On the Power of a Table: Tables As Altars

Last week, we began our deep dive into the power of a TABLE. Part two of this conversation today focuses on the biblical precedent of regarding our dining table as a type of altar, which means we hosts are then the designated priests meant to represent the presence of God to those who gather around our table. There's so much to study when it comes to tables! I'm loving this. BONUS: We begin with a Bible-reading tip that has helped me recognize the frequency of themes in the Bible when I read through the Bible in a year.

And, I finally remembered to add in a personal update at the end! I'll try to get that in on a more regular basis. This week, I'm sharing my intention/focus/habit for 2026 and what it has to do with tables and my family. Hint: I was convicted by a Joe Rogan podcast. 

Pull up a chair. 🪑 

SHOW NOTES

"Episode 178: Dr. Matthew Sleeth" on That Sounds Fun with Annie F. Downs

Reforesting Faith: What Trees Teach Us About the Nature of God and His Love For Us by Matthew Sleeth

Moses, Aaron, & 70 elders share a ceremonial meal with God on Mt. Sinai: Exodus 24:1-18

Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus: How the Jewishness of Jesus Can Transform Your Faith

The Joe Rogan Experience: #2424 - Jelly Roll

The episode where I talk about my conviction to intentionally make space for long-form conversations in my life: "The Big Bonus Episode" on As We Grow.

Transcript

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When I started the series about the table, I did not even begin to understand the amount of power that we were tapping into by studying this. Today we're going to talk about the altars that you have in your home right now and the power that they have to focus your soul, your spirit, and your body on God as our source. It is an incredible message from God that I am humbly coming to you with and excited to share with you. So pull up a chair and let's get into it. Welcome back to the mentors table. My name is Joy, and I'm the host of this table. And like we talked about before, the reason that we call this community the mentors table is because it's a place for us to gather. But the community aspect and the power that is inherent in a community gathering is only accessible when the pe people in the community at you show up and share your voice here at the table as well. Like we talked about last week. And if you have not listened to last week's episode, I strongly recommend you go back. I'll link it in the show notes. But it gives you a foundation for why we use the word table in the name of this podcast and why the principle of a table is so powerful and draws us in. And part of that is the communal aspect, but it's only a community when we're sharing with one another what's going on in our lives or what God is teaching us or what we're learning. So I invite all of you to bring not just your seat to the table, but also your voice so that we can do this life together. Before we go on and we talk about a different aspect of the tables, we're going to take a minute of silence and solitude. So if you could just get your body in a posture of surrender, that would be feet flat on the floor. Preferably sitting down, but I don't think that is necessary. Hands open and palms facing up in a posture of surrender. Let's go ahead and take a deep breath in. Let's do one more deep breath in. And we focus on you. Open the eyes of our understanding. Open our ears to hear and to see what you have for us today. We worship you. And release it slowly. I think we're ready. Okay, we're gonna jump in today and we're gonna talk as the title of this podcast indicates about how a table is also like an altar. But before we jump in too much with what that means, I think it's important to talk a little bit about altars in general. I don't know about you, but one of my techniques for reading through the Bible, um, I've done it three or four times. I'm real-time fact-checking myself. Um, I've done it a couple of times in the last few years. And one of the things that I do is I choose a word or a phrase that I am constantly underlining or making a little picture of out in the margin. To um, I'm choosing one word that I see repeating over and over. I got this idea because I was listening to a podcast talking about trees in the Bible. I'll link the podcast in the show notes, and then highly recommend you go and get his book as well. I believe his name is Matthew Sleeth, and he's talking about the power of trees. I'll link it in the show notes. Anyways, and he talks about how trees, um, the word bushes, shrubs, vines, all of those are related in Hebrew and Greek, and so they count as a singular theme, uh, fruit as well, coming from any of those plants. It counts as a singular theme throughout the Bible, and there's something about physically seeing with my eyes and then getting my body involved by using my hand to underline and then maybe draw a little picture over and over and over, especially in the Old Testament. I was doing it multiple times on each page. It is just mind-boggling how often that theme comes up, but I'm able to remember it because of that physical practice of underlining and making little pictures over and over and over again. I've done the same thing with the words the land. There's a lot of really powerful things, and really kind of the story of humanity is just constantly trying to find our own land to inhabit. Um I mean, isn't that kind of summing up what our whole life is about? Anyways, but then I also did the word altar, and I just googled it real quick. An altar actually appears in the Bible over 400 times. Now, another technique that we've talked about in studying the Bible is to notice repetition. Repetition is God's way of highlighting, underlining, adding an exclamation point, or maybe a little star on the outside to say this is important. So when the word altar occurs over 400 times, think of it like an exclamation point. That is something that we're supposed to take note of. And so when we see the word altar over and over again, we know that it is important. Today I was just reading in Genesis 12 and 13 how Abram was told to go to the land that God was going to show him, and this is where that promise of you will inhabit this land, and those who you bless, I will bless, I being God, those who curse you, I will curse. And um, and it's this key covenantal promise at the beginning of the hit not the very beginning, but towards the beginning of the history of humanity that is so important. And I notice that he goes out and begins to journey towards the land that God is leading him to. He stops in Shechem, and this is interesting. He stops, the Bible says, at the oak of Mora, and I'm saying Morah because I'm going from the complete Jewish Bible. I don't remember what it says in like the NIV version, but he stops at a tree. And again, if we're noticing all the trees, I think that that is significant as well. But he stops at a tree, God appears to him, gives him direction, and Abram's response is to build an altar. Then he continues going on. And what is the altar, right? It is a place to mark where you've heard from God, it's a place to offer sacrifices in worship to God, it's a place to remember, like we talked about so much last year or last season on the mentor's table, the the biblical principle of remembering and how much that empowers your faith. And here we have not just auditory acknowledgments of God's direction and worshiping God, but we have physical evidence where again Abram's entire, not just spirit and soul, gets involved, but his body, his physical body as well, in dragging the stones over and possibly cutting the wood that he's going to burn on top of the altar. It's a whole body experience of worship to God. And it marks as a physical reminder of where God spoke to him. And as we're about to see, he's eventually going to return to some of these altars. So it's not just a meaningless pile of rocks that he'll never revisit, but they are in specific places where he's going to go back and see it and remember again. From that part of the story, um, Abram goes on to Bethel. He builds an altar there. Then he gets scared and he goes to eat. Sorry, he doesn't get scared. There's a famine, and so he's naturally kind of nudged in the direction of Egypt because they have um less effects of the famine going on. This is the story where Abram tells Sarai, his wife, just pretend like you're my sister, and that goes horribly wrong. Pharaoh takes in, takes in Sarai as one of his own wives, and then all these plagues and things come on his kingdom, and then he realizes it's because of this, and he sends them off again. And so they leave Egypt and they actually at this point return to the altar that he built in Bethel. Let's just think about that for one second. You know, he was being led specifically by the voice of God. The Bible says in Genesis 12 that God appeared to him, which I mean, let's just take a second and wonder about that moment. You know, I I tend to dismiss these moments because I have some sort of like a cartoon version in my head where God appearing to Moses might be some sort of like shining light or a cloud, or maybe some sort of like white-robed, blonde figure in the sky. Um, and I think that that is taking away from the um the beauty and the power of these moments. I think it's so much more than that. I try to imagine, I just want you to take a second in your own mind. What does that phrase mean? God appeared to Moses. Or what was he seeing? What was he hearing? Or possibly what was he feeling as in the sense of touch? Could he reach out and touch him on some level? Was he down on his knees in the dirt and there was dirt in his fingers and in his fingernails because he and in his face and possibly even in his mouth because he was in such a posture of worship and surrender? God appeared to him. And how interesting that God appears to him in Bethel when Abram goes, takes his wife, lies to Pharaoh, has all these things happen to him. He comes back out of Egypt and he gets back to this altar where God appeared to him. Can you imagine the conviction? Can you imagine the power of seeing that altar and all that it represented and the presence of God that he tangibly was able to experience and being reminded of that right after literally disobeying, not following God's voice, doing it his own way, and having that blow up in his face. That must have been a really humbling moment. That's what I would imagine. I would imagine that the temptation would be to shame spiral. If Abram was a type A like me, whose inner critic goes really loud, that would have been a really difficult moment for me. But did he stop and surrender and fall again on his knees and repent and confess all of his sins? Did he feel God's presence again? I don't know. But it's interesting. That's all the things that an altar represents, not just to Abram, but throughout the Bible. So if we take this concept of an altar as a place to sacrifice and worship God, it's a place where our whole bodies, spirit, soul, and physical body get involved in worship. Then the word altar creates such a a bigger picture of its power and of its importance. Now we're gonna layer on another level of altars because often when a covenant was made in the Bible, it was followed by a ceremonial meal, and the meal would have taken place obviously at a table, and that was a place to seal the covenant, to celebrate what God has promised and where we're going from here. It's a place for community, it's a place for peace, and as we talked about last week, it's a place where we can kind of seal that okay, now God's protection is with me because He promised it in this covenant, and this meal is like the bow that we tie at the end that wraps it up and confirms it. One of my favorite ceremonial meals after a covenant is made is found in Exodus 24. I am not gonna take too much time on this, but I just really encourage you to go back and to read through that. I have read through the Bible, I've been, it feels like I've been saved all my life. I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior as a very young child, and because I was type A and now I am a recovering perfectionist, I knew that reading my Bible was important, and so I was consistently reading my Bible, and yet for decades of my life, I read through this story and totally missed it. Did not it really like conceptualize the power of it. It's not a story that we cover in Sunday school very often, if at all. Um, and then it's it's a story that I was not familiar with, and I think that I just kind of like read it as words and didn't even take time to picture it because when I went back, I was like, wait, what? Moses and Aaron and the 70 elders go up on the mountain in Exodus 24, and they have a ceremonial meal with God. Again, God appears. God doesn't just appear. This is after the law has been given. God sits down and eats with them. What an incredible moment to stop and wonder. What was that like? What did they see? What did they smell? What did they hear? Anyways, again, super powerful and finished with a ceremonial meal sealing God's protection and provision for them. One more meal that I think is really important that again goes back to the table is Passover. And for those of you who have even just kind of a cursory understanding of Passover, one of the main components that they talk about, and especially at the original Passover, which happened in the final plague when the Hebrew children were still slaves to Pharaoh, and God sent the angel of death to kill all the firstborns unless the blood of the lamb was painted on their door. Oh, I just feel so much power in those words. Anyways, the lamb, they were told, had to be without blemish, had to be sacrificed in their home and eaten completely. You could not have any leftovers. Well, for those of you who have any understanding of sheep, that is not something that a family of four can accomplish in one night. Generally, a lamb can feed around 15 people. So, what does that mean? That means that even at Passover, Passover was a communal moment. It was a time for gathering multiple people together. And their table was the altar where that ceremonial meal sealed the protection that the Hebrew children needed from that angel of death. Actually, in Jewish culture, you'll read often, and the reason that the blood was put on the doorposts of the homes is because the threshold, there's another word that's great to uh underline and continually look for as you're reading through the Bible, but the threshold or the doorway was also considered an altar of sorts. And so by putting that blood on the threshold, it represented putting that blood on the altar, sacrificing and worshiping and acknowledging that God is our protector, and we are offering this blood to God, our protector. The Passover meal, again, if you think about it, you have a communal gathering, and maybe it's just family, but in this cultural moment of family, that was not just the nuclear family, but it involved aunts and uncles and grandparents because everybody was living in community with one another. I believe in Jewish culture it's pretty common even today. So there is this huge gathering, not huge, but a large, significant gathering, and they're eating at the table, the sacrificial lamb, and uh worshiping God in the presence of their enemies. Does that remind you of any other verses? Last week we read Psalm 23, and the Bible says, or David said, You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. God is not restricted to protecting you when you're in a safe haven, and then he somehow forms a hedge of protection around you. God says, in the presence of your enemies, he's not limited to some sort of physical distance between you and your enemies in order to be able to protect you. He can protect you right there in the midst. And eating at a table is that seal of that protection, the seal, the ceremonial meal that um connects him back or connects and seals the covenant that he has made with you. After saying all of this, I want to read to you again from sitting at the feet of Rabbi Jesus. I'll link the book in the show notes. I'm on page 142. It says that God's presence at the table brought his people protection and their enemies judgment. It goes on to talk about how communion, one of the sacraments, is also it started at a table, and really, if you think about breaking bread and wine, what are we always thinking about? We're sit thinking about a meal, a meal that is experienced together as a community at the table. And what do the the bread and the wine represent? They represent God's protection, they represent God's covenant, and by partaking of that meal, it represents God sealing that just like He did, even on Mount Sinai with the seven. The elders and Moses. I want to read you one more quote from sitting at the feet of Rabbi Jesus. It says, Table fellowship with God was not restricted to the temple, it is also celebrated in the home. Even now in traditional Jewish homes, the dinner table is considered the family altar. And the home itself is called the Mikdash Miyat. I may uh pronounce that wrong. Which means a little sanctuary where God can dwell. Because the family invites God to join them at every meal, all foods must be ritually acceptable. Within the home, the father and the mother function as priests, bearing witness of God's presence to their children. If you are a parent listening to this right now, I think that that is such a beautiful and poignant and convicting reminder of our role raising our children. We are priests bearing witness of God's pre presence to our children. But this is also important to note that uh when you are gathering at the table for meals with your family, those are sacred moments. And those are worthy of some intentionality on your part to prepare the table and also to protect and hold sacred the moments that you have at the table. I think practically speaking, this means making sure screens are turned off, whether it's a TV nearby or phones that need to be put in a basket in another room. I think it also involves um prayer. I believe it's in this book that they talk about how prayer is not just a um, it's not a time to bless the food. This is gonna sound controversial, but the way that it was interpreted from the Bible when Jesus blessed the bread, he wasn't blessing it in the sense of um like it is dirty and I need to cleanse it. He was blessing it in the sense of the Hebrew word baruch, and a baruch is a blessing, and it is commonly used in Jewish tradition to continually thank and acknowledge God as the provider, as the creator, as the originator of all these blessings in our life. So at a Sabbath meal, one of the blessings or the baruchs would begin with Baruch Ata Adonai Elohenu Mela Akala. I think I said that right, which translate, Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the universe. And then after that part, they would say, Who brings forth bread from the land, who brings wine from the vine that we can drink, who provides light from the candles? Um, it is continually blessing God and acknowledging Him as the source. It is not blessing the food and acknowledging that it needs to be cleansed on some level. We as parents, we as people who continually come to a table to eat, our invitation is to begin that time of a meal with community. Even if you're not a parent right now, whether it's with your spouse or it's with your community, your church, your friends, your family, the people that you are doing life with, the altar is sacred, and it begins with an acknowledgement that God, without you, we could do none of this. You are our source. So why is a table so powerful? A table is powerful not just because it gathers community, not because it's a seal and a sign of protection, but also it is an altar, it is a place for us to come, to set aside sacred space and time and acknowledge that God is our source, to worship him with our whole bodies, to worship him in spirit and in truth, to worship him and enjoy physically the nourishment that he is the source of and that he has provided. It's an opportunity for us as parents to be representatives or priests, bearing witness of God's presence. What a beautiful and powerful picture that that creates as we continue to learn more about the power of a table. I realized after our Christmas break I got a little derailed on the format that I was aiming for in season two of the podcast. I promised you at the beginning of season two that I was going to provide some personal updates in my life at the end for those of you who were interested and stuck around long enough. And I'm so sorry that I forgot about that and just started plowing ahead with teachings and then just rocking it out and being done. So I'm gonna jump back in with some personal updates for you. Something that's been on my heart, and if you listen to my other podcast called As We Grow, I will link it in the show notes. But I had a specific conversation with Gretchen on that podcast, and so that I can elaborate more there if you want to listen. But I was listening to a podcast. This is how I start many sentences, um, and it was Joe Rogan, and he was interviewing Jelly Roll. This sounds like a really interesting start to any sort of story, especially one that has significantly affected my life. But Jelly Roll has been touched by God and is just on fire for God, and it was so fun and convicting to hear him on the Joe Rogan show talk unashamedly about how God has delivered him. I highly recommend it. I do want to say that there is language, and so um maybe not something to listen to with your kids, um, depending on your judgment. But anyway, from that conversation, they were talking about the value of long-form conversations and how we've kind of not kind of, we have gotten away from opportunities to practice long-form conversations, and therefore we're losing the skill set to have long-form conversations. And Joe Rogan commented that in his own personal experience, he has learned and come to value the role of long-form conversations because, as he mentions, you can't get to the good stuff and really get to know a person until you are a couple of hours into the conversation. This is not something that naturally happens in a 20-30-minute window. It's something that takes time, it's something that takes getting past all the false whatever that um conversations are generally or in shallowness that they generally start with, and working your way into more deeper conversations and thoughts. And I really felt convicted that um convicted is a is true, but also I think a better word would be I felt a hunger and a longing for more long-form conversations in my own life. I don't want the superficial, I don't want the the quick and easy, I don't want the it feels to me, um, and this is an extreme and this is an all or nothing thought that I am working to heal from, but it feels when I am in a conversation that's full of shallow comments, that it feels like lying. I'm lying to this person, this person is lying to me about what's really going on in their lives. And I my number one pet peeve is lying. Now I realize that that is an extreme view and it's not true. Um, but it just kind of like sets the stage for why I feel this great hunger for long form conversations. And I thought that it was interesting that as we're talking about a table, we're talking about how the table is an altar, how parents represent priests that represent the presence of God. The number one way that I am going into 2026 looking for more long-form conversations is by setting expectations with my own family and treating dinners as that opportunity to encourage more conversations. So we're turning the screens off. We are intentionally sitting and talking louder, sometimes not louder, longer. Um, we are sometimes bringing a question that I've prepared ahead of time or just Googled and found online that jumps the conversation into something deeper. Questions that these are ones that Jenna, my life coach, has given me, but questions like, what's something that you're really proud of right now? Or what's something that you've just been going after really hard recently, and getting to some deeper things. It's beautiful to be able to have a moment with my kids, my teenage girls, and let me see a little window into their heart that just doesn't naturally come up in our day-to-day goings on, running from activity to activity and doing homework and all the things. I've also found in the spirit of a table as an altar, one little thing that I did during the Christmas season, specifically uh when the kids were out of school, was I put a couple deck of cards on the table so they were readily available. Actually, I had to start back up a step. I bought a bunch of cards because I don't know about you, but decks of like a full complete set of cards is a rarity. It's really hard to find in our house. And there's games that we we really enjoy playing as a family that are just impossible to play if you don't have a full deck of cards. Um, one of our favorite games is golf. You can look that up if you want. But, anyways, I had a couple decks of cards on the table because I thought, man, that would just be like a natural way to start a game where we're not searching through the house trying to find it. Like we're setting ourselves up for success. This is all in atomic habits as well. Um, but that idea of preparing ahead of time so that the the habit itself is so much more accessible. And I found that by doing that, and similarly, we've got a puzzle going right now, and that's either on the table or in a table in the den. But I found that by having that preloaded on the table, we have just naturally gone to playing a game together that we did not do before. We have lots of board games, we have lots of games in our home. Um, but they're in baskets and they look really pretty, hidden away in those baskets. But it creates a barrier to entry that makes it more difficult for us to spend time together as a family because there's that extra little barrier of what game do we want to play? Okay, somebody go and get it, or find it if it's not in its normal spot, set it out, or all the pieces here. You know, now we're like 15 minutes in and we haven't even started the game, and it just is so hard to build up the motivation to continue on with that. So I thought that that was uh kind of a practical application of considering the tables in our home as altars and creating space for community. Creating space for long form conversations, creating space for a ceremonial meal that reminds us of God as our source and our provider. I would love for you to take this next week and really meditate on the idea of a table as an altar, as a part of your home, as a part of your community, your family, and I would really love to hear from you as you bring this before God. What is God revealing to you? What are invitations that God is extending to you for your family, for your life, for your community, that you can incorporate that make the table more intentionally an altar in your home, reminding you of the presence of God, reminding you that He is your source and building you up. You know, a meal is meant to be nourishing to our body, but with that conversation and with that time spent together, it's also nourishing to our hearts, to our souls, and to our spirits, reminding ourselves that God is the source, nourishes our spirit and recenters our focus on God and takes our eyes off of our striving and our work to provide and to um and the the ditch to fall into of relying on our own self-will and strength to provide for the family and be the source for your family and to live your best life. And instead, it focuses your eyes back on the true source that is the actual one that provides for your for you and for your family who deserves the worship and it it unburdens your shoulders of all that responsibility and places your focus on the thing, well, not the thing, on God, the right focus of our lives that leads to our best life. I can't wait to talk to you more about altars or tables. I'm um confession, I'm learning as we go, and I'm really loving this, and I look forward to our future conversations more about this. I'll see you next week at the table. And remember, we can't have a community unless we hear from you and you add your voice. So please comment on joyabod.com or on my Instagram so that you can add your voice to the table, and you can always email me hello at joyabod.com. I'll see you next week. Nerd alert, nerd alert. Guys, I am such a nerd. I geek out on show notes. So if you ever want to know how to contact the show directly, how to find us on socials, uh links to books or anything that we mention on the show, go to the show notes. And at the very bottom, there is always a link that says support the show. It doesn't matter how little or big or how often you want to give, it's super easy to do. And I like to consider it a way for you to take me out for coffee and say, Hey, thanks. And you know what I say? Thank you. You guys are the best.