Anchored In Christ As A Church That Loves, Lives, And Leads Well

Hebrews 13:1-8 “God’s Blueprint for a Kingdom Community: Anchored in Christ as a Church that Loves, Lives, and Leads Well”

Today's message is called God’s Blueprint for a Kingdom Community. It’s actually a 2 parter. So, the subtitle is “Anchored in Christ: A Church that Loves, Lives, and Leads Well”.

That’s because these are one and the same thing, and I couldn’t decide which title is better.

Why? Because our passage today, which comes from Lectionary, which is a church calendar for preaching that’s used by a lot of churches; our passage today really focuses on both the building of kingdom community, godly community in the church, and it does so by addressing these three questions:

What does it mean to love well, what does it mean to live well, and what does it mean to lead well.

And this applies to us individually, and it applies to us as part of the body of Christ.

When we approach the Bible, context is always essential. The verses that come right before our passage set the stage for what follows. In Hebrews 12:18–27, the writer reminds us that in coming to faith in Jesus Christ, we haven’t arrived at Mount Sinai—a place of fear, trembling, and judgment when the law was given.

Instead, we have come to Mount Zion, the heavenly Jerusalem—the joyful city of God—where grace and welcome flow to us through Christ.

That’s why we’re urged to listen carefully to His voice and cling to the unshakable kingdom He has given us.

The chapter closes with these words: “Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our ‘God is a consuming fire.’” (Hebrews 12:28–29)

That’s the immediate backdrop for our passage today, which we’ll be walking through together in an expository way, line by line.

Keep in mind that these thoughts, expressed in the first eight verses of Hebrews 13, immediately follow Hebrews 12:28.

Hebrews was originally written as one continuous text, without chapter or verse numbers.

Those divisions were added in the 13th century by Stephen Langton, a monk who later became Archbishop of Canterbury. Before that, Scripture appeared in scriptio continua—a flowing script with no breaks.

Here’s an early fragment of Hebrews 12:1–11.

Anchored in Christ as a Church that Loves Well (Keep this heading and add highlighted verses below)

What does it mean to love well?

So chapter 13 starts with this: Keep on loving one another as brothers and sisters.

Sometimes Scripture feels like it comes in super-sized portions— kingdoms, mountains, heavenly cities. Big stuff. It takes real mental energy just to picture what went down on Mount Sinai, let alone wrap your head around the joy of God’s eternal city.

Honestly, these massive ideas can make our brains want to tap out and grab a nap. That’s why it helps to take them in small, bite-sized pieces—spiritual tapas, if you will—rather than trying to swallow the whole feast at once.

And the first thing we're told here is deeply relatable. The first thing we’re told about this magnificent kingdom that we are inheriting, that cannot be shaken is that it is deeply relational.

And what is that the centre of it? Well, God is at the centre of it, and because God is at the centre of it, love is at the centre of it.

One of the hardest parts of church life is that the church is full of people just like us—imperfect.

We bring strengths and weaknesses, wounds and wisdom and blind spots, maturity and immaturity. In other words, every one of us is a bit of a mixed bag.

And because we’re complex people—sometimes falling apart, other times shining with grace—we need the reminder from Jesus, the gospels, and right here in this verse:

“Keep on loving one another as brothers and sisters.”

Christian love isn’t just an idea or a lyric—it shows up in loving actions: in listening well and deeply, in welcoming strangers, caring for the hurting, visiting the imprisoned, and sharing in others’ struggles.

This outward posture is how faith is made visible, in how we treat both those close to us and the vulnerable we meet in the world.

There is consistent encouragement in scripture about this. In John 13:34–35 Jesus says– “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

Does Jesus present this as an optional thing that we can add to our faith? No. It’s a command from the living God.

In 1 John 3:16–18 we see this – “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.”