The Gospel Comes with a House Key
The Gospel Comes with a House Key (4|5)
The Seal of Hospitality
• Lisa
• Let Perfect Love Cast out Fear
• Be a Way of Escape for Someone - Live as Living Epistles
Pages 105-112
TOGETHER read the book (END READING AT: ...no one is scapegoated in this Christ-bearing community.) and discuss the content below.
INDIVIDUALLY take notes in your journal on what stands out (try to keep it brief).
Exodus 10:8-9 (NIV) Then Moses and Aaron were brought back to Pharaoh. “Go, worship the LORD your God,” he said. “But tell me who will be going.” Moses answered, “We will go with our young and our old, with our sons and our daughters, and with our flocks and herds because we are to celebrate a festival to the LORD.”
1 Corinthians 10:13 (NIV) No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.
Romas 12:12-13 (NIV) Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality.
Titus 1:8-9 (NIV) Rather, he must be hospitable, one who loves what is good, who is self-controlled, upright, holy, and disciplined. He must hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught so that he can encourage others by sound doctrine and refute those who oppose it.
Life outside of Christ is infantilizing. It celebrates youth, and it revels in irresponsibility. It values self-indulgence, not self-control.
TOGETHER pray for one another.
INDIVIDUALLY answer the questions in your journal - process your notes and pray.
Radically ordinary hospitality begins when we remember that God uses us as living epistles and that the openness or inaccessibility of our homes and hearts stands between life and death, victory and defeat, and grace or shame for most people. 1 Corinthians 10:13 (above) speaks to the intensity, the loneliness, and the danger of temptation. It also speaks to the lived tension of applying faith to our trials and then waiting for that way of escape to present itself.
What is your response to that statement?
How does awareness that - you, your house, and your time are not your own but rather God’s ordained way of escape for someone - change how you think about hospitality?
We live in a world that highly values functionality. But there is such a thing as being too functional. When we are too functional, we forget that the Christian life is a calling, not a performance.
What is your response to that statement?
Pause and Pray - thank Jesus for the calling on your life - he says “Come, follow me”.
EXTRA READING:
“When someone steals a person’s clothes, we call him a thief. Should we not give the same name to one who could clothe the naked and does not? The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to those who need it; the shoes rotting in your closet to the one who has no shoes. The money which you hoard up belongs to the poor.”
- Basil of Caesarea (330 - 379)