Hospitality Is The Heart Of God

The God that we serve is welcoming. He pursues us and loves us. 1 John 4:12 says, “No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love is brought to full expression through us.” John is basically saying, “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.” His logic is: No one has ever seen God, but Jesus came and he made God known.

John also says, “No one has ever seen God; but if we love, we make him known.”

The Greek word for full expression is exēgesatō. It means exegesis or exegete. When you exegete a passage of Scripture, you discover the original meaning or full expression. John says that Jesus exegetes the meaning of God. He removes all of our interpretations, and he shows us God in his full nature.

John also says that we get to exegete God by loving others. The Pharisees thought that God was a nitpicker, a rule keeper. Jesus exegetes God in a whole new way: God full of grace and truth. The story of the Prodigal Son exegetes God as having a heart of radical, costly, extravagant welcome.

Jesus exegetes God and he wants us to do the same. That’s our job. In Western culture, we use hospitality to mean this: Inviting someone we like for a brief visit. This isn’t bad, but that’s not how the Bible defines hospitality. Here’s God’s hospitality: Pursuing us in order to win us at a costly love, willing to die for them in order to adopt them as sons and daughters of heaven, to come live in your house forever. Some theologians say the chief attribute of God is hospitality.

The word hospital captures this sense of divine hospitality. The more busted up you are at the hospital, the more priority you get. That’s getting close to divine hospitality. When we are willing to sacrifice and stretch our own comfort zone to welcome others, That’s how we exegete our God.  We are willing to stretch ourselves to serve those who are busted up.