The Christians Hour

Aaron Brockett: Welcome to The Christians Hour. Thank you for joining us today. It’s a pleasure to have you with us. The Christians Hour is a ministry of gospel broadcasting mission where we take the good news of Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth through radio and media until all have heard.

What can I ask you? Have you ever noticed how much of your day revolves around food? There are a few key moments each day: breakfast, lunch, and dinner, that often shape our schedules. And sometimes those moments become the best parts of our day. But how often do we rush through them, moving quickly to the next task, the next responsibility, the next thing on our list?

Recently, I was invited to lunch by a friend and my first thought was, I’m just too busy. I don't have time just to sit and talk. But after I decided to go, wow did I realize I needed it far more than I thought. Busyness can slowly pull us away from meaningful connection and that can be a dangerous place to be. We were created for relationship, yet it's so easy to settle for surface-level interaction: texting, social media, quick conversations, when what we really need is something deeper.

Often, one of the simplest and most powerful ways to build that kind of connection is around the table. In fact, it’s something Jesus did again and again. He shared meals with all kinds of people, building relationships, showing love, and pointing people to truth. In today's message, Ben Cachiaras, lead pastor of Mountain Christian Church in Joppa, Maryland, explores how something as simple as sharing a meal can be a powerful ministry. Here's Ben.

Ben Cachiaras: I heard about a woman who had been married for many years, but she was describing that awkward period when she was first meeting her husband's family. Remember that period where it's tense and it's weird and you're meeting the parents and you try to impress the family? Every time she went, it was a struggle. She felt so out of place and like they were judging her and wondering did they really like her and all that.

She went to Thanksgiving dinner and she was the brand-new prospect. Nobody knew what was going on. Her boyfriend inconsiderately was watching football in the other room and left her to stand around and listen to inside jokes she didn't get. But a year later, she went back for Thanksgiving dinner and now she was engaged and she'd been with the family a little more.

As it came time for everyone to be seated, she knew to look for her little name card by the plate because that was the tradition. Her boyfriend's mother would write everyone's name in her best cursive and put it right there on the plate. This year she noticed something that made her heart skip a beat because last year she had a name card as well, but it was written in pencil.

Like she's probably just a temporary fling, who knows how long she'll be around, erasable pencil. Everyone else had their name written in ink. Hers in pencil. This year, though, she looked and there it was, her name in ink. Then the woman who would become her dearly beloved mother-in-law, fiercely loyal mother-in-law, came, took her hand in her two hands, looked her in the eye, and said, "I'm so glad you're here and part of this family."

You think something changed in that moment? Everything changed inside of her. Something was different. Her name wasn't written in pencil. It was written in ink. She belonged. She knew she was welcomed. She was one of them. She was loved. And somehow the food tasted better and the jokes were funnier. Everything was better that year and every year since. Why? She knew she had a place at the table. It's powerful when you know you have a place at the table.

When Jesus wanted to describe what God's family was like to people who really didn't know, when he wanted to say God's building something and he wants all of us in on it and he called it like the Kingdom of God and he wanted to describe it, one of his favorite ways to do it was like a great big dinner feast. A great big table where you accept that invitation and you walk in and you realize there's a name card with your name on it.

It doesn't matter who you are or where you've been or what happened before you got there. All that matters is that you got there. Jesus says that's what it's like. One time Jesus said it's like a guy who throws a banquet and he invites a bunch of people and they turn him down. He says to his servants, "I want you to go out there in the neighborhoods and I want you to get anybody you can. Get the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, the people who don't get invited anywhere. I want my table full." Jesus says that's what it's like where a whole bunch of people just come together and get around the table. Forgotten people discover they have a place.

Another time Jesus was talking about the Kingdom of God and he says it's like a wedding feast where you go to the wedding, but you don't care about the wedding. You want to know what's for dinner afterwards. He says that's what it's like and they all gather there and he says it's just a happy time and the invite list is really surprising. That's how the Book of Revelation reads. The Book of Revelation describes heaven as this huge crowd where all the believers in Jesus are finally together and high-fiving and praising God. Revelation 19 says we're going to be glad and happy and give him praise for the time has finally come when we can sit down for the wedding feast. Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding feast of the Lamb.

These are great pictures. Here's the thing. That's God's dream for all of us, that there would be this deep connection and fellowship that happens around the table with lots and lots of food. The message of the good news is "come and go with me to my father's house where we can eat at a big, big table." We used to sing a song like that. There's a place for you. You belong and there's fellowship there.

Jesus is so aware of this vision, this idea of what heaven is like, what God's family is supposed to feel like, that I think it's always in his mind. As he goes about his ministry, he's trying to take that future reality and plant it in the hearts and souls of everyone he meets. And you know how he does it? By sitting down to real tables with real people and eating with them. That's how he wants every meal to be a little appetizer of the great banquet feast that every one of us is invited to in heaven.

He eats with as many people as he can. He's sitting around the table helping people feel invited, included, welcomed. And then Jesus says, "Now all of you, if you want to be Jesus-shaped, you should do the same thing." For Jesus, the table was like a tool. It wasn't just a place to get your daily caloric intake. The meal was like a place you could give a message to someone. It was a place of ministry.

If we're going to get better at trying to be like Jesus, you don't have to get more pious or learn more Bible right out the gate. Those things are fine, but the first thing we need to do is just do like Jesus did and that is get better at seeing every table we sit down to eat at as an opportunity to connect and bless someone because that's what Jesus did. Potentially every meal is an opportunity to live your life on the mission. Have you ever thought of it that way?

I don't think Jesus wasted too many meals. Some of you are like, well, I don't miss too many meals, is that the same? No, that's different. For Jesus, every table was a tool. Every meal was a mission. Every person was someone that needed to know they had a place with their name written on it. He used tables as a place to do it. Believe it or not, what he did around this table was one of his core strategies. He used a table to draw people, to bless people. As he shared food with them, he was sharing faith with them. Table was a tool. Meals were a mission. It wasn't about the menu. It was about the meeting. For Jesus, eating was not just a time to say grace. It was a time to extend it.

I don't think all of us are convinced about how important and central this was to Jesus' ministry. It seems like there needs to be something harder to do, but it really is as simple as this. Let's just crack our Bibles open and do a little digging around for a minute. One place we can go is Matthew chapter 9. This is one of the Gospels. It's telling about the life of Jesus. It starts out this way in verse 9. It says one day Jesus is walking along and he saw a man named Matthew sitting at his tax collector's booth. Now some of us have heard that word "tax collector." We don't think that much of it. We think, oh, it's like an IRS agent. Okay, well, yes, but we've got to make sure we're really catching this or we'll miss the importance of what's happening here.

Every self-respecting Jew in those days hated the Romans. The Jewish people resented the fact that they were living under Roman occupation, under Roman rule. Here they were feeling like misfits and exiles because they couldn't live out their faith. It was so different and then they were being persecuted as well by those Romans. One of the worst symbols of all this resentment was the Roman taxes.

To make matters worse, it wasn't a small tax. It was oppressive and it was squeezing the life out of them. To make matters worse is those very taxes were then gathered to make statues and to build temples and to honor gods that they thought were abominations and to support a military that kept the boot of oppression on their own necks. This is what they're paying taxes for, to build an empire that mocked the one true God. The taxes were a symbol of everything that they abhorred.

To make matters worse, the Romans had a nasty habit of hiring out and paying off some of their own fellow Jews to do their dirty work for them and to become the tax collectors. They were considered unfaithful infidels, sellouts to those Roman jerks who sold their souls for a buck. To make matters worse, those tax collectors didn't just collect the tax that they were supposed to. They inflated the taxes and gouged their fellow countrymen, their brothers and sisters in the faith, and lined their own pockets to live in luxury while God's people suffered. If you saw a tax collector, first of all, spit on them because they were just despised, vile sinners.

Verse 9, Jesus is walking along and he sees one of these guys sitting in his booth. So what does Jesus say when he meets someone that everyone else can't stand? "You sinner, you sellout, you pagan loser." No, he says one of the most shocking things that should shock us. Verse 9: "Hey, why don't you follow me too? You can be my disciple." And Matthew got up and followed him. The only thing that's more shocking than that Jesus would ask that kind of guy to follow him is that the guy said yes and left his pension and his job and his money and all of that security like he was looking for some kind of change.

So he leaves his tax-collecting table and he starts spending time at Jesus' table and everything begins to change for him. That's how it is for everybody. Everything begins to change for Matthew. It's like he wanted that kind of change and he does a very logical thing. He's like, "I want my friends to meet some of these new friends I have. I want some of my old friends to meet Jesus just like I have. I want to get them around the same table."

So he does the smart thing. He throws a party, a dinner party if you will. Matthew 9 verse 10: Matthew invited Jesus and his disciples to his home as dinner guests. "Come to my table." Along with many tax collectors and other disreputable sinners. Is that the kind of party you'd get excited about going to? Some of you are like, yeah. Some of you are like, no. Matthew's not trying to stir up trouble. He's just like, when you're a messy person who's far from God and you're a sinner type, guess who your contact list is? So his friends are messy people far from God, sinner types, and he invites them all to meet this Jesus that he just met.

The disciples are probably like, "Jesus, are you going to RSVP 'yes' to this one?" Jesus is like, "I like people. I like food. I like this Matthew guy. Yes, I'm going and so are you." And we begin to see Jesus making a statement. He always used the table to make a statement. He doesn't say, "Ooh, I don't know, it might ruin my reputation," or "is it a good networking event?" "What would the church ladies say?" He doesn't ask any of that. He just says we're going.

That didn't go over so well. That went over about as well as a disco at a funeral. I'm telling you the Pharisees did not like it. Verse 11: When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, "Why does your teacher eat with such scum?" Now they're not trying to be mean, but they are saying something that's actually a clue to understanding the passage because they understood something that a lot of us don't and that is that table fellowship was special.

You didn't just go sit down and eat with anybody. It was sacred. To break bread with someone was an extension of your life and an openness to someone. "Why does he eat with scum?" Jesus hears that and here's his reply. Verse 12: He said, "Well, it's because if you're healthy, you don't really need a doctor, but if you're sick, you do. So that's why I'm going to this dinner. I've come not to call those who think they're so righteous, but those who know they're not."

You see how Jesus is rewriting the rules about who's in the family and who's out? It's not the righteous people who think they're so religious and special. It's all the people who know they need God, who know they need grace, and he uses a table to illustrate the whole thing. He's teaching us what the family of God is like and how you get in. Not by thinking you're righteous, but when you discover that you can join Jesus at the table by his invitation and you walk up and it's like, oh, there's my name.

So there's another guy named Zacchaeus another time. He's also a tax collector. Jesus is walking by and he stops and he says, "Hey," verse 19, chapter 19 verse 5 of Luke. He says, "Zacchaeus, come down. Guess what? I'm going to your house." Everyone's like, "What? He's gone to be the guest of a sinner." Jesus says, "Yeah, I'm going to go have a sandwich with Zacchaeus." And when he went and had a sandwich, the next thing Jesus says is "salvation came to his house today." Did you ever think that salvation could come through a sandwich? Jesus thought so. Is there someone that you could bring a sandwich to or yourself to or meet around a table somewhere and bring a little Jesus to them?

Jesus radically redefined: bring the crippled, the blind, the lame, everyone, everyone, he says, so they'll know there's a card. Here's the problem with American culture. The thing they said about Jesus: he's a glutton, he's a drunkard, "this man welcomes sinners and eats with them." That was the worst thing they could think to say about him. So if you want to be a follower of Jesus, what are they saying about you? "This man welcomes sinners and eats with them."

What would that mean for you if you took your table more seriously as a tool and tried to bless someone with it? If we were really Jesus-shaped, his attitude toward people and then the actions he took around the table is what infuriated some of the Pharisees. Now we're Americans and we'll eat with anybody. We don't care. But in their culture, it really signified a very special level of openness and connection and acceptance. The act of eating, table fellowship was very special and sacred. It was an act of a declaration of friendship. It was a way of saying "I'm here with you. I'm going to share my life with you. I'm open to you." It's very, very powerful. Do you think people still long for that in our culture today? Absolutely. It's a missing ingredient.

There's a price to be paid for living in any culture. Follow me here. Wherever you live, there's a price that you're paying to live in that culture. Now if you live in a developing culture like an under-resourced what we would say poorer country somewhere, the price that you pay for living there is that you might bury some more of your babies. Infant mortality or bad water or sanitation or lack of access to medicine or education. Those are very real risks that you can face just by living certain places.

But guess what? We all pay a tremendous price for living in this culture, too. And it's not usually those things. One of the prices we pay is that we live at arm's length from nearly everyone and we call it friendship and we think it's normal. We've been swimming in this water so long we think it's the way things are. But what would it mean to be Jesus-shaped when it comes to the table? To shock the world, to shock this culture that is so used to everything I'm just describing. To see your table as a tool. To use some of your meals as ministry. To be shocking enough to overcome that fearful distance that everybody lives with.

The early Christians, man, this is what they did. They didn't turn the world upside down and shock the world back in the early church because they had big screens. How'd they do it? They had little tables and they just said, "We're going to picture the future dinner with God right here in our kitchen." And every table became an altar and Jesus showed up. I just wonder if in a fast-food-hurry-up-and-eat-it, emphasis on how many calories and all of that culture that we live in, if once in a while could we use one of our twenty-one meals this next week on purpose? And really just be intentional. Make one of them count because you're going to let God kind of help you know who you're going to eat with and what might happen there. No pressure, but you just trust that if you go into a meal saying I'm going to bless someone, whether it's my family to start with or this person at work or in the lunchroom, or "Hey, who wants to meet on Tuesday afternoons for lunch at work?" or "I'm going to breakfast, would you like to go with me?" to be more intentional about our meals.

Acts 2:46 describes the early church. It says this. It says they shared their food with glad and humble hearts. I just wish that described my life more. And I wish it described your life more, that radical hospitality. Because it's not about what's on the table, it's about who's around the table and what happens once we get there, right?

One of the earliest Christian writings we have from an outsider's perspective describing the church is from 112 AD. It's a guy named Pliny. He was a government leader and a lawyer and he's having trouble with those pesky Christians in his district. He doesn't know what to do with them. They won't worship the emperor the way that they're supposed to. They keep talking about worshipping this Jesus instead. He doesn't want to have to kill them all, although that's a possibility. He doesn't know what to do, so he writes a letter to the Governor Trajan.

In that letter we have this letter, it still exists from 112 AD as he's an outsider describing the Christians and their practice and he's trying to report it to the emperor saying "I don't know, this is what they do. They get up, they worship this Jesus, they sing hymns, they sing songs and they hear from an ancient text and they encourage each other and they love each other. They're nice to everybody. They make vows, but not to go be insurrectionists. They're making vows to not commit adultery and to not steal things and all of that. It's very, very strange." He says, "And then the weirdest part is at the end they eat some food together." And then my favorite line is the last one where he says, "But it was, it's ordinary and harmless food."

Like I don't know what he expected, but he's trying to report on these Christians. They're up to something, I know it. And maybe he'd heard they were cannibals because some were saying that in those days because they kept talking about eating the flesh of Jesus or something and maybe they're cannibals but I know I think it's actually just bread. For two thousand years, two thousand years we've been gathering around tables, just eating ordinary food with ordinary people and singing praises to the one we call our God, Jesus.

I've been around ministry a long time. Seen a lot of stuff come and go, a lot of the fads. A lot of it well-intentioned and good and important and helpful, but none of it matters if we change all the methods and the window dressing if we've missed out on this simple way of Jesus. And here's what doesn't change: the simple way of Jesus is he loved people and he said you've got a place at God's table one day and I'll prove it to you by inviting you to my table today. And if you invite me, I'm coming. What about you?

A Cappella Ministries: Who else commands all the hosts of heaven?

Who else could make every king bow down?

Who else could whisper and darkness tremble?

Only a holy God.

Come and behold him the one and the only.

Cry out, sing holy forever a holy God.

Come and worship the holy God.

What other beauty demands such praises?

What other splendor outshines the sun?

What other majesty rules with justice?

Only a holy God.

Come and behold him the one and the only.

Cry out, sing holy forever a holy God.

Come and worship the holy God.

What other glory consumes like fire?

What other power can raise the dead?

What other name remains undefeated?

Only a holy God.

Come and behold him the one and the only.

Cry out, sing holy forever a holy God.

Come and worship the holy God.

Who else could rescue me from my failing?

Who else would offer his only son?

Who else invites me to call him Father?

Only a holy God.

Come and behold him the one and the only.

Cry out, sing holy forever a holy God.

Come and worship the holy God.

Come and behold him the one and the only.

Cry out, sing holy forever a holy God.

Come and worship the holy God.

Aaron Brockett: So how about you? Are you open to building relationships over a meal? To using your table as a place for connection and ministry? To loving others like Jesus did by simply sitting down and sharing a meal together? Here's a simple challenge. Be intentional with your next meal today. Invite someone. Slow down. Be present. You might be surprised what God will do through something so simple.

Our thanks to Ben Cachiaras for helping us discover how sharing a meal at our table can be a powerful tool for ministry. And our thanks as well to A Cappella Ministries for providing today's song of worship. If you'd like to listen to today's program again, visit our website at thechristianshour.org where all of our programs are free to stream and download anytime.

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