Let me tell you what the first argument in the Church was about.
Not the resurrection. Nobody in that room was arguing about the resurrection. Not the divinity of Christ. Not the end of the age.
Dinner.
The apostles and the believers in Judea heard that something had happened up the coast, and when Peter came back to Jerusalem they met him at the door, and here is what they said to him. It is one sentence and it is in your Bible.
You went into the house of uncircumcised men and ate with them.
That is it. That is the charge. Not you preached to them, though he had. Not you baptized them, though he had. They went straight past the sermon and the water and landed on the meal, because everybody in that doorway understood something we have to work to see.
You can preach to anybody. Preaching costs you nothing. You can hand a stranger a tract in the street and go home to exactly the life you had.
But who eats at your table is who your people are. That is not a religious rule. That is how a human being actually sorts the world, and it was true in Jerusalem and it is true in your kitchen tonight.
So let me ask you the only question this message is going to ask you.
Who has eaten in your house this year?
Not who has been invited in theory. Not who would be welcome if they ever came. Who sat down. Who had a plate. Go through the year in your head and count them.
The charge sheet was one sentence long
I know what the counting turns up, because I have done it in my own house and it was not comfortable.
The same people. Lovely people. People I would lie down in traffic for. And every one of them somebody I would have found anyway, without trying, because they are already like me.
Now hear me, because I am not here to beat you.
There is nothing wrong with loving your own. Nothing. The people at your table are a gift and God gave them to you and you are not going to apologize tonight for having a family you love.
The thing I want you to see is smaller and sharper than that.
You never decided the list. That is the whole problem. Nobody sat down and drew up a policy for your dining room. It just settled, the way dust settles, and now it looks like a fact.
And beloved, you are not a person who takes a settled thing as a fact. You are somebody the Holy Spirit has already moved on more than once, and the word says God does not show favouritism, and the same Spirit who broke the first argument the Church ever had is living in you right now. You are not starting from zero here. You are further along than you think.
The apostles and the believers throughout Judea heard that the Gentiles also had received the word of God. So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticised him and said, You went into the house of uncircumcised men and ate with them.Acts 11:1 to 3
Read the charge again and notice how short it is. You have a table, and the Holy Spirit ended the argument about tables by falling on a house full of the wrong sort of people before anybody had finished debating it. Nobody is asking you to win that argument. It was won over dinner.
And what was Peter's defense? He did not argue about the law. He did not do theology. He told them what happened.
As I began to speak, the Holy Spirit came on them as He had come on us at the beginning.
That is the whole defense and it ended the argument. God had already poured out on the wrong people while Peter was still mid-sentence, and once He has done that there is nothing left for anybody to rule on.
That is the fire this house is named for. In 1906 in a stable in Los Angeles the same thing happened, and the papers wrote about it for the wrong reason. They wrote about the noise. The witnesses inside kept trying to tell them it was not the noise, it was who was on the plank next to them, and nobody had planned that either.
The Holy Spirit keeps ending arguments by falling on the people the argument was about.
And you have everything this takes already, beloved. Acts 11 says the Spirit came on that house as He came on us at the beginning, and the Holy Spirit is standing in your kitchen tonight, which means the widening is not a virtue you have to work up. It is a current, and you are in it.
So do it. Not next year, not when the house is tidier, not when you feel more hospitable.
Count.
You are not being asked to love strangers in the abstract, because nobody can do that and God has never asked anybody to. You are being asked to do the one thing the first church fought about, which is to let somebody eat.
And you already have everything you need for it. Acts 11 says the Spirit came on them as He came on us at the beginning, which means the deciding was done in heaven long before anybody in Jerusalem got to the door, and the Holy Spirit is not going to be talked out of it by a seating plan in your kitchen.
The guest list is not a law. It never was. You wrote it by accident and you can put it down on purpose.
Declare this over yourself
Say these where you can hear yourself. Know what holds them up. This authority is not yours by nature, it is Christ's, and in Christ it has been given to you, so you speak as one representing the King. And you speak under His will, never over it. However He answers, and in whatever way He comes, the outcome is His.
- Guest list, you were never a law in this house and I am not keeping you. Acts 11 says the whole first argument was about who ate with whom, and God ended it by pouring out on the ones being argued about, so I count chairs now and not reasons.
- Fear of an awkward hour at my own table, you have been running my kitchen and you are dismissed. In the name of Jesus I take the room back, and the Holy Spirit who fell on that house while Peter was still talking is the One who fills the seat.
- Lord, Your word has the Spirit falling on that house while Peter was still mid-sentence, and You never once asked who had earned a place before You set it. I am carrying a chair in from the other room this week, and my house is as wide as Your table and not one inch narrower.
Acts 11:3
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