For the one who has been waiting to obtain something more suitable.
You get in at twenty to two in the morning and there's a stack of tortillas on the counter under a tea towel, still faintly warm, because you made them before the shift.
The apartment is quiet in the particular way that an apartment is quiet at that hour. One lamp is on. The fridge is doing what fridges do, and your boots are by the door where they always go.
You lift the towel, take one off the top of the stack, and stand there eating it over the counter, which is what you do on most nights of the week.
On this particular night, with a warm tortilla in your hand at twenty to two, you think about bread and a cup. You think it clearly enough that you stop chewing.
Then the second thought arrives, the one that has arrived perhaps two hundred times, which is that you'd need to get proper bread first. Something more suitable. Something that isn't just supper.
He took what was already on the table, and you've been waiting to obtain something more suitable. The written word says He took bread, meaning the bread that was there, and the Spirit has not asked you for better.
The Bread on That Table Was Supper
Establish what the bread at the first occasion actually was, because it decides your question.
It was the bread of the meal they were eating. It was on the table because they were having supper, it had been brought in for the purpose of being eaten, and nobody had set it aside for any other purpose.
The room had been prepared that afternoon and the food had been prepared with it. Two disciples had been sent ahead to arrange a supper, and what they arranged was a supper rather than a ceremony.
He took it. That's the verb, and it means He reached for what was in front of Him and picked it up. There was no interval in which something more suitable was obtained from elsewhere.
The bread became what He said it was because He said it, over an ordinary loaf at an ordinary supper, and not because that loaf had been distinguished from any other loaf beforehand.
That is the whole answer to the question you have been asking for two years. The suitability does not come from the bread, and it never did. It comes from the words said over it, and those words were given to you to say.
The loaf was distinguished by what He said rather than by what it was. The written word has Him taking what was on the table, and the Spirit works the same way over a tortilla.
He Took Bread
Here's the verse, and the first three words are the ones that answer you.
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)
He took bread. Not He obtained, or procured, or sent for. He took what was within reach of His own hands at a meal that was already under way.
The whole sequence is domestic. Take, give thanks, break, give. Those are the four actions anybody performs with a loaf at any table anywhere in the world, and He did them in that order with the food that was already on it.
Luke wrote that about a supper in a borrowed room, and it carries over to a man standing at a counter at twenty to two in the morning.
Take, give thanks, break, give is what anybody does with a loaf. The written word gives the sequence, and the Spirit brings it to the counter you are already standing at.
Two Hundred Postponements
Count what the more suitable requirement has actually cost, because you've never totaled it.
Two hundred nights, near enough. Each one ends the same way: the thought arrives, the requirement arrives immediately after it, and the requirement can't be met at twenty to two in the morning.
There is no shop open at that hour. There's no proper bread in the apartment and there never will be at twenty to two, and by the following afternoon, when there could be, you are asleep.
So the requirement is not a delay. A delay resolves eventually. This is a permanent exclusion dressed as a postponement, and it has been running for most of two years.
A condition that can never be met at the hour you are awake is an exclusion. The written word sets no such condition, and the Spirit has been present at every one of those two hundred nights.
I Am Not Telling You Preparation Is Wrong
Be fair, because the instinct underneath your requirement is a good one.
Wanting to prepare for something properly is right. If you want to buy a loaf on a day off and keep it for this, then do exactly that, because there is real value in setting something aside deliberately.
Nor am I telling you that everything is equivalent and nothing matters. Care matters, and a man who treats this casually has missed something.
What I want off you is the precondition. Not the reverence. Not the wish to do it properly.
You Made Them Before the Shift
Here's the turn, and it's in what you did twelve hours earlier.
You made those tortillas yourself, before you left for work, knowing you'd be back at twenty to two and that there'd be nothing else. You made them with your own hands and covered them so they'd keep.
Look at what that is. A man prepared food, in advance, deliberately, so that there would be something warm waiting when he came in tired in the middle of the night.
You've been waiting to obtain something more suitable while standing in a kitchen holding something you made with your own hands in preparation for this exact hour. The preparation you've been requiring was done twelve hours ago, by you, before you left.
The preparation you keep requiring was done twelve hours ago, by your own hands. The written word asks for bread taken and broken, and the Spirit was in the making of it before your shift.
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.
This is agreement rather than persuasion. Christ has taken up residence in you, the Spirit carries what you say back to God, and the ordering of everything else remains His.
Say it through, and stop at the end.
He took what was already on the table, and I have been waiting to obtain something more suitable. The Word says that He took bread and gave thanks and broke it and gave it, which are the four actions anybody performs with a loaf at any table, done with the food that was already on it. The Spirit brings that to a counter at twenty to two in the morning. I am not waiting for better bread. I made these with my own hands twelve hours ago so that something warm would be here when I got in, which is the preparation I keep saying has not been done. I take what is in front of me.
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
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