Tuesday, August 2, 2016

MEAL

What is the best meal you've ever eaten in your entire life?

Meals at the Taylor house are routinely amazing.  Joelene is an incredible cook.  Food at our home is very often better than food at a great restaurant.

But great meals consist of more than the food.

There's the location.  If you're sitting in a booth screwed to the floor in a place where high school kids in uniforms are cooking your food and serving it with a spork, chances are that isn't your best meal ever.  I would say, if pressed, that the best meal I've had in my entire life was the first time Joelene and I were in Rome, sitting in Piazza Navona at an outdoor restaurant.  It was a bowl of tomato soup - that's it - but it tasted so good.  I said to Joelene:  "This is honestly the best bowl of soup I've ever tasted."

"You realize it's just soup, right?"

"I know, but . . . "

It was really good.  I'm guessing now - looking back - that it was probably at least 70% the location.

The other thing that makes food great is the company.  Some of our best meals have been around the Thanksgiving table with our entire family just enjoying conversation and laughter and making memories.

The first meal in the Bible is one eaten without God.  He creates the first couple - Adam & Eve - and places them in a perfect garden.

"You can eat whatever, with one exception - just one - fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Don't eat that."

Tons of freedom and joy; one thing forbidden.  Just one.

Eve ends up having a conversation with satan - the serpent - the enemy.  He invites her to eat of the forbidden fruit.  Adam, her husband, isn't far away in some clover field while this is happening.  He's complicit to the whole thing and they eat together.

As a result, the received a sin nature.  God came searching for them and they hid.  They blamed one another and had to cover their nakedness.  They were kicked out of the garden and separated from God.  They ultimately experienced death.  By the next chapter of Genesis, their two sons are fighting and one kills the other.  And so it begins.


When you eat a meal it's about community with others and friendship with God.



We're told in Romans that you and I inherited that sin nature from Adam.  Because of his rebellion, we all get to die now.

So that's nice.

Adam takes the wrong thing off the shelf at the grocery store and now every human being after gets to croak.

But it isn't just about eating a meal -- it's about picking a friend.  Because Adam & Eve were saying in essence: 'We choose not to be friends with God.  We choose to be friends with this slippery one over here.  We're going to push God out and invite satan in.'

When we eat a meal, we aren't simply selecting food.  We're picking a relationship.  That's why Christ-followers pray before they eat.  Not as ritual; we're choosing to be friends with God - to welcome Him in to our setting and situation.

So when you eat a meal, it's bigger than the calories - or the food choice - or the fat content - or the sugar levels -- it's about community with others and friendship with God.

Buon appetito!

And be blessed.

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