The Bread Of Life
I am the bread of life. Only one could make that statement.
Even our literal bread, corn or wheat or rye, has relation to religion. The Master's followers were taught to pray, for their "daily bread." When a Christian offers thanks for his morning toast, audibly or otherwise, that toast is "sanctified by the word of God and prayer." Should one become so delirious about prayer that he decides to go into his closet and pray and pray till a loaf of bread came bouncing in, that one is liable to lose faith in prayer and God. But he is just mistaken. He has forgotten Genesis 3:19:"In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread." Hard work is connected with getting clover-leaf rolls ready for butter. Many who can see this truth about prayer-and-bread fail to see it about prayer-and-sickness. He who refuses doctors and medicine, trusting only in his faith in prayer, is as foolish as the man doing nothing but praying for bread. That man just has not learned that miracles do not happen now. Walking on water, feeding five thousand with two fishes, raising a corpse, being fed by a raven, raising up sick people--were all easy in days of miracles; and one of them is as easy as another today: to raise a corpse is as easy as to raise a sick person by miraculous faith or prayer. Neither is possible.
Another mistaken notion is that God takes better care of Christians in this world than of sinners. No, he sends the sun on a Christian's garden no more than on the vilest sinner's; he sends the rain on the just and the unjust. More bread will not be in your cupboard because you are a church member. God's natural laws operate on saint and sinner alike, "without the slightest reference to moral desserts." In a rainstorm, it is not the man with religion, but the man with the umbrella, that keeps dry. In the next world it is different.
Does this teaching validate the Sermon on the Mount: "and all these things shall be added unto you?" No, for it is the same preacher in the same sermon who declared the sun and rain come on all alike. "All these things shall be added unto you" by natural laws. If you are lazy and won't work you'll starve. And even if buy are a hard worker and put the kingdom first,--"all these things will be added unto you" by natural laws. Sometimes you, like Paul, may suffer necessities; you may know, what it is to be full and to abound, to be empty and to be abased. You may desire crumbs from the rich man's table. Does not God know about every sparrow that falls? Yes, but some of them fall. Are not the hairs of our head numbered? Yes, but good heads have been scalped; even Paul's bounced from the chopping block.
Thus natural bread comes by natural laws, but it is spiritual bread that counts, the bread of life. "Work not for the food which perisheth, but for the food which abideth unto eternal life." "He that eateth me, even he shall live by me." Certainly one cannot eat and drink of Jesus Christ if he does not do what he says do. When a Christian partakes of the Lord's supper, he is eating and drinking of Jesus Christ. No, not literally, no more than he eats a book when he feeds on the Word of God. Anything Jesus commands is a way for one to eat his flesh and drink his blood: denying oneself, bearing the cross, reading the Bible, praying, visiting the sick and the poor, assembling with the saints. Until we get the spirit of being so close to Jesus as to think of eating his flesh drinking his blood, we have no life in us. "He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me and I in him." Therefore a Christian can say, "Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of my enemies."