How Do I Fight Against My Own Heart’s Resistance to Being Hospitable to My Neighbors?

The Call of the Holy Spirit

How do I fight against my own heart’s resistance to being hospitable to my neighbors? That is a very good question, and I want to take it in two angles. One angle is that maybe your heart resistance is because this is not a good season of life. Maybe you are a young mother with a newborn feeling guilted into hospitality, and you actually shouldn’t be doing it. Someone else in your church should be.

I think this is a wonderful question that requires other Christians speaking into your life. Those other Christians would be, if you are married, your husband; certainly, you are a member of the church, your elders; and your closest friends. And the question is, Is this the right season of life to be practicing hospitality? The reason I say this is that hospitality is required of the church, but I don’t expect that every person in the church is going to be doing it the same way at every moment. That’s ridiculous.

There are babies that need to be born and old people that need to die, and if that’s happening in your house, you are not having a fellowship meal. So first, let’s make sure that you are actually responding to the call of the Holy Spirit and not just to a sense of guilt or a deed of the flesh. And then if it actually is your time to serve and God is calling you to do this (your husband says, We need to do this. We have neighbors who need the gospel. We’re ready. Your church is saying, I think your house is a great outpost for hospitality.), then what you need to do is what everybody needs to do: You need to sit down with the Word of God and take yourself by the throat and say, I will obey.

You need to look at it as obedience. You need to think about what you need in order to do this well. I hope you are called to do this. I am a very joyful warrior. I enjoy hospitality, and I enjoy talking with neighbors who disagree with me. I love seeing the gospel permeate a neighborhood and a household. I think that’s terrific. But it does take a certain amount of spiritual maturity to get there because you want to do this in the Holy Spirit. You don’t want to just do this in your flesh. Make sure that you are deeply in the Word. Make sure that you are bathing all of this in prayer. You want to have a known prayer life, a known devotional life. And then you want to see this as an extension of those means of grace.

Rosaria Butterfield is the author of The Gospel Comes with a House Key: Practicing Radically Ordinary Hospitality in Our Post-Christian World.

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