Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

Sunday I gave some devotional thoughts before we shared the communion supper.  As I looked out at the assembly, a large crowd nearly filling our 1,000 seat auditorium, I thought to myself that it was our family who were about to have dinner with each other and the Lord.  And that's a good thing.  Our family.  Us.  The dinner was for us and the assembly for us as well.  Sunday morning services are not really for the outsider; Our assemblies are not for outreach, but for inreach and upreach.  We are there to give each other courage and strength.  We speak to ourselves in psalms, hymns and spiritual songs.  We spend time in prayer calling on our Father to bless us and to bless others also.  We let God speak to us through His word, so that we might learn more about Him and His ways.  We are there for edification and growth and reunion and communion.  But then I thought...

   Should we not invite others to dinner?  Don't we ever invite outsiders to our homes for dinner with our family?  And of course, I had to answer, yes.  Yes we do.  And while it generally is not the purpose of our dinners together, we do invite others to join us and we fellowship with them and laugh with them, there are even times when we cry with them.  And when we have done all of these things and the dinner is finished, I think to myself, I am closer to those folks than I was before they came for dinner.  I know more about them than I did before.  I enjoyed being with them.  I hope we can be friends.

   I'm thinking, that is the way it ought to be with the dinner we share on Sunday morning.  We need to put some extra emphasis on it.  Be a bit more open with it; call others to share it with us.  Invite the lost to dinner and let them see the faith, communion and union we share in that one great act of worship and fellowship.  It would be a bit more like home and hospitality, don't you think?  And...and...it's just possible that when they see it and share it and talk with us and laugh just a little, that they might like to come again.  And just think, they might even want to join our family and invite some people that they know.  Should that happen, and we want it to, we could all rejoice speaking the words of the scarecrow when he realized he could do math and said, "Oh joy, rapture."