“The Table”
(For this sermon you need to set up a very elegant dinner table complete with chairs and food, anything to make it look inviting. You’ll understand as you read the text.)
Want to know a staggering statistic? Did you know that nearly 1/3 of the world’s population call themselves Christians? Out of the entire population of the world, nearly 1/3 call themselves Christians. Now if we were to do a study of those people, we would quickly find that the people that are actually involved in a church setting and spend time doing things such as worship and praying to God, the number is significantly less, but still 1/3 of all the people in the world call themselves Christians and would say they believe in God.
Now at face value that may sound pretty good, but the reality is that right now over 2/3 of the world’s population are lost. 2/3 of all the people in our world are lost that’s over 4 billion people. 4 billion people LOST! Do you know how many people that is? If we could fill Paul Brown Stadium in Cincinnati to it’s maximum capacity, which is around 80,000 people, it would take 50,000 stadiums to get to that number of 4 billion.
Now you might say to me this morning, “Brandon, you can’t possibly expect me to do anything about that! I’m not a missionary, and Evangelism isn’t my thing, plus I live in Foster, or Butler, or Falmouth Kentucky!! What can I do?” Let me bring my point a little closer to home. Right now as I speak within a 10 mile radius of this church building there are about 22,000 people that call this place home. Of those 22,000 people that live within 10 miles of this church and are our neighbors, 2,000 are actively involved in church. 2,000 people know who God is and have accepted Him as their Lord and Savior.
Do you know what this means?? It means that within 10 miles of THIS church, there at least 20,000 people that are lost and do not know God’s saving grace and will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven!
Now I have another question for you this morning. Have I gotten your attention yet, or do I need to remind you that according to these statistics, if Jesus Christ were to come today, only 1 in every 3 people in the world would be saved. That’s tragic enough, but what’s even scarier is that in our little community here that number jumps to more like 1 in 11! Do you think you live in a area of the world where everyone for the most part believes what you believe and were “raised” the way you were raised? THINK AGAIN!!
There are so many people around us that are lost, and it’s definitely bad on our part because we are called to be the hands and feet of Jesus. We are the ones that are called to “go and make disciples”, and Jesus instructed in the Great Commision. And we aren’t doing what Christ asked us to do. But it’s even worse for the people that don’t know Christ, or have a relationship with Him.
Isn’t it awesome to have a relationship with Christ? If you’re sitting in front of me this morning and you’re saying “yeah yeah” then I hate to break it to you but you don’t have an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ! Now you may think that you do, you may have been told that you do, but if you aren’t absolutely filled today with love and compassion and excitement about what God is doing in your life, then you don’t know what it’s like to be in a relationship with Christ.
And guess what, God doesn’t care how many years you’ve been coming to church, it doesn’t matter how much money you’ve given, or how many Sunday School classes you’ve been a part of. God doesn’t even care if you’re a preacher or an elder or a deacon, or a teacher, or a choir singer. What matters to God is what’s inside. And if what’s inside isn’t that big a deal, neither is the outside. God doesn’t care about WHAT you do, He cares about WHY you do it. And this relationship with Christ, changes everything. It changes the way we think, the way we act, the way we live, even the way we talk imagine that!
If we could picture a relationship with Jesus and how we come to that relationship, it would be a lot like a table. And at that table Christ is the head, and we are the ones that are invited to join Him. So if we could picture this table, we would have some questions about it. One may ask, who is sitting around the table? And better yet, how do we even get to the table?
Jesus tells us Himself in John chapter 4 that He can give us living water that we will never be thirsty again, and we even celebrate the Lord’s Supper and eat bread and drink juice representing Christ’s blood and flesh to be filled by His Spirit and not hunger or thirst for any sinful thing.
We have all been invited into this relationship with Christ, we’re invited to this table, because all of us are seeking food that will satisfy our hunger completely. And this is the ultimate invitation to dine with Christ and be full. But how do we get to this table? To understand how to get to the table, we must first understand what is holding us back from this table.
The first thing that’s holding us back is that we can’t come to the table with filthy hands. When my mother would call me to dinner the first thing she would always say was, “Wash your hands first!” And good thing that she did because we played with mud, bugs, and dried cow pies! Did you know you can throw them like Frisbees? We can’t come to the table with dirty hands, what do I mean by that? We can look at Ephesians chapter 5 to understand what it means to “wash our hands first.”
READ EPHESIANS 5:1-2
This says to be imitators of God. Now that’s a big challenge. We know God as being the source of everything that is good. We know that God is without sin, and loves all of us, and has sacrificed the most valuable, precious thing to Him for us. And we are called to imitate that. Ever notice how people will often ask little boys and young men, if they’re going to go into the same line of work as their fathers? For instance, people used to ask me all the time when I was growing up, “Hey Brandon, are you going to be a plumber, like your dad?” Such a cute little question, and to those people I would always respond “Are you crazy?”
Just like kids following in the footsteps of our parents, we are called to follow in the footsteps of God and to imitate His likeness. Going on in this chapter of Ephesians, we also see what we must get rid of in our lives to come to this table.
READ EPHESIANS 5:3-5
Not a hint of sexual immorality. That’s kind of a taboo subject around here, but an important one. This isn’t just limited to premarital sex, or affairs. This is also pornography, lust, anything that is clouding your mind about what sex is, and what it shouldn’t be. He even says to stay away from any kind of impurity, or greed. It’s always about the money isn’t it?
If we’re clinging so tight to our money, so driven by dollars signs, and how to get more and more, we can’t come to this table. Also obscenity, foolish talk, coarse joking when you’re at work how do you joke with your friends? When you’re sitting at the store, what’s your conversation about? Is it something that pleases God or something fun, or interesting, or does it seem to revolve around slander and obscenities, and just plain foolishness?
We can’t come to this table with our hands covered in filth and sin. It’s made clear for us that for us to have an intimate relationship with the Father, to really be connected to Him in the way that I’m talking about this morning, we have to be IMITATORS of God, to be like Him! We can’t live our lives the way that we want, and involve ourselves in the sinful things in life and approach this table.
This is a pretty easy concept to understand if you think about it. But we make it so difficult, and we look for any and all loopholes, and we try to justify our sin. But it’s like this, when I married Megan I said that I would devote myself to her and her alone. But lets say that next Sunday this good looking blond walks in and struts up to me and says, “Hey cutie, I like the cut of your jig!” And if I were to ask this little lady to join me for lunch after church so we could get to know each other and get a little more comfortable!
Now a lot of you know my wife and you think she’s a sweet innocent woman, and you might think that there’s no way she could ever get upset about anything, but let me tell you something… She’s gonna have a problem with that, and I’m gonna have an even bigger problem! But you know what she doesn’t have to worry because this guy loves his wife, and no woman in the world, no matter how attractive or seductive she may be, has a shot with Brandon Hatfield! I’m taken!
In that same way, I don’t want to give my heart or devotion to anyone or anything other than Jesus Christ! I want to dine at this table and commit myself 100% to Him. And this brings me right to the next thing that is holding us back from coming to this table and that is that we can’t come to the table unless we are sanctified.
Do you know what that word means, sanctified? We kind of throw it around every now and then, but do you know what it means? It means to be “SET APART” for some purpose. So I’m saying that we have can’t come to this table, we can’t come into this relationship, unless we are sanctified, we’re set apart for it.
And so we can’t come unless we’ve washed our hands so to speak of sin, and then God sets us apart and sanctifies us for this awesome relationship, he brings us to this table where we can be filled. Listen to 1 Corinthians 6:9-11. Paul says, READ.
You see here he’s saying you know at one time you were wicked, you were sexually immoral, and idolators, and caught up in adultery, BUT NOW… you were sanctified, you were set apart, and you were justified, you were freed from the bondage of your sin and in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. That’s interesting isn’t it, it says that we were sanctified by Christ and the Spirit of God. You know I’m afraid that a lot of people in this room don’t even know what the Spirit of God is, and certainly don’t know what it feels like. Remember all the statistics and numbers of people I gave you before all who are lost, it really tugs at me because I know that those people as well don’t know what the Spirit of God is even like.
You might say well, I really don’t care. I mean what does it matter anyway, I’m here at church, or I’m not into that lovey-dovey Jesus is my best friend kinda thing anyway. But you know the reason that you don’t care, or the reason that you don’t know about what it’s like to come to this table into this intimate relationship is because you never have. You know as I look around and as I see people everyday, I just see how hollow and empty people are.
I see men and women, guys and girls, that are so empty, so alone and so void of anything and they can’t figure out whats wrong with them. And the truth is, and what many of us do is we just shut it out and let our hearts harden and we snuff our the Spirit of God. We don’t open ourselves up to it, and we just turn cold. You see when you come around the table, you find life. You find that life is so full of happiness and joy, and you just feel so satisfied. Like no matter what happens, I’m taken care of, and loved.
Lee Strobel is a Christian author, and a scientist, who used to be a very bold and avid atheist. In his quest to disprove Christianity, he became a Christian, and in one of his books called “God’s Outrageous Claims” he tells about a time his friend Bob called him frantic. He writes: READ
What happened to Lee’s friend Bob is going to happen to you. It may not be the same kind of tragedy, but it is inevitable that someday, somehow you will experience some kind of soul crushing heartbreak. You’re not immune and neither am I. But Jesus want to take us in those situations and heal us and reassure us that everything is going to be ok, and we can depend on Him. Being at this table, is the most amazing place we could ever be and to experience God’s Spirit, what an awesome, wonderful gift!
But we can never come to this table if we have filthy hands, or if we aren’t sanctified and set apart for it. But there’s still another problem. There is one more glitch that keeps us from coming to the table and into this relationship with Christ. Even if we’ve done everything else, we still can’t come to the table.
Why? Because of sin. Because of the filth that we’re covered in and because there’s nothing we can do about it. So I’m sorry to get your hopes up this morning. But none of us are worthy of this table. We can’t go. We just can’t.
Unless, we give our lives, everything about us- our wants, our needs, our desires, our very being to Jesus Christ, and let Him complete us. Then we can come into God’s presence and dine with Him at the Table. There are a lot of lost people out there, so many just in our community alone. Who are you going to bring to the table with you? How much longer are we going to let others eat out of the trough?
The table is set, the invitation is at your feet. But listen to me, it is not possible for us to sit at the table and eat at the trough. Today may seem like any ordinary day, but it can be a brand new day for you. Today can be the day that you say, I’m gonna give my life completely over to Christ, it might be frightening, the future may be unsure but, I’m going to trust Him, and it’s gonna change who I am. Are you going to make a change today? I hope that you’ll say yes. I hope that you will search your heart this morning and know that this message is for you, yes for YOU! It’s not for the person sitting two rows in front of you or 3 rows behind. This message is for you today. Christ has called all of us to something much bigger and greater than the stuff that we settle for. If you have a decision to make for the Lord I pray you’ll come as we sing.
