19B21.     1 Kings 19:4-8.   Exhausted by all the difficulties he had gone through in his prophetic ministry, Elijah exclaimed, “This is enough, O lord! Take my life.”    He lied down and fell asleep but an angel touched him twice, providing him with food and drink, ordered him to eat.  Then strengthened by that food, he walked forty days and forty nights to the mountain of God, Horeb.”  God can test us to life’s limits but not without supplying us with what we need to go on.

John 6:41-51.  The Hebrews had murmured in the desert that they were being left without adequate nutrition.  Now “the Jews murmured about Jesus because he said, ‘I am the bread that came down from heaven.’”  They were being supplied with the nourishment they needed to get to heaven in the person of Jesus.  However, they did not recognize the fact that they needed that spiritual nourishment and that Jesus, who appeared to the eyes to be nothing more than an ordinary human being, was the divine nourishment the needed.  In the feeding of the five thousand Jesus gave stupendous evidence of his divinity.  With their earthly eyes all they saw was what they thought to be an earthly magician that made bread and not the God who was proclaiming that he himself was the divine bread of life that gives eternal life.  Jesus was demanding that they see beyond the earthly and ordinary framework of thinking to what was heavenly and beyond the ordinary and natural.   In claiming to be not just a natural person of this world but a divine son of God the Father, “They took offense at him.” (Matthew 13:57a)  The person of Jesus is the bread or flesh that takes away the death of this world and gives us the life of the world that never ends.  To be able to see beyond the natural to what is spiritual we need to be awakened by the movement or working of God within us.  When we lock God out, we lock ourselves in to a blindness that sees only what is physical and material.

Ephesians 4:30-5:2.  Paul writes, “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were sealed for the day of redemption.”  Paul is telling the Ephesians to be true to the grace given them by the Spirit till the day they are called to heaven.  Then he continues, “So be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love as Christ loved us” to the cross.  With the love that God pours into us, we become love ourselves as God is love, true sons and daughters in the likeness of God our Father.  When God gave us life into this world, he gave us the opportunity, the calling and the demand to grow as his children in the holiness with which he is holy.  The Holy Spirit actively enables us to mature in holiness daily.