{"id":98,"date":"2008-02-08T00:01:08","date_gmt":"2008-02-07T23:01:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.christlutheranchurch.org.uk\/site\/?p=98"},"modified":"2008-02-08T00:27:01","modified_gmt":"2008-02-07T23:27:01","slug":"lent-devotions-2008-friday-8th-february","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.christlutheranchurch.org.uk\/site\/2008\/02\/08\/lent-devotions-2008-friday-8th-february\/","title":{"rendered":"Lent Devotions 2008: Friday 8th February"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Jesus said to them, &#8220;I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. <\/em>(John 6:35)<\/p>\n<p>The natural instinct of human beings is always to turn religion into Law; into rules for what we are to do or not do. From this follows the equally natural instinct to turn Jesus into a new Moses, giving a new Law to a new people of God, just as Moses gave the Law to the Israelites in the Old Testament.<\/p>\n<p>This was the mistake that Jesus was addressing in this famous statement. He is speaking to members of the 5,000 who had been miraculously fed the day before, but who seemed curiously unimpressed by what they had experienced. After all, feeding 5,000 wasn\u2019t much compared with Moses\u2019 achievement in giving the Israelites \u201cbread from heaven\u201d (manna) to eat in the wilderness, was it? (vv.30,31)<\/p>\n<p>Jesus retorts that His listeners have misunderstood both Moses and Himself. It wasn\u2019t Moses who had fed the Israelites in the wilderness; it was God who had given them \u201cbread from heaven\u201d. And Jesus wasn\u2019t a new Moses, sent to introduce a new Law for God\u2019s people. Rather, He was the new manna, sent by God to give life to the world.<\/p>\n<p>So what does it mean to \u201ccome to Jesus\u201d, the bread of life, today? Jesus gives a number of clues to this elsewhere in this chapter: recognising that He has \u201cthe words of Eternal Life\u201d (v.68), eating His flesh and drinking His blood in the Lord\u2019s Supper (v.54), believing in Him as the one sent by God (v.29).<\/p>\n<p>Word, sacrament, faith: the daily life of the Church and of us as Christians. Here is no new Law, given by a new Moses. Rather, here is new Manna, as we come to Jesus and receive, as a gift, the Life that He came to give to the world.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Lord Jesus, may we come to You not as the new Lawgiver, but as the new Manna, the Bread of Life, whose Word satisfies every hunger and quenches every thirst. Amen.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jesus said to them, &#8220;I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. (John 6:35) The natural instinct of human beings is always to turn religion into Law; into rules for what we are to do or not do. From this follows the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-98","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lent-devotions-2008"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.christlutheranchurch.org.uk\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.christlutheranchurch.org.uk\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.christlutheranchurch.org.uk\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.christlutheranchurch.org.uk\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.christlutheranchurch.org.uk\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.christlutheranchurch.org.uk\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.christlutheranchurch.org.uk\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.christlutheranchurch.org.uk\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.christlutheranchurch.org.uk\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}