Don’t Work FOR Bread
The Life of Jesus Vol.2 (True Religion) Part 16 (Revised)
John 6:21-35       11-27-11

Summary: The twelve leftover baskets imply the promise of provision of physical food. When Jesus said don’t work for food He meant don’t make temporal things your ultimate goal. But it is OK to work for temporal things if they are used as tools to reach the ultimate goal (which is coming to Jesus as bread). So use temporal pleasures to obtain the goal of coming to Christ as bread by 1) using them as samples, 2) interpreting them as gestures of His love, and 3) holding them loosely and not stressing over them.  
				
Introduction
Ask not what you can do for Jesus, but what Jesus can do for you (relationship is reward)
Love seeks the benefit of interaction with the beloved
But we need food
How do you obey the command not to work for food that spoils?
The Promise of Physical Bread
Earthquake
The Disciples miss a spiritual point because of distraction over food
That was a failure to understand about the loaves
Twelve leftover lunchboxes
Precision
The Purpose of Physical Bread
Contradiction?
End goal
How to use physical bread
Illustrations of real satisfaction
Gestures of His love
Freely give it up for spiritual purposes
Everything you need…for what?
Giving
 
John 6:21 Then they were willing to take him into the boat, and immediately the boat reached the shore where they were heading. 22 The next day the crowd that had stayed on the opposite shore of the lake realized that only one boat had been there, and that Jesus had not entered it with his disciples, but that they had gone away alone. 23 Then some boats from Tiberias landed near the place where the people had eaten the bread after the Lord had given thanks. 24 Once the crowd realized that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they got into the boats and went to Capernaum in search of Jesus. 25 When they found him on the other side of the lake, they asked him, "Rabbi, when did you get here?" 26 Jesus answered, "I tell you the truth, you are looking for me, not because you saw miraculous signs but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. 27 Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. On him God the Father has placed his seal of approval." 28 Then they asked him, "What must we do to do the works God requires?" 29 Jesus answered, "The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent." 30 So they asked him, "What miraculous sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do? 31 Our forefathers ate the manna in the desert; as it is written: 'He gave them bread from heaven to eat.'" 32 Jesus said to them, "I tell you the truth, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. 33 For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world." 34 "Sir," they said, "from now on give us this bread." 35 Then Jesus declared, "I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty. 

Introduction
Ask not what you can do for Jesus, but what Jesus can do for you (relationship is reward)
President Kennedy once said, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” That is a good statement. When you are dealing with an institution like the United States, which has limited resources, you cannot just mooch off everyone else – you need to pitch in your fair share. But let me ask you this – would it be proper to make that same statement about the kingdom of God? Should we say, “Ask not what Jesus can do for you. Ask what you can do for Jesus.”?
Last week we left off with Jesus driving away a crowd of seekers because they were seeking Him with the wrong motive. They wanted use Him to get an earthly treasure – namely, food. They were willing to bow their knees to Him and crown Him their king, if He would give them what they wanted. And Jesus said in no uncertain terms, “No – that’s not the way to come to Me.”
And I think most Christians understand that. If you ask the average Christian, “Is it acceptable to come to Jesus as your waiter with the motive of using Him to get the thing you regard as the true treasure in life?” – they would say, “Absolutely not.”
However, I am afraid many would go even further and say this: “When you come to Him, you shouldn’t have the motive of receiving anything. Our motive in serving God should not be any kind of personal reward whatsoever. Our motive should be to serve God and honor God and obey God just because it’s the right thing to do. And if you are trying to get something out of it, then you have a mixed motive. The highest motive of all is to serve God without wanting to get anything out of it for yourself at all.”
That is a very, very popular way of thinking. It is a philosophy that is embraced by a lot of Christians, but it did not come from Christ. Nor did it come from the Bible. It came from the influence of a non-Christian philosopher by the name of Immanuel Kant. He said no good deed is really a good deed if you get something out of it for yourself.
That is Kant’s philosophy; what is Jesus’ philosophy? Jesus’ philosophy was the exact opposite of Kant’s. If Jesus thought like Kant, He would have said, “Don’t come to Me for earthly bread. Come to Me for nothing. Come to Me for no benefit at all.” But that is not what Jesus said. What Jesus said was, “Don’t come to Me for bread that goes bad in a week. Come to Me instead for spiritual bread that will satisfy all the cravings and longings of your soul forever, and that will also give you eternal life!”
So what we say is, “Ask not what you can do for Jesus. Ask what Jesus can do for you.” Jesus never rebuked anyone for coming to Him seeking too much. He only rebuked people who sought too little. The problem with this crowd was not that they were seeking a benefit for themselves. The problem was the benefit they were seeking was too small. They should have been seeking eternal life, and instead they were seeking earthly food. Come to Jesus seeking eternal treasures – full satisfaction of your soul forever, and forgiveness of sins and the acceptance and love of God as your Father, and the Holy Spirit to live within you – seek huge things like that and He will lavish it upon you. But come to Him seeking a sandwich, and He will send you away. Come to Him seeking anything that will not be here one hundred years from now and He will turn you away. There is no danger of seeking too much from Him; but there is a great danger of seeking too little. It is not a sin to seek too much from Christ. But it is a sin to seek too little. It is impossible to seek too much, because the only acceptable way to come to Christ is to come seeking Him as your treasure. And if you come seeking Him – if you desire Christ Himself – that is the greatest, most expensive, most lavish gift you could ever ask for. There is nothing bigger than that. So He requires that you come seeking the greatest benefit in the universe for yourself.
Love seeks the benefit of interaction with the beloved
And if that strikes you as selfish – if you are like Kant, and you do not see it as a good thing to seek a benefit for yourself – you probably don’t understand love. Because when you love someone, interacting with that person is a reward. If it isn’t, then you don’t love that person. If someone says, “I’ll hang out with you as an act of my Christian duty, but I will get nothing out of it – I won’t enjoy it, and interacting with you won’t profit me in any way” – if someone says that to you, that person doesn’t love you, and his spending time with you purely out of duty does not honor you at all. In fact it dishonors you because it shows you to be undesirable. But if the person wants to spend time with you, and regards time spent with you as a reward, that honors you.
But we need food
So it is good to come to Christ seeking a benefit for yourself, as long as that benefit is not some lame, cheesy, temporal, earthly treasure like food. We come to Jesus not as our waiter, but as our food. All that is a review of last week. But that leaves us with a problem. That is one of those sermons that can sound really spiritual and profound when you are sitting in church, but then when you get out into the real world you are faced with reality. And reality is this – if I don’t get some physical food, I will die. Look again at verse 27.
How do you obey the command not to work for food that spoils?

27 Do not work for food that spoils

Do you obey that command? But isn’t every person in this room guilty of going to work, earning money, and then taking that money to the grocery store and buying physical, temporal food that spoils? So how could we possibly obey this command not to work for food that spoils? Won’t we all starve to death? Am I sinning every time I open up the refrigerator to find something to eat? If my cupboards are empty, and my family is starving, and I need food, or I need money, or I need some other earthly thing and I get down on my knees and pray for God to supply it, am I guilty of coming to Jesus for the food that spoils? What exactly is the relationship between the food from heaven that brings eternal life, and physical food that we need to stay alive?

The Promise of Physical Bread
Earthquake
The answer to that question is in Mark 8, where Jesus brings up the topic of the feeding of the five thousand again, even though this is quite a while later. The miracle of the feeding of the multitude lands like a major earthquake in the gospel accounts, and it has aftershocks that continue all the way into Mark 8 and Matthew 16. It keeps coming up, because Jesus has to keep correcting failures to understand it. Failure #1 was when the Disciples failed to understand that it proved Jesus to be Almighty God. Failure #2 was when the crowd failed to understand that it pointed to Jesus as the true bread that they should seek. And now in Mark 8 we see a third failure – a third misunderstanding. And at first this one sounds like a contradiction. 
The Disciples miss a spiritual point because of distraction over food
Jesus feeds the five thousand, then walks on water, then does a bunch of healings, then has a run-in with the Pharisees about ritual hand washing, then the gentile woman comes to Him and they have the conversation about the dog eating crumbs from the table, then He crosses the Sea of Galilee again to the Decapolis and does a bunch of healings there, then He feeds another multitude – this time four thousand. And now in Mark 8, He is making the return trip across the Sea of Galilee to come home. And as they are sailing along, Jesus begins to warn the Disciples about the danger of the influence of the Pharisees and Sadducees. And at one point He compares their influence to yeast. And as soon as He mentions yeast, the Disciples infer that Jesus is upset because they forgot to bring bread with them in the boat.
That was a failure to understand about the loaves

Mark 8:17 Aware of their discussion, Jesus asked them: "Why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not see or understand? Are your hearts hardened? 18 Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear? And don't you remember? 19 When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many basketfuls of pieces did you pick up?" "Twelve," they replied. 20 "And when I broke the seven loaves for the four thousand, how many basketfuls of pieces did you pick up?" They answered, "Seven." 21 He said to them, "Do you still not understand?"

What is the point of all that? When I preached about the miracle I purposely skipped the part about them picking up the scraps afterward, so we could talk about it in this message. So let’s go back and take a look at that.
Twelve leftover lunchboxes

John 6:11-13 Jesus then took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed to those who were seated as much as they wanted. He did the same with the fish. 12 When they had all had enough to eat, he said to his disciples, "Gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted." 

Does that sound like a strange command to you? Gather up every scrap? Believe it or not, some people have taken this as a statement about littering. It is Keep Bethsaida Clean month. Jesus did not want to leave a big mess in that remote wilderness, so He commissioned the Disciples as a cleanup crew. In my judgment, that interpretation is ridiculous. First of all, barley crackers are biodegradable. It wasn’t like Jesus handed these lunches out in cellophane packaging with individually wrapped crackers. There was no trash – only food. This is a remote area, there are plenty of wild animals desperate for food, so if they left a few crackers on the grass, I guarantee they would all be gone by the next morning.
Precision
And besides all that, the amount of leftovers was incredibly small.

13 So they gathered them and filled twelve baskets with the pieces of the five barley loaves left over by those who had eaten.

Some of the commentators talk about how this points to overflowing bounty – such a huge amount of extra food. But it is really not very huge. This word for “basket” refers to a wicker basket that the Jews would use to carry supplies with them. For example, if they were going to travel into Gentile country, and they wanted to bring some kosher food with them, they would pack it in one of these baskets. So basically they were like a lunchbox. Now think about that – they pick up every last scrap after an all-you-can-eat feed for five thousand families, and all it amounts to is enough leftovers to fill twelve lunchboxes. We have a fellowship meal for one hundred people and we carry out five huge garbage bags of trash. My brother-in-law works for Young Life and is often in charge of feeding large crowds. I asked him how many leftovers they would have in feeding a crowd this size, and he said with the tight budgets and the desire for good stewardship, they have honed their process to the point where they have what is considered essentially a one hundred percent yield – meaning they come as close as possible to no wasted food at all. In a family-style meal, Young Life can feed a large crowd and make sure they don’t run out of anything and everyone gets fed, and they still only end up with an average of four ounces of leftover food per person. They have that down to a science. Getting it that close is considered in the industry to be as close to a one hundred percent yield as it is possible to get.
But even with that kind of efficiency, if Young Life fed a crowd of five thousand families, four ounces of leftovers per person would be between three and five tons of leftover food. Jesus only has twelve lunchboxes left over. This is a miracle of incredible precision. Normally God does not do that. Since when is God into economy? Every time there is a cup in the Bible it is always overflowing. Almost every page of the Bible talks about God’s superabundance. When God waters the ground, He does not conserve water by making the rain land only on the grass and crops. He just dumps rain all over your house and in the streets and on the lakes and everywhere. Of all the rays that go out from the sun in every direction, only one ray actually hits the earth – and heats the whole planet. Only one billionth of the sun’s energy actually hits the earth. All the other heat just goes out into space and is wasted. Enough food is now grown in the world to provide each resident of the planet with almost four pounds of food per day. There is such a food glut that our government pays farmers to back off on growing crops so we aren’t buried in food. When God decided He wanted to adorn the skies a little bit, He threw some lights up there. And when we built telescopes for a closer look we found countless billions of galaxies. When God provides, it is always massive, overflowing excess. So the precision of this miracle stands out as different. I am not denying that it shows the richness of His generous bounty – the largest crowd ever and everyone ate as much as they wanted and there were leftovers. That is a lot of food, but why the precision? 
It is not too hard to figure out. Twelve guys collect leftovers from thirty thousand people and end up with exactly twelve lunchboxes full? Not eleven, not thirteen – twelve lunchboxes? Jesus is making a statement about His provision for the Twelve. There is no way they could miss the number twelve. Jesus is saying, “This is for you. I’m going to provide for you guys.”
And so later on, when the Disciples miss a spiritual lesson Jesus is teaching because they think He is mad at them for forgetting to pack a lunch, He says, “Don’t you understand – even after you picked up the twelve baskets?” Understand what? That we do not have to worry about food – Jesus will provide us with all the food we need. So the Disciples blow it by failing to assume that Jesus would provide food for them.

The Purpose of Physical Bread
Contradiction?
Now, can you see why I said earlier that this sounds like a contradiction? The crowd did assume Jesus would provide physical bread, and He rebuked them. Now the Disciples fail to assume He will provide physical bread, and He rebukes them. So which is it? Does this miracle imply that Jesus will supply physical bread or not? What exactly is the relationship between physical bread and spiritual bread? Let’s go back to John 6 and let Jesus answer that question for us.
End goal

John 6:27 Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life

How can Jesus command that when the day before He commanded the Disciples to go around and collect all the leftovers? When they did that, weren’t they working for food that perishes? And what about 2 Thessalonians 3:10?
2 Thessalonians 3:10 If a man will not work, he shall not eat.

Scripture is crystal clear that God expects men to work to feed their families. How do we reconcile the command to work for our food with Jesus’ command not to work for food?
I think the key is in understanding the way Jesus used that word “for” when He said, Don’t work for food that spoils. There are two different ways to work for something. You can work for something as an ultimate, final goal, or as an intermediate goal that is a stepping stone to a higher goal. Imagine you have the goal of being reunited with your long, lost family. But they are in New York, and you are in Los Angeles. And you are broke. So you get a job to earn enough money to get a plane ticket to New York. And one day your boss comes to you and says, “Man, you’re a hard worker. You put in more overtime than anyone else. What is it you’re working so hard for?” What is the answer? Are you working to get money? Are you working for a ticket? Are you working for a plane ride? Sort of. You are working so that you can get those things, but those things are not your ultimate goal. You don’t buy the plane ticket and then just go home with that ticket in your hand and say, “OK, now I can die. I’ve reached my goal.” No, the money and the ticket and the plane ride are intermediate goals. They are really just means to the ultimate goal, which is being with your family.
When Jesus commands that we not work for physical food, I think He means “for” in the sense of our ultimate goal. Every non-Christian in the world works for the bread that spoils as their ultimate goal. They work for earthly, temporary things. For some of them that ultimate goal might be a particular career, or a certain amount of money, or marriage or fame or you name it. There are a lot of different things that your secular co-workers have as their final goal, but whatever it is, it is temporary. And what Jesus is saying is, “Don’t have any temporal thing as your ultimate goal.” The things in this world – food, money, marriage, career – those are all tools that God supplies for us to use in order to obtain eternal things. Just like the guy would use his money to get a plane ticket, and use that ticket to get on the plane, and use that plane ride to get his final goal of being with his family; so we use money and career and health and leisure and food to gain our ultimate, final goal – the goal of experiencing Jesus as our bread.
How to use physical bread
How does that happen? How, exactly, do you use a double Whopper with cheese as a tool to reach your highest goal? Well, what is the highest goal? Our ultimate goal is to come to Jesus as your bread – to come to Him as that which satisfies all the appetites and cravings and longings of your soul. That is our highest goal because the most important thing in the universe is the glory of God, and the best way to glorify Him is by coming to Him as the bread of life. So that is our ultimate goal. That is the arrival in New York in my illustration before. So how do we use a Whopper with cheese as a plane ticket to get there?
Before I answer that question, let’s just stop for a second and think about what an amazing thing it would be if there is an answer to that question. Can you imagine? Can you imagine if eating a big turkey dinner and seconds and thirds on pumpkin pie – can you imagine if that could be used as a plane ticket to get us to our ultimate goal of glorifying the Lord Jesus Christ as the bread of life? Would that change the way you enjoy food – and the way you enjoy money and clothes and cars and sex and all the other temporal joys of this life? I hope it does, because this is the reason why all those pleasures exist. I believe Jesus’ teaching about the feeding of the multitude reveal three insights into how we can use physical food and all the other pleasures of life as tools to reach our highest goal.
Illustrations of real satisfaction 
The first comes from the fact that Jesus used bread as a way of describing Himself. That teaches us something about the purpose of physical bread. The bread of this world is a sample and illustration of real satisfaction. The reason eating exists is to teach us that what happens to you spiritually when you are in the presence of God is similar to what happens to your body when you enjoy a great meal. And the same goes for all the other pleasures of life. Every comfort, every delight, everything that puts a smile on your face, everything that gives you rest, strength, renewal – use every one of them to preach a sermon to your soul about how delightful and satisfying the presence of God is. If you eat a meal and all you think about is the meal, then you are working for the food that spoils. You are getting the plane ticket and just framing it and putting it on your wall. But if you use what you experienced Thursday on Thanksgiving as a sample, and you say to your soul, “If that was the sample, what must the real thing be like?...” and that causes you to have greater desire to experience the presence of God, then you are not working for food that spoils, but for the real bread from heaven. So the first way to use physical food as a tool to reach your ultimate goal is to see it for what it is – an illustration of the real thing.
Gestures of His love 
The second way to use physical food and other pleasures as plane tickets that get us to our final goal of coming to Jesus as bread comes from the whole picture of the Messianic Banquet that we talked about two weeks ago. The Messianic Banquet is where the Lord spreads out a table for all His favored people, whom He accepts and delights in. That banquet is a gathering of His beloved children to Himself in a fellowship of family love. Another reason why the physical pleasures of this world exist is that they are gestures that God uses to express His love for us. So you can use earthly pleasures to reach your highest goal by interpreting them for what they are - expressions of His love; specific, intentional gestures of love from God to you.
This is what gratitude is about. Our culture has no understanding of what gratitude is. This time of year you hear everyone saying, “I’m thankful for my family and I’m thankful for this country and I’m thankful for my health and I’m thankful for this and thankful for that…” And I just want to ask them – “Thankful to whom?” True gratitude is all about the person to whom you are grateful. Ninety percent of the time when people say they are thankful for something, what they really mean is they are just glad it happened. But being glad something happened is not the same thing as gratitude. Gratitude is a relational thing that is focused on a person. When you are out shopping and the parking space right by the front door opens up right in front of you, just being glad it happened is not gratitude – even if you believe God did it. Gratitude comes when you see it as a purposeful, intentional gesture of love from God to you individually at that moment.
I have used the illustration before of a diamond ring. If a woman finds a diamond ring lying on the ground, she will pick it up and be very glad that she now has an extra ring. But if that same ring comes to her in a different way – if she gets it because the man of her dreams puts it on her left hand and says, “Will you marry me?” – that is a whole other level of gladness. In both cases she ends up with the exact same ring, but in the first one the ring is all she gets. In the second scenario she is ten times happier because the issue is not the ring, but what the ring means. It is a gesture of love from someone whose love she cares about.
When that parking space opens up in front of you, if you are glad it happened simply because it saves you some walking, that is no different from the reaction of an atheist. But if you interpret it the way a woman interprets an engagement ring – a symbol of love from God, you can walk into the store enthralled with the hug that God just gave you at that moment. So use the bread of this world as samples of the real thing, and interpret them as gestures of God’s love.
Freely give it up for spiritual purposes
The third way to use earthly pleasures and treasures to reach our goal of satisfaction in Christ we see in Mark 8. Jesus rebuked them for missing what He was saying because of their preoccupation with food. Was it wrong for the Disciples to have thoughts about the fact that they forgot to bring food in the boat? No, it is fine to do that. We need to think about food sometimes. We are physical beings, and we need to concern ourselves with physical things. We have to put some thought into how much money we are making, and how we will pay our bills, and how much we should save, etc.
It was not wrong for the Disciples to have some thoughts about bread. Where they went wrong was in being so consumed with thoughts about food that they missed the spiritual issue Jesus was talking about. Too much of a focus on temporal things blinds the heart to spiritual things. How many times does God make some marvelous truth available to you – some insight that would give you victory over a troublesome sin, or that would give you guidance in a hard decision, or that would enable you to overcome discouragement or gain the zeal that you need – He is making access to that principle available to you, but you miss it because you are so consumed with worrying about money? It is fine to think about earthly things up to a point, but once we start missing the things the Lord is saying to us because we or so focused on earthly things – that is when we cross the line into folly.
So the third principle for how to use earthly bread to reach our highest goal is to place the treasures of this world down where they belong near the bottom of your list of priorities. Do we think about them? Yes. Plan for them? Yes. But do we allow ourselves to be consumed with thinking about them or become obsessed? No, because the fact that Jesus is our bread includes the promise that He will supply us with everything we need. And that means we have nothing to worry about – ever!
Everything you need…for what?
The twelve lunchboxes of leftovers were designed to teach us that the Lord will provide us with all the physical bread we need. Do you believe that Scripture teaches that God will supply us with ALL our needs – everything we ever need? Sometimes you hear preachers say, “God will supply all your needs, but not all your wants.” And then they go on to say, “All you really need is some food and clothes and a place to sleep.” God promises only enough to keep me alive and that is it. But what about Christians who starve to death? Or drown? If you drown, doesn’t that mean God did not supply you with oxygen? And wouldn’t air be included in the list of basic needs? Or does the promise somehow just short out when it is time to die?
None of that makes any sense to me. God’s promises do not short out when we need them the most, when we face death. I think the reason there is so much confusion about this is the fact that the word “need” makes no sense by itself. It only makes sense when it is followed by the word “for.” If some asks me what I need, my answer is, “Need for what?” If I am climbing Mount Everest, I need a whole bunch of mountain climbing gear. If I am going swimming I need a swimsuit (and some water). If I have to transport five tons of gravel, I need a truck.
When God promises to supply everything we need, why do we assume He means everything we need to stay alive? Obviously that is not what He means, because every Christian dies. When you die, clearly God is not supplying you with everything you need to stay alive. Instead of assuming God means “everything you need to stay alive,” wouldn’t a more reasonable assumption be that God means, “I will supply you with everything you need to do whatever God requires you to do? Why would we assume anything else? God will supply you with everything you need to carry out whatever He calls you to do. If He calls you to teach, He will supply all you need to teach. If He calls you to be a parent, He will supply what you need to raise your kids. If He calls you to something that requires a car, then for you a car is in the category of needs, not luxuries. If He calls you to something that requires a huge house, then for you a huge house is in the category of a need. And if He does not supply another Christian brother with any house at all, it is because that brother does not need a house to do what God is calling him to do. And that promise does not short out at death at all. When it comes time for you to die, you will still have a calling. Your calling at that time will be to die in a way that honors Jesus Christ. And He will provide everything you need in order to do that – courage, hope, joy, faith – everything you need to starve to death the right way, or drown the right way, or be executed for your faith the right way, or whatever it is God requires of you at that time.
All that is implied in the twelve leftover baskets, and when we understand that, we are never going to be so preoccupied with earthly things that we miss spiritual things, because God’s promise to supply us with all the earthly things we need means worrying out earthly things is way down near the bottom of our list of priorities. So when we refuse to worry, and we refuse to become distracted by earthly things, that very refusal to worry actually accomplishes our ultimate goal. The peace we have in our hearts about earthly, temporal matters means we are coming to Christ as our true bread.
So the third was to use the bread of this world to achieve the final goal of coming to Jesus as bread is simply by holding it loosely. We are not in a mad scramble to get the treasures of this world like unbelievers are, because unlike them, our happiness and wellbeing is not dependent on earthly things.
Giving
That is also why we can be generous. In the United States, the average Christian gives away $1500/year, and the average atheist or agnostic gives $200/year. So Christians give away more than seven hundred percent more than secular people. Why do you suppose that is? Why are Christians so generous? Because we have an endless, eternal supply of everything we need from the bread of life, so our happiness does not stand or fall based on our bank account. That is a testimony to this world. I was reading on an atheist website last week, and they were all criticizing Christians for every kind of hypocrisy, and one guy got on there and said, “It’s true that Christians are hypocrites in a lot of ways, but one thing we have to admit is they really do give away WAY more money than we do.” We use the treasures of this world to honor Christ as our bread by holding those treasures loosely. We do not worry and fret about them. We do not scratch and claw to get them. And if we can accomplish a spiritual purpose by giving them away we happily give them away.

Benediction: 2 Corinthians 9:8-10  And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work. 9 As it is written: "He has scattered abroad his gifts to the poor; his righteousness endures forever."   10 Now he who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will also supply and increase your store of seed and will enlarge the harvest of your righteousness.