You Were Adopted Into A Family Not An Audience

You can do everything “right” at church and still feel painfully unknown. We start with the story of Daniel, a faithful believer who has spent years in the same seat, hearing hundreds of sermons, only to realize he has no one to call when his marriage starts quietly coming apart. That moment is not a guilt trip. It is a diagnosis of how easily a healthy, Jesus-loving church can drift into functioning like a well-run event where people watch, get moved, and go home alone.

From there, we go straight to Ephesians 2 and the phrase that changes everything: “members of the household of God.” We talk about the difference between being gathered as a crowd and being adopted as family, and why loneliness in a sanctuary can actually be homesickness for the kind of belonging Jesus bought with His blood. We follow the Bible’s table thread through Psalm 23, the prodigal son in Luke 15, and the early church in Acts 2 where koinonia means a shared common life, not small talk in a lobby.

Then we make a hard turn: this is not only about you finally getting a seat. Luke 14 confronts us with the empty chair and the line we cannot ignore: “still there is room.” A stage can scale up and keep everyone anonymous, but a table scales deep and makes real healing possible because names, stories, and burdens get carried together. We close with practical steps for everyday believers and church leaders who want to stop running an audience and start building a household.

If this helped you, subscribe, share it with one person who came to mind, and leave a review so more people can find their way to the table.

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Daniel And The Church Lobby

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All right, welcome everybody. So glad that you're here tonight. I want to start tonight with a man that I'm going to call Daniel. Okay. Daniel isn't one person. He's about a hundred people that I've stood next to in church lobbies over 20 years of doing this. Daniel loves Jesus. And I really need you to hear that first because everything that I'm about to say only lands if you believe that part about him. Okay. He's not a backslider. He's not lukewarm. He's not one of those people who shows up twice a year and feels guilty about it. He got up this morning, he read his Bible before his cup of coffee got cold. He tithes, not the leftovers. He gives the first part the best part. He's been in the same church for 15 years. He sits in the third row, left side, same seat every single Sunday. And if you moved his seat, he would be in anxiety. He can tell you the pastor's sermon series from the last three years in order. He can hum the bridge of every song before the band gets to it. He's heard about 400, 500, maybe a thousand sermons inside that building. And he's taken more notes than most seminary students. Why am I saying all this? Because Daniel's faith is real and his knowledge is deep and his commitment is not in question. But last month, his marriage started quietly coming apart in the privacy of his own home. And one Sunday, he sat in his car in the church parking lot after the service had ended, watching everybody else pull out one by one, and he realized something that literally took the wind out of him. There was not one person inside that building that he could call. Not one. A thousand sermons, 15 years, same seat, and nobody had his phone number. Nobody would notice if his chair was empty next week. He had been perfectly faithfully present in a room full of people for 15 years, and yet he realizes 15 years in and he's still a stranger. Now, watch what Daniel does with that, okay? Because it's exactly where every one of us, um, it's it's literally exactly what every one of us does with that, okay? He turns it inward, he blames himself, he decides that he has to be the problem. He's too private, he's too guarded, he should have joined a small group years ago, he should have signed up to serve on a team, he should have gone to the men's breakfast, even though the men's breakfast makes his skin crawl. He should have tried harder to be known. And listen, maybe that's true, maybe some of that's fair, but I'm not gonna stand up here, not gonna sit here today and tell you that you have zero responsibility for your own relationships. You absolutely do. Okay. But I want to tell you tonight that Daniel, and there's many of them, is asking deeply personal questions about what is actually a structural problem within the modern American church. He's standing inside a machine that was engineered with the best of intentions to do one thing extremely well, gather a large number of people, point them all at a stage, and deliver something excellent to them. And he is blaming himself for feeling the exact same, the exact thing that machine was always going to make him feel. Anonymous, one of many, a face in the crowd. Because here's the uncomfortable truth about excellence, okay? You can perfect the lights and the sound and the preaching and the parking flow and the coffee in the lobby. And the better you make up all of it, the more it works real like a really good theater. Okay. And nobody expects to be known by the people they sit near in a really good theater. That's not what a theater is for. You go, you're moved, the lights come up, you drive home alone, and that's fine for

Excellence That Creates Anonymity

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a theater. It is a catastrophe for a family. So I want you to look at me for a second. Whoever you are out there tonight, if you have sat in a good church, a Bible preaching, Jesus-loving, genuinely good church for years, and you are still lonely inside of it, I need you to hear this before I go a moment further. You are not the problem. You did not fail at being a Christian. You are not spiritually shallow because a thousand sermons didn't cure your isolation. You have been handed a version of the church that was built to be watched instead of joined. And the ache that you feel, that is not a character flaw. It is your soul telling you the truth about what it was made for. And I don't say any of this, listen to me, friend. I don't say any of this to be cynical or critical about the church. God help me. That is the very last thing that I want to do tonight. Okay. I love the church. I've given my entire adult life to the church. And I'm going to spend the rest of this message defending her. If so, so if you came here tonight to watch a man burn down the local church, you came to the wrong show, the wrong podcast. But I do have to get our category straight before I can help you because if I misdiagnose this, you're going to go home, you're going to try to fix it with more of the thing that caused it. Okay. You'll try to cure your loneliness with better attendance. And the ache for most of the people watching this tonight or listening to this is not an ache about whether the preaching was good enough or the worship was anointed enough. It's an ache about whether you are known. And no amount of excellence on the stage will ever heal an ache that was only ever going to be healed at a table. Friend, you were not recruited into an audience. I want you to hear this. You, by way of the blood of Jesus, were to be adopted into a family. And there is a chair at a table. Listen to me, friend, with your name on it. I hope you hear that. Okay.

Subscribe, Share, And Partner Gathering

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Now, I want to do something real quick before we jump into this. Hey, before we get started, if this channel has been good for your soul, I want you to do two things for me. Subscribe. It's free, it only takes a second, and it's the single most useful thing that you can do to help this message reach somebody who really needs it. And then send it to a friend. Not everybody, one person. You already know who they are. The name came to mind when I mentioned it. So somebody send it to you once. Now pass it on. Now, a quick word for our ministry partners before we begin. On Saturday, August the 22nd at 10 in the morning, we're gathering in person right here in Covington, Georgia, at the Courtyard by Marion. This is a partners one day only gathering, and I want a room where I can be all the way honest and go into the deep end with the people who have been supporting this ministry and helping us make this happen. Guys, the gathering itself is free. The only cost is a meal ticket if you'd like to join us for lunch or dinner. And I hope you will, because the most transforming moments always happen around a table. The registration for this event, the link is below in the description. I hope you'll come join us. All right, guys.

Ephesians And The Household Of God

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So before I say one word about tables or meals or what any of us are supposed to do about this, I have to really nail this one thought down because the rest of this message is going to hang its entire weight on this one word. And if this word doesn't hold, none of the rest of it will hold. So I want you to turn with me to the book of Ephesians, and we're going to go to Ephesians chapter two here, okay? And I want to start in Ephesians chapter two, and we're going to start in verse 11. Okay. And for a little context here, because Paul is building an argument, and I don't want to steal his run up. Okay. So Paul is writing to the Gentiles, outsiders, people by who by every religious standard of their day were on the far side of a wall. Okay. And he makes them remember it. And if you go to verse 12, okay, remember that you were at that time, this is what he says, without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. Friend, that's our starting position as Gentiles. No covenant, no hope outside, standing in the parking lot of somebody else's religion, hoping maybe to be tolerated near the edge of it. Okay. But then in verse 13, and I want you to go read this after we get done here today, verse 13, he says, but now. And I love it when Paul says, but now. You should always set up when Paul says, but now. But now in Christ Jesus, you who were once afar off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. Friend, brought near, not brought closer, not upgraded to a better seat further up. You were brought near. The language of proximity, of access, of distance being abolished. And notice the price tag on it. By the blood of Jesus Christ. Friend, this nearness, this union was not cheap. It cost the death of the Son of the Living God to close that distance. Now, I want you to hold on to that. Okay. It took the blood of Jesus to literally uh demolish that illusion of separation. Okay. Um, but I want you to hold on to that because we are about to see what he purchased with his blood. So if you jump down to verse 14, it says, For he himself is our peace, who has made both one and has broken down the middle wall of separation. So what Paul's talking about here is there was a literal wall in the temple, a barrier that kept the Gentiles out in a court where they could see the worship, but they could never enter into the worship. So they're close enough to see the light, but not close enough to come in. And Paul says, Jesus in his body tore that wall down. The thing that kept the outsider is now rubble. Okay. And now we get to the word in verse 19. And here it is. He says, Now therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but now you are fellow citizens with the saints. And listen to this, and members of the household of God. Now, I want you to camp with me on these last four words, okay? Members of the household of God. So in the Greek, that phrase, members of the household of God, I won't try to pronounce the Greek here, but what I will say is the root of that phrase, which means house, is translated household family. Um, it is not the word for a citizen of a nation. It is not the word for a member of an organization or a subscriber to a movement. That that root word of that phrase there is an intimate word. It's the word that you would use for people who live under your own roof, okay? It's your own, your kin, the ones who have a key to the front door and they don't have to knock before they come in. Now, watch how carefully Paul chose that word because this is where it really gets surgical, okay? He had a whole vocabulary available to him. Greek is a very rich language. And he could have said, you are now spectators or watchers, uh, the Greek word where we get theater from. He could have said you are participants or partakers in a program. He could have said another Greek word, which would have meant um citizens or members of a civic body. And in fact, he does use a word for citizen right before he dropped that four-letter phrase, but um he didn't stop with fellow citizens, he didn't let that be the last word. He climbs past it and he says, and and more than fellow citizens, you are family. Friend. The reason why he does this is because a citizen belongs to a country, but a family member belongs to a father. Okay. Now, go back and look at two things that he says okay in in this text. You are no longer, because he chose, listen, he chose those words just as carefully. You're no longer strangers and foreigners. Strangers is a word where we get xenophobia, okay? The stranger, the outsider, the one nobody knows and nobody's obligated to. And foreigners is a word, and I want you to really hear this one. Um, it literally means one who dwells alongside the house. Okay. So it's it's like two words coming together, para, which means alongside oikos, which is the house, okay? A resident alien, someone who lives right next to the household, close enough to see the light in the windows every night, close enough to hear the laughter through the walls at dinner time, but never once gets to eat inside and sit at the table. So do you hear what Paul just describes here in Ephesians chapter two? He described the man I was describing at the beginning of this podcast. He described Daniel. He described the man in the third row for 15 years, paracoys, okay, living alongside the house, close enough to see the light, never actually carried into the door and seated at the table with the family. And Paul stands up and says, That day is over. That is what you were, okay? And it's it's emphatically not what you are anymore. The blood of Jesus Christ has brought you near, okay, and not near to a stage, brought you in and seated you at the Father's table. Now, I want to go further than some of you probably are expecting me to go because I do not want you to walk out of or I don't want you to walk away from this episode tonight and file this away as like a really nice metaphor, as a warm sediment, okay? As Mark's little word picture about family. No, this is not sentiment, okay? This is the actual architecture of the gospel. And I can prove it to you from the way that the Bible refuses to describe your salvation any other way. Ready? If you search the New Testament for how it talks about what happened to you when you were saved, it never once, not for one single time, describes it as getting a good seat at an event. Every image it reaches for is a family image. You were adopted. Galatians 4 says, God sent the Spirit of His Son into your heart, and now you're crying out, Abba, Father. Abba, the word that a small child uses, the word that that that our kids would use when they climb into their daddy's lap, and says, so that you're no longer a slave, but a son. You were born again, born into a household, not enrolled into a program. You have brothers and sisters, not fellow attendees. First Peter says you are living stones being built up together into a spiritual house, not spectators watching a house get built from a safe distance, but stones set into the actual wall, load-bearing, part of the structure. If you pull one individual out, something is missing in the architecture. Okay. So, friend, you are not the crowd at the wedding. Revelation goes a step further and says, you're the bride. Okay. And here's why every bit of this matters so violently for the man sitting in his car in the parking lot. If the church is fundamentally an audience, then being unknown is just the normal expected cost of attendance. Friend, it's not a problem to be solved. It's the nature of a thing. Nobody files a complaint that the person three seats down at the concert didn't learn their name. But if the church is a household, if the word the Holy Spirit chose through Paul to describe you is the word for the people who have a key to the house, then you being unknown for 15 years is not the normal cost of anything. It's a contradiction. It's a scandal. It's a house that is forgotten that it is a home. It is a family that has started running itself like a business venue. Friend, if you've ever felt that ache, or when you feel that ache, that specific, bottomless loneliness in the exact middle of a crowd of people who share your deepest beliefs. I don't want you to hear one syllable of condemnation and I don't want you to hear it as your personal failure. I want you to hear it correctly. For maybe the first time, okay. That ache was homesickness. Something in you was aching for the house because the house is what the blood of Jesus Christ purchased for you. The blood of Jesus purchased this home for you. And your instinct that you're feeling here of like, man, something's not right. I how can I be here and yet be disconnected? That instinct is not broken. Your instinct, your instinct is accurate. You were just told over and over to satisfy it in a room that was designed to do something else entirely. Friend, I want to say this the blood of Jesus is not recruiting you to be a face in the crowd. You were born to sit and have your face seen at the table. And friend, I want to tell you tonight, if you're struggling, I want to let you know God is once again restoring the church's family, and he's restoring the family table, and he's restoring a seat for you, and there's a table with a chair, and it's got your name on it. Years ago, my spiritual father Damon Thompson would say, You are in you, there's a seat called Beloved at a table called Goodness and a home called Abba in a land called Free Indeed. It's one of my favorite things that he's ever said. Okay. Now, let me ask you this. So if we were not made for the stage, okay, then what were we made for? And I've told you the word is house. Now, because we know that it

The Bible’s Through Line Of Tables

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is a house. Now let me show you the furniture, okay? Because when God builds a house for his family, there is one piece of furniture that shows up again and again and again as the center of everything. You ready? You probably already guessed it. It's a table. And I want to prove to you that the table is not my idea. And it and it's not just a nice recurring theme for a ministry that happens to like that word. Okay. It is the it is the through line of an entire story of God, and it runs straight through the middle of his heart. Okay. So let's start in probably one of the most familiar passages in the whole Bible, Psalm 23. Okay. You've heard it at every funeral you've ever attended. Okay. You've seen it at on a lot of Hobby Lobby signs over the years. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. We read about the green pastures, still waters, the valley of the shadow of death. You know it so well that you've stopped hearing it. Okay. So I want you to slow down with me, and I want you to watch where the shepherd is actually taking the sheep the whole time. Verse number five says, You, God, prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. Stop right there. The shepherd. The same shepherd who leads, who protects, who carries the lamb on his shoulders, who walks you through the valley, the thing this shepherd is finally ultimately after is not a bigger flock. It's not more sheep. It's a table. He leads you beside the still waters and through the dark valley and past the very things that want to destroy you. And where he's taking you the entire journey is to a meal that he's set with his own hands in the presence of your enemies. He doesn't hand you a sword, he pulls out a chair, and the whole job of the Good Shepherd, it turns out, ends at a table. Now, if you'll jump over to Luke chapter 15, to the most famous meal in the entire New Testament that hadn't happened yet when the story started. The son who took his father's money while the father was still alive, which was a way of literally saying, I wish you were dead. I just want the inheritance. Let me go. And he burned it all in a far country, and he ends up in a pig pen, which for a Jewish boy is as low as the story can actually put a Jewish kid longing to eat the slop he's feeding to the unclean animals. And he comes to himself, and Luke says, and he starts home rehearsing a speech. Watch the speech. Father, I've sinned against you. I'm no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants. He's this young man has already downgraded himself. He's he's decided that the best that he can possibly hope for is a job. So give me a position, not a place. Let me earn my keep at the edge of the property. Let me be staffed. Because in his mind, sonship's off the table. He blew that. He ruined that when he asked for the inheritance. But maybe, maybe he can be useful enough to be tolerated near the house. And so we we know the story. The father sees him a long way off, which means the father was watching the road. And the father runs, a grown, dignified, wealthy man in a culture where such men did not run, hiking up his robe, sprinting down the road in front of the whole village to get to a boy who smells like pigs. And the son starts rehearsing his speech. Father, I've sinned and I'm no longer worthy. And he never gets to the part about being a servant. The father cuts him off. And he doesn't even let the boy finish demoting himself. And what does the father call for? Bring out the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet. Friend, the robe is the honor of the household. The ring is the authority of a son. You don't give a servant a signet ring. The sandals are for the sons. Servants went barefoot. Every single thing that the father does is a violent reversal of the boy's attempt to become staff. And then he says, Bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let's eat and be merry. The father's entire answer to a son who comes home begging for a job was to throw a feast and put him right back at the table. Friend, I want you to hear this. God does not want your labor at the edge of the house. He wants your face at his table. Friend, he's not looking for, uh looking to staff a religious operation with your exhaustion. He is looking to fill a house with his children. And don't miss who's standing outside at the end of the story. Oh, you know who I'm talking about. The older brother, the one who never left, the one who's been faithful and present and did everything right for years. And when the music starts, the Bible says he was in the field and he would not come in. Okay. Here's a man who lived in the house his whole life and related to his own father like an employee, relating to a boss. And this is what the the older brother actually says. He says, All these years I've served you, he says, and you never gave me a young goat. He was the he was a son the whole time, friend. He was a son who lived like a staff member. He had a seat at the table, but yet he chose to be the audience. He stood outside the party that his own father was throwing. And what was he doing outside of the house? Just keeping score. Friend, some of you have been the younger brother out in the far country and you're afraid to come home. And some of you are the older brother. You never left, you've been faithful for 20 years, and somewhere along the way, you started relating to God more like an employee instead of a son. And you're standing outside of every celebration you were invited to, counting up everything that you feel like you're owed. And then the father comes out and pleads with both of them. He wants both of them at the table. In the father's mind, the party isn't complete with either chair empty. He wants the older brother and the younger son both at the table together. Now, here's where it

Acts 2 And A Church Built In Homes

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stops being poetry and becomes history. Because a group of ordinary people actually believed all of this. Okay. Believed that they had made that they had been made family, believed the table was the point, and they organized their entire lives around it, and it changed the shape of the world. Anybody want to guess where I'm going? Acts chapter two. That's right. Acts chapter two. You're going to love this. I think this is going to help a lot, a lot of people. You ready? Acts chapter two. This is the church, just newborn church, days old, right after Pentecost. And before there was ever a single church building anywhere on the earth, before there was professional clergy, before there's an order of service or a sound system or a building fund, look at Acts chapter 2, verse 42. I want you to see this. Acts 2. I'm going to read it to you. Acts 2, starting in verse 42. Okay, this is what it says. All the believers devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship and to sharing in meals, including the Lord's Supper and to prayer. A deep sense of awe came over them all, and the apostles performed many miraculous signs and wonders. And all the believers met together in one place and shared everything they had. They sold their property and possessions and shared the money with those in need. They worshiped together at the temple each day, 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 fellowship, their fellowship, those who were being saved. Friend, this is so powerful. That word fellowship is a Greek word koinania. It doesn't mean coffee and a small talk. It literally means a shared common life, holding your life in common with other people. I I believe it's it's much deeper than that. I'm giving you some general things here, but but we'll take this much deeper in a later podcast. Okay. But if you look at verse 40 46, okay, if you look at verse 46, it says they were continuing daily with one accord in the temple and breaking bread from house to house, they ate their food with gladness and simplicity of heart. Okay. So from day one, it was house to house. The church had two rooms, okay, and it needed both. It had the temple, the large public gathering where the apostles teach, what what we'd call the corporate gathering that was real and it mattered. Okay. But they also had the house. Okay. That's where the meal was, where the table was, where the door had your name on it. And and and and and somebody actually knew if you didn't show up. Okay. And notice which room the Bible attaches the growth to. Look at verse 47. It says, and the Lord added to the church daily those who were being saved. Friend, the growth did not come pouring out from the platform. It came pouring out from the tables. The public room gathered them and the house room, the household room that they met in, that's what formed them. The public, I'm gonna say it again. The public room gathered them, but it was the house-to-house that formed them. And the world experienced salvation in the overflow between a big meeting and a small meal. Listen, I have nothing against big churches. I have nothing against the four-walled building that we call the church. But what I'm saying is it's not one or the other, it's both ends. We need a space where we can meet publicly, but we also need a small meal that we can be formed around. Now, let me give you a little piece of history here that ought to leave you a little bit speechless because we've been trained in our modern day church culture to measure a church by everything the early church did not have. So let's put it to you this way. Okay. For the first three centuries of the church, they had no earthly power whatsoever. It was illegal. It was on and off active. Listen, it was on and off actively hunted. Okay. They met in living rooms and dining rooms and rented halls and and catacombs, but they had no political protection, no buildings to speak of, no stage, no budget, no celebrities, no cultural approval. And by every single metric we use today to measure whether or not a ministry is winning, which is building, crowd, budget, platform influence, the early church was a failure that should not have survived one generation. And guess what? It outlived and outloved

How Love Outlived The Empire

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the Roman Empire too into the ground. Okay. How? Not with better arguments, though they had those. Not with a bigger platform because they had none. Listen to what actually happened. Okay. If you've never read this, you need to read this. It's so fascinating. When the great plague swept through the Roman cities and they came, waves of them, disease that emptied whole neighborhoods. Everyone who had the means, they literally would flee from these cities and leave. The doctors ran, the wealthy ran. Families abandoned their own sick relatives in the streets to avoid catching it. Okay. Literally, it was a culture of selfishness and self-preserving. And you know what happened? The Christians stayed. They walked back into the infected cities. They carried strangers and strangers, people whose names they had only just learned into and brought them into their own homes and nursed them. And a great many of them caught the disease doing it and died. I know we don't like to talk about it, but it's the truth. In the place of people who weren't even their family, so that those people, listen to this, would not die alone. Friend, the the early church, they didn't only care for their own either. A hundred years later, the emperor Julian, who hated Christianity and was literally trying to stamp it out and bring back the old pagan gods, he wrote a frustrated letter complaining that the Christians were beating him. And do you know what he said the problem was? He said, these Galileans support not only their own poor, but ours as well, while our people get no help from us. Literally, Julius the emperor, he was furious that the Christians were feeding the pagans. Their own enemy identified their strategy. And their strategy was a table with room for outsiders at it. Look, there was even an early Christian father named Teturlian. Okay. He recorded what the watching Romans said about all of it. Okay, this is what they recorded. You ready? They didn't say, see how they argue. They didn't say, see how they perform. They didn't say, look at the size of their crowds. They said, see how they love one another? That was the apologetic. That was the whole argument that toppled an empire. Love that you could watch, love that you could see, love that was demonstrated, love with skin on it at a table inside of a house. See, friend, Rome had swords, Rome had legions, Rome had emperors who literally called themselves gods and would kill you for saying otherwise. But you know what? Rome could not stop a family. Friend, you cannot arrest your way out of love. You cannot outlaw a shared meal. You cannot execute a household faster than it can adopt one more person at the table. See, friend, the most powerful empire the world had ever seen was quietly, patiently overwhelmed by a movement of nobodies who ate together, cared for strangers, and refused to let each other die alone. Friend, that is what we come from. That is the actual family you were adopted into. Not an audience that watched a show once a week and went home. We were a household of members of the household of God that ran into the teeth of plagues and was willing to die with strangers than allow strangers to die alone. That's our foundation, friend. Now, pretty passionate about this. Okay. Now let's take, let's, let's, let's turn a hard corner together, okay?

The Empty Chair And The Banquet

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Because there is a danger that's buried in everything that I've said so far. And I'm I'm looking at some of the comments here below. And if I don't name it, you'll walk out with half the message and the wrong half. The danger is that you'll hear all of this the house, the table, the chair with your name on it, and you make it entirely about you finally getting a seat. Friend, you should get a seat, okay? You have one, you have a name on your name's on the chair. And I've said that five times tonight. I guarantee five, six, seven times. And I meant it every single time. So if you've spent years as the parakeet, okay, alongside the house, please come on in. Okay. Come on in. Take the chair, it's yours. It was bought by the precious blood of Jesus. But that table, okay, but the table that God sets always has one more chair than there are people in the room. Okay. Go with me to Luke 14. We're gonna look at this. Luke 14. Okay. Go check this out after we're done. Okay. Jesus is at a dinner. Of course he is. He's always at a dinner in Luke. He does more theology at meals than anywhere else. Okay. And he tells a story about a certain man who threw a great banquet, okay? A feast. And he sent his servant out to tell all the invited guests that everything was ready. It's time for you to come on. And Luke says they all, with one accord, began to make excuses. Okay. One says, I've bought a field, I have to go see it. One says, I've bought five oxen, I have to go test them. One says, I've married a wife, and therefore I can't come. Notice, okay, ready? Property, work, family. The three most respectable reasons on earth to be busy, um, busy enough to not show up to a table. Nobody in this story is a villain. They're just full. Their lives are already good enough that a feast feels optional. Stay with me. And what happens in the story? The master gets angry. And then he says the line that I genuinely can't get, I literally can't get away from this. Okay. Verse 21. Okay. Go out quickly into the streets and the lanes of the city and bring in here the poor, the man, the lame, and the blind. So the servant does it, and he comes back and says, Master, I did what you said. And if you go into verse 22, it says, Still there is room. Friend, still there is room. And the master says the sentence that this whole message has been walking towards. Verse 23. Okay. Go out into the highways and the hedges and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled. Friend, listen to that statement. That my house may be filled. Friend, the master is not content with a respectable half-empty banquet. He looks at the empty chairs and he does not see nice decoration or breathing room. He sees people who are not yet seated where they belong. And he sends the servant out not once, but twice, first into the streets of the town for the poor and the broken. And then when there's still room, all the way out to the highways and the hedges, out past the edge of the town, alongside the road, alongside the house, close enough, making sure that we get all the people that's close enough to see the light of the windows, but certain it was never lit for them. The paracoy, the strangers who dwell alongside the house, the Daniels, the ones living right next to belonging who were never once carried through the door. So here's what I'm actually trying to put in your hands tonight, okay? When God gave you a chair, he did not just give you a place to sit down and be comfortable. He handed you a chair to carry. Your seat at this table comes permanently attached to the empty one right next to it. And that empty chair is not empty by accident. It has a name on it too, somebody's name. Somebody who tonight, right now, believes about God and about themselves, exactly how Daniel believed in that parking lot that I told you at the beginning of this podcast, that they're unknown, that they're alongside the house at best, that no one noticed if they simply stopped showing up and disappeared. And this is precisely why the stage, no matter how excellent it is, will never be enough to do what God is after. A stage can hold 10,000 people, it can hold their attention and leave every last one of them a stranger. Because a stage scales in exactly the wrong direction. The bigger it gets, the more anonymous you become. But a table, a real table in a real house with real food and your actual name spoken out loud, a table can only hold a handful of people at a time. And here's the thing that we get exactly backwards. That limit of a small handful is not the weakness of the table. It is the entire power of the table. Because a few who sit at it together and that they are known, and the ones who get known get healed. And the ones who get healed can't help it. They go find one more person out in the hedges and they carry that empty chair over and they say, There's room, come and eat. Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good. Friend, that is how a table beats a stage over a hundred years. Not by gathering more, but by multiplying deeper. See, friend, a crowd adds, but a family multiplies. I'm gonna say it again. A crowd, you may add to the crowd, but a family multiplies. Friend, I've traveled all over the world. I've stood in front of crowds my entire adult life. So believe me when I tell you that I know exactly what a crowd can do. A crowd can move you, a crowd can make you weep, a crowd can give you a night you'll remember for a decade. And then the lights come up, and every single person in it drives home to the same loneliness that they carried in. Matter of fact, even the people who are standing on the platform deal with the loneliness just as much as anybody else. Friends, friends, listen to me. Crowds inspire. I'm not against inspiration, but inspiration is a fuel that burns off by Tuesday. Okay. Tables transform. Friend, you cannot be truly known at a distance. And you have never once been healed by information. Nobody in the history of the world got free from their deepest shame because they received a superior piece of teaching about it. You got healed the day that somebody actually learned your name, heard your actual story, and pulled out a chair and set a plate in front of you, anyways. See, friend, that's the mechanism. It's always been the mechanism. It's the mechanism that beat Rome. So the greatest thing this church could ever do, hear me, listen to me, friend. The American church is not to fill another room. It's to empty these rooms into a hundred living rooms to become so ordinary. I want you to hear this. This is revolutionary, if you can hear it. To empty the room and fill up living rooms all over the place, to become so ordinary, so unimpressive by the world's metrics, so much like an actual family that a water Watching world looks at us the way a watching Rome looked at those nobodies in the plague cities and is forced to say the one thing that has ever actually brought an empire to its knees. See how they love one another. Friend, I'm gonna say it. I've said it once, I'm gonna say it again. You were not recruited to be a part of the audience. You were adopted into a family, and there's a chair, there is a chair at the table with your name on it. So

Find A Table And Carry A Chair

SPEAKER_00 44:38

let me wrap it up, okay? Let me just shoot you straight here for the next few minutes, okay? If you're still hanging with me. I'm gonna pray for you here in just a second. But I think this message is landing for a specific group of people tonight. Some of you watching this, you came in as Daniel. You've been in the third row for years, faithful, but you're unknown, and you're so tired of being the stranger in the middle of a crowded room. Um, and and you're tired of never like literally being a stranger in a room of a bunch of people that share your same faith. So I want you to hear me carefully, okay? The loneliness that you feel is not evidence that you don't belong there, okay? It is evidence that you are made for a house and you've been quietly living alongside it, okay? And listen, friend, that moment ends the moment that you decide to walk through the door and and quit spectating from the outside and come sit down at the table. Because that mentality is never going to get fixed by a better service. It gets fixed by sitting at a smaller table. So I want you to find one this week. And if you can't find one, then set your own. Like literally, just set up, open up your and get on your cell phone, invite some people, set up the living room or the dining room, and stir up a pot of something. Please make it good. Because the kingdom of God has begun with less. Now, there's also some of you that are leaders, and this message puts its finger on something you already knew in the dark, and you're just afraid to say it out loud in the light. That you've built something genuinely impressive that is not underneath actually a family. And listen, I am not doing this tonight to shame anybody for that. Okay. And I want you to really receive that because I've built those things too, and I know how you got here. You got here by being faithful. Some of you got here by being extremely gifted and by giving your people your best. Okay. But you can't, you, but listen, listen, I want you to get this. But you can start setting tables inside the thing you've already built. Okay. It's not too late and you're not too far in. Friend, the early church didn't have a fraction of your resources, and they reordered civilization with shared meals. So you could literally begin this week with six leaders and a table and no agenda except to know and be known. And there's some of you, you're not even sure that you're in the house yet. And if we're honest, you've been out in the hedges a long, long time. You've watched the warm light in other people's windows, and you made your peace years ago with the assumption that it was never going to be lit for you. Maybe religion hurt you. Maybe you disqualified yourself. Maybe you're the younger brother who took the money, burned it, and you've rehearsed your servant's speech so many times that you've got it memorized. I want to tell you that the whole reason the banquet story even exists is you. The master sent the servant past the edge of town specifically, deliberately, to find you. The house was never going to be full without your chair filled. And you do not have to clean yourself up first. The father ran down that road, threw his arms around a boy who still stank from the pig pen. And he put the robe on him before the boy could ever get his apology out. You come home exactly the way you are tonight. And friend, and he doesn't rest at the door, okay? Literally, he does the rest at the door. He doesn't rest at the door, he does the rest at the door. And then there's some of you that you're the older brother, okay? You never left. You certainly've served faithfully for years. Some and and and then somewhere along the way you started keeping score. And now you find yourself standing on the outside of a celebration you were invited, you were always invited to. You got your arms crossed, you're certain that you're owed something. And then the father comes out to you, too. He's not angry that you kept score, he's grieved that you ever thought you had to. Son, he says, you are always with me, and all that I have is yours. So stop working the edge of a house that you already own. Come in and sit down. You've always been invited. It's always belonged to you. So wherever this finds you tonight, whether the far country, the hedges, the field outside the party, or the third row for 15 years, the invitation's the same. And it's the oldest invitation there's ever been to come home. There's room at the table, and the shepherd is still tonight setting a place for you. Okay. Let me pray for you, okay?

Prayer, Closing, And Family Table Giving

SPEAKER_00 50:00

Oh man, I hope this was a blessing to you tonight. Okay. Oh man, I hope this was a blessing to you. Father, I know that many people watching this tonight feel like they're the audience. But God, I believe tonight they're leaving this teaching, realizing their family. So, Father, I pray for the one who's been lonely in the middle of a crowd. Let them finally hear that that ache is just homesickness, not failure. And I want you to lead them to a real table this week. God, I'm asking that you put some people around them and put them at a table where they can begin to develop those deeply known relationships and they can experience what it's like to have a chair with their name on it. Father, I pray for the leader who's tired of running a stage. Give them the courage to build smaller and to build something truer and the freedom. Give them the freedom to believe that it's not too late. God, for the ones that still find themselves out in the hedges, still certain the light was never lit for them. Lord, I'm asking for you to run right at them the way that you always run. God, get to them before they can finish apologizing. Put the robe on them at the door and sit them down at the meal. Father, and I pray for even the older brothers that are standing outside the party that they're already invited into. Go to them, God, and walk them back into the party. Father, I just thank you that your son is the good shepherd. You prepared a table before us in the presence of our enemies. You've prepared a table for us. Thank you for the chair with our name on it. Thank you for purchasing it by the precious blood of Jesus. Now make us the kind of people who notice the empty chair. And let us go and find more people because there's still room in your house. Father, we thank you for loving us. We thank you for calling us family. I thank you for home. And I thank you for it all. In the mighty name of Jesus. Amen. Friend, I hope this was a blessing for you tonight. Thank you for joining us. I look forward to connecting with you in the future. If you're not following us on Facebook, Instagram, you're not subscribed to this channel, go ahead and do that now. And guys, we'll catch you next week, Tuesday night, for another edition of the Shepherd's Tent. God bless you guys. I want to tell you about something that we call the family table. Almost everything we make here, we give away. The teaching, the resources, the tools that we put in the hands of pastors and church leaders who are running on empty. It's free because we believe it should be free. And it's free because a group of people quietly decided to pay for it. Friend, that's the family table. Monthly partners who fund this work so that somebody who could never afford it can walk in wholeness, anyways. You're giving those three things. It gets free resources into the hands of individuals and churches. It plants family table communities all across the country, and it helps pastors and church leaders find the wholeness that they've been handing to everybody but themselves. Friend, family table members get exclusive content, early access to new resources, and a monthly Zoom call with me and my wife, a real one where we talk about what we're actually doing, a little behind the scenes and casting vision for the future. So if that's you, you want to be a part of the family table, want you to go to markcasto.co backslash donate, set up your recurring gift, and we'll send you the details shortly. We'd love to have you at the family table.