If you’ve been with us over the last number of Sundays, you might have noticed that all our Gospel readings have come from this Chapter 6 of John’s Gospel; it’s turned into a whole series on John 6!

We’ve already had at good look at some of this extraordinary teaching of Jesus in this ‘Communion’ chapter, how his disciples grumbled and argued; eating his flesh and drinking his blood, to Jewish ears, quite fantastic and even to us taking it out of context, it can all seem quite grotesque.

Now we read, “many of his disciples said, ‘This is hard teaching. Who can accept it?…From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.”

Who would be Jesus trying to convey heavenly truths to earthly men? How could they possibly understand? Yet, do we not still find his teaching hard to accept, in this intellectual, enlightened world in which we live?

Who would be Jesus?

A mother was preparing pancakes for her sons, Kevin, 5 and Ryan, 3. The boys began to argue over who would get the first pancake. Their mother saw the opportunity for a moral lesson.

“If Jesus were sitting here, he would say, ‘Let my brother have the first pancake, I can wait.’” Kevin turned to his younger brother and said, “Ryan, you be Jesus!”

Who would be Jesus? Yet, isn’t that what we are called to be? To live his life, to accept his teaching, to be him in this world of unbelief!

After many had left him, he turned to his twelve disciples and asked them, “You do not want to leave too, do you?” Although Simon Peter’s official response is “Lord, to whom shall we go? It sounds rather polite, and I think a better paraphrase is, “Lord, we’ve nowhere else to go!” I think that has a better ring of truth about it and sounds more like Peter. “We’ve nowhere else to go”!

After complicated teaching, after troubled times, after doubt and argument, when things seem bleak and life is hard, when sometimes grief seems to consume us and we have nowhere to turn, it is often in the darkest of days that, ‘Lord, we’ve nowhere else to go”. Isn’t it a good place to be when there is nowhere else to go? In the official words Simon Peter says, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you were the holy One of God.” ‘We believe and know!’

Anthony Flew is a well-known atheist and philosopher and once described two men walking through a forest. They came to a clearing where some flowers were growing up. The believer immediately pointed to them and said, “Look! There’s been a gardener here. Look at all the flowers!”

The cynic said, “There has been no gardener. Look at all the weeds!” And so the argument between the atheist and the believer goes on and on.

The man who wanted to believe in the gardener had ample evidence to support his claims, as did the man who refused to believe there was a gardener. There’s the dilemma right there!

There is a book entitled “Does God exist? The Craig-Flew Debate”, Flew being the atheist. But the most extraordinary thing about Anthony Flew is that since that story (and all his books) there was a headline that said, “Anthony Flew Accepts God”. Here is what it said, “Any halfwit can jump up and down denouncing God, but for a half-century Professor Anthony Flew has been considered probably the number one living intellectual proponent of religious scepticism and atheism”

So what happened? Admittedly Flew wouldn’t necessarily call himself a Christian, he prefers the term a “Deist”, but something, nevertheless, has happened. I think it is not dissimilar to our disciples in John 6. How on earth were these disciples ever able to ‘believe and know’, as it says in verse 69?

I am sure it is because they chose to believe and know. Being a believer is a decision-making process.

As a guest speaker at an Ivy League university, a question-time followed his address. He was asked, “How is it that, as an obviously intelligent person, you can possibly accept those Bible stories as true?” And his answer was, “Because I decided to!” The speaker began to explain his intellectual searchings and quests and all the rest, and in the end, he decided that the Bible was true. Having made that decision, he spent the following years finding arguments and debates that would buttress his beliefs. “But to be honest, I believed first”, he said. Before the questioner sat down, the speaker challenged him on why he didn’t believe. And his answer was something similar, but the other way around. He decided not to believe and since then he has been looking for things to support his nonbelief; it’s a decision-,making process

Whenever you come here to get married, or if you have recently got married here, you were asked, “Wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honour, and keep her, in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all other, keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall live? And your answer was… I WILL! (Come on, guys!)

By the time you’re getting married, your decision to marry your beautiful wife is a decision, not only of your heart, but of your mind as well. It is a very conscious decision, and when the Clergyman says “Wilt thou?” you say, “I WILL!”

It is time, when we are asked about whether or not we want to be a follower of Jesus, that we’ll decide to answer the question with a resounding, I WILL