Let Love of the Brethren Continue

Pastor Ray preached from Hebrews 13:1-8, the opening verses of the closing chapter of the book. After months of working through some of the deepest and most demanding material in the New Testament, this passage offered something more practical: a set of concrete instructions for how to actually live out the faith that has been the subject of all those earlier chapters.

What was said

Ray noted that the book of Hebrews has been a long stretch of heavy theological argument, and chapter 13 functions something like a preacher saying "in closing." It is practical counsel, not a break from the earlier teaching but the application of it. The same urgency to persevere in faith that ran through the whole book is still underneath everything here, just expressed in everyday terms.

The passage opens with two outward-facing commands: keep on loving one another the way you already are, and do not neglect hospitality to strangers. Ray pointed out that living in a place that sees millions of visitors a year puts this congregation in a particular position to act on that second command. He told a story about stopping to help a group of stranded travelers on a cold night, eventually jump-starting their dead van with a good set of cables, and said the point was not to congratulate himself but to illustrate that opportunities for hospitality keep showing up whether you go looking for them or not.

On the command to remember prisoners as though you were in prison with them, Ray noted that few people in this context get literally arrested for their faith, but he extended the image to anyone surrounded by people who don't share their beliefs and can't easily leave. He mentioned middle schoolers and high schoolers specifically. He also told a story from his time at Columbia International University, where seminary professors crossed the river to teach theology classes inside a state prison, and where the first graduates received their degrees on the condition that they were serving life sentences and would go wherever the prison system sent them.

The passage then addresses marriage, and Ray was direct about it: marriage is to be held in honor, the marriage bed undefiled, and the text names fornicators and adulterers as those God will judge. He said the plain wording of the passage is the point, and that the surrounding culture's drift on these questions does not change what is written.

The warning against the love of money follows immediately, and Ray drew a line between having money and loving it, calling greed a sin while saying wealth itself is not. The reason the passage gives for being content with what you have is the promise that God will never desert or forsake his people. That promise, Ray said, is not only from Jesus to his disciples but goes back through Deuteronomy and Exodus, woven through the whole story of God's dealings with his people.

The final movement of the passage is a call to remember those who led you and spoke the word of God to you, and to imitate their faith. Ray thanked Don Boyles by name, the pastor who shaped his first eleven years as a believer and who is still preaching at that same church. He connected this to a story about running a midnight five-kilometer race with his daughter Paschal on his shoulders through a dark uphill stretch, and about the difference it made when the crowd reappeared on the other side. The cloud of witnesses, the people who ran ahead and the people cheering from the sidelines, matters to how anyone keeps moving.

All of it, Ray said, rests on the final verse: Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Whatever shifts in the surrounding culture, whatever the pressure to drift or fall back into something easier, that constancy is the ground on which all the practical counsel stands.