9) Opinions Without Encounter (John 7:10-13) Knowledge Without Submission (John 7:14-24) Strategy Without Faith (John 7:1-9) So let's look at that first section, strategy without faith. Let's set the scene for what's going on here. They're talking about the Feast of Tabernacles, or the Feast of Booths. This is a time where Israel is remembering wandering in the wilderness for 40 years. They would live in tents, and so what they would do is gather in Jerusalem, have a feast, have a festival at the temple, and live around Jerusalem in tents, in booths, in tabernacles, to remember what God had done. This was a famous water-pouring festival to symbolize that God would pour out his Holy Spirit — that becomes relevant later on in this chapter. But there was also a famous lamp-lighting festival, where they remembered God's pillar of fire leading them, his presence leading them throughout the wilderness. This is the most popular feast in the Jewish calendar. There were seven major festivals throughout the year, and this one drew the most people in. This is the most populated time that Jerusalem would be — all of Israel seemingly would go to one city for this week-long festival. And that's why in verses 4 and 5, Jesus' brothers tell him about this feast and why he needs to go. They tell him he needs to go to this festival and teach openly, teach loudly, to be seen — because they don't believe him. Not that they couldn't believe that he would do miracles — they had seen him do miracles, they had seen him grow up — but they couldn't understand the significance of what they saw. And that should be sobering for us. This shows us that you can be near Christ, that you can be around him, that you can watch him from a distance, and still not know him — not even a distance, watch him up close, and still not know him. John Piper, preaching on this text, said this: one may be convinced Jesus can work wonders and still lack the faith that saves, for miracle-working power is an insufficient basis for saving faith. Just to see a miracle, just to see God at work, and to know that he can do amazing things is not sufficient. James says just to believe in God — the demons believe in God, and they shudder. What we see in the brothers of Jesus is an unbelief. It's polite, it's actually respectable, it takes a form that isn't outwardly offensive. But John writes this down for us because it is easy for us to justify this kind of rebellion in our own lives. This sounds like reasonable counsel. It sounds like they even care for Jesus, that they just want him to be known better. But it's not — and Jesus has some harsh words for them. So what is their sin? From the outside, the first time reading this, it seems like they just want Jesus to be more well-known. Why would this be a big deal? The sin they've committed is that they simply do not care what the Father thinks of their plan. They don't care whether or not their plan fits in with God's will. That's why Jesus says in verse 6, my time has not yet come. That word for 'time' really should be translated to something more like 'divine appointment.' It's not just talking about time as we can measure it. It's talking about something that God has ordained — a specific moment in history that God has made, a divine appointment. Jesus's whole itinerary is built and dependent upon the Father. It's regulated by his timing. Look at the other half of what Jesus says: 'For you, any time is right.' Jesus is saying the brothers can come and go, they can do whatever they want, because they are divorced from God's kairos — the Greek word for time here — divorced from his divine timing, his appointments. This shows up elsewhere in Scripture. John 12 says this: 'For they love the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God.' This is the problem with the brothers. They looked at the big crowd and said, 'You should want the glory, you should want these people to be on your side.' You should want everything that these people can offer you. 'Jesus, in chapter 6 you lost a lot of your followers — it's time to get them back, it's time to seize the moment.' They didn't care whether this was the right time for Jesus, the right time from the Father. The world's applause isn't the scoreboard we think it is. What people think of us is not the accolade, the thing that will be a lasting legacy for us. Jesus could care less about winning people over — his primary goal was doing the will of the Father. His brothers want him to go there to show the world who he is. Jesus would show himself, but not in the way the world wants. He refused to go to this festival and say, 'Hey, I'm your king, I'm the one who's here to save you.' Instead, he would climb up on a cross. He would be humiliated. He would not put on a show that entertains people, but he would become the sacrifice that saves. People all throughout the gospels get Jesus wrong over and over, and he will continue to be misunderstood as we go through chapter 7. We can't wrap our minds around God, because there's no one side of God that we can pull him to. We can't grab him and pull him to where we think we want him. He refused to perform for the crowd. So watch what he does instead. Opinions Without Encounter (John 7:10-13) Let's look at this next section — verses 10 through 13, opinions without encounter. Look at verse 10: 'But after his brothers had gone up to the feast, then he also went up, not publicly, but in private.' If we read this, and then read verse 8, it almost sounds like Jesus lied. Verse 8 says: 'You go up to the feast. I am not going up to this feast, for my time has not yet fully come.' Does Jesus lie to his brothers here? Is he just saying something easy to get them off his back? When Jesus says this, the Greek explains it a lot better. The word in verse 8 that is the hinge for us understanding this is the word 'this.' When Jesus says, 'I'm not going up to this feast,' what he's saying is, 'I'm not doing it in this way. I'm not doing it the way you want me to do this, brothers. I will not go in this way.' His brothers told him to go and to show who he is, to proclaim to the world who he is — but he wouldn't do it that way. Jesus isn't lying. It would be like being invited to a party by your friend, and your friend says, 'I want you to come, I want you to have this grand entrance, I want you to give a speech, I want you to walk in on a red carpet.' Your answer would most likely be, 'No, I'm not doing that. I don't want to do that. I don't need that.' But if you show up to the party later, talk to a couple of people, and then leave, that doesn't mean you lied. What you said to your friend was, 'I'm not doing this in this way. I'm not going to the party in the way in which you want me to.' The brothers want Jesus to seize the moment after he had just lost a lot of followers — chapter 6 shows us that Jesus said some hard things and some people left. We don't know the motive behind why the brothers say this. We don't know whether they were embarrassed of him, whether they had coworkers teasing them — 'Look at your brother, he's lost all these followers, he says he's going to lead a movement but he's only got twelve people, what kind of Messiah is this?' Maybe they felt bad for him and wanted him to have more followers. We don't know — the text doesn't tell us. What it does tell us is that they think Jesus needs to go where the people are — to strike while the iron's hot, to seize the opportunity, to go while the venue is full of people. In the Greek, it's clear. Jesus is clear that in his going up, it's not going up in the way they wanted. Jesus then goes quietly. The word 'quietly' here really means maximum discretion — he almost slides in. Jesus must go through a season of being hidden — not because he's ashamed of what he's doing or ashamed of the Father, but because if he goes out publicly right now, verse 2 tells us they're seeking to kill him. And yet this is not the time — this is not the time the Father had laid out for him to be crucified. All of this is dependent on the Father's timing. Look at verses 11 and 12: 'The Jews were looking for him at the feast and saying, "Where is he?" And there was much muttering about him among the people. While some said, "He is a good man," others said, "No, he is leading people astray."' When he goes to the feast, the Jewish leaders are looking for him — they want to arrest him, they want to end this movement. This is why he could not go in the way his brothers wanted him to go. While he's there, he's hearing this muttering. He is the most discussed person there, and yet the least addressed. The crowds talk all about him — some think he's a good man, some think he's leading people astray — but nobody goes to him. Nobody talks to him. In this muttering, we see a little sliver of the gospel: Jesus would become the Messiah through execution, and the way in which he was executed was on the grounds that he was leading people astray. What we see in the cross is the one true good man dying for those who had been led astray by sin and death. The crowd tries to judge Jesus, tries to put him on trial, tries to figure him out, tries to talk about who he is. Søren Kierkegaard says this: 'Christ was crucified because he would have nothing to do with the crowd. He wanted to be the truth, which is related to the single individual.' What this means is Jesus is the truth — the truth is a person, one person. He didn't want to do this by committee, or Savior by election, by popular vote. He wouldn't conform to what the crowd wanted him to do, and it frustrated them to the point where they hung him on a cross. The crowd gets Jesus wrong. What does this look like for us today? There are two postures in the crowd. I think most of us fall on the side of 'Jesus is a good man' — we don't criticize him for leading people astray. Those who saw Jesus as good were probably the same people who saw him do miracles, saw him do amazing things. In our world today, as Christians, that means we can experience God, we can see him move in our lives, we can see that God is good — we can probably all think back to a time we prayed and he came through and answered it. But have we actually come to him? So many of us can talk about Jesus, can talk about our faith, through a kind of secondhand Christianity. Many of us have never had that nearness, that firsthand experience — we've never actually gone to him. We can talk the talk, we can do the right things, we can talk about our faith secondhand, but we've never experienced it firsthand. Jesus does not merely want us to talk about him. I think we're good at that — it's easy to talk about Jesus without a relationship with him. But Jesus wants more than that. He wants us to go to him, to walk with him. Christian activity is not the same thing as a relationship with Christ himself. Knowledge Without Submission (John 7:14-24) Jesus continues on in this last section, knowledge without submission. Jesus goes to the temple and starts to teach in the middle of the week, when the fanfare had died down. And the first response to his teaching is critique. Look at verse 15: 'The Jews therefore marveled, saying, "How is it that this man has learning when he has never studied?"' They're not saying Jesus doesn't know how to read and write, or that he's not smart. What they're saying is Jesus never had a formal teacher. In that time, to become a rabbi, a teacher, you would be an apprentice. You would learn from someone else. They didn't have seminaries or colleges back then — that was the formal process. They're saying his teaching was too good to be from someone who never had this kind of education. So Jesus answers them. Verses 16 and 17: 'Jesus answered them, saying, "My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me. If anyone's will is to do God's will, he will know whether the teaching is from God, or whether I am speaking on my own authority."' Culturally at that time there were two kinds of rabbis. There were the regular teachers, called the Tannaim, who would often quote other teachers throughout Jewish history to make sure what they taught was sound and true. There's nothing wrong with those teachers — they were the faithful, everyday preachers, and they did a great job. But then there were the teachers who came around once in a generation, called the teachers with authority — the ones who could give a new, true understanding of Scripture. They would say, 'You may have heard it said this, but I tell you this.' Jesus was one of these teachers with authority, but when he says this, he's saying, 'It isn't my own authority. When I claim these things that are true, when I correct a false interpretation, it's not from my authority. My authority comes from God because I am God. My authority is me. I am the authority.' What Jesus is saying is that you cannot stand on the outside and see whether or not he's true without trusting his words, without walking with him, without submitting to the will of the Father. If you loved God's will, then you would know this is true. There has to be trust in this. It's like planting corn. If you're planting more than an acre, you can't harvest your corn without first planting it in the ground, without first trusting your salesman that it's going to work. You can know the science behind it, you can understand a new variety of corn, you can even see it in your neighbor's field — but until you purchase it, until you plant it in the ground, you can't cash the check. You can't go and harvest someone else's corn — you have to be the one who plants it. That's what Jesus is saying about himself. You cannot stand on the outside looking in, hoping that you'll understand and just glean some of what Jesus is saying and maybe that'll work. You can't try Jesus out. That would be like standing in your field while your neighbor's planting and hoping some of the seed comes onto your land — it would be insane. I've heard pastors say, 'If you're unsure, just try Jesus out for ten days and see if you like him — you can return him after that.' That's not how it works. We're not neutral judges. Our hearts are already rigged against us, like a rigged jury. We can't just say, 'I'll weigh this and figure it out — I'll cancel my subscription after the free trial.' You can see all the evidence in the world, but if your heart is set against him, no amount of evidence will change that. There will always be a reason not to believe. That's why I am not huge on apologetics — I think there's a place for them, I think they can be helpful, but I do not think the best thing for me to do every Sunday is try to convince you with facts from science that Jesus is real or that God is real. Because a heart turned against him will always find a reason not to believe. This was never a knowledge problem for the crowd, for the Jewish leaders — it was a want-to problem. Are we willing to accept it? Are you willing to trust Jesus? This passage is not saying we get to pick God, that we get to come to him if we only believe enough — John chapter 6 has led us here, and it's clear that God is the one who chooses. This is talking about the human side of salvation: if anyone is willing to do God's will, they will see where this teaching comes from. Then Jesus presses this in even harder for the Pharisees. Look at verse 19: 'Has not Moses given you the law, yet none of you keeps the law? Why do you seek to kill me?' Jesus is talking to the professional law-keepers, the ones whose job it was not only to know the law but to keep it. They loved the law, they had memorized it — probably the first five books of the Bible by heart. They knew all the rules and all the rules about the rules, and yet they weren't willing to keep the law. It would be like a pharmacist who develops a new drug, spends years developing it, and at the end is unwilling to take it. One of their laws was not to murder, and yet they seek to murder Jesus. The experts of the law are, at this very moment, refusing to keep it — which is precisely why they cannot recognize the truth standing right in front of them. Then Jesus talks about circumcision. To them, circumcision was one of the first commandments — commanded in Genesis, which predates Exodus, where we find the Ten Commandments. So to them, this was a more important law, one that took precedent over the others. And so if someone needed to be circumcised on the Sabbath, they would break their own Sabbath rules to do it. This is why Jesus says what he says — you break the Sabbath law to make just a part of someone whole, to make them conform to what God has said, and you'll do that for one part. 'You want to murder me because I made a whole man well. You break the law for a small part, and yet I heal the whole person, and you're ready to crucify me for it.' This wasn't about being right — it was about how they perceived right and wrong. And that's the whole chapter, stacked three times over: the brothers try to manage Jesus strategically — advise him, position him, get him back on top — but never ask what the Father wants. The crowd talks about Jesus, secretly or socially, and argues for him or against him. They form an opinion, they pick sides, but they never once go to him. The Pharisees study Jesus intellectually — they quote the law, they come up with clever arguments, they demand credentials — but they will not submit to God nor his law. Three different postures, and yet it's that same identical heart: to relate to Jesus from a safe distance, to reserve the right to judge him and rule over him from out there. But that's not what's on the table. That's not how God operates. And that leads us into our main idea: you don't get to judge Jesus, you get to submit, and then you see. So what is John showing us in all of this? All three of these groups make the same mistake — they put themselves in a position to judge over Jesus. They decide what Jesus should do, what Jesus must prove, whether or not Jesus is believable enough. And yet Jesus refuses all of their arrangements, because Jesus is not another idea that they could just try on. He's not a product we try out to see if it improves our lives. He's not a candidate trying to win your vote — he is the Son of God, sent by the Father to save the world. So the question for us is: will I bow down to his standards? Will I submit to his will, or will I hold on to my own understanding? That's the main idea for this passage: you don't get to judge Jesus, you get to submit, then you see. The Jesus who demands your surrender is the same Jesus who surrenders himself for you. He will not go to Jerusalem the way the brothers wanted, on the brothers' timetable — but he will go in the way the Father had sent him. And when his final hour came, he did not climb onto a stage with a crowd to impress. He climbed onto a tree to take your place. Jesus is not asking you to put your weight on someone who has not earned it, who hasn't displayed it. Jesus is asking you to put your trust in him, because he has already proven that he is more than trustworthy, and that he is willing to lay his life down for you. If this is true, this changes how we live, how we respond, everything about us. And there are two ways this changes us — our application. First: do not soften your convictions to win people. This isn't primarily a spiritual failure — softening your convictions on anything is a bad move relationally. When you edit what you actually believe down to what people will tolerate, that's not being kind — what you're doing is lying. You're handing someone a curated, false version of yourself and calling it honesty, and it puts a barrier in your relationship from the start. Think about where you actually do this — maybe in a small group, in conversations with coworkers, at a family gathering. Every one of those moments has the same trade: you're giving up truth, letting it take a backseat to the opinions of the people in front of you. What's actually happening underneath is that you're managing a verdict — trying to make sure the people in the room still favor you, still like you. But the truth is the verdict isn't theirs to give. You don't get to negotiate your convictions down to whatever keeps you most liked. You get to tell the truth and let them decide what they think of you. Every time you edit yourself for the audience in front of you, you're telling God that his opinion of you isn't enough, but theirs is. Second application: do not play Christian. It's far easier to pretend to be a Christian than to actually live it out. We can master the things that culturally seem Christian — sing the right songs, say the right things, make the right faces when it's time to pray. We can build a completely convincing performance and never break character. But the question is, what do you do when you're all alone, when there's no one else to impress — is Christ still beautiful to you? Is he still someone you desire to be with? A good diagnostic for this is: when do you pray? Is your prayer life mostly confined to being in front of people, where others can see? Or is it alone — where you're not managing how you come across, not rehearsing how someone else will perceive you, just you, honest, unobserved? Maybe that's the challenge this week: seek those quiet moments, and reflect on whether this has been a performance — because the fix is not a better performance. The fix is dropping the act and coming to Christ authentically, because he was never grading you on how convincing you were. The beauty of this passage is that it's for all kinds of people — 'if anyone is willing to do God's will.' There isn't a class of people who are qualified or disqualified from coming to saving faith. The humblest, submitted heart can know what the proud expert misses. The door is open to anyone, and the grace to walk through it is given by God. What we see in this passage is Jesus being judged for his appearance, judged on what he has done and what he says. They see this unlearned man from a place in Israel nobody thought anything good was going to come from. The beauty of the gospel that they missed is that they're judging the Judge. And this would not be the last time Jesus would be falsely judged. About a year later, he would submit to a totally erroneous judgment — a kangaroo court held by the Jews, and then a judgment under Pilate — to be crucified. And on the cross, Jesus would be judged again, not by his own deeds, but by ours. Jesus would trade places with us and submit to the Father's judgment that should have fallen on us — his righteous judgment that should have fallen against us — he took willingly. We must believe this and submit to this, because that wasn't the last time Jesus would interact with judgment. One day, Jesus will come to judge the living and the dead — we say that before we take communion, we say it in the Apostles' Creed. There will be a day we stand before him. He let the world judge him falsely so the Father could judge him rightly in our place. The only question left is whether you will meet him now as Savior, or later as judge. You don't get to judge Jesus — you get to submit. Submit to his will, submit to his life, submit to his love, submit your life to his — and then you will see. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

Come And Be Free Sermon Series Description Come and Be Free is a series about a freedom most people do not know they need. We are still at the Feast of Booths. Last series, Jesus stood up on the great day and offered living water to anyone who would come. Now he makes a second claim drawn from the same feast: I am the light of the world. The pillar of fire that led Israel through the wilderness is standing in the temple courts. But the conversation that follows is the most confrontational in John's Gospel so far. Jesus tells the Pharisees that if they reject him, they will die in their sins. Then he turns to people who have just professed belief in him and tells them they are slaves. Over three weeks, we will watch Jesus claim to be the light, draw a line between faith and death, and redefine freedom in a way that offends everyone who thinks they already have it. This is where the summer lands. The one who raised the helpless, fed the hungry, and offered water to the thirsty now shines a light into the dark and says: the truth will set you free — but first you have to admit you are not. Jesus is the Light of the World who exposes the slavery his own listeners refuse to see — and only those who abide in his word will know the truth and be set free by the Son. The Pillar John 8 Watch

The Bread You Can't Buy Prosper Christian Reformed Church The Bread You Can't Buy Come And Eat Mitchell Leach Sunday, July 12, 2026 Audio The Bread You Can't Buy Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 39:12 Sermon Transcript John 6:22-40 Three thousand years ago, Solomon set out to answer one question: how can I be satisfied? This man was given every possible avenue to answer that question — money, power, pleasure, work, achievement, notoriety, family. He had it all. Solomon is one of the scariest figures in the Bible — not because of what he did, but because of what he wrote at the end of his life. He wrote the book of Ecclesiastes, and at the end he writes, 'It was all vanity. It was all meaningless. It was all vapor.' This is a man who had everything at his disposal to satisfy himself, to be a fully actualized person, and he gets to the end of his life and doesn't say, 'If I'd only had a little bit more, I would have been fine.' He says, 'None of it meant anything.' Three thousand years later, another rich man, J.D. Rockefeller, was asked, 'How much money is enough?' His famous answer: 'Just one more dollar.' Two men, different centuries, and yet the same hunger. For them, every finish line was just a new starting line. And if we're honest, that's the same hunger we have too. No matter how full life becomes, something inside us keeps asking for another bite, needing more — which raises our big question for today. Big Question Why are we still hungry? Almost every high school has some version of an assignment where you write a letter to your future self, making goals for your life — we do this all the time, especially right before New Year's, making resolutions. And sometimes we really do get the things we hoped for: the job, the relationship, the pregnancy, the vacation, the promotion. In the moment, as Christians, when we get these, it's a gift from God — we're delighted, we rejoice. But usually, about a month later, this gift becomes the new baseline, the new normal, and what once was something we rejoiced in now becomes something we take for granted. We grow hungry for more. This is exactly where Jesus meets the crowd in this passage. They're convinced their deepest need is another meal. But Jesus knows the real hunger isn't tied to bread, isn't tied to something physical. We're going to see three major movements in this section: the bread that leaves you hungry, the bread you cannot earn, and the bread you cannot lose. Jesus had just fed 5,000 people, then walked on water to prove to his disciples that he is God, that he is divine. The sea calms, they get to where they're supposed to go, and people go looking for him. If I were to summarize this passage in one sentence, I would say this: Jesus is the bread of life that will not perish, and everyone who comes to him will never be cast out. Outline The Bread That Leaves You Hungry (John 6:22-27) The Bread You Cannot Earn (John 6:28-33) The Bread You Cannot Lose (John 6:34-40) The Bread That Leaves You Hungry (John 6:22-27) If we're going to understand why we're still hungry, we first have to understand what these people were actually searching for. At first glance, it looks incredibly faithful — here are a bunch of men who saw Jesus, and now they're going out on a boat, trying to look toward him. They even call him by the right name. Look at verse 25: when they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, 'Rabbi, when did you come here?' They call him teacher. This looks like faith, looks hopeful. But now Jesus is going to confront and address the heart motive of these people. What looked like honest devotion is actually selfishness. Look at verse 26: 'Jesus answered them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves."' The crowd was willing to follow Jesus. The point of having a big crowd there was to show a couple things: one, Jesus was supposed to be their Messiah figure, a king who would conquer whoever was oppressing them. This group of 5,000 people, who eventually tried to make him king, would have been an awesome army to start off with, an awesome group of people to start a kingdom with. They're willing to sign on the dotted line, willing to go all in after Jesus — except it's not him they want. They want food. They're willing to follow Jesus as long as it's easy, as long as they've got enough to eat. What they wanted was a useful savior. They didn't care for a glorious savior, a savior worth worshiping. We think we would never do that. But in our lives, when we depend on God and our comfort disappears, if we're honest with ourselves, it makes Jesus way less appealing — it makes it seem like, why should I devote myself to him? Which can reveal something uncomfortable within us: maybe we never actually wanted Jesus. I think in our minds we create a version of Jesus that we manufacture, but as soon as the real Jesus confronts that view, it makes us uncomfortable. They wanted a Jesus who could provide, and Jesus is not pleased with that. They wanted a Jesus focused and centered around what they could get, the benefits of Jesus. Many people will follow Jesus if there's an emotional response — I see that so much today. Whole churches manufacture worship services to try to get you to feel emotional, to muster up something inside of you, so that if you continue to feel this mountaintop experience every single Sunday, you'll always show up. The problem is, our faith, the Bible, doesn't talk about that. We're not supposed to have a mountaintop experience every Sunday. We're supposed to have communion with God, communion with other believers. I'm not saying mountaintop experiences are something to avoid — praise God for the times when he moves in and through you, when you can feel his nearness. The problem is chasing Jesus for the benefits of having those incredible experiences — what we do is turn Jesus into an idol, turn those feelings into an idol, when Jesus is the source of those. We try to use him to get those emotional feelings, and in a sense we're perverting who and what Jesus is. That's not what we live for. We live for Christ. Augustine said it best: 'Jesus is scarcely sought after for Jesus' sake.' So rarely do we come to worship because all we want is him — whether he confronts us, challenges us, or encourages us. We often want a Jesus we can manage, a Jesus who fits within our understanding, who makes us feel good. If we cannot be satisfied with all of who Jesus is, then his gifts will turn sour in our mouth. That's what Jesus is talking about when he says 'the food that perishes.' You could be a zealous person running after Jesus, just like the men in the boat, and be doing it for all the wrong reasons. This is a time to take an honest look at ourselves — I can't answer this for you, maybe not even your spouse or your kids or your parents could answer this for you: why do you want Jesus? What is it you actually want? Do you want to follow him to try to get something from him, or do you want him? Do you delight in just having him? I think there are too many people who call themselves Christians yet use Jesus as an accessory for their best life now. Jesus exposes our appetite, exposes what we truly seek after. That's what he's done with the people here, and now the crowd asks a question every religious person eventually asks: what do I need to do? The Bread You Cannot Earn (John 6:28-33) What must be done? That's what we see in this next section, the bread you cannot earn. Jesus had just told them not to work for the bread that perishes, so let's see their response. Verse 28: 'Then they said to him, "What must we do to be doing the works of God?"' Their immediate response to 'do not work for bread that perishes' is, what works can we do, what is the course of action we must take? They're not asking for one specific action to earn this eternal bread — they're asking what kind of program they need to be a part of, what curriculum they must use. Can you give us a checklist we can run through to make sure we're okay? They're asking the only question they know how to ask. Up until this point in history, I think every religion outside of Christianity asks this question: how can I be good enough, what must I do to be good enough? Every religious teacher up to this point had been there to offer a new philosophy, a new set of rules you must follow to be good. That's what they're asking. They're saying, 'You're the teacher, you're the one who just gave us this miraculous bread, you must know what we must do, you must know the curriculum, you must know the checklist. Tell us this new program you can put us on so we can inherit this goodness.' They wanted Jesus to be their teacher, to tell them how they could climb up to God — and they forgot to realize they were standing in front of the God who had come down to meet them. They could not make their way to him. We cannot make our way to him. We want to assume that we can make it, that we have the power to save ourselves if only we had the right instructions in front of us. But Jesus responds in verse 29: 'Jesus answered them, "This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent."' The work, the works, is no work at all. Jesus answers, 'Believe.' Because Christianity isn't fundamentally about climbing towards God — it is about trusting the God who climbed down to meet us. They ask for works, plural — 'what works must we do?' — and Jesus gives them the work of God, singular. God requires one thing, not a thousand, and even that one thing is given to us. God gives us this gift of grace, this ability to believe. Their response was to ask, then prove it — prove that you're someone worth believing in. Essentially they say, 'Moses gave us bread too and fed all of Israel, every single day. If you're better than him, maybe you should do something better than him.' They're trying to bait him into another miracle, trying to trick him into proving himself again. You would have thought that feeding the 5,000 would have been enough — but even miracles aren't enough for people when they're trying to serve themselves. So Jesus responds, verses 32 and 33: 'Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.' What these people wanted was a spiritual ziggurat — a Babylonian structure, a huge pyramid with a shrine at the top for the gods to come down and stay, so the harvest would be good or the plague would subside. They would leave offerings to try to trick the gods into coming down and giving them favor. This goes back to the Tower of Babel — almost certainly a ziggurat, a way for people to make a name for themselves and try to get God to come down, to trick God into doing what they wanted. They didn't realize they had the answer to the Tower of Babel standing in front of them. God had already descended, God was already there, and they didn't have to trick him. He came on his own accord, of his own voluntary nature. Trying to trick God into doing what we want, or trying to earn enough good to earn his favor, does not work. Trying to use God is like pretending he's some cosmic slot machine — if we do the right amount of things, order things properly, he'll give us the jackpot. The other way is trying to earn God for yourself, essentially saying, 'God, I've done the right things, I've done good, therefore you owe me — now you must do what I ask.' Either way, you're trying to exert your will over God, trying to force God to do what you want. This open rebellion minimizes your own humanity and makes you almost superior to God. Both are impossible. The bread that gives eternal life came down for us. The Bread You Cannot Lose (John 6:34-40) After hearing all of this, the crowd still misses it — still thinking about bread, still trying to get another miracle — which leads us to a verse where Jesus says one of the most profound things in all of the Gospels. He says, 'I am the bread of life.' Their response to this is upsetting. Look at verse 34: 'They said to him, "Sir, give us this bread always."' Their response is essentially, 'Why haven't you given us this bread the whole time? Why have you been holding back the good stuff?' What they're saying to Jesus is, 'We want the bread guy back. We want the one who feeds us — all this stuff about eternal bread, I don't know, it's just a lot. It was nice when it was simple, when you were just the bread guy who gave us what we wanted. Can you just give us another sign, some more bread?' I think often our approach to Jesus is similar. We want a Jesus we can contain, that we can put into a box, that we can control — a Jesus who never calls us out on sin, who's really just there to uplift us and make us feel good, that we can add into all the other things we use to feel good about ourselves — the guy who says, 'You're forgiven, it's all good, you're not a bad guy.' Isn't that simpler? That kind of manufactured Jesus. But Jesus will not allow us to reduce him to something lesser, something weaker, something less beautiful than he actually is. That's why he says what he says next — a sentence that shatters all of our worldviews. Verse 35: 'Jesus then said to them, "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall not thirst."' They asked what the bread was, and the answer was who. Bread isn't a substance handed out by God — it is God himself being handed out. This is the first of seven 'I am' statements Jesus will make in the Gospel of John, each one building on another. For us, Jesus saying he's the bread of life might go over our heads — bread is an option for us, in our pantries, whether we have it with a meal or not. But for a first-century Jew, bread was life itself — bread was survival when survival wasn't guaranteed. People genuinely died of starvation; bread sustained life. Jesus isn't offering to be another option, another blessing alongside all the others. He is saying, 'I am the only way. I am the blessing.' And suddenly, the manna in the wilderness makes sense. The bread in the wilderness was a foretaste of the true bread that would come. In the Old Testament, manna rained down from heaven every morning for the Israelites to sustain them, to teach them that God operates on grace, not works. The manna was a 40-year lesson in daily dependence on God. But every piece of manna was pointing beyond itself — it wasn't the destination, it was a preview of what was to come. The true bread was still coming. God did not merely send food from heaven — he sent heaven in the flesh. The wilderness bread would postpone death, but the Bread of Life comes to defeat death itself. And because he defeats death, everyone who comes to him will remain. That's what he says in verses 37 through 40: 'All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out. For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but to do the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.' Think about who he's talking to here — the people who questioned him, doubted him, wanted to use him for the benefits of what he has to offer. And his response isn't, 'Go away, and when you've changed your attitude, come back,' or 'I'll think about it,' or 'Prove that you're sincere.' His answer is, 'Whoever comes to me, I will never cast out.' There may be people who are convinced that everyone has given up on them, that their family, their friends, even they themselves have given up on them. But Jesus never grows tired of seeing a sinner transformed. Jesus never grows tired of receiving a sinner. This is one of our foundational beliefs as Christians: it does not matter what you have done, previously, either bad or good — Jesus receives us. And Jesus is the one who makes the way, and because of that, he holds us to himself. This is another foundational belief for us as Reformed people: when Jesus saves, he's the one who holds salvation, he's the one who owns it — we cannot run away from him once he's truly saved us. He holds us to himself. The language in the Greek here is that he will never drive us away. The one who would not waste a scrap of barley bread will not lose a single one of his own. He is the only one who has the power to save you, and the only one who has the power to hold you to himself. Jesus has overturned the way we think about life with God. The world says buy, religion says earn your way, and Jesus says come. That's the heart of this passage — our main idea for today: come to the bread you cannot buy, you cannot earn, and once you come, you cannot lose. You cannot buy it. Jesus, out of love, will not allow you to buy it, because if you could own it, you'd be able to lose it. You cannot buy it because you don't have the capacity to. This is why he's been talking about his deity leading up to this point — that he is God himself, because he's the only one able to purchase it. And because he purchases us on the cross, we cannot lose it, because he owns it. God owns everything — we know that, we believe that, we profess that God is sovereign, that he holds the whole world in his hand. But he also owns our salvation. There isn't a part of us that he doesn't have a right to, even our own salvation. He owns it, and because he owns it, we can never lose it. That's why we sing 'He Will Hold Me Fast' — when we say that, we're saying that he holds us to himself, that he can never let us go, and that if we come to him, we can never be lost. Because he owns our salvation, we can never lose it, and there's a kind of rest that comes with that — not licentiousness, not 'well, God, I said a prayer at summer camp so I can do whatever I want now,' but a kind of rest that leads to delight, to belonging, to obedience. As parents, you probably see fractions of this — there are slivers of time where you can see your kids trust you, feel secure, and know that whatever you ask next is going to be for their best. There's trust. This is a deep longing we need — to sit on our Father's lap and say, 'Abba, Father, we trust you,' to be held, to know we're safe, to know that whatever God asks of us next is going to be good, that we can trust him, that we don't have to put the whole weight of the world on our shoulders, don't have to pretend to be the sovereign one who holds the stars together, don't have to try to order our future because he's already ordered it for us. When Jesus says, 'I am the bread of life,' what he's saying is, 'Stop looking to created things, even within yourself, to keep alive what only I can keep alive.' He's asking us to rest in him. So what does this rest look like? Two points of application. First, stop chasing what cannot satisfy. All of us are hungry, all of us are searching for the next thing. Whatever God has given us becomes our new baseline, and we become numb to it, no longer see it as a gift, and start searching for anything that would make us feel alive again. The danger is what Ecclesiastes calls chasing the wind — we will never be able to be satisfied. The crowd tried to live this out in real time: one night of fullness, and the next morning they're hungry again. You can spend your entire life working for a food that never stays eaten. You can throw yourself into your job, and when you retire they will buy you a cake and forget you. You can spend your whole life trying to be the perfect parent, and one day your children will move out. Our identity cannot be in what we do, because what we do can always be taken from us. Our identity must be founded in Christ Jesus — something we can never lose, and someone who promises we will never be lost from him. Chasing after things that will not satisfy will not lead to life, but to the grave, and you will run your whole life and have nothing to show for it. Our second point of application is this: stop earning what God freely gives. I think oftentimes we're exhausted from trying to chase God, trying to run after what he has promised he will give us. We spend years trying to become the kind of person that God would finally love, finally approve of — climbing a ladder of trying to do good things, to be a moral person, wondering every day if we've done enough. The gospel of belief blows apart that kind of meritocracy. Acceptance comes first, as a sheer gift. The works flow out of that acceptance, never toward it. That is the fault line between mere religion and the gospel. Religion says, 'I obey, therefore I am accepted.' The gospel says, 'I am accepted — I have been accepted by Jesus Christ — and therefore it is my delight, my desire, to obey him.' One produces either pride or despair. The other produces gratitude and rest. But everything we've been talking about this morning hinges on this: how can Jesus say this? How can Jesus look at a sinner and say, 'I will never lose you, I will never cast you out'? The answer is not found within ourselves but on the cross. On the cross, Jesus was cast out. On the cross, Jesus experienced the only hunger that really mattered — separation from the Father, from the Father's love. The one who said, 'I will never cast you out,' was cast outside the city, hung on a cross, rejected, forsaken, and condemned — not just by men, but by God himself. Because of that, everyone who comes to him will never be condemned, forsaken, rejected. One day, everything in your life will become meaningless. One day you will sit on your deathbed, and there will no longer be thoughts about the promotions you've had, even the grudges you might have held against other people — all of that will be meaningless. Every avenue we seek satisfaction from will be exhausted and will lead to no more life. The promotions will be over, the applause will stop, the vacations will end, the money will belong to someone else. Even our last meal on earth will be just that — our last meal. But there is another table being prepared for you right now, a wedding feast where the Bread of Life himself will be the host. He has a seat for you with your name on it, and all you have to do is come. Come to the bread of life — you cannot buy it, you cannot earn it, and once you come, you cannot lose it. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

Flesh and Blood Prosper Christian Reformed Church Flesh and Blood Come And Eat Mitchell Leach Sunday, August 2, 2026 Audio Flesh and Blood Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 41:58 Sermon Transcript John 6:41-59 There's an old story about a man named Tantalus. In this story, he was punished for some of the things he had done, and his punishment was to stand in a pool of water with ripe fruit trees hanging over his head. As he stood there he got thirsty, so he bent down to get some water, but the water moved — wherever he chased it, the water would run away, to the point where he couldn't drink. He got hungry, so he reached up for the fruit just above his head — it was almost hitting him — and every time he reached and jumped, the branches would move. No matter what he did, everything was right there. He could see it, could almost touch it, but he was never able to actually possess it. He stayed hungry the whole time, surrounded by the very things he needed. This is where we get the word 'tantalize' from — it's from Homer's Odyssey, a very old and famous story, but the idea is to have something you desperately need or want right in front of you, but never quite able to get close enough to possess it. There may not be a better picture of the crowd in John chapter 6 than that story. The Bread of Life is standing directly in front of them. They can see him, they can hear him — they've been hearing his sermons, they even ate bread out of his hand — and yet they remained spiritually hungry. Not because Jesus was unwilling to give himself to them, but because they wanted a different kind of savior. They didn't want to accept the savior standing in front of them. They wanted his gifts without his claims. They wanted his power without the cross. They wanted bread they could hold in their hands, but they were unwilling to submit their life to a savior who would demand that they entrust everything in their being to him. Big Question What does it mean to truly receive Christ? Every generation has their own version of this crowd. We don't grumble over manna, we don't grumble over bread from Jesus — we grumble over things quieter. Our culture says we should get close to God, we should be spiritual, but we don't need to submit to anyone, we don't need to be under him. We say things like, 'Read a verse in the morning, say a prayer, light a candle — keep just close enough to God to feel comforted or steadied, not so much that he gets to tell you what to do with your money, your Sundays, your marriage, or your body.' We want a God we can simply visit — that's our natural default as people. We want the bread; we just don't want to have to kneel for it. Fortunately, the Bible has an answer for us in John 6. So keep your Bibles open there as we look at three major sections in this passage: the wilderness grumbling repeats itself, the bread that gives life is broken, and no body and blood, no life. Outline The Wilderness Grumbling Repeats Itself (John 6:41-46) The Bread That Gives Life Is Broken (John 6:47-51) No Body and Blood, No Life (John 6:52-59) The Wilderness Grumbling Repeats Itself (John 6:41-46) So let's look at that first section: the wilderness grumbling repeats itself. There's a word in verse 41 that we can't move past — grumbling. This is the same word used in the Old Testament in Exodus 16, the story of Israel wandering in the wilderness a month after they had passed through the Red Sea. A month later they are hungry, they can't find food, and the word 'grumbling' there is talking about a distrust of God, a distrust of Moses and where God was leading them. This is the word the Bible uses when people are responding to a God they don't feel like they can trust. These people had just asked Jesus to give them bread — they said in verse 34, 'Sir, give us this bread always.' And now look at their response in verse 42: 'Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, "I have come down from heaven"?' Essentially their argument against Jesus is, 'How dare he claim to be God — we know his parents.' The crowd stumbles over both edges of the same stone. They can't accept that Jesus would call himself God, that he would elevate himself to be God. And on the other end, they look at him and say, 'We know you, you're a local, we know your mom and dad.' In verse 44, Jesus says something that lets us peek behind the curtain of how God saves people: 'No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.' Then he quotes from Isaiah, giving the promise of the new covenant where the truth is written on hearts: 'And they will be taught by God.' What Jesus is teaching us here is that in God's drawing us to himself, there's teaching — something we must know, something that must change in our perception of him. This is where God opens the hearts of people who are hardened to him, so that they love him. In doing so, he teaches them, but he draws us to him out of love. Oftentimes I think we picture this process as God dangling something attractive that we would bite onto, almost like a fishing lure — but that's more a description of sin, something appeasing to our eyes that ultimately pulls us away. That's not how God draws us. God draws us like children to a birthday cake, like deer to salt, like a dog to peanut butter, like a hummingbird to nectar. There's no media campaign, no marketing strategy, no clever argument he needs to make to convince us. It's voluntary. Throughout the Old Testament, one of the major questions was, 'What is God like?' No one had seen him — God had forbidden idols and images of himself, and Moses was the only person who ever saw even the backside of him. Jesus is the answer to this. Jesus is standing in front of them. When the Father teaches how people are going to be saved, that teaching never goes around Jesus — it goes right through him. The crowd could not accept this. They knew Jesus' mom and dad, they had seen him grow up, they had been in buildings he had helped build — Jesus was most certainly a stonemason, not a carpenter, so he would have built stone buildings in that time. To them, these claims were offensive because they knew who Jesus was — he was too low. One of the things about our faith and how God calls us is through offensiveness, through something that seems almost offensive. Søren Kierkegaard, in his book Practice in Christianity, wrote: 'The possibility of offense is the crossroad. From the possibility of offense, one turns either to offense or to faith. But one never comes to faith except from the possibility of offense.' This is what happens when we encounter the living God. When we peel back the layer of an infinite God, we see things that challenge us. If God is truly who he is, if he is above us, he has to be able to say things to us that are offensive, that challenge what we believe or how we've grown in our worldview. To make God align himself with everything we believe is not to put him above us — it's to make him our size. It's not to put him above us, it's to put him next to us. If God is truly infinite, truly grand, all-knowing, he has to be able to offend us — he has to be able to tell us, 'You don't see this properly.' And that's the crossroads where we either turn away from him or turn to him, trusting that he is bigger and grander than us. Oftentimes as a pastor I meet with people who have almost a crisis of faith because they're encountering something in Scripture that seems hard for them — not hard to believe, but seemingly unloving, or seemingly against God's nature. And yet we see it in Scripture. Countless times, it isn't people who are first becoming Christians — it's people who have journeyed in their faith and stumble across something that troubles them. That's the crossroads we often find ourselves at. I think it's actually a sign of our faith strengthening when we find things that make us doubt, that make us question, but we're not willing to just stay there — we move past that into faith. The same claim that makes the crowd grumble is the claim that saves everyone. Jesus became a man. Jesus humbled himself to be a person, to have a father and mother who could be known. The question isn't how do we remove the offensive parts of God, how do we remove the parts that make it harder for us to believe him. The question is whether the Father has made the bread of life sweet to you — whether he has made these offensive things actually things of beauty. Often when people are talking about evangelism, they'll ask, 'Do you believe in Jesus? Do you believe in God?' And the answer is almost always yes. But that question is incomplete. A better question to ask ourselves is: Is Jesus Christ your greatest treasure? Is he the thing you value most? If you lost everything you had — your health, your money, your family — would you still be satisfied in what you have in Christ? Is he your greatest treasure? Scripture tells us that demons believe in God and shudder. Is the bread of life something that isn't a stumbling block to you, but has become sweet? If Scripture, if God himself, is no longer ridiculous but is becoming wonderful, becoming beautiful — this is a sign that God is drawing you to himself. It is a beautiful thing. Jesus says in Matthew, 'Blessed is the one who is not offended by me.' We will find things in Scripture that put us at the crossroads of offense. We are the ones who are blessed when we turn to faith and not away from God. The Bread That Gives Life Is Broken (John 6:47-51) Second, we're going to look at the bread of life that is broken — verses 47 through 51. Look at verses 47 and 48: 'Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life.' I want to notice what he says there — it's not 'whoever believes in me will have, can have, may have.' Whoever believes in Jesus already has eternal life. This is the beautiful thing about our faith: we don't have to wait for eternity to start — it starts the moment we believe. Just like Amazing Grace: 'how precious did that grace appear the hour I first believed.' It is ours the moment we believe — that God changes our heart and we respond in faith. Then Jesus repeats his claim that he is the bread of life, because he's about to explain it. Look at verse 51: 'I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.' What Jesus is saying is that he himself is the bread — the bread they have been waiting for, the bread that came down from heaven. He's talking about the thing they loved, the picture of God providing for his people in the Old Testament, when God sent manna, the bread from heaven, in the wilderness. What Jesus is saying is: you loved this picture, you almost worshiped this thing — but it was only pointing toward something greater. It was only a glimmer, only a shadow of what was to come. Think about it like artwork: you can look at a high-resolution photograph of a famous painting online and think, 'wow, that's awesome' — but there's something even more beautiful about being able to touch it, to see the fine details in person. Or think about a photo of a sunset someone shows you on their phone — it never quite captures the real thing, because they were there and saw something breathtaking. That's what Jesus is saying: you had a picture — God providing manna from heaven — but now you have it in the flesh, standing in front of you. They were amazed and satisfied with a 2D image when the three-dimensional object was standing right there. And it is his flesh and blood. John uses language here that's almost different than you'd expect — you'd think this is almost a commentary on the Lord's Supper, and yet he uses 'flesh and blood,' not 'body and blood,' the way any other New Testament passage on the Lord's Supper does. John is compacting three images together into one: he's alluding back to the incarnation, when 'the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.' Jesus is combining his incarnation, his crucifixion, and the Lord's Supper into one. The flesh he took in the incarnation is precisely the same flesh he would give during the crucifixion — the same killable stuff he was clothed in at Bethlehem, he would wear and hand over at Calvary. This is the same flesh we must consume, that we must eat. Jesus presses this image further, saying one of the most offensive things he could say to a room full of Jews at that time — that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood. No Body and Blood, No Life (John 6:52-59) No body and blood, no life. Verses 52 through 59. Jesus says that those who want eternal life, true life, must eat his flesh and drink his blood. Jesus is being intentionally offensive here — this may be one of the most offensive things he could say to the people standing before him. He could have used a variety of different language, different imagery, different metaphors, and yet he chose this. He knew this would be unsettling, and why it was unsettling is because in the Old Testament, the people were given permission to eat the meat of a sacrifice, but they were prohibited from drinking the blood. Leviticus 17:10 says: 'If anyone of the house of Israel or the strangers who sojourn among them eats any blood, I, the Lord, will set my face against that person who eats the blood and will cut him off from his people.' This prohibition was severe. In a synagogue full of Jewish people, this couldn't have been more of a stumbling block. So why would Jesus say this? Why use this image? He wants to talk about his blood because they understand this — they would have grown up seeing goats and bulls slaughtered, the blood drained out of them. This was a violent picture, a messy picture, the picture of a violent death and a sacrifice. Jesus says this with almost a double-intended meaning — he's saying it in order to give them life, and to judge them. Remember, this is at Passover, one year before they would hang him on a tree. These people are outraged that Jesus would tell them to drink his blood, and yet one year later they would have no problem spilling it. The offense of this statement points them directly to the cross — they're offended by the sacrificial language, but they won't be offended when they nail him to a tree, when they nail the second member of the Trinity, a sinless man, to die for them. In saying this, Jesus isn't saying that doing this or not doing this makes you spiritually weaker or stronger, some optional thing for a mature believer to do — some sort of spiritual eating your vegetables. What he's telling them is that they have no life in them. True life needs to be given to you, taken into you from his violent and bloody death — we need the result of his bloody sacrifice. The word he uses in verse 56, 'whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him' — that word for 'feeds' is more blunt than it sounds in our language. It's talking about gnawing on something, almost chomping on it, the way an animal would eat. This is not polite snacking, not refined dining. The language here is taking Christ into ourselves with an animal-like intensity, bringing him wholly and totally into ourselves. To feed on Christ is to take his death into us, with a hunger like an animal has. To feed on Christ is not to simply admire him from across the room — we can't do this from a distance. We need to be so united to him that he is in us and we are in him. That's what the Lord's Supper is all about. We will be taking the Lord's Supper next week together, but we cannot take him in an unworthy way — we can't come to the table and miss what Jesus is telling us here. To believe is to eat. Jesus connects these two — earlier in this chapter he said, 'Everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life,' and here he says everyone who eats his flesh and drinks his blood has eternal life. To eat is to believe, to believe is to eat — they're one and the same thing, one setting the scene for the other. This is because Jesus is the bread of life, and that's our main idea: the bread that gives life to the world is the body of Jesus, broken and given. Is this passage talking about the Lord's Supper? It doesn't mention it directly, and yet this may be the best commentary on it. The Lord's Supper doesn't offer us a different feeding or a different Christ. It's not bringing Christ down to us — it's making the gospel visible. The Lord's Supper is John 6 enacted. So when we come to the Lord's table, does that mean the elements we take are literally the very body and blood of Jesus — the Catholic view, the Eucharist? No. And yet this is not simply an act of remembrance, not simply a time we dedicate to remember that Jesus died for our sins. There is something more, something real happening here. When we eat the bread and drink the cup, we aren't physically ingesting Jesus' body and blood — we aren't tasting or eating it with our mouths. But we are, with our souls. To our soul, it is as if it is truly his body and blood. In a Catholic view of the Eucharist, God comes down into the elements. What the Bible says about communion is that the Holy Spirit brings us up to him spiritually — we are brought before the throne of God, into his chambers, and we receive him physically there. You receive the living God into your soul every time we take the Lord's Supper. God knew that our faith would waver, so he gave us a promise that not only we could hear, but that we could touch and taste. Eating is the posture of surrender, the posture of having empty hands. Eating is one of the only things we can't do for someone else — it's a vulnerable position. Not to eat is to die; it's to say, 'I need something outside of myself, I can't do this alone.' Eating is the least self-assertive thing our body does, and God chose to make this the way we encounter him, because this cannot be done by the strong or the self-made. All we bring when we come before the Lord's table is our need. That's why it's worship — worship is when we understand who we are in relation to God, that he is God and we are not. When we eat, we declare that we cannot save ourselves, and we rejoice in knowing that we are saved by God. So if this is true, how do we respond? This can't be just a ritual, just another thing we do as a checkbox to make ourselves feel spiritually better. First, we must come to the table. Jesus says, '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 you.' This is not a spiritual add-on, not an optional thing for a mature believer. Communion is where you regularly receive the life that only he can give. We cannot passively take this, and we also cannot skip this. This is one of the most important things you can do — so important that we ought to rearrange our calendar for it. Not because we need higher attendance, but because it is spiritually beneficial for you. It is worth rearranging around a family visit, a grandchild's game, even a family vacation. This is not a guilt trip — it's an invitation. Christ has set the table for you. He has given his body and blood so that you can have a seat at it. So don't miss it. Every other posture we take in worship can be faked — we can be performative while we sing, we can use prayer as a time to put something on display, even our confession can become a kind of achievement. But you cannot fake hunger. You cannot eat without admitting you're starving. And if this is so important, then second, we must examine ourselves. We cannot take communion flippantly. The Bible says to examine yourself and not take it in an unworthy manner — which means we should not take communion if any of the following are true: if you're living in active rebellion to God, if you're actively choosing sin without repentance, if you haven't reconciled with another Christian and there's a rift in that relationship — it's more important to go and fix that first — or if you're living in hypocrisy, contrary to the gospel. These are reasons to temporarily withhold from the Lord's Supper and go address those things. I tell you these things not to make you feel condemned, but because it is so important that we cannot take the Lord's Supper in a way that would dishonor him. I want to draw you back to Jesus and away from a performative version of Christianity. The Lord's table is too important to go through the motions, because it's more than a ritual — besides your baptism, the Lord's Supper is the most important thing you will do as a Christian. It is a tangible gospel that you get to encounter, hold, and taste. The crowd wanted bread from Jesus, but Jesus came offering something far greater than bread that would feed their stomachs. He came to give himself. The bread of life came down from heaven. He took on flesh that would be wounded, blood that would be poured out, a body that would be broken. And at the cross, he did not merely show us how much he loved us — he wasn't just a good example for us. He gave the life he knew we needed by surrendering his own. He came and carried our guilt, endured our judgment, entered death so the starving sinner could have life. In the Old Testament, the sacrifice worked this way: you brought your sacrifice, it was burnt on an altar, and the smoke rose to heaven. The gospel reverses that order. God is now the one who brought the sacrifice, once and for all. We no longer need to bring something to God to show him we've arrived — God brings the sacrifice to us. The Son gives his body and pours out his blood, and shows the empty-handed sinner: come, take, eat, and live. That's what faith is. Faith is not proving you're strong — faith is admitting you're starving. It's not bringing something impressive to Christ — it's receiving what only Christ can give. So the challenge is to stop trying to live on what cannot keep you alive. Stop feeding your soul with achievement, approval, recognition, comfort, or religion. Come to Christ. Come hungry, come with nothing other than your need, because the bread that gives life to the world is the body of Jesus, broken and given — broken for everyone who feeds on him by faith, and they will live forever. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

Where Else Would We Go? Prosper Christian Reformed Church Where Else Would We Go? Come And Eat Mitchell Leach Sunday, August 9, 2026 Audio Where Else Would We Go? Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 36:11 Sermon Transcript John 6:60-71 In our culture, we love loyalty. It's something we talk about in the relationships we have. We see it most beautifully in the wife who stayed, the friend who never left your side, the person who committed to something and actually came through. But most of us, if we're honest, have conditions built around our loyalty: I'll stay as long as it keeps making sense for me, as long as I feel like I'm getting some end of the bargain. We'd like our loyalty to be immune to circumstances, but in the real world, if the person were tested, it's easy to follow someone who always tells you what you want to hear or gives you what you want or need. But what happens when they contradict you? What happens when they say something that crosses a boundary you had put up? Most of our relationships carry conditions — even with the people we follow, the people we're under authority to. If we reserve the right to decide what the people in charge of us are allowed to say, what they're allowed to lead us into, what we're actually doing is no longer following that person — we're following ourselves. And that's the crisis Jesus creates in this passage, in John chapter 6. Miracles. People like Jesus. They just got fed. They've seen him do miracles. And now Jesus says something that goes against almost everything they've believed — something they would have never wanted him to say out loud. Big Question What do you do when someone you trust says something you cannot accept? Fortunately, the Bible has an answer for us. So let's look at John chapter 6, where we see three major movements in this story: first, the word Jesus will not soften; then, the followers who turn back; and lastly, the faith that has nowhere else to go. Over the last three weeks in this series, we've seen Jesus do some incredible things — he fed thousands of people, walked on water, showed that he was the true bread of life. He pointed people back to the Old Testament manna and showed how it was pointing to him. And then he says something pretty hard: that if you're going to have eternal life, you must eat his flesh and drink his blood. Today we reach the morning after the miracle wore off, after the spectacle was no longer in the forefront of their minds. A crowd had chased him for loaves — now only a handful of people remain. Outline The Word Jesus Will Not Soften (John 6:60-65) The Followers Who Turn Back (John 6:66-67) The Faith That Has Nowhere Else to Go (John 6:68-71) The Word Jesus Will Not Soften (John 6:60-65) Let's look at who's talking right now. Look at verse 60: 'When many of his disciples heard it, they said...' — and look who's talking. It's not the crowds, it's not the Pharisees, it's the disciples — the people who had been traveling with him for months, maybe years. What do they say? 'This is a hard saying. Who can listen to it?' When they say this, they're not saying, 'Jesus, you've told us some kind of riddle we have to decipher, you're speaking a different language.' It's not that this was hard to comprehend in their minds. It was hard to accept in their hearts. What they meant when they said 'this is hard' is, 'This is intolerable. We can't accept this.' I think we can often move past how offensive what Jesus had just said to them was. When Jesus said, 'Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, there is no life in you,' imagine being an alcoholic reaching out to your sponsor — the man or woman who had answered your calls in the middle of the night, who had saved your marriage, who had helped transform your life. Imagine you're meeting him for dinner, and suddenly he pours a glass of wine and says, 'Unless you drink this, you have no life in you.' You wouldn't say, 'This is a difficult thing to understand.' You'd say, 'This works against everything you've told me not to do.' That's something like what's happening here in this chapter. The disciples trusted Jesus — they had seen the miracles, they believed, they had faith that he came from God. But they were also Jewish, formed by the Scriptures — Scriptures that forbade drinking blood. The difficulty wasn't merely that Jesus sounded strange. For a moment, Jesus sounded unbiblical. The question they now faced is the question every disciple must face: what will you do when Jesus, the one you know and trust, says something you cannot reconcile with what you thought you knew? So how does Jesus respond? It would have seemed natural for Jesus to turn to the Old Testament and say, 'Let's look at that passage — I'll give you a new understanding, show you how this didn't mean what it meant before, how there's a new covenant happening.' But Jesus doesn't do that. Or he could have talked about what he was about to do — Jesus talks a lot about how he's going to die, how he foreshadows the cross. He could have talked about the upper room, said, 'In a year we're going to gather, and I'm going to institute this thing called the Lord's Supper — I'm not being literal about drinking my blood, this isn't something you need to be offended by.' But he doesn't do that either. Instead, look at verse 62. Jesus says, 'What if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?' His response isn't a rational argument. It isn't clever words to try to help them understand more clearly. Jesus forces them behind what he was saying, into the identity of the speaker. The question is no longer simply, can I accept these words? It pushes them into: who is the man who has said this? Essentially what Jesus is saying is, either I'm God or I'm not. What he's saying is that belief in me cannot be a cost-benefit analysis. We can't weigh the things we like about what Jesus says against the things we don't — 'well, he says awesome things about not going to hell and some pretty cool things about heaven, but he also says some things about human sexuality that don't jive with the culture we live in.' We can't say, 'In Shalom he promises to give us rest and peace, but on the other hand he's asking me to give up my Sunday.' Either he's God or he isn't. Either he was crucified and raised from the dead or he wasn't. Either he's the second member of the Trinity or he isn't. Oftentimes we look at our faith and say, 'There's some parts I'm just not going to read, not going to follow — I'm not going to spend much time in that part of the Bible because it's convicting for me.' How moronic would it be for us to believe that Jesus truly is God, and then say, 'I might walk away because I don't like this one thing he says.' If Jesus is God, who are we to determine what he can and cannot say to us? If he were simply a good teacher, we could weigh his teachings over time and see what stuck — take the good things, disregard the rest, the way we do with other teachers, other pastors, other philosophers. But he wasn't simply a teacher. If he is the Son of God, then we do not stand over his word and judge what he has to say. His word stands over us. Jesus will not soften the truth to keep people who only want him for the benefits. He would rather have a group of twelve than a stadium full of people ready to leave once the bread runs out. Jesus has been and always will be a stumbling block for people who cannot see beyond their own desires. But Jesus refuses to change his words, and many of his followers respond by making a different choice. They change direction. That's what we see in the next section — the followers who turn back. The Followers Who Turn Back (John 6:66-67) Verse 66 might be the saddest chapter — the 'disciples turn back' chapter. 'After this, many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him.' Yesterday there were thousands of people on a hillside ready to make Jesus their king. Now some of the disciples walk away — not the Twelve, but people who had followed Jesus for months, maybe even a year. They'd had one-on-one conversations with him, they were regulars, they followed him wherever he went. That's why Jesus, in other places, asks the Twelve to prove themselves as his true disciples after this happened. A crowd of followers is not the same as a company of a few faithful. The thing that separates the two is not intellect, not zeal, not enthusiasm — the difference between those who are true disciples and those who left is whether they stay when the words stop being flattering. It says they 'turned back.' This phrase is a direct allusion to Israel wandering in the wilderness, when they kept desiring to go back to Egypt. Over and over in the Old Testament, the desire to turn back is almost exclusively a bad thing — Lot's wife turned back and looked at Sodom and Gomorrah. It also says they 'no longer walked with him.' That phrase is pregnant with meaning. Throughout the Old Testament, walking with someone wasn't just an activity — it was the status of a relationship. It showed who you cared for. Adam and Eve walked with God in the garden. Enoch walked with God. And now these disciples will not walk with him any longer. The interesting thing is that Jesus does not stop them. He doesn't plead with them, doesn't run after them to bring them back. It shows us something: our staying, our showing up, isn't a favor we do for Jesus. Look at verse 67: 'So Jesus said to the Twelve, "Do you want to go away as well?"' Essentially Jesus is saying, 'Look, there they go — there's the door, if you want to join them, go ahead.' Our staying was never a gift we gave Jesus. Our staying was a gift he gave us. Only Jesus can hold someone fast, because it's part of his nature, because he's God. As humans, there are relationships we're dependent on — if you're married, you need your spouse; if you're a child, you need your parents. But God does not need a relationship with us to be complete. It's one of the beautiful things about creation — he didn't make us to fill something he was lacking. He was complete when he made the world, in relationship within himself — that's what the Trinity is. Out of love he created us. Jesus does not need to chase after them. God does not need people he manipulates into worshiping him. He doesn't need hostages. God is glorified when we see his beauty and desire to walk with him. This shows God's trust in the Father's faithfulness — it shows how Jesus trusts the Father's calling for the elect. Jesus knows the Father will bring to him whom the Father has chosen. Jesus is bringing them to the moment every disciple must face: if everyone walks away, who do you believe Jesus is? The question isn't to reassure Jesus — it's not asked to make Jesus feel better about himself. Jesus is giving the disciples an opportunity to stand their ground, asking if they're leaving too. And that's what we see in the next section — the faith that has nowhere else to go. The Faith That Has Nowhere Else to Go (John 6:68-71) Verses 68 and 69 say this: 'Simon Peter answered him, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed and have come to know that you are the Holy One of God."' Others had said this was too far, too much, and they left. Peter looked at Jesus and realized he had nowhere else to go with his questions — nowhere else had the words of life. The difference is not that Peter had fewer questions. The difference is that Peter knew who has the answers. He doesn't say, 'Jesus, I figured out your riddle, I get it, I've comprehended it, I understand what you have to say.' He also doesn't say, 'What else would we turn to, or where else will we go?' Peter says something very specific: 'To whom shall we go?' He's saying, 'We've looked around — there's no one else who has the words of life, no one else can give us life and life eternal.' He gets it. And if you read the rest of John's Gospel, Peter is certainly still confused about what Jesus had said. He makes some pretty boneheaded moves throughout the rest of the book. He's still confused. But he stays, because he knows there isn't another way. He stays because there is no better alternative. Christianity is not a system of ideas for us to adopt. It's not a moral code. Christianity is not a philosophy we apply to our lives to make us into better people. Christianity is, and always has been, a person. It's Christ. It forever will be. Peter is not saying, 'We have found the best worldview.' He is saying, 'We have found him' — the one that Scripture, that all of time, has been looking forward to. Where else can we go? To whom can we run? This is the faith of a cornered heart that has found the only open door. Peter does not have to understand every hard word to know that they are the words of life and that Jesus is the only one who has them. Then he says this beautiful thing — 'we have believed and have come to know.' That order is important. We are not people who understand in order to believe. We believe because it makes us understand. St. Augustine, a 4th-century pastor and prolific writer, said this: 'Seek not to understand so that you may believe, but believe so that you may understand.' True faith is not the absence of confusion. Peter is still confused about much of what he has just heard. This is not about knowing it all, not about having all the answers — it's about running to the one who has the words of eternal life. There is nowhere else to go, so run to him. We often think faith means having no doubts, having absolute certainty, no questions, no hesitancy, no fear. But that's not what we see in Peter. He doesn't say, 'Jesus, I understand everything now, I've logically put it all in order and it makes sense.' No — he says, 'Lord, to whom shall we go?' Faith is not having every question answered. Faith is knowing where the answers are. Saving faith does not depend on the strength of your certainty — it depends on the strength of the one you're trusting in. Imagine you're falling off a cliff and you see a branch, and you're 100% certain it will save you if you grab onto it. You can study the branch, know exactly what type of wood it is, know it won't snap under pressure. You can tell everyone, 'This branch can save you.' But if you never grab it, you're doomed. But if, in the same situation, you're uncertain the branch will save you, and yet you cling onto it — you cling on with trembling hands — you will be saved. What saves you is not the confidence of your grip, not the perfect strength of what you are gripping. That's what Peter understands. He does not have a perfect grip on Jesus. No one ever has. It's not the amount of faith that saves you — it's the object of your faith that saves you. It's not the strength of your trust that saves you — it's the strength of Christ. Christ is strong enough to hold weak faith, even if we're unsure, even if we have just a mustard seed of questions. Maybe you grew up with questions. In this reformed world we live in, we love to be right, we love to know the right thing — we don't say that out loud, but we pride ourselves on it. Maybe you brought some questions with you this morning. Maybe there are things in Scripture you don't understand. Maybe you're going through a season of suffering and you don't understand what God is doing. Maybe you feel weaker than you used to. The answer is not to manufacture a pseudo sense of certainty — it's not to fake it. The answer, again, is to run to Christ. Weak faith in a strong Savior is still strong faith in a strong Savior. Peter is right: where else do we go? To whom shall we run? Who else has the words of eternal life? There's nowhere else to go, so run to him. There are two points of application. The first is this: stop. Verse 66 says many of his disciples turned back — and that's not something people just do with their feet. Turning back is something we do with our hearts. What they did was essentially repent from Jesus — turn 360 degrees and walk away. Some of us spend our lives trying to return to a season that's gone. We want to go back to when our children were small, when our marriage felt easier, when our bodies were stronger, when our parents were alive, when the church felt fuller, when faith felt simpler — back before the diagnosis, the grief, the disappointment. There's nothing sinful about missing what is good, about remembering the blessings God has given us. Grief often means we cared about something that was good. But nostalgia becomes dangerous when you begin to believe that life itself is behind you. You cannot follow Jesus while constantly facing backwards. Christ has not promised to take you back to the life you had. He has promised to lead you to the life he has now given you — he's our shepherd through the valley of the shadow of death. So stop asking only, 'How do I get back what I've lost?' and begin asking, 'How do I follow Christ faithfully from here?' Maybe faithfulness from here means learning to live with limits you did not choose. It means loving the spouse you have today instead of resenting the marriage you used to have. Maybe it means serving the church that exists now instead of comparing it to the church you remember, or trusting God in a quieter season when you no longer feel as useful as you once did. The past absolutely contains gifts we should thank God for. But the past is a terrible place to live. Trying to resurrect what is dead will only make us miserable. God is not calling you to look backwards. He is calling you to walk with him. The second application is this: do not demand that Jesus explain himself before you obey. We often say, quietly in our hearts, 'I will do this, God, but only once you make this clear to me, once you explain it.' But that kind of obedience is conditional obedience. Peter does not understand everything Jesus said, but he knows who Jesus is. Faith does not mean we stop asking questions, but there is a difference between asking questions and putting Jesus on trial. Sometimes Christ calls us to obey before we understand what it means to forgive, what it means to tell the truth, what it means to remain sexually faithful, what it means to give generously, or what it means to trust him in suffering — and yet he still calls us to obey. Saying 'God, explain it to me first, show me it's all going to work out, I don't know if I can do this, I'm still thinking about it, still praying about it' can be a respectable way of saying no. Obey what Christ has made clear. Keep asking questions, keep seeking understanding — but do not make complete understanding the price Jesus has to pay for your obedience. But there is nowhere else to go. So we must run to him, because the one who says the hard things is also the one who did the hardest thing for us. Jesus did not stand at a distance and tell sinners, 'Go save yourself.' He went to the cross for us, and on that cross he did not merely suffer — he stood in the place of sinners. He bore the guilt we deserved. He took the judgment, took the wrath that should have fallen on us, so that everyone who trusts in him would never have to bear it. The Holy One of God was treated and condemned as guilty, so guilty people could be declared holy and righteous. The Son was forsaken so that all who belong to him would never be abandoned. That's why Peter is right: where else will we go? Who else has carried our sin? Who else has borne our judgment? Who else has taken God's wrath upon himself? Who else has defeated death for us? Who else can look at every sinner and say, 'Son or daughter, you are forgiven'? And who else has the words of eternal life? Eternal life is not merely living forever. Eternal life is not merely getting a mansion or streets of gold — those are a cherry on top. Eternal life is life with him. One day, faith will become sight. The questions that confuse us now will not have the final word. The suffering that makes obedience hard will be gone. Sin will be gone. Death will be no more. And we will see the face of the one we trusted when we could not see the way. And on that day, in the presence of Christ, we will not say, 'I wish I would have turned back, I wish I would have trusted less, I wish I would have chosen another way.' We will see the one who brought us home — the Lamb who was slain, the Savior who bore our sin, the King who was worth it. So when the word is hard, when obedience costs, when you don't understand what he is doing, when the world offers a hundred other places to go — hear Peter's question again: Lord, to whom shall we go? There is nowhere else to go. So run to him. There is no one else you need. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link