Welcome to today's encouragement from Our Daily Bread.

I'm Mike Whitmer, and I titled our reading, Welcome the Stranger.

In Everything Sad is Untrue, Daniel Nayeri describes his harrowing flight with his mother and sister from persecution

through a refugee camp to safety in the United States. An elderly couple agreed to sponsor them,

though they didn't know them. Years later, Daniel Steele can't get over it. He writes,

Can you believe that? Totally blind. They did that. They'd never

even met us. And if we turned out to be villains, they'd have to pay for it. That's almost as brave,

kind, and reckless as I can think of anybody being. Yet God desires us to have that level of concern for others. In Leviticus 19, he told Israel

to be kind to foreigners. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. In Ephesians

too, he reminds Gentile believers in Jesus. That's many of us, that once we were separate from Christ

and foreigners to the covenants of the promise without hope and without God in the world.

So he commands all of us former foreigners, both Jew and Gentile, to show hospitality to strangers.

Now grown up with a family of his own, Daniel praises Jim and Gene Dawson, who were so Christian that they let a family of refugees come

live with them until they could find a home. God welcomes the stranger and urges us to welcome them too.

Today's Our Daily Bread devotional scripture reading is from Ephesians chapter 2,

verses 11 through 22.

Therefore, remember that formerly, you who are Gentiles by birth and called uncircumcised

by those who call themselves the circumcision, which is done in the body by human hands,

remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel, and foreigners to the

covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world.

But now in Christ Jesus, you who once were far away, have been brought near by the blood of

Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one

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