17B18.    2 Kings 4:42-44.   “Elisha insisted, ‘Give it to the people to eat.’  For thus says the Lord, ‘They shall eat and there shall be some left over.’” The Lord provides abundantly.  Spiritually, if we try to live on our own efforts with little or no support from God, we will starve to death.

John 6:1-15.  “Jesus went across the Sea of Galilee.  A large crowd followed him, because they saw the signs he was performing on the sick.”  He feeds them all, five thousand men plus at least as many women and children, from five barley loaves and two fish.  “When they had had their fill, he said to his disciples, ‘Gather the fragments left over, so that nothing will be wasted.’  So they collected them, and filled twelve wicker baskets with fragment from the five barley loaves that had been more than they could eat.”  The power of God is infinite and he is always ready and willing to use it out of love for use.  However he wants nothing to be wasted, never using his power uselessly as just a way of flexing his divine muscles. He wants to see results or fruit that will benefit us eternally.  The people wanted to make him an earthly king but he wanted them to get to heaven where he would be their eternal king.  He had given them the bread of this world so that they would put their faith in him so to seek the spiritual life on earth that would give them a life in heaven.  He filled their stomachs for a day so to fill their souls for all eternity.

Ephesians 4:1-6.  If the bread of our spiritual life is God, then we are bound to one another in the one God who is the same source of spiritual life, common to all who find life from Him.  He gives us the love to bear with one another, since we all find that love in the “one God and Father of all.”  We are made one united by all going to the same table to feed our spiritual lives, Jesus, who keeps us in communion with him by sharing his divine life with us.  In Romans 12:4-5 Paul wrote: “For as in one body we have many parts, and all the parts do not have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ and individually parts of one another.”  In Ephesians 4:15-16 Paul writes: “Rather, living the truth in love, we should grow in every way into him who is the head, Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, with the proper functioning of each part, brings about the body’s growth and builds itself up in love.”  In Colossians 1:17 Paul wrote: “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”  We receive him Body and Blood so to have him as the source of the body’s life, the unity that is the Church, over which he is the head.