He has rehearsed it about four hundred times and it has never once gone the way he rehearses it.
There is a conversation he has to have. It has been coming for two years and everybody involved knows it is coming, and it concerns something he did, and he was wrong, and he has known that from about the third day.
He has thought about the words endlessly. He has thought about the tone. He has thought about whether to open with the apology or to build to it, and whether to explain the circumstances or to leave them out entirely, and he has changed his mind on that about thirty times.
What he has never once thought about is where.
Not the room. Not the hour. Not whether anybody will have eaten, or whether there will be something to hold, or who will be standing and who will be sitting down.
And I mention it because he is a man who would think about all of that for anybody else. He is the one who makes sure there are chairs. He is the one who notices that a room is too cold.
For this, he has been living entirely in the sentences.
Two years of it, and the whole thing exists in his head as a wall of words with nothing underneath it and no floor.
So let me ask you, my friend.
Where is the hard conversation going to happen, and who is making the food?
He had breakfast on before anybody landed
There is a morning on a beach in the last chapter of John, and the thing everybody remembers is the conversation.
Three questions. Do you love Me. Three answers, and a man who had denied Him three times beside a fire in a courtyard now standing beside another fire being given his work back.
That conversation is one of the great restorations in the Bible and I am not going to reduce it.
But read what is on the sand before a word of it happens.
When they landed, they saw a fire of burning coals there with fish on it, and some bread.John 21:9
He got there first. He gathered fuel. He lit it. He had fish on it and bread beside it, and He did all of that before the boat came in, for men who had been out all night and caught nothing and were cold and wet and about to have the most difficult conversation of their lives.
John 21 puts a lit fire and cooking food on the beach before one word of the restoration is spoken, and the Spirit who had descended on Him at the Jordan was in that ordinary preparation, so tending the physical circumstances of a hard moment has never been a distraction from the moment.
And then, before the questions, He says: come and have breakfast.
They eat first. The text is unhurried about it and so is He.
Now, I am not going to tell you that a fire fixes anything, and I am not going to hand you a technique dressed up as hospitality. The conversation still happened. It was still hard. Peter still had to answer three times and the third one hurt.
What I am telling you is that the Lord thought about the sand, the fuel, the fish and the bread.
John 21 has Him preparing a place before He restores a man, and the Spirit was fully in the gathering of driftwood, which means the where and the what-is-in-their-hands were never beneath His attention.
You have been living in the sentences for two years. He was on the beach at dawn with breakfast on.
Here is where it turns, and it is not about the words.
Prepare the place.
You have spent two years on the sentences and no time at all on the sand, and you are a man who does the sand for everybody else. Do it for this. John 21 has a fire already burning and fish already on it before one word is spoken, and the Spirit was in the breakfast before the conversation.
Pick the room. Pick the hour when nobody is starving. Have something to put in people's hands. Make the tea before anybody says anything, and let the first four minutes be about mugs.
Nothing here promises you the conversation goes well. I do not know that, and anybody who tells you they do is guessing at somebody else's heart.
John 21 has a fire of burning coals and fish and bread on the sand before a single question is asked, and the Spirit was in every part of that preparation, so the room and the food have never been beneath the weight of what you are carrying.
He was on the beach first. You can be too.
Declare this over yourself
Say these where you can hear yourself. Know what holds them up. This authority is not yours by nature, it is Christ's, and in Christ it has been given to you, so you speak as one representing the King. And you speak under His will, never over it. However He answers, and in whatever way He comes, the outcome is His.
- Dread, you are about a conversation and nobody has thought about where it will happen, and He is already on the beach with breakfast on. John 21 says when they landed they saw a fire of burning coals there with fish on it, and some bread, and none of that lit itself.
- Two years of living in the sentences, you have had every hour of my thinking and no part of my hands, and in the name of Jesus you are finished. The Spirit was in the gathering of the driftwood as much as in the three questions.
- Lord, John 21 has You preparing the place before You restored the man, and You said come and have breakfast before You asked him anything. I am doing one physical thing today toward a real room, and the sand was never beneath Your attention.
John 21:9
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