"To Whom Shall We Go?" (Hitchings) | John 6:60-71

Sanctuary

05.31.2026

Transcript

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A reading from John chapter six, verses sixty to seventy-one. Many of his disciples heard it, they said, This is a hard thing. You can listen to it. But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, said to them, Do you take him into this? And what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? It is the Spirit who gives life. The flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But there are some of you who do not believe. For Jesus knew from the beginning that those who those were who did not believe and who it was who would betray him. And he said, This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted to him by the Father. After this, many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. So Jesus said to the twelve, Do you want to go away as well? And Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed and have come to know that you are the Holy One of God. Jesus answered them, Did I not choose you to the twelve? And yet one of you is a devil. He spoke of Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, for he, one of the twelve, was going to betray him. This is the word of the Lord. Please be seated.

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Well, good morning to you all. My name is Frank Hitchings. I'm one of the pastors here, and I'll add my welcome to that of John Marks. It is good to be together this morning to start our week worshiping the Lord. And if you are visiting with us this morning, we do extend a special welcome to you. Before we jump into this passage, though, let's pause and pray and ask God's blessing on his word to our hearts. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, you're the one who told us that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. And in your word, Lord, you tell us that the word itself is living and active, that it's God breathed, that it can penetrate our hearts and change our hearts and judge the thoughts and attitudes of our hearts. And we know this is correct. For you have used it that way in our lives. You have used it that way from generation to generation, and we ask this morning that you would do that again. That you would, Lord, through the power of your Spirit, press the truths in this passage deeper into our hearts that we might respond with worship and adoration that's based on who you have revealed yourself to be and how you work. We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen. Indeed, this morning we come to the last passage in our study of John's Gospel before we take a break for the summer. Next week we'll start our summer series in the Psalms. Say that three times quickly. Summer series in the Psalms starts next week, and we'll return to John's Gospel in mid-August. But as we come to this passage this morning, the end of this season of us in John, it's helpful just to pause briefly and review what we've seen, what we've learned so far. If you've been with us throughout the series, you'll note that after Judas, excuse me, after Jesus left Judea, he had encountered a lot of hostility there, and he finally said, that's enough, and he left and he went to Samaria. At first it seemed like things were going really well. The crowds were drawn to him. They were drawn to his miracles. The crowds were flocking to him. Think about it for a minute, just what we've seen in recent weeks. Think of the miracles that Jesus performed that they got to either see with their own eyes or hear about from firsthand eyewitnesses. He turned the water into wine at the wedding in Cana. He healed the official son who was close to death at Capernaum. At the pool of Bethesda, he healed the man who had been an invalid for 38 years. He multiplied the five loaves and the two fish so that he might feed the five thousand men, plus the women and the children, and the disciples might take up twelve basketfuls of leftovers. Amazing. Absolutely amazing. The people were amazed at the miracles, and they flocked to him, we're seeing this week, largely because of those miracles. But in the passage we have before us this morning, we see that things are starting to change. They're about to change. The clearer Jesus claims became, the more his followers would turn back. The clearer his teaching on what it means to be a disciple, what it will look like, what it will entail, the clearer that teaching, the more many of his disciples would turn away. And John's now showing us what happened not among Jesus' enemies, but among his followers. And that is a very important distinction for us. This passage is not about his enemies, this is about his followers. It's a turning point in John's gospel. So let's look at it together. If you look in your outline and your bulletin, you'll see the first point is this the difficulty of Jesus' teaching. Look at verses 60 through 62, and then we'll skip down to 66. When many of his disciples heard it, they said, This is a hard saying. Who can listen to it? But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, said to them, Do you take offense at this? What if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? And then skip down to verse 66. After this, many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. Now, it's important that we understand a couple of things at the beginning here. What was it that his disciples, and in this case it means his followers, not he's not talking specifically about the twelve. What was it that his disciples found so hard? And it's important also to realize that the word that that's chosen here that John chooses for hard, it doesn't mean hard to understand. It means hard to accept. The next phrase there says, who can listen to it? It really is a wooden translation. It's really who can accept it? What is it about his teaching that's so hard to accept? What is it that they are internally grumbling about? Well, it's really three things. If you look at the last chapter alone, it's three things. The first is this, he's really been teaching them about the doctrine of the incarnation. That he came from heaven, that he came from the Father, that he possesses the divine nature. He's been teaching them that he is the true bread that comes from heaven. Basically, that he is the God man who's taken on human nature upon himself, and they viewed that as blasphemy. God in the flesh? Who could accept that? They could not accept it then, and I think there are many today that can't accept that. They can accept that he was a good teacher, but not that he's God in the flesh, and certainly not that he's the only way to the Father. So he's been teaching them about the doctrine of the incarnation. He's been teaching them, secondly, that salvation is all of grace. That he would give his life, he would have to give his life if anyone were to be saved. How hard it is to accept that. I love what Kent Hughes wrote on that. He said, they could understand how salvation might be earned, but to think that Jesus had to earn salvation for them and that they would have to receive it as a free gift from him or not receive it at all, this they found highly objectionable. He ends with this. He says, this is the primary difficulty that most people today have in accepting Christianity. And I think it's so true. Deep down we think we can do something to merit God's favor. And Jesus is saying, no. You can't earn salvation in any way. You have to receive it as a free gift from Him or not receive it at all. Listen to what he said. This is in last week's passage, but verse 51, he says this I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. They were appalled at that. Although they probably knew that he was speaking figuratively when he talked about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, it was still more than they could stand. And it really wasn't so much the outrageous nature of the metaphor, it was more the whole argument. The argument all along through chapter 6 and the previous chapters is implying that Jesus, the son of Joseph, the carpenter, is greater than Moses. And they just couldn't stand that. That was too offensive. But as we saw last week, the whole point of this flesh and blood teaching is really about accepting Jesus and living life being in total union with him. He was teaching them, he was teaching us that he has to be our life, not an add-on to our life. He has to be our sustenance in life, our food and drink in life, not an add-on. He was teaching that there has to be a deep partaking of him. A partaking of him into all of our lives where we'd end up living in total dependence on him as the bread of life. I love the title, I am the bread of life, the living bread. Think about what bread would suggest in the first century. Bread was a staple of life in those days. It was difficult for people to conceive of life without bread. So it must be, Jesus says for my followers. So let's pause. Let's ask ourselves now, can you conceive of life without Jesus? What if he had never come? How would our lives be different? Jesus is saying the bottom line is I have to be your life, your spiritual food and drink, not an add-on to our lives. So he's been speaking of the incarnation, speaking of salvation being only through grace. And thirdly, it sounds like a reformed theological sermon here, our total inability. He taught them that the reason most of those who were listening did not believe in him is that they in themselves were unable to do so. Left to ourselves. This is what he's been teaching. Every one of us, we're totally unable to come to him. Listen to what he said last week in verse 44. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. Could it be said more clearly? No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. Again, I love what Kent Hughes said. He says this nothing is more calculated to arouse the ire and rebellion of the human heart than this teaching. But it's true. And Jesus didn't hesitate to proclaim it. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. So his teachings offend our pride and our self-sufficiency. They demand total surrender. They demand total dependence on him. The reality is, the truth is, we are incapable of saving ourselves. And yet that truth just goes against our nature. But it's so clear in Scripture. One of my favorite passages in Scripture is in the middle of Ezekiel, Ezekiel 36 and 37. If you're taking notes, Ezekiel 36, somewhere around verse 24, listen to all that God declares that he will do for those he calls. He says, For I will take you out of the nations. I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean. I will cleanse you from all your impurities and all your idols. I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit in you. I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh, and I will put my spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and to be careful to observe my laws. And you will live in the land that I gave your forefathers. You will be my people, and I will it just goes on and on saying, This is what I will do. Not what we will do, but what he will do. But then chapter 37, this is one that we we probably learned, we all heard it in Sunday school if you grew up in the church, the valley of dry bones. Ezekiel is brought into the midst of this valley, and it's full of bones, and he's walking back and forth among them, and he says this. He said, I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. And the Lord asked him, He said, Son of man, can these bones live? And I said, Oh sovereign Lord, you alone know. Then he said to me, Prophesy to these bones and say to them, Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. This is what the sovereign Lord says to these bones. Here we go again. I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin. I will put breath in you and you will come to life, and then you will know that I am the Lord. Jesus is saying the same thing in John 6. And the people are having a really hard time accepting it. It's so contrary to their views that they are not sick people in a valley needing to hear a message and make a choice. They are dry bones in the valley. And here's the point unbelief is the default condition of the human heart. We can't change that. It's hard to accept that. And we won't accept it until the Spirit of God works to renew our hearts. Jesus is, in a sense, he's unmasking what you might call fickle faith. Faith that's far more interested in what he can do for us than in him and what he's already done that people like us could be reconciled to God. He's unmasking that. And he starts really with just saying, here's the difficulty in my teaching. But then look secondly here at the necessity of divine intervention. Look at verse 63. It is the spirit who gives life. The flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But there are some of you who do not believe. Remember, he's talking to followers. There are some of you who do not believe. For Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe and who it was who would betray him. And he said, This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it's granted him by the Father. You know, again, how much clearer can Jesus be? It's the Spirit who gives life. The flesh is no help at all. The words I've spoken to you are spirit and life. Remember now that the Holy Spirit has not come upon believers like it will at Pentecost. That doesn't happen until after the ascension. Jesus himself here is the bearer of the Spirit. His words are the product of the Spirit. His words bring life. And again, just think Ezekiel 37: dry bones, hearing the word of God and having life breathed into them by the Spirit. He says, the flesh is no help. We're dead in our sins. That's our natural spiritual condition. Every one of us, that's our natural spiritual condition. We won't understand or embrace the things of God until the quickening power of the Spirit changes our hearts. I love how Paul put it in Ephesians chapter 2, verse 1. And again, it's so clear. He says, As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed the ways of the world. You're dead. You're spiritually, you're physically you may be alive, but spiritually you're dead. And then verse 4 he says, after he sinned, you were dead in your transgressions. He says, But because of his great love for us, God who is rich in mercy made us alive with Christ, even when we were dead in transgressions. It is by grace you have been saved. It's a great passage. It's the same thing Jesus is saying here. Paul's point is this, simply this, without divine intervention, none of us can be saved. None of us can come to faith in Christ. It's an absolute necessity. It is a gift. Paul goes on to say, faith is a gift of God, not works, so that none of us can boast. We can't say, well, I chose to believe it, and that person didn't, so I can look down on them. And don't miss, I also love how these verses show Jesus has this insight into the human heart. He's not taken by surprise when many of the followers leave him. He's not surprised by this mass defection. In verse 64, it says he knew them. He knew everyone who would leave. He knew even those, the one who would betray him. Alright, so let's put some of this together here. So they were his followers. Remember, they're not his enemies, they're his followers. They're intrigued by him. They liked him, they liked what he thought, what they thought he could do, what they'd seen him do, what they hoped he would do for them, but they did not believe. Their hearts had not been changed. And when all of a sudden they start to realize that he has not come to satisfy their material desires and their national desires, when they realize that, they're like, we're done. And they walked away. But they were his followers. We might put it this way. To put it in our context, they were in the church. They were not out there in the world the enemy of the church. They were in the church, but they didn't believe in him. And when they came face to face with these astounding claims and these hard teachings, they said, that's enough. And they stopped following him. They revealed really that they weren't true disciples, but they were in fact false disciples. And the danger is this: false disciples often never come to grips with the claims of lordship of Jesus. Jesus says, I've got to be your food, I've got to be your life, I have to be everything. I cannot be, I will not be, an add-on. So the question it leaves us with here is this simple question. Is Jesus the center of our lives? If he's not the center, what is? What is of first importance? Is it that he'll grant us success in our careers or satisfaction and fulfillment in our relationships? Is it recognition that we want for our achievements or acceptance that we want by some social group that we desire to be included in? Is it the acquisition of more things? What is it we think we have to have in order for life to be okay? And it's not okay if we don't have it. Here in chapter 6, Jesus is saying, I've got to be the center of your lives, and I've got to be the thing that makes you tick. He's showing the necessity of divine intervention. He's telling the disciples that saving faith is ultimately not about a human choice, it's about a gracious, sovereign gift from God. He's making it clear that our condition is moral inability, and it has to be overcome by the gracious, sovereign power of our God if we're going to come to faith. The necessity of divine intervention, the difficulty of Jesus' teaching, and lastly, the essence of true faith. Look at verse 66 till the end. After this, many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. So Jesus said to the twelve, Do you want to go away as well? And Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed and have come to know that you are the holy one of God. And Jesus answered them, Did I not choose you, the twelve? And yet one of you is a devil. He spoke of Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot. For he, one of the twelve, was going to betray him. The disciples, uh the followers of verse 60, they had been offended by Jesus' teaching and his claims, his hard sayings, and this had not made it any better here. Up until his refusal to be crowned their king, to be made their king, they listened eagerly and they loved following him. They loved seeing his miracles, but now they've lost interest. Because they didn't have true faith. F.F. Bruce says it this way, and this is so clear, he says this what the people wanted, Jesus would not give. And what Jesus offered, they would not receive. To be attracted to the signs is one thing. To appreciate and embrace their inward significance is another. And it's only those who do the latter that can be counted as true disciples. I think he's right. So Jesus turns to the twelve and says, Do you want to go away as well? And, you know, we have a tendency to read that and feel like, is this Jesus despairing that these people have left him? And it's not about despair at all. It's about Jesus challenging the twelve. He's saying, Have you found these things too hard to accept also? Do you have misgivings in your hearts? And I love Peter. His response is so perfect. Lord, to whom shall we go? You've got the words of eternal life, and we believe, we've come to know that you're the Holy One of God. Don't you love Peter? Peter just says, This is what's on my mind, and he just says it. And he recognizes here, and he's saying, he's recognized there's nowhere else to go. There's no other way to be reconciled to God. Eternal life comes through you alone, Jesus. He recognizes that the essence of true faith is this: it's a commitment to follow Jesus, not based on getting what we want from him, but on getting him, the Holy One of God. False disciples here, the false disciples, they were all about following Jesus if they could get what they wanted. If they could get him to do something for them, to supply the bread, supply the fish, restore the nation of Israel, throw off Rome and restore the nation of Israel. Be our king. But here, and this is probably what's most important today, but here, Jesus distinguishes between genuine faith and what we might call transactional faith. Transactional faith. Those who have transactional faith, they may be claiming to be followers of Jesus, but they're following him because of what they want him to give them. Those who have genuine faith follow to get Jesus. It's much more dangerous if you think about it. It's so much more dangerous to be a transactional follower of Jesus than a non-follower of Jesus. It's more dangerous because transactional followers often think they are genuine followers when in fact they're not. And eventually something happens and they get disillusioned with Jesus. You're not doing what I thought following you would do for me. Let me close with an illustration that I hope will help. Some of us are old enough to remember vending machines when they only took coins, right? You couldn't put a dollar bill in a vending machine, and you certainly couldn't put a credit card in a vending machine. And sometimes with a vending machine, you would walk up to it and you would put your quarter in it and you put it in the little slot, and nothing happened. You remember that? Nothing happened. And why was it? Because although the coin went in, it didn't drop all the way to the bottom. It stopped part way. Since it didn't go all the way to the bottom, it didn't trigger what the machine was designed to do. You didn't get the product that you expected to get. So what did you do? You banged on the machine, didn't you? Remember those days? For some that are that were claiming to be followers of Jesus, it can be that way. They can end up being transactional followers. They can say, I believe. I sent to most, uh I sent to most of Jesus' teachings, maybe not all of them, but most of them, at least in a general way. I follow him, I go to church, but I really don't think following him has made much difference in my life. And my life certainly isn't going the way I think it should. The reality is the coins never dropped. Maybe that's you this morning. If it is, we're glad that you're here. Maybe you've never come to grips with the magnitude of Jesus' claims and with the cost of following him. If that's you, maybe today, my prayer would be today. Maybe this day would be the day you come to grips with his claims and what he does offer salvation through trust in him, reconciliation to the God of the universe through him. If he really is the holy one of God, if he really is the living bread that's sent from heaven by the Father as he claims, then he is of ultimate importance in our lives. And if he is not, he is of no importance. Because the essence of true faith means we accept Jesus on his terms, entirely on his terms, and we commit ourselves to following him, not based on getting what we want in life from him, but on getting him and getting what he offers through trust in his blood. Let's pray together. It's challenged us also to fully accept that we can't save ourselves. We have to have your divine intervention in our hearts through your Spirit. We have to receive the gift of saving faith from you. We ask, Lord, that if there are those here this morning who have not come to a saving knowledge of Jesus yet and are still living in a transactional relationship, we ask that this would be the day, Lord, where you open their eyes and change their hearts just as you've done for us. We ask that you would press these great truths that we've studied deep into our hearts, that we as a people might be overwhelmed afresh with all that you've done for us through Christ and in us through your Spirit. We ask that you would evoke from our hearts worship and thanksgiving that flows from our lives, not just here on Sunday morning for these few hours, but throughout the week, Lord, wherever you take us, in our homes and communities and relationships and workplaces. And we ask all of this in Christ's name. Amen.