Three Years Since the Bread

For the one who is surprised by which part they miss.

Why is this the one that keeps coming back, when the rest of it went quietly and has stayed gone?

You don't miss the sermons. You've been honest with yourself about that and it was a slightly uncomfortable discovery. Three years, and you could not name a single sermon you wish you were hearing.

You don't much miss the notices, or the car park, or the twenty minutes afterwards standing about with a cup of something going cold in your hand.

But three or four times a year, and increasingly more often than that, you think about bread and a cup. It goes straight through you. The last time it happened in a supermarket, which was inconvenient.

You have wondered whether that makes you shallow. As though a serious person would miss the teaching, and missing the ritual is a lesser grade of loss.

This is the one that keeps coming back because it is the only part that was put into your hands. The written word describes something given into hands, and the Spirit has kept that memory alive in you for a reason.

Everything Else Was Received by Hearing

Sort what you have lost by how it reached you, because that sorting explains the whole pattern.

The sermons arrived through your ears. So did the announcements, the prayers said from the front, and most of what happened in between them. All of it came in through hearing, was processed, and either stayed or didn't.

Hearing is an excellent way to receive teaching, and it is how most of Scripture has reached most believers for most of history. It is also, and this is the relevant part, the sense that has been the easiest of all of them to replace.

That replacement happened quietly and you barely noticed it. Something on a phone in a car, a book, a chapter read late at night. Within about eight months the gap had closed without anybody arranging it.

You can hear teaching almost anywhere now. You have probably heard better teaching in the last three years than you did in the ten before them, and you know it perfectly well, which is precisely why the sermons have not been missed.

There is no equivalent for the other one. Nothing available to you at any hour, in any format, puts an object into your hand. That gap has stayed open for three years because nothing in the world was ever going to close it.

Everything that came in through hearing has been replaced, and this one has not. The written word puts this into hands rather than ears, and the Spirit has kept the difference sharp in you.

And Gave Unto Them

Here's the verse, and the physical transaction in it is what makes this one different.

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)

Gave unto them. Something left His hands and arrived in theirs. This is the only part of the whole arrangement that involves an object crossing a space and being held by somebody.

That is not decoration. He could have instituted a remembrance made entirely of words, which would have been easier to transmit and considerably harder to get wrong. Instead He instituted one with an object in it, handed over from one person to another, on purpose.

Everything that has gone wrong with this over two thousand years has gone wrong because of the object. It can be argued about, withheld, charged for, and fenced. He knew all of that and put the object in anyway.

Luke wrote that about eleven men at a table on the last night, and it reaches past them to somebody standing in a supermarket three years later.

He instituted one with an object in it, handed over, and He chose that on purpose. The written word records the giving into hands, and the Spirit has kept your hands remembering.

Your Hands Remember

Take the supermarket seriously, because the location tells you what's going on.

It happened in a supermarket, near bread presumably, and it went straight through you without warning. That isn't how the loss of teaching behaves. Teaching is missed thoughtfully, in the evening, when you have time.

This one ambushes you, in shops, at odd hours, without any intellectual content attached to it. That's the signature of a physical memory rather than an idea, and physical memories are held in the body rather than in the mind.

Your hands did something, repeatedly, for years. They held out, they received, they closed. Then one week they stopped, and they have not forgotten any of it, and they raise the matter at inconvenient moments in shops.

This ambushes you in shops because your hands remember rather than your mind. The written word made this a matter of hands, and the Spirit has not let the memory die.

I Am Not Telling You the Teaching Did Not Matter

Be careful, because this could be read as a dismissal of something valuable.

Teaching matters enormously and I'm not building a case against it. The reason you don't miss the sermons is that you've replaced them, not that they were worthless, and a person who replaced them with nothing would be in real trouble.

Nor am I telling you that missing this is proof of anything about your spiritual condition. It might simply be that your hands have a long memory.

What I want off you is the word shallow. Not the ache. Not the honesty about the sermons.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

Written by Amir This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.