What if I told you that the least important part of John 6 was Jesus walking on water? What if the thing that seems most miraculous to us is actually the least meaningful to God? I don’t mean that it doesn’t matter because everything God does is filled with purpose, for His glory and a part of His work of redemption, so everything God does has meaning, but what if the moments that amaze us are just the tools He uses to engage us? So far in this chapter of John Jesus has fed a crowd of far more than 5,000 people using just 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish and then He walked across the Sea of Galilee to meet His disciples as they struggled through a wind storm. He has done the miraculous, He’s done things that we desire Him to do, things that we are praying for Him to do for us today as we call out to God for healing, provision, deliverance, favor and direction. And yet, as we read in today’s text, all these things that Jesus has done have simply been so that He could lead us into a deeper conversation. A conversation that exposes our hearts and reveals His character, a conversation that brings us to a crisis of belief, a fork in the road in which a decision must be made, will we take Jesus by force so that He can do our will for us or will we surrender ourselves to Jesus so that He can do the Father’s will in us? Jesus didn’t come so that we could make Him our king, He came to establish His Father’s Kingdom. We’d like to think those things are the same, but they are not. The difference is we don’t elect Him, we bow to Him; He doesn’t fulfill our plans, we yield to His; He doesn’t invite us into His kingdom, He conquers the kingdom we’ve been living in. Jesus came as the King, not to become the King, He came so that we could surrender to both the King and His Kingdom. In this morning’s text we find that an excited crowd went searching for Jesus, to see what He might do next, but when they found Him, He decided it was time to search their hearts. My prayer today is that we will let God search us, that we will not follow Jesus for our stomachs or try to take hold of Jesus for our kingdom, but that we will allow the One who provides to have a greater place in our hearts than the things He has provided. I pray that we will see that hunger is not something to be avoided but it is a gift that has been provided because God knows that until we are truly dissatisfied with this life we never seek the “food which endures to everlasting life”.