Five in the morning in November is as dark as the middle of the night and there is one light on in that whole house, and it is the one over the stove.
Wendell is fifty-eight and he has done this most mornings since he was nineteen.
Pan on. Two eggs, whatever bacon is going, bread. Four minutes to cook it and about four minutes to eat it, standing at the counter, because there is a calf that has been off since Tuesday and a stretch of fence in the bottom field and a load coming at seven and there is no version of this morning where a man sits down.
Coffee in the travel mug. Plate in the sink. Boots. Out.
On Sunday it is different. On Sunday his daughter brings the family and there are eight round that table, and Wendell says grace. He has said it for thirty years. He is not showy about it and he is not long about it, and he means every word, and the youngest ones fight about who gets to say amen.
He would tell you, if you asked, that Sunday dinner is the meal that belongs to God in that house.
Yesterday he was going through the diary for the accountant, which is a job he hates, counting things.
And it caught him sideways, standing at the counter this morning with a plate in his hand.
Fifty-two Sunday dinners in a year. Give or take, allowing for the ones they miss. And the plate he is holding right now, this one, standing up, in the dark, with one light on: that is more like three hundred and forty.
Three hundred and forty plates in a year that have never once had a word said over them, because they are not meals. They are fuel. That is the exact word he has used in his own head for forty years without ever once examining it.
He has been consecrating about fifteen percent of his own eating and calling the rest of it maintenance.
You have that ratio. Yours might not be food. But you know which small percentage of your week you have quietly marked as belonging to God, and you know exactly what word you use for the other eighty-five.
Paul reaches for the smallest possible example
First Corinthians 10 has a long argument in it about a real dispute those people were having, and at the end of the argument Paul stops arguing and gives them a direction instead. And look at what he picks to hang it on.
Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.1 Corinthians 10:31
Whether ye eat, or drink.
He could have said whatever great thing you attempt. He could have said in your worship, in your giving, in your work. He picks the two most ordinary, most repeated, least remarkable things a human body does, and he puts them at the front of the sentence as the examples.
You have been handed the smallest possible example on purpose, and it is already yours to use. That is the written word and not my encouragement in a dark kitchen, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the end of a long argument and lays it on a counter at five in the morning.
Nobody has ever needed a verse to know that a church service belongs to God. That was not in doubt in Corinth and it is not in doubt in your house. The reason Paul reaches for eating is that eating is exactly the thing everybody had already filed under maintenance, and he goes and gets it out of that file and puts it in the other one.
He refuses to give them a rule
Now look at the shape of what he does, because it matters for this site and it matters for you.
Those people wanted a code. The whole passage is them trying to get a ruling: is this all right, is that all right, what about if somebody says something. Paul spends a chapter refusing to hand over a code, and what he gives them instead is an aim.
Do all to the glory of God. That is not a fence, it is a direction. It does not tell you what to eat. It tells you where the eating is pointing.
This is yours, and what you have been given is a direction and never a code, and it is already settled. First Corinthians 10 gives them an aim instead of a ruling on purpose, and the same Spirit who moved Paul to refuse them a code is the one making it a present fact in a man standing at a counter with a plate in his hand.
Which means that nothing in this message tells you what to have for breakfast, and nothing in it is going to. That is not what the verse does and it is not what this site does. The plate is not the point. Where the plate is pointed is the point.
Let me guard the other side of it too, because a man can hear this and put a burden on himself.
I am not asking you to add a ceremony to a four minute breakfast. If you turn this into a new duty, with a right form of words and a low grade guilt when you forget, you have taken a verse about freedom and built a fence out of it, which is exactly what Paul spent the chapter refusing to do.
One sentence. Out loud, once, over the plate. That is all this is. And if you forget on Thursday, the plate was still His on Thursday, because the belonging was never generated by your remembering.
And there is nobody to blame for the ratio. Nobody sat you down in 1987 and taught you that Sunday counts and Tuesday does not. It is simply what happens: the visible things get the words said over them and the repeated things go quiet, and it happens in every trade and every house in the country.
So here is where we are, at the counter, in the dark, with one light on and about eight minutes before the boots go on.
You are going to take the eighty-five percent out of the file marked maintenance. Not by making it into a ceremony. By saying one sentence over one ordinary thing, out loud, and finding out that it was already His and that the sentence was recognition and not a transfer.
It is already settled that whatsoever you do can be done to the glory of God, and a plate at five in the morning has no right to stay outside that. First Corinthians 10 puts eating at the front of the sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one confirming it in you right now, in whatever kitchen or cab or corridor your feet are actually on.
Declare this over yourself
Say these three out loud. The authority to speak them is yours because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, not because of which meals you said grace over, and Scripture is the ground under every word while the Holy Spirit carries it. Jesus said speak to the mountain and do not doubt in the heart. So speak, and leave what He does on this ground to Him, in His own way and His own time.
- Plate at five in the morning, you were never just fuel. Scripture says whether ye eat or drink, do all to the glory of God, and He picked eating as the example on purpose.
- Fear that only the visible things count, get out, in the name of Jesus. Paul anchored it at eating and drinking and it is written that way at the front of the sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes the ordinary, not my sense of what is worth offering.
- Lord, You said whatsoever ye do and You meant whatsoever, and I thank You that You reached for the two most repeated things a body does when You wanted an example. Your word says do all to the glory of God, and Your Spirit is the one standing at this counter in the dark. I am saying one sentence over this plate.
1 Corinthians 10:31
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