Friday, November 03, 2006

The Order of Breaking Bread

The most popular ringtone with hustlers on the Southside is that Rick Ross,

‘Everyday I’m hustle-EN!’

I like that hook too..it’s motivational to me. Let’s get it!!

Of course, I don’t have that ringtone on MY phone..as a matter of fact, I don’t have ANY ringtones on my phone. I’m really not that kinda dude. I might go through the menu and see all the FREE stuff they got, but I’m not about to be changing up every week to keep something that’s hip and I’m not about to pay money just to get a song to play on my phone. But I’m not tripping on the people who do it. You can actually find out a lot more about a person by listening to the ringtone on their phone.

Women who you might have thought were quiet and shy and demure, all of a sudden you hear their phone blaring, “I’m BOSSY!!!”

Wtf??

(smiling) Oh..excuse me, let me put my phone on vibrate.

I don’t know mane, the more I live the more I am amazed by the peculiarities of people. People are strange. They say strange words and they do strange things. I’m not excluded either. I’m a weird kinda dude. People pick me out of the crowd all the time and say, ‘Heyy…there’s something peculiar about you.”

My grandmother tells me that I have that shine from the Lord.


“Baby..whenever you stand up and proclaim Christ as the Lord and Saviour of your life, when you really embrace Him and don’t just talk about it, then people can see that Holy Spirit in your heart. It’s just like the song goes, ‘This little light of mine, I’m go let it shine.’ And that’s what you do and people may love it or hate it, but God’s children are always going to stand out from the world. And for you to be a young man, that works and takes care of his wife and kids, take em to church and set an example for them on serving the Lord. Don’t you know how better off all these kids would be if they had a daddy that loved them and took care of them like you do with your family?? That’s what’s wrong with so many of these kids today, their parents not teaching them right. The Bible say, ‘train up a child in the way that they should go, and when they grow old they will not depart from it’ but if ain’t nobody training and teaching these kids about the Lord, they’re going to grow up ignorant. I thank God for you and all my children and grandchildren. God is gonna bless you in ways that you don’t even know yet.”

“He already has Grandma. He already has.”

I know it’s hard on the folks who have never read any D.E. Washington before. A lot of folks read some of the material I have already put out there and they have a lot of questions.

What’s up with this dude?

Is he fo real?

Is he crazy?

Is he janky?

Who the hell is THIS n’ga???

So there are questions and inquiries about who I am and what I’m really about. I’ve had some hard-core Christians jack me up in the corner and start mean mugging me for the lengths that I go to stay real to my peeps.

From curse words, to claiming a woman was the first preacher of the full gospel of Christ, to people asking me if I was On the DL myself..writing on the internet has opened me up to more public criticisms. Something tells me that what I have received thus far is just the tip of the iceberg, God is getting me ready for something even bigger, I already know.

And once you know God has commissioned you for a work, a place to join the battlefield and serve the Lord..it’s a blessing. Everybody ain’t been assigned yet. Everybody ain’t been anointed for service yet. So let me share something I learned from a self proclaimed ‘red neck country boy preacher from East Texas’ during a sermon at my uncle’s church in Port Arthur, Texas.

Before some of ya’ll get too out of bunch, his name wasn’t ‘red neck preacher’ it was actually Rev. Moss and he was a dynamic evangelist for the Lord and he loved to eat pig feet and mustard greens. Matter of fact, he was so country that he didn’t even call em pig feet, he called em ‘trotters’. So it ain’t just blacks folks that know about the blanket that came down in front of Peter.

The name of his sermon was, ‘The Order of Breaking Bread’ and he came out of Luke..

"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

That verse is from Luke’s account of the Last Supper. Christians around the world still commemorate this event with communion. A lot of Baptist churches have communion on the 1st Sunday of every month. Some Catholic churches give communion everyday, there are different ways that the different denominations get down. It’s not even like it’s a requirement for salvation, the Scripture just says, ‘as oft as you do it’.


"For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till he come. " - I Corinthians 11:26 KJV

But what Rev. Moss highlighted in his sermon, was the sequence of events that are common to all who are children of God. Because if you’re going to be a Christian, you have to live a ‘Christ-like’ existence. And the first step that God is going to take, is taking you out of whatever situation or environment that you’re in.

1. He TOOK the bread.

This doesn’t mean you’re going to just disappear, or move away or go to jail (although it MIGHT), this just means that your eyes will be opened to the Lord and His mighty power and you will begin to realize that you are a stranger in a foreign land. Whether it’s at home, at school, at work, locked up in a solitary cell, it doesn’t matter.. if you’re a child of God, then you’re going to realize that you’re a peculiar person.

2. He BLESSED the bread.

And when you begin to diligently seek after Him, praying and studying your Bible, that’s when you walk into your anointing. It’s a blessing from God that no one can ever take away from you.

And after you’re anointed, that’s when you have to be broken.

3. He BROKE the bread.

And every person who has ever repented from their sins and confessed Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior has been broken. Brought down. Humbled. Distressed. Maybe even depressed. It’s not an easy thing being broken.

4. He GAVE the bread

But it’s only after we have been broken, that we can be given out for service. The thing you learn to lean on is that Blood. It will give you strength from day to day when you learn how to lean on it. It shall never lose it’s power.

So, that sermon really stuck with me. He went on to illiterate on several different people in the Bible who’s life illustrates that process. Moses was taken from the Pharoah’s house, and he ended up tending sheep for 40 years out in the woods before God called him to lead the children out of Egypt.

David was an anointed servant of God, a King who spent a large part of his life either fighting or running for his life. But yet through his trials, God blessed David with a covenant, a promise that the Messiah would come from his family bloodline.

It’s kinda hard talking about the Bible to some folks, because they’re completely Biblically ignorant. They don’t study, they never hear any good gospel preaching, they’re not in anybody’s Sunday School class or Bible study class trying to learn. They’re ignorant because they haven’t been broken yet. A lot of them still think they can do it all by themselves.

Other’s ‘play the role’ that they believe, but whenever their Christianity becomes inconvenient to what they need to do at the moment, then they lay their Bible aside and block Jesus, God or any kind of higher power out of their mind and they just do their own thing.

The only time they proclaim Jesus is if they think it can help their immediate circumstance.

You can run for only so long, but at some point you’re going to have to face the facts.

There is an order to breaking bread.