The True & Greater Model (The True & Greater #20)

When I was three or four years old, my hero was Bob Barker. I don’t remember this myself, my mom had to tell me, but apparently I was obsessed with The Price is Right. What I would do is pull the footrest out on the recliner in our basement, set my little brother in the gap between the footrest and the seat, and make him bid on items. I’d hold a pretend microphone. I’d hold up some toy and ask him to guess how much it cost.

I was a strange child. I’m probably still a strange adult. But why did a four-year-old do that? Because my eyes saw Bob doing these things on TV, and because I thought he was great, I wanted to imitate him. I turned him into a model. That’s just how it works. Any time you admire someone, you’re your hero, you inevitably start to act like them. You dress like them. You pick up their mannerisms. You start talking like them, even thinking like them. You want to become like them.

At Riverwood, we have an agenda, and it’s no secret. Our agenda is to help you become like Jesus. We want you to love like Jesus loved and live like Jesus lived. Hebrews 13 helps us see Jesus as the true and greater model, and it gets specific about what loving like he loved actually looks like.

Not a Hodgepodge

A lot of the New Testament is made up of epistles, letters written by an apostle to a church or a group of people. And you notice a pattern in a lot of them: by the last chapter, the author realizes he’s got to wrap things up, but there are still loose threads he wants to mention, so he throws them into a closing potluck. Take 1 Corinthians. After fifteen chapters of working through the church’s problems and pointing them back to Jesus, chapter 16 spends two sentences on generosity, moves into travel plans, mentions a couple of people the church needs to take care of, and closes with some greetings. It’s a hodgepodge. Romans, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and others do something similar.

So coming into the final chapter of Hebrews, it would be natural to expect the same thing. We’d just spent three weeks in chapter 12 on discipline, on looking to Jesus, on persevering through hardship because God is doing something good in us through it. Then chapter 13 opens and suddenly we’re talking about brotherly love, angels, people in prison. It can read like a grab bag.

If that’s how you’d read it, I don’t blame you, because that’s how I read it too, right up until last week. It was a little embarrassing, honestly, after years of following Jesus and even studying Hebrews, to have this hit me for the first time: this isn’t a hodgepodge. This is one idea, applied across five different groups of people.

The one idea is right there in verse 1: let brotherly love continue. That phrase is doing more work than it looks like. Back in John 13, Jesus told his disciples, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Jesus had the authority to say “I give you a new command” because he’s God. If he were only a prophet, he’d have had to say “the Lord says.” Instead, he says it himself.

In Mark 12, when Jesus is asked for the greatest commandment, he answers with love the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, straight out of Deuteronomy, and adds a second: love your neighbor as yourself, out of Leviticus. Neither of those is new. What’s new is what he does with the second one in John 13. He takes “love your neighbor as yourself” and pushes it deeper: love one another the way I have loved you. And how did Jesus love us? He died for us, sacrificing himself to make us his family, his brothers and sisters. So when Hebrews 13 opens with “let brotherly love continue,” it’s picking up that command. Brotherly love means sacrifice, our finances, our time, our energy, our wisdom, given away for someone else’s good, because Christ gave himself for ours. There’s a reason soldiers call each other brothers. Brothers sacrifice, even their lives, for one another. We’re called to that same sacrifice.

So instead of a hodgepodge, Hebrews 13 gives us five groups of people to pour that brotherly love into.

Loving the Stranger

The first group is strangers. Verse 2: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” Here’s something I learned this week that changed how I read this verse: the Greek word translated “hospitality” essentially just means love for strangers. Most of our English translations add the word “strangers” for clarity, but it’s already built into the word itself. Show kindness. Show care. Show concern. Show brotherly love to the stranger.

That means welcoming the stranger into your home, letting a stranger onto your calendar sometimes, holding the door at the store, buying the coffee that starts a conversation, giving of yourself for someone you have no history with. I know the introverts reading this are already uncomfortable. This is really uncomfortable, right? You’re saying I have to talk to someone, sitting next to them on the plane, can’t I just put my headphones on? You could. But that’s probably not loving the stranger.

Right now our country is deeply fractured, and it needs us to love strangers well. Our podcasts, our social feeds, our cable news are training us to be combative, to talk over people, to pull away from anyone who doesn’t already agree with us. We start treating the stranger like the enemy. And what does Jesus tell us to do with our enemies? Love them. Because it turns out the stranger might not be an enemy at all. The stranger might be a brother or sister in Christ that God is sending you to encourage, or who’s about to encourage you. The stranger might be someone God has been working on, and he’s arranging a conversation for you to help them understand the gospel for the first time. Or the stranger might, like the verse says, be an angel, sent to test whether your calendar and your energy are all about you, or whether you’ll let sacrificial, Christ-like love pour out toward someone you didn’t plan on meeting.

Remembering the Overlooked

The second group is the overlooked. Verse 3: “Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body.”

If your growing-up years were anything like mine, you learned early that jail was for bad guys, and you wanted to be a good guy, so you kept your distance from that world. But within the Roman Empire, people were sometimes thrown into prison unfairly, simply for claiming Jesus was king instead of Caesar, treated as treason. So they were imprisoned, and mistreated on top of it. Think about what you’d want if that happened to you. You’d want the people outside, your family, your friends, to remember you, pray for you, write you letters, come visit. You wouldn’t want to be forgotten.

So don’t let the people in prison be forgotten. Give your time and energy to remind them they still have value, that God hasn’t forgotten them. But I’d push this wider than literal prisoners. Who are the outcasts, the overlooked, the forgotten in our own communities? In the Gospels, Jesus gives as much time, if not more, to people like that than to the influential, the famous, the people with the great reputation. Too often we spend our attention on people who might reflect some of their glory back onto us. What we’re called to instead is giving our attention to people who can’t repay us, because it was never about us in the first place. It’s about Christ, who sacrificed himself for people who had nothing to offer him back.

Loving Your Spouse, or the One You Haven’t Met Yet

The third group is our spouse. Verse 4: “Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous.”

If you’re not married, you might be tempted to skip this one. Don’t. Notice it says marriage is to be honored by all, not just by married people. And statistically, if you’re single right now, there’s a good chance you’ll be married someday. Roughly 90 percent of people who are currently unmarried will end up married. That means about 10 percent won’t, and if that turns out to be you, you are not a lesser version of anything. Your worth in God’s eyes was never tied to your relationship status. It’s tied to his image in you, to what Jesus did on the cross and out of the empty tomb. If you end up in that 10 percent, you’re still fully loved, still full of purpose, still worth everything to him.

But if you’re currently unmarried and likely headed toward marriage someday, part of applying this verse means honoring your future spouse now. How you’re spending your days, your time, your energy, your body, your heart. How you’re stewarding this season as a single person is already a way of honoring the person you haven’t met yet.

Now the harder part. The middle of verse 4 says, “let the marriage bed be undefiled.” About a year and a half ago, a megachurch pastor went viral for a sermon arguing that the Greek word porneia, translated here as “sexually immoral,” only refers to prostitution and the sexual exploitation of the weak. He’s not wrong that it covers those things. But porneia carries a broader meaning: any sexual activity outside the boundaries the Old Testament law set, which reserved sex for one man and one woman within marriage. That’s the consistent teaching across thousands of years of Judeo-Christian scholarship, and it’s why we get verses like this one.

And yet, statistics tell us that around the world, about 90 percent of people have sex before marriage. In America, the most recent study I’ve seen puts it around 96 percent. So why does God write it this way? He made us sexual creatures. After creating Adam and Eve, he told them to be fruitful and multiply. He gave us these desires on purpose. She’s really cute, he’s really nice, you both want this, what’s wrong with that? Sin has affected everything, including our desires, so it’s completely understandable that people give in.

Knowing that 96 percent of us have slipped up here, a verse like this can make you feel like a failure, wondering if God could really love you or if it’s a permanent mark against you. I’d be a bad shepherd of this church if I skipped past the verse, God put it here for a reason. But I’d be just as bad if I used it to beat you over the head. If this is your story, I don’t want you living in guilt and shame. There is freedom. There is forgiveness.

So why does God ask us to wait? Because something good happens through the discipline of waiting, the same pattern we saw back in chapter 12, where trials produced freedom, strength, wisdom. Waiting is hard, and sometimes the best things come out of the hardest things. This letter was written to people living under the sexual permissiveness of the Roman Empire, people who felt entitled to just engage without restraint, because waiting was actually for their thriving.

So to anyone unmarried reading this, I want to see you thrive, which is exactly why I’d say wait. Our culture insists that two consenting adults doing whatever they want is fine, good, glorious, and that sex before the ring is better than sex after it. The culture is wrong. Study after study shows the marriages that last longest and report the highest satisfaction are the ones where the couple waited, and where partner counts were lower. I know that goes against everything the culture and your own desires are pushing you toward. God still writes it because he loves you. It’s for your good.

Now, to the married. You’d think loving your spouse would be the easiest of these five, and yet sometimes it’s easier to love the stranger who’s in your home for two hours than to love the spouse who lives there and shares your bed. If you’ve been in a hard season of marriage, you know the pain of it, and it’s because Scripture says the two become one flesh. If you’ve ever had your own flesh torn, you know it hurts. I got cut by a knife three weeks ago, cutting sweet potatoes of all things, and it sliced my finger open. It hurt. Ripping flesh hurts. So if that’s what a hard marriage has felt like, yeah, it’s brutal.

But our culture says that when it gets hard, you go find someone else. You deserve better. So if you’re bored, unhappy, if the finances are a mess, if there’s a health issue you didn’t sign up for, just set it aside and go get a different one. Jesus says something else entirely in Matthew 19:6: what God has joined together, let man not separate. Married people, the greatest way to honor marriage is to stay in it, even when it’s hard. You can’t make your spouse do anything. What you can do is submit yourself to the Holy Spirit and say, do in me what needs to be done, so I honor my side of this even if they aren’t honoring theirs. That’s the Christ-like response.

Romans 5 tells us Christ died for us while we were still sinners. He didn’t wait for us to clean ourselves up first. He went to the cross while we were still his enemies, actively working against him. God is generosity itself, and in our sin we are selfishness itself, and Jesus still died to change us. So married people, do what’s yours to do regardless of how your spouse is doing on their end. It’s hard. Invite the right people into that struggle to pray with you and encourage you. Be people of the word, of worship, of prayer. Honor marriage.

That also means honoring the marriage bed. 1 Corinthians 6 tells married people their body belongs to God, purchased at the price of Jesus’ blood. 1 Corinthians 7 adds that your body also belongs to your spouse. It isn’t only yours anymore, which is why you can’t join it to someone who isn’t your spouse, and why verse 4 ends with God judging the adulterer. Sex is connection, bonding between husband and wife, and I’d push that further than just the physical. Don’t let anyone else in there mentally either. If that means walking away from porn, walk away, because you don’t want someone else’s body in your head when you’re with your spouse. If it means you need to stop flirting with a coworker or picturing what it’d be like to be with them, repent and hand it over to God. Don’t text your ex. Give all of yourself to this marriage, not for your happiness alone, but for your holiness. Let the Holy Spirit keep that fire contained to the fireplace it was built for, and let it burn bright and hot there.

I want to be honest before we move on: this is a messy area for a lot of people. If you’re struggling here, with pornography, with texts, with something you can’t seem to put down, you are not alone. It’s worth fighting for, because it’s for your good. Find someone, a friend, a leader, someone who knows you, who will give you grace and also speak truth. We want you free. We want you living like Jesus lived and loving like Jesus loved.

Loving Yourself Enough to Say No

The fourth group was the hardest for me to name. Verses 5 and 6 say, “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?”

At first I thought this was about not loving money, but we’re obviously not being told to show brotherly love to money. Then I thought maybe it was about God as provider, since verse 6 quotes Psalm 118. But every other point in this passage is a horizontal relationship, someone else we love, and this felt vertical instead. Something wasn’t fitting.

Then it clicked. The person who is content is at peace, not just with their circumstances but with themselves. The person who’s always clamoring for more, another coffee, another shirt, another car, is essentially saying, God, I don’t think you’re quite enough. I need the things of this earth that are going to pass away instead of you, who lasts forever. Your healing won’t come through money and more. It comes through Christ.

Sometimes the greatest way you can love yourself is to say, I’m fine, I don’t need that, I’m good. Saying “I’m fine” is actually a statement about God’s sufficiency, an echo of the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. It’s verse 6: the Lord is my helper, I will not fear, what can man do to me? For some of you, loving yourself well means learning to say no. Loving yourself sometimes means denying yourself, not giving in to the world’s version of self-care that says you have to book the spa day, get the massage, spend the money. Sometimes the healthiest thing you can say is, God’s enough. I’m good.

Following Leaders Who Point Past Themselves

The fifth group is leaders. Verse 7: “Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God, consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith.”

I want to name the obvious awkwardness here. As the lead pastor here, it can sound self-serving for me to be the one telling you to honor leaders. So if it helps, don’t think of me. Think of our volunteer elders instead, guys with full-time jobs and full-time families who still give their time to shepherd, love, and pray for this church. Or think of our Sunday team, the people who lead worship, handle the administration, keep the cafe running, lead our kids’ ministry. Or think ahead to some point down the road when you move to a new city and find yourself in a new church under a different leader. Think of that person. This isn’t about propping up any one individual. It’s about what God is calling you to do for others.

What’s the actual instruction? Consider the outcome of their lives. If they’re living selflessly, living for Jesus, imitate their faith. If they’re showing you a better way than the world is showing you, go ahead and make them your Bob Barker, and start acting like them, because they’re pointing you somewhere good. If a leader turns out to be self-serving, look past them to Jesus instead.

Verse 7 doesn’t say much more than that, but the author circles back to leaders later, in 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.”

I know that one day I’ll stand before God and he’ll ask me what I did with the people of Riverwood. I’ll be held accountable for that. So I want you to know plainly: our agenda has always been to help you love like Jesus loved and live like Jesus lived. It was never about a bigger building, more people, or being the coolest church in town. It’s about helping you become like Christ, the true and greater model. If you see a leader following Jesus well and you imitate them, what you’re really doing is imitating Christ, because it was always about him.

But here’s what happens in our weakness: we stop loving with brotherly love and turn inward. That’s when complaining creeps in. That’s when division creeps in. That’s why the author warns against leading people into groaning. I’m thankful that across twelve and a half years of Riverwood’s existence, we’ve been a healthy church. But I’ll be honest, there have been seasons where there’s been some groaning in me, not because people refuse to follow, but because I want something better for them and they can’t yet see it. When I see you loving the stranger, remembering the overlooked, loving your spouse, loving yourself in a healthy way, this place comes alive, and our elders and team lead with joy, no groaning at all.

There’s another reason the author calls for this kind of submission now: some of you reading this will become leaders yourselves someday, helping plant a church, moving to a city that needs elders and deacons and growth group leaders. What you’ll find is that you want the people you lead to follow you, not because you’re perfect, but because you genuinely want what’s best for them. So because you’re going to become that leader someday, start practicing submission now.

Which One Are You Being Called Into

Let brotherly love continue, across all five. So take a minute and ask yourself honestly which of these you need to grow in. Do you need to grow in loving the stranger? In remembering the overlooked and the forgotten? In loving your spouse, or the one you haven’t married yet? In loving yourself enough to say no to something? In submitting to the leaders God has placed around you?

This is why we close every gathering at the table. We celebrate communion every week here at Riverwood, and we hold an open table. We believe the bread and the cup belong to anyone who proclaims Jesus, so if you know Christ died on the cross for your sin and rose again, you’re welcome there.

If you’re still working out whether any of this is true, I’d rather you not take the elements yet, not because you’re unwelcome, but because something more important is available to you first. Ask yourself honestly: is the gospel true? Did Jesus, the Son of God, really live a sinless life and die in the sinner’s place on the cross? If the Holy Spirit is making that clear to you, the invitation isn’t to a table, it’s to him. Give your life to Jesus. That’s the beginning of everything else in this passage, because none of these five, loving the stranger, remembering the overlooked, honoring marriage, loving yourself well, following good leaders, makes sense apart from first belonging to him.

He is the true and greater model. Everything else we imitate is only worth imitating because it points back to him.