This Christmas Eve, my wife and I did something completely different. We invited two alcoholics and a Syrian refugee to our home. I must confess that just two years ago, I would have had serious reservations. After all, one cannot know how it will turn out. Taking someone into your home can also leave you exposed as they then know where you live.

But this year it just seemed right. We had no concerns or fears, just an uncertainty about how well these three men might interact. They didn’t know one another but they had one thing in common: They were alone for Christmas, separated from family with few friends. Being alone on holidays is a tragic reality for them. And since my wife and I were also alone for Christmas, why not?

We will not let people into our homes until we first let them into our lives

One might ask what changed our view? The answer is really quite simple. We had gotten to know all three men quite well over the last two years and had come to trust them. More than that, they had become our friends and it pained us that they were always alone, particularly on birthdays and holidays.

Those who have read our prior posts may know we work for a Christian charity that provides housing to the poor, drug & alcohol dependent and refugees. Our post Fortress Evangelicalism was inspired by a trip that brought together an alcoholic and his family.

Our ministry began largely with renovations of older apartments that often lacked kitchens, needed painting or lighting. Often we would work in apartments so dirty and unkept that I wanted to wear a full Hazmat suit! It opened our eyes to an entirely different world we’d never seen before.

A Tragic Mistake

Too often I was so focused upon “serving” by completing renovations that I didn’t take the time to stop, chat and get to know those in the apartments. But a year ago, we decided to move well outside our comfort zone and try to address their emotional and spiritual needs.

About a year ago, two of our renters – both alcoholic and chain smokers, passed away after a hard life on the streets. Both had come to know Christ but neither was able to fully break free of their addictions. We’d not had the chance to get to know one of them but we’d begun to develop a friendship with the other. When he passed, we realized no one in the Christian Charity had secured his family’s contact information. It was particularly sad as shortly before his death, he had reached out to his father after years of estrangement and planned to meet him but death intervened.

He had passed and we couldn’t reach out to his family to inform them. To this day, none of us knows if his family ever learned of his death or if he even had a burial. Contact with his father simply ended abruptly. Our friend passed from this world without anyone noticing. He lived his life in obscurity and passed in obscurity, alone without family. It seemed too common a fate, one as Christians we should seek to change.

A Change in Thinking

So we made a commitment to refocus to meet their emotional and spiritual needs too. Through that commitment we came to know them. They are all terrific men who face struggles in life most of us never experience. Key though, is that we became good friends, and through that friendship had grown to trust them.

After all, which of us would bring strangers into our home? The risk is too high. If we are to let people into our homes, we must first let them into our lives. And if we don’t let them into our lives, we’ll never let them into our homes. It seems to me this was Jesus’ approach. He wandered the highways and byways of Israel, reaching out to precisely those who were most in need – those burdened in sin or sickness, downtrodden, demon-possessed, the least in our world, the overlooked.

In a prior post we argued that people won’t come into our churches so we must go to them. And it is precisely these types of people who will never come into our churches. And let’s be honest. Any of us who regularly attend church know these types of people never come into our churches. They know they’re not welcome. Our churches are hardly places of refuge – for them. It was no different in Jesus’ day. The religious leaders were never found helping these people. They were unclean, dirty sinners to be avoided (Luke 15:2).

Christ didn’t invite them to the temple to meet God. He invited Himself into their lives and met their needs right there where they were on the streets. He did this because he loved them and felt a deep compassion for their sufferings. Like Jesus, we’d come to truly love these men. They were super people whose lives had derailed through no fault of their own.

The terrible circumstances of their lives made it impossible to live in the world they’d come to know. One fled war and bloodshed, the other two fled horrible realities too difficult to accept, self-medicating in alcohol. But God loves them deeply and seeks to extend mercy to these exactly these kind of people out of compassion for the tragedies that victimized them. But if love and mercy are to flow, it must come from us. It means we must love them too and invite ourselves into their lives – and yes, into our homes.

The Fount of Blessing that Opened

The really cool part was that these men took to one another immediately and became friends. Conversation never stopped, not even a pause. They all had a great time together with us. For one night, they escaped their isolation from an indifferent world and were delighted to interact with anyone who would interact with them.

And here’s the key point. These men were each brought one step closer to the kingdom of God, one step closer to deliverance and freedom from their problems, one step closer to a life healed by Christ. The two alcoholics decided to spend New Year’s Eve together – but without alcohol. They both attended our church’s Christmas Eve service, loved it and committed to coming back for Sunday services.

God was already doing a work in their lives, blessing them . . . and I must say, it blessed us! This is the great privilege of being a child of Abraham: We get to bless the world (Genesis 12:3), and in doing so, we are blessed (Genesis 12:2). We pray they come to Christ and find deliverance from their dependencies. We also pray you will be inspired reach out so others will not continue to live in obscurity and die unnoticed, without Christ. And like us, experience the joy of glorifying God by loving the lost.