Family Talk Pod

Meals are a pivotal time for our families to engage in relationship with one another, and they’re also a significant time when our families can work on becoming witnesses to the world around us by practicing hospitality. Luke Stehr talks about using meal times to form your family for sharing the good news of Jesus.

Episode Transcript:

Hi, and welcome to the Family Talk Pod. My name is Luke Stehr, and I’m Community Engagement Coordinator at First Baptist Arlington, and I’m also a dad to two wonderful and fun little girls that my wife and I are trying to raise to follow Jesus way.

This week, I want to talk about the opportunity that eating together provides for development as a family.

We live in a culture of busyness. Between all of the activities that we can take on as a family, taking time to eat at a table as a family can be big challenge!

In our family, we work pretty hard to have dinner together, all together, at the table most nights of the week. Since our kids are little, conversation is often not smooth, but we practice sitting down and being together as a family. We talk about our days, we refill cups of milk, and wipe up messes. It’s a little chaotic, and it is work. It’s not always smooth.

There are all sorts of scientifically backed social benefits to this. Kids that eat meals at the table with their families are less likely to use drugs, have better language development, tend to have better grades, are less likely to experience depression, and tend to be healthier! All of those are great reasons to make eating together a priority as a family.

As Christians though, we believe that there’s spiritual significance to eating together even beyond those wonderful social reasons.

There’s a pastor named Gannon Simms who says that our family life is one the ways that we learn to find our true home in God, because in our families, we learn to give and receive love. By learning to give and receive love as a family, which happens through the very natural lessons of eating together, we learn how to receive God’s love and give it to others.

Our family meal is a chance to pray together and help our kids cultivate yet another habit of prayer as we pray before our meal. It’s an opportunity for us to talk about daily life with our kids and help them reflect on how God is working in their lives. Meals are a great place to ask some of the questions on your family talk box cards.

Meals are also a place where our family life can become a part of God’s mission. Have you ever thought about the role your table could play in building God’s kingdom?

The Gospel of Luke has two statements about Jesus that are sometimes called, “The Son of Man” statements. One of those is Luke 19:10, which tells us “The Son of Man came to seek and save the lost.” It tells us why Jesus came and what his mission was. The other tells us how Jesus went about doing that, and it’s Luke 7:34, “The Son of Man came eating and drinking.” For the Gospel of Luke, Jesus seeks and saves the lost by eating with them.

Jesus’ act of eating and drinking with people became a foundational way the early church, which met in homes, gathered. Early church meetings were centered around meals, and it was their expression of love and hospitality that caused others to want to be a part of what was happening in the life of the early church.

I want to encourage you to not only have dinner as a family, but to share your table with people who are not a part of your family, and even with people who may not be a part of our church. In doing so, you’ll be modeling the hospitality of the New Testament church to your kids, and you’ll be involving them in the mission of God. It doesn’t have to be at your house. You can take a picnic to a park. You don’t have to cook the whole meal. It can be potluck. You can use real dishes or paper plates. But by inviting others to share a meal with your family, you’ll be ministering to people like Jesus ministered to people, and you’ll be showing your kids how to do it too. Your family will be a part of building up the family of God. You may be worried about having Jesus oriented conversations, but if you’re truthful about who you are, and if you love Jesus, it will come out.

If you’ve got a habit of talking about Jesus at the table, there’s a really good chance your kids will talk about Jesus at the table before you can. My kids know that praying before dinner is our habit, and when we forget (and we do), our two-year-old extends her hands and authoritatively reminds us to pray. She’s not shy or embarrassed about it. It’s what we do, and she’s going to keep us on track.

Recently, our family joined another family for dinner. We have two kids, age five and under. They have three kids, age four and under. The kids didn’t sit down for long, and us adults sat at the table finishing up dinner while preschoolers and toddler and an infant raced through the house, turning lights off and on, pulling out toys, and generally making a racquet. They were happy. We were able to talk with some interruptions. We chatted about how they’d been doing since their foster daughter returned to her family, struggles and successes of parenting, and more. Life has a way of coming out around a meal. It was messy. It was loud. And it was really good. We left tired, but fulfilled.

Eat together as a family, have Jesus oriented conversations, and pray together. The Family Talk Box cards are such a great resource for questions and things to talk about with your kids while you eat. If it’s not your family habit to eat dinner together at the table, I promise it’s worthwhile for so many reasons. It won’t always be perfect, but it will always be good.

Remember to utilize the Family Talk Box! The cards inside provide excellent questions and resources to help you have conversations about following the Jesus way with your children.