By Arron Chambers
This is an excerpt from the book “Eats With Sinners” by Arron Chambers.
To some, Lost is a highly addictive TV show about the survivors of a plane wreck who find themselves on a deserted island””in the middle of the ocean””where nothing makes sense and they are not alone.
Lost might be a zone where single socks, class rings, your favorite hat, sunglasses, my brother”s car keys, the Watergate tapes, and my six-toed cat (Sasquatch) dwell while waiting to be found . . . or not.
Lost is how I feel listening to my daughter as she tries to explain why it”s so great that Troy (played by Zac Efron) is now singing “for real” on High School Musical 2 and not simply mouthing the words to someone else”s voice like he did in the first High School Musical.
Being lost is never fun. Being lost and realizing that no one is looking for you is even worse.
To God, lost describes people who are not where they are supposed to be, from his perspective, and found describes people who are exactly where they are supposed to be””with him, in Jesus. “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus“ (Romans 8:1, emphasis added). God prefers that people be found rather than lost, so he sent his Son into this world to find and save them.
Jesus was a magnet for lost people. They were drawn to him because he was drawn to them. The rejected found acceptance, the hurt found healing, the judged found the Judge to be surprisingly nonjudgmental. The Gospel writer Luke penned these words: “Now the tax collectors and “˜sinners” were all gathering around to hear him. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, “˜This man welcomes sinners and eats with them”” (Luke 15:1, 2). The Pharisees were the religious leaders of Jesus” day. Sinners was a term the Pharisees and teachers of God”s law used to identify lawbreakers””social pariahs considered morally filthy and to be avoided at all costs.
I used to be immersed in a world of lost people. I rode my Big Wheel with them. I sat next to them in school. In the cafeteria I traded my last piece of Bazooka bubble gum for their chocolate milk. We played soccer together, went to see Footloose together, skated all-skates together at Sun State skating rink, danced to “Rock Lobster” together, took driver”s ed together, took the SAT together, graduated together, and waited tables together.
But eventually my encounters with people some would call pre-Christian became fewer and further apart. Today I have to work very hard to build relationships with unsaved people.
One of the things I”ve done to get to know people who don”t know Jesus is join the local health club. That”s where I met David.
David was a triathlete like I am. I could tell because his legs””like mine””were shaved. (It”s a triathlete thing.) I saw him once a week at the YMCA, and””at first””we”d talk a lot about training, but then we began talking about more significant things, like family and faith.
As I spent time getting to know David and showing sincere interest in him, he began to trust me and open up to me. I found out he was in a homosexual relationship but that he wasn”t completely comfortable with it. I didn”t allow anything to shock me or discourage me in his presence. He knew I was a Christian who claimed to love Jesus, but I felt it was more important at that time for him to know that I was a Christian who loved him.
I moved away before David made a decision for Jesus. I”ve lost touch with him, but I still pray that he will one day, if he hasn”t already, give his life to Christ.
Making It Happen
Interactions like this don”t just happen for me; I have to make them happen, because””unlike how it used to be back when I was in school””now I”m a “professional” Christian, serving as a preaching minister. I interact with lots of other Christians””professional and laypeople. I play fantasy football with Christians, sit next to Christians at my daughter”s volleyball games for the private Christian school where my wife coaches, laugh with Christians, argue with Christians, and play Xbox 360 one Friday night a month with Christian guys. My wife and I host a small group of people from our church on Wednesday nights. And whenever my wife and I go to our parents” homes and spend time with our siblings and their families, we are surrounded by Christians. The next time I need a physical, my Christian doctor will conduct the examination. I eat most of my meals with Christians.
I”m immersed in Christians almost all the time, and I know that”s not what Jesus intended. Yes, we”re instructed to be around Christians (Hebrews 10:25), but we”re also commanded to be salt and light in this world. We must be careful not to confuse morality with isolation from the world. In my experience, the more committed some Christians become to God, the more isolated they become from lost people.
Truly moral people hang out with lost people.
Examining the Heart
As religious leaders, the Pharisees were committed to the law””and that should have been reflected in a deeper commitment to God and his people . . . but it wasn”t. Instead, their commitment to God resulted in neglect of the weak, poor, and needy.
Once, a Pharisee invited Jesus home for a meal, so Jesus went to the Pharisee”s house and ate with him. The Pharisee noticed Jesus didn”t wash his hands before the meal. This surprised him, and he asked Jesus about it. Jesus””struck by the irony of the situation pointed out that although someone eating with dirty hands upset the Pharisees””and this one in particular””they seemed indifferent about serving God with a dirty heart. They cleaned the outside of the cup but neglected the greed and wickedness filling the inside. (See Luke 11:37-54).
The heart is the heart of the matter. God designed our hearts to beat for others. I don”t know about you, but too often my heart beats only for the saints gathered in a sanctuary. Yet some of our best friends should be lost people.
Jesus lambasted the Pharisees and the experts in the law for giving their hearts to their perverted interpretation of the law of God but not to the maker of the law and the people for whom the law was written. True commitment to God does not result in legalism, but love; not harm, but help; not pride, but humility; not judgment, but mercy; not isolation, but infiltration; not rules over people, but relationships with people. True commitment to God results in lost people being found, because true commitment to God results in lost people being loved.
Jesus eagerly ate with sinners on earth because he longed to eat with them in Heaven. Jesus referred to himself as the bridegroom (Luke 5:34, 35) putting on a great banquet meal (Luke 12:36; 14:13, 16, 17, 24) that one day he will eat in the kingdom of Heaven with everyone who accepts his invitation. Jesus” love for lost people was so great, he was willing not just to eat with sinners, but also to die for them on a cross. The Pharisees obsessed about ritualistic sacrifices for God, but because of the cross, Christians should be obsessed with loving sacrifices for others, doing whatever it takes to reach them with the hopeful message of Jesus.
Eating With Sinners
So here I am, surrounded by Christians in my little world, wanting to be more like Jesus and to do more for him. I want to eat less often with saints and more often with sinners. I want some of my best friends to be lost””but not for long.
In some of Jesus” last words to his disciples, he said, “The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem” (Luke 24:46, 47).
You can”t miss the point without professional help. There are lost people in “all nations,” and Jesus expects all Christians to go to where they are wandering, find them, and eat with them.
It”s important to point out that eating with someone in the ancient world was much more significant than most of us modern people will ever understand. To eat with someone was a statement of hospitality, acceptance, tolerance, and intimacy. Living with this understanding of mealtime made people in the ancient world much more aware of whom they chose to eat with.
It was one thing for Jesus to welcome sinners, but it was altogether something else for Jesus to eat with them. Jesus shared a table with sinners because he wanted to have a relationship with them.
Relationships are the key to reaching lost people. I define evangelism as “an intentional relationship through which someone is introduced to Jesus Christ.” Healthy relationships are essential if we want to have the kind of life God intended for all of us, and they are also essential if we want to reach lost people like Jesus did.
A few years ago the Institute for American Church Growth (today known as Church Growth, Inc.) asked more than 10,000 people, “What was most responsible for your coming to Christ and this church?” Seventy-nine percent responded, “A friend or relative invited me.”
The survey proves what you might already suspect: most people come to a saving faith in Jesus through an intentional relationship. An intentional relationship for a Christian is one in which a person intends to””one day””have the chance to introduce another person to Jesus and then””one day””does introduce him or her to Jesus. And there is no more scriptural model for building relationships with lost people than eating with them.
The word church means “called-out ones.” Christians are called to be different from all the hazardous influences in the world. Perhaps we have taken that too far, with too many of us deserting the very world Jesus expects us to impact. We are faithful in meeting with other saints on a regular basis around the Lord”s table, but are we faithless in our refusal to meet with lost people around theirs?
This can change. It must change . . . one relationship at a time . . . one meal at a time.
Arron Chambers is lead minister of Journey Christian Church in Greeley, Colorado. He is author of four books and a contributing editor of CHRISTIAN STANDARD. This article is excerpted from his book Eats With Sinners (Standard Publishing, 2009), available athttp://www.standardpub.com/detail.aspx?ID=4079.
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