Yorba Linda Vineyard

Why Do You Follow Jesus?

By, Christy Wimber

There are many reasons as to why people say yes to Jesus.

Some feel they will get an easier life. Some believe they have nothing to lose, some believe it’s the only way, and the list goes on & on. The truth is in my own personal life there have been many times where I have been disappointed with the results of life around me. I find it so frustrating when life turns out different than what I wanted or thought should happen. But that’s life. And what I’ve found in this journey is life is hard at times and we will go through difficult times.

The real choice is do we want to do life with God because we get what we want and expect or do I want to do life with Jesus because I died the day I said yes to him.

The Gospels give us such insight on who Jesus is but also His model of how to do life with Him. He doesn’t just throw us out into the world, giving us cheers on hoping we’ll make it. He plans on us making it and doing well.

John 6 gives a great picture of the choice we have in life to see the Jesus He is or the one we want Him to be.  Its where we find a large number of people begin a journey with Jesus. They have experienced His goodness. They are among the 5000 men plus women and children who enjoy loaves and fishes courtesy of the King of Kings.

This is right after he multiplied food. Nothing like when you’re hungry to be satisfied.

So you can you imagine the excitement they felt when Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes?

What an experience! They had already heard Him speak as no man had ever spoken. They had already seen Him heal the sick and deliver the oppressed. They were thrilled at what Jesus has done and eager to see what He will do next.

So they start out super excited. In fact, they are so excited they want to make Jesus their king. He must be their king. They will insist that he lead them as king.  If you notice what they are saying in verse 14, “Surly this is the Prophet who is to come...” Remember, Moses had prophesied that God would raise up a prophet like himself to lead God’s people into liberty.

Deut 18:15 “The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own brothers. You must listen to him.”

You can see that surely they were beginning to feel this must be the Messiah. Surely this is the One we have been waiting for.  Surely Jesus will free us from the tyranny of Rome, just like Moses freed Israel from the tyranny of Egypt. This is exactly what we need. But why are they excited?

I think to some extent it was based upon what they had already seen Jesus do—the healings, the miracles, the feeding of the five thousand. But mostly their excitement was based upon what they expected Jesus to do for them.

Just imagine, if you’ve got a leader who can heal sick bodies and multiply food supernaturally, you’ve got a good start toward great success.  Life could really get good under Jesus’ leadership.

We should have great expectations with Jesus, and also full be full of excitement- there’s nothing worse than people who are miserable Christians, that doesn’t make any sense to me.

I think the problem here is their excitement is based upon some false assumptions about Jesus—the assumption that Jesus has come to be their political leader, the assumption that Jesus has come to make life easy for them, the assumption that Jesus has come to give them what they want.

Jesus of course knew all this. Jesus knows our expectations of him. What we would like to see happen.

So He begins to respond by first sending the disciples away. He knew their hearts and He knew they are vulnerable to the influence of the crowd.

They too want Jesus to be a political activist. They too want to move from the bottom of the social ladder to the top. They too want earthly power and influence.

So it’s actually for their own good Jesus sends them across the lake away from all this excitement. Many times Jesus will lead us in a direction where it makes no sense. All of the sudden there is a great miracle and great excitement and now He’s going to send them away?  These are the greatest times to trust Jesus. It’s trusting without seeing or understanding. And remember when we understand or expect to understand everything, we have just then brought God down to our level of understanding.

Jesus knows our heart. He knows what you and I can handle so He makes the provision we need, but it’s always for our own good, for our own provision. Here, Jesus knew—they would not able to say no to the excitement of their own Kingdom being built.

Then, instead of seizing the momentum of the crowd, Jesus withdrew to the mountain by himself. This crowd saw Jesus send the disciples away on the only boat to the other shore.

They knew Jesus had not gone with them. They didn’t know about Jesus walking on the water and rescuing the disciples in the storm. They didn’t know about how the boat miraculously, immediately arrived at the other side as soon as Jesus joined the disciples.

We see where the crowd got into boats in search of Jesus. They are looking for Him everywhere.

“How, Jesus, are we going to make you our king when we can’t even find you?

These people were not apathetic. They were passionately and aggressively trying to find Jesus. They are an excited crowd. But when they find Him they ask Him a question. “Why did you leave?” They want to ask, “How in the world did you get over here without a boat?” But instead they ask a safer question—one that might yield the answers they seek without much risk. John 6:25, “Rabbi, when did you get here?”

If you look closely at verse 26, you’ll find that Jesus didn’t even bother to answer that question. Which is so funny to me but also very true in this life where we want to hear one thing, but Jesus will often go right to the root of what our spirit really needs to hear.

And here Jesus answers a much more important issue—the issue of why they were seeking Him in the first place. “...You are looking for me, not because you saw the miraculous signs, but because you ate the loaves and had your fill.” You are excited about all the wrong things.

You are seeking me for all the wrong reasons. I gave you a miraculous sign. Within that miracle was a message about who I am. You totally missed the point. In a miracle, there is always a message. This is why we don’t go after miracles, but we go after Jesus. When we find Jesus and his presence, miracles always follow.

We have to remember that Jesus is always our provision. But how He decides to provide is up to Him. If we get caught up in the way He provides, it will become a stumbling block when it changes. We have to trust in the fact that Jesus is our great provider, but how He chooses to provide is up to Him. Will we trust him?

Here, Jesus has given the sign of the provision of bread. It was a revelation of Him as the Bread of Life. It was a revelation of Him as the spiritual provision every person needs. It was a revelation of Him as the compassionate Messiah that He is.  But these people were blind to the true message. They had preconceived ideas of what God through Jesus should and would do for them. They were very busy trying to push Jesus into the mold they had prepared for Him.

I have seen this many times in people’s lives—excited about Jesus—not the real Jesus but the Jesus they have assumed.   So Jesus confronts it and they’re heart is really revealed. Everytime Jesus moves and leads it will reveal where our heart is truly at. And here the crowd begins to grumble.

Their first question Verse 28, “What must we do to do the works God requires?” “OK, Jesus what do you want us to do? We want you to be our king. The answer was not what they expected. “The work of God is this: to believe in the one He has sent.”

See, they believed in the Messiah they had conceived, not the One the Father has sent. The Sent One is standing before them revealing Himself if they would only accept & believe him.

So they have a choice. If they will accept Him as He really is, if they will abandon their own agenda and allow Him to truly lead, if they will place all their trust in Him and simply obey Him because of their confidence in Him, everything else will fall into place.

You can hear the frustration in verse 30, “What miraculous sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you?” Remember, They have just experienced one of the greatest miracles ever recorded in human history. That didn’t satisfy them. Now they are putting demands upon Jesus. Now they suggest to Him what He needs to do to convince them.

It was commonly assumed by the Jews at that time that when Messiah would come he would give manna like Moses did. Jesus never did miracles to prove anything. He knew who he was and he did miracles because he loved the people.  Not to fulfill man’s expectations.

And to the unbelieving mind even if there were more miracles they would not believe.

 “I will do this for you Lord, if you do this—if you heal my mom, if you give me money… If I get this job etc..” But Jesus is not in the negotiation business.  He’s in the Kingdom Business.

He is full of grace and sometimes He will accommodate our frailties. But Jesus has already done everything as “He gave all” So Jesus will correct these people, and remember they’re still on the

 “What’s in it for me track”. So, they answer Jesus, “Ok, then from now on give us this bread.” Food was an even more significant part of the budget for these people. They’re thinking of how easy life would be if the food budget were just provided miraculously.

They are trapped in a materialistic mindset.  It’s actually materialism that’s their narcotic; materialism has deadened them to their spiritual state. But Jesus is offering them something eternal—something of more value than anything in this world. But they are so caught up in their own materialistic world that they cannot seem to hear it.  Many times the voice of the world becomes louder than the voice of Christ.

And we need to hear the same words Jesus spoke to these, “I am the bread of life.” In the book of John, Jesus uses the term “I am” to declare His deity and to reveal Himself to the people. It is the same term Moses heard from the burning bush. Jesus is using bread to illustrate Himself as the giver and sustainer of spiritual life.

 There will always be a counterfeit to the real deal. And too much of the Church takes the counterfeit.

Grumbling will always take people out of their true inheritance.  And grumbling is only empowered when we decide to be offended.

Here the people are operating out of false assumptions about Jesus. They assume Joseph is His father. But Jesus was not conceived by Joseph. God is Jesus’ Father. (17)

So they begin to draw back from Jesus. Even when Jesus clarifies His statement significantly—even when Jesus contrasts Himself as the bread from heaven to the manna in the wilderness— still they don’t receive His correction.

The manna in the wilderness only sustained physical life and only did that for 40 years. Those people still died. In contrast, Jesus offers eternal life to all those who partake of Him.

Remember, were all terminal. No matter how well you eat, you’re still going to die. The real questions isn’t “Are you going to die, but rather are you going to live?”

You can never truly live until you first deal with death.

Jesus specifically tells them in verse 51, “...This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.” The cross is clearly in mind when He says those words—“my flesh...which I will give for the life of the world.”

Now the grumbling crowd is so offended at the response of Jesus. This isn’t quite turning out as they expected. They begin to argue among themselves. “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

Notice, in verse 52, they are no longer calling him Rabbi, and they are certainly not calling him Lord— “this man”, How can this man give us his flesh to eat?

But that sacrifice must be appropriated by faith. That’s what Jesus means when He says,

“Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life...” The sacrifice must be received, but this is not what they want to hear. They still want what they want and they want Jesus to stay on their plan.

And they are completely offended by what Jesus is saying. And therefore it’s revealing what’s in their heart. This is really going to separate those that are really going to follow after Jesus and those only saying “yes’ if he continues to do what they want and how they want… 

The cross is a stumbling block that cannot be ignored. Either one accepts God’s provision and receives it or one is offended and insists upon his own ideas of what must be done to do the works of God.

The people were not saying they could not understand his message. They were saying we understand it but do not accept it. They didn’t like what they were hearing.

So, Jesus asked them the question, “Does this offend you?” already knowing the answer.

When we follow Jesus for the wrong reasons this is revealed when things turn out differently. But its His way were after. Even if we don’t understand or He speaks things we don’t get or leads us in a direction that offends us in every way. Will we still say yes? Will we still follow? In this life with Christ we will be offended. We will be uncomfortable, but remember that’s why we have the Holy Spirit, who is our ‘comforter.’

Remember at the end of the day faith is choosing to believe even when we don’t see. Will my heart live this out not because of what I want, but rather what Christ wants in me. “For to live in Christ is to die to self..”

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