Love is a Verb (Hebrews 13:1-4)
Fiddler on the Roof was a 1960’s musical that was eventually made into a movie in 1971, it was the kind of old movie that my parents would make me watch when I was a kid. Musicals didn’t make much sense to me, but this story was interesting enough. It was about a Jewish settlement in Russia about the turn of the last century, and focuses on a man named Tevye who has 5 daughters. Tevye is a poor milkman, making his living delivering milk to the village people. He is so poor he only has a lame horse and so has to pull the milk delivery cart by himself.
The story turns on how the traditions his people have kept for centuries and form their identity are under pressure from the world around. Tevye knows the world is changing, he just doesn’t know whether he should change with it or not. This is most on display as an older widower wants to marry his oldest daughter, something set up by the local matchmaker. This was how marriages happen — his own marriage to his wife was set up by a matchmaker. Tevye is overjoyed for his daughter because the man is rich and he knows she will be taken care of financially. He agrees to the match, until his daughter finds out. She begs her dad not to force her to marry for money, she is in love with a local boy her age. And it is this idea of love that stops Tevye in his tracks. He realizes, that in a world of survival and money and tradition he had not thought enough about love.
He goes back to his wife and asks her, in song of course, “Do you love me?”. He is asking because his marriage, like everyone else’s, was arranged some 25 years earlier. He is asking because he is trying to figure out what this thing called love is. She tells him to stop being silly but he presses on and she says (or sings) something interesting: “For twenty-five years, I’ve washed your clothes, cooked your meals, cleaned your house, given you children, milked your cow. After twenty-five years, why talk about love right now?”
One of the reasons that Fiddler on the Roof is a classic is that it is asking a timeless question: What is love? Movies and musicals are bound to ask that question mainly about romantic love—we could ask it more broadly. But what is it?
One of the challenges we face in answering the question comes from the culture around us. Our world, like Tevye’s is changing. Older definitions of love are being replaced with new and improved versions. The older definitions of love were generally something like “desiring the good of the beloved.” I love you if I desire your good and work for your good. The more I desire and work for your good, your health, your flourishing…the more I love you. Seems basic, makes sense.
But increasingly love doesn’t mean that. Love nowadays usually means something like “affirming whatever decisions I make.” You love me if you give a perpetual thumbs up on me doing me. And I’ll love you back basically because your affirmation makes me feel good.
So what does it mean to love? We don’t take our cues from culture, our task as always is to look at God’s word, we want to let him tell us what love is, and how we should love. Love, after all, is at the center of our faith. We’ve been working our way through the book of Hebrews, we’ve come to this final chapter which is filled with practical exhortations.
We could summarize the first 12 chapters this way: God brings about a great salvation that calls for a grueling endurance for a glorious future.
And as we finished chapter 12 two weeks ago we reached a climax with this vision of the heavenly Jerusalem where the universal church, all Christians from all times and all places are gathered around the throne of God—and we are reminded again not to reject the one who is speaking but in gratitude for receiving a kingdom worship God with reverence and awe.
And here I am reminded that though this book is written down and is somewhat in the form of a letter, it is really a sermon where all the theology and illustration is brought to bear in a great series of “so what” practical instructions.
Christian, you have every reason to pay attention to the duties of love.
As we look at the first 4 verses of the chapter this morning our main idea is this: Christian, you have every reason to pay attention to the duties of love.
Let’s consider 4 “duties of love” that we see here, one in each verse:
Love to those inside the church
Love to those outside the church
Love to the suffering
Love to the married
It’s my prayer that God would help us to see how we are called to love those around us.
Love to those inside the church (Heb 13:1)
“Brotherly love” is a familiar idea to us in English, we’ve heard it, an American like me thinks quickly of Philadelphia the city of brotherly love, that is the Greek word here, Philadelphia. We need to slow down and not let this command slip by for its simplicity. Coming out of this command to worship God with reverence and awe, this is the first practical command: Let brotherly love continue (Heb 13:1).
What is brotherly love? Jesus did a revolutionary thing when He told his disciples “you are all brothers.” Do you remember that from the gospels? People in the ancient world, and in many parts of the world today have no concept of loving people outside of your biological family. If you aren’t blood, then you aren’t brothers. But Jesus turned those expectations on their head — He told his followers that they are His body, and therefore they should act like family. That is why Christians call each other brothers and sisters, in the most important way possible, in Christ, we are family.
Why might they have not let it continue? Why might they let it lapse? Well for one it is hard to keep doing the things you did at first.
These Christians would have known that, it was a part of their early discipleship. But the author of Hebrews doesn’t just say “love one another as brothers” but “let brotherly love continue.” Why might they have not let it continue? Why might they let it lapse? Well for one it is hard to keep doing the things you did at first. We learn as young Christians to have times of Bible reading and prayer, do you keep doing that years later? Time has a way of making you forget things, a way of making you lazy. It’s one thing for a church plant to love each other, another for that same church to keep loving each other decades later.
I really enjoy hearing stories about this church from decades ago. As someone who has mainly been involved with church plants the last 10 years, I like hearing stories about this church from many decades ago. About Sunday School under a tree outside. About shophouse meetings and church camps. If I get a chance to talk to Tony or Gilbert or Uncle KY, or Anna Lenn I just want to listen and try to imagine what this church was like way back when. It is perhaps easy in my shoes to overromanticize things, I’m sure the church always had problems. But the way I hear it told this church was like a family, you tried to act like a family.
Well years, and conflict and hardship happen to all churches and it is hard to let brotherly love continue, isn’t it? I think it was hard in this church that Hebrews was written to. They had been through a great deal of persecution and suffering. It would have gotten hard to keep up the serving and the praying and all the practical duties of love.
New Testament biblical Christianity means being in a community where you are known and others know you. The leadership knows you are there, so they can shepherd you. The other Christians know who you are.
I’m persuaded that this command is an absolutely massive one for our church right now. By God’s grace we have had a large influx of new members the last number of years. We are thankful for it! What a great time we had yesterday morning with 25 new friends at Membership Matters class. What a gift new friends are. But at the same time it places upon us a great deal of need — need to get to know each other, for many of us don’t know each other that well. Loving begins with knowing. If you don’t build relationships with each other you don’t know what each other needs and how you can meet those needs. That is one of the reasons you will hear us talk about church membership so often here. New Testament biblical Christianity means being in a community where you are known and others know you. The leadership knows you are there, so they can shepherd you. The other Christians know who you are. There is a strange idea out there in modern evangelical Christianity where your spiritual life is like a personal portfolio that you are the manager of. You do a Bible study here, a large group gathering there, maybe a campus fellowship here and a BSF there…all of it managed by you, and all the commitments and connections are temporary and tenuous. Maybe you have come this morning primarily because of some perceived benefits —proximity to the MRT, adequate facility, decent programs.
If you’ve adopted that kind of thinking let me encourage you to compare it with the Bible. I think you’ll see that God envisions so much more for you than that. He wants you to be part of a family, He wants you to be more like a body part or a brick in a building, something indispensable to the whole, where you help others and are helped by others.
So join a church. And once you are in… let’s all of us make brotherly love a practical thing? How? 5 things we can do:
Show up when the church gathers. Sunday morning. Prayer meetings. Come to Equip.
Meet someone. Try to talk to someone new each time. What is your name, how long have you been around, how has God worked in your life. Talk to old friends too, but make yourself a level 3 goal of a new person each Sunday.
Pray. Pray for the people you meet. On your way home from church, later in the day.
Look. Look for opportunities to meet practical needs, for opportunities to serve people.
Be hard to offend. Building church community sounds great until someone rubs you the wrong way. One of the outworkings of your faith should be a generosity of spirit. Go ahead and ask my name for the fourth time. I won’t be offended. It’s fine. Be a puppy not a sea urchin.
The first duty of love is to love those inside the church.
Love to those outside the church (Heb 13:2)
Our second command as we consider the duties of love, and moves from “philadelphia” to “philoxenia”. What the ESV translates as 3 words — “hospitality to strangers” — is just that 1 word in Greek, “philoxenia”, which means love of strangers.
In the first century, travel was difficult and dangerous. If you are moving around and go from town to town you may often show up needing water, food, and shelter. There were not always inns or businesses able to provide service in a new place even if you could pay for it. So the culture relied on hospitality. This is still the case in much of the Middle East.
Now I’m persuaded that in this text “strangers” probably refers primarily to travelling Christians that you don’t know. I say that because this text is in part echoing Jesus’ words from Matthew 25:34-40, where he is talking about final judgment and the test of who is a true believer.
As the writer of Hebrews echoes both the treatment of strangers and the treatment of those in prison, he is probably referencing Jesus’ teachingm and when Jesus says “as you did it to the least of these my brothers”, He is referring to His disciples. Jesus is saying that part of the proof of your discipleship, of your being a real Christian is not only your love of Christians inside your church but even those outside.
Now none of this means we shouldn’t love those outside the faith too, that we shouldn’t be hospitable more broadly. Galatians 6:10 is a good cross reference for us here, “So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.” Loving our neighbour as ourselves means we should be looking to extend the love we have in the community to those outside the community.
This may lead us to think about those who live in our physical neighbourhood, and those at businesses we frequent, and perhaps paying especial attention to those around us with some need we can meet. Love ought to make you ready to be inconvenienced to help meet the need of someone around you.
But our love of strangers certainly should begin with those who show up here at GBC as strangers, as those we don’t know. Do you remember what it is like to be new? To walk in and have everything and everybody be strange and different? To feel like everyone already knows each other? I have an almost encylopedic memory of the first time I walked into various churches. I remember because I was a bit scared, uncertain, not sure where to go and what to do. And almost unfailingly I remember the people who came and shook out a hand and said, “Hello. Are you new? My name is ________.” The people who stood and talked with me. I was a stranger, they extended love to the stranger. They were hospitable.
Now being hospitable goes beyond a conversation to be sure. It may mean opening your home for meals, and perhaps offering a place to stay for travelling missionaries or pastors. Just this past week many of you did just that for the many visitors we had to our church from around the region.
There are other forms of hospitality we could think of. One we should probably talk about more often about is bringing children into your home through fostering and adoption. There are children in need of this right here in Singapore. I can’t think of a higher form of loving the stranger than inviting them into your home, into your family. Some of you ought to pray about that.
Now, this second command, and quite a few of the ones to follow in this chapter include with them a reason, a motivation for obedience. He says here show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. Now the author almost certainly has in mind the story of Abraham in Genesis 18, who is sitting at the door of his tent in the middle of the day and he looks up to find 3 strangers in front of him. He runs to them and asks them to not pass by but let him feed them, which he does, Sarah baking bread and a servant killing a calf. He feeds them, standing by as a good host and then it turns out that these men are messengers of God. They are angels, including one who speaks as Yahweh himself. So Abraham starts off thinking he is just going to be a good host to some travelling men — he ends up with a divine audience.
This might seem like a strange motivator to you—invite someone over to dinner because they might be angel is probably not something that crosses your mind. But what this is getting at is that you and I often act like practical deists. A deist is someone who believes there is a God, but that He doesn’t interact at all with the world he has made. He is the divine watchmaker, he wound things up and they run now without miracles, without any sort of supernatural phenomena at all. That is not at all the picture the Bible presents. The Bible presents us a physical realm the world God has made, but also a spiritual realm with spiritual beings that don’t have a body like ours and the two realms interact. Indeed for God as the Creator it is no strange or abnormal thing for him to interact with his creation. He is here now, watching us and listening and it is really useful for you and I to know and live like the spiritual world and spiritual beings are real. God wants us, as Matthew 25 says us to interact with others and do things to others as doing them to Jesus himself. Like He is here, because He is. Indeed we might very well be face to face with one of His messengers.
Love to those who are suffering (Heb 13:3)
This church was similar to many churches in the latter part of the first century in the Roman empire. As Christianity was not an approved religion, and because Christians viewed bowing down and praying to the emperor as idol worship, they were seen as dangerous traitors. We read in the text a number of weeks back that talked about the days soon after this church was planted where they had many members thrown into prison and had their property plundered — a really terrible persecution that apparently continued until the writing of the letter on some level. They have members in prison and those who are being mistreated — and as time stretches on it caring for these people would be a strain. In fact it would be easy to forget them amidst the busyness of life. That is why he urges remembering them. This might have involved regularly visiting them, taking them food or clothing and certainly praying for them.
I’m grateful for the work of the ministry Prison Fellowship that some in our church have been involved in it over the years. This ministry has helped many believers realize that there is a great evangelistic work that can be done reaching out to those who are incarcerated. They are often those most acutely aware of their spiritual state as sinners in need of forgiveness. We ought to look for ways to pray for and support evangelistic work among those imprisoned. Maybe that is something some of us should get involved in.
But I think we also ought to apply this verse by thinking about those who are suffering in our midst. Most applicable would be encouraging and praying for those who try to be bold for Christ in their workplace or home and experience some level of persecution as a result. I would encourage you in your care groups and discipling relationships to share about your own efforts to be bold for Christ — and lift each other up in prayer as you receive opposition.
We could go further and think about those who are suffering more generally. In Paul’s great chapter on living as members of the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12, he summarises the idea of unity by saying If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together.
Its similar to the motivator offered here — love the imprisoned and the mistreated, since you also are in the body. You have every reason to sympathize with them, to see yourself connected with them. If they are suffering, you are suffering. It’s the way we should view our body here—if somebody here is hurting, we should care, we should reach out, we should remember them.
When someone is low, when they are struggling and suffering—the love of a brother or sister in Christ is like a hug from the Lord Jesus himself. We are the hands and feet of Jesus to each other. I
When someone is low, when they are struggling and suffering—the love of a brother or sister in Christ is like a hug from the Lord Jesus himself. We are the hands and feet of Jesus to each other. I wonder as you look around you right now—who is struggling or suffering and might need you to remember them in prayer, in friendship, in practical help?
Do you want to worship God with reverence and awe? Do you love him for what he has done for you in Christ? Love those in his body, the church love those inside. And look to extend this to those outside, the strangers. And then especially love those who are suffering around you. And there is one final duty of love here.
Love to those who are married (Heb 13:4)
Speaking to the church, the author wants all of them to honour marriage. Honour means to respect and esteem highly. We might ask how to do that? Well first we honour it by not changing it — marriage as God made it is between one man one woman exclusive to each other for life. It is wonderful when the greater society around us supports that. But if they don’t either by allowing so-called same-sex marriage or by supporting no-fault divorce as in many countries, the church simply insists on the Biblical definition.
We honour it by clarifying that single Christians marry in the Lord. There is no circumstance whereby a Christian should consider marrying an unbeliever and so being in Paul’s words unequally yoked.
We honour it by helping engaged couples prepare well for marriage for teaching them that marriage is more about service than satisfaction. By teaching them what marriage is and what it requires of them.
We honour it by making a big deal of weddings. They are both joyful and solemn occasions worthy of our attention as we become witnesses of the vows that a couple makes.
And we honour it by walking alongside couples through the many peaks and valleys that come in between “I do” and “till death do us part.” Let marriage be held in honor by all.
And then our author gets even more specific: and let the marriage bed be undefiled, and he gives us the motivation or the ground “for God will judge the sexually immoral and the adulterous.”
The Bible talks both clearly and delicately about sex—here it uses a euphemism in saying “the marriage bed.” But there is no mistaking the meaning of undefiled—other translations say “keep the marriage bed pure”. The word he uses for “sexual immorality” refers simply to sex outside of marriage in any form. The word adulterous refers more specifically to a married person sleeping with someone not their spouse.
Now we ought to ask why the writer needs to be as specific as he is—and the reason has to be just as reinterpretation of marriage is as old as human beings, so is the reinterpretation of sexuality. God invested sex with great meaning and power — it is the consummation of what makes two people one in marriage according to Genesis 2:24. For human beings in rebellion against God sexual immorality is an expression of their rejection of the presence and goodness of God in the way He made the human family. It is also an expression of selfishness and personal gratification that refuses to accept this good gift in the context which the creator intended it.
What is clear here is that those who live this way can expect to meet God as their judge. He will judge. These are sobering words friends. Paul is no less clear in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10.
The person living in sexual immorality right now, the person who is defiling the marriage bed should not expect salvation, but judgment. It doesn’t matter that they think they made a profession of faith earlier in their life, it doesn’t matter that they were baptized or joined a church. Their current lifestyle shows where they are at and what is true of them. Praise God that doesn’t have to be the end of the story. God’s hands are ever held out to a disobedient and obstinate people, if they will turn from their sins and be saved.
If you are ensnared in sexual sin, or any other sin, take the warning, run from your sins, flee to Christ. He will wash you, He will sanctify you, He will justify you in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of God. But you must leave your sin behind.
But friends if you are ensnared in sexual sin, or any other sin, take the warning, run from your sins, flee to Christ. He will wash you, He will sanctify you, He will justify you in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of God. But you must leave your sin behind.
So this fourth and final love command here has application both to those who are married — love your spouse in an exclusive and God — honouring way.
And it has application to all—love God by honoring and protecting marriage the way he made it to be.
We’ve considered then four commands to love that we want to pay attention to — those inside the church, those outside the church, those suffering and those married.
We began by thinking about Fiddler on the Roof and Tevye’s struggle to understand the meaning of love. Towards the end Tevye and his wife swing a sweet duet. His wife Golde sings: “For twenty-five years I’ve lived with him, fought with him, starved with him. Twenty-five years my bed is his. If that’s not love, what is?”
Tevye then asks: “Then you love me?!”
Golde replies: “I suppose I do.”
Tevye responds: “And I suppose I love you too.”
Both agree: “It doesn't change a thing, but even so, after twenty-five years it's nice to know.”
The idea there is that these two people find that in the midst of the covenant of marriage the duties of love express and fulfil the meaning of the thing itself.
Friends how much more should we, those who by faith in a crucified Saviour were brought into a new covenant by His blood pay attention to the duties of love? We are His once by creation and twice by redemption. No matter where we look we see evidence of His great love for His bride, the church. He loves us, and has given us every reason to pay attention to the duties of love for others. Let’s pray.