The Ministry of Hospitality

A House That Belongs to God

By Jill Briscoe

We are going to have to learn that our home is not our home. It belongs to the Lord. If you struggle with privacy problems in the ministry, I really understand – because born into me is my English lady’s sense of privacy. If our homes belong to Him, Jesus has every right to invite anyone He likes into them. And Jesus has some weird friends. I began to note right away that Jesus’ friends were not always the sort of people I would have thought of inviting for an evening. Above all, I wasn’t sure I wanted them mixing with our children!

Learning what it meant to receive all sorts of people into His life, Jesus was busy meeting with the unclean, healing the deformed, and touching dead bodies. He was even handling lepers! Jewish Peter suffered a set of traumatic spiritual and social shocks. Jesus was teaching him a hard lesson. “Peter,” He was saying, “if you are a disciple of Mine, you’re going to have to receive the world. The people you call common or unclean you are going to have to learn to love, because I made them. I’m going to die for them. That’s all part of following Me.”

Hospitality

In Scripture hospitality is not a gift but a command. It’s the ability to make the environment such that the stranger feels welcome – to make it a place people want to come to. In Mark 1:29, when Jesus left the synagogue with James and John to go to the home of Simon and Andrew, Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told Jesus about it. Perhaps this is when Peter’s wife met Christ for the first time. Jesus touched the mother-in-law, the fever left her, and she began to wait on them. That evening the people brought all the sick and all the demon-possessed to Peter’s house. In fact, “the whole town gathered at the door” (Mark 1:33). I have that phrase underlined: The whole town gathered at the door. Do you ever feel as if that is happening to you?