John chapter 6, we now have finished the feeding of the 5,000, and Jesus has now moved across the lake again with his disciples. He came to them in the midst of a tempest and a storm walking upon the water, and they took him into the craft, into the boat, and were immediately on the other side, and the storm was stilled. And now it is the next day, and those who had gathered there to find Jesus and to receive the blessing of his feeding of them and the miracle of the feeding of the 5,000, and remember those were just heads of household that were counted. So in all likelihood it was many more than 5,000, most likely at least double that, unless they also had their children in tow. And so he fed most likely many more than 5,000, only the men were counted. And so we return now, John chapter 6, John chapter 6, verse 25. When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, Rabbi, when did you come here, Jesus answered them, truly, truly I say to you, you are seeking me not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not labor for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of man will give to you. For own him, God the Father has set his seal. May the Lord add his blessing to the reading and the hearing of his Word. Seeking after God. Looking after God, we hear much today of seeker services. We hear much of those who are looking for the Lord. We'll even hear some who in desperation will say, I'm just looking for God, but I cannot find him. Some will go to the desert, some to the mountain top, some to the woods, some to the sea, all looking for God. There was a cosmonaut who was launched into space and when he came back, he said that he looked out of his window and he didn't see God in space. I had a professor once told me that if he had simply opened the door and stepped outside, he probably would have seen him much quicker than he imagined. Looking for God, does anyone know where God is hiding? Does anyone know where God has gone that we have to search so hard and so far and so wide to find him? Why is it that God is so difficult to discover? Why do we need to employ such ingenious and innovative means to help people find the lost God? He must be lost because everybody all over the place is looking for him. And they just can't find him. Where is God? When I was little, on Easter, we used to go to my grandmother's house and we would hide Easter eggs. Some of you may have had the same practice growing up or maybe you still do and when I was very young, the eggs were hidden in places that were usually fairly obvious. My cousin would go outside or he was actually adopted by her, so he was my uncle legally, would go outside and he would place eggs around trees right on the ground next to the tree, put them in the mailbox, put them in obvious places wherever they might be, and then the children would go out with their baskets and they would go around and you could see them all. You could count them each one and know where all of them were. You pick them all up and you come in and you have just made some great discoveries. And if there was a sly hider of eggs, I didn't know exactly how to phrase that, what do you call one who hides eggs, an egg hider, I guess. If there was one who wanted to be particularly sly, they would put it up high in the branch or they would hide it under the pine needles or pine straws it were, or they would put it somewhere that you couldn't see it like perhaps not on the front bumper of the car. And what would be the charge when there was one egg missing? Well, that's not fair, it didn't put it where I could see it, it's not fair. Well, the whole point is to go out and to discover and to find, and yet if someone plays a little trick, well, we lay the charge, well it wasn't fair, I couldn't see it was obvious. Is that a charge we would lay against the Lord? Do we think that somehow through sleight of hand or through some sort of mysterious cloaking of his intention that God has somehow concealed himself in a way that's just not fair? It's just not fair that we can't find God. Where did he go? That was the very question that they asked. The people on the opposite side of the lake, on the east side of the lake, woke up in the morning and they knew there'd only been one boat and the disciples they saw leave but Jesus they saw go to the mountain. And yet as they woke up and the sun was shining and they rose and they began to search for Christ for Jesus, they couldn't find him. So it occurred to him he must have left somehow, they were puzzled by this because there was only the one boat and it had left. Now there were boats that came in from Tiberius and we're not sure if those were blown in by the storm that night before or if they had heard or known that there was a massive people on the east side who would need to get back home and so this would be either an opportunity to go and take their friends home or it would be an opportunity to make a little money and ferry people back across. We're not sure what the motivations are but we are told that there were boats and the other accounts where the boats moved in to the side of the shore and the people boarded and those boats took them back across to where Jesus had landed. And when they got there they asked Jesus when did you come here? When was it that you arrived now in the original rendering of this? That question when did you come here really has two prongs? It is asking literally when did you come but it also is a how did you get here? There's an implication here of how did all this happen? When did you come meaning when and how did you arrive? You notice Jesus' answer? He doesn't give them one. He doesn't say to them how he arrives. He immediately goes to their motivation for seeking. He goes to the motivations of the seeker, Augustine of Hippo, said this, one of our church fathers. Val has formed us for thyself and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in the. Man was created in God's image and it's been described as a whole in his heart that is God's size that can only be filled by God. It's been expressed in many different ways but we are spiritual in our nature. We are created in his image and it is certainly true that we can never be complete in our persons without God. It is not possible for us to be completely fulfilled without the Lord. And so we spend our lives on a quest for satisfaction, for the attainment of some sort of peace and we'll pursue it through a number of different ways. There are a number of people who would pursue it materially. There are some people who would pursue it through spiritual seeking but do they seek after the one true God? All men are searching for meaning in their life but most form their own meaning by synthesizing some religious experience with their own preferred lifestyle. They'll decide what it is that they like in life and then they will try to paint that with religion. What kind of music they like? What sort of message they prefer here? Whatever it might be, what colors they like in a church? Their architecture really is in their taste and then they will seek to find a place that fits their likings and then paint it with religion. How do you paint it with religion? You get a pulpit and you have a pastor and you have him carry the Bible and you sing traditional songs. And so there you have Christianized your architecture of spiritual expression. That has been molded and shaped by the Lord in that. Do all men seek after God? The scripture tells us plainly no, Romans 3, 10 and 11. None is righteous, no not one, no one understands, no one seeks for God. Not in their natural state, they do not seek for God. First Corinthians 2, 14, I've read it many times, I'll read it again because it speaks directly to the spiritual ability, the spiritual vision of man who would seek for God. Now we have not received the Spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. It is when the Spirit of God and dwells man that he is able to understand the truths that are presented from the scriptures. Still then, the reading and the preaching of the Word of God does not satisfy the seeker who is looking for peace and joy and satisfaction in life. All men seek, not all men seek the living God. What is it then that they seek? Personal progress, personal gain, reputation, money, healing, happiness, they seek, but they will not find. The people start looking for Jesus and Jesus asks them this question. I say to you, you're seeking me not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves, a statement, not a question, rather, imagine we have a visitor who comes into the church and as you rise to greet them at the end of the service, you look at them and go, you didn't come here because you were interested in the things of God. You came because you knew we had a fellowship dinner afterwards and you heard that we served good food. That's sort of the confrontation that Jesus is giving them. You would have imagined in our contemporary society if someone came and they were pursuing Jesus, he went to one side of the lake and they walked ten miles to go around. They have a huge potluck, feed five thousand with bread and fish, and then Jesus goes back across the lake and they get up early in the morning and go to all the trouble to go where Jesus is and they say, well, how in the world did you get over here? Jesus said, you're not looking for me because you're interested in me. You're interested in the bread that I gave you yesterday. What a course and confrontational greeting. We would say that is and yet Jesus, who is the knower and the seer of all hearts, knows exactly what it is that they were looking for. Jesus points out that they had missed the signs and they were after the food. He says, you didn't come because you saw the signs. You came because you wanted the food. What is it that we want? Do we want money or healing? Do we want Christ? Do we want our family to be whole and we want it to be well? We want our marriage to be one that is focused on godly principles and we want our children to grow up with some sense of morality that we believe that a church can give them. Do we just want some psychological peace in our life because our minds are so twisted and contorted and bent around the issues of life that we are just struggling each and every day and we want perhaps if we keep going every Sunday, he'll say something that will give me some resolution to the conflicts in my life or are we seeking Jesus because we know who He is. There are three things and I need to give credit to James Montgomery Boyce. This was in a message preached by him. He pointed out three motivations for people who seek. The first one is that they seek Jesus out of a love for self, not out of a love for Christ. They seek Jesus out of a love for self. How is it that you would seek Jesus out of a love for yourself? Remember it was just the day before that those had been with Christ and He had fed them bread and He had fed them fish. Their seeking was based on the fact that Jesus had given them food and He had provided for their physical well-being but were they seeking because they had spiritual need? Johannes Eckert said this. If we seek God for our own good and profit, we are not seeking God. The motivation of the seeker is one that has to be questioned. Our own motivation has to be questioned. What is it that we're looking for? Are we looking for God? Are we looking for something based upon our own needs? Patrick Morley said this. There's a God we want and there is a God who is and they are not the same God. The turning point comes when we stop seeking the God we want and start seeking the God who is and the great writer, A.W. Tozer, the great theologian, adds this much of our difficulty as seeking Christians stems from our own unwillingness to take God as He is and adjust our lives accordingly. We insist upon trying to modify Him and bring Him nearer to our own image. There are those who would seek God because of their own issue because of their own desires. There's a qualitative difference between seeking Christ because of His majesty and His glory and because of our own hunger for significance. Does Jesus satisfy people's needs? Of course He does. Can we rightly say the answer to all of your problems is found in the scriptures? Of course we can. Can we say to people, if you are hurt and you are anxious and you are lonely, that there is a friend that sticks closer to a brother, there is a Christ who understands there is one who has gone through trials and tribulations and temptations just as you have, there is one who will love you as no other does, yes. Of course all of these things are true but can we say to someone, if that's your motivation is to have a personal power, if it is your motivation because no one in your life understands your issues and you just need a sympathetic ear is that the Christ of the Bible, the Christ of the Bible is a mediator between God and man. He is the one who has brought peace between God and between man. He is the one who stands for us in our stead and has taken the curse of sin upon himself and has died our death thousands of times in that one time on the cross, one death for thousands of people, millions of people. Is that the Christ, in view, when the seeker comes, a change in perspective, the classic passage as far as I can understand it is found in Job. In Job he has been, everything has been stripped away from him. He has lost his home, he has lost his children, he has lost his livestock, his position, his reputation, his wife certainly doesn't understand. She keeps saying there is something wrong and you need to fix it. His friends, his religious advisors, the three pastors and the youth guy they come and they don't really help him out too much. They say some things that are true but they are missing the point as well. And finally Job asked God, why, why, I've lived a good life, I've been a righteous man, I don't curse and swear, I don't do all those things that you tell me not to do, why is all this happening, beginning at verse 38, Job receives an answer from God, says, the Lord answered Job out of a whirlwind, who is this, that is darkening, that darkens counsel by words without knowledge, he tells him to dress for action like a man and God is going to question him. And then we go through a series of verses in fact chapters where God recounts for him his creative power and his providence, his providential control of all creation, his holding all things together, his holding the sea in its place, his causing the mountain to be raised up, his raising of the sun to go across the sky and to set the tides that come in and out, the bringing into life through the birth of a goat from a mayor, is that a goat mayor? He answered, of course, a baby horse from a mayor of all of these things that only God can do, the shaking to the foundations of the earth and Job then answers the Lord in chapter 40. He answered the Lord and said, behold, I am of small account. What shall I answer you? I lay my hand on my mouth. He say, and basically hush my mouth. I spoke once, but I'll never speak again. Why? Because he sees God. Because he sees the Creator. Because he sees God for who he is and all of his issues of life, the loss of his home and the loss of his family, all of it melt away and he goes, I am so small as I look at the living God, I am so unimportant, I am so small that I will not even speak. There is nothing that I can say. Beginning with the self and our search for God, instead of beginning with a view of the Lord, Andrew Murray says, self is the root, the branches, the tree of all the evil of our fallen state and Martin Luther and almost a humorous statement, the great reformer said I am more afraid of my own heart than I am of the Pope and of all his cardinals because I have within me the great Pope, self. Getting past ourselves will be our greatest challenge in seeking God. Because he is the Comforter, because he does provide, because he has loved us with a never lasting love because he has died for us on the cross and because of all of that, it is so easy for us to view his work for us and his love for us in such a way as to take it into ourselves but never seek Christ. Instead we just have all that the world cannot provide us perfectly but God is so much more, he gives so much more. The miracle must never be separated from the Word. Jesus provided them a sign. They saw the sign but they took the sign and they forgot the Savior. Who is it that told us the miracle must never be separated from the Word? It was John Calvin. He said that as you look at the miracle, as you look at the feeding of the 5,000, as you look at the bread, as you look at the provision of God in your life, as you look at the miracle of childbirth, you can't become so enraptured with God's provision that you fail to look at the provider. For it is God who provided Jesus told them he said, truly I say to you, you're seeking me because you saw signs, because you were full of the love, not because you saw signs but because you had your fill of the lobes. So the first error is that they were concerned not with recognizing the Messiah. They weren't looking for the kingdom of God. They were looking for someone to provide for their needs. That needs. That requests and they wanted someone to provide it. They weren't interested in Jesus telling them about the kingdom of God. They were interested in Him doing what they wanted Him to do. Provide. Give us what we need. Fill our stomachs with bread because the physical is our pressing need. We might add to that for we have very little physical want. Our emotional need is our pressing need. And so Jesus, fulfill my emotional need but minister to us from the Word of God, demonstrate and show forth your kingdom. Why do we want to talk about these things? We have needs. The second error that our minds are set on material things. First commandment given to us is that we should have no other gods before Him. We should make no graven images. There should be no gods except God, the Almighty. And yet we know through the scriptures that it is so easy for us to slide other priorities and other issues in place of God and of serving Him. We get stuck on material things, things that are passing from this life. We get stuck on these issues of life and we forget that it is God that provides all that is needful and necessary. Proverbs, chapter 30 verses 8 and 9, give me neither poverty nor riches, feed me with food that is needful for me, lest I be full and deny you and say, who was the Lord or lest I be poor and steel and profane the name of my God? Aiken, one of the Israelites who came out of the wilderness as Joshua was leading the men and they conquered Jericho, the first city. They were told to consecrate and destroy everything and to give it all into the Lord as a sacrifice. But Aiken saw some clothes from Babylon that he liked and he saw some silver and he saw a gold bar and he felt this would be a great opportunity to really set my family up for the future. And he looked around and he said, we have been wandering around in the wilderness and homeless and nowhere to go, but I have here an opportunity. When I will just take these, it is no big loss, I will pull them into my tent and who will know? It is an opportunity to invest in the future. But in Joshua chapter 7, right after he did this secretly, the Israelites went out and they went out into battle against the city of A.I. And they were routed in that battle and 36 died in that battle. There were casualties who were not associated with at least in time and in space with the sin of A.I. And they died because of A.I.'s sin. And the people were turned back and the whole of the Hebrew nation became discouraged because they couldn't understand why God had shown them such tremendous power and now they were failing and they didn't know why until they found that it was the sin of Aiken. The sin of his materialistic hunger, his desire to rely upon himself and his own hands to not trust the God who provided manna and delivered them Jericho but instead to accumulate for himself the issues of life. Saul in the same way, Saul was anointed king and he was to go out and destroy all of God's enemies. But Saul spared King Agag. He spared him and he spared not only him but the best of his sheep and his oxen and his calves and his lamb and were told everything that was good. He spared. And when Samuel came and confronted him with this gathering of riches for himself to establish his own kingdom, he said, oh, I did that because I was planning to consecrate to the Lord what was the best of the catch. I'm afraid that the Lord who is the knower of hearts knows that that wasn't true. And so he says in chapter 15, verse 17, Samuel says to him, though you were little in your own eyes, are you not the head of the tribes of Israel, the Lord anointed you, King over Israel. His quest for material gain was petty compared to the calling in the mission of God. His quest was petty and it put the Lord to the test, is seeking and grabbing after things for himself, materialism, though we may own much, we must possess nothing. It's the possession of it, the declaring that it's mine. We may own plenty but possessing it, the drawing it in and nesting it in our heart there is where the danger comes. Because the Lord will not share the abode of your heart with anything. And so owning things and using them according to God's plan and his desire is God who provides. But when we begin to possess them as our own, as if they belong in our hands as our very own, rather than belonging to the Lord, that's when we begin to lose our focus and to stop seeking after God. Oh, we appreciate God's provision and we won't forget that. In fact, anytime He provides, we'll be sure to give thanks, but when we begin to possess the things of this world, then it is to this world that we belong. Again, A.W. Tozer, the blessed ones who possess the kingdom are they who have reputedated every external thing and rooted out all sense of possessing. This idea of possessing, of owning, of making it mine will destroy the soul. The third error was that they came with a half-hearted seeking. The third error was that they came with just a half-heartedness. We know this because later on, we're told that when Jesus did not perform for them, when He didn't provide for them and when He gave them a hard seeing about Himself, they left. They just left. All of that roaming around and all of that catching the ride and all of that seeking after Jesus, when He didn't provide the bread and when He told them, I am the bread of life, I am the true bread, which He does later. We're told that they all went away to their own homes. After all, it was probably already almost lunchtime and they had missed breakfast. If Jesus wasn't going to provide, well, then we'll just go somewhere else. A half-hearted seeking. A half-hearted looking for Him. They didn't get immediate and full satisfaction so they left. They did the Jesus thing, but it just wasn't fulfilling. And so we are to seek God in Christ. A proper approach, a proper seeking can be framed this way. You seek God, but you seek Him in Christ, John 146. Jesus said, I am the way and the truth and the life, and no one comes to the Father except by me. We seek God in Christ who is found in the Scriptures. John tells us these things are written that you may know and have eternal life. The Word of God was left to show us Christ. A second thing, the first being the Bible, the second is prayer. You must come to Him yourself. You must ask of God yourself, not by proxy. You can't ask someone else to pray for your salvation. You can't ask someone else to do something to save you. You can't just give your money or mail your check-in to some charity or to some church or anything like that. You can't simply say, I hold a membership at the church, but yet remain uninterested in the things of God. None of these things will do what that which is needed to save your soul, but through prayer. We are coming to the Lord to make confession of sin, for asking, for forgiveness, and to plead for His mercy based on the grace of Jesus Christ we are saved. And then finally, surrender, coming with the whole heart, a commitment, a surrender and a commitment in Matthew 5.6 and the Beatitudes were told blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Doesn't this really get at the root of it? What is it that you hunger and you thirst for? What is it that your mind is preoccupied with? What is it that your agenda would betray is the passion of your heart? What is it that you are driving towards and driving for? Are you forcing the things in life? Are you forcing the issues in life? Are you not content unless it is going to be the way you need it to be? What of the provision of God? There's a kind of hunger and a starving that only those who are without and in need can know. No one knows the value of a piece of bread like a man who has been starving for days. No one knows the value of a drink of water like one who has wandered in the desert for days with no drink. And no one can know what it means to hunger and thirst for righteousness except one who spirit has been stirred by the spirit of God to desire the things of God and to seek after God because of who God is. Because of who God is. In the Psalms as you read through those, don't we see over and over again. The psalmist begins with issues of life. He begins with concerns whether it's his own privation or enemies that are pursuing him. And then where he comes and finds his peace is not with God necessarily dashing the enemies to pieces. There's the prayer for that. But he comes to resolution by the end of the prayer because he sees God. And he proclaims who God is and God's magnificence and God's worth. And you know why that brings us peace? Because it takes us from this life and sets our vision on that which is eternal. There is no peace here. Our destiny is the grave but we will rise from death to life everlasting if we are in Christ. There is no fix for this life. We can pursue, we can attain, we can clamor, we can pull in and we can try to possess all we want but we will go to the grave without it. We will go to the grave and those that gather at our grave side within a generation, our grave will not be visited that often a generation later. We will be a name on a family tree and so concern over self will not last. The building up of ourselves will not last. The acquisition of wealth and material prosperity will not last. None of these things will last and so we must take our focus and set it on that which is eternal. Without that there is no hope at all. So the true seeker is one who comes seeking God because he is God. Not for what he can do but because he is God. That is the true seeker. The kind of hunger that can only the starving can know is satisfied through our approaching Christ through the scriptures, through prayer and through surrender. That was what Jesus was communicating to them. He said, you did not come to me because of the signs which pointed to the kingdom. You came to fill your belly. Let's ask ourselves the same question. We're here. That's true enough. But why are we here? We come here this morning because we know that we desire to be in the face of God. We desire to be seen by God. We desire to be known by God and because he is God we desire to sing glory and praise to his name. Or are we here for something else? When God has spoken do we leave disappointed because something else did not occur? Or is it more than sufficient that our God has spoken to us today? What kind of seeker are we? What is it that we're looking for? God or something else? Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, for the salvation of our souls we pray and give thanks. Father we ask that you would help us to see rightly that we might seek rightly that when we come to Christ Father that we would see our Lord and that we would recognize our citizenship in your kingdom. And just as Abraham had to learn with his own son Isaac that that which we love most may be required of us not simply as a test of faith but because we will not be allowed to put anything ahead of the one true God. And so Father we pray that you would help us to these ends for we are a weak people. We are a weak people so easily distracted and pulled aside. Father we pray that you would draw us near, show us yourself and we pray Father that you would bless us. Now as we leave to serve in Jesus' name, Amen.