True Brotherly Love: Rejoicing and Weeping...Continued from page 2

Everyone who belongs to Jesus belongs to me. And I owe all of them tender affection-brotherly love. God has put into the heart of every Christian a desire to love all of God’s children everywhere. It’s part of the DNA of being a follower of Jesus. If you are a Christian, that love is already in your heart. You just have to let it loose.

What does brotherly love look like in the nitty-gritty? Here are four answers to that question from Romans 12:13-15

When Paul mentions “contributing to the needs of the saints” (v. 13a), he doesn’t necessarily have in mind the Sunday morning offering. This NLT offers us this contemporary rendering: “When God’s people are in need, be ready to help them” (NLT).

The word translated “contributing” doesn’t usually refer to money in the New Testament. It’s a broader word that means “to share in something as a partner.” God wants his children to identify with the needs of others and make them their own. Today we live so far apart that we hardly ever see each other. Someone will suffer and we won’t even know it. We have to get close enough to see the needs and make them our own.

He explains what he means in second half of verse 13...

Paul says that we are to “pursue hospitality” (v. 13b). The word “pursue” means exactly what it sounds like-to run after something, to chase it down. Hospitality comes from a Greek word meaning “kindness to strangers.” This was a sacred duty in the early church and a requirement for church leadership (1 Timothy 3:2). The Message translates this as “be inventive in hospitality.”

In thinking about this we need to make two distinctions. First, hospitality is not the same thing as entertaining. We entertain when we invite our friends over for a party. That’s a good thing to do but having your buddies over for a Super Bowl party is not exactly what Paul has in mind. Hospitality involves reaching out to new people who are “strangers” to you. And that leads to the second distinction. The word “stranger” conjures up images of odd people who seem a little weird to us. Now there are people like that in the world, and they need our love to, but that’s not the focus. God wants us to think about those we don’t know and find ways to reach out to them.

It’s really as simple (and as difficult) as that.

 Does it still work today?  Or has hospitality gone out of style? In 1986 I traveled to Haiti for the first time. I spent a week in Pignon, a small town tucked away in the north central region of the country. It’s about as far away from modern America as you can get and still be on the same planet. I went there at the invitation of my friend Caleb Lucien. On that first trip I met Caleb’s father, Sidoine Lucien, the founding pastor of Jerusalem Baptist Church. The poverty in Haiti is overwhelming. Most Americans are rich compared to the richest person in the church in Pignon. What’s more, Pastor Sidoine and his wife have personally taken in over 50 orphans over the years and raised them to become productive and godly men and women. Many of the leaders started out as Pastor Lucien’s orphans.