Native Christian Hospitality

Even for a people-person like myself, it could be physically exhausting to be committed to showing hospitality by opening our home to friends, both old and new.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not complaining. I am fully convinced that it is a Christian duty and privilege to ‘show hospitality to one another without grumbling.’ (1 Peter 4:9)

But my almost-twoscore body is no longer possessed of the same verve and dynamism that it did a little over a decade ago when I was just starting out as a church planter. For three mornings-after now of having people over — for CDG, for marriage counseling, for wedding ninong-ninang meet and greet dinner, followed by late night church ministry team meeting — I have noticed that the grip of our bed has been just a little bit tighter and more irresistable.

Nevertheless, being committed to showing hospitality is a sentiment fully consistent with and native to our Christian identity. Every believer must, with God’s help, seek to show hospitality to both friend and stranger, as one would were one of God’s angels to show up at the door.

It is true that showing hospitality is often expensive. This is perhaps why not as many Christians do it.

It means expending resources for the good of our housewarmers; God-given resources that we might already be starting to believe belong to us and are ours to use as we please.

But if, as the Heidelberg Catechism puts it, we are not our own, then how could we even imagine that the resources that God has placed under our stewardship could actually be ‘ours’ in the absolute sense? They are not. All that we are and all that we have are his and must therefore be at his command.

And he commands us to be hospitable to one another.

As well as being a good for others, hospitality presents a spiritual good, too, for our sanctification.

Being compelled by the love of Christ to invest money, time, and energy into opening up our homes and our lives to others in loving service, teaches us to emulate the kind of divine generosity and hospitality that the gospel shows us.

Showing hospitality teaches us that this is an activity fully consistent with and native to our Christian identity.

We will remember that at the moment of Christ’s death on the cross, the massive and thick curtain that sealed off the most holy place in the house of God was slashed in half, from top to bottom, as by a flaming sword which turned every way.

Christ’s satisfactory death on the cross has opened the way back into the paradise of God for all who would repent and believe in his name. This is the hospitality that all Christian hospitality flows out of. It is a hospitality that is sacrificial, is costly, is welcoming, and which says to all who are burdened by sin and striving, ‘come.’

Come to Jesus, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and he will give you rest. (Matthew 11:28)