Hospitality & the Gospel

Are you expecting visitors this summer and feeling the pressure of having everything in order?

True confession: Living alone as I do, I like having my space, my order, my time. It can be too quiet at times, but it’s predictable. But managed and predictable is not the picture of biblical hospitality that Linda Huffman painted for us this spring during our Hidden Heart of the Home series. Linda knows of what she speaks, having opened their home during their thirty years of marriage to more than seventeen people in need of a home (their stays ranged from a few days to one who lived with them for five years.) Her presentation during our Hidden Heart of the Home series was both comforting and convicting.

Linda reminded us that hospitality isn’t about having an HGTV home that makes you feel good. (I liked that part.) It’s about loving others in a way that invites them to be at home, to be family in your home. It’s really not about opening your home at all, but more about opening your heart. It’s the working of the Gospel that makes others feel important, loved, and cared for.

Hospitality is defined in Scripture as, “Being a friend to someone, hosting someone that is a stranger, without any benefit to you.” That’s the picture we get from Matthew 25:35: For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me …

Linda reminded us that hospitality will:

• Be Expensive: In terms of time, money, heart, home, possessions.
• Be Inconvenient: The opportunity to be hospitable often coming at the most inopportune time and taking longer than expected.
• Be Messy: Because opening your heart and home is risky as you open yourself up to be hurt, to have breakage, spillage and damage to your stuff.
• Invade Your Privacy: Allowing others to see the real you, your home, your family in real life.
• Expose Your Heart: Especially as you welcome those who are different than you.
• Mean Listening Well: Mary listened well. It’s not about you, but about making others feel loved and listened to; it’s about asking good questions and getting to know others.
• Make Your Time About Others: As a prime commodity in hospitality, we make time about those we are serving and loving. It is an eternal investment for the sake of the Gospel. Often it takes way more time than we think we have, but we can trust God. He is the Creator of time and is in every minute of our lives using our time better than we can.
• Be Humbling: Pride has no place in hospitality. I am often humbled as I welcome others into my home or office, recognizing that I am often blessed in a far greater way than those I serve.
• Call for Grace: Grace is giving what is not deserved. Hospitality is just that—knowing who you are serving, perhaps the unlovely, so you can serve them in the way that will make them feel comfortable and loved.
• Call for Creativity and Flexibility: At times, planning goes out the window when chicken breasts prepared for six must be turned into Chicken Alfredo for 20.
• Be Loving: Loving others with the heart of Christ is the main goal of hospitality.
• May Include the Proverbial Foot Washing: Hospitality might mean lowering yourself to do the dirtiest of jobs—cleaning up a plugged and overflowing toilet, etc.
• Be Rest-Giving: Offering refreshment to those you are serving.
• Be Extraordinary: Meaning going beyond the expected, the ordinary to love in extravagant ways because that’s what Jesus did for us.
• Be Peace-giving: Bycultivating the ability to offer people a place of calm, safety, and warmth in the eye of the storms of life in a cold and unsafe world. It is the Gospel.

Linda’s presentation helped me distinguish between “entertaining” and “being hospitable”—the former about making an impression, the latter about giving guests a taste of what it is to be loved with the extravagant love of Christ. What a relief! I’m re-thinking my reluctance to share my home and life with others.

How about you? What is your motive for welcoming guests? Will you let God stretch you and let Him choose the guest list?

Therefore welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.       Romans 15:7