LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 1971, Page 93

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EVENING DEVOTIONS 93

promise, “Seek and ye shall find!” We’re sure to find
Him also today, even here in our convention, especially
at this evening hour, if we will but seek Him, as, I pray,
we are doing right now. But we are not going to find
the Jesus we are looking for if we seek Him to endorse
our own ideas of Him or of God or of God’s Word. If
we think that He is going to make us comfortable with
what we are and give us a pat on the back for the ardor
of our seeking and our willingness to go to great lengths,
even to mustering this last effort at the end of a tiring
and difficult day, we’re always due for the shock of our
religious lives. ‘“You’re not seeking Me to find Me!
You’re seeking Me only for what you can get out of
Me!” we’re going to hear if we still have ears for hear-
ing what He says. “I am the Bread of life. There is no
other way to live except to eat My flesh and drink My
blood. Only so will you abide in Me and I in you. Any
other kind of eating, even the eating of the manna in
the wilderness, ends in death. He who eats Me as the
Bread come down from heaven shall live.” And here’s
where it starts getting rough, just as rough for us as
for those people back there. Traditions, past history,
certainty of being the children of God as Israel or as the
church, purity of doctrine as they had it from the Old
Testament and we from the New Testament, great reso-
lutions and necessary resolutions — all of it ends in
death. Jesus Christ alone, sent of the Father and living
always in the Father, is the One whom we must eat.
Then we shall live for no other reason than because
of Him. “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?”
And if it doesn’t cause some such reaction in us, it is
only because we do not understand it. We cannot and
we will not listen to it on our own. We will come to
Jesus on these His terms only if it is granted to us by
the Father.

It was after this final judgment upon men and what
they are in relation to Jesus that many of His disciples
drew back and no longer went about with Him. For our
own sakes we need to note that these were disciples
who drew back, not the common crowd, the miracle
seekers, the bread-king advocates who looked only for
full stomachs. Disciples are learners. Disciples of Jesus
are learners of Jesus. They always draw back when
they are no longer willing to be learners of Jesus by
humbly continuing in His Word, but seek to be masters
of Jesus and stalwart defenders of God’s Truth as they
know it, and then trying to press Jesus Himself into
their mold to make Him come out on their terms. What,
do you suppose, they went back to? To the practice
of their religion as it was all formulated and prescribed
for them by their religious leaders, to the worship of
God as the God of Israel who fed their fathers in the
wilderness through Moses, to their sacrifices in the tem-
ple and the keeping of their feast and fast days, to their
assured standing before God by virtue of their circum-
cision and their descent from Abraham. And all of it
was good and proper and perfectly correct. But simple
80odness and propriety and correctness end in death
as long as they are a drawing back from Jesus as the
Bread from heaven, from Jesus who alone is the Way,

the Truth, and the Life through whom, and in no other
way, we come to the Father.

As Jesus was compelled to watch many of His disci-
ples draw back because they no longer wanted to go
about with Him, He was so deeply moved by this whole-
sale departure that He turned to the Twelve and asked:

Will You Also Go Away?

And you cannot help but wonder if He didn’t see
here a preview of His aloneness on Calvary when the
whole purpose of His being and His coming was called
into question. When He turned to the Twelve, He was
turning to the church of all time, because they were the
church, always representative of the church, even the
foundation of the church, without whom and apart
from whom we are not and cannot be the church. If
we are not willing to submit to this soul-searching ques-
tion of this same Jesus, it is only because we are disci-
ples who have already drawn back and no longer are
willing to go about with Him. And if we are convinced
that we have no need of it, we are not willing to see the
precariousness of our being disciples of Jesus Christ
as He sees it, nor do we take seriously the strong pull
exerted upon us by every manner and means to make
us draw back and no longer go about with Jesus.

The only answer that we can give without being
presumptuous or resting in a security that we do not
have as church is the one framed for us by the early
church through Peter: “Lord, to whom shall we go?
Thou hast the words of eternal life; and we have be-
lieved, and have come to know, that You are the Holy
One of God.” If we still think that there are other
options open to us so that Jesus is not fully Lord and
Lord alone, we are bound to draw back from Him, if,
indeed, we have not already drawn back. If we look
to other words, even our own best words, as able and
needed to make us and keep us church, we may have
a semblance of life, but we do not have that eternal life
which only Christ’s words are able to give. And if we
are not fully committed in faith and knowledge to Jesus
as the Christ, the Son of the Blessed, the Holy One of
God who alone can make us holy and acceptable to the
Father, then we are operating with no more than our
Own assumptions as to what makes the church and us
disciples of Jesus Christ, because we still have some
other to whom we think we can go.

Our Lord accepted Peter’s response, and He will also
accept ours if it is the same as Peter’s. But our Lord
accepts no response, neither Peter’s nor ours, without
reservation. Men who join in making such a response
can still become Judases, chosen by the Lord, but still
ending up betraying the Lord. And all the others, and
Peter especially, did not always see themselves under
this question of the Lord and in their answer of faith
that they here gave Him. One dark night in Geth-
semane, it is written of them that they all forsook Jesus
and fled, while Peter went beyond and three times
denied even knowing Jesus, to say nothing of believing
in Him and knowing Him as the Holy One of God. And
if we think that that is a possibility that is not open

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