Deep down, even people who come to God carry a fear that He will eventually give up on them — that sooner or later they’ll be shown the door. That fear is exactly what Jesus meets head-on in John 6.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The pastor emphasizes that “every page is about Jesus” in the Bible. How does this interpretive approach shape the way we read and understand Old Testament stories, and what are potential benefits and challenges of this lens?
The pastor shares personal grief about losing his sister at age 33 and uses this to illustrate how death demonstrates abandonment. How does his vulnerability about his own loss affect the credibility and emotional resonance of his message about hope in Christ?
How does the connection drawn between looking at the bronze serpent and looking at Jesus on the cross reshape our view of the crucifixion—as both foolishness to the world and the throne of God’s saving love?
The sermon contrasts two ways of grieving: “with hope toward eternal life” versus “as those who have no hope.” What does it practically look like to grieve with Christian hope, and how is this different from denial or avoidance of grief?
What practical implications arise from the call to reach out in love to others journeying through the shadow of death, especially in light of the reminder that we are not offering an economic or self-help message?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
I met Jason at a Thursday night Bible study, and it was a pleasure to meet him. I just love the way that he could find scripture out of his head. We’d be going through something, and he’d say, “Hey, that reminds me of something.” The next thing you know, he’d come out with the scripture out of the clear blue. I wish I had the mind that he has, but I’m not envious of that because being envious of somebody would hurt. But come on up, Jason, we’re getting ready for you.
He’s going to go through John’s talk so we can know your voice. Your mic’s on, right? Is it on? I don’t hear myself echoing. Where is it? He’s got the green light. There we go—everybody. All right, he’s on. Good.
So, this is Jason, and I always pronounce his last name wrong because it’s Kettinger, right? Kettinger? Kettinger. Kettinger? That’s fine. Kettinger’s fine. I’m used to it. Just don’t call you late for dinner, right? Is that it? I wish I could pick you up and turn you around there. Yeah, I’m bad at driving—good at preaching, bad at driving. Okay. Watch my foot there.
Well, may the Lord bless Jason as he gives us his word. All right, Jason. That was it. I was the quick Baptist prayer. Thank you. All right, guys, I got to go this way. See you, Jason. Thank you.
Would you pray with me before we start? Lord, open our hearts to receive your word. Your word, as recorded by the Apostle John, is simple and yet profound. We come before you asking your grace to go before us and to teach us in this unique fellowship. Thank you for bringing us together. Thank you for uniting us around your Son, who lived for us and died for us and now calls us together. We ask all these things in Jesus’ name, amen. Amen.
So, the scripture that we’re going to do tonight is John 6, verses 35 to 40. Why don’t I read that for us? 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. But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe. All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me, I will never cast out. For I have come down from heaven not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me but raise it up on the last day.”
Let’s go back to verse 35. This is a profound statement by Jesus. He says, “I am the bread of life,” and he’s setting us up for—it’s already done the miracle of the loaves and fishes. And he says to them, “Don’t hunger for the food that perishes, but hunger for the food that does not perish.” As we think about what Jesus is going to tell us here, the food that does not perish is him.
Jesus will never fail us. He will never let us down. He has come down for us—the bread of life. We know bread. Bread is a food staple. Bread is the basic of all food that we know about. You can’t bake a cake without bread. You can’t make a pizza without bread. You can’t do anything without bread. And so we know its sustaining power in ordinary life.
Jesus takes this and reminds us of when the Israelites ate the manna in the desert, and they even had a conversation about it later. His opponents later on will say, “Our fathers ate the manna in the desert and they died. What do you have for us?” And he says, “He who eats of me will never die.” So let’s go back to our text. Let me go back to verse 35 again. “Whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.”
When we see the word belief or believes, by John, he’s asking us not just to take our minds and believe in Jesus. He’s not saying, “Oh, do you believe that Jesus Christ is real?” or “Do you believe that he’s the Savior of the world?” That’s not strong enough for the belief that he’s talking about.
The belief that he wants us to have, the faith which will save us in Jesus, is the faith that trusts in him above everything else, above everyone else. If we don’t trust in Jesus, then we will not be sustained in life. We have to trust only in Jesus. We can’t trust in ourselves. We’re going to be able to see that in the text. Let’s go to verse 36. I want to focus on 36 again. I’m going to be really annoying tonight.
But he said, “I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe.” If you go through the gospels, like here in this gospel, but if you go to the other gospels as well, you will see one of the things is rising opposition. You will see this, and Jesus starts to have opponents, and he even starts to do miracles.
After the miracle of the wedding at Cana, of turning the water into wine, that’s when sort of the clock started and the opponents of Jesus got moving. So, as you read through from the beginning of John all the way to the end of John’s gospel, Jesus’s opponents are getting it going, getting the opposition going.
One thing we want to do is we want to trust in Christ. We don’t want to oppose Christ. The opponents of Jesus could not see with their eyes who he really was. But the gift of faith is the gift that gives us the spiritual eyes to see the meaning of what it is that Jesus comes to us as the Savior.
I think that’s one thing that we forget. We think, “Okay, he’s the Savior of the world. He died on the cross. He did all those other miracles to announce the kingdom of God.” But we have to even recognize that understanding that, even intellectually, is a gift. And to trust in Christ is a gift of grace. To exercise that saving faith is a gift of grace.
And so when we encounter Jesus, and when we have a choice to be either Jesus’s opponent or Jesus’s follower, then we need to ask for the grace to make the right choice.
You can hear people—there are Christian people and various religious people of different flavors—that will try to tell you, “If you want to be saved, you gotta do this, this, this, and this.” But what they don’t tell you is that we don’t have the power to do that ourselves.
Everything we’re talking about is a power of God’s grace, which comes along with the announcement of the good news. He not only announces himself, but he gives us the grace to do what he’s asking us to do.
Especially those who are hearing me online, you’ll say, “Jason, what is grace?” Well, I’m going to tell you. It is the favor of God and the power of God to do the will of God. The favor of God and the power of God to do the will of God.
And so he gives us the very power to do what he’s asking us to do. And that’s the opportunity that Jesus gives us here in this text.
Let’s keep looking at the text. We’ll go to verse 37. “And all that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out.” I think this verse, “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out,” this promise of never being cast out gets at the heart of the thing that we struggle with most.
We struggle with the fear of abandonment. Even when we come to God, even when we’re dealing with spiritual things, deep down somewhere in our souls, we feel that God will abandon us.
That is why he’s coming to us with this assurance tonight because that is the thing that we most deeply fear.
Now, I could be wrong, but I think much sin that we get ourselves into, and that people just out in the world get themselves into, is rooted in this fear of abandonment. This fear that maybe the promises of God are not what he said they are. They’re not as good as he says they are.
Or we encounter struggle, and we go, “Maybe it’s not worth it. It’s so hard to carry this cross, and I just want to lay it down, and I want to give up.” And so we turn to sin, and we think that we will be freed from that burden, that anxious burden of carrying whatever suffering he’s given us to carry.
But it doesn’t work because the promises of God are true, and the promises of the enemy are the greatest lies that have ever been told.
We recognize—we talked about the followers of Jesus and the opponents of Jesus—we have to recognize that ultimately, spiritually, if we’re going to be opposing Jesus, we are working for the enemy.
So when we take the opportunity to be a follower of Jesus, we’re switching teams, as it were. It’s almost crass to say that. It’s almost simplistic to say that.
But we come into this world as enemies of God, and we have the tendency to be enemies of God when we enter this world.
That was the fall of Adam and Eve all the way back at the beginning. They were seduced by pride and false promises, and they ate the fruit. And we’ve never been the same since.
And so we struggle with sin; we bear with it; we cry over it, whether it’s in ourselves or in other people, and we’ve been wanting liberation ever since that day.
There are so many people around the world—they want to give you liberation some other way. They want to give you political liberation. They say, “Well, if you just embrace this philosophy and do these things we’re asking you to do, then you’ll be perfectly free and perfectly happy.”
And it always ends up the same. Somebody’s happy, but large numbers of ordinary people, they’re not happy, and they’re not secure, and they’re not having the hunger that’s at the deepest places of our hearts filled by anything on this earth.
We know that there’s nothing on this earth that can make us happy.
Or if you don’t know that, if you’re listening today and you’re watching today and you don’t know that, I’m here to tell you, there’s nothing earthly that can fill that hole, that yearning for happiness.
What fills that hole and that yearning for happiness is drawing near to God, receiving His Son, receiving the forgiveness of our sins, and becoming sons and daughters of God ourselves.
And when we’re in that family—because God, especially God our Father, is the greatest Father, the prototype of all fathers, the essence of fatherhood itself—He will never abandon us, and we will never feel like the neglected, maybe the neglected oldest child while the younger kid gets away with everything.
We will always be the beloved child who has whatever we want. We will sit like princes and kings in the kingdom of God because He has elevated us by His grace.
We have received His gospel, His truth, and now we will shine like the sun through His grace and His love and His mercy.
Let’s go back to the text. I went on a little rant there, excuse me. All right, back to the text. Verse 37, I think, Tim?
Oh, bless. Let’s go back to 37, because I missed something in 37, and according to your little clock, I have plenty of time.
Look at this: “All that the Father gives me will come to me.” This is a clue that that power to come to the Lord comes from the Father, comes from His grace. It can’t come from anywhere else.
Later on in this text, which we’re not going to look at—I will not torture Tim with that—but Jesus will say, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him in” (verse 44).
So Jesus is literally saying, “You can’t even come and receive me unless you’ve received grace from the Father to receive me.” That’s how important it is.
And there are people, you know, there is an ongoing debate with Christians, between Christians, and ongoing disputes about this or that and how do works fit in and how does this work and why do we do these things and why don’t you do these other things?
But the bottom line that everybody is united on is we need God’s grace. Without grace, we have nothing. We come to God with empty hands, and it is the Father who grants us the grace, especially in verse 37, to come to Jesus.
Let’s go to verse 38. “For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me.”
Now, this is mysterious because you’re thinking, “Okay, well Mr. Jason is going to tell me that Jesus is God, so how does he have to worry about his own will?”
But Jesus is quite mysterious because he has a human nature and a divine nature, and that also means that he has a divine will and a human will.
And we see this when he is very close to going to the cross, and he says, “Father, if it is your will, let this cup pass from me, but not my will, but your will be done.”
So Jesus is taking his human will and aligning it with the Father’s will, with God’s will. He is God. He has access to that divine will, but he also, when he’s here, has a human will, and as he goes through the steps that lead to the cross, he has to exercise that will and submit it to the Father.
So whenever you see Jesus submitting to the Father…
Don’t let somebody lead you astray and say, “Aha! That means Jesus isn’t God.” No, what that means is he has a human will, and he used it to submit to the Father. He’s going to give the kingdom back to the Father. That’s not in our text tonight, but that’s all over the Bible. He’s going to give the kingdom back to the Father because he came down not to do his will but the will of him who sent me.
Okay, let’s go to verse 39. “And this is the will of him who sent me: that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day.” This is where this sermon’s going to get a little serious. Well, maybe it has been serious here, but a little levity here, a little joking here and there. But we know as we live in this world that we live in the shadow of death.
Death as a reality—death touches all of us in some way. So when Jesus talks about raising, he’s talking about people. He’s talking about the resurrection of the body, the resurrection of the dead at the end of the world. The last day is the end of the world, and death is our great enemy. I said that a lot of what we fear is rooted in our fear of abandonment, and death is probably the most profound feeling or expression that appears to demonstrate abandonment because our loved ones, they die. They leave us. They’re no longer here.
I come to you to preach this word of the Lord in a great shadow of death because in April this year, we lost my sister. She was way too young. She was 33 years old and she left behind four kids. It wasn’t sudden in some ways, but no one that young should ever die. And we know other deaths—even beloved grandparents that are old, you know, old and full of years—they die, and there’s something unnatural about death. We know that death is something that God never intended for us, but we know it’s a reality.
Jesus is speaking to that great fear. You know, if you meet people out in the world, think about how afraid of death they are. Some people are so afraid of death that they’ll go to a doctor, a plastic surgeon, and try to pretend that they’re not aging. Jim, how’s that working out? How’s pretending that you’re not aging working out? How’s that going?
Not very well, that’s right. And I’m aging. I’m a schoolteacher. My students age me every single day, and I go, “Man, I can’t imagine doing this for 30 years,” and I’m about to try.
We know about death. We know it’s coming for us all. We’ve experienced it. We’ve experienced the sorrow of death, but we need to know that Jesus is in that moment because when he went to the cross, he experienced death. And when he was in the ground for three days, the disciples experienced that separation, that sadness. When they were walking on the road to Emmaus, Jesus was there, and they didn’t recognize him. The two disciples were so sad. They thought that all the promises of God that were made in Jesus were false.
They said, “Sir, have you not heard any of these things that have happened these three days?” And Jesus is so funny—I love this text; I always go back to it. Jesus is so funny. He says, “What things?” So they begin to tell the story, and then, but how great is this? Jesus, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, begins to unfold to them the Scriptures concerning himself.
So Jesus knows that the entire Bible from beginning to end is about himself. Let us know that anything we read in the Bible is about Jesus. Never let anybody tell you that it’s about anything other than Jesus. Yes, you can pay attention to the context. You can do lots of different things. You can explore various stories in the Old Testament. You can dive deep—you can dive deep into the historical details all you want to—but the bottom line is every page is about Jesus. Every page is about Jesus conquering death, conquering our fear of death, conquering our experience of death. Conquering our fear of abandonment, which death not only symbolizes but makes present.
But in the kingdom of God, we shall never die. But let’s think about… and there’s little echoes here in this text of when Nicodemus came to Jesus in John 3. Jesus says crazy things like, “Unless a man is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” And Nicodemus is like, basically, I mean, this is my translation: “Dude, what are you talking about?” And Jesus says, “You’re the teacher of Israel, and you don’t understand these things.”
But in Jesus, we begin to see that water is the waters of baptism, and the Holy Spirit is the promise of the Father that comes through Jesus to guide us in the ways of Jesus after Jesus is going to go back to the Father. So we did the Holy Spirit come and to remind us. He says in John 14, “I will send the Spirit to you, and he will bring to your remembrance the things that I have taught you.”
So the Holy Spirit—and the Holy Spirit is very mysterious—and back in chapter 3 Jesus says he blows where he wills, and no one knows where he’s going. But we know he’s there because we can see the fruit wherever there is the fruit of faith in Jesus, wherever there is love, wherever there is peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, self-control, and all those other ones—the fruit of the Spirit.
We know that the Spirit is at work, and no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Spirit of God. That we’re taught in one of the letters of Corinthians there.
Man, that was a rant too, but we know that to be born again is to have faith in Jesus and to no longer be subject—we’re born naturally—we’re all born naturally. And as soon as we’re born—not to be morbid—but we’re waiting to die. As soon as we’re born, some babies live an hour; they live a few minutes. And you’re like, “Man,” and there’s people in the world going, “There’s got to be something more than this.”
Well, there is because we can be reborn. We can be born again in Jesus, and in Jesus we shall never die.
Let’s look at the end of the text. There’s a couple other things I wanted to say for this: “For this is the will of my Father that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.”
This is why I wanted to go back to John 3 because Jesus mentions in John 3 verse 14, “As the serpent was lifted up in the desert, so also the Son of Man must be lifted up.” And this was crazy because Israel, because of their wickedness, had become ill and they were dying—they were bitten by snakes. So, the children of Israel were dying, and God tells Moses to put a bronze serpent on a pole.
Hope your Ten Commandments alarms are going off because he tells us not to make graven images, and he literally tells Moses, “Make a graven image and put it on a pole.” And whenever the people of Israel would look at it, they’d be saved from the illness brought by the snakes. And so you’re like, “Lord, what are you doing?”
But show how much God desires our salvation. All they had to do was look at the serpent on the pole. All they had to do was look at the serpent on the pole, and they would be saved. When we look with our eyes of faith through the grace of God and we see Jesus on that cross, and we understand that Jesus died for us—not just for all the other people in the world—when we can see that with our eyes of faith, we have become different.
We have become different because we’re not seeing with our visual eyes; we’re seeing with the eyes that God gave us by his grace. So, the cross is meaningless to the rest of the world. It is foolishness, as Paul will tell us in Corinthians again. It is foolishness to the Greeks, I think Tim says. Foolishness to the Greeks.
Think about the stand-up comedians. It’s something I’ve sort of dreamt of doing, and then I became a high school teacher and said, instead, but stand-up comedians will joke about this. It’s a running joke. They’ll say, “You know how weird it is to carry an execution device around your neck? To wear it around your neck? Yes, it’s crazy.”
Because never in the history of the world has anyone been executed by some government, and that become the means of everything that we want and desire. But with our eyes of faith, Jesus is not just a man punished by the Roman Empire. He’s the Son of God come to save us from sin.
And as soon as he came into the world, he knew that he was in the shadow of that cross. He knew it, and Mary knew it too—his mother. She was right there with him. Notice how the only people that didn’t abandon Jesus were his mother, there were a couple other women around, but his mother, a couple of the other women, and St. John, that wrote this gospel.
John stayed there and he’s the disciple that Jesus loves. Jesus, like, “Behold your mother,” after he said to Mary, “Behold your son.” So John lived in the home of Mary, the mother of Jesus, the rest of his life—basically till he got exiled and all that stuff.
John is the one that he loved most in the world, and John is the one who wrote this gospel down for us.
We see what Jesus is doing on that cross—that he’s reigning from a throne on that cross. The cross is the throne of Jesus. And now when he’s risen from the dead, he sits on a throne in heaven. But when you see Jesus on that cross—whether it’s in your mind or maybe you see a painting or you see another image, maybe even you see a crucifix—know that the suffering Jesus is willing to be with you in your suffering as you journey through the shadow of death.
Because it’s going to find us. We either grieve with hope—and hope that is toward eternal life—or we grieve as those who have no hope, and we end up saying with the rest of the world that life is meaningless and it’s pointless, and why are we even here?
Well, we’re here because we’re here to love as God loved. Now, 1 John 4:19 says, “We love because he first loved us,” because the divine love that comes down in Jesus Christ is not a love that comes from us; it comes from the Father.
That grace that came down that allows us to believe in him is the same love that propels us outward to see our neighbors and to see what they need and to be with them as they journey through the shadow of death. And so we reach out in love as we have turned to Jesus and accepted Jesus, and that way we’re doing the works which he prepared in advance for us to do, as it says in the letter to the Ephesians.
We’re doing the works that he prepared in advance for us to do because we have become new people in Christ—no longer afraid of death, no longer afraid of abandonment, but ready to share the union, the communion of God with men, with everybody that we meet.
And that’s why Pastor Tim is always saying, “Invite people,” because we’re not reaching out with some clever message. It’s not an economic message. You’re not going to get rich if you go here to Little Hills. In fact, it’ll probably be the opposite. And Tim will never be rich, and that’s why he wears those Rick Santorum sweater vests, that’s so… But rich in good deeds, rich in the awareness that God has loved us and given his life for us in Jesus, and he’s risen again, and we will be risen to new life as well.
Death will not defeat us. We will not be defeated because trusting in Christ, nothing can separate us from the love that is in Christ Jesus—Romans 8:39.
So we’ve got everything in Christ who loved us and came down for us and then died on the cross for us. No suffering that we encounter in this life will ever be able to separate us. And it is a suffering that Christ our Lord already knows. He’s met you where you are. He’s met you in your pain. He’s met you in the sorrow of death and the sorrow of loss. He’s already been there, and he’ll be with you all the way to heaven.
Let’s pray. Father, thank you for this promise of Jesus that meets us in the very shadow of death. We cannot escape it, but with you, we can be free. We can be free from fear. We can be free from grief that has no hope. Give us the hope that pushes us towards you. Give us the grace to do what you’re asking us to do. Help us to reach out to others who need you as well. We ask all this through Christ our Lord. Amen.
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