I love going to restaurants that serve bread before the meal.   Sometimes I enjoy the bread so much that I don’t have room left for the meal and end up taking most of it home in a go-box.

One thing about bread though, it needs something with it otherwise it’s just kinda plain and dry.  It needs butter, or honey, or sandwich meat and mayo.  Something.  By itself it just isn’t quite satisfying.

“Then Jesus said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, Moses did not give you the bread from heaven, but My Father gives you the true bread from heaven.”  John 6:32

The bread from heaven that came down in the wilderness for Israel was symbolic of the bread that was to come.  But it wasn’t that bread and couldn’t satisfy.  We read of Israel’s complaining about the manna because they became weary of it.  It wasn’t the true bread.

How often are we found trying to satisfy ourselves with something that the Father only meant to be a pointer to lead us to Jesus?  Even our spiritual disciplines, which are important and necessary, can fall into this category.  We pray and fast and read the Bible, but find that we keep looking for something to add because we just aren’t quite satisfied.  It is only when these things lead us into true communion with the living Lord that we will find contentment and satisfaction.

Jesus needs nothing added.  The true bread doesn’t need any butter.

“No one has seen God at any time.  The only begotten Son, Who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him.”  John 1:18

What more intimate place could there be than the bosom?  It is the place where the infant is comforted and nourished.  It is the place where the lover will rest his head to be near the beloved’s heart.  It is not a place appropriate for the casual acquaintance.  Only those truly known and dearly loved are welcome in the bosom.

The Son was in the bosom of the Father, receiving His love, knowing His heart and His secret counsels.  There was such an intimate communion and knowing, that He could declare the Father and make Him known to those who had never seen Him.   In the bosom of the Father, for those who will venture near enough to recline upon His holy, heavenly bosom, there is a spiritual seeing and knowing that all our study of theology and listening to sermons will never produce.  And from that place of learning Him, we too are made able to declare Him.

My church has a time of prayer before the Sunday morning service.  I have my own little spot where I go to pray.  I like to sit on the floor between two pews so I am hidden away.  Earlier this year during one of these morning prayer sessions, a lady I hadn’t seen before came into the prayer service and came and sat down on the floor right next to me.  She looked at me and smiled with a big smile.  I was a bit shocked because nobody had ever come and sat down on the floor with me.  I didn’t quite know what to say.  She broke the silence with a question – “God doesn’t like it when we sin, does He?”  In the brief interaction that followed I could tell that she had some level of mental disability.  For whatever reason, she latched onto me.   Ever since then she would walk to church in the morning from the nearby apartments and then ask me to bring her home after church.  She didn’t always act “appropriately” in our Sunday School and church service.  Sometimes she said Amen in the wrong place, or ate way too many donuts in the church kitchen before Sunday School.  Things like that.  She’s just a little bit different from the rest of us.

Last Sunday during the altar time after the service was over, I could hear her voice.  It kept getting louder, until you could surely hear it throughout the whole sanctuary.  Over and over she kept saying “Hallelujah!” with deep and loud emotion.  It wasn’t proper in our reserved little church.  I heard her one last time exclaiming “let everything that has breath praise the Lord” and then she collapsed on the floor in tears.

She was the most simple minded among us that morning, and I am convinced the most pleasing to God.