Crumbs of Manna

As I’m reading through Exodus again this spring, I started thinking about the Israelites gathering manna six days a week for the duration of their wilderness wanderings. How long did it take them each morning to pick up about two quarts of the fine flakes for each person? (Multiply that by the 600,000 men plus women and children mentioned in Exodus 12:37!) Certainly, there was grumbling about the inconvenience and lack of variety, along with groaning about aching backs.

The manna foreshadowed Jesus. “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 Israelites couldn’t just stock up for a month or stop gathering the manna. They needed the daily grace of God’s provision for them. We too need God’s grace every day for forgiveness, sanctification, and maturity. Jesus taught us to pray for our “daily bread” (Matthew 6:11). We receive God’s provision through Jesus’s death on the cross and His intercession for us, as well as through Scripture, prayer, and gathering with the Body of Christ on a regular basis. We can’t just accept Christ as Savior and expect to live and grow in our faith any more than we could eat one meal and expect it to last a lifetime. The provision is there if we will make the effort to gather it.

It’s curious that Exodus reports, “They gathered [manna], some more, some less. But when they measured it with an omer, whoever gathered much had nothing left over, and whoever gathered little had no lack” (16:17-18). This is reminiscent of Jesus’s miraculous feeding of five thousand with five loaves and two fish in John 6, the act that preceded His statement that He is the Bread of Life. The crowd followed Him because they wanted to be filled without expending any effort and without understanding that Jesus wanted to give them something far better than daily sustenance.

In our consumer-oriented society, how often do we settle for a few fringe benefits of faith rather than digging deep for our daily nourishment from the Bread of Life? How many in our churches expect to be spoon fed when (or if) they show up?

Let us press on to maturity, “for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil” (Hebrews 5:13-14). Let’s make it our constant practice to gather manna daily from God’s word and through interaction with our brothers and sisters in Christ.

“Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but My Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is He who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world” (John 6:32-33).

© 2021 Dawn Rutan. Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture are ESV and all images are copyright free from pixabay.com. The opinions stated do not necessarily reflect the views of my church or employer.

Jesus, Draw Me Close

In John chapter 6 we read of Jesus feeding more than five thousand people and then withdrawing. The next day when the crowds sought Him out again He told them:

“Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking Me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves… I am the Bread of Life; whoever comes to Me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in Me shall never thirst” (John 6:26, 35 ESV).

We are often like the crowds, seeking Jesus to meet our felt needs rather than for a desire to know Him deeply. Sam Allberry wrote about this passage, “The greatest gift Jesus gives us… is Jesus. He is not the means to some other, separate end. The Bread of Life is not something else, with Jesus being the one who dispenses it for us. He is the prize.” Heath Lambert wrote, “They minimized Jesus and his work by seeing him as the source of only one good thing rather than cherishing him as the fountain for all life… You should come pursuing a full-fledged relationship with this sovereign King who saves, desiring to draw close to him in every way, and not just seeking to get your problems fixed” (142).

It’s not just unbelievers or young Christians who seek Jesus for the wrong reasons. Even those of us who’ve been on this journey for a while can lose perspective. Our prayers can become a shopping list: heal this person; save that one; bless our food; and, oh yes, I could use a little bit of forgiveness and freedom from temptation too. I know I’m not the only one to fall into this pit at times. It is all too easy to go through the motions of prayer and Bible reading without actually seeking God or interacting with Him. Alistair Begg often uses this short prayer at the beginning of his sermons: “Make the book live to me, O Lord. Show me Yourself within Your Word. Show me myself and show me my Savior, and make the book live to me, for Jesus’ sake.” That might be worth adopting for personal devotional times, though that too can become a meaningless habit.

How might our lives and our churches be different if we were truly and consistently seeking a living relationship with our Heavenly Father rather than seeking the good things He can give us? It is appropriate to be thankful for forgiveness, the promise of eternal life, and the blessings of life and family. But we may start to sound like little children at Christmas saying a perfunctory “Thanks!” while racing off to play with our toys. And yet children who only get periodic packages from an absentee parent quickly learn that gifts are meaningless apart from a loving relationship.

The Apostle Paul prayed for the Ephesians:

“[That] according to the riches of His glory He may grant you to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:16b-19).

The blessings of His riches are for the purpose of knowing the Father’s love—knowing the One who is love. We miss out when we settle on the gifts apart from the Giver. May we not stop short of knowing the best He has to offer—Himself.

“See what kind of love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are… So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 John 3:1, 4:16).

© 2019 Dawn Rutan. Unless otherwise indicated all images are copyright free from pixabay.com. The opinions stated do not necessarily reflect the views of my church or employer.

Sufficient and Necessary

The lessons have been piling up lately. Actually I should say lesson, because it is all part of one larger picture. It started with comments in a couple different sermons from Sam Allberry. In one he referred to John 6:35 (ESV): “Jesus said to them, ‘I am the Bread of Life; whoever comes to Me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in Me shall never thirst,’” and he reminded me that Jesus is the only one who truly fulfills all our needs. In the New Testament context bread was a staple of life, not an incidental item. Jesus is not just some side dish, but He is the main course. Everything else is secondary. Later I read this: “‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in Him’” (Lamentations 3:24). How often have I looked to something else to satisfy me rather than waiting on God to do what only He can do, when I’ve thought that some need or desire was more urgent than it really was?

In another sermon on Luke 22:39-46 he said,

“‘Pray that you may not enter into temptation.’ It highlights for us the importance of prayer. [The disciples] need to pray so that they will not enter into temptation, so that they will not fall, so that they will be faithful to their master. And that is no less true for us. We will face trials. In His executive summary of what we’re to pray for, Jesus tells us to pray about temptation, that we would be delivered from the evil one [Matthew 6:9-13]. We need to be people of prayer so that when the temptation comes, we will not fall into it. A verse that has been really challenging and haunting me, actually, recently on prayer is James 4:2, ‘You do not have because you do not ask God.’ You do not stand because you do not pray.”

I wonder how often I have missed out on God’s provision, protection, and deliverance because I have not asked Him. How often have I fallen because I didn’t pray or because I was praying for something less than God’s best?

As I’m reading through Isaiah again this verse caught my attention. “Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you, and therefore He exalts Himself to show mercy to you. For the Lord is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for Him” (30:18). And He not only waits to be gracious, but He also says, “I will rejoice in doing them good…” (Jeremiah 32:41). I wonder how long God has been waiting to show me grace and mercy and do good for me while my attention has been focused somewhere else.

It’s interesting that by showing mercy God exalts Himself. Through encountering His mercy and grace we see God for who He really is and we’re reminded of who we are both with Him and apart from Him. On our own we are weak, sinful, hungry, and needy. But in Christ we have strength, forgiveness, satisfaction, and fulfillment. It’s easy to forget that Christ is sufficient for all our needs. I need frequent reminders of His sufficiency, but those reminders usually come in the form of tripping and falling flat on my face. That’s always a good time and place to pray.

“If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you” (John 15:7).

“And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” (Matthew 6:13).

© 2017 Dawn Rutan. Unless otherwise indicated all images are copyright free from pixabay.com.