To Whom Shall We Go?

This Sunday, we dove into John Chapter 6, the longest chapter in the entire book of John. Instead of breaking it into three neat sermons, we took it all in one sitting. This chapter wasn't meant to be divided.

A Sermon Rewritten at 1 AM

I'm going to be honest with you. I had a whole sermon ready to go. The classic feeding of the 5,000 message. Surrender what you have, and God will multiply it. I've preached it before. I know how to make it land. But sitting with this passage the night before, something shifted.

I don't know if I can preach that sermon anymore.

Not because it isn't true. But because I've seen too many people build their entire faith on the idea that God will always multiply, always calm the storm, always come through the way we want Him to. And when He doesn't? That's when faith falls apart.

Why People Are Really Walking Away

We talked about deconstruction, that word that's been floating around church culture for the last decade. A lot of leaders like to blame it on Gen Z being soft or lacking perseverance. But the real issue goes deeper than that.

People grew up hearing that if you believe hard enough and live right, everything works out. A fairy tale gospel. Then life happened. Darkness came and didn't resolve. Prayers went unanswered. And the version of God they were handed started to crack. Not because God failed, but because that version was never the full picture to begin with.

I've been on mission trips where mothers shared stories of watching soldiers take their children. Where was Jesus in that moment? All of a sudden, our happy ending, our American Disney Channel gospel doesn't really hit. I've seen it in my own life too. Seasons that didn't resolve. Prayers that went quiet. And I realized I was this close to coming up on Sunday morning and repeating the same Sunday school brainwashing that causes people to lose their faith every time a difficult season hits.

The Whole Point of John 6

Here's what hit different this week. John Chapter 6 has three major moments: the feeding of the 5,000, Jesus walking on water, and the Bread of Life teaching. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all include the miracle and the storm. But only John includes what Jesus says next, and it changes everything.

Jesus looks at the crowd and basically says: You followed me because you ate your fill. You believe in me because I calmed the storm. But that was never the point.

The point? "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry. Whoever believes in me will never be thirsty."

It's not "Jesus, give me bread." It's "Jesus, be my bread."

The God-Shaped Hole We Keep Filling Wrong

I brought up Blaise Pascal's famous idea, that we all have a God-shaped hole in our hearts that we try to fill with everything except God. Money, followers, job titles, relationships, vacations. And even when we get those things, the hunger comes back. Every time.

I asked our church to sit with a hard question: Is the problem that God hasn't answered your prayer? Or is it that we keep asking for things that don't actually satisfy?

I used my daughter as an example. She loves cooking with us. She can crack eggs, scramble them, season them. She's great. But then she grabs a sharp knife and a potato and says, "I want to cut." And when I tell her no, she hits me with the psychological warfare: "Appa, you don't love me." And I have to look at her and say, Shiloh, it's because I love you that I'm not giving this to you.

I think some of us are doing the same thing with God. We're asking for things that would genuinely hurt us. And it's His grace, not His neglect, that holds them back. Sometimes the things we call a blessing would actually be a curse because they'd ruin our souls.

Happiness vs. Joy

We walked through the difference between happiness and joy. Not just as feel-good concepts, but as two fundamentally different postures of the heart.

Happiness is tied to what's happening around you. It rises and falls with circumstances. Joy is something rooted within. It stays even when life is hard. Happiness asks, "What's happening to me?" Joy asks, "Who is with me?"

Happiness fades when suffering comes. Joy sustains us through it. And I think that's the question Jesus is really pressing on in this passage. Not whether He can provide, but whether His presence alone is enough for us.

Moses, Peter, and the Same Prayer Thousands of Years Apart

This was the moment that brought it all together. John is actually layering Old Testament references throughout this entire chapter. Passover, the manna in the wilderness, God guiding the Israelites through the desert by fire and cloud. It's all there.

In Exodus 33, God tells Moses He'll send the Israelites to the Promised Land, but He won't go with them. And Moses says something stunning: "If your presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here."

Thousands of years later, Jesus watches as crowds walk away from Him because His teaching is too hard. He turns to His twelve disciples and asks, "You don't want to leave too, do you?"

And Peter responds: "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life."

Same prayer. Same heart. Don't send me anywhere without You.

A Living Room, a Whisper, and a Church Plant

I want to share the personal story behind Beloved New York because I think it connects to everything we talked about this Sunday.

I left a really good job at an established church. Great salary, great benefits, the whole package. And I felt God putting it on my heart to move back to New York and plant a church. My first reaction was, God, how are we going to pay for stuff? I just had a daughter. You can't seriously ask me to give everything up.

For a full year, I stayed longer than I was supposed to. The financial security had its grip on me. My peace and stability were coming from the income, not from Him. And I kept going back and forth until I finally landed on the honest truth: God, I don't know if I can trust you.

What finally got me over that wall wasn't a promise or a big donation or someone handing me a check. It was a whisper in my living room, on my knees, scared out of my mind. I said, God, how do I know this is you? And the Holy Spirit said something so simple: I'll go with you. I'll be with you.

That was it. That was enough.

The Bottom Line

We don't need more bread. We need His presence. And if we have His presence, in the commute, in the exhaustion, in the financial stress, in the seasons that don't make sense, we can make it through.

My wife and I, our bank account isn't exactly thriving right now. But I feel such a sweetness in our marriage these days. I feel such a presence of the Spirit in my life and my emotions. The numbness is gone. The apathy is gone. The depression is gone. And it's being replaced with this presence.

I closed with a quote from Henri Nouwen that I think wraps the whole morning in a single breath: the truest friend isn't the one who fixes everything. It's the one who sits with you in the pain, tolerates the not-knowing, and faces your powerlessness alongside you.

That's the kind of friend we have in Jesus.

Beloved New York gathers every Sunday. If you're looking for a church that's honest about the mess and still hungry for God, come through. Lunch afterward is basically mandatory (not really, but also kind of).