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Marriage should be honoured by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral. 

‘For best results follow the Maker’s instructions!’

I saw these words on a poster many years ago.

Marriage comes with ‘the Maker’s Instructions’. But increasingly, the human race baulks at these instructions. In fact, many deny that there is a Maker or that there are any instructions. ‘Just be yourself’, they say. ‘Live as you please.’ Of course, if everyone does so, without regard for others, there will simply be anarchy and chaos. Like them or not, instructions are issued for a reason.

Then there are those among us who want to ‘have their cake and eat it.’ They still believe in the Maker, they claim, and some would contend they worship Him. But they think He is wrong, and they are therefore re-writing His standards for the modern world. They want to keep Him relevant.

May God have mercy on us all. There is something of the rebel in all of us – even as we, by grace, seek to die to sin and live to God. We know how repeatedly the flesh wants to have its own way; how reticent it is to put out ‘the white flag’.

Romans 1 graphically describes what happens to a culture that rebels against God, and chooses its own path. Funnily enough, it reads like the latest newspaper.

Continue to remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.

Tom Wright says:

‘The writer turns to the darker side of early Christian experience. Prison has been a feature of Christian life from the earliest days. Those at present enjoying freedom must regularly think of, pray for and find ways of helping those who are in prison…But the writer would certainly not have excluded the wider work of caring for those in prison in the modern world, where locking people up is used far more often as a straightforward punishment than it was in the ancient world. There people were often executed, fined or banished for crimes both serious and not so serious.’ ‘Hebrews for Everyone’, pp.169,170.

But I also remember a church secretary in Leeds, not a young man himself, who felt a solemn call to visit elderly, shut-in people from the church. He didn’t drive, but criss-crossed the city on the bus. Jesus said, ”I was in prison and you visited me’, he told me, ‘and there are many people who are prisoners in their own homes.’

Continue to remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.

It is a dangerous thing to be a Christian. For most of the time, here in the western world, we don’t really feel this. We may recognise it intellectually, but we don’t live under a sense of day to day threat. Any ‘persecution’ we experience tends to be at a low level. We might experience scorn and ridicule, but it is rare for it to go much beyond that. Nevertheless, ‘the times they are a-changin’, and who can say what the future may hold?

All of that said, many of our brothers and sisters around the world, face daily the prospect (or the reality) of imprisonment for their faith – or worse. They know much of violence, loss and constant risk.

Our situation is abnormal. The freedom we enjoy would be almost unimaginable to millions of our fellow Christians.

May we never forget this. May we never forget them.

PRAYER: Lord, help us to keep our suffering brethren in our hearts and prayers. Strengthen us to suffer shame for the cause of Christ, and to persevere in faith whatever may come our way in the days ahead.

 Keep on loving each other as brothers and sisters. ² Don’t forget to show hospitality to strangers, for some who have done this have entertained angels without realizing it! (New Living Translation).

Just a further thought on the subject of hospitality.

If you come across people who have the gift of hospitality, you might be over-awed and conclude that you should leave this stuff to those who are better equipped. But as I understand the Bible, it seems to me that all Christians are called to be hospitable whether or not they have the hospitality gift.

I remember hearing a friend lead a Bible Study on Romans 12. Ironically he and his wife had this gift to a marked degree. But speaking about verse 13b: ”Practice hospitality”, he encouraged everyone by saying, ‘You don’t necessarily have to provide a slap-up meal. It can be a cup of tea and a piece of cake. Just open your home and welcome people in.’ I believe that is the gist of what he said.

It may indeed be that uncomplicated.

Amazing things can happen when we open our doors to others, along with our hearts. But I think the opening of the heart comes first?

Keep on loving one another as brothers and sisters. ² Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it. 

Loving shows itself in practical ways: none more so than the sharing of hospitality.

‘The family (in other words, the Christian brothers and sisters) must continue to care for one another in practical ways. Mutual affection is vital; financial help for those in need is vital; the word used in verse 1 includes both. And the hospitality which so marked the early Christian community must be extended wherever possible, with the fascinating promise that in opening your front door you never know when an angel is going to walk in. It happened to Abraham in Genesis 18; it can happen to you.’ Tom Wright: ‘Hebrews for Everyone’, p.169.

Jesus, of course, reminded us, that when we receive strangers we receive Him (Mt.25:31-40).

Hospitality was important in the earliest days of the church, when they had no formal buildings for worship and met in homes; and where food played an important part in their gatherings. No doubt they remembered the part played by shared meals in the life and ministry of the Lord Himself. Hospitality was also a way of caring for the poor among them, and helping those who suffered loss and privation because of their Christian profession. Additionally, the inns were notoriously immoral, unhygienic and expensive, and Christian travellers needed a safe and welcoming place to stay.

Hospitality will always be important. Perhaps, in the church today, we need to recover a sense of what rich fellowship we can share, what ‘electric’ spiritual encounters we can have, what discipling may be done, around a meal table? Perhaps we should focus less on spotlights and smoke machines and more on bread and wine??

Keep on loving one another as brothers and sisters.

It looks so simple in this single, short sentence. Easily said and swiftly read, but so hard to do.

We need to be told to ”Keep on” because loving can be exceptionally hard work. It is probably true to say that some (maybe many) in your orbit will not stretch your love muscles all that much, bur certain others…!!! Another story altogether.

Be encouraged today. However many times you’ve come off this horse, you can get back up and try again.

”Keep on…”

Remember, whenever the Bible exhorts us to move in a particular direction, it does so with the assurance that God is with us (indeed He is in us), and He will help us.

We are not alone.

Prayer: Lord God, you are love, and I am not. Please fill me to overflowing with what I lack, but what is yours in abundance. I come to the Fountainhead to be filled again. Thank you that you will not turn me away.

As we come into the final chapter of Hebrews, you may want to do a read-through of the whole of it this morning.

But before we get into the details, I simply want to make a general comment.

It has been said about the apostle Paul that he uses ‘a steam hammer to crack a nut.’ In other words, he repeatedly takes hold of a mighty theological doctrine, and uses it to make a simple, practical, down-to-earth point.

We do not know who wrote ‘Hebrews’, and I’m not arguing it was Paul. I’m not at all sure he did; and I’m certainly not convinced that he didn’t! But I make the observation that we see the same principle here. After many chapters of doctrinal learning, this last one deals primarily with daily living. There is some doctrine mixed in, but it is essentially practical material (It’s interesting that the writer actually refers to this letter as ”my word of exhortation”: v.22).

As Alistair Begg reminds us with his radio ministry, truth is for life, learning is for living.

Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, ²⁹ for our “God is a consuming fire.”

This passage, as we have seen, reminds of continuities between the Old and New Covenants. It is the same God we worship. We must not drive a wedge between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New. Although we can come to Him through the mediating work of Jesus (23b,24), He is nevertheless to be feared. We are to worship Him ”acceptably with reverence and awe…”

But also with thanksgiving.

I found this passage in Tom Wright’s commentary so helpful, I’m going to quote it in full:

”I was talking with a friend the other day who had been wrestling with the proper Christian attitude to what we sometimes call ‘the good things of life’ – food and drink, money and possessions. Knowing perfectly well that these things can become severe temptations if pursued for their own ends, he had often found himself led in the direction of renunciation, setting aside all interest in and claim on them, going the route of asceticism. Now he had come to the conclusion, he said, without wanting to pursue them in an idolatrous fashion, that the proper response to material goods was gratitude. Thanking God for what you have is the way to keep the things of this world in proper perspective. That way, you can never turn them into idols; nor can you make the mistake of supposing that when God made the world he made trash, which we can ignore or sneer at.

If that is so with the present world, with all its ambiguities, how much more ought we to be grateful for the world that is to come, the world that we have been promised as our true inheritance!” ‘Hebrews for Everyone’, pp.166, 167.

At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, ‘Once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.’ ²⁷ The words ‘once more’ indicate the removing of what can be shaken – that is, created things – so that what cannot be shaken may remain.

Nothing pertaining to God’s Kingdom is shakeable! Those who build on Jesus’ Words erect their lives upon an unshakeable foundation (Matthew 7:24-27). But everything that can be shaken is one day going to be, before the unshakeable Kingdom comes in its fullness.

Tom Wright says that the really worrying thing in today’s passage is that God Himself is going to do this ”as part of his plan to take his creation by the scruff of the neck and make it, at last, what he always intended it would be.’‘ ‘Hebrews for Everyone’, p.164.

It will involve not only an earthquake, but, so to speak, a ”heavenquake”, as God brings in a whole new universe.