Text: Hebrews 13:1–3
Preacher: Pastor Brian Sauvé
A Brief Word On Getting Over Ourselves
Like I said last week, the end of chapter 12 marks the transition of the book from its central thesis—its central argument that Jesus is better than all of his rivals and forerunners—and into a widely varied assortment of final instructions, greetings, and blessings.
This final chapter, if you were to read through it quickly, might look at first glance as if the author closed his eyes, reached into a bag full of Christian exhortations, and then removed a random selection and wrote them down here.
But what you find as you take your time is that this chapter makes perfect sense in light of what he’s labored to tell us over the last 12 chapters. It’s not a random shotgun of instructions, as if he realized he didn’t have enough application in the book and decided to squeeze some in at the end.
No, the point is that, in light of Jesus’ utter supremacy, certain demands are placed on us, on key areas of our lives as a people who belong to that Jesus. He’s going to walk us through these key areas of what it means to be a human being in this new humanity, what it means to do church and marriage and sex and hospitality and money and worship as that new people.
So we will take our time a bit as we round out this final chapter together, so that we don’t rob ourselves of some strong help in living as God’s new humanity, his new creations in Christ. Let’s start this morning with Hebrews 13:1–3. This is the Word of the Living God:
“Let brotherly love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body.”
-Hebrews 13:1–3
Thus ends the reading of God’s Word; may he write it on our hearts by faith.
Today’s text is very, very simple. We have three instructions in three sentences that are conveniently divided into three verses.
1. In verse 1, we will talk about brotherly love, essentially trying to answer the question: How can we obey this command, very practically, and love one another as a local church. We will spend the most time this morning on this point out of the three.
2. In verse 2, we’ll talk through hospitality to strangers, and see how Christian hospitality is world changing and institution-building.
3. Finally, in verse 3, we’ll think through what it looks like for us to remember our brothers and sisters who are suffering for the faith.
Love the Brethren
So number one, we receive the simple command to…
“Let brotherly love continue.”
-Hebrews 13:1
The kind of love that the author of Hebrews is calling us to is love for the brethren, meaning love within the family of God, the church.
He’ll get to loving the stranger and the outsider in verse two, but the order here is important: If we can’t love our brothers and sisters, how can we love our neighbors?
It’s like the principle built into elder qualifications in 1 Timothy 3:4, that if a man doesn’t govern his household well, how can you trust him to be a pastor in the household of God? The fruit he bears in that household, his household, will be the fruit he bears in God’s household.
There’s a parallel principle at work, here: If we can’t love the family of God, how will we love the stranger? So what we need to do is interrogate this verse and ask, “Practically speaking, how do I obey this instruction?”
Let’s widen our view in the Scriptures for a moment and look at three very practical ways the Word teaches us to love one another:
1. Fight abstraction—even right now in contemplating this very verse in Hebrews 13.
There is a perennial tendency and temptation that we all face to varying degrees, and it is the temptation to attempt obedience to verses like this in the abstract—in the world of theoretical and theological musings—and neglect to incarnate our theology, to see it live and breathe and become visible in the real world. There is a reason that Paul told the Corinthians that “…the Kingdom of God is not a matter of talk, but of power.” Meaning the Lord Jesus Christ did not establish a Kingdom and a people of that Kingdom and then neglect to give that people the corresponding power to live as people of that Kingdom. Ours is not an impotent King. His Kingdom is one of substantive, ground-level distinction from the kingdoms of men.
How easy is it to love in theory, or even in theology, or in our feelings—but end up not actually loving at all? The Apostle John gives us a sober warning to ponder in 1 John 4:20–21,
“If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.”
-1 John 4:20–21
See, the problem is that our real theology really does come out of our fingertips and off of our tongues and through our feet. Our real theology—meaning, what it is that we actually believe, regardless of what we profess to believe—is betrayed by what we do. This is why the book of James spends so much time warning us against trying to authenticate Christian faith in the abstract—far safer to authenticate Christian faith by actually loving your brother and your neighbor than by staring deeply into the soul of your own emotions and aiming for security-by-warm-feelings.
John teaches us that it is possible to profess with our tongues that we love God, that we delight in God, that we will dance, we will sing, to be mad for our King—all the while proving that our love for God is counterfeit by our hatred of our brother. “…anyone who says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar.”
It is easy to love and profess love for an abstract, in the theoretical, in the conceptual realm. It is another matter altogether to love in the real, the concrete, the minutes and hours and days of our lives, and with the resources and energy that we all know are finite and limited.
We just are limited creatures, and what that means is that when we do anything, we are using parts of ourselves and things and assets that seem to become smaller as we give them away. We are not God, who is infinite, who has no lack, who is totally independent. We are rather finite, dependent, contingent sorts of things.
So everyone, all the time, everywhere has to decide what to do about that limitedness and finitude. Will we wall ourselves off into little bunkers of self-protection and self-love and self-care and self-absorption?
Will we hoard up our our time and our health and our energy and our money and our things into a big pile and sprawl out on it like Smaug the dragon? We’ve all seen our kids do it with toy guns and baking sets and other kid-treasures. And we can scold them for their immaturity and then proceed to do the very same thing in principle, just with adult treasures like “me time” and more sophisticated playthings.
There is a reason that the Lord Jesus relentlessly reduced the Law for us down to this little distillation, this one principle, of rightly ordered loves. He taught us in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 22, that the two greatest principles of the Law—the principles that you can boil all other laws down to in their essence—are to love the Lord our God will everything we are, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.
And as you expand the law out from these two principles, you see that they all work out from this ground floor. The Ten Commandments are divided into two tables, one dealing with the right love of God, and one with the right love of neighbor.
Paul does the same in Galatians 5, even teaching us that we could sum up the whole law just in the single decree, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” because you obviously couldn’t obey that law without loving the Lord your God properly, since God is love, the very source of love and defining principle of love.
And so we can respond to our finitude that first way, by trying to hoard up and store up and preserve and protect ourselves and our things and our loves. But the very heart of the gospel calls us to a higher way, the only other way, the way that our Lord took when, for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.
And in the gospel, God first brings us through this pattern of self-giving, cruciform love, and then calls us to walk in it as new creatures. Christ bears our sins—all of which reduce to improperly ordered love, love of sin and self rather than God and neighbor—by giving himself up. And with him we die, even as the record of our debts dies. And with him, we rise new.
And then the gospel puts new hearts in our chests, hearts that Ezekiel promised would be inscribed with the very Torah, the very law, of God, and he puts his Spirit in us and causes us to walk in his ways. So in our aim to let brotherly love continue, we start by fighting abstractions, believing that the God really has given us new hearts and put his Spirit in us to bring us to Christlikeness, and work to push our theology of brotherly love out into our kitchens and dining tables and bank accounts and evenings and everything else.
2. Fight pride to the death; pride kills brotherly love. As we open up the Scriptures, we quickly find that the enemy of brotherly love is pride. Two helpful passages to see:
“Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor.”
-Romans 12:10
“…all of you, have unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart, and a humble mind.”
-1 Peter 3:8
Both of these passages draw a straight line between humility and brotherly love. Proud, insecure people cannot obey Romans 12:10, because they are too insecure to give honor. They think that giving honor to another lowers them by comparison. Proud, insecure people cannot obey 1 Peter 3:8; they will not put on the humility of mind required for true brotherly love. But one of the first things the gospel does is to humble us, right? To bring us to the confession of our own cosmic need for grace. And through the help of the Spirit in new hearts, proud people can become humble people who are able to love.
And so the humbling of the gospel brings a greater capacity to love others across annoyances and sins, right? To love one another across slights and trespasses? To say, “The Lord forgave me of my cosmic treason. I can forgive my brother for this slight or sin against me and love him.”
This is what is happening as Paul connects the humble love of the brethren to showing honor. He says to outdo one another in showing honor. That’s a humble people, right? That is a tenacious commitment to building up the body around you rather than begrudgingly withholding honor with the aim of feeling taller by comparison.
What if we were marked by a commitment to outdoing one another in showing honor rather than by a spirit of competition where we tried to find our value in our relative rank to our neighbor? What if we rather found our joy in the flourishing of the whole family together?
Proud people are too insecure to show honor. May we be humble and therefore delight in giving real, hearty, honor—not fakery and flattery and emotional manipulation. That’s gross. But real, authentic honor that studies our brothers to find what is honorable there and to name it out loud and honor one another.
3. Don’t be a coward.
This one may sound out of place in this list, but here me out. If we are to rightly love one another, we have to repent of cowardice. You cannot love someone whom you fear more than God. You cannot love someone whose approval you are addicted to.
Rightly ordered love in the local church requires the right administration of church discipline—most of which ought to happen way before elders and what we might think of as “official” church discipline happens.
Listen to how the Apostle Paul ties our love for each other together with discipline and bearing one another’s burdens in Galatians 6:1–2,
“Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted. Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” -Galatians 6:1–2
How often do we fail to love one another by gossiping about one another rather than lovingly, gently, humbly confronting one another when someone is caught in a sin? How often do we resort to passive aggressiveness, anonymous airing of grievances, and the like rather than taking one another aside and directly, plainly inquiring about an issue we see?
We cannot give into fear of man; it is deadly to brotherly love.
You can’t love someone when you fear them rather than God, when you live for their approval rather than God’s, when you worship them rather than God.
The temptation to cowardice is very strong when we see sin in a brother or sister. We have to love one another enough to obey Galatians 6 and restore those caught in trespasses—and that requires private confrontation and correction, not passive-aggressive, gossipy, cowardice.
Loving the Stranger
So we are called to love the brethren. But number two, the author would expand the scope of our love outward another click:
“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”
-Hebrews 13:2
The love of the church doesn’t end in the church; it expands outwards into the world. And historically, this has been one of our most powerful witnesses. From hospitals to universities to orphanages to shelters for runaway slaves, Christianity has built the foundations of hospitality in Western Civilization. We take much of this for granted, and that’s because of the sheer degree to which Christianity altered the world. See, when this command was written, hospitality was no casual thing, no mere dinner table issue.
If you travelled, you often had to rely on a stranger, knocking on a door, for food and shelter as you passed through, especially outside of major cities. It would be commonplace for the Hebrew Christians receiving this letter to face requests for food and lodging and more.
And so the author points them to this as an opportunity for gospel witness: Christ, who took us in as strangers and sojourners and made us family, would have us love strangers the same way. And some have entertained angels in obedience to this command—including folks like Lot and Abraham in the Bible.
As I mentioned, as Christians obeyed this command through history, they invented whole new social structures, like Basil in the fourth century, a wealthy Christian who virtually invented the hospital—a word that comes from the very word “hospitality,” which means “stranger.”
There was no guarantee of medical care and coverage, especially to the poor and seriously ill, in the days before Christians built these hospitals and said, “We’ll take in the poor and the leper and those who can’t pay. We’ll treat everyone.”
I can’t wait until the days when we can, God-willing, rebuild some of the ruins of the old Christendom. We let the pagans, the unbelieving culture, seize some of our things, see, things like hospitals, and act like those things were their idea. I pray that we can get them back some day and even surpass our ancestors.
But it all starts with our homes, doesn’t it? It starts with us committing to love our neighbors, to invite non-Christians to our dinner tables, to show love to the undesirable, to adopt the orphan, right? May we be such a people by the grace of our Lord, amen?
Remember the Suffering Church
Finally, verse 3 calls us to remember our suffering brethren.
Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body.”
-Hebrews 13:3
One of the things the Lord does that we often forget, is to try to talk people out of following him by letting them know that to follow him will include following him into suffering and rejection and hatred.
In Acts 14:22, Paul promised the fledgling churches that they would enter the Kingdom through many tribulations. The Lord Jesus, in John 15, promised his disciples that if the world was willing to persecute him, they would indeed persecute his disciples. Peter warns us not to think it’s weird when we experience trials. Paul even universalizes the principle in 2 Timothy 3, promising persecution to all who would desire to live a godly life in Christ.
This has proven out over and over again, hasn’t it? Those who hate God will hate those who are called by his name.
This is why verses like Revelation 12:11 are so precious, where we see the veil peeled back and find that those who have been persecuted—even to death!—are actually conquerors, that “…they have conquered [the Accuser] by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death.”
Our brothers and sisters who are willing to die to meet and worship and receive baptism and confess the Lordship of Jesus Christ over all rule and authority—those in Iran and China and North Korea and elsewhere—they are conquerors.
That is why the fastest growing population of Christians in the world right now is the church in Iran. Afghanistan isn’t far behind. In atheistic, communistic China, Christianity is exploding, and the political elite are terrified.
Don’t forget our brothers and sisters suffering in prison and facing death. Don’t forget to pray for them. Why? Hebrews 13:3 tells us why: Because we are one body, with one Lord, one faith, and one baptism. Whey they suffer, we suffer. And Christ along with them, as the head of the body.
So pray earnestly. Write it down. Set reminders. Let’s be a people who pray for our persecuted brothers. Pray for Johnny, a missionary we have a large part in supporting, who faces regular death threats and beatings as he labors in dangerous areas of the Muslim-controlled Middle East. Pray for him as he translates the Bible into a dialect of Turkmen that has never had a Bible. And may we also gird up our loins to be ready to suffer for the sake of the Gospel if it comes to that, even here. Amen? Let’s pray.