“Eating is Believing” John 6:32-40

The old saying is “seeing is believing”. There are many things I’m told that I respond with, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” In John 20 we are told that Thomas was not with the other disciples when Jesus first visited them after He rose from the dead. When they found Thomas they told him, “We have seen the Lord.” Thomas responded, “Unless I see the nail marks in His hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe.” We have this idea that if we see something for ourselves then it will become easy to believe, but as we’ve already discussed in this study, believing takes work, it takes faith, it takes trust, it takes something far more than seeing. Even more, what about the fact that seeing is often unreliable? We’ve all thought we saw things only to later discover that what we’d seen had been different than we first believed it to be. If an event happened among us this morning, something unexpected and unplanned, chances are that many of us would recount it differently because we would see it differently. What if seeing is not believing? What if many have seen but have been unwilling to believe? In today’s text this is exactly what Jesus tells the crowd in Capernaum, the crowd that He had miraculously fed on the other side of the sea the night before. He said, “you have seen Me and still you do not believe.” This morning I want us to look closely at this passage of Scripture to search our hearts and Jesus’ words and to ask ourselves, is our faith based on what we’ve seen or what we’ve tasted? Jesus seems to teach us that seeing is not enough to create belief, that in the kingdom of God, eating is believing.