Well, in God's Word this morning, John chapter 6, I'll begin reading with verse 52. The Jews therefore strove among themselves, saying, How can this man give us his flesh to eat? Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood dwelleth in me, and I in him. As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father, so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me. This is that bread which came down from heaven, not as your fathers did eat manna and are dead. He that eateth of this bread shall live forever. May God add blessings to the reading of his word this morning. Today as we read this passage, we realize that we're moving closer to the finish of John chapter 6. And in doing so, I hope you remember, chapter 6 begins with 5,000 men following Jesus. Remember the feeding of the 5,000? That was men and the women and the children. There were some 20,000 to 30,000 people there. It began with that many people following Jesus. And you will soon discover as chapter 6 ends, it will end with 11 following Jesus. 11. Andreas Kostenberger says in his commentary, chapter 6 ends on a note of failure. Think about that. Think about that. From a standpoint of looking at losing that many people, I can understand the concept someone would get by saying Jesus was failing. When you start with tens of thousands of people, men and women and children following you, and then you end with eleven. Wow! That's losing a following. At least that's the appearance, right? The resistance to Jesus in this chapter gets stronger and stronger and stronger until almost everyone abandons him. The resistance to Jesus. If you've been following along, if you've been really marking your Bible and making your notes, remember earlier the Jews were murmuring about Jesus. When Jesus said that I am the bread of life and he started that message, they were murmuring because of his metaphor. Well, now they've moved from murmuring to out and out rebellion against him. So the resistance to Jesus is growing and it's getting stronger and more and more people are joining it. And it appears that it's winning. It looks like the message of Jesus is a failure. So what's the point of the chapter? What is the point in John chapter 6? Why would John even want to write about it? When we talk about and we consider the Word of God as being inerrant and inspired, we have to consider this because look, If the people who were following Jesus, if the four Gospels and the work of John and the work of Paul and all of the other folks that have written in Scripture, if their goal was to create a following based upon a personality or a charisma, they would have left out all the bad stuff. They would have left out all the things that may have been discouraging, wouldn't they? I mean, after all, If you're going to write a resume for a job, are you going to write down the bad stuff? Or are you going to write down the good stuff? Leave the bad stuff out. If you're going to try to sell something, are you going to write down all the negative points about it and very few positives? Or are you going to write down all the positives and not focus on the negatives? This is the word of God. Now I want to repeat what I just said in a little more realistic of a way, something that touches home. But the point of the chapter is, whenever it appears that resistance and rejection to Jesus is winning in this world, the people of God need to realize that they need a very robust and a very clear vision of God. And in God's sovereignty over everything, including that resistance. Let's bring that down and get it a little more personal. Whenever it appears in your life that Jesus is not winning, whenever it seems as though He's not being triumphant over the enemy, when it seems like the battles in your life are winning and Jesus is not gaining any ground on them, At that point in time is when you need to have a very robust and clear vision of God's sovereignty over you. Over you. Personally. God gets personal right here. You have battles. You have struggles. You have trials and tribulations and difficulties every day in your life and often we feel overwhelmed by them. We feel like we don't know where to go or what to do and we see our families falling apart. We see our jobs falling apart. We see life in general falling apart and crumbling around us and we wonder, God, where are you? Where are you? It is at that time when we need to back up and we need that vision. We need that robust reminder of the sovereignty of God in our lives and in our salvation. and His work and His will and His presence. With these difficulties, we find our main point. With that understood, we find our main point in this chapter. It is a big overarching lesson of the chapter and it's taken as a whole. We have to see it as one. To see it more clearly, we have to walk through the text that I just read. We need to see the magnificent offer Jesus was making. We need to see it, we need to grasp it, we need to own it. It needs to be personal in our lives this morning. We need to walk out of here at the end of this message having ownership. of this message. Because we all experience temporal resistance to God's will and God's Word. There isn't one of us that hasn't resisted God's Word. We read something, we hear a message preached, we hear something that is taught It tells us something about ourselves that we really just don't want to accept. God, I'll accept that about my neighbor. God, I will accept that about my fellow church member. God, I'll accept that about my spouse. God, I won't accept it about me. We've all been there. We may not admit it this morning. That may be one of those oh me moments and not an amen moment. But nonetheless, it's a very real moment in our lives. In all of our lives. So, given a little time, as a child of God, those of us that really know Jesus as Lord and Savior, and I'm not speaking to a... I'm speaking generally when I say that because let's be realistic. Churches are sitting packed this morning with folks who feel like they're a Christian just because they're sitting in the pew. That doesn't make you a Christian. Sitting in the pew makes you a Christian about as much as sitting in a garage makes you an automobile. Christianity comes from that personal relationship with Jesus Christ. And those of us who have that personal relationship and those of us that experience resistance to God's Word, over time we come around and we grow through that resistance and we realize that we had to have that in our lives. We had to have that confrontation. with reality of God's Word in order to make us grow, in order to let us and pull us closer to God, in order to see failure and fault in our lives, so that we can repent. So that we can repent of something that is standing between us and a closer walk with the Lord. And we also need to understand and realize, and I believe this sincerely, I believe that people in the 21st century are much more sensitive to correction than people in the past, say, in the first century. To say it another way, we have a tendency of wearing our feelings on a shirt sleeve. We have a tendency of being easily offended. And it's not just one or two, it's the culture. It's the culture. You know, it's one thing when you could walk down the street and your neighbor was sitting on the front porch, and you could speak to your neighbor, and your neighbor could speak to you, and something could be said in a conversation, and you'd kind of take a little bit of an offense to it, but you'd go on about your way, they'd still be your neighbor. And today you have Facebook. And I see more people with their feelings hurt over Facebook than I've ever seen in my life. And they're not even on the same side of the country with one another. And my thoughts are, come on, folks, get over it. It's an opinion and a thought-based message center. That's all that it is. But with us being so sensitive to what people say and of being so sensitive to things, we have a tendency of relating that back to God's Word. And we hear the sincerity and the straightforwardness of God's Word and we say, God, you've offended me. And God says, get over it. Because it's written there for a purpose and for a reason. See, the devil and us, by our nature, we want to be in control. And that's a lot of why we're so easily offended today. We want to be in control. We have our own way, our own vision, our own thought about the way things are supposed to go. Pastors can be particularly vulnerable to this in a church environment. I'm the pastor. I'm the man. I'm in control. No, you're not. God's in control. God is in control. God's in control of this pulpit. God's in control of this congregation. God is in control of your life sitting in this congregation. God is sovereign in everything that He does and in everything that He says. He has total control. He has final say. If He chooses to get involved in things, He gets involved. If He chooses not to, He doesn't. That's the benefit of being God. So, as we look over chapter 6, does that mean the devil wins? No, not at all. That's not the way it is. John makes it clearer and clearer as resistance rises that resistance itself is in God's hands. The resistance didn't catch God off guard. It never does. You and I can resist God and it's not going to catch Him off guard. We can rebel against God and it's not going to catch Him off guard. He can overcome it. He can overcome it any time He chooses. He can overcome it any way He chooses. He can overcome it through any adversity and over any adversity that the devil or we put in front of Him. The devil is not in charge and man is not in charge. God is. So what can we walk away with? What can we learn from this this morning that will make us stronger? Well, there's three things that I want us to see quickly this morning. I want us to see first that resistance and even rejection opposes spiritual truth. Let's look at verse 52. The Jews therefore strove or quarreled among themselves saying, how can this man give us his flesh to eat? Remember I said earlier, Jesus is no longer dealing with dissatisfied people. He's dealing with outright hostility right now. And the reason of that is because people didn't understand the truth. What did they understand? Well, they understood the Levitical law or the law of Moses. Over in Leviticus chapter 17 verses 10 through 14, you get the Jewish law there and it says, as I paraphrase it, that you can't eat any flesh that has blood in it, raw flesh, and you can't drink blood. Why? Because blood is given upon the altar to make atonement for your souls. Blood contains life. It is through blood going in our veins, pumping through our body that we have our strength. That we experience the strength of life. And God says, you can't eat that. Even an animal or things of that nature, you can't eat of that stuff. Because the blood is sacred. And that's all that the Jewish people here were thinking of. That's why they took such offense to it. Jesus was speaking out in their mind against the Mosaic Law. But in reality, that wasn't it at all. They just were not catching the spiritual truth of the matter. How often do we read or hear a message or we experience God's Word and we see it in a way that puts us away from it, pushes us away, and we become resistant to it because we don't understand the spiritual truth behind it. The spiritual truth is about Christianity. It is not about do's and don'ts. There isn't a checklist that comes with Christianity. There isn't a checklist that says, all right, I have to do this this many days a week. I have to do this this many hours a day. I have to do this this many minutes an hour. We don't have that. Christianity isn't like that. But in too many circumstances and situations and too many churches have turned Christianity into that. If you want to be saved this morning, your hair can't be but so long. If you're a Christian, women can't wear except dresses that have a neckline for here and a length to here. If you're a Christian, You can't listen but to this type of music. If you're a Christian, you can't do this but you have to do that. There are churches today that are full of that. And if that's the way they choose to practice and people follow that, that's between them and God. But in reality, we are to be modest, we are to be sincere, we are to be sensitive to the moving of God in our lives, good stewards and responsible people that are born again and saved by grace. It is the spiritual truth of the Word of God that sets the standard that we are to follow. It sets the standard that you are to follow, that I am to follow. Now that doesn't mean that we have the liberty to be indecent in the way that we approach God's house or God's worship. That's not what I'm saying at all. But it does not set a precedence or a standard for whether we are or are not saved. that has nothing to do with our salvation. The way we live our lives is a reflection of God being in our lives. And if God is in our lives, then we are going to live in a way that is honoring to Him. That's what Jesus was saying in this text. Christianity. And dealing with rejection and dealing with resistance is about not understanding spiritual truth. When we, as God's people, get ourselves, get our feelings hurt, or we start pushing back at the Word of God, we start saying, well, God, I don't know about that. That's not about me. We start being resistant to speaking to our hearts and our lives. It's us realizing there's a spiritual truth there and we're not catching it. Because it's the Word of God. If we're finding it in His Word and it's touching us, then we need to be sensitive to it and we need to realize there's a truth there. We need to realize God is trying to tell us something. So what was it? Or is it? in these passages that God is trying to tell these folks through his son Jesus. What exactly is that? Four promises. Four promises that are found in this text. And these four promises will never fail. They will never fail God. They will always be sure and they will always be true and they will always be obvious in the lives of everyone, the unsaved and the saved. First, notice with me that resistance and rejection is met with these promises and these four promises are for those who find a way to understand and receive Jesus, who find it in their heart to open their lives up. This passage reveals the reception of Jesus. Now, when we look at this, and many commentators do this with this passage, they take this and they turn it into the Lord's Supper. Because it is the eating of the flesh and the drinking of the blood, they draw a conclusion of the Lord's Supper. I'll tell you why. Because the Lord's Supper hasn't taken place yet. If Jesus was referring to do this in remembrance to me, they had no idea what he would have been talking about. The Lord's Supper took place on the night before his arrest and before he started his Passion Week, his Passion Time. But there was no Lord's Supper here. Jesus was talking about not remembering him, but he was talking about receiving him. He was talking about what it would take in a person's life to receive him, to accept him as Lord and Savior. The first promise is found in verse 53. It says, He who rejects Jesus have no life in you. Do you see that at the end of verse 53? He says, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat of the flesh of the Son of man, and drink of his blood, ye have no life in you. Unless you accept the death and burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and that is a metaphor that points back to that, then you have no life. No eternal life. There is no eternal life without salvation through Jesus Christ. None. You can't be prayed into heaven. You can't be baptized into heaven. You need to be baptized into the local church that you affiliate with. You need to understand the proper role of baptism. But baptism does not get you into heaven. Only accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior opens that door. Only that. Promise number two, in verse 54, whosoever eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood again, a metaphor that says whoever accepts me hath eternal life. Only those that accept Jesus, only those that believe in Jesus, only those that ask Him to cleanse them from their sin, only those who repent of their sin and say, yes, Lord, I realize I have failed, I realize I am a sinner, I realize I need to be forgiven, and I accept. Only those, only those will have eternal life. Promise number three. He who receives, I will raise him up the last day. The resurrection. The promise of the resurrection. We see the news broadcast. We hear everything that's going on around us in the world and we know the time is quickly approaching when the church is going to be called out of here. When the rapture is going to take place. We realize that's coming. Those of us who are saved and know Jesus Christ are anticipating it this morning, we're thankful for it. We love God and we love the reality of knowing that through Jesus Christ we have a resurrection. Over in Acts chapter 24 verse 15, Paul says, and have hope, hope toward God. which they themselves also allow that there shall be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and the unjust. There will be a judgment. There will be a rapture, then there will be a judgment. 1 Peter 1.3 goes on to say, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to His abundant mercy, His abundant mercy again, has begotten us into a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. A lively hope. It is something that we should be embracing. It is something that we should be excited about. It is something that should encourage the church this morning. There is a lively hope of a resurrection. A resurrection that is coming first in the form of a rapture, then in the end a resurrection of a judgment. One day, we're going to hear that trumpet sound. We may be alive and walking the earth, or we may be dead and buried in the earth. But either way, it's okay, because God's going to call up our bodies, and He's going to have a meeting in the air, the body and the soul, and we're going to have a glorified body, and we're going to be serving in heaven with the Lord as this world begins to unravel. Promise three, the promise of a resurrection. And promise four, he who receives dwelleth in me and I in him. In other words, it's a union with Christ. Look at verse 56. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood, again that metaphor for salvation, dwelleth in me and I in him. If you're saved this morning, if you know Jesus Christ and you know your name is written in the Lamb's Book of Life, Jesus Christ is dwelling in you. Your body is His temple. Your body is His temple. And you are in Him. You are present with Him. You are just as much a part of Christ as Christ is a part of you this morning. Now that's something to say amen for. That is something to be excited about. That is something to be celebrating this morning. The church misses many opportunities for celebration and worship and praising His name because we lose track too often of the fact that He is living inside of me, Jesus that is, and I am living inside of Him because of Him. Because He lives, I live. And if you're saved this morning, you can say the same thing. Because He lives, I live. The world is going to always put stumbling blocks in our feet. The world is going to always put things there that will trip us up. The devil is going to always put things in the way. Those things are not going away. That's life. Folks, we have to live it. When we're on this side of eternity, we're going to be troubled by the devil and we're going to be troubled by the things of this world. Just because we are troubled by them does not mean we have to let them control us. That's what had happened to the Jewish people in this day. Remember before John the Baptist and Jesus, the Jewish nation had been 400 years without a preacher. 400 years. Now, I know there's some in America today that would say, boy, I wish we could get like that now. No, they don't. They just think they do. They are so resistive and so rejecting of the Word of God, They want the Word of God completely and totally silenced. Well, when the Word of God is completely and totally silenced in the land and there's no preaching, there's no presence and no conviction of the Holy Spirit in and of the folks and the lives of the people in the land, then there is nothing that can happen except chaos, corruption, and collapse. And that's what had happened to the Jews. And that's what will happen with us if we're not careful. We have to understand these promises and we have to grasp them and we have to take ownership of them. Especially if we're saved, we have to realize whom Jesus Christ really is and the role that He plays in our life and realize we are vessels for Him to work through. The church too often forgets that we are a vessel for the Lord Jesus Christ to work through. It is through us that He reaches people with His message. It is through us that He reaches people with love and mercy and kindness and grace. It is through us that the message of judgment comes. And He will be the judge, not us. He will be. What a glorious blessing it is today to realize those four promises and realize that they will not fail because Jesus Himself put them into play. They are founded on His death, burial, and resurrection. Well, the last purpose and the last point I want to make is that Resistance is overcome by the power of Jesus. Look with me in verses 57 and 58 quickly as I close. As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father, so he that eateth me even, he shall live by me. Again, that metaphor, he that takes me as Savior shall live by me. This is that bread which came down from heaven, Not as your father did eat manna and are dead, that he that eateth of this bread shall live forever. It is through Jesus who was present during the creation, who was present during all eternity. It is through His power. It is through His power. that we have the ability to overcome resistance. Yes, you're going to doubt and yes, you're going to have issues and yes, we're all going to have times where we struggle with the Word of God and we want to say, no God, that's not for me, that's for someone else. But we also have the blessings and the grace and the mercy of knowing that with the power of Jesus Christ and through the promises that He has made to His people, that it can be overcome, and that we can overcome it through Him, through the work that He has done. Jesus is the great I Am, and His authority comes from the triune Godhead, as part of that Godhead. He is sovereign in everything. Period. Everything. Because He is everything this morning. I think it's necessary that we take inventory of our life by asking ourselves, are we resisting or outright rejecting the Word of God in some area or maybe in all areas of our life this morning? You know, often it's easy to get put out, to get our feelings hurt in the church. And because of that, we start pushing away. We're not pushing away from church members. We're pushing away from God. We don't need to be resistive to God. We don't need to be resistive to rejecting the Word of God. We need to let it fit. We need to let it fit and speak to our lives. Where do you fit in chapter 6 of John's Gospel? Are you one of the many who walk away Are you one of the many who walk away? Remember, I said in the opening, chapter 6 begins with 5,000 men plus women and children that were following Jesus. That was probably 20,000 or so total. After they were fed, they began following Jesus. And we will see as we finish chapter 6 that only 11 will remain. The rest of them walked away. They rejected Jesus because His message did not fit their perception. We don't want to wind up in that this morning. You don't want to wind up in that position this morning. I don't want to. So we have to ask ourselves, where do we fit? We're either going to find ourselves in one of the groups that walk away that are resistant, or we're going to find ourselves in the group that stays. And if we find ourselves in the group that stays, that means we're putting ourselves in a position to grow spiritually in our walk with God. And that's a good thing. That's a good thing. That's where we need to be this morning. We need to be growing in our walk with God. We need to be letting the Bible speak to our hearts and speak to our lives today. And we need to be obedient to what it's asking us to do. So as our song leaders come and give us a hymn of invitation, I want to give you a closing thought. from my heart to yours. It is my sincerest desire this morning that the Lord would grant that you will be among the number who find in Jesus a teaching of Him not being a stumbling stone, but a rock of refuge. That you find in Jesus that He is that rock that gives you a foundation for your life, but He is not a stumbling block. That's my desire this morning. You may be among these who see in God's sovereignty a sanctuary, and I hope you are this morning. I hope you see God as a sanctuary. Maybe you didn't when you come in, but as you leave, I hope you see God as a sanctuary for you to find comfort and strength in. Maybe you see God now as someone who can forgive your sin, who will forgive your sin, who cares about your sickness and has power over that sickness, or the sorrows or the burdens that you're bearing. He does. He cares. He cares enough to have gone to the cross and to have given His life. The four promises that will not fail, all four touch your life in some way, shape, form, or fashion. Embrace them. Embrace them. As we sing this morning, if God's dealing with your heart, would you come and would you let him have his will and have his way? The church doors are open. Anything needs to be said or needs to be done needs to be dealt with with God up here Is this as the opportunity ladies?