Welcoming Love - 1 Peter 4:9 Series

1 Peter 4:8 Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. 9 Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling. 10 Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God's multifaceted grace. 11 If anyone speaks, they should do so as one who speaks the very words of God. If anyone serves, they should do so with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ. To him be the glory and the power for ever and ever. Amen.

Introduction

I read this week that in a hurricane, if the wind speed is over 150 mph sustained for at least six seconds on a building, it will cause serious rupturing damage no matter how well the building is engineered. Imagine for a moment that you are huddled together with your family or friends in a house that is being hit with a category 5 hurricane. The trees outside are all down, massive damage everywhere, the storm has just started, but already wind speeds are around that 150 mark, it sounds like a freight train outside, and you can just see the house bending and shaking and it feels like at any moment the whole thing could just become splinters. And you find yourself wondering things about the structural integrity of the house that you never cared about before. How much pressure can a house withstand? Sometimes in places that have hurricanes people build with 2X6's instead of 2X4's. There are things you can do to make a house stronger.

What about God's house? How much pressure from the outside could we withstand here at Agape? As the end draws nearer and persecution and trouble increase, the structural integrity of every church is going to be tested to the limit. Not the buildings - the church itself (the people). So what are the structural components in a local fellowship that will make us strong or weak? Peter has been talking about that pressure for the last couple chapters, and now midway through chapter 4 he stops to tell us about three structural components - three things we can do on the inside so we will be able to handle all the pressure from the hurricane outside. The first of those three we saw last week: tenacious love that covers over repentant sin. We cannot be picking at each other over all our failures and weaknesses, we cannot be bringing up the past. We cannot have people who have committed certain kinds of sins be forever relegated to second-class status. And we cannot allow our affection for one another to be diminished by resentment over sin. We need tenacious love that buries repentant sin. That was last week. Today let's look at the other two. Two more massive beams that will give internal strength to this house that can withstand anything from the outside.

Welcome One Another

1 Peter 4:9 Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling.

The word translated hospitality is a word we have talked about before - philozenos.

philo - love

zenos - stranger

Stranger love. Every time you see the word hospitality in the Bible the literal meaning is stranger-love. It is the kind of love that welcomes and includes an outsider into your circle of love. That person is outside the boundaries of your warmth and care, and you bring them inside. It can range all the way from welcoming them into your home when they do not have a place to live all the way to drawing them into a conversation. You are standing there having a conversation with a couple friends, and you see someone who no one is really paying attention to, and you draw them in with your group. Hospitality is the act of pulling someone closer to you. So first we need tenacious love. Second we need welcoming love.

Receiving One Another

So to one degree or another we need to show that kind of love to everyone. Because no matter how close you are with someone, you could draw them in closer, right? Even your spouse. Isn't it true that sometimes your spouse is on the outside looking in on your life to some degree? For whatever reason you have them at arm's length. So sometimes you need to show stranger-love even to your spouse or your kids or your close friends because something has happened to where they have become like outsiders to you. Any time a relationship is not nurtured there is a drifting apart, and a need to draw the person back.

Romans 15:7 Receive one another, just as the Christ also received you

The word receive is proslambano – it is used to describe the act of physically grabbing someone and pulling him close to you. It is the word used to describe Peter pulling Jesus close so he could talk to Him in private (Mt.16:22 – see also Acts 18:26). It is even used to describe the act of eating – receiving food into your body. You have the responsibility to grab the people around you and pull them in close – right inside your personal world. Right inside your intimate circle of friendship. Into your home. Into your living room. Up to your dinner table. Into your conversations. Into your heart. One writer said, "Through … hospitality we share the things we value most: family, home, financial resources, food, privacy, and time. In other words, we share our lives." The unbelievers you know at work might be friendly enough in the office, but you are not a part of their life in any other area. Certainly not in their home. But in the church it is different. We are family. We are welcome in each other's homes and private lives - even people we are not close friends with. When we get so all our fellowship is only at the church, then we go home and we have our own cozy, comfortable, private existence with just our family and no one else - then we have slipped from Christian hospitality and stranger-love. We do not have anyone over because we never want to sacrifice any family time, or we don't want the hassle of having to clean up the house, or we don't want to give up our lazy routine of watching TV all evening - when that happens it means those things have risen above stranger-love in our priorities.