Food that you don’t know about

FOOD THAT YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT

Jesus had been sitting beside a well talking to a very preoccupied, unhappy and unfulfilled Samaritan woman about giving her the living water of the Holy Spirit, and the words he spoke to her changed her life forever. His disciples had become hungry and had gone into the township to get something for them all to eat. They returned with some food for Jesus and offered it to him.
John 4:31. Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” So the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought him something to eat?” Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. 
Jesus didn’t say ‘My duty is to do the will of him who sent me’. He said that doing the will of the Father was the energy that sustained and strengthened him. 
Jesus carried enormous burdens of responsibility to do his Father’s loving will for other people. He also had to absorb the discouraging activity of other peoples’ negative attitudes and resistance towards him and his teaching, and he needed more than just willpower to give him the energy to fulfill these demands.

How strange that the doing of his Father’s will was what both took his energy and what gave him energy. It had to belong to a different energy system that we usually operate from. He said, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” Jesus knew full well about that food, and he lived within the energy that it gave him. It was spiritual food. It was supernatural food. It came from the heart of the Father. It was the Father’s love for him.

The way it worked was that Jesus felt energized and supported by the same energy that created the Universe. That energy never runs out. It is a loop system that feeds itself because it is eternal, not natural, even though, to Jesus it would have seemed natural, because of the perfect love that existed between himself and the Father and the Holy Spirit. This was the ‘Christ energy food’ that humanity had never known before Jesus arrived on the earth. This was the energy food of God’s love that allowed Jesus to bear the burdens of a suffering humanity.

Paul knew this source of ‘Christ energy’ to serve others and he writes to us about it.
Galatians 6:2 Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.

Paul tells us that this is what compelled and motivated his own faithful service in the Lord to the people he was sent to serve, and that includes ourselves who read and receive his inspired Word of Scripture to us.
2Corinthians 5:14 For the love of Christ compels us, because we now see things this way: that if One died for all, then all have died; and He died for all, that those who now live should live no longer for themselves, but for Him who died for them and rose again.
We need the provision of this spiritual food that nourishes our hearts and souls, as we share in the supernatural work of the doing of God’s good will to others. The powerful energy of God’s love through us to others feeds and strengthens our souls and even our bodies as well. This powerful energy of God’s love lifts the burdens of suffering and shame and guilt from other people in our world of relationship and involvement however large or small that world is. 
This is not like normal food or fast food – It is everlasting food. 

Jesus had been talking to the Jews who were crowding around him and his disciples, listening to him teach. He said to them
John 6:27 ‘Do not labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to everlasting life, which the Son of Man will give you’ 
Some in the crowd argued that Moses gave their forefathers manna, the bread from Heaven they ate in the wilderness. Jesus then said to them Moses did not give the bread from Heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is He who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world." Jesus crowned this by saying If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread that I shall give is my body (my flesh - sarx), which I shall give for the life of the world (vs.51).
His message was that the manna from Heaven that their forefathers ate didn’t last, but if they partook of him spiritually as their bread of life, they would experience everlasting life. Then later in this conversation Jesus finished by saying ‘The Spirit alone gives eternal life. Human effort (the flesh) accomplishes nothing. And the words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life’ (vs.63).

We can receive that ‘Christ energy food’ of God’s love that energises us to bear not only the burdens that we have to carry for ourselves, but also the burdens that we carry for others, in the same way that Jesus received and lived in the everlasting love of the Father.
Jesus plainly tells us that The Spirit alone gives everlasting life. Human effort accomplishes nothing, so, doing the will of the Father in completing his work of loving service to others is not an effort of the human will alone.

But when we desire to do the will of the Father, we have to engage our will somewhere and to choose to faithfully do his will as best we can. We become faithful in putting natural things in order then he gives us authority in bringing spiritual things into order – his Kingdom order. We go from faith to faith in a faith that is working by love. It is God’s will we are seeking, and it is God’s love that we are seeking to reveal, no matter how incompletely we yet see this being accomplished.
The secret of Jesus was that he lived fully in the love of the Father. Jesus completed the Father’s love to him first, by his loving gratitude for that love, then he revealed the Father’s love to those he faithfully served that were around him in his world of relationship and involvement
‘Love the lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength - and then your neighbour as yourself’.

The Holy Spirit wants to help us to live in that same love that the Father had for Jesus and also has for us. Through the grace of Jesus, we can first purposefully respond to the Father’s love for us in an act of worshipful thanksgiving. We come into his presence and receive his love, and in quietness and confidence we find our strength in that bread of his loving presence. We come to partake of a food that we did not know, the bread of life. Jesus is the gift of love to us from the Father.

We can arrange that communion with the Father purposely but doing the good will of God for others is something we may not always be able to arrange (other than in prayer – and that becomes the most powerful way of praying – by releasing the Father’s love and goodwill to all those in our world of relationship and involvement.).
The opportunity of bearing the burdens of others often tends to land on your doorstep unexpected. How many interruptions did you encounter last week that may have actually been opportunities to eat the bread of life and be nourished and strengthened, but we so often don’t see it at the time. Jesus can often seem like an interruption to our day, but He comes disguised as our everyday up and down life, waiting for us to respond to His heart of goodwill for other people. 

Jesus was ready to give words of life to that unhappy and unfulfilled woman by the well and see her life transformed. He was always ready because he had a food that his disciples did not know about. That food is ready for us to live on. It is the energy ready for us to live in. It is the constant unchanging energy of his love towards us that created all things, and that reorders all things according to his will, which he invites us to complete for him and with him wherever we are and wherever we go. His love is there as the reason that you are there.