Welcoming Strangers
Written by T. M. Suffield |
Monday, September 25, 2023
You don’t have to be best friends with everyone you invite over but we are supposed to welcome strangers. Do it by degrees, go a little further than before, but make your table a hub of life and hope to those who eat at it. Beyond the commands of scripture, we could talk about cultural benefits and statistics and do some delightful social science, but let’s not. Instead, think of this. When you were far off, a rebel and exile from the presence of the living God, he decided to lay a table for you to come and eat at.
One of the qualifications for elders is hospitality (1 Timothy 3, Titus 1), which means ‘welcoming strangers.’ While this is an absolute expectation of pastors, most of the qualifications describe the ordinary Christian life. We’re meant to be welcoming strangers, and we’re all meant to be doing it (Hebrews 13).
Yet, we’re terrible at it.
It’s natural and human to be better at welcoming people who are like you than people who aren’t. You have a better sense of what they would receive as a welcome, conversation flows more easily because you have more things in common, and though we are often uncomfortable with the fact of it we also prefer to welcome those like us. There’s something in all humans where like calls to like.
This can be a normal innocuous, human thing, or it can grow into the excesses of racism or other prejudices. We shouldn’t be overly dismayed if you notice that you find it easier to welcome people who are like you. Welcome requires walls, and the walls of your household are more likely to be comfortably shaped for those whose walls look similar. That’s life.
Christians are also compelled to step out of our worlds and welcome the stranger. This means the literal stranger, the person you haven’t met at all before—I am now used to meeting people for the first time in my kitchen, strange though that would sound to many people—but it also means the person who is different to you. Those differences can be small or large, sometimes we are trying to join hands over vast cultural gulfs. We are not commanded to be the best of friends (though you can be!) but to welcome.
It’s not easy to do the difficult thing and have people in your home who you think you’ll struggle to talk to or that you’ll struggle to feed (hot sauce for West African friends who think your food is dreadfully bland is a winner), but we should.
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The Lord Is My Restorer
The Lord desires us to live for His glory, and this is good news for us because we find our ultimate joy in doing so. Your best response to your Shepherd is satisfaction in His provision, gratitude for His restoration, and trust as you walk carefully and diligently in His steps no matter the path He chooses for you. Our response is to bring Him glory, whether wealthy or poor, well-known or obscure. He has promised to provide all that we need.
He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Psalm 23:3As a new school year is upon us, I am reminded of a strange experience I had a few times when I was young. You no doubt experienced it as a child as well. That moment when you walked into the grocery store and saw your teacher pushing a cart full of food. Or perhaps you visited a restaurant and saw your principal with a spouse. Seeing school personnel entirely out of context is stunning for a child! The young mind tries to grasp that teachers and principals have a life outside the school building. As a child, it is quite mind-blowing.
For many of us in church leadership, we can contextualize ourselves in the same way. We are the leaders. We are the ones offering encouragement, rest, and loving guidance. It can be a hard mental shift to take ourselves out of the role of giver and put ourselves into the role of receiver. But my friends, we need the same things we so often offer others. Our Heavenly Father abundantly provides everything we need for life and ministry but with a singular purpose in mind.
The third verse of Psalm 23 tells us that every care we have falls under the provision of the Lord so that He might glorify Himself in our lives. Did you get that? True, we do kingdom work here on Earth, yet sometimes it can become unclear whose kingdom we are actually building. But Scripture is clear that each act of lovingkindness granted on our behalf is accomplished for the glory of our Leader and for His name’s sake. We belong to His flock, and He is our Shepherd even as we shepherd others. Our priority must never be to love our church body for our own sake but to bring glory to His Name. Let’s reintroduce the words of this very familiar verse with these thoughts in mind.
He restores my soul.
Our Lord, the Shepherd, restores us. The word restore can have a dual meaning, referring to the return of one who has strayed in sin and also the reality of renewal and sustenance. When those in our congregation stray, we follow the example of our faithful Shepherd who sought after us and rescued us just as the shepherd in the parable of the lost sheep left the ninety-nine to search for the one (Matthew 18:12). The Lord seeks His people for His glory, each one precious in His sight. As church leaders and brothers and sisters in Christ, we should pursue and bring back others into the safety of the fold. Galatians 6:1 admonishes us, “Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness.”
However, it is not always an issue of one who has strayed, but perhaps of a life that is strained. Ministry can be stressful, and in those seasons, we need renewal. Psalm 19:7 says, “The law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.” The Lord speaks to us and restores us by the work of His Word. What good is a green pasture of provision when our anxious minds have blinded us to it? We must continually keep our eyes alert to the corrective balm of Scripture as it drives us to personal repentance, removing the calluses of this world. This produces soft hearts, sensitive to the leadership of the Lord, so that we can in turn, be effective leaders for others. He offers the restoration we need to persevere in our spiritual journey.
The truth is that sometimes, even as spiritual leaders of whatever flocks the Lord has given us, we lose our footing and may become discouraged. The temptation to focus on the strains of ministry gets the best of us. The cruelty of this world crushes us. At times, we simply feel knocked over by the storms in the valley. We need to be restored by our Shepherd.
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Burying the Talents of the Great Rewarder
Written by A.W. Workman |
Thursday, March 7, 2024
What was the servant doing all those years when the other servants were busy trading for the increase of their master’s wealth? Presumably, looking out for his own wealth. And why? Because he did not believe that it would be worth it to risk spending all those years and all that sweat, only to have his master come back and take it all from him. If he invested for his master, he would labor and sacrifice and risk, and for what? A stingy master? No, thanks! He would instead do the minimum, follow the letter of the law, try to serve two masters. His master had given him this money to keep safe, so he would do that – and no more.A number of months ago I was reading the parable of the talents to my kids at bedtime. There was nothing unusual about the night. I was leaning against the doorframe to the bedroom they all currently share, Bible open in my hands. The lamp was turned off in their room to help them settle down and I was relying on the hallway light for my reading. The plan was simple as always. Read a little bit, discuss a little bit, sing a song or two together, pray, give kisses and hugs goodnight, and finally, navigate multiple attempts to get out of bed again for various and sundry reasons. It was a typical night, not the kind of time I would have predicted for the conviction of the Spirit to fall.
We were almost finished our reading through the book of Matthew and that night had come to chapter 25, verses 14-30. The parable of the talents will be well-known to most of you, but if it’s not you can read it here and I’ll also post it below. The summary is that a master leaves on a long journey, entrusting three servants with three very large sums of money (called talents). The first one receives five talents, about 100 years’ worth of wages for a laborer. The second receives two talents, about 40 years’ worth of wages for a laborer. And the third receives one talent, roughly 20 years’ wages. The first two servants spend the following lengthy period investing their master’s money and both double the amounts they received. The third servant goes off and buries the money he received. When the master returns, he affirms the faithfulness of the first two servants and then rewards them with both increased authority and joy. But the third servant explains that he played it safe and merely stashed his master’s money away. He says he did this because he knew his master’s character to be harsh and stingy. The master, in turn, strongly rebukes him, telling him that if he knew this he still should have at least put the money in the bank, where it could have collected interest. He then commands that the one talent be given to the first servant, and that the wicked servant be cast out into the “outer darkness,” essentially into hell. The parable ends with the third servant losing even the amount that he had preserved, while the first two servants receive even more than the enormous amounts they had ended up with.
This is a parable I know well, and have read dozens and dozens of times. But for whatever reason, when I read it this time (and read it for my kids, no less, not for me), clarity and conviction fell hard. The familiarity of the passage meant that I’d never really understood the whole bit about the master’s character. But I suddenly realized that this was at the very core of the parable. The wicked servant says of the master, “I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground.” Essentially, “You are a stingy, exacting man, so I didn’t risk doing costly work that would go unrewarded. I played it safe and stashed your money away.” In Middle Eastern culture, then as well as now, stinginess is viewed as one of the very worst vices.
I was struck with a question I’d not thought of before. What was the servant doing all those years when the other servants were busy trading for the increase of their master’s wealth? Presumably, looking out for his own wealth. And why? Because he did not believe that it would be worth it to risk spending all those years and all that sweat, only to have his master come back and take it all from him. If he invested for his master, he would labor and sacrifice and risk, and for what? A stingy master? No, thanks! He would instead do the minimum, follow the letter of the law, try to serve two masters. His master had given him this money to keep safe, so he would do that – and no more.
The other two servants seem to have had a radically different view of their master’s character. We see this from their actions. They do spend a long time using what their master had entrusted to them to generate even more wealth for him. How are they able to do this? Well, the parable tells us that they are faithful. In one sense, this is enough.
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Christians and Personal Empire Building
“A church ought to be friendly to genuine seekers, but the church ought to recognize that there is only one Seeker. His name is God! If you want to be friendly to someone, if you want to accommodate someone, accommodate Him and His glory, even if it is rejected by everyone else. We are not called to build empires. We are not called to be accepted by men. We are called to glorify God. And if you want the Church to be something other than a distinctive people, a people marked out by holiness as belonging to the God of heaven (Titus 2:14; 1 Peter 2:9), then you want something God does not want.”
Many folks want to make a name for themselves and want to be great in various ways. This can be good or bad, depending on the ends in mind. Sometimes it means amassing power, control and dominance over others. Sometimes it means seeking to do some good in the world, even if no one knows your name or what you are doing – but God knows.
Both Christians and non-Christians can seek to build their own empires, their own kingdoms. As I say, it partly depends on what sort of empire you want to build, and for what ends, that can make all the difference. A recent news headline got me thinking once again about such matters. It had said this:
Crikey! How Irwins built their multimillion-dollar empire
Terri, Bindi and Robert Irwin have successfully carried on the environmental legacy crafted by Steve. Here is how the family has built their very own conservation empire.
Now let me say that because what the Irwins are up to is basically neither here nor there for me, and because the article was behind a paywall, I could read no further. But the title about building an empire was enough for me to want to turn this into another devotional piece.
I have often talked to Christian leaders and those in ministry over the years – especially those just starting out – and if and when they ask me for a bit of advice, usually the first thing I say is that we must be careful that we do not end up being an empire builder, a kingdom builder.
We must be very careful, in other words, that in our effort to serve the Lord, we do not get a big head, do not get proud, and do not think we are going to be the next best Christian thing since the apostle Paul or the Great Awakening. Staying humble, and being willing to work with others and to share the glory with others, is crucial.
Too often those in ministry are NOT all that willing to work with others, and too often they do NOT want others to get any credit or any glory. I find this so often in various parachurch groups and in certain churches. And of course at the end of the day none of us deserve the glory – only God does.
A quote attributed to Harry Truman fits in well here: “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” Whether or not he said this, or said it in quite that way, the general principle is sound – especially in the Christian church.
I find so many leaders and pastors who do not seem to be very interested in working together with others. Part of the problem is they want to do things their way, and they want to get all the credit and all the glory. They want to make a name for themselves.
But that is not how it should be for any Christian worker, whether a megachurch leader or a humble church janitor. Our aim should be to glorify God in all that we do and let him get all the credit. But having been involved in all sorts of ministries over the decades, I have seen too much of this empire building.
Now don’t get me wrong here. There is a fine line between having godly ambition and wanting to see great things done for Christ and the Kingdom, and just wanting to be in the spotlight, wanting to get the applause of men, and wanting to be seen and praised.
The quote by William Carey is appropriate here: “Expect great things from God, attempt great things for God”. So in one sense, yes, we should seek to see great things happening, to see many folks getting saved, and to see our churches being filled.
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