Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, June 11, 2023
If you want hearts to change with minds you need to change what we do as well as what we think. Try celebrating the Supper more frequently, as the climax to your meeting, give it time and I think the Lord will do his own work. Habit combined with the Holy Spirit is an unstoppable combination.

It surprises many people I talk to, but it’s true that the more you do something the more you like it.
Most of us assume that we keep things special by only doing them occasionally. There is a pleasure that comes from the occasional activity, but what we love we do. Our tastes are formed by what we put ‘in our mouth.’ I’ve told the story before of my colleague who gave up sugar, retraining her palate such that she no longer liked sugar, but carrots were wonderfully sweet. Our habits form us.
Which means we should think about habits carefully. If you want to love reading the Bible, read the Bible. You can train your loves by choosing discipline and we need to know this so that we persevere through the time when we don’t love something until we do.
This, framed the other way around, is why habitual sin is difficult to break: because we love it. We don’t want to, and the Spirit reframes our loves for us, but we’re trained by what we do. Our affections are more malleable than you might think.
This has lots of applications in the Christian life and in the Church. If you pray, you’ll grow to love prayer. If you stop going to church, you’ll stop wanting to. There are a thousand other examples.
Of course, there are a multiple of reasons that it’s not as simple as that to retrain our habits.
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Jesus’ message about being the bread of life is one of the most convicting and revealing in the Gospel accounts. People who are confronted by this message cannot stand in the middle and they cannot pretend which side they are on – at least for long. We all must either recognize that we have nowhere else to go but to Christ or that we are unwilling to relinquish our hold on our illusory autonomy. 

In John’s Gospel account, each of Jesus’ seven “I am” statements revealed something about His person and work, allowing John’s readers to know Him more intimately, clearly, and personally. These statements are designed to bring us back to the foundation of our faith, which is the Lord Jesus Christ.
The first of these statements occurs in John 6, where Jesus twice declares, “I am the bread of life.” By human standards, the message here could be categorized as the worst sermon Jesus ever preached. When the chapter begins, Jesus is being followed by crowds of possibly more than 20,000 people. At the end, He is left with 12 followers – one of whom is, in Jesus’ words, a devil.
In the modern church today, if a teacher loses 99.94% of his audience, he would be deemed a failure. That’s why by the world’s standards, this message Jesus gave in John 6 was a complete disaster; but by Jesus’ standards, it accomplished exactly what He intended it to do – and so it was a roaring success.
The tension of this passage is due to the crowd’s refusal to understand and accept Jesus’ true meaning when He called Himself the “Bread of Life.” Members of the crowd following Jesus were hungry, and they wanted our Lord to provide them with sustenance. Jesus, who was perfectly capable of such an earthly minded miracle, had a spiritual focus with His statement, knowing that their eternal destinies mattered exponentially more than the state of their empty stomachs. More than two thousand years have passed since this interaction between Jesus and the crowd, but the same tension and truth remains with us today.
John includes two scenes at the onset of this chapter to provide context for the forthcoming conversation and to demonstrate that Jesus is God. Only God can create bread to feed 20,000 people out of five crackers, and only God can overrule the way water and density normally work so that He can walk on water. John’s point in the inclusion of these stories is to force us to grapple with this question: ‘Who is Jesus?’ Is He a human bread factory, ready to meet our temporal needs and submit to our whims and desires? Or is He God in human flesh, the sovereign ruler of all?
As the crowd gathers around Jesus after His miraculous stroll across a stormy sea, the Savior confronts their worldly motives in seeking Him by highlighting their real reason for coming: they didn’t want spiritual truth or eternal life; they wanted physical food. This is how many people in this world search for Jesus. In fact, the entire seeker-sensitive movement in the church is built on this premise, that they want to attract a crowd by appealing to their fleshly desires.
Not only does Jesus understand the crowd is only interested in a resolution for their temporal problems, but He also knows they mistakenly believe they have some stake (i.e. works) in the things that only God can do. This crowd only wants to come to Jesus on their terms.
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To listen to the chaotic, nonsensical ramblings of many in our society (many of which reside in our “highest” institutions of learning and who are currently rioting in our streets) is a study in Isaiah 5 and Romans 1. Any man or woman, any family, any nation who, in their pride, reject God’s Word will fall into a dramatically deluded mind and depraved behavior.

Forgive me for some reminiscent rambling. I don’t do it often, but I digress to highlight a comparison and a tragedy. In my lifetime, I remember when…

Most churches were filled on Sunday morning and night.
All businesses were closed on Sunday.
Every day at public school began with a prayer over the intercom or in the classroom.
Children in almost any neighborhood could play or walk to school with no threat of harm.
Most children had zero thought or confusion about their gender identity and happily embraced who they were.
There was a general understanding of many undeniable, universally accepted moral values across the nation.
Certain sins and behaviors were generally condemned, not accepted and applauded.
And on and on…

What has happened? Don’t think I am naive enough to believe that our society was altogether righteous and I am not advocating a return to the 50s. We were rampant with our own brand of iniquity. But to compare our nation in the past to the current highlights a major moral declension.
It’s Beginnings
In Isaiah’s day, the prophet speaks for God to His people…people to whom He had shown great mercy, blessing, and favor. Somewhere they had made a turn, best described in a few verses. It didn’t take many words from God and His prophet to identify what had happened.
Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight.Isaiah 5:21
A fall away from God always begins with pride. We think we know better and are wiser than God, and this pride leads to a further disastrous decision.
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