Your Brothers Keeper

We claim a hopeful heritage as Christians, though it has been made all the more real in Christ. His very life attests to the truth that the road between heaven and earth is real. His proclamations of the kingdom among us indicate that there are far more windows and doors than we might have realized. His depictions of this kingdom, small but potent, waiting to be discovered, declare that we, too, traverse the ladders between heaven and earth—ascending in worship, discovering Christ beside us in our laments, awakening to the house of God in our own neighborhoods. His death and ascension, likewise, assure us that these rooms we now see in part will one day be fully ours. "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house there are many dwelling-places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?" (John 14:1-2). We live our lives in this great house, preparing for the day when we will fully move inside.

Part of that preparation comes in striving to make our own houses the house of God, making sure our own doors are open and the roads leading to them are well-traversed. For the great invitation to come inside the house of God is far from an invitation to exclude. The Israelite's identity as God's people was not one that gave them permission to stave off every neighbor and keep every foreigner at bay. On the contrary, hospitality was written into the very consciousness of Israel. They saw that they were living in "none other than the house of God" and as such their very lives were to signify the master of the house. With an understanding of God's hospitality to her, the woman of Shunem urged the traveling Elisha to stay for a meal. Later, she said to her husband, "'Look, I am sure that this man who regularly passes our way is a holy man of God. Let us make a small roof chamber with walls, and put there for him a bed, a table, a chair, and a lamp, so that he can stay there whenever he comes to us'" (2 Kings 4:8-10). Those who see the rooms of the many-storied house of God recognize the need to build even more.

Though the hospitality we offer may not include the physical building of new rooms onto our houses, the image is one we cannot forget. For how often it seems we find God asking us to do the very things that God has done for us. Hospitality is a command that we are given because we have been given a home. We welcome others because we have been welcomed. We build rooms in our lives for strangers, for outcasts, and for neighbors because we, too, were once strangers when the Son prepared us a room.

We also build rooms simply because our neighbors need them. In Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous sermon on the Good Samaritan, he distinguishes between asking "What will happen to me if I stop to help this man?" and "What will happen to this man if I don't?" King then asks himself, "What will happen to humanity if I don't help? What will happen to the Civil Rights movement if I don't participate? What will happen to my city if I don't vote? What will happen to the sick if I don't visit them?"(2) Choosing to do nothing in terms of hospitality, service, mercy, and justice is still very definitely making a choice. What will happen to my neighbor if I refuse to see her need for the room I can offer? What will happen to my neighbor if I fail to see his need for the house of God?

Here, we might further discover that God not only encourages hospitality for the sake of the one who would receive it, but also for the sake of the world that sees it. In an article in The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof made the very public observation that in certain countries where danger and instability are constant threats, "you often find that the only groups still operating are Doctors Without Borders and religious aid workers: crazy doctors and crazy Christians."(3) He continues, "In the town of Rutshuru in war-ravaged Congo, I found starving children, raped widows, and shellshocked survivors. And there was a determined Catholic nun from Poland, serenely running a church clinic."(4)

Genuine hospitality is not only a logical outworking of life within the rooms of faith, it is also one of our most effective means of being the light Christ has called us to be throughout God's great house. On multiple levels, the one who builds a room for a neighbor is illustrating the good news, and it may well be the only vision of the kingdom those who witness the act will ever behold. With Elisha and the Shunammite woman, with Jacob who first saw the ladder between heaven and earth and with Christ who used it to come even nearer, we live our lives in none other than the house of God. Might the people with whom we come in contact respond to our hospitality with the same surprise that greets us in each new room, "Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it."

The Ultimate Diet

The Ultimate Diet

Some years ago, a group of young boys discovered a bird nest with a couple of baby birds inside. When the boys touched the nest, the birds stretched their feeble feet to their fullest heights, balancing their heads on their wobbly necks, alternating methodically between chirping expectantly and holding their mouths wide open. Apparently, a touch of the nest had, up to this point, meant that their mother had returned with food. Unfortunately, there was no trace of motherly instincts in these boys, a fact promptly confirmed by the actions of one of them. He picked up a handful of dirt and emptied it into the mouths of the birds.

The recklessness of the actions perpetrated by the boys and the appalling consequences in this story are easy to spot. But there is a parallel habit that is all too common in many churches, and much of the time it goes unnoticed. Easily stated, the problem is that many consistent churchgoers do not have a comprehensive, steadfast biblical foundation for their faith. The rugged discipline of critical, theological reflection for a mature application of the faith in all aspects of life has all but vanished from some of our pulpits, and, as a result, many in our churches are defenseless against the onslaught of worldviews, behaviors, and other cultural trends inimical to our faith. Like unknowing, feeble hatchlings, we will swallow anything that comes our way.

We live in a period when science is believed to be the stalwart custodian of what can confidently be known about reality. In matters of religion, it is assumed that there are no experts, and the advice of a talk show host on spirituality is as reliable, if not more so, as that of the pastor. Church leaders who distinguish themselves by their oratory skills and ability to draw a crowd are unwittingly branded successful, regardless of the depth and rigor with which they themselves, let alone their listeners, grapple with the Scriptures. The admirable, deeply felt admission by the leaders of Willow Creek Community Church near Chicago that in spite of the millions of dollars they have invested in church activities over the last several decades, their way of doing church has failed to produce devoted disciples of Jesus should serve, as Pastor Bill Hybels put it, "as a wake up call" to all of the people of God.(1)

In stark contrast, the apostle Paul envisions a church community in which gifted leaders equip God's people towards unity and maturity in their knowledge of Christ so that they (the people) can do the work of the ministry. If we run the church this way, "we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming" (Ephesians 4:14). The Christian life is neither a call to legalism nor a call to lawlessness; it is a call to true, lasting transformation of the whole person. Fruits of righteousness will necessarily sprout from a well-tended, blooming soul.

Consequently, we must resist the temptation to let the ministers in our churches study the Bible for us—they are there to teach us how to study and apply its message. We should have the same expectations of ourselves that we have of our pastors. Questions such as how could he, a pastor, behave that way? or how can his kids be like that?, etc., should be asked of any follower of our Lord. Our assignments may differ, and those who are ahead in the spiritual journey bear more responsibility towards others, but we are all priests in the temple of God. We labor under the same Shepherd, and any black sheep—pastor or not—disgraces the whole herd and dishonors the Shepherd.

Popular daytime television programs illustrate this point in a powerful way. The format is always the same: you show as much garbage as you can during the program and then take the last few seconds to issue some moral exhortations. When you think about it, the logic behind this is truly incredible. How can any thinking human being believe that a one minute, haphazard, second-rate moralizing statement can ameliorate the effects of a full hour of unmitigated moral filth? Yet unfortunately, we operate on a similar premise when we live our lives as though God does not exist six days out of the week and then expect a one hour church service on Sunday morning to straighten us out. If we don't learn to feed properly and consistently on the reality of God's Kingdom delineated in his Word, we leave ourselves quite vulnerable to the never-tiring enemy of our souls whose time-tested skills at feeding unprotected, hungry mouths are unequalled.

J.M. Njoroge is associate apologist at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Christianity Today, October 18, 2007.