Last week I did something I have never done before. Despite hundreds of millions of people or perhaps billions of people (if you go back to the beginning of time) having done it. For me, it wasn’t necessarily one of those must do before I die events. But I decided to do it anyways. So what did I do? I baked a loaf of bread. I’ve baked heaps of loaf breads such as banana bread over my lifetime. I regularly bake a high protein and high fiber keto loaf. But this was different. This was a loaf of bread where you take yeast and let it rise. I carefully followed the instructions, so I was envisioning a beautiful loaf of bread that if I entered it in the local fall fair it would win first prize. It didn’t turn out that way. The bread just didn’t rise much. The instructions said to let it rise in a very warm place. My guess is that our kitchen wasn’t warm enough. It was a gluten free bread, so my wife had some. She said it was dense, but tasted quite okay.

In our household it has just been much more convenient to buy a loaf of bread at the store. Though nothing can beat that fresh, warm slice of bread when it comes out of the oven. After my wife and I were married we rented a basement apartment for a while. When our landlord lady was baking bread, we could smell the incredible comforting aroma wafting through the vents as it wrapped us in yummy coziness. Like a soft, fuzzy, warm blanket on a snowy day. Soon after we would get a knock on our door. It would be our landlord lady. She would have a fresh out of the oven loaf of bread for us. Put a little soft butter on a hunk of her warm, right-from-the-oven bread and it was like eating a slice of heaven. It was so good. Although my mom baked actual bread only occasionally, she was extremely well known for her amazing baking. Her buns were so soft they melted in my mouth. Her pastry on her pies and butter tarts was done to perfection. Everyone always raved about mom’s pies and butter tarts. The tradition of my mom’s family recipes continued with my sister who was a regular at the Barrie Farmers Market for decades under the name “Baking by Linda”. She had many, many regular, loyal, faithful customers over the years. Some regular customers she had for decades. She retired from her business during Covid. Every culture loves its’ bread. So many countries have their own specialty. The Bible speaks often about bread. In fact, bread in its’ many forms appears 492 times in the Bible. Often with a variety of meanings and symbolism. Bread is that important that we still celebrate it today in both Jewish and Christian faiths.

Here in Canada we also do love our bread products. According to the Canadian Grain Council, the average Canadian consumes approximately 130 kilograms of bread a year. This equates to about 355 grams of bread in various forms a day. The weight of a dozen powdered mini donuts is approximately 341 grams (28.4 grams per donut). In 2022 competitive eater Joey Chestnut devoured a record 255 of them in 8 minutes. That is 7.24 kilograms (16 pounds) of sugary baked dough devoured in 8 minutes). I’m definitely not going to attempt to break that record. The world’s oldest bread that exists is 8,600 years old and was recently discovered in Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic site in south-central Turkey. In Ancient Egypt, bread was used as a form of currency. We still use the word bread as slang for money. There are different words that come out of this. Such as asking someone, “how much bread is your job paying”? Or a breadwinner, meaning the person in a family who works to provide the money that the family needs to live on. Out of curiosity I thought I would look up the Guinness Book of Records for the world’s biggest loaf of bread. The longest loaf of bread ever baked was in Vagos, Portugal on July 10th, 2005. The loaf of bread is a staggering 1,211.6 m (3,975 ft 0.69 in) long.

I definitely will not attempt to break that record. As it was, I found baking my one regular loaf of bread quite labor intensive. I started at 7:15 pm and included waiting to let the dough rise (it never did rise). After baking it in the oven I was finished at 11:15 pm. I really needed to get to bed to get some sleep so I could talk about bread in my sermon the next day. But compared with Biblical times we really have it easy. People back then likely ground their own grain. There was no power appliances to mix and kneed the dough. We have electric stoves with temperature settings where you can set the timer and then do other things. In Biblical time the wood in the fireplace for baking bread needed to be carefully monitored. The process of turning grain into flour, then into dough, and finally into bread, would have been time-consuming in Biblical times. Not to mention the construction and maintenance of the oven which is called a tannur. Baking bread was such a arduous task back then. But then along comes Jesus.

In the beginning of John 6 we read about a large crowd of people who had gathered to hear Jesus preach. As the day wears on, Jesus notes that the people need to eat and performs the miracle where He fed the 5000 with just 5 small loaves of bread and 2 fish. When it was all over they collected 12 baskets of leftovers. It would have been so amazing to be in that crowd of people. I am sure the bakers in Vagos, Portugal who made that longest loaf of bread that attained a Guinness World Record in 2005 could have used a breadmaker like Jesus. The people who witnessed Jesus’s miracle were so amazed.

The miracle was so impressive that they wanted Jesus to perform it again a couple days later. They wanted more bread but Jesus apparently wasn’t going to give them any more. That so upset the crowd so much that they tried shaming Him into doing His miracle again by referring to the manna that God rained down from heaven for 40 years while the Israelites wandered in the desert (Exodus 16). In the desert God was not just handing out free meals, though. His people’s survival depended on it. Back to the feeding of the 5,000, the crowd wants more bread. Not only is Jesus not going to give them what they ask for, He turns it into a teaching situation. John 6:35 states, “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.“

I found it interesting that Jesus didn’t day “I am the GIVER of bread”. Instead He said I AM the bread”. So why did Jesus say it that way? The problem here was that the crowd had only come looking for Jesus because He had given them what they wanted. They wanted the bread, but they didn’t necessarily want Jesus. So we just had Thanksgiving a few days ago here in Canada. We really have so much to be thankful for. But it is so easy (myself at the top) to come to God with our list of requests. We want God to come through with our requests, but we don’t necessarily want God. We may not be wandering in the desert for 40 years like the Israelites. But these days we still depend on God for survival. And it is not just physical food. Jesus said “I am the bread of life”. Just as bread nourishes our bodies, Jesus nourishes our souls. Offering us eternal satisfaction. Physically, God provides us with our jobs to help earn a living, our accommodation, medicines, transportation, good friends to lean on. And there is so much more. At church each Sunday we pray the Lord’s Prayer, which includes the words, “Give us this day our daily bread” we are reminded that God does that day in, day out, without fail. Both physically and spiritually. He is so faithful. He is worthy of all our praise and adoration.

This article is based on a message preached at Willis Presbyterian Church in Jarratt, Esson Presbyterian Church in Rugby and Knox Presbyterian Church in Uptergrove on Harvest (Thanksgiving) Sunday, October 12, 2025. If you live in the Orillia, Oro-Medonte, Ramara areas and don’t have a church to attend, we would love to have you join us. Details on times and addresses can be found here at the Three Churches…Carl.