What Biblical Hospitality Really Looks Like in Practice

From the sermon preached on May 10, 2026

Welcoming like Jesus is not the same as agreeing with every decision someone makes or pretending hard things aren't hard. Biblical hospitality, as the apostle Paul lays it out in Romans 15, means accepting a person fully while still caring enough to speak honestly about the direction they are heading. It is the kind of welcome that costs something.

Most of us have someone in our lives right now who is in a hard place. Maybe it is a sibling who walked away from faith. Maybe it is a friend whose choices are visibly tearing their life apart. Maybe it is someone under your own roof. You still love them. You just do not know how to stay close without either going silent or pushing them further away. That tension is exactly what Romans 15 is written to address. The answer is not more distance and it is not dishonest peace. It is a harder, rarer thing: welcoming like Jesus did.

Radical Christian hospitality, as Paul describes it in Romans 15:1, is not a personality trait for the extroverted. "We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves." The word "strong" here does not mean confident or socially polished. Paul is describing people who are grounded in Scripture, seasoned by years of walking with God, and anchored enough to carry someone else's weight without losing their footing.

That phrase "bear with" carries more weight than it sounds like. In the original Greek, it implies physically carrying a burden. Radical Christian hospitality is not tolerating someone's habits at a distance. It is getting close enough to actually share the load. When someone stumbles, it means being quick to forgive and quicker to turn their feet back toward something true. It means not watching someone fall when you have the strength to help them stand.

Paul gives three warnings to people in that position of strength. The first is the trap of self-righteousness: measuring yourself against the person who is struggling and feeling better by comparison. The second is the trap of avoiding responsibility: finding reasons not to engage because mentoring is genuinely messy. The third is the trap of demanding your own rights: insisting on your freedom rather than laying it down for the sake of someone who needs you. All three of those traps are subtle. All three can feel like wisdom in the moment. None of them look like radical Christian hospitality.

If radical Christian hospitality asks you to sacrifice your comfort, your time, and your social ease for someone else's eternal security, that is the ask. It is not a small one. It is also not optional.

The word Paul uses in Romans 15:7 (translated from the Greek proslambanō) is adoption language. "Welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God." This is not the welcome you give at a front door. Accepting without approving, in this context, is the welcome you give to a newborn: you feed them, stay up with them, protect them, teach them. You do not hand them a brochure and leave.

The world has flattened the word "accept" until it means the same thing as "approve." Accepting without approving is harder than either option on its own. You can look at someone and say honestly: I love you, I accept you exactly as you are, and I am deeply concerned about where you are heading. That is not rejection. That is the kind of care that is actually willing to say the hard thing rather than preserve the easy silence.

Lead Pastor Ryan Mustered, in collaboration with Ashkum Campus Pastor Tim Tammen, offered a vivid illustration in the sermon: imagine a conversation that is supposed to feel welcoming but turns into a shunning. Hard conversations have a way of landing like a door closing instead of a door opening. Accepting without approving requires asking yourself honestly whether the person across from you feels loved or cornered. That check matters. The goal of a hard conversation is to feel like a welcome home, not a push away.

Paul also names the alternative: choosing to "please them in the moment" by saying nothing. That kind of kindness, he says plainly, is cruel. It protects your social comfort at the cost of their direction. Accepting without approving means choosing their eternal security over your own ease.

Sacrificial love and welcome is what Paul is pointing toward when he writes about the purpose of Scripture in Romans 15:4: "whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the scriptures, we might have hope." The Bible is not a book of quotes to reach for in a crisis. It is, as the sermon put it directly, the fuel for endurance. Sacrificial love and welcome is sustained by that fuel.

There is a reason Paul grounds the command to welcome in the example of Christ. Jesus did not stay in a comfortable place. He stepped out of it entirely, into a world that beat him, mocked him, and killed him — so that people who had done nothing to deserve it could be welcomed into the family of God. That is the plumb line. The sermon used the image of a construction plumb line: a weight on a string that hangs true and reveals what is crooked in the wall. Jesus is the plumb line. The question is not whether we are doing better than the people around us. The question is whether our lives hang true against his.

Sacrificial love and welcome is also the testimony Paul is after in verses 5 and 6. When people with genuinely different backgrounds, different histories, different levels of faith, and different amounts of struggle gather together and treat each other with that quality of care, the world notices. It is not a program. It is not an event. It is just very different people choosing to love each other well. That is a harder thing to explain away than almost anything else a church can produce.

The practical application offered in the sermon is specific: think of one person right now who is struggling in their faith. It might be someone sitting across from you at a table tonight. Sacrificial love and welcome starts with that one person, not a strategy.

The full passage, Romans 15:1-7, holds together two things that the modern world tends to treat as opposites. The table below maps the contrast the sermon names directly:

The weight of Romans 15 is not abstract in Iroquois County, Illinois, or Newton County, Indiana. In places like Watseka, Ashkum, Clifton, and Milford, people do not move away from their hard relationships easily. You see the same faces at the grain elevator and at the school bleachers and at the end of your road. The person you are tempted to hold at arm's length is probably someone you have known most of your life. From Goodland, Indiana, across the county line into Gilman and Danforth, the same truth holds: the people who most need to feel welcomed are usually not strangers. They are the ones you already know. The call to welcome like Jesus is not theoretical here. It is a Tuesday night decision about whether to make the phone call or not.

Biblical hospitality, at its root, is the story of what God did for people who had nothing to offer in return. While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. He did not wait for the cleanup. He stepped into the mess first.

That is the standard Romans 15 holds up. Not whether we are doing better than someone else, but whether our lives reflect the welcome we have already received. The weight of the welcome is real. So is the joy of watching someone come alive because someone chose to stay.

If you are ready to take a next step, we would love to welcome you at Trinity Church — at our Ashkum, Goodland, or Watseka Campus. Plan your visit at the button below to let us know you are coming.

If you are not quite ready for that, you can still reach out and let us know how we can pray for you; connect here and we will take it from there.