Gathered Every Morning and Never Once Hoarded

The gate into the run has a latch that only works if you lift it and push at the same time, and every person who has ever visited this place has been defeated by it at least once.

First light. Bucket. The hens come at her like a small riot the way they do every single morning of the world.

Her sister is at the gate with a mug, not helping, providing commentary, which is the arrangement.

And she is thinking about a thing she has been ashamed of for a while.

Something got into her about two weeks ago. A good thing, a real one, and she went about her days for a few mornings different. And then it went, the way it goes, and she has been flat since, and she is embarrassed about it.

Because she has tried, over the years, to store it. She has tried to get enough of God into herself on a good Sunday to last her to the next one. She has taken notes. She has underlined things. And it never keeps, not once, not ever, and she has come to the conclusion that this must be a fault in her, since surely a person who really had it would not need it topped up every few days like a car.

Come and stand at the gate, honey, and let the hens sort themselves out. Because there is a whole chapter in Exodus about bread that would not keep overnight, and the not keeping was the design.

It went off on purpose

The manna in the wilderness. Everybody knows it came in the morning. Fewer people notice what happened when anybody tried to be sensible about it.

And they gathered it every morning, every man according to his eating: and when the sun waxed hot, it melted.Exodus 16:21

And a few verses earlier, when some of them left it till morning anyway, it bred worms and stank.

Now stop and think about that, because it is extraordinary.

God could have sent bread that kept. It would have been less trouble for everybody. Instead He sent bread that had to be gathered every single morning, by every single person, for forty years, and that spoiled the moment anybody tried to make it last.

That is not an oversight in the provision. That is the shape of the provision, and it was chosen.

You are being fed by a supply that was designed to be daily, and the not keeping was built in on purpose rather than being a fault in the person gathering. That is not a way of excusing two weeks of flatness; Exodus 16:21 has them gathering every morning and the bread melting in the sun, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a wilderness arrangement and lays it on a farmyard at first light with a bucket in somebody's hand. What you cannot store was never storable.

Now the shame, and let me deal with it plainly because it is the only thing here that is actually wrong.

You concluded that needing Him again is evidence of a fault. Follow that logic and see where it lands: it would mean the whole nation of Israel, for forty years, in the most attended to stretch of their history, had a fault. Every one of them. Every morning.

They did not. They had a God who had decided that His people would meet Him at breakfast, daily, forever, and would never be able to get far enough ahead to stop.

You are not deficient for needing Him again this morning, and an entire nation was arranged that way deliberately for forty years. Exodus 16:4 says I will rain bread from heaven for you, and the people shall go out and gather a certain rate every day, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a certain rate every day sound like intimacy rather than like rationing.

Why He built it that way

One more thing, because knowing the reason will take the last of the shame off.

There is a clue in the same chapter. God says He is doing it that I may prove them, whether they will walk in my law. And later, in Deuteronomy, Moses says the whole purpose was to teach them that man does not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord.

The daily arrangement was not about efficiency. It was about relationship. A supply you can stockpile is a supply you can have without the supplier. A supply that arrives fresh every morning means you see Him every morning.

You have been trying to get enough of God to not need Him for a while. And He has designed the whole thing so that this is not possible.

You are inside an arrangement built so that nobody has to manage without Him, and the daily part is the relationship rather than the limitation. Deuteronomy 8:3 says man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that proceeding a present tense thing rather than a fact about a book.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it works at first light with a bucket in your hand.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed there is. Not how much of last Sunday you managed to keep. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.