I've been reading a book called War of Words by Paul Tripp and wanted to share an excerpt with you. It's from the chapter entitled, Following the King for All the Wrong Reasons:
The blessings God gives you in your family, job, home, church, friends, and community are meant to do something for you. They are meant to point you to the deeper and fuller blessing of the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ in your life. He is life! Abundant life is not your spouse, children, house, car, possessions, job, friends, or church. Abundant life is Jesus Christ! The amazing reality is that he is ours and we are his! This is the bread worth living for. Not the bread of physical blessing, but the spiritual bread, Christ, that his gift of earthly bread represents. Some of us are only excited about Christ because we think he will deliver more physical bread. We fall into spiritual depression when he removes the physical bread so that we would hunger again for the Bread that really satisfies. Can you see beyond the physical bread to see Christ and the glories of his grace? Or do you consume the physical bread without any desire for the spiritual blessing that he gives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control?
In John 6, Jesus says, "I am the bread of life." Ask yourself this question: Which bread do I hunger for? What kind of bread do I really want to feed on? I'm not saying that physical things are of no consequence or that we should not seek to improve our lives (marriages, jobs, churches, families, etc.), but I think that we can miss the point. We too can see the miracles and miss the sign. We can rejoice over jobs given, friendships restored, homes supplied, and bills paid and fail to hunger for the spiritual blessings that physical provisions represent. We can be like the people who pursued Jesus only to keep their stomachs full. They didn't really want him as their King. They wanted him to be their Great Waiter, dedicated to keeping them physically satisfied.
Many of us come to Jesus today because we are holding onto our dream and we want Jesus to somehow help us get it. If we are honest, we would have to admit that this is all we really want from him. And if we don't get it, we are miserably disappointed.
If we are living for earthly bread and see it as our source of life, we are going to be in big trouble when we don't have it. But if we are living for spiritual bread, for a deeper communion with Jesus Christ, then our lives (with all their problems) become wonderful places to know and grow in fellowship with the One who is life. (pgs 95-96)
He goes on to say that a lot of the problems in our communication are because we are focused on the physical bread we want that others get in the way of so we respond badly. Rather we should be focused on the spiritual bread of becoming more like Christ that daily trials give us frequent opportunities to respond rightly to.
