Text: Hebrews 13:5–6
Preacher: Pastor Brian Sauvé
Free Men & Mammon’s Slaves
Continuing our look at Hebrews 13, we remember that this section takes the main point which has been built by the author for the previous 12 chapters—that we and the Jewish Christians who first received this epistle would be fools to abandon Christ for any of his forerunners or rivals. That we would be fools to do so, because he is the very Word, the very speech of God in flesh; because he is the reigning, cosmic King at the Father’s right hand; because he is our great High Priestly Advocate, who brings us by his grace and through his blood into the very holy place—so he takes that main point and then turns to apply that truth to those who belong to Christ, this new humanity being remade in the image of the God-Man, Christ.
In doing so, he basically sketches out for us what it means to live as the people of God in the Kingdom of God that is ruled by this great Son of God. And if you’ve been with us for the last few weeks, you remember that the fundamental characteristic of this new people, saved by grace, is that they have new hearts, which means that God has committed to the project of rightly ordering their loves as he remakes them in the image of his Son.
So we saw that the gospel reorients our love for one another in the local church, our love for the stranger, our love within the marriage covenant. Now in verses 5 and 6, we find that the gospel also reorients us from loving money and what it can buy to loving God, and by faith in his promises, living as free men and women, content with his provision.
Look with me, if you would, at Hebrews 13:5. This is the Word of the Living God:
“Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” So we can confidently say,
“The Lord is my helper;
I will not fear;
what can man do to me?”-Hebrews 13:5–6
Thus ends the reading of God’s Word. May he write it on our hearts by faith.
One Warning & Three Tasks in Hebrews 13:5–6
There is one warning we need to heed, and three tasks we need to see through in understanding and obeying our text this morning:
Here is the warning; it’s very simple: We need to do everything we can not to deal lightly with the issue of money and our worship.
We need to understand just how alluring and deadly the love of money is. We need to make sure that we don’t read a verse like this and think something like, “Yes, what a good warning for that neighbor who lives on the corner, what with his new Tesla and perfect lawn.” No, this is for all of us. Listen to a few cross-references about the nature of economic idolatry:
“…those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all evil. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs.”
-1 Timothy 6:9–10
“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.”
-Matthew 6:24
“Whoever trusts in his riches will fall, but the righteous will flourish like a green leaf.”
-Proverbs 11:28
Jon Bloom wrote something that stopped me in my tracks one day and stuck with me about this. He said the love of money is at least as dangerous as pornography. I think he’s right, especially in our culture. Very few people glory in the love of pornography; they do it secretly, love it secretly. But hundreds of millions of people glory in the idolatrous love of money.
Don’t take this lightly. Believe it or not, Jesus speaks about money fully one-fourth of the time he speaks in the gospels. So don’t believe that you and I aren’t susceptible to worship and trust in and lust after money.
So we need to be sober in our hearing this morning—so that we can be free in Christ and not miserable slaves to money. Make sure you hear that: The goal of this text isn’t to make us feel guilty so we can by holy, because you know, holiness is all about feeling as guilty as possible all the time.
No! God is not most glorified in us when we are most miserable in him. The goal of correction is like the goal of a good father who leans down and talks with his son about something that is hurting him. The goal of this text is that we would know the freedom of God in Christ, even if it requires us to see our sin clearly in order to bring it to his throne of grace for forgiveness and help.
So that’s the warning. Now we have three tasks as we walk through the text:
First, we need to make sure we properly locate and define the sin, because there is a danger here that might not be obvious to us—the danger of dislocating the sin into the stuff, which turns out to be too easy. There are two words in verse five that will help us out on this front.
Next, we’ll turn to some diagnostic questions to help us look in the mirror. Because remember, that’s what the Word of God is supposed to do, partly, is to serve as a mirror to show us our true selves. Our brother James teaches us as much in James 1:23.
Finally, we need to identify the medicine the text prescribes to us, the inoculation the author prescribes to us against the love of money, so that we can live as free men and women, not slaves of mammon.
First Task: Locating the Landmine
So first, let’s make sure we properly locate and define the sin the author warns us against properly. Look at verse 5 again, and you’ll see what I mean.
“Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”
-Hebrews 13:5
Now I told you up front that there are two words in that sentence that will help us out here. The first word is “love” and the second word is “content.” Those two words help us to properly locate the dwelling place of this sin—and consequently where it does not live.
Where does the idolatrous, sinful love of money live? Is it in the currency? Is it in the drachma or the shekel or the dollar or the Bitcoin or the Krugerrand? No. And if we try to locate the sin in the money, we will be tempted to do what the prophets warned against, and we will try to “heal the wound lightly.”
We are not warned about the use of money, but the love of money. We are not warned against having things, but against discontentment with what we have.
See, there is an impulse in the way fallen humanity wants to deal with sin, and it runs deep. The impulse is to want to make the sin live in the stuff. We can tend to want to divide reality into two parts, kind of like a double-decker bus, two stories if you will, with the lower story being the world of the stuff, of atoms and molecules and quarks and candy canes and bodies and marriage beds and yes, money.
And then in the upper story of the bus, we put all the spiritual things—the immaterial self, the moral good, the eternal and unchanging. And we try to cram the evil into the lower story. So the physical world becomes the habitat of evil, the place evil lives. Evil lives in human bodies and in sex and in food and in desires. The good lives in this clean, immaterial and spiritual world.
That, friends, is gnosticism and all its damnable relatives. And in the words of Gollum, it is wicked and it is tricksy, and it is false. It’s easy to see why, right? Because God disagrees with it! God created a world full of stuff, and he proclaimed his Very good! over it.
God smiles over the stuff. He smiles over the cherry pie and the marriage bed and the music and trees. He smiles over the human desire to conquer and cultivate and take dominion in it. He smiles over all of it, because he made it!
So the sin doesn’t live in the stuff. This is very important for us to grasp, because if we believe that the sin is in the stuff, we will heal the wound lightly. We will reach for impotent things like legalism or asceticism to try and fix it.
Legalism, which says that what we need are the right rules to order how we do things. Asceticism, which Paul in Colossians defines simply as the doctrine of “do not taste, do not handle, and do not touch.”
But he tells us that though these things have the appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh!
Translation: The sin isn’t in the stuff, and so rearranging the stuff is no good. Merely avoiding the stuff is no good. What we need is to sort out the place where the sin really is coming from, which is where? Jesus tells us in Matthew 15:17–20,
“Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach and is expelled? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person. But to eat with unwashed hands does not defile anyone.”
-Matthew 15:17–20
This is why this gospel we come together to remember and celebrate week after week is so good: It is the good news that God is giving new hearts to his new humanity through new birth.
So listen: We won’t be able to obey this instruction, to keep our lives free of the love of money, either by Dave Ramsay alone (some good rules about money), or by getting rid of the money alone (asceticism), but only by means of the heart-reorienting, love reordering work of the gospel.
That’s why this instruction comes now, in Hebrews 13, not in Hebrews 1. Remember, this is application of what we’ve already established: That Christ is Lord and Savior, and that we would be fools to trust in any other Lord or any other Savior.
Second Task: A Self-Audit
So that was our first task done: The love of money is a sin that lives in us, not in the stuff. So naturally, the first place we should look when we see this kind of warning—to keep ourselves free from the love of money—is in our own souls, hearts, lives, and hands.
How can I know if I love money? We are self-deceiving people, aren’t we? We don’t know ourselves. So it would be helpful to go through our own books and do an audit of our economic lives.
I’m going to give you some examples of the kinds of questions that our text might invite, and what I’d encourage you to do is to take some time and think this through this week, with your bank accounts open in front of you, something to write with, and the people present who need to be, like your spouse.
Does my economic life align with my economic doctrine?
What is my money for? What are my plans for it?
Do those plans make sense in light of what my money is for?
How can I love my children and grandchildren with my money?
How can I love God and my neighbor with my money?
Am I lazy?Am I undisciplined in my spending?
How much do I give to the church? Why that number?
Do I give at all?
Who am I responsible for, economically? How am I doing at providing for them now and in the future?
How do the ways I’ve used money and use money speak about what I believe about money?
Who does my money say I love? My neighbor? My family? God? Or just me?
Most of us don’t think about this stuff often, or at all. We just earn, spend, consume—unthinkingly. We are acted upon by our own whims and desires rather than bringing those desires to Christ, taking them captive, making them obey him by the power of the Spirit. We need to begin by thinking.
And what nearly all of us will find if we’re honest is that the love of money is an enemy that lives in us to some degree. If you are not self-deceived, your audit will reveal sin. It just will. Money is too deceiving, too tempting, too powerfully alluring for any of us to actually get through an audit without discovering some sin to repent of.
So this is the command of Hebrews 13:5 when we see it: Repent quickly, joyfully, and gospel-rememberingly—this is a part of God’s grace to you, his love for you!
I want to be really clear here, because there is a danger that will keep you from doing any repenting at all by trying to get you to repent of too much: I’m not telling you, and Christ is not telling you, to repent of some kind of vague guilt.
We have been conditioned to feel vaguely guilty about things that aren’t in our power as a strategy to keep us from feeling specifically guilty about things that are in our power. And so maybe you think about money and you begin to feel vaguely guilty about homelessness or third-world poverty, which conveniently helps you never to think about being generous to real people that you actually know.
Vague guilt is the enemy of true guilt, and therefore the enemy of true repentance and grace. Our guilt before God is not a vague thing because God’s holiness is not a vague thing—his righteousness has edges to it; and they are obsidian sharp.
God is not a burden-maker; he is a burden-lifter. His calls are to life, not impossible burdens. So if our view of economic life creates impossible and inhuman burdens, it isn’t of God. He doesn’t do that. Are you called to end global poverty? No. Are you responsible to make Congressmen and kings act a certain way? No.
But are you called to love your neighbor, provide for your kids, care for your aging parents, and serve your poor brothers and sisters in church, give to your church? Yes! He is a burden-lifter.
You can’t repent of vagaries. You can’t repent in general, only in particular. And so when the Lord convicts you of your sin and points you to the people you need to love with your money—repent and obey!
Receive his all-surpassing grace, be freed from the dehumanizing idolatry and autonomy of trusting in money, and in your joy use your possessions for his Kingdom. And the third task that we have in responding to this passage, as we do so, is to look to the promises.
Third Task: Looking to the Promise
We need to see what medicine the text prescribes to us—the inoculation the author prescribes to us—against the love of money.
And it is a good medicine. It is good news. It is not the heaping on of guilt, but the heaping up of promise. Look at the text again and we’ll see it together:
“Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” So we can confidently say,
“The Lord is my helper;
I will not fear;
what can man do to me?”-Hebrews 13:5–6
Do you see the inoculation? God would inoculate us against the love of money with contentment that is anchored in the promises of God.
Think: What is the love of money? Why do we love and worship it as a god? Because we ascribe to it godlike powers: Money gives me security, comfort, joy, pleasure, and safety. Money can bless me and keep me.
Obviously, that’s not true, right? Those are false promises. Money offers no real security—it is vulnerable to moth and rust and thieves and economic downturns and inflationary fiscal policies. And even if none of those things happen to you, even if it pays for the best doctors in the best healthcare facilities on earth—money can’t shelter you from the Curse. It can’t secure your eternal self. It can’t forgive your sin and anchor you in the holy places with the Son of God, to inherit the inheritance promised him, namely, all the blessings in the heavenly places.
Money is a bad God, and God is a good God, and the true God has made promises the false god just can’t. He will never leave you nor forsake you. Wealth will. He is your helper, you need not fear; what can man do to you?
So Christian contentment is therefore a radical act of faith in the promises of God. When we refuse to be lured by the promises of that false god, mammon, we are preaching: “My trust is not in the strength of the dollar. My trust isn’t in the dopamine hit of an Amazon purchase. My trust isn’t in a my ephemeral possessions, but in eternal God.”
The promises of wealth are flimsy, but the promises of God makes contentment possible in all circumstances, because they anchor us to a hope that goes beyond death, beyond anything money can touch.
And we know that these promises of God that the author quotes from Psalm 27 and 37 and 56 and 118 in our text this morning are secure, because Christ has secured them. Because of the truth of Hebrews 1–12.
The reason we can trust Christ over wealth is because of a gospel that can actually be put in economic terms. Paul does so in 2 Corinthians 8:9,
“For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.”
-2 Corinthians 8:9
God, who is unimaginably, incomprehensibly rich, became poor—not to remain so—but that he might make those who were incomprehensibly poor rich beyond their wildest imaginations. That he might, to use the language of Ephesians 1, shower on his people every blessing in the heavenly places.
And Jesus is the blazing center of that blessing—Christ himself. Jesus is the treasure that every dollar in your checking account is whispering about. Every cent of wealth on this earth is a tiny little good gift that is preaching about an infinitely better gift.
On the cross, we give him our debt, and we receive his riches. We give him our greed, our envy, our avarice, our faith in the strength of the dollar. We give him our misplaced hopes and well-polished idols, and receive in their place the God from whom all blessing flow—the God who is himself the blessing of blessings.
Remember the point of Hebrews: Christ is greater than all of his rivals. So don’t be the fool who trusts in the shadow of treasure when you are offered the substance of that treasure, God himself.