Watching the Olympics gives us thrill after thrill as we see athletes perform one amazing feat after another. We’ve never seen that before, but they have. They saw it before they did it. They saw themselves succeed and then they went out and lived it.

This Lent, we are going to “picture Jesus.” We are going to visualize who He is and what that means for us today. We’re going to move beyond sight to insight, and then go one step further from insight to application. This Lent, we will see Jesus perhaps as we’ve never seen him before. Imagine the difference this could make in us and through us if we “picture Jesus” and then go out and live what we have seen!

John 6:35 (NRSV) Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

Bread is no big deal for us. When we need bread, we go to the store. Throw in some milk and eggs and we’re set for the next winter storm. Bread is ordinary; it’s nothing special.

Until we go without bread; until we go on some low carbohydrate diet; bread is bad; and suddenly, we see it everywhere; we long for it; the smell of fresh bread reduces us to a shuddering mass of hunger.

C. S. Lewis said something like, “Our problem isn’t that we desire too much, but that we are satisfied with too little.”

What are we hungry for? What do we desire? At first glance, we’re hungry for nothing special. We desire the usual – bread on the table, maybe an extra loaf or two in the cupboard – nothing special.

“During the bombing raids of World War II, thousands of children were orphaned and left to starve. The fortunate ones were rescued and placed in refugee camps where they received food and good care. But many of these children who had lost so much could not sleep at night. They feared waking up to find themselves once again homeless and without food. Nothing seemed to reassure them. Finally, someone hit upon the idea of giving each child a piece of bread to hold at bedtime. Holding their bread, these children could finally sleep in peace. All through the night the bread reminded them, “Today I ate and I will eat again tomorrow.”

What are we hungry for? We’re hungry for life; life in all its richness; life in all its fullness. We hunger for life because we know how fragile it is: A phone rings, a boss beckons, a doctor pulls us aside, and the life we knew is lost forever. We hunger for life that will endure through the losses; life that will truly conquer death, our physical death, but also the many ways death’s shadow looms over our lives.

To put this another way, we hunger for security in an insecure world, for stability in an ever-changing world. The great temptation is to try to satisfy those hungers with something or someone in this insecure, ever-changing world, but they always leave us wanting more. No matter how hard we try, it’s never enough. We cannot satisfy a limitless appetite with something or someone from a limited world.

John 6:35 (NRSV) Jesus [says to us], “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.

What if we believed this? What if we came to Jesus, with our hunger, with our longing for security and stability, our yearning for a life we can trust, and we offered it to him. We said, “Lord, I’m hungry, and only you can satisfy my longing. Lord, I’m thirsty, and only you can quench my thirst. I’ve tried the rest. I’ve done my best, but it’s not enough. “Bread of heaven, bread of heaven, feed me til I want no more.”

Imagine the difference this could make in us and through us if we stopped trying to satisfy the deep longings of our souls with lesser things and instead offered our hunger to Jesus and said, “Lord, feed us!” And he did.

Picture this: You are walking along a trail. Sometimes the path has been steep; sometimes it’s been easy. You’ve been walking for a while now. You are hungry. You are thirsty. You come around a corner and see a man sitting on a rock. You’re startled. You didn’t expect to see anyone. You’re about to turn around and evade him, when his gentle voice says, “Hi there, would you like something to eat? I have plenty of sandwiches and my cooler is full of cold water.” He catches your eye. You look into his, and something about – his voice, the look in his eyes – something tells you, it’s alright. You sit beside him, take a long, cold, refreshing drink and bite into a sandwich. You didn’t realize you were that hungry and thirsty, but now you are satisfied. You talk about small things at first – the weather, the trail, then you and he begin to talk about deeper things, the things that really matter to you, some things perhaps you weren’t even aware of until now, and as you talk these deep hungers are also satisfied. Somehow you know when it’s time to move on, and as you head up the trail, he says to you, “I’m always here for you. Come to me anytime. There’s plenty more where that came from. I am the bread of life.” Amen.