You Can't Live on Yesterday's Bread

October 12, 2023

Exodus 16 records the account of Moses leading the Israelites through exile in the desert and how God miraculously provided for them with sustenance in the form of manna (bread-like nourishment from heaven) and quail. But God instructed them to only gather enough food for that day (except the day before the Sabbath when they could gather double so that they would not have to work on the Sabbath day). However some of the Israelites shockingly did not obey Moses and gathered extra food anyway. They quickly discovered that the extra portions smelled rotten and filled with maggots, forcing them to only survive on what would sustain them for one day.

You can’t live on yesterday’s bread.

God wanted the Israelites -and He wants us- to be reliant on Him one day at a time. They literally could not live on yesterday’s bread so that they would have to learn to depend on God for something new; new solutions, new inspiration, new creativity. His mercies are new every morning. He wants to continually renew us and shape us every single day. He is making a new thing.

You can’t live on yesterday’s bread.

Throughout Christian (and, actually, Jewish) history our mission is simple and unchanging: Love God, Love People (Matthew 22:47, Deuteronomy 6:5). But the shape of that mission is not one-size-fits all. The world and the history of humanity is a beautifully woven tapestry of cultures, circumstances and possibilities.

And so, in order to successfully live out our mission, we must first accurately identify its shape. What worked for Priscilla and William Tyndale and Aimee Semple McPherson and Billy Graham is different than what works for Oak Haven Church. And that matters for how we live out and share the gospel, with action as well as words.

You can’t live on yesterday’s bread.

Or to put that into Jesus’ words, you can’t put new wine into old wineskins. One of my favorite missiologists, Mike Frost, wrote in his new book I’m reading right now called Mission is the Shape of Water: “If we only have one historical container in our imaginations, every mission initiative we think of will fit that container.” The problem is then, we force the new wine God is giving us into the old wineskins of our old ways of doing ministry. This is about the moment where churches discover they don’t actually want to change. There are many names this idol can take: the Idol of Fear, the Idol of Security, the Idol of Comfort, the Idol of Nostalgia, the Idol of Preference… What are we worshipping today? Church, do we worship our comfort? Are we so attached to whatever era of church we most fondly remember that we actually start worshipping that instead of truly fulfilling the missional mandate we’ve been given?

You can’t live on yesterday’s bread.

Yesterday’s bread worked for yesterday, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t still provide important, life-giving nutrition yesterday. How do we view the past in a way that productively informs our future instead of holding us back? It’s still helpful for us to understand how we got here, where we came from. Looking back gives us a hope of what God is capable of and reminds us that He can do it again. There are lessons that we can learn from our forefathers and foremothers that are absolutely applicable today. The trick is looking at those things through the right lens. We are part of an epic story -the Greatest Story Ever Told- and there is an assurance and confidence in remembering that. This reminds us that, facing a shift of culture is nothing new for Christians. True, we are facing something radically new in the mid-21st century, but the necessity to adapt is not new.

When we look back at Christian history I can’t help but be overwhelmed by the weight of our collective mission and what that has meant for those who have gone before me. It compels me to honor that heritage with my very best innovation, my very best energy, my very best creativity, my very best. We can point to where we were being called yesterday and celebrate the ways in which we fulfilled our mission then. But today we need to ask ourselves: Where are we being called to now?

Because you can’t live on yesterday’s bread.