Week 3 - Chapter 2
Notes
Transcript
The word hospitality approximates the Greek word philoxenia, which means “love of the stranger.”
Question: What does it mean to be a “Pro-Life” Christian?
27 Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.
19 “ ‘Cursed be anyone who perverts the justice due to the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.’
3 Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute. 4 Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”
17 learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause.
22 You shall not mistreat any widow or fatherless child. 23 If you do mistreat them, and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry,
10 do not oppress the widow, the fatherless, the sojourner, or the poor, and let none of you devise evil against another in your heart.”
3 Thus says the Lord: Do justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor him who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the resident alien, the fatherless, and the widow, nor shed innocent blood in this place.
8 Open your mouth for the mute, for the rights of all who are destitute. 9 Open your mouth, judge righteously, defend the rights of the poor and needy.
Right now in the United States, there are, roughly 105,000 children in foster care system, who are waiting for their nightmare to end, and hoping to be accepted into a loving home.
And yet, how often do we as Christian’s sit idly by, not lifting a finger to help.
All while claiming to be “Pro Life.”
“As committed pro-life Christians we know this: each life is a gift, each life is a mystery, each life reflects God’s image, each life holds treasures indescribable.”
I sit here in this house, in my class and racial privilege, and I know what it means to pray for the whole lost world of mankind, myself being the chief of sinners, pleading with God to undo me so that I can do good to everyone (Gal. 6:10), so I can honor and respect all (1 Pet. 2:17).
10 So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.
17 Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor.
The truth is, it’s pretty easy to do good and show honors to others when there is a direct personal benefit for it.
BUT,
When there isn’t, it’s not so easy.
And why not?
43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. 46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47 And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 48 You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
Christ is calling us to treat others with the same Grace we have received from God.
“Teenagers placed in foster care feel broken and unwanted. They have told me that they feel like lepers. They need the Advocate, Jesus himself. Often they feel marked and shamed. Outsiders. Rejects. Even the rules of the system work against them. They need grace. We need grace. Contagious grace.”
We live in a world which quickly marks a person as a social outcast, as a leper.
“When Jesus walked the earth, leprosy was the worst of all plagues. Not only was it a filthy, deadly disease from which no one recovered, but its contagion spread arbitrarily and wildly, rendering beloved family members outcasts and wanderers in the beat of a heart. Like Frankenstein’s creature, the leper’s skin no longer covered his sinews and muscles. With a pop of white pus, a beloved family member overnight became abhorrent. Lepers—moral and social outcasts, isolated, rejected, feared, despised—banded together in pain, waiting to die, bereft of hope.”
The ceremonial law deemed the leper morally and physically unclean. Leprosy was more than an infectious skin disease. It rendered the person who embodied it unfit to be part of a healthy community and unable to join in the worship of God. When Jesus walked the earth, leprosy was thus a repulsive corporealization of original sin. It was not caused by a particular sin or behavior. Rather, it pointed to our sin nature, the walking time bomb inside each and every one of us.
The only solution was containment of the leper and protection for the yet healthy. Whole chapters of the law—Leviticus 13 and 14— are devoted to how to contain the contagion and restore the healed leper. This disease could transform a beloved father or mother into a despised outcast overnight. One day you could enjoy belonging, touch, recognition, value. The next, you were as good as garbage.
But, when God sent his son, Jesus, fully God and fully man, to live on earth, He did something remarkable!
He dined with the social outcasts - including lepers!
And not only that, but He touched them, and healed them!
12 While he was in one of the cities, there came a man full of leprosy. And when he saw Jesus, he fell on his face and begged him, “Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.” 13 And Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, “I will; be clean.” And immediately the leprosy left him.
That’s amazing!
Jesus touched this leprous man
a man who had not been touched since the plague had ravaged his body,
the man whose fate was sealed from the moment the first white sore appeared.
This very same man was touched by the Son of God.
What a picture of the gospel!
For the truth is, we are all lepers, who have no hope apart from Christ.
For Christ alone saves.
And so our job isn’t to save others, but to point them to the healer Jesus Christ, who saves!
But this means being willing to tell people the truth!
[Jesus] did not tell the leper that God loved and approved of him just as he was. Jesus did not say that the problem of leprosy was a social construction rooted only in the mind of the beholder, and now that “grace” had arrived, “the law” was no longer binding. Jesus did not encourage the leper to develop greater self-esteem. Nor did Jesus rebuke the faith community for upholding irrational taboos against leprosy—leprophobia. No. The problem was the contagion, and the contagion was no social construct. The contagion was dangerous.
And so the gospel demands that we point out sin, but then point people to the savior who graciously saves us from our sin!
Which can be called “Contagious grace.”
Question: What is “contagious grace”?
For just as the leper’s leprosy was contagious, so too is God’s grace!
But what if we have no desire to share the grace of God with others?
What if, we just “don’t really like people” cuz we “aren’t a people person?”
We cannot will ourselves into the deep obedience that God requires. We can’t obey until we ourselves have received this grace and picked up our cross. We can’t obey until we have laid down our life, with all our false and worldly identities and idols. We can’t obey until we face the facts: the gospel comes in exchange for the life we once loved. But when we die to ourselves, we find the liberty to obey. As Susan Hunt explains, “When God’s grace changes our status from rebel to redeemed, we are empowered by his Spirit to obey him. We are transformed by the renewing of our minds (Rom. 12:2) into his likeness (2 Cor. 3:18). Joyful obedience is the evidence
And so with this mind, we look at using biblical hospitality to serve God as we serve others.
“Radically ordinary hospitality is this: using your Christian home in a daily way that seeks to make strangers neighbors, and neighbors family of God. It brings glory to God, serves others, and lives out the gospel in word and deed.”
The purpose of radically ordinary hospitality is to build, focus, deepen, and strengthen the family of God, pointing others to the Bible-believing local church, and being earthly and spiritual good to everyone we know.
What else but the gospel can bring together people from different backgrounds, ages, diversity, etc.?
The Christian life is a cross-bearing life, and the Word of God calls and equips God’s people to holy living. All our neighbors must know that we live differently from the world, and they will know as we live visibly within the means of grace, placing ourselves under the authority of the church as members in good standing—and we must be unmistakably hospitable.
So what are we saying here?
Are we saying that we should re-double our efforts to advance the social gospel?
To put most of our time and focus on soup kitchens and homeless shelters?
No, because that is simply re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
“radically ordinary hospitality practiced by biblical Christians views struggling people as image bearers of a holy God, needing faith in Christ alone, belief in Jesus the rescuer of his people, repentance of sin, and covenant family within the church. Bible-believing Christians do not believe that a shave and a meal help people in the long run—or atone for the sin nature of us all.”
Strangers and refugees are marked by the dignity of the God of the universe but also by the imputation of Adam’s sin. In order for the gospel to be proclaimed in deed and word, we must recognize that we all deserve hell itself—with all its ravages, injustices, poverty, and pain—and that only through the blood of Christ, poured out for the sins of his people, and through the power that God used to raise Christ from the grave, bestowed upon all who submit to the authority of Scripture, are any of us saved. The Christian home is the place where we bring the church to the people as we seek to lock arms together.
Question: What keeps us from this?
False Identities (Our tribe instead of our Creator)
Not truly believing we are the family of God
Kent and I practice daily hospitality as a way of life because we must. We remember what it is like to be lonely. We remember the odd contradiction: to be told on the Lord’s Day that you are part of the family of God but then to limp along throughout the rest of the long week like an orphan begging bread.
Another reason we don’t practice biblical hospitality is because of Lone Ranger Syndrome.
“We believe that Christians are called to live as the family of God and to draw strangers and neighbors in, with food and a bended knee, beseeching God’s grace to pour out on those who do not yet know the Lord and to encourage and uplift and fuel those who do. We lock arms together because we must. Christians are not lone rangers.”
Another reason we don’t practice biblical hospitality is because it’s inconvenient:
daily hospitality can be expensive and even inconvenient. It compels us to care more for our church family and neighbors than our personal status in this world. Our monthly grocery bill alone reminds us that what humbles us cannot hurt us, but what puffs up our pride unwaveringly will.
Another reason we don’t practice biblical hospitality is because of fear.
“Too many of us are sidelined by fears. We fear that people will hurt us. We fear that people will negatively influence our children. We fear that we do not even understand the language of this new world order, least of all its people. We long for days gone by. Our sentimentality makes us stupid. We need to snap ourselves out of this self-pitying reverie. The best days are ahead. Jesus advances from the front of the line.”
Another reason we don’t practice biblical hospitality is because we forget we are engaged in warefare
Radically ordinary hospitality does not simply flow from the day-to-day interests of the household. You must prepare spiritually. The Bible calls spiritual preparation warfare. Radically ordinary hospitality is indeed spiritual warfare.
4 For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. 5 We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ, 6 being ready to punish every disobedience, when your obedience is complete.
Another reason we don’t practice biblical hospitality is because we forget that it’s a command:
God calls Christians to practice hospitality in order to build loving Christian communities, to build nightly table fellowship with fellow image bearers, to ease the pain of orphanhood, widowhood, and prison, to be qualified as elders in the church, and to be good and faithful stewards of what God has given to us in the person, work, example, obedience, and suffering of the Lord Jesus Christ.
God calls us to practice hospitality as a daily way of life, not as an occasional activity when time and finance allow. Radically ordinary hospitality means this: God promises to put the lonely in families (Ps. 68:6), and he intends to use your house as living proof.
Another reason we don’t practice biblical hospitality is because we are ashamed of the gospel and so we cower in fear.
Our other option is to despise the blood of Christ and reinvent a Christianity that fits nicely on the “coexist” bumper sticker, avoiding the disgrace and shame of the cross for a respectable religion that bows to the idols of our day: consumerism and sexual autonomy. This manipulation strategy relies on using biblical words in anti-biblical ways. It shares with biblical Christianity the same vocabulary but not the same dictionary. This option is equally dreadful, and prevalent.
in order to practice radically ordinary hospitality as spiritual warfare—we must be deep in the means of grace and fluent with the way that God’s law and God’s grace cannot be compromised or detached. Do we spend enough time within the boundaries of our Christian faith to renew, rebuild, recharge, repent, and grow in Christ—and to teach our children to understand that we are nonnative speakers in this new world culture? We must. We must build strong Christian infrastructures and launch from these. By so doing, we take Paul at his word: “The weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds” (2 Cor. 10:4).
But how? Deviled eggs with divine power? Muddy kid and dog footprints all over the house (especially on the cream-colored carpet) as heavenly proof that herein tromps the “feet of him who brings good news” (Isa. 52:7)? No. Instead, God calls us to make sacrifices that hurt so that others can be served and maybe even saved. We are called to die. Nothing less.
What else keeps from practicing biblical hospitality?