He said, as we consider your word this morning, Lord, help us to think carefully about the nature of that ransom, all that it meant and all that it means. He asked that you would give grace, that this might happen. These things are spiritually discerned. And therefore, Lord, we need the Holy Spirit in order to open our minds and to make our hearts receptive.
We ask these things in Jesus' name. Amen. A man was born 473 years to the day before I was born. In Germany, he became a professor.
And he began to teach things that were attracting some attention and concern because he was an Augustinian. My mic is not on. It's my mic on. So we'll continue with the propeller instead of the jet engine.
And the prevailing Catholic Church began to notice what he was teaching in his classes. And things were brought to a head when he was a 34-year-old professor, when he took some objections because of a visiting man named Tetsl who came selling indulgences. It was too much. And he wrote down his objections.
What do you think? I can dispense with that. It was Wittenberg University. And he wrote down his many objections.
There were 95 of them. As I say, it had been driven by initially the fact of the selling of indulgences. And that was the straw that broke the camel's back in the mind of Martin Luther. And he wrote down his objections.
And he nailed them to the door of a castle. These in the year 1517. And if you've ever seen any old German castles with their monstrous wooden doors, you would be very impressed. And these would be the centerpiece of the town.
Militarily, they would have been the center of town. And the town would grow around such castles like Wittenberg Castle. As you may know, the idea of an indulgence is that if you pay money to the Catholic Church, for a specific relative, who has died, and gone to punishment, you will be able to pay money to get that person out of suffering sooner than later. This, in fact, is how St.
Peter's Basilica was built if you have ever visited it. I find that to be actually a very creepy place. As big as it is in an architectural wonder. But in visiting St.
Peter's Square with my wife some years ago, I was looking around at the columns. And I noticed a posting there. And I saw some names on the columns. And what's the old saying?
The more things change, the more they stay the same. If you pay some money, you can get your name inscribed on the column. Maybe that will help you with regard to how God regards you. But in doing so, he lost his job.
How many of you would do something that would probably cost you your job? He lost his job, his security, many colleagues and friends. And he would be interrogated and hounded for decades. He would be on the run.
He would be treated with great disdain and disregard, and even hatred. And he died at the age of 62. What did he do? He reopened the biblical truth of salvation by faith, sola fide, personal faith, nothing else.
He taught that this salvation requires no human mediator. It only requires faith in the finished work of Christ, sola fide. As a result of that, Pope Leo, the 10th, excommunicated him, which is guaranteed L. Isn't it interesting that in 1999, certain Protestant denominations, including the Lutheran Church, had a meeting in which they said that they agreed on the basis for justification by faith, that it is by faith, that they agreed that the basis for saving faith was the finished work of Christ.
They said they did. But a man named Carol Whitella, otherwise known as Pope John Paul II, the first Polish pope, he did not lift Martin Luther's excommunication of 1521. No, no. I guess part of the problem with that is then you have one pope saying that another pope made a mistake.
And that's impossible. The doctrine of papal infallibility would preclude Pope John Paul II saying that Pope Leo, the 10th, had made a mistake. In 1520, three years after publishing the Theses on Wittenberg Castle, he published a booklet called the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, in which he said that the idea of trans-substantiation was a monstrous idea. In 1521, he published a pamphlet and said that the mass, the Catholic mass, is not, is not a recurrence of the sacrifice of Christ.
The sacrifice of Christ had occurred once for all and that the mass did not represent a recurrence of that sacrifice. In the same year he published another book that said that there is only one kind of confession. And it does not happen to a priest. The only kind of confession that there is is from the individual Christian believer to God.
That is how you confess. It is how you confess your sins. If you want to become a Christian, and it is how you confess your sins, if you want to be in sweet fellowship with the Lord, you confess only to God. So this is all very good.
This is what began, as you would know, the beginning of the reformation, the reformation. And it happened within a period of time known as the Renaissance. And there was a great deal of change in the world at that time, both in engineering, in architecture, in printing, in religion, in so many different fields. The world was undergoing, the Western world was undergoing a radical, mental, theological, and societal revolution.
This man, Martin Luther, we should keep in mind that a man is still a man. Unfortunately, in 1523, he defended what he called the adoration of the Eucharist at Catholic Mass. And I suppose we might wonder what he meant by that. But I think myself that part of the reason that Martin Luther could not completely, seemingly escape from this kind of thinking is the old saying of the Catholic Church, give me a child until he's five, and I'll have him for the rest of his life.
He had been through countless, countless, countless masses. He had officiated as the officiating priest at countless, countless masses in impressive cathedrals, with special garments and incense, and all the trappings, which are human trappings, of a mass. And he in 1523 indicated that that was something in which one might adore the Eucharist. What does that mean, the Eucharist, this combined element?
You meaning good and charismatic grace. Grace to you, good grace to you. But you see, there is the key word here. The key word is sacrament.
According to biblical belief, there is no such thing as a sacrament. There is no such thing as eating something or doing something, which will give grace to you, that will put grace into you. There is no such thing. Being baptized, whether as a child or as an adult, does not bring grace into you.
Partaking here, as we did a couple of hours ago, of the Lord's Supper, does not put grace into you the moment that you eat, the emblem of the bread, and drink the emblem of the wine. It is not a sacrament. It is not a sacrament. The Catholic Church has other sacraments, marriage, the last rites, and so on, infant baptism.
But there is no such thing as a sacrament. So we come to a difficult passage of scripture. And I would like it to be put on the screen, my slides today, number four, and they are only scripture. They are only the scripture in question today.
And so we have John chapter six, verse 51. So let's just think about these verses. These are not easy verses. Even the disciples wondered about these verses.
So I am the living bread, which came down from heaven. If any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever. And the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world. 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. You 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.
These things said he in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaum. Powerful passage, an unequivocal passage, a difficult passage. But I want to point out to you some important things. In your Bible, you will notice that John chapter three comes before John chapter six, it comes before John chapter six chronologically, it comes before John chapter six, theologically.
What happened to John chapter three? Jesus said to a man named Nicodemus, except a man be born again, he shall not see the kingdom of God. If a person, I put it to you this morning that if a person is born again, he has partaken in the body and blood of Christ, because he is saved, and that is the teaching of scripture. When we think of the Lord's Supper, which is a remembrance service, we are celebrating the preexisting reality for the believer, the person who is partaking in the Lord's Supper, we do it to remember him.
What did he say? This do in remembrance of me. And we will do it till he comes. We remember his death and resurrection every week.
When we walk up those steps into this room, as born again people, we are in our state, in our preexisting state before we enter the building, people who have partaken in the blood and the body of Christ by virtue of the fact that we were saved before we got here. That is a necessity. That is the only way that this remembrance service has any meaning. When you look at this chapter, John chapter six, you will see that it begins with the feeding of the 5,000.
It begins with the material production of bread, which is a material need for 5,000 people who were physically, materially, hungry in their stomachs. That's how it begins. How does it progress? It escalates and escalates and escalates.
You can see a little earlier in the chapter that the Lord Jesus said, they are looking for bread. They've been very human in their humanity and they came to me because they were physically hungry because of the bread. It's a very human thing to do, is it not? But that is not why he came.
He goes on to explain to them, he says, I am the bread of life in verse 35. Now when he says I am the bread of life, is he talking about the pieces of bread that had just been distributed? He's not. He's talking about the bread of life which everyone needs to partake of if they are going to go to heaven, if they are going to be saved.
And that's the beginning of it. Who is this man? I find it, you know, I teach for a living. And you don't get this online, but you can get it in the classroom.
And it reminds me of a little bit of being a parent. If you're a parent or a teacher and you're trying to get something across to your children or your students and there's this undercurrent of, you know, stop right there. I'm speaking to you. What is it you are trying to say?
You either say it to me or you stay silent, please. There's none of this murmuring, murmuring, murmuring, first 41, the disciples said, have the honesty, have the courage, have the forth-rightness, that if you have a problem with something that I'm saying, say it, say it. But these people are just the bread. What is this bread?
What is he talking about? Isn't that interesting? They don't like what he's saying. And there's this repeated murmuring.
And as we come up through this chapter, you should read it, of course, on your own. The entire focus shifts toward the meaning of the bread and then of the blood. It keeps escalating so that the entire focus shifts from a completely inexplicable event, the feeding of 5,000 people, into a discussion and an argument and a teaching which has actually completely gone sort of seven leagues above the consideration of the provision of that bread. Isn't it interesting that nobody says there must be an explanation for why this bread appeared?
We've got to get to the bottom of this. Wasn't there some bread hiding behind the rocks here? Wasn't there some physical explanation as to how these 5,000 people were fed? There is not one word along those lines.
And I submit to you that the reason why is because it actually happened. The bread was provided miraculously, and it was completely indisputable. What the Bible then moves on to in your Bible in John chapter 6 is the higher meanings and the struggles with the higher meanings. Well, that's because the miracle is a true miracle.
It is something that actually happened. And the Jewish discussion with our Savior moved into the deeper meaning. Well, that is very good because the significance of the deeper meaning is actually far more important than how the bread appeared to 5,000 people. Now, that is exactly the opposite of the kinds of things you would encounter on the sidewalk and dealing with non-believers.
If you could make something appear to me, then I would believe. Actually, no, you wouldn't. You don't understand what is at stake. You don't understand the issues of salvation.
No more did the Jews here. The issues of salvation are far, far more significant and weighty and profound than the ease with which our Savior can provide bread at will. It was nothing to him, in a sense. He is the Son of God.
For him to perform that miracle was simplicity itself. It was completely easy for the Savior to do such a thing out of concern for the suffering of those people who hadn't eaten. You might say that was the least of his concerns with the people around him. The concern is, do they know what the bread of life is?
Do they know what the water of life is? Do they know that they not only have to partake of me, they have to partake of my blood? They don't understand any of these things. No more did their leaders.
So in John chapter 3, before talking about partaking of himself, we have the account of Jesus telling Nicodemus about some kind of a birth. There's a lot of trouble with this. A new birth. And that this new birth, this second birth, is absolutely essential.
He has so much trouble with it. He says you might say a silly thing like, how was a man supposed to be born again, enter again into his mother's womb and be born again? This is ridiculous. Obviously not.
Obviously not. And absolutely essential. So then the question becomes, what is this man talking about? What is this new birth all about?
It is absolutely essential, and I don't understand it. Well, this is therefore worthy of your full attention, worthy of your full concentration, to try to find out what this new birth really means. Following chapter, we have the account of Jesus and the woman at the well. And the Lord Jesus is dealing with a woman who has, I was going to say, experimented with life in the department of relationships with men.
Goodness, me. Good luck with that. Multiple husbands. A life that must have been just, I don't know, so empty.
We see it all around us all the time. The world in its various ways of experimenting with pleasure and escapism and entertainment and every conceivable thing. And then switching to the next thing, like she did. And the next thing.
And the next thing. Well, if you were satisfied, you wouldn't be doing that. This is obviously not working. This is obviously a totally empty thing that you're involved with.
And what does the Lord Jesus tell her? That she needs the water of life. She needs a kind of water that springs up within her to eternal life. It's not H2O.
And she comes to faith in Christ and other people near that well that Jacob built, Sychar, came to faith in Christ as well as she brought them to meet the Savior. But there's something stronger than water, you know? You know what's stronger than water? Blood.
Blood is stronger than water. And then we have in chapter six, the feeding of the 5,000 and bread. And that bread fed them. There's something stronger than bread, you know?
You know what's stronger than bread? Flesh. Flesh. How is it then that the Lord Jesus would make these claims and give these teachings to us?
I want to share just three aspects of it here at 12 noon. Why are these words pertaining to the partaking in the flesh and blood of the Savior himself so unequivocal? Why did he perhaps choose these teachings? Well, of course, part of the reason is that it is a fact.
It is the reality. It is the spiritual truth. But let me perhaps as they say unpack this a little bit more in thinking about this necessity, the necessity of being one with Christ in salvation. The first thing that I can say is that it is unmistakable.
You have either partaken in the flesh and blood of Christ or you have not. It is exactly like being born again. Either you are born again or you are not. There's no such thing as being half born.
You are either born again or you are not. It is unmistakable in its nature. You have either come to salvation and share in the essence of Christ and know what this means or you have not. If it is a mystery to you, I submit to you that you have not, that in all probability you are not born again.
So my number one point is it is unmistakable in its realization. My second point is that it is individual. The benefits of Jesus' sacrifice to himself, his body and his blood must be settled between you and Jesus himself individually. That settling of accounts is utterly non-negotiable.
You must repent and believe. You must open your heart and life and mind to him in submission and worship. You must give over to him all that you are and especially your sin in coming to faith in Christ. No one in this room can escape that fact.
It is individual. There will be no intermediary. There will be no ceremony or anything else that can help it happen. It is individual and it is between you and the Lord Jesus Christ.
It must be one to one. God knows and sees your heart. Salvation happens on an individual basis and it is real. No one is exempt.
My third point is that it is personal. I recall accidentally finding a giveaway Gideon Bible. And man, I was a person of a hard heart. And you might say a hard mind, an unregenerate, angry mind against God.
I picked up this giveaway, Gideon's Bible New Testament. It had some water damage. It's sort of like a book can kind of get fat at the edge when it gets a little bit of water damage and I picked it up and I've thumbed through it and I came to a page. I guess it was at the beginning, near the beginning.
And there was the sinner's prayer. And I thought, how quaint the Christians are and what the Christians. Here's the sinner's prayer with I trust. I don't remember the exact words but you know them that they would be to trust and believe in the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ and that his death paid for my sins and that I trust and believe in you the Lord Jesus.
And you know what it had? It had that underlying empty blank and you're supposed to write your name there. I started to help quite the Christians. The fact of the matter is, it is personal and you do have to put your name there.
You do have to do this. You yourself personally fill in your own name. It is personal, it is personal. There's no benefit for John Smith.
There's no power in the blood for John Smith. No blood has been applied to the soul of John Smith unless John Smith has come to Christ as John Smith. You think about blood and flesh. Could there be anything more personal than that?
That's extremely personal, extremely personal. And it has to be applied to each individual person at a personal level. I hope that you will take that in and think about that. This teaching, when we think of it, it's uncompromising.
When the Jews murmur and they try to deflect and they try to dance and they foment and they try to make plans to kill this person, all the things that were going on in the background. The Lord Jesus was faithful to the truth because you know what? The truth is the truth. The truth is the truth.
I am the way, the truth and the life the Lord Jesus said in the 14th chapter in verse six. There is no way of compromise. There is no other way. This is an uncompromising truth because that is the nature of truth.
Truth cannot compromise. Do you see here in the Lord Jesus interaction with these Jewish leaders that he is sentimental in any way? I don't see one bit. I'm also not reading really a debate.
I am reading the Son of God telling people what it means to be saved, including these Jewish leaders. That it is unmistakable, that it is individual, that it is personal. It is very, very personal. Very unsentimental stuff.
Will you be offended too? Will the disciples be offended too? Even they have difficulty with this. They didn't fully understand everything that was going to happen.
But there's nothing sentimental about this. There's nothing sentimental about the truth. The truth is the truth. Your feelings are merely your feelings.
When you look at the word sentimental, we have the word sentient and we have the word mental. And you wonder how these two words can even go together because to be sentient and to have feelings and to be alive and to be a being, sometimes that just overwhelms the other part. It comes first. Not the truth part, not the mental part, not the facts, but the feelings.
I think that the way that the Lord Jesus has presented the truth to us here in John chapter six, maybe that the analytical Jewish leaders should have had an easier time with it. But they didn't. We live in a day and age where if something doesn't feel particularly good, it must be false. That's a non-sequitur.
Those things don't even connect. How you feel about something is basically nothing to do with whether it's true or not, unless you live in 2021. Then it seems to be a different story. But when you go back and you see the sacrificial system that these Jews were perpetuating, that there was a tabernacle and an outer altar and an inner altar and incense and a veil and special garments and the sacrifice of a lamb, were all of these pictures, not pictures, were all of these things pointing at nothing?
It is actually a ridiculous suggestion. When you take in your Old Testament as they should have done, including Isaiah 53, which was read in our hearing this morning, you should be able to gain an understanding that the entire Old Testament points to the Messiah. They would have said, yes, it does. But how deeply have you looked, my friend?
Who is the lamb? What is the lamb? Is it nothing more than a little animal with white curly fur? It is not.
It speaks of the Messiah and of his physical sacrifice. They should have known this. Greek thinking under people like Aristotle and Plato was quite different in its character, but actually had influenced thinking in this part of the world quite profoundly. It is actually Hebrew thinking that enables you to get a better appreciation of the symbolism that is built into the Old Testament that points to the Lord Jesus as the Messiah.
Offended? Are you offended? Does the cross offend you? Does the necessity of being born again and in that becoming one with Christ and having his flesh and his blood within you as part of you in your unity and your salvation?
Does that offend you? It offended lots of people and it still does, but it doesn't change the fact that that is what is necessary. John the Baptist said both in chapter three of Matthew and in chapter three of Luke. He spoke of the Lord Jesus and he said, his winnowing fork is in his hand.
His winnowing fork is in his hand. What is winnowing? It is the separation, the process of separation between what is nourishment and what is suitable for being burned. Read 3-17 of Luke or 3-12 of Matthew of being burned.
His winnowing fork is in his hand. He met people like the Jewish leadership with a winnowing fork in his hand and many of them turned away rather than look into the meaning of salvation and what it is to be born again and partake of the flesh and blood of Christ. I'm going to close with references to your New Testament. If these things are somewhat mysterious, don't forget that as you continue to read in your New Testament, it expands on it and reinforces it.
It doesn't stop there. And for the believer when we read these various verses in our New Testament, our heart resonates and we say yes. Yes, I know about that. That is the experience of my heart in being born again, to be one with Christ.
It was in fact read this morning, for he hath made him to be sinned for us who knew no sin, that we might become the righteousness of God and then the two key words, in him, in him. Romans 6 were buried in baptism, in union with his death, and in coming out of the water, in union with his resurrection. This morning we read from Philippians, Paul said, I want to be found in him. Apart from all of the things I have accomplished in my learning, I count them as nothing, but I do want to be found in him at his coming and to enjoy that resurrection power that he had written about in Romans chapter 6.
And I love Colossians chapter 3, for your life is now hidden with Christ in God. What a wonderful truth that your life as a believer is hidden with Christ in God. The Christian enjoys union with Christ. The Christian enjoys the benefits of the sacrifice of the life of Christ.
This morning we celebrated with the bread and the wine, the fact that his body was broken and his blood was spilled. And we remembered that. We remembered that. He told us do this in remembrance of me and we did it.
It is the simplest thing. How little did the Lord put on us in terms of burdens? Abide in me, he said in John 15. That's what we need to do.
And we should remember him in that simple way. It is an expression of a reality. The reality of John chapter 3 is the reality behind John chapter 6. And that is the reality of having been born again, so that that remembrance service is meaningful to us, as we reflect upon the price that was paid.
Shall we pray? We thank you, Father, this morning. Help us to always be profoundly and deeply grateful for the redemption that is ours that we have been ransomed by the blood, by the body of Christ. That is how we have been made yours.
That is how we have been redeemed with the flesh and blood of Christ. Help us to be believers who trust always in your love, who trust always in the cross, who always know where it was that our redemption was wrought. We thank you for our savor this morning in his name. Amen.