Sharing the Gospel Through Hospitality - Rosaria Butterfield Part 1

that practically means you Christian share the gospel with a house key that practically means you Christian share the gospel with a with an invitation that hey you know what Christmas Easter Thanksgiving my house there's no question about where you're going to spend your birthday you're my brother you're part of a family and the Christian community exists sometimes on what I like to call a starvation diet of community welcome to the focus on the family broadcast helping families thrive Rosaria welcome back to focus on the family thank you so much it's always an honor and privilege to be here with you it's just good to see you my heart is leaping inside because it's so much fun I just love the way you think and what God has done with your life and what a background and we're not going to cover all that ground we're getting into a new direction today but I so appreciate what the hand of God has done in you and your husband in your family it's one of those amazing stories of God's work in someone's life help us understand why you are so passionate about hospitality you know we read that in Scripture and we think yeah be kind be joyful be hospitable okay and we keep moving but it is a key to unlocking the the heart yeah especially non-believers and it's also connected to what it means to be a radically converted person in this post Christian world why here's why when I share with people what cannon Floy Smith did for me in my conversion process now I don't believe that I'm discipled into conversion I don't believe that you know it was a casserole but brought me to faith it was it was the Spirit of God this is which is a supernatural you know the power of heaven coming down to save a sinner like me but the highway that that traveled on was cannon voice Smith's tireless Christian hospitality I was in their home at least weekly for two years and while in their home I would argue with them and after I would argue with them I would go back to to campus where I was a professor at Syracuse and I would demean them I would mock them and I would go back the next week and do it again what let me ask you this what why did you say yes I mean what well because I was doing research on a book for the Religious Right and I thought if Ken Smith is my unpaid research assistant ya know I this came with a little bit of an undercurrent Oh an agenda you know if you think you know if I thought evangelical Christians had an agenda believe me I say gay rights activist I had a bigger one in my opinion right and I thought I had the winning one so you said yes you go and week after week it's the sort of that's the same thing lots of people come in good food simple food sort of like how I cook simple food but plenty of it people come in they talk that in a certain point the you know the Bible is open the Salters open they sing the Psalms exclusively four-part harmony the aesthetic of beauty of the Psalms was compelling to me and the words quite frankly were disgusting and and after years and years of that and I talk about this elsewhere something happened the Bible got to be bigger inside me than I and that's what changed and when I came to Christ I did not stop feeling like a lesbian but I knew Jesus was who he said he was to paint that picture a little more fully I mean you even referred to their home as the cult house Oh II did your student oh yeah yeah my lover at the time you know like what are you doing again oh I'm warming up my vocal cords like that was just the most common thing for me to do but we were going to sing yeah and the challenge compelling yeah and the challenge there is this tension you had to face between your life and what it was then as a sinner not drawing or knowing God right and then this attraction very odd disarmingly did that process take before you said Lord I did it it was two years let me just turn to listeners again because this is critical think of somebody in your life that you think is so beyond God's reach they could never become a Christian and start praying for them start inviting them over right I mean that's the tank why let me ask you this question Rosaria why do we stumble with that simple idea well because I think the spiritual warfare that we experience is it's it's disarming to us and it's unusual and instead my invitations is for Christians to just just relax and step into the conflict but I think that we want it to be nice we want to have a nice dinner we want you know we want the table settings to match we don't want the cat to have a hairball as soon as the guests come in you know we we want and we certainly want our guests to be potentially offended we don't want our guests to offend us we have lots of anxiety and this is spiritual warfare if we're going to be agents of grace then we need to get close enough to the stranger to put the hand of the stranger into the hand of the Savior and you know what somebody here is going to get hurt yeah may God be given all the glory yeah and I love the idea that you're what's the right way to say this you're deconstructing the complexity of doing something yeah yeah it doesn't have to be it doesn't happen long goal and guess what guess what you know 20 years ago people could sit together at the same table even though they voted differently today we're told that's impossible a good question is why and those are some of the things that I try to unpack in this book and some of the practices that I think are necessary but here's what I know as I've shared with people my testimony I have so many people just walk away rich young ruler style and they say wow they're super Christians I could never do that and I'm here to say we are all called to set our boundaries a little differently yeah in the past we've set them according to our checkbook and according to our calendar in a post-christian world were called to set them according to the blood of Christ yeah but it's where we should all be and that's why I like the the subtitle of your book which is radically ordinary hospitality describe what that looks like day to day well day to day it means two things first of all conceptually it means always looking at the objective of the Christian life the purpose your purpose for being here and that is to seek strangers and seek them you must they don't actually fall from the sky to seek strangers and make them neighbors and embrace neighbors praying that God would make them family of God so that's conceptually the journey and once you cross those thresholds everything changes when you cross the threshold between strain your neighbor you never go back to stranger the bridge is burned down you can't go back there and when you cross the bridge from from neighbor to family of God that check that doesn't you can't go back either and so that's conceptually what it means and what it means practically is that for the last 17 years of marriage can't and I have just done this thing that we thought was normal but we you know we are in the world so we know that Christians don't think it is and so we we sort of think of this book is our coming-out party if you will so for when Kent and I got married we were the only believers in our extended families that means that we were lonely people yeah and and our our commitment to family of God meant that that we believed that our home was a place where family of God gathers not by invitation only but organically and regularly so we started practicing daily hospitality with our family of God from the very beginning of our marriage one of the nice little old ladies in the church had bought us one of those little guest books you felt like well after four months of marriage we had filled it up entirely and we looked at each other and said we're gonna throw this sucker away get anywhere no we're never gonna get a new one because we're gonna have God keep these tallies oh because there's something about keeping these tallies that is going to spook us hmm because we we were noticing then a crisis of loneliness in the church and you know part of how the post Christian world became a post Christian world is it kept the secular secular world capitalized on some real sin issues in our church I'm not talking right now about sexuality right I'm talking about cold hearts right I'm talking about the willingness to allow crushing loneliness to reside in the hearts of the people who are our fellows you know our fellow shoulder rubbers in the pews right and and why well because it was a sin that just went under the radar we started to feel that our time our own that our homes were our castles and that really the scriptural command that the gospel would come with a hundredfold practical nurturing connections within the family of God and that's in mark chapter 10 we might get to that on this in this conversation and we started to see that as somebody else's business we started to prefer programs over relationships and we looked at the singles in our church as people who needed to be fixed or fixed up yeah and that's those are sins that we are revisiting in this post Christian world well I so appreciate that the way we started the program that heart for truth and understanding and I think that's true when we really dissect where we're at we're in a cold place we have automatic garage door openers I would assume that like me I know some of our neighbors I don't know all our neighbors and even when I'm in you know Christian company many people don't know any neighbor and I think that's an indication of what you're talking about this you know it sounds harsh but that cold-heartedness that we don't really care the other thing is just with modernity you have so many things pulling at your time you know we're busy people and we make excuses that we're busy people and and therefore we don't have time for hospitality and getting to know the people around us and that that's really an error isn't it because an old book i think paul trip is the author instruments in the hands of god there's a line in there that caught me for today's program and that is our relationships belong to god think of that that our relationships belong to god and it's how we nurture them and how we steward them that is important to him that's right the heavenly father when you start looking at it from that perspective wow that's a lot of responsibility right absolutely and i would say in addition to modernity creating a kind of self-absorption the idea that somehow i'm really busy and that I'm guilty of that I'm really busy doing important things and and maybe I should have a blog in my own name I mean can I just tell you that I think the Puritans would call that sin hmm I really do and maybe you all have blogs in your names the idea was it was the the self autonomous individual finding meaning and nothing but himself that's the American creed but now we're at even a more dangerous place because we've moved from modernity to postmodernity and we are now in a place where we have the quote-unquote intersectional person finding purpose and meaning in nothing but victimhood yeah that's so true and you know that that is damaging in a different way but that makes it that's what makes it impossible today or seemingly impossible I argue in the book it's not impossible you just have to have enough foot spa with that but but the the idea you know often Christians feel that how can I talk to my neighbors who identify as lesbian when everything I say is hate speech well here's how you make sure that your relationship with that person is stronger than the words you're going to use and how do you do that well get off Facebook stop thinking that anybody really cares what you have to say on Twitter and and peel some potatoes put on a pot of coffee invite them over and invite them over and you know what it's not efficient we're talking about one person at a time yeah it's tough but you're really hitting it I want to highlight some of the critics that you've had in your church I mean because I think that's an important place to go and that that will be something you face people that say you know I just don't have people over maybe their personalities are more introverted speak to the temperament issue too because this is hard to do for some people that aren't bent toward relationship right right and I would say to that everybody doesn't have to do this the same way alright so there are lots of things that you can do and if you do what you do and you open your arms a little wider you're going to find that you have a niche that I don't have and if a couple of families in the church do it together that means that you all can support another family in crisis now all that means is that you have access to people in need it doesn't mean you have to do anything there are seasons of life when you can't if you're a mom with small children and let's face it 7 o'clock is not the time you're having dinner with you know with friends that's bath time right is there a time during the day that you can open your home to other moms with small children but make it explicitly gospel focused I think this is the challenge Christians need to do what you do but realize that the gospel is not going to transmute by osmosis so if you're having you know lunch with people how are you going to move from egg salad to eternity well figure out the rigor that oh it's ask good questions ask good questions but I'll tell you in our house it helps to have a routine already established you know I want to ask you about that because earlier you said you know you if Christians have an agenda you had an agenda all right so go back to me I'm inviting a neighbor over for coffee I feel like I have to turn it to Jesus right now that's a great question one of the reasons that we have found making open invitations to our neighbors so useful I mean one is I talk in the book about a crisis in our neighborhood that that kind of conjured that up but it became so useful to just say Thursday night is neighbor night Thursday night is soup and prayer I put on pots of soup at 6:00 come join us anybody's welcome we put this out on the next door app invite 300 households no kidding and then at 7:00 o'clock we're going to have a short Bible lesson and we're going to sing a psalm and we're going to pray and you know what first of all neighbors already know we're going to do so it's not a surprise it's not a surprise and because we do this every single night Kent has been leading family devotions every single night at a certain point that you know the kids bring all the dishes up to the dishwasher and they send the Bibles and the mugs of coffee and the Salters down and you know what sometimes neighbors say up hey I gotta go that's fine but they don't always but the reason for these open and regular invitations is this many of your neighbors I might even say most are afflicted with abuse and addiction and that means that as noble as your invitation you know Tuesday night at 7 might be quite frankly many of your neighbors do not know if they're going to be sober or safe that particular on Tuesday but you know if it's regular hey we do this every week one of those weeks they will be ready and so we we turn it in this way and it's it's a known reality and we've had neighbors say wow is this some strange ritual you do I don't care what you call it but we're going to go there and the reason is because we've just talked about heavy things we've just talked about important things and now we want Jesus to enter this conversation not to stop the conversation but to deepen it and then you know what we're gonna come back and do this tomorrow and we're going to do this the next day so we don't have a one-time opportunity to talk to our neighbor this is the problems that people have very shallow understandings of the relationships that they are to create I'm not talking about a shallow relationship with my neighbors God never gets the address wrong he gave me these neighbors he appointed these relationships and I'm going to build them for as long as he keeps me there and so to spend a good amount of time listening is very important I mean how will you know what the gospel bridges to your neighbor - often Christians think in false categories of personhood they think oh there's got to be some special gospel for my neighbor who identifies as lesbian or a different way of approaching the gospel for my neighbor who identifies as Muslim or not you know I mean a big question that Christians have to ask do you believe that what is true determines what is ethical or do you believe that what is ethical will determine what is true we are all image bears of a holy God every single person I don't what category you have slapped on to yourself there's only a few that are going to survive eternity we know the Word of God will survive eternity so we want to make sure that our neighbors who might never hear it elsewhere will hear it from us but here's what we need to also remember life is hard and some people of one cross to bear and others have ten so rather than pretending that the Christian life is democratic why don't we just work hard to roll up our sleeves and help carry some of those crosses but we can't do it until they know what they are I need to ask some tough questions too about our attitude as Christians in the issue about our tongue and how we use our tongue and I I want to get into this and I'm gonna have you come back if you can let's come back next time tomorrow and continue the discussion but but this idea I think it's partly borne out of insecurity that we don't know enough to spiritually battle competently and so we turn to this defensive posture when people knock us off our our spot and we attack verbally which is utterly the wrong thing to do when you're talking to somebody with the gospel I love Romans 2 to 4 which says don't you know it's God's kindness that leads one to repentance I mean this is what you're saying it doesn't say I often speak in front of audiences and I'll ask who was beaten verbally emotionally or physically into the kingdom kingdom of God I've never had a hand go nobody had said to me I was so mistreated by those Christians that I decided to become one of them right that's it's always the other way I saw such incredible love they treated me with such kindness and yet it's a tool we don't readily use that's right no I think that's absolutely right but I would also add to that that those Christians were disarming I came to them with a sense that this is Who I am I came to them with a sense that I am a lesbian two years later I came to realize that lesbian may very well be how I was but it will never be Who I am there's no way for you to have a good witness to your neighbors if you're mouthing off on Facebook I mean I'm a person well person but I would say I would say a big challenge that people have is that they've gotten really comfortable with this idea that when I'm with my people I'm just gonna let loose yes we have unguarded unsanctified speech with each other because we don't think that Outsiders are listening in and we apparently don't seem to think that Jesus is listening in - this has been a great conversation and a challenging one I know that some people are going wait a minute that doesn't sound right the best thing is read the scripture look at second Timothy 2:22 read it right to the end of that chapter I think you'll be convinced that certainly the Lord and the disciples were teaching us all not just Timothy and those of the New Testament time but us as well as Christians in the modern era to better understand the heart of God and this is a fantastic book the gospel comes with a house key loved the title and I'd love to see it in everyone's home and I'm telling you if you can make a gift to focus on the family I'll say thank you by sending you a copy of the book and hopefully putting that in your hand so you can put it into use that's the goal and if you can't make a gift that's okay I believe in the message so much others will cover the cost of this or just get a hold of us and let's get this into your hands so you can better understand the heart of God Rosaria thank you so much for being with us oh it's my pleasure thank you so much hey I'm John fuller and thanks for watching get more info about focus over here and more from our guests over there and be sure to subscribe to our channel as well you

Channel: Focus on the Family

Views: 20,537

Rating: 4.9299998 out of 5

Keywords: focus, on, the, family, focus on the family, gospel, evangelism, hospitality, Rosaria Butterfield, sharing the gospel, worldview, atheism, jesus

Id: oxyaSRWJNqw

Length: 22min 40sec (1360 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 30 2019