Previous Challenge Entry (Level 2 – Intermediate)
Topic: Desire (01/17/05)
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TITLE: Passover with The Lamb | Previous Challenge Entry
By Andy Gilmer
01/24/05 -
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The night before His death, Jesus sat down to eat with his disciples and said, “With fervent desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer;” Luke 22:15 NKJV.
Wow! I have looked forward to quite a few meals in my life. I’ve craved Chesapeake Bay Benedict while sipping coffee on the front porch of the Mad Batter as a gentle salty breeze blew in from the Jersey Cape. I’ve anticipated takeout chicken and ribs from one of the local smokehouses while resting by the fireplace in a cozy cabin nestled in the Smoky Mountains above Gatlinburg. I’ve even had a yearning for a gumbo boat at a patio table on the Mississippi River walk in New Orleans at sunset. But to find in myself a longing for my last meal I think I would struggle. And if the menu actually signified how I should die tomorrow then I dare say I would lack desire. Yet, our Lord says, “With fervent desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer;”.
What makes a great meal? Isn’t it the anticipation to meet a reservation that you have made several days or weeks in advance at that perfect restaurant, at your favorite table, with your closest friends? We all like a place with one of those menus full of indecisively good choices? However, we find ourselves in an upstairs guest chamber at a table with Jesus and twelve men. All of them with dirty feet and one who was going to betray Him after dinner. The menu seems to be bread and wine, and still Jesus tells them that He has been looking forward to this.
Might I suggest that there would be a no more desired place for the Lamb of God than to be at the Passover table. It was the reason He had come. And this is where it would all click. Everything He had taught them, and everything He had shown them came down to this one meal. This last night together they would finally internalize the message He had been delivering for the past three years.
“Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.” “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life.” John 6:54 and 63, NKJV
He desired this intimate night in hopes that all of their and our desires for heavenly things would tower above our desire for earthly things. Now, with fervent desire we desire to eat with an innumerable multitude of believers at a table with the One who not only guaranteed our reservations, but also paid the check in full.
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