"I am that bread of life"—John 6. 48.
MAN is a threefold being. He has a threefold
form of life. Paul names that threefold life
body, soul, and spirit. We do not know what
life is, but we know that life is. By certain tests
we know whether there is life in the body or not.
By certain tests we also know whether there is
intellectual life. By certain tests we likewise
may know whether there is spiritual life.
While the Bible does not ignore the physical
life, nor the intellectual life, it has very much to
do with and to say concerning the spiritual life.
Plato and Aristotle and Emerson and Bacon were
great teachers of the intellectual life. Christ was
a far greater teacher than they.
But Christ came not primarily as a teacher of
life but a feeder of life. The physical life must
be fed or it dies; the intellectual life must be fed
or it dies; the spiritual life must be fed or it dies.
Jesus said, “I am that bread of life.”
Analyze a loaf of bread, put it to, through
every laboratory test, and you find no life present.
A loaf of bread is a dead thing. The millstones
have ground the life out of it. And what the
millstones failed to do the ferment of the leaven
and the heat of the oven have done. You might
plant a thousand barrels of flour, you would grow
nothing. There is no life in bread.
But bread feeds life. You never place bread
between the lips of the dead. When life is gone
bread is of no avail. You don’t feed the dead
but the living. All the teachers and libraries in
the world cannot feed the intellectual life of an
idiot. He will peer at you out of his dead
idiotic eyes, an idiot still. You may feed the
intellectual life of one who is blind and deaf, as,
for example, Helen Keller, who became so
afflicted at the age of nineteen months, as a result
of illness. But the idiot cannot be so fed—never.
You cannot feed the dead.
The first essential, therefore, is life. Before
one can be fed he must possess life. Jesus Christ
comes first to bring life. “I am come that they
might have life.” God “breathed into his nostrils
the breath of life: and man became a living soul.”
