Bread That Keeps

"I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst." Jesus says this in the middle of an argument about food, and the argument reaches all the way back to Israel's forty years in the desert.

It begins the day before, when Jesus feeds about five thousand men on a grassy hillside with five barley loaves. The next day the crowd comes looking for Him, and He tells them plainly why they came: "Ye seek me, not because ye saw the miracles, but because ye did eat of the loaves, and were filled." When they ask Him for a sign, they suggest the one their nation already had: "Our fathers did eat manna in the desert."

So go back to that manna and look at how God gave it. It came each morning, and it would not keep. When some people saved it overnight, "it bred worms, and stank." Nobody in that generation could store up a week's supply. Deuteronomy explains why God did it that way: "he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna." He did it "that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only." Later in the same argument, Jesus says something hard about that old gift: "Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead." The manna fed them faithfully for forty years, and yet every person it fed eventually died. It kept them alive one day at a time, but it could not give them a life that lasts. Jesus offers Himself as the bread that can.

So try one small, honest thing today. Write down what you reached for first when you woke up feeling uneasy: your phone, a person, or a plan. Beside it, write how many hours it actually held you. Then read today's verse again and see what the promise is tied to: coming to Jesus and believing in Him. He has already said what happens to anyone who comes: "him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out."

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 78 is Strength and Power (2 Samuel 22:33-34).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two