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Who Are You Bringing to the Table?

From the Series: Non-series
Speaker: Heather Zempel
Date: August 17, 2008

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Transcript

Welcome to National Community Church. So glad that you are with us this weekend. If you are joining us from one of our other locations via video, we welcome you. If you are tuning in by podcast or webcast, thanks for joining us. My name is Heather Zempel, I work with our Discipleship and Small Group Ministries here at NCC and I’m excited to be here with you today. I had so many moments of conviction this week preparing for this message more than I ever have. It’s a real bummer when you realize that you have more in common with the Pharisees than with Jesus. So we’ll look at some of those differences and distinctions. If you have your Bible with you, you can turn to Matthew 9, that’s where I’m going to be hanging out most of today, but before that, I want to share a few stories with you.

Back in 1995, a young college freshman by the name of James invited his roommate Anthony to attend a campus Bible study with him and that night, Anthony made a decision to shift his allegiance from himself to Jesus Christ and today Anthony is leading Children’s Ministries and Adult Ministries in his church.

A few years ago, there was a woman who went to a Bible study and got really uncomfortable during the Bible study and sort of bolted for the door. One of the leaders chased after her and said, “Is there anything I can pray for you about?” And the woman said, “No, not really.” And the leader said, “Can I just pray a blessing over your life?” And that leader prayed that Jesus would just bless her. That afternoon, unbeknownst to the leader, who didn’t know anything was going on in this woman’s life, this woman confessed to her husband that she was in an inappropriate relationship and potentially leading to an affair. She cut off the relationship, turned her life over to Christ, and is now leading Bible studies and mentoring young women in their marriages.

A few years ago, in 2004, I think it was at the very first Alpha we ever had, there was a young couple that had come to our church and the wife was a believer in Christ and the husband didn’t really know what he thought about Jesus. They came to church together and they sat down and said, “How can we get connected to this church?” And through encouragement, Gene decided to come on the Alpha course and several conversations later and several prayers later, Gene decided to give him life to Christ. He was baptized last summer at Baptism by the Bay. And when I asked Gene what Alpha had meant to him and how it had impacted his life, he said, “It led to me accepting God into my life, being baptized, and choosing to raise our daughter in a Christ-like way. My wife and I are now spiritually aligned and it means more than I ever thought possible. No longer do I believe in pure luck or what goes around comes around, God has a plan, He always did, and now I understand that.”

Ya know, we always feel like we have to have some big answer or some big argument or we have to have some stirring stump-speech to share our faith with other people. But what all three of these stories have in common is one person who had the boldness and conviction to say, “Come meet Jesus.” That’s all it’s really about, is saying, “Come into an environment where you can encounter Jesus Christ.” It wasn’t about arguments, it wasn’t about having a speech prepared, it wasn’t about having some slick presentation. It was about inviting someone to come with their fears and their insecurities and their questions and doubts and concerns, to bring them to the table in front of Jesus.

There’s a great story like this in Scripture and it happens in Matthew 9. Jesus approaches this guy named Matthew, and I’ll just start reading in Chapter 9, verse 9: As Jesus was going down the road, He saw Matthew sitting at his tax collection booth. “Come be my disciple,” Jesus said. So Matthew got up and followed Him. That night, Matthew invited Jesus and his disciples to his home as dinner guests, along with many tax collectors and other notorious sinners. But when the Pharisees saw this, they were indignant, “Why does your teacher eat with such scum?” Did they ask that so people could hear? I’m not sure, I want to see the playback on some of these stories. When Jesus heard this, He said, “Healthy people don’t need a doctor—sick people do.” Then He added, “Now go and learn the meaning of this Scripture: ‘I want you to be merciful, I don’t want your sacrifices. For I have come to call sinners, not those who already think they are good enough.”

Now, I just want to make a couple of observations about this. This particular is told in all three of what we call the synoptic gospels. It is told in Matthew, Mark and Luke. It is important enough to be included in all three of those parallel books. The other thing I’m finding is that Jesus was surrounded by notorious sinners. When this story is told in the Book of Mark, Mark actually says this: There were many people of this kind among the crowds that followed Jesus. It seems to me that the people who were running toward Jesus are the same people who are running way far away from us today. Now I could preach on that but I’m going to leave it there and save it for another time.

Jesus was surrounded by notorious sinners, by scum, people who were not even accepted, not just by religious people but in many ways, not accepted by society. Jesus was eating with tax collectors, why was that such a big deal? You see, the tax collector in Roman government was not just an ancient form of the IRS, they were much much worse, if you can imagine that. They were actually considered to be thieves by their own people. This is how it worked, the Roman government had an intricate tax system established where they would actually pressure the people to fund their lifestyle, and the Roman government would choose different deputies and people that they would put in different cities and different regions and allow them to collect the taxes and Matthew was one of these people. The way the tax collectors made their living was by over-taxing people. They had a set amount that they had to pay back to the Roman government and they made their living on whatever they were able to profit from squeezing more out of the people. So the Jewish people hated tax collectors not only because they were cheating them and stealing from them, but also because they were traitors to their own people. They were in cahoots with the Roman government, with the occupying enemy. Matthew lived in Caperneum, he was a tax collector, he might have been collecting taxes on the commercial trade routes, he might have been collecting taxes on the fish being caught in the Sea of Galilee, which would make for a fascinating dynamic with his new best friends Peter, James and John, who were fishing on the Sea of Galilee. These guys were despised. In fact, they were thought of in the same category as murderers by the Jewish people, and Jewish law allowed, permitted lying to tax collectors if necessary. So these were bad guys. I’m not making any theological statement in that, do your taxes and do them right. But they were considered to be bad, bad people, and yet Jesus is sitting around a table eating dinner with them. And it wasn’t just coincidence, He didn’t just happen to pick the right table at Union Station and all the guys just came over to Him, there was an intentionality on the part of Matthew because what we learn in Luke is that it says in Luke 5:29 that Matthew threw a great banquet in his home with Jesus as his guest of honor. There was an intentionality and strategic thinking on the part of Matthew to get his friends around the table with Jesus.

Now I’m going to be real clear right up front with you this morning about what my point today is. I’m going to ask you – Who are you bringing to the table? Who in your life are you bringing into a relationship with Jesus Christ? Who are you saying, “Bring your doubts and your concerns and your questions and your fears to the table where Jesus is?” It’s not about having a speech, it’s not about having some persuasive argument, it is about inviting people in your life to sit around the table with Jesus.

Some of you are here today and you would kind of identify yourself, you might not refer to yourself as a notorious sinner, but you might identify yourself as someone who is far from God, or you feel far from God, or you haven’t made up your mind yet, you haven’t’ made a decision to shift your allegiance and loyalty from yourself or your career or your friends to Jesus, and that’s great, we are glad you are here, and I hope you find an opportunity today to connect with God and connect with other people. But in a lot of ways, you are off the hook today, because I’m primarily speaking to people who have decided to shift their allegiance to Jesus, people that have identified themselves as Christ’s followers. It’s a little awkward because we will basically be talking about how we need to convince you to be Christ’s followers, so that’s a little awkward but just hang with me for a bit because I am going to talk about this unashamedly and unapologetically because as Christ’s followers, it is what He has commanded us to do, to be in relationship with people who are far from God and help them find relationship with Christ.

Now, four things I want to talk about. One, we’ve got to be friends to people. Two, we’ve got to invite people into an environment where they can experience the presence of Jesus. Third, we have to invite people into an environment where they can question Jesus. Finally, we’ve got to become spiritual tour guides to people.

Going back to Matthew, the first thing we have to do is we’ve got to be a friend. If we want to have the life-changing impact that Matthew had, then we’ve got to be friends with people who are notorious sinners. Are you around notorious sinners? How many of you are sitting by a notorious sinner right now? How quickly some of the hands go up! I am not a notorious sinner but I happen to play one named Weezer Buodreau [?] on the Ebenezer stage in Steel Magnolias which opens in three weeks, this is the commercial, tickets go on sale next week. Shameless self-promotion. Moving on, we need to be friends with people who are notorious sinners. Now, I say that a little tongue-in-cheek because when we are really honest about this, we are all notorious sinners. But here’s what I want you to do, for just a minute, you might need to close your eyes and think about this, focus in, when you hear the word ‘notorious sinner’ when you really think about that, what comes to your mind? Who do you picture? Whether that is a specific individual or a group of people that perhaps you have stereotyped, what I would challenge you today is that that is the person that Jesus wants you to be friends with. Why? Because it was the kind of person that He was friends with. And this is not about us developing evangelistic targets, this is not about us writing down our spiritual hit list, this is not about us coming up with the people that we want to share our faith with tomorrow. This is about us becoming more like Christ, by following his lead and being friends with the kinds of people that He was friends with. Who are you friends with? Some of us have become so entrenched in Christian subculture that we can’t even point to people that we hang out with on a regular basis who don’t know Jesus. We need to think about people that we need to re-engage, that we need to re-initiate friendship with, not so we can put them on our evangelism bulls-eye, but because that’s how Jesus lived his life and called us to live it. And Jesus had this amazing ability to see through people’s sin, to see them on the other side of the cross to their God-given potential. When he looked at Zacheus, who was another tax collector, He didn’t see that tax collector, notorious sinner, scum. He saw a philanthropist turning his neighborhood upside down. When He looked down from heaven and saw Paul, He didn’t see a murder, He saw a church-planter who would turn the ancient world upside-down. And Jesus wasn’t afraid to go out of his way to influence people that needed a relationship with Him. I love in John 4 when it says Jesus went to Galilee, it sounds like a scene-change verse in Scripture, it says Jesus went to Galilee but He had to go through Samaria first. If you look at Jesus’ route that day and you look at a map, you can see that He didn’t have to go to Samaria that day. Samaria was not the most direct line for Him to travel but He had an appointment with a woman at a well and was willing to go out of his way to find relationship with people who needed to have a relationship with Him. Who are you hanging out with? Who do you know that is someone far from God, that God desperately loves and wants to use you to bring them into a relationship with Him? What friends, what co-workers, what neighbors, what people at the gym do you need to initiate relationship with? What friends from your past do you need to reinitiate a friendship with? For many of us, the most spiritual thing we can do heading into the fall is to learn how to be a friend to people, it’s that simple.

The second thing we need to do is invite people into an environment where they can meet Jesus. We just need to invite them into where they can meet Jesus Christ. I think Matthew was probably an amazing party-thrower. I’m guessing that tax collectors could throw a really good party. They had the money to do it and he was able to assemble a quite impressive group of notorious sinners and scum. Matthew could throw a party, and that’s what he did to allow his friends to meet Jesus. There is another great, my favorite story in Scripture I think, and I want to see a movie of this in heaven, found in Mark 2. Flip over there, Chapter 2, verse 1: Several days later, Jesus returned to Capernaum and the news of his arrival spread quickly through the town. Soon the house where He was staying with so packed with visitors that there wasn’t room for one more person, not even outside the door, and He preached the Word to them. Four men arrived carrying a paralyzed man on a mat. They couldn’t get to Jesus through the crowd, so they dug through the clay roof above his head. Then they lowered the sick man on his mat right down in front of Jesus. Seeing their faith, Jesus said to the paralyzed man, “My son, your sins are forgiven.” Now I’m going to stop right here for a second because this is funny to me. I think we read these Scriptures and we don’t really imagine what’s going on in our heads, and this is why I want a movie. Because this is amazing to me, these four friends go to this guys house, he is paralyzed, this is dead weight they are carrying, they pick up this guy’s mat and walk from wherever his house was to the house where Jesus was, and if that wasn’t hard enough work, they get there and they can’t in the front door, standing room only, they can’t even get near it. My idea would’ve been – He’s going to be done teaching at some point, we’ll just hang out here until He is done. Well one of these crazy guys got the brilliant idea to take him on the roof, and they carried this guy up on the roof. I have no idea how they got him up there! He is paralyzed on a mat, did they have to sling him over their shoulders? I don’t know how they did this, but they get this guy up to the roof, I’ve got one word for these four guys, tenacious. They get up to the roof, then they have to dig a hole in the roof! Where was the owner of this house? And Jesus is standing there teaching, and then how did they lower him down? He is on his mat? They must have set up an intricate pulley system. They lowered this guy, Jesus is teaching and here comes a paralyzed man. We miss the comedy of Scripture because we know it so well or we think we know it so well. And then the most amazing thing occurs, are the four guys still up there peering in? Did they repel down? I don’t know, but it says that Jesus saw their faith and said to the man, “My son, your sins are forgiven.” And in the typical Pharisee form, we have a debate about whether or not Jesus can forgive sins. So Jesus says, in Heather paraphrase, “Ok, fine, how about this? Get up, take your mat and go home.” And that day that man found forgiveness and healing because of four friends who were willing to bring him into an environment where he could experience the presence of Jesus. They didn’t have an evangelism strategy, they didn’t have some speech, they understood the power of community, it’s the power of community that Jesus prayed about on the night of his crucifixion when He said in John 17: My prayer for all of them is that they will be one just as You and I are One, Father. That just as You are in Me and I am in You, so they will be in Us and the world will believe You sent me. Frances Schaffer when he talked about this verse said it is the final apologetic, community, people living as one in answer to Jesus’ prayer, becomes the final living ultimate proof for Jesus Christ. There is power in community. What some of our friends need to do is to encounter the body of Christ, which is us, which is the church. Here’s the deal. Some of you have been around NCC long enough to know that we are going into our fall season of small groups, and what I want to encourage you to do this semester is not to look for a group that you want to get in and be in it. I’m going to say that again, I do not want you to go home and look for a group that you want to be in and get in it. What I am encouraging you to do this weekend is to find a group that might appeal to a friend of yours who is far from God and invite them to come to that group with you. It might mean you have to go out of your way, but your friends need to experience an encounter with Christ and that happens in the context of community.

Let me give you some real practical ways to do this. You have a friendly, unfortunately that like to run. I’m very sorry for you. I have made it a priority this fall to make sure I have no friends that like to run. If you have a friend who likes to run, we have a small group of people who run together. They train for the Marine Corp Marathon together. You have a friend that likes the beach, ok, that’s better for you. Take them with you to never-ending summer. You’ve got friends that have financial things they need to figure out, that is probably all of us, take them with you to Crown Financial. You’ve got friends who are real brainy types, they like to talk philosophy, take them with you to Aaron Welty’s logos group or to Aaron Mercer’s New Testament survey group. You’ve got friends who like to make things or go to museums, take them to the arts group or to our knitting group. Even if you are a guy, you can do it. Find a community that you can introduce your friends to the presence of Jesus Christ because there is power in the community that we experience as people of faith.

The third thing we have to do is find a place where we can take our friends to question Jesus. When I left Capitol Hill to come on staff here full-time, I got a lot of questions. The funniest question I got was from a friend of mine who happened to be a lobbyist, when I told him I was coming to work for NCC, he said, “You’re church is big enough that they need lobbyists?” That was my favorite question. Some of the questions I can’t repeat from behind the pulpit, but lots of questions. And I imagine that when Matthew got up from his booth that day to follow Jesus, he was getting a lot of questions. But Matthew didn’t let that freak him out or make him nervous, he just invited them over to a party. He wanted them to come see for themselves. There was another disciple who did the same thing, a guy by the name of Philip, over in John 1, Jesus has just approached Philip and said, “Will you come be my disciple and follow me?” So Philip immediately runs to find his friend Nathaniel, who is also called Bartholomew and so Philip goes off, it says is verse 45: Philip went off to look for Nathaniel and told him, “We have found the very person Moses and the prophets wrote about, His name is Jesus, the son of Joseph, from Nazareth.” “Nazareth!” exclaimed Nathaniel, “Can anything good come from there?” “Just come and see for yourself,” Philip said, “Just come and see for yourself.” Philip didn’t feel like he had to defend Jesus or explain anything or give any sort of theological background pulling from the Book of Micah about how this guy really is the Messiah. He just said, “Come see for yourself.” One thing I find fascinating too is if you keep reading in that passage is that when Jesus gets to Nathaniel, He speaks into his life, he kinda reads his mail, and Nathaniel said, “How did You know about me?” And Jesus said, “I saw you sitting under the tree before Philip found you.” This is a side note, Jesus already sees our friends. When we start praying for our friends to come into a relationship with Jesus, that’s not news to God, He is already at work. When He sends us out to go find our friends, He already sees them as exactly where they are and exactly what they need.

What I love about Philip is he says come and see. There are some very real and legitimate questions that people have about the faith that we hold. Like why does God allow suffering? That’s a legitimate question. Why would a good God allow people to go to hell? If He is all-powerful, why does that happen? That’s a real, legitimate valid question. Why do bad things happen to good people? How do we know Jesus is the Son of God? Why would we believe that the Bible is true? How do we really know that God exists? What about those places where it looks like science and faith don’t seem to intersect well? Those are very real and valid and legitimate questions. And they don’t make God nervous. So often, they make us nervous. I believe that we need to study to show ourselves approved, that we need to be able to give an answer to any man who asks a question for the reason that the hope that we have inside of us, but what we really need to do is say, “Come and see.” We need to find places where people can ask those questions in a way that it is safe for them to ask them. And those questions are validated. We need to invite them to the table, to bring their questions to the table.

We are setting tables right here at NCC in about a month called Alpha. It’s a place where people can bring their questions to the table. All those questions we just talked about get explored every semester in Alpha, and what I want to encourage you to do, if you’re here today and you haven’t made a decision to follow Christ yet, then I encourage you to come to Alpha. I encourage you to take your Connections card out of your bulletin and put your name and email address on it and somewhere in big letters, just write Alpha and take it to Connections Center after service and we’ll give you all the information you need to know. Come to Alpha and bring your questions to the table. Now if you are here and you have already made a decision to follow Christ, I want you to come to Alpha as well, but not just by yourself. I want you to write your name, your email, Alpha, and take it to Connections Center and then take the postcard that’s in your bulletin. This ‘what will you bring to the table’ is not for you, the question for you is ‘who will you bring to the table?’ This is a question for somebody, one of those notorious sinner scum, that you are friends with that Jesus desperately loves, you give it to them and you say, “I’m going to this because I’ve got questions about faith,” and if you don’t have questions about faith, come to Alpha and you will have questions about faith. You can be very real and honest and say you’re exploring some of the things you believe and ask them to come with you, and bring them to the table. It is that easy, it’s just about inviting people to bring their questions to Jesus, because the questions exist, and instead of running away from them, let’s say those are good valid questions, let’s go explore those together, in the context of community where you can see the body of Christ and we’ll walk through this together.

The final thing I want to encourage you to do is to be a spiritual tour guide. Over in Acts 8, there is another guy named Philip, he is Philip the evangelist as opposed to Philip the disciple, Philip encounters an Ethiopian Eunice riding in his chariot reading in the Book of Isaiah and Philip goes up to him and asks him if he understand what he is reading, and the Ethiopian says, “I can’t unless somebody explains it to me,” and Scripture says in verse 30 of Acts 8 that Philip got into the chariot with the Eunice, explained the gospel to him from the Book of Isaiah and before the day was over, the Ethiopian was baptized. Now, you talk about somebody going out of their way to get into a relationship with somebody who needs a relationship with Christ! Philip found himself so much out of his way that Jesus had to like teleport him to where he needed to go after that. Just keep reading that story. But Philip wasn’t content to stand outside the chariot and give instructions, he got up in the chariot with the Ethiopian. You know, travel agents sit in front behind a desk, in the climate-controlled comfort of their office and tell you where to go, what you should see when you get there, how to get there, how much you should expect to spend, some things you might encounter when you get there. A tour guide is very different. They put on their hiking boots, strap on their backpacks and they go on that journey with you. They are there by your side to interpret what you are seeing, to help you understand what you are experiencing, to translate for you, to be with you on that journey. I fear that too many of us have turned ourselves into spiritual travel agents telling people where to go, what to do, what to think, how to get there, how to live their life once they are there from the safety and security and climate-controlled comfort of our church setting, when what God has called us to be are spiritual tour guides that strap on our packs and walk with people through their life journey, through their spiritual quests.

Be a tour guide, look for people that you can be friends with. Invite them into an environment where they can experience the presence and the life changing power of Jesus Christ. Invite them into a place where they can bring their questions and ask them in a way that is safe for them to ask, and strap on your pack and walk with people through the life that they are walking through, and look for fingerprints of God along the way.

Who are you bringing to the table? Who are you bringing into the place where they can experience Jesus? Two things I want to encourage you to do today as we go into our small groups kicking off in about three weeks. Number one, if you want to come to Alpha, fill out the card, take it to the Connections Center, take that postcard and give it to a friend. That’s one way you can do this. Or, you can go online to www.theaterchurch.com/groups and with your friends in mind, look for a group, not for yourself, I know some of you guys get real excited about all the groups and you have like six that you want to join, let go of your wants and desires and look for a group that makes sense for a friend and invite them to come with you.

I want to address something that I know is going on with at least some people here. This is what I would be doing if I were in your shoes. I would say, “Well, that’s great and I hope a lot of people do that, but for me, I’m not ready to do that yet and I need to spend this semester growing in my faith. I need to concentrate on me, I need to make sure I’m becoming more like Christ.” If that’s what you’re saying then I would push back and ask you if that is an excuse, because if you really want to grow in your faith over the next four months than investing your life in the life of someone who needs a relationship with Christ. Why? Because you will pray more than you have ever prayed, you will read the Scriptures more than closely than you ever have before because you will be looking for the answers to the questions they are asking. You will live your life differently because you know they are watching. You will relate to the people around you because you want to make sure it is God-honoring because you know that they are watching. If you really want to concentrate on your own spiritual growth this semester, then get outside of yourself and invite somebody to come to the table with you because it will transform your life.

Here’s the deal, when we invite people to come to the table with us, it’s not just about inviting people to our space, to our table so that we can introduce them to Jesus. When we bring people to the table, we are literally inviting them to the table of God Himself. Throughout Scripture, Jesus paints these pictures of the kingdom of God and one of the most fascinating ones is found in Luke 14, and the picture that Jesus paints, the kingdom of God is like this, it is a man who threw a party, I think the actual word used there is feast, a man who organized, planned, prepared for and threw and feast and then the man said this to his servants, “Go out into the country lanes and behind the hedges and urge anyone you find to come so that my house will be full.” I’ve been on a little bit of a kick lately of trying to figure out how I can become an answer to Jesus’ prayer. We are always asking Him for stuff, but what I’m finding is that when we live in community with one another, we become the answer to Jesus’ prayer that they would be one. When we are bringing people to the table, we are becoming the fulfillment of Jesus’ desire that his house would be full.

Who are you bringing to the table? Who are you going to invest your life in? Who are you going to be willing to go outside of the comfort of your own life to bring them into places where they can experience and encounter Jesus Christ, where they can bring their questions? You can be a spiritual tour guide for them. Who are you bringing to the table? Don’t look for a place where you can jump in and grow spiritually, look for that place where you can invite someone to come to the table with you and let’s experience Christ together.

Father, I confess tonight that I’ve been much more like a Pharisee who has questioned whether or not if is a good use of my time to hang out with certain people. Father I pray that You would make us more like You. Some of us have a lot further to go than others. Jesus I pray that You would convict us, that You would help us to grow more like You and look more like You. God that we would be like the person that You said to go out into the country lanes and behind the hedges and urge anyone you find to come so that Your house will be full. God make us those people. God help us to bring people to the table because we know that You are already there and You are already ready and willing to meet people right where they are. God I pray that right now You would begin to put on the hearts of people here the names and faces of people they need to bring to Alpha, the names and faces of people they need to invite to a small group. God encourage us to bring people to the table this fall, and help us do it. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.

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