Hospitality: What It Is and What It's Not
Inviting Strangers In
Hospitality, biblically speaking, means love of the stranger. It transliterates from a Greek word philoxenia. What hospitality is not is fellowship. There’s nothing wrong with fellowship. We love having our friends over, who think the way we do, and they’re safe, and we can just catch up right where we left off, but that’s not actually hospitality. Hospitality has the stranger in mind, because we were once strangers to the Lord.
You don’t have to be somebody else to do this. You have to be you.
So, that’s what hospitality is. Radically ordinary hospitality is a way of life that sees every day as an opportunity to practice hospitality from right where you are. You don’t have to be somebody else to do this. You have to be you.
The Gospel Comes with a House Key
Rosaria Butterfield
With engaging stories from her own life-changing encounter with radically ordinary hospitality, Butterfield equips Christians to use their homes as a means to showing a post-Christian world what authentic love and faith really look like.
Universally Applicable
Hospitality is a universal command, uniquely applied. I think we all need to think about how we’re all needed in this. There’s only one you, and you will apply this differently than I will, and that’s okay, but nobody gets a free pass. You don’t get to not ever practice hospitality.
Now, there are seasons when we’re going to ebb and flow, but if it’s a lifestyle of refusal, that’s called sin.
Related Articles
10 Things You Should Know about Christian Hospitality
Hospitality is not always easy or comfortable, but it is worth it. Learn why.
How Radically Ordinary Hospitality Changed Rosaria Butterfield’s Life
Rosaria Butterfield invites us into her home to show us how God can use “radical, ordinary hospitality” to bring the gospel to our lost friends and neighbors.
Hospitality is not a gift unto itself, but a means through which other spiritual gifts are displayed: mercy, serving, giving, and evangelizing.