Well, we're going to talk about 10 reasons families should eat together every day. Yeah, I think we're coming from a position of scarcity, meaning that if you look at statistics, it's a rare thing for families to have dinner together every day. Most families don't. It's not because they've designed a life that doesn't have it. It's because they've just said yes to this, that, or the other.

And it yields a life where people are going in all different directions all time of the day, and there's really no time to have a meal together. And that's bad. Hey, and we've got Bill Roach to come and talk with us about this. Hey, Bill. Hey, Scott, how you doing?

I'm doing great. You know, Bill, you and I have been banging around together for probably 23 years. Our hair shows it. You both had brown hair 23 years ago when you met. I had more hair.

You know, we've been really walking the same journey all this time, and I'm so glad that we can talk about this today. Amen. God has been good. We look back on 20 years of God's faithfulness. It gives us hope and encouragement that He's gonna be faithful for another 20 and beyond.

Amen. Well, hey, this thing that we're talking about, the family table, The Bible says something about it, but you know, there are like secular statistics that say families that eat together, the kids have better academic performances. They have lower risk of substance abuse. They have better mental health, lower rates of depression and anxiety, and they have healthier eating habits. This is just sort of what happens generally, but the Bible actually pictures this beautiful thing.

I'm going to read Psalm 128 to us, because this is, to me, one of the most helpful pieces in Scripture, Psalm 128, blessed is everyone who fears the Lord, who walks in his ways. When you eat the labor of your hands, you shall be happy, and it shall be well with you. Your wife shall be like a fruitful vine in the very heart of your house. Your children like olive plants all around the table." I love that line. "'Behold, thus shall the man be blessed who fears the Lord.

The Lord bless you out of Zion, and may you see the good of Jerusalem all the days of your life. Yes, may you see your children's children. Peace be on Israel." A.D. Amen. Israel.

Amen. So let's just talk about 10 reasons families should eat together every day. First, it solidifies Family culture. Okay, so talk. Family culture.

Yeah, I would agree with that. Because you're sitting down, everybody's being still, maybe for the first time in a day, maybe since morning family worship. But I agree, you've got everybody around the table, you're asking questions, and it's almost like this is our family, this is what we do, we're here every night doing it. It might be hard to define, but every family has a different look and feel. And a lot of that is, of course, that's formed in times together.

And so just informal discussion time around the table is where a lot of that is shaped. And in a Christian home where you're careful about the things that you talk about, that can be such a helpful way to sort of form a healthy identity as a family. Amen. Agreed. Yeah.

And even the food that you choose to eat will give your family an identity. I came from a very strong Italian family. If there wasn't pasta on the table three times a week where everybody was kind of looking around and said, whose family is this? I share your identity. You know, we, every Friday night at our house, when our kids were growing up, it was, it was pizza movie night.

And so now all our kids are grown, they've flown the coop, and they do the same thing every Friday night. That's fantastic. Okay, number two, it creates a rhythmic predictability of life. Yeah, I would agree with that. You know, 50 years ago, this was just normal and natural.

Even my family, which I would classify was not necessarily a family of faith at the time. My dad was an unbeliever. Every night, even when I was two or three years old in the early 1960s, we waited for dad to come home for dinner is what I'm told. We had dinner after he came home. This was just the way family worked.

In fact, I got to tell you a story. Every week, my family right now, my brothers and sisters, we sent out a prayer request list every Saturday. My brother leads. It's a fantastic thing. Some believers in there, even some unbelievers, professing Catholics, But everybody sends a prayer request and blessings.

Just this week, they were talking about a story about getting around the dinner table. I would have probably been two or three years old. This is 1964. Telling the story of my dad waiting for my dad to come home, and it was a typical family where my mom would tell you to the kids if they did something wrong, you need to wait until dad gets home, right? And he's going to take care of it.

So this one particular day, my brother comes home with a report card. He's got two or three Fs on his report card. And my mother puts the report card on my father's plate. And he comes in, sits down, ready to eat. And my mother points at the report card on the table.

He picks it up and he looks at it and he puts it back down and he said, okay, let's eat. And my mother says, what? Don't you have anything to say? And he picked it back up and he said, well, at least we know he's not cheating. And there was my, of course, he talked to my brother afterward.

My brother said he lost his appetite there, but This was the culture. Dad waited for dad. He came home. He had something to say. And then we sat down and ate.

But this was just the norm of what happened 50 years ago, and we've kind of lost that. I don't think it's any secret that structure is good for human beings in general, but especially for young children. Structure is so good and comforting and just gives them the sense that, hey, mom and dad are shepherding these things in a predictable pattern, and it's good. Yeah, it's a predictable anchor for your family. Okay, number three, it gets you off the internet and with real people.

Why, whatever do you mean? This one would not have been listed 50 years ago. Yeah, and you actually have to protect this even at the dinner table. You've probably even been the offender where a text comes in and you attend to it at the dinner table. And hey, that's not good.

We want to encourage people to leave the phones aside, carve this out as a sacred time where you're not doing that? Scott, you remember what happened 50 years ago. I remember they came out with the TV tray stand. There you go. We went from the table to the living room and the Swanson fried chicken, mashed potato, corn, that frozen thing that you stuck in the oven.

And my mother said, that ain't happening here. We're not eating dinner in front of the TV. I remember those days. And we thought we were not the hip crowd anymore. That's great.

I remember that like it was yesterday. Yeah. Okay. Number four, it facilitates family joy. I'm going to co-opt this because I want to quote Ecclesiastes 9.7, go eat your bread with joy.

Live joyfully with the wife whom you love all the days of your vain life. Ecclesiastes 3-12, I know of nothing better for them than to rejoice and do good, that every man should eat and drink and enjoy the good of all his labor. It is a gift of God. So it's an opportunity. It facilitates family joy.

There's a phrase that we've all come to hate now, safe spaces. But there are some particular kinds of circumstances where everyone feels like they have permission to exhale. And I feel like the dinner table is one of those really key places where everybody feels like they can come exhale after a long day, maybe a bad day, a very busy day. And everyone takes a deep breath and we just have the opportunity to enjoy each other and set all that other baloney aside. It's sweet.

Amen. Scott, interesting enough, I was reading this morning, I'm reading through the Bible in a year, Paul Tripp's book, Everyday Gospel. It's a really great blessing. And just this morning, we were in Nehemiah chapter eight, and they're reading the law and they're crying because they haven't obeyed the law. And then Ezra, I think it was, no, Nehemiah actually said, you know, this is a day holy to the Lord your God.

Do not mourn or weep. And then he tells them, you go home and you eat and you drink. And if your neighbor doesn't have anything, implying again that each family was together, you give them some of yours. And then that great phrase, do not be grieved for the joy of the Lord is your strength. And it is interesting that it was around the dinner table that he was bringing that verse in.

Eat the fat, drink the sweet. Drink the sweet. Yeah, that's great. Okay, fifth, it creates stories. Stories.

Yeah. We're back to family culture now. Family culture is built by these shared experiences and stories that get told over and over and over again, until they become part of family lore. And that definitely happens at the dinner table. And boy, you have the little ones, right?

When my grandchildren come over now. And just a simple question, what did you do today? And boy, it's going to come out from going traipsing through the woods to getting hit in the head with a rock to riding a bike and falling. All the stories just come out just with a simple question. What happened today?

Yeah, we, I would do a lightning round and, and the question was favorite part of the day. And everybody would go around and, you know, give their favorite part of the day, create stories. Okay. Number six, is surfaces problems? This is, This is a really good one.

And you know, what we did one time on Sunday evening, this was back in the day when I was trying to figure out what do I do on the Sabbath? You know, I'd go to church in the morning, but what's the afternoon, the evening supposed to look like? And it kind of morphed into the family sitting around in the living room with snacks and stuff, and we just started to talk. Actually, it started as a talk about what's the Sabbath supposed to look like. But what it morphed into was this was our weekly family time.

We're all together. And what I found really helpful was that this was a nice quiet time and I allowed for the children to bring up issues that were happening throughout the week. Maybe Chad wasn't getting along with his mother very well. He knew that Sunday night was coming, where he could bring it up and ask a question when the tensions were high. We could deal with it, and we can have family discussions.

And this turned out to be a tremendous help to my family. Chad could just have a problem with his mother on Tuesday and then hold on to it because he knew Sunday was coming. Oh, why? Yeah, there are certain release valves. We need these in life and we need this in family life where you have a place to release the pressure.

Pressure builds up, but just like Chad's expectation of Sunday night, he knew there was a time where he could sort of turn the release valve and let the pressure out. Right. And there was no tension in the room. You know, when a son is banging up maybe against his mother and having trouble honoring, the tensions are very high and the emotions are high. You're sitting down in the living room, you could take a fresh look at the issue and everybody gets to take a good look at it without all the emotions there.

Of course, there's a bad version of this where it just is a venting session. And a dinner table can turn into a very negative place as well. And I think dads and moms have to really need to govern that and make sure it doesn't become an unending gripe session that ends at the end of one dinner and picks up again at the beginning of the next. Well, and it can become a place for children to learn how to slander. They learn how to take apart this person and that person, you know, and it really creates a toxic kind of pressure.

I remember growing up in high school and there was talk about having pastor for roast pastor for dinner on Sunday afternoon. You don't want your dinner table to be that. Yeah. I mean, you really want to create a culture of joy. And if you're always talking about, you know, who's bad and what's terrible going on.

You know, it's not helpful to anybody. Things like that can happen and you can talk about it, but I think parents have to be very careful to actually create a little piece of heaven, not hell, in their home. Amen. Okay, so the next one, it covers the news and world events. I'm just going to break in on this one because this is what I did.

When I was a young father, when I was at work, I would see news stories and I would hit print, and I would print out the news story, and I'd come home with a few things that were just interesting to me that happened during the day. And I would just talk about what was going on in the world. And so our kids had a sense of what was going on that day. The beauty of Deuteronomy 6 is walk along, talk along discipleship, where we don't segment off learning things from the rest of life, we integrate it with the rest of life. And WOW was the dinner table a perfect place to do that.

You know, we can help our children understand the things that are going on in the world and give them a healthy lens through which to see those things. And the dinner table is just an open time where that can happen during busy lives, where there's not a lot of time for that in other spots. Yeah. And I think also the family is very careful to shelter the children from the world during the day. So it is important that dad or mom come in with something in the world because it would create an unhealthy curiosity from the children if they never know what's going on.

But like you said, you give them the lens of which they can take in the world view as it were. Like the world view in five minutes, it's a wonderful thing to use with children too. The story was told, I think it's true, that, remember the Kennedy family, they was told that the Kennedys would sit around the dinner table in the evening, and they were all supposed to bring something from the news that day and be ready to talk about it. Joe Kennedy would do that with his children. Now, of course, you talk, it's a different worldview, but he was very set and he was purposeful in his discipleship, be it a bad discipleship, but he knew that he had to train his children, and the dinner table is where that happened for the Kennedy family, from what I'm told.

Yeah, that's a great point. One of the mistakes I made when I was mashing the print button and bringing home stories, so many of them were negative. And I remember having this sensation, You're always talking about all this negative, terrible stuff going on in the world. And so I think I probably inflected too much toward the negative. It's not hard to find negative news stories.

It's like every headline is negative, almost. But that was a mistake I made I I I think I could have done a better job with that okay next eighth it transmits values yeah I think we talked about that that again the kennedy's transmitted their values I'm going to transmit my values you're going to tell your children what's important and it's everybody's sitting around everybody's listening they're eating I think it's a tremendous opportunity that you're gonna tell them This is important and this is not important. And we're going to focus here on what is important. So it's a great time for the values to be transmitted. And it gives parents the opportunity to weigh in on the things that are being spoken of.

A lot of this has to do with the events of the day among your children. And it gives you a window of opportunity to actually speak to those things. And I think it's important that dad learns how to ask good questions, to draw out from the heart of his children. So he gets into the window of their heart to know what they're thinking, what are their values. So dad's got to become a really good question person.

You know, one of the things that I would do at the end after the news and after we talked is I'd open up the Bible and I'd read a chapter or read something that I'd read, you know, earlier in the day, kind of to tie off in family worship. It wasn't sophisticated, it wasn't complex, it wasn't long, but I just wanted to end it with reading the Bible. So that's how we would conclude it. What I ended up concluding is once everybody leaves that table, it's almost impossible to get it back. So if you're going to have anything having to do with family worship at night, you better do it while everybody's sitting there nailed to the chair.

Or immediately after because there is the great dispersion. And once that happens, bringing everybody back together is a real challenge. Especially the older they get. Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Okay. Ninth, it cultivates belonging. I really liked this one because I mean, even looking back on my own childhood, that clearly was a sense of belonging. Number one, you knew that you had to be there. Your absence would be very much noticed if you weren't there, which I think gave me a sense that that was where I was supposed to be.

That was where I was loved and I was expected to be there. I very much felt belonging to my family because I was supposed to be there for that meal. This is so cliche. I'm almost embarrassed to say it, but you hear so often a sibling say, I can attack my brother, but don't you dare attack my brother and hey that is that is the camaraderie that is is developed at home but particularly the standard times meaning these very predictable very repetitive fear regular times around the dinner table news where hey they're very just very distinctive things about the domes. And we do have those relationships where every once in a while we have a go at each other.

But if somebody has a go at one of the domes, you sort of get us all. And that's developed at the table. You know, my wife still talks about to this day, she was her, her brother, and her parents, that they would do something at least once a week. Usually it was on Father's Day off, but it was called Us Four No More. Us four no more.

And that was a time that my wife remembers with fondness, that it was just the four of them doing the things that bowers do. And very, very much looks back with it with fondness. That's wonderful. Okay. Tenth, last.

It is generationally balanced. Last, it is generationally balanced. Go ahead, Jason. Yeah, so we've all been in the echo chamber where we're with people who were born in the same year we were born or something very close. And it's so helpful to have somebody who's 10 years younger and 30 years older there to hear those things and just to offer different perspectives because often within narrow age range you get a narrow perspective range too.

So multi-generational dinner breaks that, and that's good. And now, Scott, you know in my home, we actually live right next door to 10 of our grandchildren. So it's very common at least once a week that not only do I have my children, but I have my grandchildren around the table. So we have a lot of, you know, multi-generation going on. And it's so good for those little ones to hear all those different perspectives.

Yeah. Yeah, and this is the way God designed life to be. The old people need the younger people. The little ones need the big ones. You're not stuck in the echo chamber of 13-year-olds.

You have people who are responsible, people who are experienced, people who are inexperienced. Old people need little kids. They do. They actually, and little kids need old people. And it balances, it matures, it just, it creates this balance that God created in the world.

It's a beautiful thing. It's a beautiful thing for a family to sit down with all the ages there, you know, trying to work things out and, you know, together as a, as a family. Yes. So there you have it. 10 reasons every family should eat dinner together every night.

Okay. Don't miss dinner. Don't miss dinner. Parting shot. Jason, parting shot.

We'll give you the last and then we'll conclude. This isn't profound, but it's something I'm enjoying. Just personally, we're in a very sweet time of life where we have four generations. So my parents are now great-grandparents. And just because of the love we have for my parents and my in-laws, and our kids have for their grandparents, the great grandchildren have inherited it because...

My parents are like heroes to their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. And it's just very sweet. The love is flowing in extreme measures in both directions. And it's wonderful. A lot of that has to do with the relationships built at the dinner table.

Jeff Hickman Amen. Yeah. And I would say it's worth the battle. And to bring this back and to keep it going, you're gonna have all kinds of obstacles, whether it's the children involved in other things, it's worth the battle. And understand that Satan doesn't want you to do this, but it's going to be worth your work to make sure that these things happen so that it's going to be something you could set up that your children will not only benefit from, but then they'll set a habit when they get married to do it with their children.

Amen. I quote Psalm 128 again, when you eat the labor of your hands, you shall be happy, and it shall be well with you, your children like all the plants, all around your table. So, eat of the fat, drink of the sweet, the joy of the Lord is your strength. Amen. Amen.

Amen. Thank you, Bill, for joining us. Appreciate it very much. You bet, Scott. God bless.

Okay. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. Hope you can be with us next time and hope you can come and be with us at Ridgecrest next year for our National Conference on Manhood and Womanhood, the Glory of God in the Creation Order. See you next time. Church and Family Life is proclaiming the sufficiency of Scripture by helping build strong families and strong churches.

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