Picture a wild stallion running free across the open range.

He's not a postcard. He is five hundred pounds of twitching muscle, hooves fracturing the dry earth, a chest that breathes like thunder. When you look at him, you see power. Nobility. Strength.

He is fast, alert, dangerous — exactly what he was made to be. Peaceful now, ready for anything.

Now travel to a farm dotting the landscape across the range.

Look at a work horse standing in the muddy paddock. He's standing in a deep, wet rut, staring at a wooden gate, waiting for a bucket of oats. He won't move much until a man with a halter tells him which way to turn. Tame. Docile. Domesticated.

He's no longer wild; he's been broken.

A creature built to run the plains has been reprogrammed to wait for orders and serve a master.

I'm praying to bring God's Word into deep places in your soul today.

"And on the fifteenth day of the same month is the Feast of Unleavened Bread to the LORD; seven days you must eat unleavened bread. On the first day you shall have a holy convocation; you shall do no customary work on it." (Leviticus 23:6-8)

"Therefore purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us." (1 Corinthians 5:7-8)

My talk today is part 2 in our Fall series.

The series is called: Birthright: One Festival After Another

We are looking at the annual calendar of Festival days for ancient Israel. If you want to hear God, open your Bible; he speaks to you there.

There were seven of them:

The Feast of Passover (Leviticus 23:4-5)
The Feast of Unleavened Bread (23:6-8)
The Feast of Firstfruits (23:9-14)
The Feast of Pentecost (23:15-21)
The Feast of Trumpets (23:23-25)
The Day of Atonement (23:26-32)
The Feast of Tabernacles (23:33-44)

Each Festival has its own details. Together they form a year-round calendar of reminders that God's people are blessed — with powers, privileges, and an inheritance nobody else has.

In part 2 today, we look at the Feast of Unleavened Bread — the very next day after Passover.

And the title of my talk is... to be revealed.

Dominion
When God created Adam and Eve, he set them in Paradise and gave them DOMINION.

Dominion means the right to rule. True Nobility. True Freedom.

God said, "Fill the earth and subdue it" (Genesis 1:28). Run the open plains. Cross the horizons, God said. Stretch your dominion from sea to sea.

That was our original design. We were designed to rule. We were stallions on a limitless range, answering only to our God.

But then came the fracture.

In theology it's called The Fall. It's the day Adam and Eve opened the door to sin, and said, "Come on in."

The Fall was a coup. It was an identity heist.

The Fall was the moment the human sovereigns of earth stepped off their throne, handed the crown to a predator, and climbed into a cage.

And that is when the Tamer in Chief went to work.

You see, the devil—the arch-enemy of your soul—didn't just want you to do bad things.

He wanted to crush your dominion — to take a human made for the open horizon and teach it to flinch. The Fall was his program to tame the human race.

He uses fear, shame, and the hunger for approval. He drops in distractions and dysfunctions — anything that keeps a person content in a muddy paddock, docile and domesticated, no longer dangerous to the powers of darkness.

The devil breaks the spirit with the bit and the bridle. When the Bible says that sin is your owner (Romans 7:14) and Satan is your oppressor (Acts 10:38), he is talking about a person who's been broken by the fall but not yet saved.

Or... and this is for almost everybody here today... OR someone who is saved but you still carry with you the thinking, the feeling, and the believing of the horse that's been broken by a dark master.

The title of my talk today is: UNBROKEN

The Feast of Unleavened Bread
Why are we talking about wild, unbroken horses at a feast about bread?

 

Because God's calendar is a strategic map.

On the fourteenth day of the month, you have Passover. The lamb is slain. The blood is on the doorpost. The death angel passes over. Israel is rescued from Egypt by pure grace. They did not earn it, they did not qualify for it, they did not behave their way out of it.

God qualified them. God broke their chains and said, YOU ARE FREE.

That was Passover, part 1.

The very next day—the fifteenth day—begins the Feast of Unleavened Bread, part 2.

Why the immediate back-to-back? Because...

 

The slave mind of Egypt. The docile mind of Egypt.

The okay with being okay mind, the damaged emotions, the prisoner heart, the victim instinct, the self-pitying energy.

For seven days, God commanded His people to eat bread with absolutely no leaven—no yeast. To the ancient Hebrew mind, leaven was not just an ingredient; it was an active infestation.

 

They didn't buy packets of yeast. They used seor — a sourdough starter: a pinch of yesterday's sour, fermenting dough kneaded into today's fresh flour.

Yesterday's dough lived inside today's bread, and today's would ferment tomorrow's — an unbroken chain of fermentation passing down through generations.

God looks at a newly rescued, free people and says, "Destroy the starter. Break the chain. I do not want yesterday's sour, slave-minded fermentation puffing up the fresh life I am baking for you today."

And He told them they had to eat it because they left Egypt in a hurry. They were driven out so fast their dough didn't even have time to rise.

Do you see the genius of this?

They were slaves, but now they were free. That was reality.

But their minds, wills, and emotions hadn't caught up with that reality... their inner world was infested with slave programming.

Because if you carry the old starter into the new land, instead of running free, you will build a paddock in Paradise and keep asking, "Where's my bucket of oats?"