Our own George Green was telling me just this week about how, when he used to work with youth some years ago, he always got assigned to supervise the older boys at youth camp. Apparently, George had gotten the reputation of being the one who, if called upon, could sit down on the older boys if they needing sitting on.

One year at camp, George said he walked in on some of these older Cliff Temple boys playing poker in the bunk house, for money! Among the group were both of Dr. Darold Morgan’s sons. Dr. Morgan, for those who don’t know, was the pastor here for several years in the late 60’s, early 70’s.

Many of us have been members of churches at one time or another where a seat at the poker table at youth camp would earn you a seat on an early bus home as punishment. But, these boys were more fortunate. They were members of Cliff Temple, if you know what I mean! George quickly surveyed the scene and decided upon an ingenious strategy for dealing with it. Instead of sitting down on the boys for such a grievous public display of un-Baptist behavior, he asked if he could sit down with them. Kind of like, “the word became flesh and asked to be dealt a hand”!

Taking a seat at the table, he asked, “You boys think you know something about poker?” In about forty-five minutes, he had all their money and all they had to show for the lesson were long faces of disbelief. Then, George did the best thing. He took their money, put it in the middle of the table and said, “You boys divide this up evenly among yourselves. But, the next time you think about gambling with your money, remember how it felt to lose today.”

George could have sat on them, figuratively and literally. He could have scolded them and even punished them by humiliating them in front of all the other youth. They probably wouldn’t have ever forgotten it. They probably also would have been more inclined to play poker again. There’s just something about the threat of getting caught and punished that weakens the flesh to sin!

Instead, George gave them a lesson they’d take with them from that day forward, especially when they were tempted to lose their money for stupid reasons. A lesson that was stronger than any moral straight jacket on the outside because it was a value learned from within. George didn’t sit down on them, he sat down with them, and gave them a view of losing, and winning, from the inside out.

There would come a time when Jesus would, literally, sit down at the table with his disciples and share a final meal before his enemies dealt what they believed would be their final hand, a meal that would demonstrate the significance of what he was about to do when he sacrificed his flesh and blood on the cross. Before that long night, he spoke the words we have read this morning as John recorded them for us. Words that give us insight beforehand of what his flesh and blood and sacrifice would mean later. A word of warning, they are graphic words.

After preaching on the adulterous affair between David and Bathsheba recently, someone asked me what version of the scripture I was reading that day. They were a little worried that I had perhaps chosen a loser paraphrase of scripture than was really appropriate for public reading. Well, just for the record, the words of scripture we read virtually every Sunday, including on Bathsheba day, were from The New Revised Standard Version, a legitimate translation, not just a modern paraphrase, of scripture’s graphic record of real life. This morning is no exception. Jesus said, “‘Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me.’”

Jesus, thank God, kind of like George with the poker-playing youth that day, was not interested in imposing a religious system on us that restricted our behavior according to some moral standard that people presume would win them favor with God. Jesus was interested exclusively on what was happening within us, and how we were living from the inside out. Because, if you are not living from the inside out, with true life and hope springing from within, then whatever you are doing is not living.

It is what the Lord’s Supper demonstrates every time we take it, that true life is what happens when we receive the True Life within ourselves, consume it whole, eat and drink the bread of heaven into our souls, just like we consume our daily bread into our bodies. The only difference is that our daily bread passes on through. Living bread comes to stay and nourish permanently. “‘My flesh is true food and my blood is true drink,’” Jesus said.

True followers of Jesus, true Christians, are defined by what is happening from the inside out, not the other way around. It is what is at their core, at the center of their spiritual existence, around which all else gravitates, that gives them their identity, no matter what happens around them.

Pluto got demoted this week, from planet to dwarf planet. Frankly, I didn’t even know until this week that there was such a thing as a dwarf planet. But, leading astronomers who determine such matters have now decided to tell Pluto it can’t come to the planet banquet each year. Part of their determination was based on Pluto’s elliptical orbit. It’s not a normal planet orbit. Its orbit actually crosses the path of another planet or so. It is an amazing orbit, nonetheless. Pluto is so far away from the sun that, in the seventy-six years since it was first discovered by a Kansas farm boy in 1930, it has completed less than thirty percent of one orbit. In other words, it takes Pluto longer to orbit the sun than America has been a nation. Now, after only one-third orbit, Pluto is no longer a planet, as humans define them.

I just wonder. Has anyone bothered to tell the sun? If they did, would it change anything? No matter what we call Pluto, nothing has changed the power at the center of our physical universe. Pluto could spin off into outer space never to be seen again, and the sun wouldn’t care. That’s because the sun’s power comes from within, not from without. Its significance in the universe is not determined by what orbits around it.

How about us? Are our lives more shaped by what’s happening within, or what’s going on around us?

Jesus made us a very specific promise. He said, “‘Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.’” He promised a source of life within that, unlike the daily bread for which we work and slave in ever-more sophisticated, complicated and stressful ways, the life he gave would never need replenishing. Like the sun, it’s a life whose power comes from within, not from without. Like the sun, I don’t have to completely understand it to accept it and benefit from it.

Again, how about us? Is our life more defined by what orbits around us, or by some mysterious, sacred and inexplicable spiritual power from within.

Some years ago, a pastor friend of mine told me how he had decided to respond to people who asked him how he decorated his Christmas tree every year. It feels good just to think about Christmas, doesn’t it? It just feels cooler saying the word! Of course, for many of us men, it we wanted to be honest we’d have to say that we didn’t decorate the tree, our wives did. But, this friend said that the next time anyone asked him how he decorated his Christmas tree, he would say that it had a trunk and branches and everything else was just decoration. He was telling this story, of course, as an analogy of how life itself, not just Christmas, can easily become more about the things we use to decorate ourselves and not the stuff that’s at the center, the trunk that sustains.

What is your life about, what’s at the center or what you use to decorate? Are you living from the outside in or the inside out?

My Christmas-tree-pastor-friend is probably learning that lesson again now. He recently lost both his church and his marriage because he decided some other man’s wife was what he really needed to make him happy instead of the wife he already had. Just preaching it to others doesn’t make it so for anyone.

Here are some questions we might all ponder to help us decide whether we’re living from the inside out. How much do you need something new, even when you don’t need anything anymore? Do you tend to act out in negative ways toward others when you don’t get your way? Does everyone have to agree with you in order for you to be happy? Are you easily discouraged by the negative opinion of others toward you, even people who barely know or associate with you? Are you too easily swayed by the praise of others, no matter what it takes to win that praise? Is it extremely important to you for others to like you all the time so much so that is shapes the way you spend your money, your time and the way you treat people? How hard are you on yourself when you have failed, even after others you have offended are willing to forgive you? Do you more spend more time trying to prove yourself to others or express the gift God has given you to others, whether it proves anything or not? Lastly, are you better at accumulating than sharing, more concerned about what you get and keep than what you give away?

The short version: How much do we need more things and how vital is it that others behave a certain way in order for us to be happy, or think we are? The more we need things to decorate our tree and the more we need people to shape up according to our standards the more we are living from the outside in, not the inside out, as Jesus promised we could.

You might ask where I got those questions. The answer is two-fold. First, I learned them, mostly, through the painful experiences of failure that always follow living from the outside in, instead of the inside out, from making earthly manna more paramount than spiritual manna, from being more concerned about my daily bread than the eternal bread that is Christ within. Second, I learned them as honest and loving people sat down with me to help me explore them, and very little from people who sat on me when I didn’t measure up. There were times when the “sitting down” felt more like being “sat upon.” But, the only people who ever help us are those who help us ask the tough questions about ourselves and then walk with us no matter how hard the answers might be. Jesus, the flesh of God, came to dwell with us, to feel the hand we’ve been dealt first-hand, and to walk with us no matter where that walk took us. Then, beyond that, to offer himself as eternal nourishment for the journey.

Cliff Temple’s good friend, George Mason, is the pastor at our sister church across the city, Wilshire Baptist. He just returned from a mission trip his church took with Buckner Orphan Care International to Kenya. They ministered to some of the earth’s most desperate people and began to feel quite desperate themselves when they ran out of everything they’d brought to help. The day they ran out of medicine and about a third of the people left untreated, George sat up a chair and just sat down with the people, to hold their hands and to pray with them. He prayed for their hope and healing and that help would come in time. I resonated deeply with his feeling of helplessness in the face of overwhelming need. When he got back, this is what he reported to his people about the spiritual lesson he learned from the overwhelming physical depravation those people live with every day.

“Here’s the thing about things: they are always meant to be signs that point beyond themselves. But here’s the thing about us and things: we are always trying to make the things themselves the thing itself. We want bread, in other words, instead of the Bread of Life. We want pharmaceuticals instead of the Great Physician. We want eternity collapsed into time, rather than seeing time as tipping us toward eternity. When you go to the mall to make your next purchase and walk out of there feeling more validated and valuable because of the thing in the shopping bag, you have made the thing signified into the thing, and it will never satisfy you for long. When you love another person as if your whole life depends upon that love, you have made your beloved into your god and dethroned the true God, who is love. Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Moses was the first to tell us that after the children of Israel had tasted manna from heaven and wanted more. Moses said that God fed the body that way in order to give the people a taste of the Lord’s goodness, but their hunger would never be satisfied unless they ate up the commandments of God and let them be food for the soul” (George Mason, Wonder Bread, Sunday, August 27, 2006, Wilshire Baptist Church, Dallas, TX).

If, this morning, you’ve worked and slaved and manipulated and accumulated and have no joy to show for it, would you consider listening to the words of the one who came to sit with you, and live with you the hand you’ve been dealt? I’ll not promise you that all your earthly problems will be solved. I will give you the promise of Jesus, that no one who feeds upon his life will not die without having known what it means to really live.

Do you believe that?