Jesus 4 Everybody: A Cross Cultural Movement

We have a breakfast after our service in the fellowship hall downstairs, and you can greet them and find out more about them and get a chance to talk to them personally. It's been really great this summer to have several of our missionaries in. I really appreciate the way the congregation welcomed Matt Newkirk last week as he and his family are in Japan, and we've got a great opportunity for us as a church to remember that we're part of a larger family of God worldwide, and that God is doing things all over this globe, and we get to participate in that. And that really fits our passage for this morning.

So we're gonna turn, if you would, with me to Acts chapter 10. I've got a long passage for you this morning. I believe in you—you can read this out loud though. So we can do this together. As is our custom, we're gonna read God's word. If you would join your voices with mine, we're gonna read from Acts 10:1 through 23, 34 through 45, and that's in your bulletin or on the screen behind me. Let's read together.

Scripture Reading: Acts 10:1-23, 34-45

There was a man in Caesarea named Cornelius, a centurion of what was called the Italian regiment. He was a devout man and feared God along with his whole household. He did many charitable deeds for the Jewish people and always prayed to God. About three in the afternoon, he distinctly saw a vision of an angel of God who came in and said to him, Cornelius. Staring at him in awe, he said, what is it, Lord? The angel told him, your prayers and your acts of charity have ascended as a memorial offering before God. Now send men to Joppa and call for Simon who is also named Peter. He is lodging with Simon a tanner whose house is by the sea. When the angel who spoke to him had gone, he called two of his household servants and a devout soldier who was one of those who attended him. After explaining everything to them, he sent them to Joppa.

The next day, as they were traveling and nearing the city, Peter went up on the roof about noon. He became hungry and wanted to eat, but while they were preparing something, he fell into a trance. He saw heaven opened and an object that resembled a large sheet coming down, being lowered by its four corners to the earth. In it were all the four footed animals and reptiles of the earth and birds of the sky. A voice said to him, get up Peter, kill and eat. No, Lord, Peter said, for I have never eaten anything impure or ritually unclean. Again, a second time the voice said to him, what God has made clean, do not call impure. This happened three times and suddenly the object was taken up into heaven.

While Peter was deeply perplexed about what the vision he had seen might mean, right away the men who had been sent by Cornelius, having asked directions to Simon's house, stood at the gate. They called out asking if Simon, who was also named Peter, was lodging there. While Peter was thinking about the vision, the spirit told him, three men are here looking for you. Get up, go downstairs, and go with them with no doubts at all because I have sent them. Then Peter went down to the men and said, here I am, the one you're looking for. What is the reason you're here? They said, Cornelius, a centurion, an upright and God fearing man who has a good reputation with the whole Jewish community, led by a holy angel to call you to his house and to hear a message from you. Peter then invited them in and gave them lodging. The next day, he got up and went out with them, and some of the brothers from Joppa went with him.

Peter began to speak. Now I truly understand that God doesn't show favoritism, but in every nation, the person who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. He sent the message to the Israelites, proclaiming the good news of peace through Jesus Christ. He is Lord of all. You know the events that took place throughout all Judea, beginning from Galilee after the baptism that John preached, how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, and how he went about doing good and healing all who were under the tyranny of the devil because God was with him. We ourselves are witnesses of everything he did in both the Judean country and in Jerusalem and yet they killed him by hanging him on a tree. God raised up this man on the third day and caused him to be seen, not by all the people, but by us whom God appointed as witnesses, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.

He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one appointed by God to be the judge of the living and the dead. All the prophets testify about him that through his name, everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins. When Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit came down on all those who heard the message. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were amazed because the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles.

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

I wanna know, have you ever watched a movie or been to an art gallery or sat in a jazz fusion concert and felt like everybody is getting this but me? I went to a movie recently with my family, and we saw a movie by one of my favorite directors. We've seen lots of his movies. And I walked out of the theater and felt like I had failed an intelligence test. I was like, I have no idea what that movie was about.

And I feel that way a little bit as I was preparing for this summer series in the book of Acts. I realized that I have studied this passage and preached through Acts numerous times, and I sort of missed a main point of the book of Acts. And I wanna correct that today, and I wanna know if maybe some of y'all also missed a really key important part of this plot, of this whole book. So assuming I'm not alone, this is where we're gonna go today.

And again, we're doing our summer series looking at what the Holy Spirit is up to in the early church. Now, the Holy Spirit is not an it, not a vague power source. The Holy Spirit is he in the New Testament. The personal presence of God with his people, the permanent gift to believers. And the Holy Spirit, as I said a couple weeks ago, is often called the shy member of the Trinity because his purpose is not to call attention to himself, but to point people to Christ, point people to God the Father.

And over and over though, we're looking at this book and trying to learn about the Holy Spirit, and what he was up to then, what he's up to now. It's my contention that only really the Pentecostal church is really fascinated in pursuing the Holy Spirit. We do so as particularly reformed Protestants to our detriment of not really being in touch with who is the Holy Spirit? What is he doing? What is he like? What are his ways? And that's what we're looking at.

So today, here's my outline for us. I wanna look at how the Holy Spirit in this passage sets the table for outsiders, how the Holy Spirit sets the table for insiders, how the Holy Spirit sets the table here every Sunday, and then finally, are we setting our tables for the Holy Spirit? And I wanna give props to a pastor named Brian Habig, who really influenced how I looked at this passage.

The Holy Spirit Sets the Table for Outsiders

Here's the context of this passage. I wanna remind you that the early church was all Jewish. A lot of you are like, yeah, I know this. Jesus was a Jew. Yes. I know that. Thank you very much. The first Christians were all Jews. God had only one chosen covenant people, the Jewish nation, of whom he had selected of all the nations of the world.

And we begin our study in the book of Acts with Pentecost, and here's where I've missed it. So Pentecost was a harvest festival, came fifty days after the Passover festival. So fifty days after this, God sends his promised Holy Spirit, and no accident, this comes at a harvest festival because God's about to do some harvesting by the Holy Spirit. But what happens at Pentecost, the pouring out of the spirit was entirely on Jewish people. This is the part I'd missed before.

So I want you to think about what was happening in Jerusalem that day. All these Jews from all over the Roman Empire came back to Jerusalem. Here's the history of the Jewish people. They had been through a huge exile, and a lot of those people had not ever returned back to their homeland. So there was a Jewish diaspora, a Jewish scattering, a scattering of Jews all over the Roman Empire in all kinds of other places who spoke all kinds of other languages. And when the Holy Spirit was poured out on that Pentecost, that fifty days after the resurrection of Jesus, the people who heard the early apostles speaking in their own language were all Jews. The people who came to Christ that day were all Jews. They were Jews from all over the empire.

So what happened with this baby early church is that we had a church that was multicultural but monoethnic. Now, let me define those words. Ethnic has to do with ancestry and people. Cultural has to do with language. So these people were Jewish by background, and yet were living in all kinds of different places where they spoke all kinds of different languages.

Now, this is why this passage is so important for us. This passage is a turning point in the rest of the book. And here's what I missed. This is the beginning of the Gentile Pentecost. Now, I started off this series. We talked about this earlier. I said, imagine you're walking through the woods on one of those crisp winter days, and you come upon a pond, and it's just still, like a mirror, and you take a big rock, and you throw it out in the pond, and it makes an enormous splash. That's Pentecost. But what happens after that is the pond doesn't stay still, does it? There are all these ripples, after effects.

The big wave happens at the beginning, the big splash, but the after ones are almost as big. They keep going. And this is how Sinclair Ferguson describes what happens in the book of Acts. The big rock is Pentecost, but this is the second big ripple, the Gentile Pentecost.

Now, if Acts 10 didn't happen, I want you to think about what the church would be like. The church of Jesus Christ would be a Jewish church. Our breakfast downstairs after this gathering would be a kosher meal. The men in this room would be wearing yarmulkes to worship. We would be a Jewish, a completed messianic Jewish congregation.

And what's wild—let me show of hands with this. How many of you know personally, have a friend who is a messianic Jew? A completed Jew? Yeah, like five of you. This is what is so wild that today, most of us are from all kinds of different ethnic backgrounds, from all kinds of different ancestry, and very few of you even know someone who would have been part of the first nine chapters of the book of Acts. You don't even know somebody like this.

So what happens here in Acts 10 is the beginning of the Gentile Pentecost. It's a second Pentecost. That would include non-Jews, outsiders, Gentiles, most of us.

The Insider-Outsider Divide

Now, it's all the rage over the past couple of years to trace your DNA and know your genealogy and your ancestry. Many of you have probably done 23 and me. I haven't—my mom did it, and I remember the results coming back that we were mostly from the British Isles with a little bit of Sicilian, somebody had a pirate in the background or something, and then a little Neanderthal, which shouldn't surprise you if you've been under my teaching for years. You're like, yes, I've always sort of wondered if there's not a little Neanderthal in the background.

But I've heard all these stories. You probably have too. Of people going through and doing the 23 and me and discovering I have this cousin I didn't know about, or somebody had another family we didn't know about, like crazy stories.

But if 23 and me had been available in the Roman Empire, first century, they would have had one category on there that's not on the test now, and it would have been this: Gentile, Jew. Outsider, insider. And those are huge categories of Gentile. It's not a word we use very much. Anybody who's non-Jewish is outside the covenant people of God. You are an outsider. You are not welcomed in. There is a chosen race, and you are not it.

So it's interesting what we see in this passage. Cornelius is called a God fearer. Before this, we've seen another man, an unnamed Ethiopian eunuch, that Danny preached on a couple weeks ago from Acts chapter eight. And these people could become a part of, sort of outside on the periphery, these Gentiles of the Jewish community, but they were not allowed all the way in.

So the Ethiopian eunuch travels thousands of miles to go worship at the temple and is disappointed in that he is only allowed into the court of the Gentiles. He is not allowed all the way in. And he returned home, on the way back when he meets Philip, and the gospel is preached to him. But this means you're always an outsider. And then here comes the Holy Spirit. Right? This is what's happening in Acts 10. Here comes the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is setting the table for the Gentiles. He is literally setting the table to be equally brought in as the people of God, so that after this Gentile Pentecost, we can truly say, Jesus is for everybody. We can truly say this.

Food Unites and Divides

And what we're going to see in this passage is that how he does this has everything to do with food. And this is what's really odd to me and really funny to me. I mean, I want you to think about the phrase food unites. Have you heard that phrase before? Food unites means like, hey, your family doesn't get along very well, but around the Thanksgiving dinner table, you get along okay. Right? Or people who are very different all enjoy this very specific same cuisine together.

There's a really popular TV show right now on HBO Max or Max called The Bear, and I can't quite recommend this—the language is pretty rough. But the first season is all about this man, Carmen Berzado, who steps into the family business, which is this Chicago land beef restaurant that his brother had and that's failing. It's like, can you take over the family business? And it's sort of the subtitle or the main theme of the first season is food unites. There's all these people who fight with each other, don't like each other, they're working in the same restaurant, and they come together to do that.

And then there's a second season though, which could be subtitled Food Divides. Because food has a way both of bringing people together, but also dividing. Food and diet can also accentuate differences.

Now, it wasn't a long time ago, y'all, in this city, under Jim Crow laws, that white and black people did not eat together. In fact, it was a common practice in the black community to have to bring your own silverware and your own condiments to show up at a restaurant and go in a separate entrance to eat the same food. The irony of it—black people can prepare the food and serve the food and clean up the dishes, but can't sit at the same table. Right? Food divides.

That's very similar to the first century. Roman meals were highly stratified according to who was most important and who was the least important person in the household, who was in and who was out, and that was defined by seating arrangement. The same thing is true in many ways in the Jewish community. We read in Luke chapter 14, Jewish meals—see the disciples jockeying for position of who's most important, who sits at the head of the table, who sits at the very end of the table. Food divides, and food also can divide according to diet restrictions.

Now, this is true in my family—little weird footnote about my extended family. I have a family with very odd dietary differences. My parents, for a long time, were vegan, which was challenging to feed them when they came. I have a sister who has got celiac disease, so no gluten. They also would only eat meat that they'd known had been butchered in an ethical way. I've got another sister who's married to a guy of Indian descent, and so they're practically vegetarian. I've got a brother who owns a farm to fork beef restaurant in Charleston. He raises his own high end cattle and then brings them to market. So getting together to eat—our family, Susan and me and our kids, were the only omnivores. Right? Everybody else, it was a crazy algorithm to figure out what we could eat. We figured out we could eat nachos. That's what we could eat together. That was the only thing.

Dietary restrictions play in here as well because the Jewish community observed the Levitical food laws, all the prohibitions. But I want you to see here how the Holy Spirit begins to set the table for these two groups to come together, these outsiders and the insiders.

Peter's Vision

So here in this passage, here's Peter, who's ethnically and religiously a Jew and the leader of the early church. He has this vision that comes from the Holy Spirit—falls into this deep trance. Three times, he sees the same thing: all these animals, reptiles, all these animals. And God keeps telling Peter, "Get up, go kill some of them, and eat them." And he's like, "No, no, no. I'm not going to do that."

Here's the wrinkle: the Holy Spirit is setting the table for the outsiders, but he's also setting the table for the insiders. Just to be clear, the animals in the vision don't represent Gentiles. That was supposed to be funny. Okay? He's not telling them to go kill all the Gentiles. Right? The animals represent the food of the Gentiles, all the things that the people of the nations eat.

Have you ever watched the TV show Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmerman? It's all about people around the world eating crazy stuff, y'all. I mean, people will eat anything, really. So on the show, there are things like insect-filled nuggets, stuffed lamb spleen. Yummy. Right? This is what Peter's getting. Peter is getting his own Holy Spirit-crafted vision of Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmerman. This is what he's getting—it's on TV by the Holy Spirit in his dream. And he's getting this from the Lord who's saying, "Peter, you have my God-given permission to go eat any of this stuff."

Now, several years ago, we studied the book of Leviticus. We studied all these weird food rules that God had given his people kind of like performance art, so that they would understand what God was like. I know these are odd, but let me remind you. A lot of you were there for this, some of you weren't. In Israel, God gave his people permission to eat certain types of land animals. They were all cattle, sheep, and goats—animals that chewed the cud and had a split hoof. So there were certain other animals that were off the list, most famously pork, right—all the good pork products that we love—but also camels, which probably most of you haven't been tempted to eat. But those animals did not fit the classification.

The picture of this was God saying, "There is something that's whole, it's a whole form, and there's others that deviate from that, that are different from that. And so you can eat the whole one, but don't eat the ones that deviate." Same thing with birds.

The ideal Israelite bird was what you think of as a bird—one that sits on a branch and sings and eats nuts and berries. Those are the clean ones. But the unclean ones were the ones that deviated from that: ones that ate dead things, made a squawking noise or a screech instead of singing. So owls are not on the menu. You can have all the chicken you want, but no vulture for dinner. Or bats. They thought of bats as flying things, but they got hair. Not gonna eat those.

In the same way, they had an ideal idea of what fish is. Fish has scales and fins and moves through the water. Even today, we don't think of shrimp and lobsters as fish. We call them seafood or crustaceans because they're kind of different. God's saying, this is the whole form. Don't eat the things that look like bugs that live in the water. You can eat all the things that look like swimmy fish. And then finally, the same applies to insects. There's an ideal form of insect. The ones that look like spiders and have eight legs, don't eat those. You can have locusts though. Yummy.

But the Levitical food laws—remember, they were set apart to teach the people about God and to set a distinction between Israelite and the nations. This is what God was about. He was drawing his people out so that they might know him. And at that point in history, that was absolutely essential. He'd rescued them from slavery in Egypt. He's like, you're gonna be special because this is who I am. I'm whole. I'm holy, and I want your dinner plate to reflect what I'm like. It preached.

So it's wild now that the Holy Spirit is speaking about something different. I want you to think about the great commission that Peter had received so far from the Holy Spirit and the other disciples: Go preach the gospel to all nations. But you can't have dinner with them. You can't go in their homes. That's why he doesn't go in Cornelius' home at first. You can't sit down at the table with them. You may not eat with them. Your food is to be different. And now, Peter can go inside of Cornelius' house, and he can have bat, and he can have camel, and he can have bacon wrapped shrimp. All those good things. The Spirit is setting the table.

The Power of Personal Witness

Here's the surprise of Acts chapter 10. We know, having just read in passage a couple weeks ago about the conversion of Saul, Paul becomes a disciple. God shows up and knocks him off his horse and says, Follow me. Paul's like, Yeah, okay. He doesn't have to use secondary means to do that. He doesn't have to use the witness of another person to bring one person to faith in Christ. But he normally does. As I said a couple weeks ago, I bet all of you could name one person, a couple of persons in your life who showed you Jesus, who told you about Jesus, who witnessed to you about Jesus. God normally uses secondary means. A person sharing the gospel with another person.

And here's the beauty of Acts 10. God doesn't have to do this, but in his good pleasure, he makes it so Peter and the insiders have the privilege of being the vehicle through whom all these outsiders are gonna come to faith. The Gentile Pentecost happens not by a big explosion, but by face to face, one to one sharing of the gospel. This is what the Holy Spirit's up to then, and the Holy Spirit's up to today.

So the whole point of the sermon is not thank you Jesus for bacon wrapped shrimp. The whole sermon's about something much deeper. I want you to remember, the Holy Spirit sets the table for us every Sunday. But one of the things that is so important about us having the Lord's Supper every week in our church is that we're having table fellowship together with God and with one another.

I've heard so many of you say this about our church: I would never be friends with these people if it weren't for Jesus. You're like, I don't—we don't have a lot in common here. We're not all the same. We have a lot of different opinions and thoughts and interests in life. We're in different stages. But when we come around this table, we are one body. It's so important.

One of the reasons we're going to the school and we want to be in one service is so the whole church is around one table together. It's really important, but that's not the only holy thing that's going on on a Sunday when we do this. When we come around this table, I want you to think about what's happening across the world on a Sunday. There are house churches in China who are gathered around bread and wine. There are Christians in Syria who are gathered around bread and wine. There are even churches in Kerry gathered around the table together.

We are having table fellowship together with Christians all across the world, in all kinds of time zones, who speak all kinds of languages that you don't know. There are people you would never ever interact with in your whole life, no matter how far you traveled. Afghani Christians who are worshiping Jesus in caves. And this is what's happening when we gather around this table. The Holy Spirit prizes the unity of God's people around the person and work of Jesus. This is one of his main things. We're gonna look at this again next week, how deeply this matters to the spirit.

And so, when we come around this table, we're not just doing something that's for us in this room. It's almost like this table spreads out all around the globe that way, and all around the globe this way, and all you got little name cards, and if you walked all the way down the table, they would be names that you couldn't pronounce. Christians in Brazil, Christians in Mozambique, Christians in Siberia. This is what's happening. The Holy Spirit is setting the table for the world to come and celebrate Jesus. So this really matters for us as well as a community.

And here's my question. This is my main for this morning. You ready? Are we setting our tables for the Spirit's work?

Jesus' Table Fellowship

Several years ago, when I first came to this church, we had a symposium on the Lord's Supper. And I remember our worship leader at the time brought in a guest speaker who was a seminary professor and did a bunch of teaching on the Lord's Supper. We also read this book called A Meal with Jesus by Tim Chester. The book is about how over and over in the Gospel of Luke, it just seems like food is a big deal to Jesus. Jesus seems to love a party. He seems to love eating. Luke describes more than any other gospel writer how often Jesus is eating and who he's eating with, his table fellowship with all these people.

This is what Tim Chester says: "Meals embody friendship and welcome." So food was a powerful way for Jesus of doing his mission. The son of man came eating and drinking. As I said before, meals in Jesus' day were highly stratified—they showed who's important and who's not. And this is what is wild about the table fellowship of Jesus. Outsiders are insiders with Jesus. He comes and he eats a meal with tax collectors.

I want to just remind you, tax collectors were collaborators with the Romans, this foreign government over Israel. They were people who were occupying God's promised land. Anybody who is a tax collector was betraying the people. They were enemies. They had put themselves in league with the enemy. And suddenly, this is why the Pharisees—I mean, you talk about what they could not believe about Jesus' ministry. Yeah, okay, you're eating with sinners, but you're eating with tax collectors? Are you kidding me? This is what's such a stumbling block to them.

This is what Tim Chester says: "Jesus' meal reflected the bigness of the gospel, and our meals also can express our own functional doctrine of justification." Let me explain what I mean by that. It's possible to be people who say, yes, Jesus died for the sins of the whole world. Jesus died for everybody. Anybody can become a Christian. Come know Jesus. But in the way that we live our lives, and who's included around our tables as our guests, that tells a different story. Who is invited to our table can tell a story just like for the Pharisees, that there are good people and there are bad people. There are insiders and there are outsiders.

This is why in the book of Galatians, Paul is articulating this amazing doctrine of justification, and he teaches so thoroughly about this. But the occasion of this was that Peter—the same guy who had this vision of the animals—he began to pull away from eating with Gentiles. And Paul's like, you can't do this. Your table fellowship has to reflect the gospel of grace. Who you have around your table, who you associate with, who you eat meals with matters because it tells a story about who's really in or not.

Jesus expresses God's grace through his willingness to eat with anyone, even self-righteous Pharisees. In Acts 10, this is only underscored, highlighted, bolded, hyperlinked, whatever you want to say. He just makes this huge point.

Don't call anything unclean that I've called clean. — Acts 10

The spirit is now setting the table for everybody, not just to know Jesus, but to express that oneness around the table together.

I'm not saying our justification is based on who we have lunch with. No, I'm not saying that. Of course, our justification is based on the finished work of Jesus. You are welcomed to God because of the cross of Jesus Christ, and we want everybody to know that and come believe in him. But we show our cards about who we think is in or out with our food. Who's really a candidate for the gospel and who's not? What kind of people does God really love and not?

So here's my question. Who do you eat with? Who do you share meals with? Who's welcomed in your apartment? Does the guest list, even a lack of guests, reflect a deeper reality about what you believe about grace? Do you ever eat with someone who's poor? Do you eat with someone who disagrees with you politically? Do you eat with people from other cultures or ethnicities? Who's welcome at your table?

My challenge for us today is, can we begin to set our tables for the Holy Spirit's work? Now, I want to be honest. I know this is a hard word coming out of COVID, and many of us are just not in the habit. We've lost some of our habits of hospitality. We've lost some of our having people in our homes, in our lives, in shared meals. It feels weird. We may feel really awkward about this, and you may feel like, I don't have the money to do this. I don't have the time to do this. I'm single, and this church has all these young families. How am I supposed to have a young family over? I don't have the stuff. But here's my challenge to us: to find a way to begin to open up our table fellowship to something that reflects God's grace and his mercy, and the free offer of the gospel, and the radical inclusion, and the grace for everybody that we see in the cross, the welcome of all kinds of people.

Practical Ways to Practice Hospitality

Here are a couple of ways I want to encourage you to do this. Invite members of your Christian community to a park for lunch. If you're like, I don't have this in my house, that's okay. Parks are good. Meet up for breakfast with someone on the way to work. Use lunch in your lunchroom at school or at your workplace as an opportunity to get to know people and break bread with them. If you're single, you can entertain people for dessert. Families would love to eat brownies with you. You may not feel like you have all the stuff for the high chairs, but you can do brownies. Try inviting unbelievers together with believers.

Here's why this matters, and I want to remind you, this is what I'm going to emphasize in the sermon this morning. A meal with God is the point of eternity. A meal with God in the presence of the Lord is the goal of salvation, and it is our eternity.

The first thing that God does with Adam and Eve in the garden is hold out a menu.

You may eat of all these foods except for this one.

He invites them to eat in his presence. When the climax of Exodus, after the giving of law, the elders of Israel are invited to go up on the mountain and have dinner with God. They go up and have this meal with God. And Isaiah promises that when the Messiah comes, he's going to give a banquet such that there'll be more food left over at the end than there was at the beginning. We see that in the feeding of the five thousand. Jesus takes the bread and fish, and he multiplies it, and they pick up more afterward than was even there at the beginning.

The Last Supper looks forward to a time when Jesus says, I can't wait to eat this meal with you in the new heavens. And the Bible story ends with a meal that we celebrate called the wedding supper of the lamb in Revelation 19. Every time we eat together, we anticipate this hope.

Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your word. Thank you for the radical inclusion of Gentiles. Most of us would not be here today if not for Acts 10. Thank you for the way that you deign to let insiders have a part in bringing outsiders to faith. Lord, we pray that our own table fellowship as a church would reflect a deep love for one another and a deep conviction that the gospel is for everybody. Father, Lord, would you work through our church? Would you help us to be people who love eating together, love eating the meal that we have every Sunday in the service, that we love eating together and we love inviting new people. Lord, we pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.

Let's respond to the Lord in song together. Would you stand?