The Rice of Life

What does Jesus look like to you?

Close your eyes for a moment and imagine Jesus sitting next to you.  What would he look like?  Think about the color of his eyes, the color of his hair, the color of his skin.  In your image, is Jesus wearing a robe or is he dressed in something more modern?  Try to picture how tall he is, the size of his foot, the sandals on his feet.  Take that in for a moment and then open your eyes.  If each of you had a sketch artist sitting with you and brought those pictures of Jesus up to the front, there would likely be many different versions to see.  That’s because each of us pictures Jesus in our own way.  Sometimes those images are remarkably similar, sometimes wildly different, but all with our own unique perspective.  I went to a conference on multi-cultural ministry and the pastor asked us something similar.  He asked, “If we hung up a picture of Jesus in the church, what would Jesus look like?”  I hadn’t thought of that before.  I guess in my mind, I thought of the same white robe, brown hair, brown-eyed, bearded Jesus most of us have seen.  But he noted when you asked different people from different cultural backgrounds about how they picture Jesus, they often saw Jesus as black or Asian or Hispanic and that in his church they celebrated that diversity by having lots of different images of Christ so people could find images they relate to.  It reminds me of a story I heard when I took Alpha Course for the first time.  A Japanese woman was explaining the difference between European culture and Japanese culture.  She told the man she was talking to, “What most people don’t understand is that rice is central to the Japanese way of life.  Japanese people have two stomachs – one for rice and one for regular food.  Even if you filled the one with regular food all the way, a Japanese person would still be hungry if they didn’t have any rice.”  She said, “If Jesus had come to the Japanese people first, I’m convinced he wouldn’t have said, ‘I am the Bread of Life.’  He would have said, ‘I am the Rice of Life.’”

It is important to understand that Jesus enters into our lives in different ways.

The way I’ve encountered Jesus won’t be the same as the way you encountered Jesus or even the same way your kids encounter Jesus. God seeks us out wherever we are in life.  He reaches out to us through the people, places, and things that surround us and for everyone that’s different.  One of the great rewards of being a pastor is getting the opportunity to hear how Christ has changed the lives of each person, how God has worked in and through that person’s life.  I can’t tell you the number of different stories I’ve heard and yet how similar each one is.  One man who came to Christ told me it was because of the time he spent with his grandmother driving around in her van.  She used to pick him up from school as a child to help out his parents, and when she did, she would often be playing Christian music on the radio or talking to him about things happening at her church.  Something about her and the life she led made him curious about who Jesus was and how he could be dead for thousands of years and still have this impact on her life.  That curiosity stuck with him until he decided to give it a try and dedicate his life to Christ.  Then there was the man who wandered away from God.  For decades he just pushed Jesus out of his thoughts despite knowing how much his mother wanted him to accept Christ for himself.  His mother prayed for him every day.  The topic of God and Jesus kept cropping up over the years and one day when he was talking to a friend and trying to sort out where his life was going, she convinced him to pick up a Bible and start reading it, which he did.  That set him on a journey toward a deeper faith until he felt he needed to dedicate his life to Christ.  He was baptized in our church and only a few weeks later, his mother passed away.  It’s as if she was holding on just long enough to see God working in his life. 

I am convinced that more than anything this world needs God.

When you think of all that is happening around us with war, mass shootings, hate crimes, and all the chest thumping and power mongering in politics, you must wonder if people would do these horrible things to each other if they truly had Christ in their heart. This passage below goes to the heart of what people are truly craving in the world today.  Despite all of the rhetoric, diatribe, and posturing, people are looking for purpose, hope, and meaning in the world – the kind that can only be given by God.  We might substitute other things in place of it, but only in Jesus do we find the authentic source of what we need the most. 

⁵ Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.³⁶ But as I told you, you have seen me and still you do not believe. ³⁷ All those the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away. ³⁸ For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. ³⁹ And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all those he has given me, but raise them up at the last day. ⁴⁰ For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.” – John 6:35-40

When we think of hunger, we think of food.

But food isn’t the only thing we are hungry for.  Sometimes we are hungry for attention.  Sometimes we are hungry for knowledge.  Sometimes we are hungry for affection.  There was a study done by Harvard University testing the theory that parents should let their babies cry, and they found that doing so can create long-lasting traumatic effects on the baby’s life.[1]  On the other extreme, Rene Spitz studied infants raised in hospital institutions compared to those raised by mothers who were imprisoned and the difference was shocking.  More than a third of the babies in the hospital died while none in prison passed away.  Another study showed that babies raised in orphanages compared to foster homes were 30% more likely to develop mental illness, had IQs nine points lower on average, and were less happy than their counterparts.[2]  Food isn’t the only thing we are hungry for. Jesus addresses that in this passage. When he declares “I am the bread of life” he is telling us that he is as important to our health and well-being as any amount of food we consume.  Just as we are hungry for food, we also have a spiritual hunger that simply cannot be fully satisfied in any other way than with Jesus in our lives.  He promises that all who seek him will always be able to find him and will no longer suffer from spiritual hunger. 

But how can we look for Jesus when we don’t even have the basics like food? 

The USDA estimates that 13.5% of households experience some form of food insecurity, meaning they were “uncertain of having or unable to acquire enough food to meet the needs” of everyone living there either from lack of money or other resources.[3]  Sadly, that number goes up to nearly 18% of households with children.[4]  It only gets worse around the world.  According to the World Health Organization, about 2.33 BILLION people are facing some level of food insecurity, and nearly half of all deaths among children under age 5 is due to undernutrition.[5]  Do any of us really think any child should die from malnutrition?  Should any person die from lack of food?  If we want people to come to Christ it has to start by helping provide for the world’s needs.  As we talked about last week with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, when our basic needs aren’t being filled, there is no room in our lives to contemplate matters of faith.  We can’t become our best selves, ideally at the top of that pyramid, when we don’t have a firm foundation to begin with. Jesus tells the disciples, “If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea. ⁷ Woe to the world because of the things that cause people to stumble! Such things must come, but woe to the person through whom they come! (Matthew 18:6-7)” Meeting the needs of others is more than helping them physically and materially but is paving the way to open the door spiritually as well.  How can we hear God’s call when the grumbling of our stomachs drowns out his words?

The point is YOU are the rice of life.

YOU are the rice of life.  Or the cookie of life.  Or the King’s Hawaiian Bread of life.  Or whatever metaphor works for you.  God is calling upon all of us to meet the needs of his people.  Like he told Peter to feed his sheep, God is telling us all to feed his sheep. That might be a literal feeding of his sheep, or it might be a spiritual one.  Pray for God to open your eyes for the opportunity to serve in whatever way you can with whatever gifts you have.  You might be exactly who someone needs in their life at just that moment. 

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[1] They did an updated study that said letting them cry a little bit was okay.  The technique is called “graduated extinction” and slowly lengthens the time you soothe the baby.  In the previous studies it was all or none and prolonged crying can lead to negative consequences.

[2] Both studies were covered in Forbes magazine in an archived article, “It’s The Orphanages, Stupid!” by

[3] From the USDA’s data for 2023 which showed statistically significant increases in food insecurity from 2022.

[4] The actual number is 17.9%.  Many parents sacrifice their own hunger to make sure their children have enough food, but even then almost half of those households had both adults and children who were food insecure.

[5] Data from WHO for food insecurity and malnutrition were released in 2024.