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Well, tonight we come to the final chapter of Hebrews and specifically to the opening
verses of chapter 13.
After 11 chapters of majestic teaching about the supremacy of Christ, His once for all
sacrifice, the new covenant and the unshakable kingdom that is coming, the author now turns
to very practical down to earth instructions for how we are to live as citizens in an unshakable
kingdom that is coming while we walk on the soon to be shaken ground.
In verses one through six, as we’ll see this evening, the writer gives us four different
kinds of love.
Four ways love is to characterize the people who belong to Christ in this present age.
These are not optional add-ons to the Christian life.
They’re essential expressions of the reality that we have been brought into an unshakable
kingdom that will endure when everything else is removed.
The four loves we will consider tonight are brotherly love, Philadelphia, the affectionate
family love that should mark every relationship among believers.
Number two, the love of strangers, hospitality that opens doors to people that we do not
yet know, and marital love, the honoring and protecting of the one flesh union between
husband and wife.
And then fourthly, the love we must refuse, which is the love of money, a misplaced affection
that threatens to steal our trust away from God.
Notice that the passage begins and ends with love.
It opens with the command to make sure brotherly love continues, and it closes by warning us
against letting our lives be controlled with the love of money.
In between we find the love of stranger, love for the persecuted, and a love that guards
the marriage covenant.
Why does the author gather all of these loves together here?
Because in the great shaking that God is bringing, everything that can be shaken will be removed,
but the things that cannot be shaken will remain.
And among those that endure, enduring realities is love.
Love that flows from the love of Christ for us, love that marks his disciples, and love
that will last when every other foundation crumbles.
As we walk through these verses tonight, our prayer is that the Holy Spirit would stir
us afresh to live out these loves in a world that desperately needs to see what the people
of an unshakable kingdom look like.
So number one, love your brother, Philadelphia.
We see this in verse one.
Let brotherly love continue.
Now you may not have realized this, but all of you living in Pennsylvania know at least
one Greek word already.
It’s the other major city besides Pittsburgh, Philadelphia.
Yep.
Philadelphia is a straight up Greek, unadulterated Greek word that means Phil, which is love,
and Adelphia, which is brothers, or so brotherly love.
So verse one says let brotherly love continue.
Now this is actually a command, but the let in English sounds rather weak to our ears,
because in this case we’re running into a situation in which English does not fully
correspond to Greek expression.
In Greek you can have a third person imperative, and imperative in English is a command, obey
for instance.
But in English we don’t have to put a personal pronoun in front of a, in connection with
that command.
But in Greek it would be either you all obey, or you obey, or it could be he or they obey.
When you add the third person pronoun in English though, it just doesn’t sound like
a command anymore.
Sounds like maybe a statement, a fact, or a permission.
So one way that many translators, but in Greek it’s very clear that this is a command.
It’s just in the third person.
And so one way that many translators translate it is by saying let.
Now unfortunately this still sounds a little limp and passive if you don’t actually know
what’s going on in the text.
But now that you know, you can understand when you see this, let brotherly love continue.
You ought to understand that the author of Hebrews is not saying please allow this to
happen.
He’s saying make sure brotherly love continues.
Ensure Philadelphia remains.
The word translated continue here is the same word used in verse 27 of chapter 12.
In order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain.
So here’s a clue to us of the way that the author is viewing the connection between chapter
12 and chapter 13.
In the midst of things that will be shaken away, there are enduring realities of God’s
kingdom that will remain and must remain.
One of those realities is brotherly love.
Remember that Jesus repeatedly says that deep affection for each other would be a distinguishing
mark of his disciples.
In John chapter 13 for instance, verse 34 and 35 in the upper room after Jesus has just
washed his disciples feet, he says a new commandment I give to you that you love one another just
as I have loved you.
You also are to love one another.
By this all people will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another.
We also find it mentioned in first John all over the place.
For instance, first John chapter 311, for this is the message you have heard from the
beginning that we should love one another.
Or chapter 3 verse 23, and this is his commandment that we believe in the name of his son Jesus
Christ and love one another just as he has commanded us.
Or chapter 4 verses 11 and 12, beloved, if God has so loved us, we also ought to love
one another.
No one has ever seen God.
If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.
I think you get the point.
Love between Christians is foundational to their Christian identity and is directly connected
to our relationship with God.
This term Philadelphia is broadly used throughout Greek literature in other writings to refer
to love between literal brothers.
But the New Testament writers distinctly refer to and call this Philadelphia between members
that are not literal brothers, but rather between Christians who are not otherwise related.
So it’s distinctly Christian to think of people who are different in many ways and
yet siblings and to love them accordingly.
So that’s why the scriptures call for us to exercise Philadelphia.
And in the book of Hebrews, we’ve seen this reality connected to its source.
The Christians are not only brothers of one another, but ultimately brothers of Christ,
Christ himself.
The wonder of Christ’s redemptive work is that he came down to be our permanent brother.
As Hebrews chapter 2, 11 says, he is not ashamed to call them brothers.
Christ does not treat us with the stereotypical sibling rivalry, jealousy, bitterness, or
disdain.
He has every right to treat us as lesser.
The sibling you try to pretend doesn’t actually exist when you’re in good company, but instead
he treats us as brothers and sisters of whom he is not ashamed.
And this should translate into our own attitude towards fellow Christians.
The early church was known and was misunderstood for their close affection to one another,
even by the pagan world around them.
In the second century, Lucian of Samosota writes disdainfully about the Christians that
quote, their first lawgiver persuaded them that they are all brothers of one another
after they have transgressed once for all by denying the Greek gods and by worshiping
that crucified sophist himself, meaning Jesus, and living under his laws.
Therefore they despise all things indiscriminately and consider them common property, receiving
such doctrines traditionally without any definite evidence.
The pagan Greeks looking on at the Christians thought that they were crazy for worshiping
Jesus and for calling each other brother and sister.
Now while I think that the congregation here at Grace OPC demonstrates brotherly love quite
I don’t think that this kind of love comes naturally.
So I think we need to be aware of actively engaging in it.
It comes supernaturally.
And so the author of Hebrews, who in chapter six verses nine and ten assured his readers
of his confidence in their brotherly love, feels the need to command them here in chapter
13 as well to ensure that brotherly love continues.
And so I think we need this reminder ourselves as well.
The next love that we see in our passage is the love of stranger.
So number two, love the stranger.
Filio xenia.
Verse two, do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained
angels unawares.
Now with the phrase hospitality to strangers, you can see where I might have gotten the
idea of loving strangers.
But not every translation of this verse includes the word strangers.
And this is because the word stranger isn’t exactly there in the Greek.
What I mean is that the phrase in Greek is very compact.
It’s basically three words.
Don’t forget hospitality.
But this word translated as hospitality in Greek is actually quite interesting.
It’s a Greek word combo, a combination of filio and xenia.
Filio means love and xenia means stranger.
You may have heard the word xenophobic thrown around these days, which is hatred of strangers
or fear of strangers.
And this comes from the Greek word for stranger and for fear.
Filio xenia means love of strangers.
So the Greek word for hospitality is literally stranger love, love of strangers.
The ESV translation of show hospitality to strangers gives us that meaning very clearly
here.
But in Greek, this would have been a little redundant because the word hospitality means
loving strangers.
There isn’t any other kind of hospitality except hospitality to strangers.
We can sometimes think of hospitality as something that close friends give to one another.
But in the Greek, we’re reminded that the heart of this idea is a willingness to bring
people in who we’re not already particularly close to.
Now this doesn’t mean that the biblical command to fulfill it, that we have to invite every
stranger off the street into our dinner table and put them up in our guest room.
We’re not prohibited from knowing something about the danger that might be posed and take
certain precautions.
But in our haste to qualify this command of stranger with considerations of safety, we
should not dismiss it altogether.
Consider the next phrase of the verse, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
Clearly the author is envisioning true strangers whom the host did not even know previously.
He didn’t even know they were actually angels.
The two notable examples in biblical history come from Genesis in which Abraham, as we
read earlier in Genesis 18 and then Lot later, showed hospitality to two angels while remaining
apparently oblivious to their supernatural identity.
In many cultures around the world, as in Old Testament times, hospitality to strangers
is considered a basic virtue.
My brother visited Honduras a number of years ago and was struck by their hospitality there.
Despite the impoverished living conditions, living on dirt huts with dirt floors, sometimes
struggling to get enough to eat, every house kept a thermos of hot milk ready to serve
a cup to any impromptu guests that showed up.
There was no consideration of which party could better afford it.
It was simply considered basic courtesy.
I’ve had similar experiences in Uganda when I visited there, and I’m sure many of you
who have traveled abroad have found other various cultures to be quite hospitable as well.
Callie and I have experienced firsthand that kind of hospitality here at Grace.
Since we first came and visited in June 2024 and stayed with a family we had never met before,
we were given a tour around Pittsburgh by someone we’d never met,
and hosted for a pool party at the house of more people we had never met.
The congregation here shows a wonderful love of strangers and in the process turns them
into friends, and we have been beneficiaries of that.
Hospitality is also a very powerful tool for evangelism.
While America is a nation that has a history of generosity towards immigrants, despite
the current issues of illegal immigration, we’re not often as hospitable on a personal level.
Our culture is increasingly isolated and insular, and it’s becoming more and more rare to even
know those people that live close to you or have them in your home or be in theirs.
But this creates an incredible opportunity for the body of Christ to stand out as counter-cultural
by showing stranger love to those around us, because in these days, the bar has been set incredibly low.
In a previous church I was a part of, they did a series on a curriculum called The Art of Neighboring.
It was this whole series with resources and ideas of how to engage and be counter-cultural
in loving your physical, literal neighbors in order to share the life-transforming good
news of the gospel.
It was all about learning how to be counter-cultural by going out of our way to actually engage
our literal neighbors, get to know them.
And so we ought to view hospitality as a way to engage our physical neighbors.
But in verse 3, we see that this brother love and stranger love come together.
Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated
since you also are in the body.
This verse is always very convicting to me, because I am only rarely this sympathetic
towards believers who are persecuted.
For the original audience, this would have been a call to not distance themselves from
those that might cause embarrassment or danger to them.
But for today, it means being aware, praying for those who are both strangers to us and
yet are brothers and sisters in Christ.
I’m thankful that at Grace we regularly list the persecuted Christians on our prayer sheet
for prayer meeting Wednesday evenings.
But in this age of information and desensitization, we can easily become or remain blissfully
ignorant of the plight of God’s people across the world.
And this can lead to a distorted view of our own situation in history as Christians.
We can begin to think that persecution is an abnormal reality for Christians.
This can sap our Christian witness generally and attack our courage in evangelism.
Because if you think that persecution isn’t normal, you’ll be more likely to quit as soon
as you start sharing the Gospel and it gets painful or awkward.
You’ll be more likely to give up, to try to blend in and hide your faith from your
neighbors and co-workers.
The Apostle Peter reminded us, he tells us that remembering the situation of persecuted
brothers and sisters is an essential element of fighting the devil.
In 1 Peter chapter 5 verses 8 and 9, Peter says be sober minded, be watchful.
Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour.
Resist him firm in your faith knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced
by your brotherhood all over the world.
From Peter we see that we need to remember our persecuted brothers and sisters.
Not only for their sake in prayer but for our own sake.
Satan will try to make you feel sorry for yourself and like what’s happening in your
life is totally unique.
Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen and you’re more likely to fall to Satan’s attack when
you lose sight of what your brothers and sisters around the world are suffering for the Gospel
right now.
So Hebrews comes and it calls us to remember those in prison as though bound with them.
We ought to pray for them to be delivered loving them as we love ourselves seeking their
deliverance but also pray for their endurance through the suffering that they would keep
the faith.
When you’re regularly doing this I think that you’ll find it expands your prayer life and
it strengthens your own faith to endure the trials that God has put in your own life.
The third love in our passage, number three, love your spouse.
Look at verse four, let marriage be held in honor among all and let the marriage bed be
undefiled for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous.
Now in this case the Greek text doesn’t offer us any special angle on the word love but
the concept of marital love is clearly present and I think this conceptual link is why we
have this exhortation, verse four, on the heels of verses one through three.
I find it apropos for this exhortation to honor marriage to come in the context of these
exhortations to brotherly love because many distortions of intimate desires have come
to be called love today when they should be called debauchery.
Sadly this is not much different in the Roman world of the first century in which this letter
was written.
Today healthy boundaries within the concept of love are transgressed and even erased in
the name of love but Hebrews chapter 13 verse 14 stands in stark contrast, stark opposition
to this satanic movement because to love brothers and sisters and strangers means to value and
preserve the marriage bond as set apart and as precious.
Husbands and wives love their children as well by preserving this intimate affection
between each other.
It is good for children to know that mommy loves daddy more than anyone else and that
daddy loves mommy more than anyone else.
This provides security for the children since the family unit is held together through marriage.
But it is important for those outside of the family to respect this as well and to honor
that exclusive relationship between a husband and a wife.
This means that friends don’t let friends come between spouses and pull them away from
each other.
It means that spouses love each other and others by preserving their unique union with
each other.
This means not only guarding deeds and words but also eyes and thoughts that might stray.
Husbands and wives must continually ask themselves, am I prizing and protecting my marriage and
what I think and say and do?
This comes with a stern reminder of the consequences of the alternative.
It can be easy to try to forget or ignore the consequences of sexual immorality.
In the moment it often carries its own promise of pleasure which can crowd out thoughts of
consequences.
But the Bible is clear.
The consequences are consequential.
Judgment falls on those who fail to treat the marriage bed with honor and respect.
We’ll come back to this verse next week and consider it more deeply.
But this evening we’ll move on to consider the fourth love.
Number four, don’t love money.
Afil ar geria.
Keep your life free from the love of money, verse five and six, and be content with what
you have for he has said I will never leave you or forsake you.
So we can confidently say the Lord is my helper, I will not fear, what can man do to me?
The fourth love in our passage is a love that we should not have.
The whole phrase keep your life free from the love of money is actually two words in
Greek.
The one conveys life or lifestyle and the other word says keep it free from the love
of money.
The word is afil gerias.
It has three parts, a means not, phil means love, and ar geruos which is silver or money.
So the author seems to be deliberately tying this back, this idea of love, back to the
previous verses because this is not the normal word that would be used for greed.
Instead, he uses this compound word describing the love of money.
As you can see, it’s hard to translate this single word in Greek concisely, but I think
the idea is very clear, our lives must not be characterized by a love of money.
Now when I was young, I used to think, why would anyone ever love money?
It seems silly to tell people not to love money because the number of people who cartoonishly
adore money simply for money’s sake would have to be quite small.
I imagine Donald Duck diving up and leaping down into piles of gold.
Who does that?
Who actually does that?
But as I got older and started to make money and need money for various things, I soon
began to understand what a pervasive temptation this is.
Most people do not love money in and of itself.
What they love about money is the power, the opportunities, the friendships, the comfort
and the security that money can provide.
Money is the most natural substitute for God in our lives.
We use money to function because we do not individually have the time, effort and energy
in one area to create everything that we have, everything that we need to sustain ourselves.
And so we offer our time and effort and energy in one area, which compensates us with money
that we offer in exchange for what we need.
And there’s nothing wrong with this system.
The Bible assumes the foundation, the foundational reality of private property, otherwise there
could be nothing wrong with stealing.
In fact, you couldn’t even call it stealing if there was no such thing as private property.
Money is not inherently evil, but it is tempting.
Money’s ability to provide things in this life can quickly capture our heart.
Trusting and loving money is a form of trusting and loving yourself.
You can start to enjoy the feeling of self-sufficiency.
If you have enough money, it feels like you can do anything you want.
You can love money if you have a lot of it.
But you can be equally infatuated with money if you don’t have much.
The temptation can be very strong to say, if I just had a little more, then life would
be okay, then I could actually be content.
If I only had as much as that other person, I wouldn’t be so stressed or miserable in
my life.
It’s not wrong to ask for a raise or to recognize your worth as an employee, necessarily.
But beware that even these legitimate and good things can be done out of a covetous
or a proud heart.
The heart of the problem is that money has a peculiar way of supplanting God in our hearts
and lives.
Money is the means that God uses to provide us according to the normal order of things.
Granted, God did feed Elijah directly with ravens, but that was an unusual event.
Normally, he uses money.
But our sinful myopic hearts have a tendency to fail to keep the ultimate source in view.
We lose sight of God and think that money is our real source of comfort, our real source
of security, happiness, even meaning, instead of seeing it as coming from God, who is our
real source of comfort, security, happiness, and meaning.
The antidote to the love of money is being content.
And this is fought on the field of our hearts with God’s promise.
I will never leave you or forsake you.
When our hearts get captured with a desire for money, we begin to doubt God’s provision
for us.
Sometimes this is because we’re not totally sure that the standard of living that we want
matches up with what God wants for us.
So we begin to doubt that God will make all of our finances flowing freely at the level
that we would like.
We become afraid and start acting out of fear.
We don’t think that we can actually trust God to keep our standard of living exactly
where we want it, so we don’t think that we can trust him at all.
But this is not true.
This is where we need faith, and we need to come back to remember that God is not out
to get us, but he is out to make us like Jesus so that we can enjoy heaven forever.
He’s willing to put some financial hardship in our lives, if that’s what it takes.
But he will never leave us, and he will always give us what we truly need, even if it is
not exactly everything that we want.
I quoted the ancient church preacher John Chrysostom in the past, and about this particular
verse he says,
For as when he is our enemy, it is no gain, though all men should be our friends.
So when he is our friend, though all men together should war against us, there is no harm.
When God is with you, when he is your helper, you are secure.
You cannot be shaken, and there is nothing to fear.
So as we conclude, we see the message of Hebrews 13, 1-6 is, in a world that is being and will
be profoundly shaken, love remains.
Everything else may be stripped away, comfort, status, possessions, even the visible structures
we once leaned upon, but love that flows from the unshakable kingdom endures, and it endures
because it is first the love of Christ poured into our hearts.
The author has placed before us four loves which must mark us as citizens of this coming
kingdom.
A continuing brotherly love, Philadelphia, that refuses to grow cold, treating every
believer as a true family because Christ himself is not ashamed to call us brothers
and sisters.
A courageous love of strangers, Philoxenia, that opens doors, extends tables, and remembers
the imprisoned and mistreated as though those chains were our own.
Number three, a fierce protective love of marriage that honors the covenant, guards
the marriage bed, and stands as a living testimony against every distortion that the world celebrates.
And finally, the resolute refusal to let the love of money take root, choosing instead
the far richer security of the promise, I will never leave you or forsake you.
These are not optional decorations of the Christian life, they’re enduring things,
the realities that will remain when every other foundation is removed, and they are
visible evidence that we belong to a kingdom that cannot be shaken.
When your heart grows weary, when the shaking feels overwhelming, when fear whispers that
you will be left alone, lift your eyes to the one who spoke the promise that anchors
everything, I will never leave you nor forsake you, because that is the deepest love of all,
the deep, deep love of Jesus, vast, unmeasured, boundless, and free, an ocean that rolls over
us, under us, all around us, carrying us home.
Let that love be the love from which the other loves flow.
Let it be the mark that distinguishes us in a shaken world.
Let it be the song that rises from our lips as we wait for the day when every knee will
bow, and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
And until that day, may we live as those who truly belong to the unshakable kingdom, loving
one another deeply, because love never ends.
Amen.
Let’s pray.
Lord, our Father in heaven, we thank you that we can bank on that promise that you will
never leave or forsake us, that when you are with us, when you are for us, it matters not
who is against us.
Lord, we ask that you would sink that promise deep into our hearts and lives, that we might
be able to live these loves based on that foundation and security.
Out of the love that Christ has for us, we might love our brothers, the strangers, the
marriage bed, and we might reject the love of money.
We pray this in Jesus’ name.
Amen.