Previously, we learned that Jesus’ coming has fulfilled and replaced the Old Testament “worship service” way of worshiping God, and has inaugurated a new way to worship God. Because we have received God’s eternal kingdom through Jesus’ death, we worship Him by expressing our gratitude to Him (see Hebrews 12:28). But we also worship Him by the way we live our lives. Hebrews 13:1-7 is a snapshot of this lifestyle worship, which begins with describing three different groups of people we are to love. We can depict these groups as three concentric circles starting with people who are closest to us and have most in common with us, and moving outward to those more different and distant from us. Though these love relationships are described sequentially in this text, we are to pursue them simultaneously.
Read Hebrews 13:1. The first circle is loving other followers of Jesus. “Brothers” here refers not to blood relatives, but to fellow-Christians. When you receive Christ, you get a new family. You become children of the same Father and the same Holy Spirit comes to live in your hearts. This is why you naturally feel a new bond and attraction toward other Christians when you receive Christ. This is God’s Spirit drawing you into family life with other spiritual brothers and sisters.
“Loving each other as brothers” emphasizes a level of involvement with other Christians that goes beyond mere attendance at large meetings. It describes involvement with a smaller group of Christians that is both frequent and personal. It echoes what Jesus said to His disciples in John 13:34-35.
Jesus built relationships with this small group of men. He spent a lot of time with them and He got to know them deeply — He encouraged them when they were fearful, put up with their idiosyncrasies, forgave their offenses, confronted their foolishness, cast vision for their lives, and journeyed with them and all their imperfections for several years.
And He calls on us to relate to a small group of Christians in this same way. Are you involved enough with some Christian friends that you know when they need to be encouraged, that you put up with their annoying idiosyncrasies, that you forgive their offenses against you, that you challenge them when they are being foolish, that you remind them of God’s vision for their lives? If you are not intimately involved in the lives of other believers, you are missing out on this key part of the new worship.
Why is this so important? Because we simply cannot grow spiritually without this kind of mutual support, any more than children can develop into healthy adults without real family involvement. And there is the reason Jesus mentions here. The world is a lonely place, and Jesus wants people in the world to see His followers loving one another in such a way that they think, “Maybe Jesus is alive and real after all.”
“Keep on...” alerts us to the fact that there are forces designed to deter us from loving one another in this way — forces that we need to consciously resist:
Let us look at the second circle. “Entertain strangers'' is usually translated as “show hospitality” — it is the Greek word philoxenias, which literally means “love strangers.” “Strangers'' in this context refers to people outside of God’s family — people who do not yet know Christ. God dearly loves the people who do not know Him, His heart cares for them in spite of how lost and foolish and sinful they may be. So to worship God involves responding to the impulse of His heart to show and share His love to those who do not know him!
“Do not forget” is better translated as “do not neglect.” I am glad he said this, because it is so easy for me to neglect loving people who do not know Jesus!
Christian community is so safe and enjoyable that I want to spend all my spare time with my brothers and sisters, rather than venturing out into the lives of people who are far from God. Yet, as we see in John 13:34-35 that unless we are inviting strangers to experience our loving community and learn how they can become part of it, we are rejecting Jesus’ reason for giving us this mandate! This is why the New Testament emphasizes that we should all be intentionally committed to loving strangers (see Romans 12:13).
Leading other younger Christians is such a challenge that it is easy for me to justify not making non-Christian friends or showing Jesus’ love with them. Yet the New Testament emphasizes that Christian leaders must be people who set an example of loving strangers (see 1 Timothy 3:2 and Titus 1:8).
“... for by doing so some people have entertained angels without knowing it.” This is a reference to Genesis 18 and 19 where Abraham and Lot showed hospitality to three people who turned out to be angels. The point is not that we may have the same experience — it is that the strangers we interact with are super-significant, and that our expressions of love can have a huge impact. C. S. Lewis puts it this way in The Weight of Glory:
“It may be possible for (me) to think too much about (my) own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for (me) to think too often or too deeply about that of (my) neighbor...It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, to some degree, helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with (people)... There are no ordinary people. You have never met a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization — these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with... snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.”
Here are some practical ways you can worship God by loving strangers:
Now let us look at the third circle. The heart of God goes out to His own people, and beyond them to those around us who do not know Him — and it goes out beyond these to the people we will never see unless we make a special effort. But God sees them — the people who, justly or unjustly, are imprisoned, both here and abroad, and the people who are exploited,oppressed, and powerless to do anything about it. There are millions of people throughout the world suffering injustices: people in Africa suffering from Aids, prisoners wrongly held in captivity with no scheduled trials throughout South America, genocides throughout Northern African countries, and millions of children and babies dying due to lack of sufficient food to eat.
God sees them and God loves them — Jesus showed us that in His public ministry. And to worship God means feeling empathy for their situation (“... as if you were their fellow prisoners... as if you yourselves were suffering”) and finding a way to show them God’s love to them.
“Remember” is important because it is so easy to forget about these people. Prisoners are in prisons — separated from normal human society. Most of the poor and oppressed live in countries far away from the U.S. — and when most of us do travel to other countries, it is usually not to be among them. Most of us live in neighborhoods without any poor and oppressed people — and we can go to work and visit friends and never interact with any of them. Some of us want it this way, some of us have just never thought about it.
It is also important because even those of us who do think about it have something within us that wants to forget. When I start thinking about the incredible amount of poverty and injustice and oppression in the world, I reflexively start to close my heart almost immediately because I sense that this pain will overwhelm me and drive me crazy. After all, what difference could I possibly make in such an ocean of misery? I heard a quote that said, “Open your heart and let it in. When you do this, your heart also becomes open to God’s love as His love pours out through you to these people. Your heart will be more full of God’s love, and God will show you how He wants you to express His love to them.”
Here are four practical steps you can take to worship God in this way:
Do something. You cannot do everything, but this is no excuse to do nothing. You can do what God shows you to do and this can set off a ripple-effect bigger than anything you ever imagined!
