Give Me That Bread

A sermon by Dr. James Flamming
Pastor, First Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia
June 2, 2002

Text: Exodus 16

It was that once in a lifetime family trip.  The boys were in middle school; well in those days they called it Jr. High School.  Teenagers, baseball was over.  As we put together the trip we decided to go to the Holy Land as part of the itinerary. 

We had a guide named Saleem, wonderful Arab man.  His girth, that is his waist was very ample and it wasn’t very long before we found out why.  Every place we stopped he would seek out his favorite bread store and he knew them all.  And he loved to eat bread.  He would say as he stopped, “I need some bread.  It’s what keeps me going.” 

That was not the kind of bread we eat.  It was more like they eat, it was ground a little different and made in, like pancakes or sometimes like what we call pita bread.  Our boys, being teenagers, were hungry all the time.  They even spoke of dreaming about hamburgers and french-fries during that trip.  So they found a friend in Saleem and they would say to Saleem, “Saleem if you want us to keep going you’ve got to get us some bread.”  And he would. 

In the Old Testament the word bread and the 7 words that are used as synonyms for bread occur 600 times.  If you take the 600 times and compare it to the number of times that veggies are mentioned, eggs, meat, rice, less than 100 altogether.  Which indicates, of course, that bread was the staple survival food and it was what people ate as their basic diet.  Like in the Far East it is rice.  What the Bible does is a very shrewd thing and if you have an eye for it you will begin to appreciate the way the Scripture sings about faith.  And what it does is, it brings a bridge between the physical to the spiritual, between the natural to the spiritual.  The song is, this is what you know, this is what you could know.  Learn from this so that you can discover this.  So bread in the scripture becomes more than simply survival food.  It becomes spiritual survival food. 

Of all of the many times that bread is mentioned I surface four to make the bridge for all of us this day.  The first one, Exodus that 16^th chapter, you may remember that the children of Israel, the Hebrew Nation has fled from bondage in Egypt and they’re on their way to the Promised Land.  They have no food.  They’re even saying we should return. We should turn back.  We don’t want to die here in the desert and God gave them food.  Look, as you read 16:11.  “And the Lord said to Moses, I have heard the grumbling of the Israelites.”  Wow, if you read through Numbers and Leviticus that’s about all they did.  “Tell them at twilight you will eat meat and in the morning you will be filled with bread.  Then you will know that I am the Lord your God.”  Verse 17:  “The Israelites did as they were told.  Some gathered much, some little.  And when they measured it by the omer he who gathered much did not have too much.  He who gathered little did not have too little.  Each one gathered as much as he needed.” 

The first kind of bread, friends, we need bread for the mean time.  Here’s Egypt, here’s the Promised Land.  In between is the desert.  What are you going to do in the mean time between Egypt and bondage, the Promised Land?  God gave them, well it was kind of like flakes, came in the morning on the frost – frosted flakes? And they had to gather it every day because if they kept it, it spoiled.  One of the things we’re going to look at is the fact that spiritually speaking it’s like that.  You’ll never get much spiritual energy until it becomes a daily habit and a daily practice.  You can’t gather for a week.  You can’t go down to the grocery store, fill that cart full to overflowing for the whole week. Spiritually speaking it’s a daily thing.  It’s taking what you need for this day.  Why does it have to be daily?  Because, you see, life is what happens when you have something else planned.  Maybe good, maybe a marvelous surprise, maybe a terrible heartbreak.  But life is what happens when you have something else planned.  And in order that everything that happens has a chance to be touched by the power and the energy of God it becomes a daily thing.  They called it manna.  Manna means “what is it?”  We would have said the very same thing had we been there.  In truth the Hebrews didn’t stay in the desert.  The desert stayed in them.  And they wandered around until the desert finally got out of them and the learning curve was really steep.

The other day I went into a bookstore to look for one of those dummies books.  It doesn’t mean I am a dummy.  It means there are some areas of my life in which I feel like a dummy.  Now, as I was looking through the dummies books I thought to myself wouldn’t it have been nice if Moses, on the way to the Promised Land, leading the children of Israel could have gone into a Barnes and Nobles, sat down where the dummies books were and read The Exodus for Dummies.  But, of course, there were no books.  Lots of dummies but no books.  Besides who ever heard of an exodus before the Exodus.  This is a first so they muddled through.  They were on their way to the Promised Land and in the mean time there was that miserable desert.  They were on their way to fulfill God’s promise and in the meantime all they had was a promise.  And sometimes they wondered if their trust in the promise was misplaced.  They would eventually have a place to call their own.  In the mean time all they could do was move their tent day by day.  How would they survive in the mean time?  Let me ask you a better question, how do you survive in the mean time?  Well God gave them some mean time bread.  He gives us some too.  He presents it to us but, as with everything God does, he does his part and demands of us our part.  They had to gather it.  They had to gather it daily.  And the important thing here is that we do, too.  If we gather it for tomorrow it will spoil.  And you can’t gather it for yesterday.  Not since the beginning of time has anybody ever changed yesterday.  It has to be done today.  Daily basis it’s tough to work in.  I know. 

I like one of Ted Loder’s prayers in Gorillas of Grace.  He prays:  Holy One, there is something I wanted to tell you but there have been errands to run and bills to pay and arrangements to make and meetings to attend and friends to entertain and washing to get done.  And I forgot what I wanted to tell you.  And mostly I forgot who I am and why I’m here.  Oh God, don’t forget me, please.  For Jesus sake, don’t forget me like I’ve forgotten you.

Do three things.  If you want to gather the manna, the spiritual manna for your life day by day, the first one is you’ve got to empty.  See, God has no place in a soul that is clogged and cluttered with everything under the sun from worry to anxiety to planning to schedule to feeling sorry for yourself to handling bitterness and anger, no place.  Chocked full.  And so the first thing that has to happen is emptying.  What works for me here is to get a little old spiral notebook, cheapest is the better, and in the morning just take a pencil and just start scribbling and scribble everything that comes into your mind as quick as it comes into your mind.  It will not have any order at first.  It will begin to order itself maybe later.  But it gets it out.  It empties it.  And once it’s empty you will realize some things have gotten very clear and you’re ready to let God’s spirit come in.  Emptying.

Second thing, just be still.  Allow God’s presence to move in, to fill it up.  From emptying to filling.  From emptying to filling.

Third thing, claiming.  Take your Bible, see you’re empty now, you can hear.  Take your Bible and just whatever your text is for that day, you might be using the Appointment with God book, you might be using some other devotional book, but here’s what you can do.  You can take your Bible, if you don’t have a devotional schedule just take your Bible and open it up and say, okay Lord, I need a word for the day.  I need a verse for today.  And you read and listen with your ears, the ears of your soul and the Lord will give you something.  Maybe a single word, but you see some of the Israelites went out and gathered just a little.  And others went out and gathered a whole bunch.  It may be a whole verse.  It may be a whole chapter.  But each one got what they needed.  Here is the principle, God will give you what you need for each day if only you will present yourself to him and allow yourself the possibility of gathering the manna that’s there.

Alright, you say I’m not in the mean time.  I’m not in a desert.  I’m not in a crisis.  If anything I’m just so normal I’m bored.  What do I do?  I think you begin to sense the presence of God and there was some bread called the bread of presence.  I ask you, please, to turn over to Exodus the 25^th chapter.  God is telling Moses how to build the tabernacle and one of the items of furniture is about the size of our communion table was, was a table upon which what they called the bread of presence or the show bread was put.  I begin reading verse 23.  Exodus 25:  “Make a table of acacia wood.”  Twenty-four:  “Overlay it with pure gold. Make a gold molding around it.”  Now jump down to verse 30:  “Put the bread of the Presence on this table to be before me at all times.”  There were 12 loaves.  They were to be changed every Sabbath day to that no matter what was happening there were 12 loaves to remind the people of God’s presence and that they were to present themselves to God.  Is there anything greater than the gift of the presence of God? 

When Jesus came he personalized this.  The bread of the Presence or the show bread is literally the the face of bread.  And in John 6 Jesus puts the face on the bread, John the 6^th chapter.  John 6:35:  “Jesus declared I am the bread of life and he who comes to me will never go hungry.  And he who believes in me will never be thirsty.”  What Jesus has done is said you don’t need the loaves anymore.  You got me.  And I, through the Holy Spirit and through the resurrection will be with you forever.  I will never leave.  I will never forsake you.  The show bread, the bread of Presence was always confined to a table.  What Jesus did was to move that table into our hearts and he became the face of bread.  Wherever you go, whether it’s on the face of the earth, on the other side, whether it’s next door, next county, another state, another shore, the Lord Christ goes with you.  And the Presence is always there.  All you have to do is be sensitive to the presence and let that presence guide you.  The first one is in the mean time bread.  Second one is the bread of Presence.  The third, the third is the broken bread.

In Luke’s gospel, 22 chapter, 19^th verse, it is the Last Supper and Jesus took bread and he gave thanks and he broke it and he gave it to them saying this is my body given for you.  Do this in remembrance of me.  On the night of betrayal our Lord took bread to its deepest level.  Healing, you see, happens when someone who has been where you are is there for you.  When Jesus took the bread and broke it he likened it to what he would do for us.  And he was as if saying your brokenness now becomes my brokenness.  And my brokenness now becomes your brokenness.  And sometimes brokenness meets brokenness in a way that we could never have imagined.

In his book Mortal Lessons Richard Seltzer who is a surgeon relates a story of effectively removing a tumor from the cheek of a young wife.  In order to do so he had to cut a little nerve which would leave her face affected from now on and the good news was the tumor was gone.  She wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore.  She had a new life.  The bad news was her face would never be the same again.  The day after the surgery the doctor visited the room.  The young husband was on one side of the bed, he was on the other side.  The wife looked up at the doctor and said will my mouth always be like this?  Yes, the doctor replied, it will.  It is because the nerve was cut.  She nods and in silence is trying to absorb what has happened and what will be for the rest of her life.  The young husband smiles.  I like it, he says, it’s kind of cute.  And the doctor bows his head as he senses there is something going on between the two of them, a bonding of love and commitment.  It is as if he isn’t there.  Her eyes meet his eyes and his eyes meet her eyes and he reaches down to kiss her and as he does the doctor is close enough to notice he conforms his mouth to fit hers as if to say I want you to know the kiss is still here and the kiss still works.

When the Lord Jesus on that night broke the bread he wanted us to know the kiss between God and us still works.  Regardless of how many wrong turns you’ve taken, regardless of how much neglect you’ve handed him, the kiss still works.  And he took the bread and he gave thanks and he said this is for you.