The Table

“The Table”

(For this sermon you need to set up a very elegant dinner table complete with chairs and food, anything to make it look inviting. You’ll understand as you read the text.)

Want to know a staggering statistic? Did you know that nearly 1/3 of the world’s population call themselves Christians? Out of the entire population of the world, nearly 1/3 call themselves Christians. Now if we were to do a study of those people, we would quickly find that the people that are actually involved in a church setting and spend time doing things such as worship and praying to God, the number is significantly less, but still 1/3 of all the people in the world call themselves Christians and would say they believe in God.

Now at face value that may sound pretty good, but the reality is that right now over 2/3 of the world’s population are lost. 2/3 of all the people in our world are lost that’s over 4 billion people. 4 billion people LOST! Do you know how many people that is? If we could fill Paul Brown Stadium in Cincinnati to it’s maximum capacity, which is around 80,000 people, it would take 50,000 stadiums to get to that number of 4 billion.

Now you might say to me this morning, “Brandon, you can’t possibly expect me to do anything about that! I’m not a missionary, and Evangelism isn’t my thing, plus I live in Foster, or Butler, or Falmouth Kentucky!! What can I do?” Let me bring my point a little closer to home. Right now as I speak within a 10 mile radius of this church building there are about 22,000 people that call this place home. Of those 22,000 people that live within 10 miles of this church and are our neighbors, 2,000 are actively involved in church. 2,000 people know who God is and have accepted Him as their Lord and Savior.

Do you know what this means?? It means that within 10 miles of THIS church, there at least 20,000 people that are lost and do not know God’s saving grace and will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven!

Now I have another question for you this morning. Have I gotten your attention yet, or do I need to remind you that according to these statistics, if Jesus Christ were to come today, only 1 in every 3 people in the world would be saved. That’s tragic enough, but what’s even scarier is that in our little community here that number jumps to more like 1 in 11! Do you think you live in a area of the world where everyone for the most part believes what you believe and were “raised” the way you were raised? THINK AGAIN!!

There are so many people around us that are lost, and it’s definitely bad on our part because we are called to be the hands and feet of Jesus. We are the ones that are called to “go and make disciples”, and Jesus instructed in the Great Commision. And we aren’t doing what Christ asked us to do. But it’s even worse for the people that don’t know Christ, or have a relationship with Him.

Isn’t it awesome to have a relationship with Christ? If you’re sitting in front of me this morning and you’re saying “yeah yeah” then I hate to break it to you but you don’t have an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ! Now you may think that you do, you may have been told that you do, but if you aren’t absolutely filled today with love and compassion and excitement about what God is doing in your life, then you don’t know what it’s like to be in a relationship with Christ.

And guess what, God doesn’t care how many years you’ve been coming to church, it doesn’t matter how much money you’ve given, or how many Sunday School classes you’ve been a part of. God doesn’t even care if you’re a preacher or an elder or a deacon, or a teacher, or a choir singer. What matters to God is what’s inside. And if what’s inside isn’t that big a deal, neither is the outside. God doesn’t care about WHAT you do, He cares about WHY you do it. And this relationship with Christ, changes everything. It changes the way we think, the way we act, the way we live, even the way we talk imagine that!

If we could picture a relationship with Jesus and how we come to that relationship, it would be a lot like a table. And at that table Christ is the head, and we are the ones that are invited to join Him. So if we could picture this table, we would have some questions about it. One may ask, who is sitting around the table? And better yet, how do we even get to the table?