Well, this past week I went and got a flu shot. I did so because I was motivated because, I’m sure like many of you, I have had the flu before and I didn’t want to get it again. So I got the first part and I will get the second part with the H1 when it becomes available, because I know what it did to me. You know we are good at taking care of our physical selves partly because when something gets wrong with the body, we know it. There is instant feedback: “Feed me! I am hurt. Give me an Advil.” Now sometimes we don’t know what is wrong with us but we know something is wrong with us so we go to a doctor pretty quickly. With our mental and emotional selves, we are not quite as fast but we are almost as fast. You know, we know something is wrong and we know the stigma of having an emotional problem. You know we all have emotional problems from time to time. We are all a little crazy from time to time and I don’t mean that in a bad way. We all have problems. We are starting to know that a little better and we may wait a little while longer but we respond to that, as well. But the Bible says that we have a physical self and a soul self, which is your emotional and mental and personality selves; but we also have a spiritual self. That spiritual self is our connection with God that God has given us; and, my friends that is the last thing that sometimes we will feed or do something about if something is wrong. As a matter of fact, we often do not know when we have a spiritual problem.

The Bible says that “the fruit of the Holy Spirit is love and joy and peace and patience and kindness…” Did you know that impatience is a spiritual problem? You may not think so. We think: I am just impatient. Or we are full of resentment. That is a spiritual problem, but we just think: Well it is their fault that I resent them. And we do that. Or not having enough joy. Sometimes we don’t know what is going on or we mislabel it. The fact is that our spiritual selves are often the most neglected because it is the self that doesn’t cry out: Fix me. Fix me. Fix me.

So today I want to talk about some ways to vaccinate yourself, spiritually. I think this passage has a lot to say about that. Now we are continuing in our going through the gospel of John, and as we read this scripture, again, notice what is going on. Notice what is said; and the context of this particular story is, if you remember from last week, Jesus has fed the 5000 and he has crossed the Lake of Galilee, or at least his disciples did. He joined them walking on the water and scared them to death. The crowd is looking for Jesus, and the question is why? And notice why in this story. Notice the argument that goes on between them and Jesus and what Jesus says in response. From chapter 6, verse 22: (John 6:22-40)

²²The 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. ²³Then some boats from Tiberias landed near the place where the people had eaten the bread after the Lord had given thanks. ²⁴Once the crowd realized that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they got into the boats and went to Capernaum in search of Jesus.

²⁵When they found him on the other side of the lake, they asked him, “Rabbi, when did you get here?”

 ²⁶Jesus 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. ²⁷Do 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.”

 ²⁸Then they asked him, “What must we do to do the works God requires?”

 ²⁹Jesus answered, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”

³⁰So they asked him, “What miraculous sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do? ³¹Our forefathers ate the manna in the desert; as it is written: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”

 ³²Jesus 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. ³³For 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.”

 ³⁵Then 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. ³⁶But as I told you, you have seen me and still you do not believe. ³⁷All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away. ³⁸For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. ³⁹And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that he has given me, but raise them up at the last day. ⁴⁰For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.”

Would you pray with me?

Lord, we come to this very powerful passage and we pray that you would open it to our hearts and minds. May it be a fitting preparation for the supper that we will eat as we remember all that you are and all you have done for us. Father be with us. Be with us as we listen, as we hear, may we hear well. May we see well. Touch us with your Holy Spirit, we pray, in Jesus’ name. Amen.

So, how do you become spiritually inoculated? Well I think this passage does have some things to say about that. First I would say that the first thing we need to think about is diverting our minds off ourselves. In other words, don’t be self-centered. “Don’t work for food that spoils, but for food that endures for eternal life”, says Jesus. You know, it is a very interesting passage. The crowd searches for Jesus. I mean, they go out of their way. They get into boats. I mean, it is not like they are getting into a car, they get into a boat and they row across the lake. They don’t find him there. They get into another boat and row across the lake. They do this several times and finally they find him. It is good that they are looking for him, but the question is why? Jesus, being Jesus, who is nothing less than direct, doesn’t even answer the question; he says, “How did you get here?” And he says, “Don’t work for food that spoils…” Don’t work for food that is temporary. In other words, they were focused on that which is going to die, their bodies. He says, “Don’t work for just this life. Work for eternal life.” They were essentially interested in what was in it for them. They looked at Jesus as sort of a super Walmart. He was a grocery store. They worked hard; they went out of their way; they did everything they could to find him so that they could, perhaps, get another meal or several meals out of him. And Jesus will have none of it.

You know, we have heard this thing before from Jesus. “Man does not live by bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God” or he says later, “Seek first the kingdom of God; and all those things (the food, the clothing) will be yours as well.” Or he will say in another place, “Unless you are willing to give up this life, you will not see the next.” Over and over again, Jesus gives the same message. You know, we might be tempted to laugh at these people. They were kind of silly. They were walking around, running around, rowing around looking for Jesus, working hard. Or, we might feel sorry for them; but we need to ask the question, don’t we do the same? Don’t we live our lives primarily for this life?

Wouldn’t you say that 98% of your money perhaps goes to fulfill your own needs? Wouldn’t you say the 90% of your time is spent working for yourself or your family? For this life? We need to examine ourselves. You know, we might be spiritually sick and not even know it, because we are focused on the question we ask in almost every way: what is in it for me? God has said that is not the way I work. You will be healthy if you say what is in it for me, and others.

Robert Schuller tells a story of a woman named Pam who went into the hospital with a 106 fever. They didn’t know what as wrong with her. She was so sick all night long and as she was moaning she was saying, “Lord help me. Lord help me. Lord help me.” But she happened to hear the moaning and groaning of the person in the bed next to her. She was even worse. Pam finally prayed “Lord, help this woman. I can’t stand hearing her hurt so much.” And lo and behold, the next morning her fever was gone because she was focused on someone else.

We need to focus not on ourselves and then we need to develop first things first.

Jesus uses the word work and that really sets them off because that fits right into their world view. They looked at getting in with God as a series of things that they had to do. You know this was not any different than most every other religion in the world. I, as you know, spent a lot of time in Afghanistan and dealing with Muslims in a very respectful way, but, you know, basically their view is that if you do five things, you are probably, and it is really just a probably, you are going to be O.K. If you confess that Allah is one and Muhammad is his prophet that is a confession. If you pray five times a day, if you fast during the month of Ramadan, if you pay the zakat, the taxes for their poor, and you perform a pilgrimage to Mecca, you are going to probably be alright in your life. That is what it means to be a Muslim. It is a series of things to do. And many other faiths are just like that. If you live a life of asceticism you will get in with God. If you do this, if you do that, a list of dos and don’ts; but Jesus, Jesus starts with something else. He starts with himself. He starts with himself.

It is about his work and he answers the question. He answers the question that “the work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”

You know, actually what should be up there is verse 29, but it gives me the opportunity to tell you what it is. He gives the answer that “the work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.” You know there are a lot of phrases in life which define a person and define an era. We can remember perhaps what Julius Caesar said when he went to Gaul and conquered it. He said, “I came I saw, I conquered.” Or Abraham Lincoln: “Four score and seven years ago our forefathers brought forth a nation…” Or John F. Kennedy: “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” Or a more recent president who said, “It depends on what is is.” And there are a lot of things like that that are in the Bible. “The Lord is my shepherd.” Or “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son.” Or as Paul says later, “I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” Verse 29 is something you should remember and memorize, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.” It encapsulates the gospel. It tells us what is required. Jesus starts with himself and what is interesting about that verse is that he says “the work of God is to believe.” Did you know that belief takes work? It really does. Now a lot of time we think of belief, as I said last week, as having something to do with the intellect. To some degree it does. Some people say, “I have doubt about Jesus” or I have doubt about God or I have doubts about the Bible. But the Christian view of faith is that it has to do with trust.

You know, I have discovered along the way that many people’s intellectual doubts have as their cause a heart doubt, if you will, or a trust problem. You see something may have happened in someone’s life in which they thought that God would come through but he didn’t; and they lose faith, they lose trust in God. The part of dealing with our own illnesses with faith-wise is dealing with the trust issue. Many of us remember the actor, Tony Randall. He was Felix in The Odd Couple and many other movies. Once he had an experience which surely must be the inspiration for some of the credit card commercials that we have had in the past. He was in a jewelry store and the store’s owner recognized him and became very excited. He declared that Randall was his all time favorite actor. What a treat it was for his wife and the man called her in. They schmoozed and they talked with one another. Then finally Randall decided to buy something. There was a gold necklace in the window that caught his eye and he would like to buy it and would the store accept a personal check. And the store owner said, “Do you have any identification?”

See, recognition only goes so far. You have to trust. Many people recognized Jesus, many people come to church and maybe even worship Jesus. This man actually idolized Tony Randall but he didn’t trust him. That is what we are called to do. The question we all have to ask, even those of us who have been to church for years, is what is your relationship with Jesus like on a scale of 1 to 10? I am not asking you to raise your hand. Just, where is it? If you pick a number, what are you willing to do, how hard are you willing to work to make it better?

Thirdly, we decide where our next meal comes from. We might say that I am willing to do something but what should I do? And Jesus gives us the answer. He says, “I am the bread of life.” Now, in this particular era, all the Jewish people believed, they were taught in their synagogues, that the next Messiah would recreate the giving of the manna from heaven, in other words, a way that they would know the Messiah was that he would bring down manna again from heaven. So that is the source of that conversation that is going on. When they say that Moses gave us the manna and Jesus says “Moses didn’t give you the manna, God did and God is giving you true bread from heaven.” God is giving you true bread from heaven.

How much do we eat of Jesus? You know, as I said before it is easy sometimes to be spiritually sick and not even know it. I mean this as an encouragement. It is so easy to never read the Bible. It is so easy to forget to pray except when you get in trouble. You see, God is sometimes out of sight, out of mind. It is so easy to blow off church, especially in a culture that thinks church is not necessary for any spiritual development. How much do you eat of Jesus? We need to eat of him. You know, it is hard to overestimate the importance of bread in the ancient world. We have forty kinds of bread at the supermarket and we don’t even have to eat bread to be nourished in our day. But in many places in the world bread, or something like it, is the staple. For us, it is not that Christians don’t do work, it is just that Jesus is first. We have people all over this community going out and doing work, and that is great. But we do it for Jesus because he is the bread, he is first.

Fourthly, we depend on God’s ability and not ours. A very powerful verse Jesus says, “And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose none of all he has given me but raise them up at the last day.” You may be sitting there thinking right now, you know, from this standard of what we talked about, my faith isn’t very good. Maybe you are like the man who talked to Jesus once and said, “Lord help me in my unbelief” and you know that is not a very bad place to start. If we start knowing a problem, we can do something about it. I am very impressed with AA meetings. If you have ever dealt with an alcoholic in your family, you know it is very difficult until they decide there is a problem. And until they decide that there is a problem they will do nothing about it. I have had that experience and it is very frustrating. But that is true of most everything in our lives. Until we decide that there is a problem we won’t do anything about it. Our problem is very often that our spiritual lives are out of sight, out of mind and we do not do enough about them. And when that happens, slowly but surely, doubts do creep in – doubts in God, doubts in Jesus, doubts in ourselves, doubts in our salvation. I do not know how many people I have talked to over the many years who have had doubts about their salvation. They come and say I have done this and I have done this and how can the Lord still love me?

I remember when I was a very young Christian I worked in a Methodist church, assisting. I remember this guy was one of those preachers who gave an invitation almost every Sunday and every Sunday he did that the same woman would come up because she needed to get saved again. She had no assurance. Look at what this promises; that is, you belong to Jesus, he loves you and he will never lose you, ever. Paul says later that nothing could separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus, nothing, not even your sin, if you belong to him.

I read a wonderful story this week in one of those Chicken Soup for the Soul books. A story is told by a doctor about a five year old girl named Mary who suffered a stroke that left half her body paralyzed. Even more, now listen to this girl’s life, she had been hospitalized for treatment of a brain tumor and had recently lost her father and mother. She was being examined in an MRI machine and the image sequence at that time required the patient to remain perfectly still for about five minutes which of course five year olds have a tough time doing. After two minutes of the first sequence the doctor and the technician notice on the monitor that Mary’s mouth was moving. They even heard a muted voice over the intercom and they halted the exam and reminded her not to talk. She smiled and promised not to talk. They repeated the sequence with the same result. Her lips were still moving. The technologist, a bit gruffly, said, “Mary, you were talking again and that causes blurry pictures.” Mary’s smile remained as she replied, “I wasn’t talking, I was singing. You said ‘no talking’.” “What were you singing” someone asked? And she said, “Jesus Loves Me. I always sing Jesus Loves Me when I am happy.” Every one in the room was speechless, of course. How could this little girl by happy? Well, she was happy because she knew that Jesus loved her.

You see it is all about a relationship, isn’t it? …this spiritual vaccination. It is not about dos and don’ts, although we have dos and don’ts, it is about a relationship. Where is your relationship with the Lord?

There are many other things we could say, but for today the last but not least is to keep your destination in mind. You know a lot of us are just cruising along in life and we are not exactly sure of where we are going. We are kind of like the airplane where the pilot comes on and says, “I have some bad news and some good news. The bad news is that we are lost and I do not know where we are or where we are going. But the good news is that we are making great time.” You know I often say, and I have said to you, that it is a worthy exercise to occasionally go walking through a cemetery. What I love about cemeteries is that when you walk through them you see the names of people who lived so many years ago. You realize that that was a real person who lived a real life, who touched many, many people, who had an effect on this earth somehow or another, and it reminds you of that. It also reminds you that death is not the end of the story, or this life is not all there is, because sooner or later this physical body is going to go away. Now it is probably better to say instead of that death is a reality, rather it is better to say in a Christian point of view, that life is a reality, because death is not the end of the story. Yet we live our lives, we put most of our efforts just like these guys who were running around on these boats trying to find Jesus, and the reason they wanted to find him was so that they could live their lives better right then. That is an O.K. goal as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far. Our lives do not end with death. And we need to seek the eternal things of life. It starts with our relationship with Christ. It starts with him.

One more story for you, I read about another 9/11 story about two guys who were trapped in one of the towers. One was named Stanley, an assistant and vice president at a bank, and another was Brian, an employee with a broker. As they were going through this after the event, Brian heard Stanley calling for help and he dug through a wall to rescue him. Now you have to keep in mind that Stanley is the one who is trapped and Brian is the potential rescuer. As soon as Stanley heard Brian’s voice, he called out the first thing on his mind. Now, what do you think it was? For most of us it probably would have been help me, help me. But that was not the first thing Stanley said. He said, as he was digging through the wall, Stanley asked the question, he said of him, “I have to ask, do you know Jesus?” See neither man knew if the other would make it out live and Stanley wanted to make sure that he shared his hope of Jesus with someone else. That was more important to him than his safety. Stanley was overjoyed to hear Brian’s answer. “Yes, I do. In fact, I go to church every Sunday.” And both men made it out.

These guys had an eternal perspective. And that is what we need. If you want to be vaccinated for spiritual flu, have an eternal perspective, have a relationship with Jesus Christ. Have a good one. And that is a question again to ask yourself: Do you have one at all? If you don’t, confess him. It is a good time during communion. Confess in him and believe in him. If you do, say to the Lord: I want a better one. Help me with that, Lord. I am coming to you today and I am bringing all of my sins and laying them for you. Help me know you better. Help me reorient my life so I am thinking of the spiritual things not just the physical or the emotional.

Would you pray with me?

Lord, God, I thank you for this church and everyone in it and I pray for it. I pray for us. Lord in our busyness it is so easy to forget what is really important. Help us to begin at the beginning again with you, through Jesus our Savior, and from him as our foundation, may we be your servants in this world which needs you so badly and we pray it in his name. Amen.

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