Let Brotherly Love Continue
Expressions of love within the church include hospitality, comfort care, honoring marriage vows, and contentment in God's provision
Brotherly love continues through
Hospitality
Karen Maines has pointed out that entertainment and hospitality are two different kinds of events. Writing in Moody magazine, she observes:
• Entertaining says, “I want to impress you with my home, my clever decorating, my gourmet cooking.” Hospitality, seeking to minister, says, “This home is a gift from my Master. I use it as He desires.…” Hospitality aims to serve.
• Entertainment subtly declares, “This home is mine, an expression of my personality. Look, please, and admire.” Hospitality whispers, “What is mine is yours.”
• Entertaining looks for a payment—the words, “My, isn’t she a remarkable hostess.…” With no thought of reward, hospitality takes pleasure in giving, doing, loving, serving
• The model for entertaining is the slick women’s magazines with their alluring pictures of foods and rooms. The model for hospitality is the Word of God. Christ sanctifies our simple fare and makes it holy, useful.*
Corrie Ten Boom’s family was torn apart by the Nazis, with most of her immediate relatives perishing in concentration camps due to their harboring of Jews in their home. It was a sacrifice they were willing to make, for God had given them a heart for hospitality. In her book In My Father’s House, Corrie writes about her family’s penchant for taking in guests as she remembered it from childhood: “Many lonesome people found a place with us, where there was music, humor, interesting conversations, and always room for one more at the oval dinner table. Oh, it’s true, the soup may have been a bit watery when too many unexpected guests came, but it didn’t matter.
“Mother loved guests. Her lovely blue eyes would brighten, and she would pat her dark hair into place when she knew we would be squeezing another visitor around the table—already bursting with four children, three aunts, herself, and Papa. With a flourish she would place a little box on the table, and spreading her arms wide, she would say to our visitor, ‘You are welcome in our house, and because we are grateful for your coming, we will add a penny to the blessing box for our missionaries.’
“Years afterward on my trips around the world, when I have been dependent upon the hospitality of others, I believe that I have enjoyed the reward for the open doors and hearts of our home.”*
Comfort Care
Honoring Marriage Vows
The ties of a durable marriage are not like the pretty silken ribbons attached to wedding presents. Instead, they must be forged like steel in the heat of daily life and the pressures of crisis in order to form a union that cannot be severed.846
Contentment in God’s Provision
I learned to look more upon the bright side of my condition, and less upon the dark side, and to consider what I enjoyed, rather than what I wanted; and this gave me sometimes such secret comforts, that I cannot express them; and which I take notice here, to put those discontented people in mind of it, who cannot enjoy comfortably what God has given them, because they see and covet something that He has not given them. All our discontents about what we want appeared to me to spring from the want of thankfulness for what we have.—Robinson Crusoe, on his deserted island, after his heart had been changed by finding a Bible among the chests he had salvaged from his wrecked ship