Trusting the Father: In Celebration

Good morning. I'm Russ. Get the pleasure of being one of your ministers here. I get. Gosh, I get to help people not just take next steps in following Jesus, but to help them help other people take next steps in following Jesus.

It's a fun job. And so. And really glad that I'm here with you this morning. A couple things that you should know. One is this, that in all the good things that we are up to here as a church, all the ways that we're up to, good things, they are fueled by generosity.

That means we are spiritually and practically sustained by the people in this room, the people who give their time, talents, and resources, all of it, to this end, that God's kingdom may come and his will may be done right in. In here, in here, out there, and everywhere. And so, so grateful to be a part of a generous church. Second thing you should know is this, that if you're new to us here and you're interested in knowing a little more about us or wanting to know what that next step might look like, from here, you can head right out to the info table that's across from the coffee bar out there. There are some lovely people who would love to meet you and help get you connected to that next step.

Good. Now let's jump in. I don't know if you grew up in church. I don't know what kind of church you grew up in. If you did grow up in one.

I grew up in a memory verse kind of church. Some of you know what this means. It means that they had us memorizing verses as I grew up. You know, we would get prizes for it or gold stars. And so.

And it turned out it was a really good practice because some of those verses have continued to stick with me throughout my life. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to challenge you today to memorize a verse with me. All right? Are you ready for this? Could be a high bar.

So some of you, I'm sure your memory isn't as good as it used to be. So hang on, here we go. Here's the verse. I'll let it come up. Rejoice always.

Comma. That's it. Actually, that's. As long as the verse is. You got it.

What's it say? Rejoice always. I gotta tell you, growing up in a memorizing church, this verse was a win, right? There was another one. Jesus wept.

Check. Give me the prize.

You got it. What's the verse? Always rejoice always. First Thessalonians 5:16. Paul is writing to his friends who are part of the church in a town called Thessalonica.

And he says, rejoice always. Does that bar seem high to you? The bar always.

See, it's not a one off. He's actually writing to another group of friends in a different town, different city who were following Jesus. And he writes it this way. He says, rejoice in the Lord. There's the word again, always.

And then he doubles down. I'll say it again. Rejoice. There's an exclamation point. That's why I shouted right?

Now we know that when he wrote those words, he was under house arrest. He's in prison in Rome and will not get out. He is there and it's going to lead to his trial and execution. And he's writing to people who are also dealing with persecution, meaning that they are under serious resistance for following Jesus. So he is experiencing hard times, writing to people who are experiencing hard times.

And he says what? Rejoice in the Lord. How often? Always. So does it work?

How does that work? In the midst of painful circumstances, how do we keep our on rejoicing? And I want to answer that with 1, 1 answer today. Even though there are plenty, this is one I find really compelling. Now, if you want more on this, some guy named Josh preached here back a few months ago on Joy.

It's a pretty good sermon. You can go check it out. It's still hanging out there in YouTube. I want to center in on one answer to this question. How can we rejoice always?

What does it look like to rejoice? If rejoicing is something like feeling and showing great joy or delight, how do we do that? And I would suggest it has way more to do with who God is than who we are or what we're experiencing, that we only really find ourselves in Him. What we think of him is foundational to, to everything in our life. So now that brings us to another question.

What is God like? What is he like? And so I'm going to attempt to answer that question by doing this. We're going to walk through the Bible. I'm going to do this quickly.

We're going to start in Genesis, we're going to end up in Revelation, and we're just going to look at what is up with all the eating in the Bible. E, A T I N G Eating. I gotta tell you, there's a lot in the Bible this may be surprising. And I just want to show you we're going to Walk through this and just make some observations. And that'll lead us to another question.

So it starts all the way back in Genesis 2. The Lord God took the man, put him in the garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the Lord God did what? Commanded the man, you are free to do what? Eat from any tree in the garden.

So God created as an act of joy, and he makes this lush world with abundance, with all kinds of things to eat. And he gives us taste buds and he says, eat. He sets this table for us. It reminds me I grew up in the country in north central Indiana. And on those long afternoons when my mom made me stay outside all afternoon.

If you're old enough to remember this, when it was like, no, you keep saying like weeks went by between lunch and dinner. It was so long and you get hungry. And if the garden was in full fruit to grab a tomato and to take that thing and eat it like an apple, and the juice would just run down my face. God says, here's the earth and here's its fruit. Take it and eat.

Creation is him setting a table for us so that we could feast doesn't end there. After his people, there may be a million of them or 4 million, we're not quite sure. But it's a lot of people who have been forced labor in Egypt and now they're free. They have no rules, no instructions, no way of functioning and operating. They've been operating under Egyptians systems and processes.

So God gives them instructions and in them, in Leviticus 23, he gives them seven festivals to celebrate every year. Seven different festivals. Passover, unleavened bread, first fruits, feast of weeks, feast of Trumpets, day of atonement, and my favorite, the feast of Tabernacles. Or think of it as the Feast of Tents. That is a week long camp out, grill out, come on.

God says, do these things every year. Some of them are day long, some are a week long. You add them up and it's 32 days a year. God says, I want you to celebrate to feast. 32 days every year.

32 days eating meals together. 32 days of remembering how God had delivered them, freed them from forced labor in Egypt. 32 days of celebrating God's rugged commitment to them. But there's more because I didn't include the weekly party, the weekly feast that's here in Leviticus 23. There are six days when you may work, but the seventh day is a day of sabbath rest, a day of sacred assembly.

You're not to do any work Wherever you live, it is a Sabbath to the Lord. The Sabbath is a feast. It's a party. It's a day to stop, to rest, contemplate and to enjoy. And so family and friends would come together on the Sabbath and they would share meals, they would enjoy each other's company.

They would celebrate God's presence, the beauty of creation. They would enjoy just being and being together. So now if you add up those 32 days with all the Sabbath days, which is every seventh day, we're now at 76 days a year. This is the life God arranges for his people. I want you to party 76 days out of the year, eat together, feast.

They even added one, they added one later that Jesus himself also would have celebrated. That was a way of remembering God delivering them from Persia. And so they would read the story of Esther and they would dress up in costumes and they make special food that day and they would play out that story, reminding themselves that God has saved them yet again. So now we're What? That was 76, now we're at 77 days of festivals.

Jesus celebrated every one of these. He celebrated them. And now we're up to Jesus. What, what about Jesus? Well, Jesus, the Bible tells us, is the, I'm going to quote the fullness of the deity, in other words, the fullness of all that who God is living in bodily form.

Here's another way the Bible says it, Jesus is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being. Alright, what does all that mean? Simply means this. You want to know what God is like? Look at Jesus.

That's what it means, that he is the clearest example of who God is. And so how did Jesus eat? Well, Jesus says this about himself, the Son of Man. He's referring to himself came doing what? Eating and drinking.

You say he's responding to complaints from some religious elites. He said, they say about him here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners. So here's the complaint, Jesus, you eat too much, right? You're feasting too much. And you're doing it with the wrong people.

You're doing it with traitors, you're doing it with people that can't live up to the actually unrealistic expectations we put on them. And he's doing it enough that he can be, he can be called a glutton and a drunkard. So here's the thing. Open your Bible to any of the, of the biographies of Jesus, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and You will find him at a table. He's turning water into wine.

At a wedding feast, he's at a tax collector's table, a guy named Matthew, who he invites to follow him. He's eating grain from the field with his disciples. He's in the home of a Pharisee, again, the member of the religious elite, when a woman comes in and anoints him. Sitting there, he's out in the desert with 5,000 people and they have no food. And what does he do?

He whips something up out of a kid's lunchbox.

He's in his good friends home, Martha and Mary Lazarus. He's. He's in the house of a chief Pharisee. He's sharing a Passover meal, one of those feasts with his followers on the night that he was arrested. And we call it the Last Supper or communion, and we'll take it together in a little bit, but we call it the Last Supper.

But it wasn't the last time that we see a meeting in the Bible. Check this out. After his resurrection, he is the resurrected king and what does he do? And while they still not did, still they couldn't believe it because of joy and amazement, he asked them, do you have anything to what? Eat?

Coming back to life works up an appetite, right? Or maybe if you ask the question, why did Jesus come back to life? What did he resurrect? One answer is he was hungry. Got anything to eat?

He's not done. He's breaking bread with a couple of followers in Emmaus and he makes breakfast for his friend Peter.

So just observation. Jesus knew how to party, right? He feasted. He feasted. And Jesus trained his followers to be like them and to do what he does.

And so it's not surprising that the first church, the followers of Jesus, do you know what they did a lot? Ate together. Here it is, Acts 2:46. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. How often?

Every day they're in the temple courts, which is the larger gathering. And they did that for a while, but they couldn't do it forever because persecution happened. And so almost consistently for hundreds of years, here's what the church did. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts. The architecture of the church in our guts and in our roots for hundreds of years wasn't a stage, it was a table.

Historians, they would call them love feasts or agape feast. Agape is a Greek word for unconditional love. People would come together and they would pray and they Would sing and they'd read scripture, they'd share testimonies, they'd eat together and they would take the Lord's supper together year after year after year.

Lots of eating in the bible, right? Genesis 2, Revelation. Here's one more. Revelation 19. Then the angel said to me, this is the culmination of all things.

By culmination I mean there is a day coming when God is going to set all things right.

All that's wrong will be handled and done and everything will be the way it was meant to be again. And the metaphor for that is this. Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding. What Supper of the Lamb. And Jesus added, and they added that the true, these are the true words of God.

I didn't mention that. Jesus brought up parties all the time. He taught and used the language of parties. When a woman loses a coin, she invites her friends over and they go hunting and they find it. And what did they do?

They celebrate. Right? When a man loses his son, his son leaves. And that son returns home. What does he do?

Throws a party. Yeah. And he tells stories about the day coming of what would be called the restoration of all things, the healing of all things, the renewal of all things.

And they go, it's. It's a banquet. It's a wedding banquet. And Jesus, our rescued life giving king, rescuing and life giving king. He is the groom.

And who is the bride? It's us, his church, the brothers and sisters that we have that there's a day coming that we will be at his the Lamb's banquet together. All right. We just covered the whole Bible real quick. Right?

Feel smart. What's that memory verse again? Got it. Rejoice always.

What did we learn? We learned that God created a world for us to feast. We learned that he arranged things for his people to feast 76 days out of the year. We learned. When he showed up.

What did he do? He hung out at tables and feasted with people. We saw that when he instituted a people of God who would be led by the Spirit in the world. What did they do? They broke bread together over meals.

And there's a day coming that will be a wedding banquet to beat all banquets. Right. So let me ask this question.

Do you know somebody who's like throwing parties all the time? Do you have one of those people in your life who just is like, hey, we got a feast, we got a feast. We got a feast. Maybe you don't have somebody like that, but can you imagine someone like that who is non stop going, hey, I got some food on the table, come on over, let's enjoy it together.

What is that person like? What can you imagine that person being like? I can tell you this, they're probably not boring, not judgmental, not taking themselves too seriously. They're not angry all the time. What does this tell you about who God is?

That this is a God who's like, come on, let's eat.

Came across the world happiness report of 2025. It's real. You can Google it. Find was really interesting. It's quantifiably true that people who eat together with other people have higher levels of happiness, lower levels of stress, pain and sadness on the day they eat together.

It's almost like God knows that about us.

Or maybe it's part of what it means to be made in his image.

Sure seems like God loves a feast. So here's what I'm suggesting. What is God like? That a person who's throwing meals all the time really enjoys the people they feast with and they are happy that God himself is the happiest being in the universe. Dallas Willard said God leads a very interesting life and that he is full of joy.

Imagine a God who is present to all things at all moments in the cosmos, who is present right now to tropical fish and to sunsets and to supernovas.

When you see Jesus walking the earth, he is overflowing with an abundance of joy. And he trains his followers in a way of life that their joy may be full. He said, so for us as we follow and we are enjoying life with God, the Spirit is with us and joining us at our tables as we feast.

A person who sets the table for you and eats with you is someone who likes you. And I say that because we're commonly, it's not uncommon to say, yeah, I love you, but I don't like you, right? God isn't, is not enjoying you through gritted teeth and he likes you.

Here's Dallas Willard again out of the eternal freshness of his perpetually self renewed being. Took me a while to sit with that. That he's always newer and newer all the time. The Heavenly Father cherishes the earth and each human being upon it. Fondness, endearment, the unstingingly affectionate regard of God towards all his creatures is the natural outflow of what he is at the core.

So God knows how to rejoice always. And his invitation to us is to come to him, to enter into life with Him. We started about five weeks ago and we started by talking about hunger. Jesus is the Bread of life. And we're hungry for bread.

And some of us have been hungry. We've taken time to fast, leading us into feasting and celebrating our resurrected king. And what does it look to live a life that both fast and feast, even that word, life. As we started this, we talked about there are two Greek words in the Bible for life. One is just bios, it's your body.

The other is Zoe. And that is dynamic life. It's what Jesus is talking about when he says life, abundant life to the full. And it gets translated, eternal life. So we think it's a promise for later.

It's not. It is a promise for now and forever. The invitation is to invite it into a life with God that is dynamic and full.

Best possible life. Not the easiest, but the best. This is what God wants for us. So I'm a guy who has had an orphan spirit. What do I mean by that?

It's an odd phrase. It's a deep seated sense of abandonment, loneliness, a lack of belonging. Maybe some of you have been there. It settled in for me in the way I grew up, in many ways alone and sealed by some deep experiences of rejection in my life. So I walked around with a lie that said if people really knew me, they would leave.

But God, right? Looking back over the last 20 years, 20 years of a healing process, I got to tell you, it would have gone faster had I collaborated more. Right.

It's a process that I would use the phrase he re fathered me me and is continuing to do so through his consistent presence in my life. It wasn't a healing in a moment. It was over the course of his life, by his presence and the participation of his people in my life, people with names like Dan and Cameron and Tom and Jen.

And I can point to some significant moments that happened along the way. And it may not surprise you that those moments, many of those moments happened. Do you know where it was? At a table with food or coffee or something. Right.

That is one of many reasons that I can rejoice today and rejoice always is because of what God has done for me.

The God who feast, the God who is happy and likes us. It's what he's done for me. What has he done for you?

Freed me from alcohol.

If he's freed you from addiction, stand up right now. If he's freed you from shame like me, stand up right now. If he's freed you from shame, if he's brought you into a life of belonging with other people that you never thought you'd have. Stand up right now. If he's given you hope you didn't know was possible.

Stand up right now. If in some way you've experienced healing, a growth in your life that you can credit to God, Stand up right now.

That's rejoicing. Look at the good news in this room. Look at the people standing. That is one story after another. Another.

The God who feasts. Yeah, you can sit.

Oh, I should be done. Come on.

I'll be honest. I don't always. I don't know how to do the always part. I know how to do a more part. And I want to give you something.

You can do this, right? You can do this. Any guesses what I'm going to tell you that you can do that will help eat with people. Like, let's actually do the thing that the Bible says that God does and that Jesus did. I could tell you about the gift of doing the kind of work I've done over the years where I've shared meals in samosas in Kenya and, oh, breakfast in Egypt.

They bring out dessert at breakfast. Come on. I could go through all that. I could tell you about the tables in my life right now, that every Thursday I sit down at a table with a bunch of other goons every Thursday morning over breakfast. And some of those goons are in the room.

They know that they are goons. I'm not. I'm not insulting them. Right. But then I'm there every Thursday at that table of the table at Block Coffee that I sit with Jen every Friday morning over coffee, my wife.

My favorite table, though, is this one.

This will be the picture of a table at my house. I bought it in 2010. It seats about 12 people. We've had more at it. Our goal was we're going to have a bunch of people at this table all the time.

And we did, starting in 2019. I told you it would have gone faster had I collaborated more. This is part of that. But in 2019, we decided to invite some people over, share a simple meal, invite the spirit, have meaningful conversations. And the people have shifted over the years around that table.

But I will tell you this. I have seen more healing and growth in the lives of people in my life.

So eat with people. I want to show you how to do that, too. So I'm going to. I've set up a space on June 1. It's a few weeks away between services.

If you get on the church's website right now, you can go to the events. And it just simply says, how to share a meaningful meal. It's so simple, man. So simple. I'm going to show you how to do it.

You can register right there or you can follow up and go, I'm not free. June 1st. Russ, help me out and I will help you out. I believe in it that much. There was one meal I missed, one meal I share every week, not counting Whitewater eats and the 190 of you who showed up for that crazy chaotic thing a couple of weeks ago.

We got a feast around here, right? This one, the Lord's Supper. So if you picked one up on the way in and want to take it, good. If you missed it, raise your hand and my friend Wayne right here will take care of you.

Here's the we often take this thing in a somber mode and we ought to be serious about it. I mean, we're remembering the day we killed God, but we're also remembering that death doesn't get the last word right, remembering our resurrected life giving king. And so we can take this and feast together over this meal and celebrate so we can raise the body together and you can raise it right now if you like. Can raise the body together and to taste the hope that comes in Christ as we take his body together.

And we can take the drink and remember his blood poured out and we can turn to the person next to us and just simply say peace of Christ to you right now. Turn peace of Christ to you and we can take it and drink life.

Father, May we be a people who rejoice and rejoice always. Amen.