From Customers To Waiters Series

Raise your hand if you had a favorite restaurant growing up. I don’t mean fast food. I mean the place you went for birthdays, or homecoming dances.

For me, it was Red Lobster. I grew up thinking Red Lobster was just the pinnacle of swank. To this day, I still love Red Lobster. Trish is allergic to most seafood, so we don’t go that often, but if I’m traveling and Trish isn’t with me, I will almost always go to Red Lobster.

For my sixteenth birthday, my parents took me out to eat. And you guessed it—we went to Red Lobster. And at the end of the meal, my dad looked at me across the table, and said, “Well, son, you are 16 now. Do you know what that means?” And I said, “Yeah! I can drive!” And my dad was like, “That too.” But, it also means you need to get a job.

So a few minutes later, the dining room manager came by our table to check on us. And she said, “can I get you anything else?” And I said, “A job application?” And I took the application home with me, and the next weekend I started at Red Lobster as a busboy. And do you know, I worked there for a year and a half. I loved my job. I loved telling people what was on the menu. When they moved me from busboy to host I loved greeting people at the door and walking them to their tables.

One time I was in the lobby, and there was a little girl watching the lobsters in the lobster tank. And I went over and helped her name all the lobsters in the tank. Her dad looked at me and said, “Well, I guess now I’m just going to be getting a SALAD”

I never got tired of the food, and so I never got tired of telling other people about it.

And so today, as we wrap up our series on I Love My Church, I want us to think about what makes us excited to tell someone else about our favorite restaurant. Unless you’re a horrible person, and you’re one of those that finds a great restaurant and you don’t want to tell anyone about it because you don’t want it to get so crowded that you won’t be able to get a table anymore. No… when we love the food, we want to tell everyone about the restaurant!

And if we can just get our heads around that one idea, I think it would make evangelism easier. I think it would make inviting people to church easier. I think it would make being in church easier.

When we love the food, we want to tell everyone about the restaurant.

This morning, we are going to look at a story out of the Old Testament that I think illustrates the gospel as well as any story in the Old Testament, and its actually a story that a lot of people are not familiar with. The main part of the story is in 2 Kings 7, but we get the background in chapter 6. Normally, I like to read the entire passage at the beginning of the sermon and then teach it, but there’s so much drama in this one that I don’t want to spoil the ending for you guys that don’t know the story, so we’re just going to unpack it one section at a time.

This story happens during the days of Elisha. Israel and Judah have split into two separate kingdoms. The capital of Judah is Jerusalem, and the capital of Israel is Samaria. And we learn in chapter 6 that Ben-Hadad, the king of Syria, has attacked Samaria and laid siege to it. When you besieged a city, you surrounded it with your army and basically starved them out until they surrendered. And so in verse 25, we see that the famine is so bad in Samaria that...

25 And there was a great famine in Samaria, as they besieged it, until a donkey's head was sold for eighty shekels of silver, and the fourth part of a kab of dove's dung for five shekels of silver.

Now just to give you some perspective—nobody ever thought a donkey’s head was a delicacy. How hungry do you have to be to eat a donkey’s head? But you could buy a donkey’s head for That’s about 22 pounds of silver, or over $750 in today’s prices. And if you couldn’t afford that, you could get about 8 ounces of dove’s dung for almost $50. Now, some translations say “seed pods” instead of dove’s dung because apparently there was a plant called dove’s dung, but there’s a really good chance that dove’s dung means dove’s dung, and people are so starved that they are shelling out $50 for a cup of bird poop.