Daily Service – Christian Hospitality 5

Daily Service – Christian Hospitality 5

This article is part of the 10 Things You Should Know series.

https://www.crossway.org/articles/10-things-you-should-know-about-christian-hospitality/

9. Hospitality is expensive.

Hospitality takes money and time. Daily hospitality multiplies the Butterfield food budget. It also keeps me in a daily pattern of chopping vegetables, kneading bread, and soaking dry beans. By 4:30 pm, the rhythm of our house shifts from homeschool to hospitality. While our teenage son is still doing homework, and our younger daughter is practicing the piano, I start picking up the house for table fellowship and Kent starts thinking through the passage for tonight’s family devotions. My single friends from church come home to a warm meal with many friends waiting to embrace them. Other families from church start to wander in. My neighbors know that I am often able to do childcare after school, so we regularly have children from the neighborhood here. All of this takes time, money, sacrifice, and flexibility.

10. Hospitality is worth it.

Hospitality develops eyes to see. It sharpens the saw of God’s word on our hard hearts. It develops bold intimacy among people who would never have reason to be friends. It grieves the loss of missed opportunities to serve. It shudders at Jesus’s words, “For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me. . . . as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me” (Matthew 25:42–45).

Jesus identifies with the stranger, the outsider, the needy. Daily hospitality hones a distinctive Christian culture from within as it embraces evangelistic optimism, knowing that if God wills, strangers will become neighbors and neighbors will become part of the family of God. Who knows? This may happen at your kitchen table tonight.

Rosaria Butterfield (PhD, Ohio State University) is an author, speaker, pastor’s wife, homeschool mom, and former professor of English and women’s studies at Syracuse University.

She is the author of The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert and Openness Unhindered.

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