It’s Not About Me

Scripture: John 6.35, 41-51; Ephesians 4.25- 5.2


If you had to live on just one kind of food for the rest of your life, what would it be?
Steak, chicken, pasta. . .ding-dongs, cherry pez? My friend Jim says it would be “bread” for him. That’s probably as good a choice as I can think of. Bread is good food.

“I am the bread of life,” Jesus says.

This, in John chapter six, is one of several “bread” discourses that Jesus gives us. They’re kind of broken up in the gospel, but remember what we read a couple weeks ago? The crowds had followed Jesus to the isolated place, thousands had gathered, and it was supper time and the disciples urged Jesus to send the people away to feed themselves. Jesus said, “You feed them.”

And then by faith, the disciples witnessed the miracle of the loaves and fishes. The bread was somehow multiplied. Jesus gave everybody what they needed – bread to eat.

We were reminded that Jesus doesn’t give us what we want but rather what we need.
Certainly, if we can recognize and live out this distinction between what we want and what we need our lives will be both simple and fulfilling. But even this truth does not go far enough. If we think that Jesus is God’s way of satisfying our needs and keeping us content, then we have missed the Gospel message.

We live in times of plenty and convenience. If we want, we can have one stop shopping. Wal Mart, Target, Sheetz. We can get gas and have a meal, gourmet coffee, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. Some of us are salivating over the opening of the Logan Town Centre and all of the specialty shops that it will deliver. But with all these choices and convenience, for some reason, we are not satisfied.

Jesus reminds is audience of their own history. “Your fathers had bread rain down from heaven everyday to satisfy their need,” and yet they weren’t satisfied. This bread didn’t save them. They died. I will give you a kind of bread that if you eat of it you will never hunger again.

Maybe this crowd was looking for another miracle smorgasbord, Jesus wanted them to think beyond their appetites. He wanted them to consider that maybe their lives were about something else other than their appetites.







Will Willimon tells the story of a student he had in a philosophy course at Duke University. The student came to him upset about his grade. The student accused him of being unfair and not liking him personally. Willimon pointed to the student’s poor attendance record and the fact that he had handed in his papers late. The student’s final grade reflected his coursework accurately. But the student didn’t see it that way. He suggested that Willimon had a problem with his racial background (he was Korean-American). Willimon was surprised by this suggestion, saying that all his dealings with people of this ethnicity had been positive. Finally, Willimon said this,

“I thought this course was about philosophy. That was all I intended by your grade. Your final grade is my assessment of how well, or poorly, you mastered material in this course in philosophy. You act as if this grade is personal, as if this is my attempt to give you my assessment of your personality. This grade is not about that. This grade is about philosophy. This grade is not about you.”

People sometimes ask me before a service starts, “Are you going to talk about me today?” Or after a service is over, someone will say, “You were talking to me today weren’t you?” And, invariably, I say yes to those queries because I think it will help.

But maybe, once in awhile, we need to say, “No, this really isn’t about you.” Not everything that happens in the course of your day is about you. That driver ahead of you that you think is driving too slow on purpose just to spite you, well maybe they’re not. That person that you just talked to that you’re now wondering what they are thinking about you, well maybe they’re not thinking about you at all.

When we feel that alien lump on our bodies, or we get that illness that won’t go away, we may ask ourselves, “Why did this happen to me? What did I do to deserve this?”

Well, why not you? Like one person said to me recently, “We all get sick. It’s going to happen. Pick your disease.”

Do you think God has singled you out to punish you? If God does, then He isn’t very efficient in his punishments is he? This is not about you!


A turning point, a conversion point if you will, for all of us is when we begin to act like our lives are as much about others as they are about ourselves. We become better friends when we begin to act like this. We become better husbands and wives when we begin to act like this. We become better workers when we begin to act like this.

Israel was a people formed by the commandments given to them from God

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” Deuteronomy 6.4-5

The commandments were given “so that your days may be long. . .so that it may go well with you.” In other words, these commandments are not as much to rule your life as to give you life. Jesus added a second great commandment to the first one:

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Matthew 19.19

The church is here to remind us that life is not about us. The church does not exist is provide the preacher and staff with a good income. The church does not exist to suit your personal preferences or make you feel good. When we make decisions about how to be church we would be wise to err on the side of giving preference to those outside the church rather than our own preferences.

But here’s the thing – the church really is about Jesus. We are Jesus’ body. Nothing else. We are here to visibly demonstrate to the world that Jesus is Life. Jesus is what Life is About.

Our song to the world is “Turn your eyes about Jesus, look full in his wonderful face and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace.”