Dinner With Jesus

Every meal is a good excuse to celebrate the bread and the cup of the Life and death of Jesus. If you are a believer you are qualified to serve it. If you are able to drink and eat you are qualified to receive it.

He invited Judas to His table. I became a believer one day when Jesus invited me to His table.

How we treat believers who annoy us is important, and Paul described why in 1 Corinthians 11. The Corinthians were not honoring each other as bearers of the presence of Jesus. He told them that some of them had become sick and others had died because they were eating the bread and drinking the wine in an unworthy manner: not discerning the body of Jesus as they interacted with each other.

Being kind to each other so that others like us or give us stuff or let us have our way in arguments is eros. Finding what truly blesses others and doing it is agape. That may not include just finding what satisfies them or makes them behave. What truly blesses them is what Jesus would say they need.

Being nice is not necessarily the same thing as being kind. Don Potter says that Jesus is not nice, because that would mean that He would have to lie sometimes. He is kind, but He is not nice. A friend from New York City told me recently that she had learned the hard way what Southerners mean when they say, “Bless your heart!”

Just in case no one else will tell you, you are not quite perfected yet in your attitude and behavior. Be glad that people are not rejecting you when you are annoying in whatever way you are. Give the rest of the body what you hope you will get, especially in situations when you don’t yet know how annoying you are being. Since you don’t know when that is, bless them all the time!

Honor the rest of the believers around you as parts of His body. Love Him by loving them. Bless Him by blessing them. He wants to be accepted even when He appears looking like them. When we visit Him in prison, or in sickness, or nakedness, or hunger, He will look like the “least.” (Matthew 25:31-46)