Is Your Hospitality Christian?

It’s no small secret that Christianity and hospitality go hand and hand. “Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality” (Romans 12:13). “Show hospitality to one another without grumbling” (1 Peter 4:9). “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers” (Hebrews 13:2). Like a knock at the door or food on a table, hospitality suits faith.

But while Christians may know to show hospitality, we can be less clear on how to show distinctly Christian hospitality. We are “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession” (1 Peter 2:9) — and our homes are one (massive!) way to shout that our lives belong to the Father of light. So what makes for a Christian kitchen? A believer’s backyard? The ways we welcome should be noticeably different from the world. But how?

As my husband and I look to purchase our first house, we’ve dwelt on the question often. We want God’s character and commands, not our personality and preferences, to ground and shape our hospitality. To that end, consider how faith, love, and wisdom can help Christian homes communicate that they have chosen to serve the Lord (Joshua 24:15).

How Faith Keeps House

First and foremost, Christian hospitality comes from faith (Romans 14:23). We live by faith in the Son of God, who loved us and gave himself up for us (Galatians 2:20). Therefore, we keep our homes by faith in the Son of God, who loved us and gave himself up for us. It is no longer we who determine how to live in our homes — but Christ who lives in us.

And what would the Son have us do with our living rooms and basements, extra food and spare beds, except to use them to glorify the Father? Jesus would live in no other way: “I honor my Father” (John 8:49). “The word that you hear is not mine but the Father’s” (John 14:24). “I do as the Father has commanded me.” And why? Don’t miss this! “So that the world may know that I love the Father” (John 14:31).

What makes hospitality distinctly Christian? Faith in Christ, which cannot but love him and the Father who sent him. We seek to show hospitality, as God has commanded, because we want the world to know we love God. As John Piper might put it, Christian hospitality is a label reserved for those who know their home is not their treasure. Christ is. And because he is, they are determined to use their home in ways that show God, and not their home, as their treasure.

Now, how does Christian hospitality do that? We desire to magnify God in the ways we keep house — but what does that really look like? Even without a spiritual X-ray machine, alerting us to the heart’s intent, perhaps it’s still possible to identify Christian hospitality in practice. Reflect with me on how faith makes itself known.

Let Love Set the Table

If it is no longer we who determine how to live in our homes, but Christ who lives in us, and he would have us glorify God by loving God, we have another important question to ask: How does love for God act? Simply put, love for God loves:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets. (Matthew 22:37–40)

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. (1 John 4:7–8)

“Hospitality is an opportunity to prove that God is better than anything an unshared, ‘more comfortable’ home could ever afford.”

Love for others courses through every faithful attempt to live out the likes of Romans 12:13, 1 Peter 4:9, or Hebrews 13:2, or else our hospitality counts for nothing (Galatians 5:6). Lest we forget, the New Testament word for hospitality (Greek philoxenia) does not mean “regular, friendly hosts” but literally “love for strangers.” For we serve the greatest stranger-loving Host known to history: “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). No wonder, then, that without love, each invitation of ours is a noisy gong, every conversation a clanging cymbal (1 Corinthians 13:1).

Hospitality with love is an entirely different story — every day, in fact. The ordinary ways we use our homes will matter in eternity, and those ways will differ from day to day, person to person, situation to situation, need to need. Because as believers seeking to make the best use of our homes (Ephesians 5:16), we let the good of others define “best” for us. Commenting on Christian time management, David Mathis says,

One way to make it practical is to schedule the time both for proactive good in the calling God has given us and reactive good that responds to the urgent needs of others. Learning to let love inspire and drive our planning likely will mean fairly rigid blocks for our proactive labors, along with generous margin and planned flexibility to regularly meet the unplanned needs of others. (Habits of Grace, 213–14)

Because of love, Christian hospitality is routine; because of love, Christian hospitality is also responsive. Our homes are headquarters for strategic labors; so too are they outposts, lying within arm’s reach of the battlefield.

Most of us tend toward one expression of hospitality over another. Some prefer signing up for meal trains; others, sending out last-minute dinner invites. Usually, we’re the schedulers, the preparers, the planners, or the person who means it when he says, “I’m just a phone call away.” If we’re not careful, our hospitality could start to look a lot like an ad on a cereal box: Your life. Your home. Your way.

The Christian life couldn’t fly beneath a more contrary banner. We have been bought with a price infinitely more precious than our mortgage loans or monthly rent (1 Corinthians 6:20). This life is not our own; neither are these homes. And so we set ourselves on using them God’s way — and he commands us to glorify him by pouring ourselves out in love for others.

That’s why hospitality — whether at a moment’s notice or after several days’ worth of preparation, done on behalf of friends at church or neighbors in need — is no mere inconvenience to Christians. Hospitality is an opportunity to prove that God is better than anything an unshared, “more comfortable” home could ever afford. Could there be a more loving way to set the table?

Don’t Leave Wisdom at the Door

Finally, faith-wrought love doesn’t neglect circumstances or ignore giftings as we seek to show diligent, flexible hospitality. Believers are not mindless go-getters; we are prayerful wisdom-seekers (James 1:5), people intent on doing good works with an eye to both the Bible and life. If a homeschool mom, college roommate, new pastor, and a woman in a wheelchair all tried to extend the same kind of hospitality — well, they simply couldn’t! And they need not, because Christian hospitality doesn’t thrive on just faith and love, but also wisdom.

When we come across commands to show hospitality, we do well to remember that God isn’t calling us to obey him just today, but also tomorrow, on into next spring, and over a lifetime. We should aspire to obedient, long-lasting hospitality — and longevity is one of wisdom’s many specialties (Proverbs 3:16; Ecclesiastes 7:12). Wisdom considers how to apply undying truth to everyday life, asking questions simultaneously of Scripture and context. For example:

• If wisdom starts with (and is sustained by) the fear of the Lord (Proverbs 1:7), do we have personal habits in place that, as we seek to feed others, allow our own souls to be fed on God? Do we prioritize sitting at our great Host’s table (Psalm 23:5) over setting our own?
• To whom do the Old and New Testaments call Christians to show hospitality? Given the current season of our life — with these responsibilities and those difficulties, that opportunity and this ability — how can we faithfully welcome those whom God calls the church to welcome?
• Across the Bible, is hospitality an inherent good, or does its true virtue stem from its use as a means to something — to Someone — more satisfying than the choicest drinks and most delicate foods (John 4:13–14; 6:35)? How can we begin to better use our homes as signposts, where sin-battered souls are impressed not ultimately with the way we host, but with the God who saves?

Wisdom loves to wonder about bearing abundant and abiding fruit, to the praise of God and for the good of others.

And as she goes about answering, so too wisdom loves to humbly pray alongside Wisdom himself: “Father . . . not my will, but yours be done” (Luke 22:42). If our hospitality would be distinctly Christ-ian, then we must take our cues from Christ. In him we find the only Man ever able to follow God’s commands from complete faith and with real love, every day of his life. May our hospitality, compelled by Christ’s witness and empowered by Christ’s Spirit, be guided by what Christians value most: our God.

When it comes to open doors and ready tables, any person in the world can host according to his or her own will. Only Christians can show hospitality according to the Father’s.

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