Live Free with Josh Howerton - Koinonia and the Early Church | Ep. 404 | Thursday, August 22, 2024

Episode Date: August 22, 2024

God is ready to place lonely people into communities and restore the idea of family through missional hospitality and you. This is why God calls us to draw our family circles a little bigger and fire up our grills, just like the church in Acts 2. For more information, visit lakepointe.church/dailydrive

Thanks for tuning in to today's Daily Drive with Lake Point Church, a daily dose of God's Word for your morning drive. When the word, not the world, becomes the majority of your week, your life will start to change. For that reason, our prayer is that God will speak to you through today's devotional. For more digital content to feed your faith, visit lakepoint.com. Church slash daily drive. And now let's dive in to today's devotional. Hey, thanks for joining us on the Daily Drive today. My name is Bro, and we hang here for a few minutes each day, Monday through Friday, just trying to get to know God better.

And we've been talking this week about the value of eating together, about the value of being around tables together, becoming missional eaters, if you will. Jesus was, he was around tables a lot, eating with people, lab with people, sharing with people, just being with them, affirming them as people who were made in the image of God. Yesterday we read how the early church picked up on this idea. They had seen Jesus around tables, and they decided to do the same. Let me read it again from Acts chapter 2. And all the believers met together constantly and shared everything they had.

They sold their possessions and shared the proceeds with those in need. They worship together at the temple each day. They met in homes for the Lord's supper and shared their meals with great joy and generosity, all the while praising God and enjoying the goodwill of all the people, and each day the Lord added to their group those who are being saved. At one of the churches I used to serve, we had a small group who lived in the same neighborhood, and they really want to get to know their neighbors. They started talking about how Jesus said, love your neighbor as yourself.

They said, we can't really love our neighbors the way we want to. We don't know our neighbors. So they really wanted to get to know them. So they made flyers and put in everybody's mailbox. You were invited to the first annual neighborhood barbecue. And they put a date and where the neighborhood put it, park where they would meet. They said, hamburgers, hot dogs, and drinks will be provided. If your last name is A through L, bring this, if you're M through Z, bring this. We'll have games for kids and

adults. Let's get to know each other. And they put all these flyers and all the mailboxes in the neighborhood and they wondered if anybody would show up. They worried that the six of them might be eating like 100 hamburgers. But they had to make a run to the grocery store because 176 people showed up. Most of them had never met each other. And they had so much fun and experienced so much laughter and so many stories. And one of the stories that came out of that barbecue. You know that house

in the neighborhood, that house that needs to repair? Well, they met who lived there. They found that it was a single mom of three whose husband had been killed in Afghanistan. And the neighbors pulled together and began to fix her gutters and shutters

and they mowed and re-landscaped. They just poured out their love on this lady. And it all started around hamburgers, hot dogs, and potato salad. So I encourage you, Take a risk on friendship. Open up your home. Open up your table.

Fire up your grill. Open up your kitchen. Go over to their house. Eat a meal. Have them over to your house. Have some fun. Get to know your neighbors. Become a missional eater.

And see what God might do. God might lead you to a new friend that you've really been needing. Or he might lead you to be the friend that somebody else is needed. You may discover a group of new friends with whom to do the shared life. Who knows?

It could turn into something where together is a neighborhood, you really start caring for each other. I mean, just picture a world where people are eating with and talking to and learning from, just listening, laughing, crying, connecting to one another, the picture that Jesus painted with his life around tables. In their book called Right Here Right Now, Alan Hirsch and Lance Ford write, Sharing meals together on a regular basis is one of the most sacred practices we can engage in as believers.

Missional hospitality is a tremendous opportunity to extend the kingdom of God. Every Christian household would and regularly invite a stranger or a poor person in their home for a meal once a week, we would literally change the world by eating. They're just saying there's power around a table where love and belonging and inclusivity are served as the main course.

My wife, Debbie, I've told you before, has the gift of hospitality. She is an extrovert that is fueled by people. She loves a house full of people. She loves tables full of food and full of people. I've told you before her favorite, verse of scripture, Psalm 68, verse 6, God places the lonely and families.

He sets the prisoners free and gives them joy. Her favorite quote is from Mother Teresa. The problem with the world is that we draw our family circles way too small. She likes drawing big family circles, the way Jesus did. We have a Sunday lunch. Sometimes there's 10 of us. Sometimes there's 40 of us. We never know

who might show up. We've been doing this for a long, long time. And a random person we met at church or someone we met at the ball field or a waitress and her boyfriend or friends of friends. Friends, one time we invited a single guy to come. He said, what do I bring? He said, he don't need to bring anything, but he showed up with a box of Captain Crunch. I mean, it always had a lot of fun together.

We eat, we hang out. The people would be taking naps on the couch or watching ball games and kids are swimming, and there's a small spot to play pickleball. They're watching movies or playing cars. It's a generational thing. Her mom and her mom's mom did it. I got invited into that family when I was 16 years old. But every Sunday that we're in town, we kind of throw that kind of lunch.

I remember when Deanna, first moved in with us. She was a girl that we had met in Southern California who needed a change of scenery and a recovery program that would be transformational for her life. So she came to Kentucky to a place called the Refuge for Women. And she would graduate from that program, move in with us for a few years. She is now married to a pastor. They have twin girls. She's released her second book. And now she is the director of that ministry. What God has done in her life is simply miraculous. But I can remember how she would kind of sit around and observe those Sunday dinners when she first moved in. It was so foreign to her.

She didn't know quite what to think. She had watched her mom slid her own wrists. Her dad had bailed on on them when she was a little kid. She hit the streets of the young age looking for love in all the wrong places, as they say. She got deeply involved in the sex industry, became a quote-unquote porn star, all kinds of addictions, very rough life. No real family to call her own. Her favorite verse in the Bible became the, one over an obscure little Old Testament book called Joel, where God says,

I'm going to give you back all the years the locusts have eaten. And it's so cool to watch him doing that for her. She wrote a little spoken word piece and told me I could share it with y'all. She calls it, God restores my idea, a family. Screaming, hitting, leaving me behind, or bloody towels and razors I would find, a mom so sick just wanted to give up while endless wine filled up her cup. A dad had tried to keep it all together who promised through adoption to stay with us forever, only to find he would lose his wife, and late at night try to make sense of his life, searching for a family to let me in. I would run away and try to begin the process of blending in, only to be thrown away again,

bouncing in and out of people's lives, dodging abuse and great pain that thrives. Well, the church decides to take an interest in me, saying God wants you home. Come and see. What it's like to be love while you rest and be. Come and heal your heart. This year is free. after years of families who are in each other's face i sit back and think what is this place i dine with this family of twenty or more filled with joy each week no one looks for the door i know it'll take time for this all to make sense for now i'll let down my wall so i can see over this fence this is what happens when generations are set free by the love of jesus the one and only key the time has come and here is that hour that god restores what the locusts devoured god places the lonely

and families. He sets the prisoners free and gives them joy. What do you think it would look like if places like Panera and Chipotle or Starbucks or our apartment complexes or the lobby of our dorms, or the park, or our homes, or our kitchen tables, became hubs for missional eaters? What if we began to draw our family circles bigger? I believe we'd make a difference in our families and in our world. Yeah, even though he never really owned one, Jesus made sure he was around someone's table, lot. And you know what? He wants to be around your table too, wants to connect with you, give you that sense of belonging, bless you with love. See you back here tomorrow. Have a great day. Thanks for tuning in today. For more biblical teaching and worship, join us for our church online

live weekend services on Saturdays and Sundays. For more information about all the digital ministries of Lake Point, visit lakepoint.compt.com slash daily drive. Also, if this podcast was helpful to you, would you be sure to rate, review, and share this podcast to help get the word out?