March 20 I Tuesday

Joshua 4-6

Luke 1:1-20

“Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of His disciples.... But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His name.”  —John 20:30-31

Despite our ever growing dependence on a GPS to help navigate our way, road signs are still incredibly useful for pointing us in the right direction. But imagine upon reaching a road sign we pulled over, got out of our car and camped at the sign instead of our destination. This would completely miss the point of why the sign exists!

We may laugh at this example, but it is a good analogy of the way many of us fall into this trap spiritually. With every miracle God performed through Jesus, many of the people who witnessed them took the miracles to be an end in themselves. In John’s Gospel, he records eight of Jesus’s miracles to point people toward three truths: that Jesus is the Christ, that we might experience the life He gives and that we might receive this life by believing in Him.

After the feeding of the 5,000, Jesus and His disciples sailed to the other side of the Sea of Galilee. When they arrived the next morning, they found a crowd of people waiting for them who had experienced Jesus’s miraculous provision of bread and fish the day before. Jesus knew their hearts and said to them, “Very truly I tell you, you are looking for Me, not because you saw the signs I performed but because you ate the loaves and had your fill” (John 6:26).

The crowd had left the previous day with a free meal, but they wanted more. The miracles of Jesus had become a kind of theatre for many of them, something to observe, enjoy, admire, applaud and talk about, but they had completely missed the point of the miracle. Jesus did not provide bread merely so they could eat for a day, but to point to Him as “the Bread of Life” who would sustain them every day.

That “Life” is a central theme in John’s Gospel. Jesus says in John 10:10, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” It is not just something to be received, but to be lived in the boundless energy of the life Christ imparts to us. If we sit back, content with forgiveness and salvation, then we are camping at the sign. We can know our Bibles from front to back, but if we do not appropriate its teaching into our daily living, we are still stuck at the sign. Only by bringing Jesus into every aspect of our lives and drawing upon the unlimited resources we have in Him, will we move beyond the sign and reach our destination of abundant life found in Christ Himself. 

Prayer: Lord Jesus, may I never get stuck at the sign but move beyond to the fullness of life that Your indwelling Spirit imparts to me. Thank You, Lord, for living in me.