For the one who has been waiting for permission that was given at the table.
There's a heel of bread on the porch rail beside a mug, and it's been there for about eleven minutes without either of them being touched.
You came off the harbor at twenty past six. The boots are off and the hands are still cold, and the light is doing what it does over the water at that hour, which is the reason you came out here instead of going straight up to bed.
You put the bread there yourself. You put the mug there yourself. You've now been sitting in front of both of them for eleven minutes without picking either one up.
What you are waiting for, if you are honest about it, is for somebody to say out loud that you are allowed. Not out loud. You'd not put it that way if anybody asked you. But that's what the eleven minutes are, and you've had them before on this rail, more than once, in most weathers.
This do was an instruction given to you, and you've been waiting for permission that was handed over at the table. The written word puts it in the imperative, and the Spirit is the one who brings it to mind on a porch at dawn.
Who Were You Waiting to Hear From
Follow the waiting back to its source, because it has one and naming it will do more than any amount of reassurance.
You're waiting for a voice you can't produce. Somebody with the right standing, in the right room, saying the right words over it, the way it was done when you were nineteen and everything was arranged by other people.
That voice isn't available on a porch rail at half past six in the morning. It never has been, and waiting for it has cost you a considerable number of mornings exactly like this one.
Count them if you want to. Eleven minutes at a time, several times a month, for however many years it has been since you last sat in that kind of room. It amounts to a great deal of a man's life spent sitting in front of bread.
Here's what's worth facing. The voice you are waiting for wasn't the one that gave the instruction. It repeated it. The instruction itself came from somewhere else entirely, and it came in the imperative, which is the grammatical form used for commands rather than for invitations.
The voice you're waiting for was repeating an instruction rather than issuing one. The written word carries the original in the imperative, and the Spirit brings it to a man with cold hands.
This Do in Remembrance of Me
Here's the verse, and the last four words are a command rather than a permission slip.
And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me.Luke 22:19 (KJV)
This do. Two words, imperative mood, addressed to the people in the room and to everybody who came after them. It's the same grammatical form as pray, and forgive, and go.
Nobody waits for permission to pray. Nobody sits on a porch for eleven minutes wondering whether they're allowed to forgive somebody. The instruction is taken as an instruction, and it's obeyed.
You'd think that was obvious, and it is, right up until the moment the instruction involves bread. Then something else comes in over the top of it, and the something else has a great deal to do with rooms you sat in thirty years ago.
He said that to eleven ordinary men in a borrowed upstairs room on the worst night any of them ever had, and it carries over to a harbor worker on a porch rail without losing a word of its force.
A command in the imperative is obeyed rather than waited on. The written word puts this do in the same form as pray, and the Spirit brings it to the hand that's already holding the bread.
Given For You, in the Same Breath
Look at what He says immediately before the instruction, because the order of the sentence matters.
This is my body which is given for you. Given. Already handed over, at the point of speaking, before anybody in that room had done a single thing about it.
That is worth putting plainly. The men at that table had not yet repented of anything they were about to do. One of them was already arranging the betrayal. The giving was announced over the whole room regardless.
The giving comes first and the doing comes second. You aren't reaching for something that has to be released to you by a person with authority. You're taking up something that was placed in your hands before you were born.
That's why the waiting is misdirected. There's nobody left to release it, because the release already happened, and it happened in the same breath as the instruction.
It was given before it was commanded, so there's nothing left to release. The written word puts the giving first, and the Spirit has been holding it out to you on this rail for years.
I Am Not Telling You a Table Replaces a People
Be clear, because this could be heard as an argument that you need nobody, and that isn't what I'm handing you.
Bread broken with other believers is a real loss and you're right to miss it. If a table with people round it opens to you, go and sit at it, and do not let anything in this message argue you out of it.
Nor am I telling you the old way was wrong. The words said over it were good words and the men who said them meant every one of them.
What I want off you is the waiting itself. Not the longing for a table with others at it. Not the memory of how it was done.
Your Hands Already Know
Here's the turn, and it's in something you did without deciding to.
You put the bread on the rail. You put the mug beside it. You did both of those before you sat down at all, without an argument, in the ordinary way a man puts down the objects he's carrying.
Then you sat in front of them for eleven minutes. Which means the part that required permission wasn't the setting out, and it wasn't the decision, because both of those had already happened.
Your hands did this. They went and got bread, they filled a mug, they carried both out onto a porch at dawn after a night shift. Something in you has already obeyed the instruction, and the eleven minutes are the last piece of an argument that the rest of you stopped having some time ago.
Your hands obeyed before the eleven minutes started. The written word gives the instruction, and the Spirit has been moving the man who carried it out to the rail.
Declare this over yourself
You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so what follows is not a claim made out of your own authority. It is agreement, said back to God in His own words, while the Holy Spirit carries it. How He orders the rest of it is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own time.
Speak this from inside Christ rather than out of your own resources. He lives in you, the Spirit carries the words, and the timing of anything that follows is not yours to set.
Say it once, and mean the last sentence.
This do was an instruction given to me, and I have been waiting for permission that was handed over at the table. Scripture says that He said it: this is His body, which is given for me, and then this do in remembrance of Me, which is a command in the same form as pray and forgive. The Spirit brings it to a man with cold hands on a porch at dawn. I am not waiting for a voice that only ever repeated it. The giving came first, in the same breath, before anybody in that room had done a single thing about it. I take up what was already put in my hands.
Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.
This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.
Luke 22:19
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
