The People of the New Covenant | Hebrews 13:1-8, 16-17
Brian Hedges | March 9, 2025
Let me invite you to turn Scripture this morning to Hebrews 13.
A couple of years ago, in September of 2023, there was a humorous online trend that revealed that many men frequently ponder the Roman Empire. Women took to social media asking the men in their lives if they thought about the Roman Empire and how often they thought about ancient Rome, and they were surprised to find that many men confessed that often they were thinking about different aspects of the Roman Empire; maybe the great engineering feats of Rome, maybe the military strategies of Rome, maybe they’re thinking about the gladiatorial games or something like that—but men frequently think about the Roman Empire. Of course, you just think about popular culture; there’s a lot about the Roman Empire in our popular culture today.
But this fascination with the Roman Empire is not just a passing curiosity. It actually reflects a deeper connection to a world that still shapes us today. Ferdinand Mount is a British scholar. He argues this in his book Full Circle: How the Classical World Came Back to Us. Here is a key quote. He says,
“God’s long funeral is over, and we are back where we started. Two thousand years of history have melted away into the backstory, which nobody reads anymore. So much about the society that is now emerging bears an astonishing resemblance to the most prominent features of what we call the classical world; its institutions, its priorities, its recreations, its physics, its sexual morality, its food, its politics, even its religion. Often, without our being in the least aware of it, the way in which we live our rich and varied lives corresponds, almost eerily so, to the ways in which the Greeks and Romans lived theirs.”
You would have to read Mount’s full book to get the full argument, but I think he’s onto something, in that there is this reality that we’re reckoning with today in what we might call the post-Christian West, where the culture around us is more and more like the pre-Christian world of the ancient Roman Empire than it is like the more medieval period or the period at the very height, the apex, of Western civilization.
This is especially true in the moral values of our culture, which have eroded away from the Christian values that once defined us and now are much more like the moral values of the ancient pagan, pre-modern, pre-Christian world.
That reality makes the countercultural instruction to Christians in the early church all the more relevant to us today. We have to remember when we read passages such as we’re going to read this morning from Hebrews 13 that these passages are addressed to a Christian community that offered an alternative way of life. In the midst of ancient Rome, which was hierarchical, pragmatic, centered on power, wealth, and pleasure, the authors of the New Testament letters call Christians to a countercultural way of life.
We’re going to see that today in Hebrews 13 as we begin our final leg of the journey in this great letter to the Hebrews. It’s the final chapter, and as we’ve seen in the weeks and months that have gone before, this is a letter that was written to Jewish Christians who are facing opposition for their faith. They are being persecuted. They are tempted to draw back into the forms of Old Testament worship. And in the face of that, the author is telling them to hold firm to the confidence of their faith, to be steadfast, and to persevere all the way to the end.
This letter has really switched back and forth between exposition and exhortation—exposition of the person and the work of Jesus Christ, showing us how Jesus Christ is better than all that went before in the Old Testament; but also exhortation to cling to Christ and to follow Christ and to be faithful to Christ. Now we get into Hebrews 13, and really, the argument of the letter has concluded. We’re now in application. And the last chapter of this letter is almost pure application, and we’re going to spend several weeks working through it together.
Today, I want to read Hebrews 13:1-8 and then also read verses 16-17, which have some exhortations that tie into some of those earlier verses. So, Hebrews 13 beginning in verse 1.
“Let brotherly love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body. Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous. 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?’
“Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.”
Drop down to verse 16.
“Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.
“Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you.”
This is God’s word.
We could say that the theme of this passage is the people of the new covenant. It is a call to a certain kind of lifestyle that is to define the church, the people who are now the people of God in this new covenant that Jesus Christ has inaugurated with his blood. We could say that the prevailing ethos of this culture is brotherly love, and so the command in verse one, “Let brotherly love continue,” is really a command that kind of serves as an umbrella over this whole passage.
We could say that the unchanging foundation behind this way of life is the fact of Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ who is the same yesterday, today, and forever (verse 8). But we could say then that this ethos of love is worked out in four dimensions of the countercultural community. Those dimensions are hospitality (verses 2-3), marriage and sexuality (verse 4), money and possessions (verses 5-6, 16), and then leadership and authority (verses 7 and 17). All of these are ways in which brotherly love is meant to continue, ways in which the love of Christ in us and through us is to be expressed. So what I want to do is work through those four categories with you this morning.
1. Hospitality: Love Extended to Strangers
First of all, hospitality. Here we see love extended to strangers. Look at verses 2-3. Actually, let me just read verses 1-3.
“Let brotherly love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body.”
Now the background to verse 2 is probably Genesis 18, where Abraham, if you remember the story, entertained three guests who turned out to be messengers from God. This was just prior to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. So he was entertaining angels without being fully aware of who these people were. So the author uses this as an exhortation to show hospitality to strangers.
Verse 3, “Remember those who are in prison,” is a reminder that some of their own community have already been cast into prison. They have suffered the plundering of their property and goods. We’ve seen that already in Hebrews 10. So the author now is calling for solidarity with those people, remembering that they are in prison and remembering those who are mistreated since they also are part of the body, the body of Christ. Just as one member of the body suffers, the whole body suffers.
More broadly, we could say that this passage highlights the distinctive practices of hospitality that characterized the early Christians. Again, in a world such as the ancient Roman world was, where people really were geared to seek their own advantage, Christianity called Christians to something higher and something better. It called them to a life of love—love for one another, but also love for the stranger, love for the outsider, love for the outcast, the downtrodden, and the mistreated of society.
In fact, this is one of the reasons, on a sociological level, why Christianity really began to thrive in those first few centuries of the church. Rodney Stark has shown us this in his excellent book called The Rise of Christianity. He shows that among the factors that contributed to the flourishing of that early nascent Christian movement was their whole ethic of hospitality. He said,
“To cities filled with the homeless and impoverished, Christianity offered charity as well as hope. To cities filled with newcomers and strangers, Christianity offered an immediate basis for attachment. To cities filled with widows and orphans, Christianity offered a new and expanded sense of family. To cities torn by ethnic strife, Christianity offered a new basis for social solidarity. I am not saying the misery of the ancient world caused the advent of Christianity. People had been enduring for centuries without the aid of Christian theology or social structures. I am arguing that once Christianity did appear, its superior capacity for meeting human problems soon became evidence and played a major role in its ultimate triumph, for what Christianity brought was not simply an urban movement, but a new culture.”
It’s to that new culture that Hebrews 13 is calling this new covenant community to. Brothers and sisters, this passage also calls us to a life of love that is expressed in hospitality, love extended to one another as well as to the stranger.
There are a number of different ways in which this can be expressed. Let me give you a list of options, ranging from maybe the easiest to the most difficult.
First of all, you can express hospitality by simply opening your home and using your home as a place and as a base of ministry. You might think of those who host a Bible study or a fellowship group in their homes, where they welcome both fellow believers, but also those friends and neighbors who are seekers, who are maybe inquiring about Christianity, who are seeking some kind of deeper understanding of the truth. This is one way in which we can practically put in practice this ethic of hospitality and love.
Some Christians have felt called to do much more and to offer shelter to the homeless. I have one friend who’s done this a number of times. This is costly, it’s difficult, but it is a practical embodiment of hospitality when we open our homes to those who don’t have a home, for a period of time, to help them get on their feet.
Others express hospitality by becoming a haven to children in need through foster care or through adoption. And many of you in our church have done that as you have welcomed others into your home as an outworking of Christian love.
Each of us are different. We will all have different giftings, different opportunities, different capacities, different responsibilities. But every single one of us who name the name of Christ should be thinking of ways to open our homes, to make our homes a base of ministry, and to open our lives in order to serve others. This is part of what the Christian counterculture is meant to be, our homes as places of hospitality.
2. Marriage and Sexuality: Love Expressed in a Sacred Commitment
Secondly, we see love expressed in sacred commitment in the realm of marriage and sexuality. Look at verse 4. It says, “Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous.”
We have to remember that the ancient world did not embrace the Christian sexual ethic. The ancient world was hedonistic and often immoral. We could think of the circuses, the theaters, the gladiatorial games, the brothels, the widespread acceptance of infidelity.
In contrast to that, Christians were called to chastity outside of marriage and to fidelity (that is, marital faithfulness) inside of marriage. This, of course, counters the prevailing sexual ethics of our day as well. We have seen in our culture a sexual revolution. This, of course, began about sixty years ago in the 1960s, and we continue to deal with the fallout of that, the outworking of that, all of us in some way shaped by the culture that came out of the 1960s.
In many ways, this culture now parallels the sexual and moral culture of the ancient world. To quote again Ferdinand Mount, who notes the parallel between the sexual practices of the classical world and today, he says,
“Sex relationships are officially deconsecrated and emptied of moral content. There need be no sense of shame if one changes partners, even quite abruptly. It is sometimes argued by up-to-the-minute philosophers that if you have any duty at all, it is to the truth of your emotions. It ought to be your goal to live an authentic life, and that is impossible if you continue to live a lie.”
This is what the author Paul Tripp calls self-sovereign sexuality. It’s the whole idea that the whole purpose of sexuality is to express myself and to find personal satisfaction for myself. It is one of the chief outworkings of expressive individualism in our day. And in contrast to that, Tripp tells us that Christianity teaches sex is a covenantal gift, not an individual right.
That’s why this passage calls for the community as a whole to honor marriage. It’s not just an exhortation to the married people. He says, “Let marriage be held in honor among all,” and that means both the single and the married. It means the widowed, the divorced. Any person in the Christian community is to honor the institution of marriage.
This passage tells us that the marriage bed is to be kept pure. This is not the devaluing or the degrading of sexuality; it’s just the opposite. It is the consecration of sexuality, the setting apart of sexuality to marriage, which is a divine institution, a sacred commitment of love between husband and wife.
Notice that the author enforces this command with a warning. He says that God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous. This recalls many of the warnings in Hebrews that we’ve seen as we’ve worked through this letter that warn us of the severe dangers of apostasy and of turning away from Christ. As we saw last week, we can do that in gospel doctrine, in gospel behavior, or in gospel worship. Here it is a warning to not turn away from Christ in our behavior.
Now, this doesn’t mean that sexual sins committed even by Christians cannot be forgiven. We know from many other passages in Scripture that they can be. But it does mean that those who persist in sexual sin without repentance, without confession, without fighting that sin, confessing that sin, pleading the blood of Jesus Christ over that sin; those who do so will face the judgment of God. So it’s a call for us to pursue lives of faithfulness, lives of purity.
This is the second great distinctive of an alternative Christian culture. And again, when you look to the second century, you can see just how prominent this was and what a distinctive feature it was. Let me give you a quotation, this time from the second-century Greek bishop Theophilus of Antioch. He said,
“With them [that is, with Christians] temperance dwells, self-restraint is practiced, monogamy is observed, chastity is guarded, iniquity exterminated, sin rooted out, righteousness exercised, law administered, worship performed, God acknowledged. Truth governs, grace guards, peace screens them, the holy word guides, wisdom teaches, life directs, God reigns.”
You have to admire the eloquence of these ancient fathers of the church.
Brothers and sisters, the application for us today is pretty obvious. Whether married or single, we are called to uphold the sacredness of marriage in our words, our attitudes, and our actions. In a world that treats sex as an individual right, we must remember that God has designed sex as a covenantal gift to be confined to that sacred relationship of marriage. We need to learn to guard our hearts against impurity in all its forms, not only in behavior, but also in our thoughts. The world tells us that love is all about personal fulfillment, but Scripture calls us to faithfulness and to sacrifice, to the covenantal commitment that we see exemplified in marriage.
We need to ask ourselves if we are allowing our views on relationships and sexuality to be shaped more by the world or by the truth of Scripture.
3. Money and Possessions: Love Expressed in Contentment and Generosity
Then number three, we come to the dimension of money and possessions. And here, what we see is love expressed in contentment and generosity.
You see this, first of all, in verses 5-6, which is a call to contentment. It says, “Keep your life free from love of money.” Recall another passage that says, “The love of money is a root of all forms of evil,” 1 Timothy 6. So this is a call to keep our lives free from greed or from covetousness.
“Keep your life free from love of money and be content with what you have.”
And then it gives us a reason.
“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?’”
This passage is a stark reminder to us that happiness is not to be found in our possessions, in the accumulation of wealth, that our security is not to be found in that. In fact, the second half of verse 5 and verse 6 really cuts to the heart of the money issues, and that is what we put our trust in. If we trust in the Lord, who promises to never leave us nor forsake us, that frees us from the anxiety and the insecurity that so often marks our emotions when we think about money and possessions.
This is a wonderful promise to those who had already experienced the plundering of their property because of their faith in Christ (Hebrews 10:34), a great source of comfort to them to know that God, the Lord, promised to be with them and to never leave them or forsake them. It is a reminder to us that our true riches are found not in retirement accounts or estates or in our possessions but in God himself.
As we sing in the old hymn, “Riches I heed not, nor man’s empty praise; / Thou mine inheritance now and always.”
Of course, this doesn’t mean that we should be financially irresponsible. It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with earning money. As it’s often been said, it’s not so much whether you have money, it’s whether money has you, whether it has your heart. This is a heart issue, and it will be revealed by the degree of contentment we have when we don’t have a lot, and also by the practices of generosity in our lives.
Look at verse 16, which says, “Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.”
Here, generosity to others is elevated to the level of worship. It is a sacrifice that is pleasing to God when we share what we have with others. But you’ll only become a generous person when you have learned contentment.
Someone has described contentment in this way: “Jesus plus fill-in-the-blank equals happiness.” If you can’t be happy without something besides Jesus, you haven’t really learned contentment. So this is a call for us in our lives to not only fight the sins of greed and covetousness, but to learn the grace of contentment.
Remember, the apostle Paul said in Philippians 4, “I have learned in whatever state I am to be content.” This is something that you and I can learn as well. We learn that as we trust in the promises of God, the God who promises to never leave us or forsake us, the God who promises to be our helper.
When we’ve learned that lesson, our hearts will be more free to be generous. And this radical contentment and generosity, once again, is a distinctive feature of the countercultural Christian community, especially in a world that prizes acquisition and accumulation and wealth and possessions. All of us need to search our hearts in this regard.
4. Leadership and Authority: Love Modeled in Church Power Dynamics
Then there’s one more dimension. The fourth dimension is in the dimension of leadership and authority. Here we see love modeled in church power dynamics. Once again, it is a countercultural way of thinking about leadership and authority.
You see it in the commands of verses 7 and 17. These are commands to the community in regard to the leaders. Notice verse seven. “Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith.”
Then verse 17: “Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls as those who will have to give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you.”
Human culture tends to always go in one of two extremes. We might call these extremes on the left and on the right. On one hand, you have the extreme of radical egalitarianism, which will be the dismantling of all power structures, all authority, and all inequalities, including economic inequality.
You see this, for example, in the French Revolution, where equality and fraternity were the battle cries of that whole movement. If you know the history, of course, it was a disaster. It was an absolute bloodbath, as the people tried to overturn the aristocracy of that day.
But on the other hand, there is a rightward turn as well. This is another extreme, and it is what we might call authoritarianism, where you have the subjugation of the poor to the rich and of the weak to the strong. You might think of the age of Napoleon that followed the French Revolution.
You can look at cultures within the history of the Western world and see how cultures tend to veer left and then right, and you see the same things happening in our own culture today.
But Christianity, once again, is different from either of those extremes. While Christianity recognizes authority, it radically reshapes the way authority is used. And you see that in the way in which the leadership is described in these passages. Notice what the leaders are called to do. The leaders are called to be examples. So the community is exhorted to consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith.
Then in verse 17, especially, which says, “Obey your leaders and submit to them,” notice this, “for they are keeping watch over your souls as those who will have to give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you.”
The whole purpose of authority as it is given in the church is for the good of the community. It’s to be to the advantage of the people. That only happens when leaders understand that their calling is not one of status, it is one of servanthood, where they are to be exemplary models of followers of Jesus Christ, where they are to serve with a sense of their accountability to God as they watch over the souls of others.
In other words, we could say that leaders are always called to be servants, not taskmasters. Leadership in the church is not a position as much as it is a sacred calling to love and serve and minister to the people of God. And when leadership in a Christian culture becomes exploitation, it ceases to be Christian.
Sadly, we’ve seen this happen sometimes in church movements, where leaders have become domineering and proud and arrogant and hard to work with and even abusive in their exercise of authority, but such should never be the case in the church. Tim Keller in his little book The Freedom of Self Forgetfulness says, “True leadership is sacrificial, not self-serving. The gospel redefines power as service, not self-exaltation.”
Once again, we see this as a distinctive of the Christian culture, the counterculture. It doesn’t despise authority, but it redefines the way authority is to be used, so that authority is always for the good of the people of God.
So what we see now is that this call to live a life of love is expressed in four dimensions: a distinctive hospitality, which cares for the stranger; a distinctive sexual ethic, which honors marriage as a sacred covenant; a distinctive view of money and possessions, which finds contentment and security in the Lord’s promised faithfulness and it is able to be generous to others; and a distinctive understanding of leadership and authority, where the power structures of the church, far from imitating the world, are rooted in servanthood.
When you look at the history of the church, the examples of the early Christians stand out. I want to read you one more quotation now, this time from the second-century apologetic work “The Letter to Diognetus.” It’s a beautiful description of the Christian church.
“The difference between Christians and the rest of mankind is not a matter of nationality or language or customs. Though they are residents at home in their own countries, their behavior there is more like that of transients. For them, any foreign country is a motherland, and any motherland is a foreign country. Like other men, they marry and beget children, though they do not expose their infants. Any Christian is free to share his neighbor’s table, but never his marriage bed. They obey the prescribed laws, but in their own private lives they transcend the laws. They show love to all men, and all men persecute them. They are misunderstood and condemned, yet by suffering death they are quickened into life. They are poor, yet making many rich, lacking all things, yet having all things in abundance.”
This is what we’re called to. How do you get that? How do you get this kind of Christian community? This is a call for us, folks. This is a call for Redeemer Church to live this kind of life, to have this kind of counterculture. How do we get it?
We get it through the unchanging foundation of Jesus Christ. Verse 8: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.”
That verse is a reminder to us that though culture changes and will always continue to change—the Roman Empire fell, empires continue to rise and fall, our culture today is changing more rapidly than any of us realize—but this verse reminds us that though the culture changes, the Christian way of life remains because it is rooted in the Lord, who never changes. When you think about who this Lord is—Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever—can’t you see that Jesus Christ himself is the ultimate embodiment of love? He is the ultimate example of brotherly love who welcomes the stranger home. Christ is the one who epitomizes marital faithfulness, as the divine husband who gave his life for his bride, the church. Jesus is the one who, though he was rich, became poor, so that we through his poverty could become rich. And Christ was the leader who washed his disciples’ feet, the master who went to the cross for his disciples, the king who died for his enemies. He’s the example, and we are called to imitate him and to follow him.
As the people of the new covenant, you and I are called to imitate Christ in this kind of love. Like the early Christians, may the world look at us and say, “See how they love one another. See how they welcome the strangers. See how they honor marriage. See how they hold their money loosely. See how they lead with humility.” Let’s pray.
Our gracious Father, we thank you this morning for your word, and we pray now that by your Spirit you would apply the word deeply to each one of our hearts and lives. We ask you to search us and know us, to try our hearts, to see if there’s any wicked way in us, and to lead us in the way everlasting.
We pray this morning that you would take the searchlight of your word, and by your Spirit show us those attitudes, those behaviors, those perspectives in our hearts that need to be changed, that you would conform us to the pattern set forth in your word. Supremely, that you would conform us to the glorious image of your Son and our elder brother, the Lord Jesus Christ. May we become more like him.
We ask you to forgive us for every way in which we have departed from Christ, whether intentionally or unintentionally, Lord. Would you forgive us of those sins, and would you cleanse us once again this morning and renew us by the power of your Spirit in the great promises of the gospel?
As we come to the Lord’s table, may we search our hearts and examine ourselves. May we repent wherever you show us a need for repentance. And would you renew our faith and our hope and our assurance that is rooted in the promise of your unchanging word and of the work of your Son? We ask you to draw near to us now in these moments as we prepare our hearts for the table, and we pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
