All Cannibals Go To Heaven

Sometimes Jesus’ words can make you look twice and go, “What was that again?”  If you’ve grown up in church, it can be easy to dismiss these sayings because we’ve heard them before, but honestly when you think about it, some of His sayings are pretty strange!

Hungry Much?
One of these sayings are in John 6.  Right before this, Jesus fed 5,000 men (aka 15,000 – 20,000 people), and now the crowds followed Him across the sea to get even more food from Him.  When they ask for more food, Jesus responds by saying they need to eat Him!  He says that He is the “bread of life,” and that we need to eat His flesh and drink His blood to have eternal life.

Come on, I mean just think about this.  If a hairy, homeless guy appeared on CNN talking about how we need to eat his flesh and drink his blood to live forever, what would you think?  I mean this is just not a normal thing to say!

After Jesus says these things, many of His followers found this difficult to take seriously as well.  In fact, “as a result of this many of His disciples withdrew and were not walking with Him anymore,” (John 6:66).  The thing is, these people didn’t leave because they thought Jesus’ words were strange.  They left because they didn’t want to change themselves.

Is He Serious?

Something that we have to keep in mind about Jesus is that He is constantly trying to explain heavenly concepts in earthly terms.  Many times His “odd” sayings are often because He is using earthy truths to describe spiritual realities.

With this in mind, it might make a little more sense now.  Jesus loves these people, and wants to see them saved!  They want food to satisfy their stomach, and Jesus uses this analogy hoping to save their souls!  “I know you guys think you need food to live, but regular food won’t save you.  Only I can save you.”  Jesus says that they need Him just as much as they need food; only He can satisfy their lives!  Jesus must permeate every part of their being in order to be saved.  Simply walking behind Him isn’t enough.

Awful Evangelism

And me, as a Christian and future pastor, I’m saying, “Jesus, what are you doing???” But Jesus wasn’t interested in merely entertaining those who weren’t truly interested in Him.  The people who walked away might have used the “strangeness” of His words as an excuse, but that wasn’t the reason.  If Jesus wasn’t going to perform what they wanted, if He didn’t fulfill their preferences, then they were through with Him.

Allowing Jesus to permeate every part of our lives can be pretty difficult.  So difficult, in fact, that people were willing to walk away.  They made excuses saying things like, “I don’t understand what He means,” or “I’m not getting fed properly here.”  But ultimately, they didn’t want to allow Jesus to change their lives.

The Bread of Life

So what can make this feel perhaps a little less difficult?  It’s hard allowing Jesus to permeate our being.  But we have to remember what’s going on here: Jesus loves us!  Jesus is the Bread of Life!  We are literally unable to live out our lives without Him!  Jesus knows exactly what we need in order to be satisfied, and He sees this as the best way possible to show us what it’s like to be a follower of Him!

Doing the “religious thing” by going to church isn’t enough, just like simply walking around behind Him wasn’t enough either.  Jesus invites us to bring Him into our lives and completely rework our inside, changing who we are completely.

Although it might be tough to go through the changes Jesus wants to make in our hearts, ultimately we will be living out the life He has called us to live.  Instead of walking around trying to fill a void in our hearts, we will be completely satisfied with Jesus, the Bread of Life.