Read John 6:32-40.

Jesus’ first “I am” statement in the gospel of John occurs just after an incredible miracle. Five thousand men, plus women and children, had followed Jesus and His disciples out into a rural area where, after a while, the people began to get hungry. Jesus fed them supernaturally—divinely—with just five loaves and two fish. All those gathered saw it with their own eyes. There was no denying how miraculous it was to feed so many with so little.

Later on, when the people came to find Jesus, they were seeking more of the bread that He had given them. This is precisely why Jesus went on to claim, “I am the bread of life” (John 6:35). He wanted to lift their eyes upward. He wanted to shift their focus from their bellies to eternal life—to the eternal God and to eternal food. As important as bread was for their daily living, the spiritual bread found in Christ alone is far more important.

Without that spiritual bread, Jesus Himself, there is no hope of heaven—only eternal suffering and pain. Without Jesus, life becomes slow death and eternal agony. And so He told the crowd—and us today—“I am the bread of life.”

This claim of being the only eternal, life-giving bread did not even make sense to Jesus’ disciples. Although everyone there that day knew how bread was made, they could not understand the fullness of Jesus’ statement until after His death and resurrection. In Jesus’ day, everyone made their own bread at home. A woman would take two stones in a clay pot, one stone on the bottom and one on the top, add some wheat, and then crush the wheat between the two stones to make flour. Then she would take that flour and knead it, beating it again and again to make a dough, which she then would break apart and place in a blazing furnace to be baked.

This is exactly what Jesus, the Bread of Life, endured. It was only after the crushing of the crucifixion, after the burial and the resurrection, that Jesus’ disciples were able to comprehend passages like Isaiah 28:28, “Grain must be ground to make bread,” and Isaiah 53:5, “[H]e was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities.”

Jesus is the Bread of Life. We must continuously, daily, even moment by moment feed upon Christ and His Word. He is our spiritual nourishment, and there is no other!

Prayer: Jesus, thank You for nourishing my soul with Yourself. What a gift to know You, my Savior and King. May I share the wonder of the Bread of Life so that many might find their fill in You and receive salvation. I pray in the name of Jesus. Amen.

“Then Jesus declared, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty’” (John 6:35).

Learn more in Dr. Michael Youssef’s sermon There Is an ‘I’ in the ‘I AM’, Part 1: LISTEN NOW

Check out more from Dr. Michael Youssef, here!