The Blessing of Baked Bread
One of the best birthday gifts I have given to my wife, Colleen, is a bread-making machine. For the last 15 years my wife has, on average, made 1-2 loaves of bread per week.
She gets a lot of satisfaction making the bread, and my children and I get a lot of satisfaction eating it. She likes to eat it too.
There is something special about a fresh loaf of bread. There is also something basic about it. For many people in the world it is a fundamental part of their diet.
In one way, it’s representative of food in general. It is not uncommon for a person to say: “I work so I can put bread on the table for my family.” Bread represents something basic to our physical sustenance and well-being. We eat bread for survival and for pleasure.
Living Bread From Heaven
It is not surprising then that our Lord chose to use something as basic and fundamental as bread to represent His body broken for us.
In John 6:35 Jesus declared: “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.” As created beings, we are all dependent on our Creator and His creation to meet our basic needs. Only God is all-sufficient within Himself. He is the only one who doesn’t need something outside His being to complete Himself.”
We aren’t like that. We need food like bread to survive physically. We need good relationships with people to have a sense of emotional well-being. And we need Jesus to meet our deepest needs. It is through Him we are made right with God and it is through Him we receive the life of God in our soul.
Without Jesus, our soul and spirit continues to hunger and thirst for ultimate meaning and satisfaction in all the wrong places. We look to things like gambling, pornography, illicit relationships, excessive work or alcohol to fill the God-shaped vacuum in our hearts.
But it’s only as we come to the Bread of Life and learn to feed on Him that we will never go hungry and never be thirsty.
I want to share a quote from C.S. Lewis: “If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospel, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us. We are like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mudpies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
Let us taste and see that the Lord is good, now and forever. It is He, the Bread of Life, that sustains us and completes us. He is the Only One who can fulfill our deepest yearnings. He is the Only One who can take all our human relationships to the next level of selfless love. He is the Only One that can infuse our work with eternal meaning. He is the Only One who can bring wholeness to our lives through His broken body.
Our souls and spirits are restless until they find their home in Him. Amen!
QOTD: What are you feeding on to give you ultimate satisfaction and meaning?