Today, I am reading and commenting on  John 6-7.

Today’s passage contains some things said by Jesus which seem to support the Roman Catholic Church’s stance that the bread and wine in the Lord’s Supper literally becomes flesh and blood.  When you combine what Jesus said when He broke bread and shared the cup with His disciples at the Last Supper with what He says here, one could easily draw that conclusion.  Here He says, “ For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.”  However, I think we can better understand what He means here about His flesh and blood being food by looking what He said to His disciples when they returned and brought Him food after He spoke with the woman at the well.  In John 4:34, He said, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.”  So, my understanding of what Jesus said here is that we eat His flesh and blood as real food, food and drink which will satisfy our spiritual hunger and thirst, when we do the will of Him who called, and then sent, us.  I mentioned that when we do the will of Him who called us we eat Christ’s flesh and drink His blood and that it will satisfy our spiritual hunger.  Yet it is worth noting that when Jesus spoke to the woman at the well, doing the will of His Father satisfied His physical hunger.  

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  John 4-5.

The account of the lame man at the pool whom Jesus healed contains a couple of interesting points.  The first one being the question which Jesus asked the man, “Do you want to get well?”  The man’s response to the question is interesting and instructive.  He said that he couldn’t get well because he had no one to help him.  Together these tell us something about helping people in need.  We cannot help those who do not wish to be helped, and sometimes all people need is someone to walk along side offering some assistance.  Which brings us to what Jesus did to heal the man.  He told him to get up, pick up his mat, and walk.  He gave the man something to do.  Then later, Jesus found the man and told him, “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.”  That is a message for all of us.  When we accepted Jesus as our Lord and Savior, He forgave our sins and made us well with God.  We need to stop sinning or something worse may happen to us.  Fortunately, God will help us with that, just like He made us well.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  John 1-3.

John does an interesting thing in his Gospel that I have noticed before, but never really thought about before.  He switches from quoting someone to making commentary without leaving a clear indicator of where the quote ends and the commentary begins.  Primarily he does that when he quotes Jesus, but he also does it a few times in today’s passage when he quotes John the Baptist.  Until today, I always thought it was just something which John did without thinking about it (side note: while there is some debate about whether this Gospel was written by John, or by someone else, and, if it was written by John, whether that was the Apostle John or another John, I generally write my blogs assuming that it was written from the perspective of the Apostle John).  As I read it today, it struck me that John did it on purpose; partly to communicate that his “quotes” were only paraphrases of what was said, and partly to communicate a deeper understanding of what the speaker said than conveyed directly by what they said.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  John 19-21.

When Jesus appeared to His disciples after His resurrection He told them that He was sending them into the world as the Father had sent Him.  He followed that up by telling them to receive the Holy Spirit and that if they forgive anyone’s sins, those sins are forgiven, and if they do not forgive those sins, those sins are not forgiven.  From one perspective, Jesus was sent into the world to forgive people’s sin.  So, Jesus sent His disciples, and us, into the world in order to forgive people’s sin. This has some serious implications.  First, Jesus carried out His mission to forgive sins by dying n the cross, so we should expect that we may be called upon to suffer and die for others.  Not all of those present when Jesus said this died as martyrs, so not all of us will either.  I also want to stress the importance of forgiving the sins of those we meet.  Jesus told us that those we do not forgive will not be forgiven.  Of course, He also told us that if we do not forgive others, we will not be forgiven.

I want to add one final note: while it is important that we forgive the sins of others, there must be some sins which we should not forgive.  If the latter was not the case, Jesus would not have granted the Church the power to refuse to forgive some people’s sins.

Note: the Church is the Body of Believers. That is, each one of us who put our faith in Jesus Christ represent one portion of the Church.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  John 17-18.

I am going to start today’s blog from the end of the passage with Jesus’ exchange with Pilate about truth.  When Pilate asks Jesus for the second time if He is a king, Jesus responds by telling Pilate that “king” is his word, not Jesus’ word.  Then He tells Pilate that He to testify to the truth and that everyone on the side of the truth listens to Him.  To which Pilate replied with “What is truth?” and walked away without waiting for an answer.  Like so many people today, Pilate did not believe that there was such a thing as objective truth.  Which brings us to the first step necessary to faith in Christ: you need to believe that there is such a thing as objective truth.  You don’t have to believe that you know what that truth is, or even that you can know what that truth is.  You just have to believe that truth exists, and that Jesus embodies Truth.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on John 14-16.

Today’s passage teaches some important lessons.  It starts with Jesus telling His disciples, and us, that they, and we, know the way to where He is going.  When His disciples asked Him how they could know the way, He replied that He was the way, the truth, and the life.  Jesus goes on to tell us that those who believe in Him will do the works He had been doing, and even greater works.   Overall, I want to note that today’s passage is a very difficult passage, starting with that right there.  I don’t know that I have done the works which Jesus did when He walked with His disciples, and if I have not, does that mean that I am not truly in Him?

Fortunately, Jesus goes on from saying we will do works like His that He will ask the Father, and the Father will give us another advocate.  That advocate will be the Spirit of Truth.  And who will He ask the Father to send that advocate to and for? Those who live Him.  He tells us that if we love Him, we will follow His commands.  Repeatedly, Jesus had told His disciples that His command was that we love each other and that we love our neighbor as ourselves.  The Advocate, the Spirit of Truth, will remind us what those commands are and teach us how to follow them.  And Jesus answered the question I asked at the end of the first paragraph today by telling us not to let our hearts be troubled, telling us not to be afraid.  Jesus is in the Father, and we are in Him.  In order to bear the fruit which Jesus desires us to bear, we must remain in Him.  Here is the key, as we remain in Him, and His words remain in us, everything we ask of God will be done.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  John 12-13.

I am going to write some thoughts today which I have not completely worked through, so I am not convinced that I will be able to express them without allowing them to be understood as meaning something which is sacrilegious.  Jesus said that if we wish to serve Him, we must follow Him and that if we are His servants we must be where He is.  I understand this to mean that we must be willing to face a death as painful as His if that is where He leads us.  From there He tells those listening to believe in the light while they have the light.  Then,  a little further on He says that the one who looks at Him see the One who sent Him.  Finally, He says that He came into the world as a light so that no one who believes in Him should stay in darkness.  Therefore, as we live our lives those who look at us will see the one who sent us.  If that One is Jesus, they will see the light and have the opportunity to believe in Him, becoming children of light just as we have become children of light.  Let us strive to allow the light of the Spirit to shine through us so that others have the opportunity to walk in the Light of God’s love.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  John 10-11.

I was struck that Jesus implies that not all of the sheep in the sheep pen are His.  He tells us that He calls His sheep by name and leads them out.  Then He says that after calling all of His own sheep out through the gate, He goes on ahead of them.  This suggests that there are sheep which are not His, which do not follow Him.  Having made note of that I want to point out that Jesus has called each of His sheep by name.  There is something very comforting in knowing that the Creator of the Universe has called me by my name to follow Him.  As importantly, Jesus tells us that His sheep will only follow His voice, that they will run away from the voice of a stranger.  I think this helps explain why we sometimes feel that certain preachers are not to be trusted, even before they have said anything we can point to as wrong.

The account of Lazarus’ death and resurrection contains many things which advance our understanding of Jesus’ message.  However, I want to look at what we learn from the Sanhedrin’s response to it.  A couple of days ago I wrote about the human tendency to ask God for a sign after He has already given us the very sign for which we are asking.  Here the Sanhedrin recognized that Jesus had given signs which supported His message and were more concerned that people might believe His message than they were in what message He had for them.  They believed that Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead, but that did not inspire them to believe that God was working through Him.  Instead, it inspired them to fear that His actions would lead to them being removed from their positions of power.  These men, who claimed to lead their people to worship God properly, were more concerned with their positions and power than they were with listening to God’s message.  They were afraid that if people listened to God’s message, the temple would be destroyed.  How often do we today become more worried about the survival of our congregation than we are with its members doing God’s will?

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  John 8-9.

Today’s passage begins with the account of the woman caught in adultery.  The oldest sources do not contain this story, which suggests that it was not in the original.  Nevertheless, I think the fact that it became ubiquitous in later versions of the Gospel of John suggests that God intends for us to learn lessons from it.  I think the most important of those comes from Jesus’ final statement to the woman.  “Neither do I condemn you.  Go now and leave your life of sin.” (or, as other translations put it, “Go, and sin no more.”)  We should not condemn those who sin, but we should call them to stop sinning (just as we should strive to stop committing whatever sins come into our lives).

This passage contains two stories I think teach us a lot about following Christ.  The first I wrote about in the first paragraph.  The second is the story of the man born blind.  Jesus’ disciples thought that the man had been born blind either because of sins he later committed, or because his parents had sinned.  That is a potentially interesting theological debate, which the disciples took to Jesus, probably because they thought that His answer would reveal a lot about His understanding of God.  And it did, but not in the way in which they expected.  His answer tells us that people do not necessarily experience what we consider suffering because of sin.  In this case, the man was born blind so that Jesus could demonstrate God’s power through him.  When we see people suffering, our question should not be about why they are suffering.  Our question should be, “How can God’s power be displayed through relieving the suffering so that people will glorify God?”  When we see people suffering we should seek ways to relieve that suffering in a manner which brings glory to God.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.