Remembering the Remarkable (Hebrews 13:7)

The Call to Remember and Imitate Faithful Leaders

And with your Bibles open to Hebrews 13, let's bow and a word of prayer before we look at our text. Our Father, it is our simple desire that we would be sanctified by Your truth, that You would search our hearts and our minds, see if there be any wicked way in us.

Pray that You would be glorified through the preaching of Your Word, through how we hear that Word, how we fellowship together in it. We pray that it would conform us to the image of Christ and that You would use it to bring glory and honor to Your great name.

We ask Your blessing upon our time here and our study together to that end. In Christ's name, amen. There seems to be something in our human nature that is hardwired to imitate and to mimic others. We seem to be, by nature, imitators.

You see this in children when they are very young. They start to imitate and mimic hand gestures and facial expressions and laughter and body language and the behavior of their older siblings and even their parents.

In fact, as a brand new parent, that's one of the things that sort of strikes you immediately as, oh, I have to be careful because this thing is a living mirror and I get to see my behavior and my reactions displayed back to me in living color.

And then later in life, we mimic our peers as we adopt lifestyles and preferences and fashions and behavior from the crowd. Peer pressure forces us to conform to sometimes the group think, for better or for worse.

And we tend to act like our peers and be like our peers and want to fit in with our peers. And there is obviously a societal pressure that takes place upon us that tries to make us mold and conform ourselves to the behavior and to mimic others.

Nobody wants to be the outcast in that regard. So we seem hardwired to find role models and follow after them. And the question for us is not whether or not we will imitate others, but who will we imitate?

This is one of the things that as parents, you teach your children early on, find good role models and follow after them. Don't be like so-and-so, bad company corrupts good morals, but instead be like so-and-so.

That's always the goal of parenting is to try and point your children in the right direction and to use that natural inclination to get them to pursue people whose example is worth.

Imitating.

One of the underrated blessings of Bible college for me was being dropped into a situation where I had a number of men in my life, since I grew up in a fatherless home, had a number of men in my life that were suddenly worth emulating.

They had a depth of Scripture knowledge and experience and maturity that just struck me as, it caused a sense of awe in my heart as I saw that in all of my professors, men who were worthy of being imitated, men of character and consistency, knowledge, virtue, humility, and service.

And there is one that I have referred to on a number of occasions throughout my preaching in years past, and his name was Herb Peeler. When I showed up at Bible college in 1980, Herb, sorry, 1990, I'm not that old, 1980, Herb Peeler was 80 years old.

That's you see the switching, the 80, the 90. When I showed up in 1990, Herb Peeler was 80 years old. He was still teaching and had been teaching for right about 60 years, which tells you for how old he was when he started teaching Bible.

He was really the founder and the first president of that Bible college. And if you didn't see him teaching in class, you would see him outside of class, shoveling a walk in the winter, planting flowers and plants in the flower beds around the campus in the spring, weeding the flowers out in the fall, even in the fall, working out in the communal garden.

That's what they called it, but he was the only one I saw out there on that two-acre piece of land, rototilling and putting away and harvesting and all of that. He was busy. Even in the winter months, he was the one for the, I think for the first three years of my Bible college, he was the one who would flood the rink, the outdoor ice rink in the.

Winter.

And he would do that overnight. He'd roll out the hoses after dark and flood the rink. He had students who would help him do this and it would go all overnight until the next morning and then he would teach the first class of the morning after being out all night, while the students who helped him would go back to the dorm and sleep off their all-nighter out flooding the rink.

Mr. Peeler was influential in my own life because I befriended him and loved him and I would go over to his house and I will find out someday in eternity if he looked forward to those times that we spent together or not, but I would sit down in his living room and I can still, to this day, see the images and even smell some of the smells in his living.

Room.

His living room was, it smelled old because it had old furniture, old books, old papers, old everything. It smelled like an old suit, but not in a bad way. It had kind of this homey, like an old library smell to it.

And you could sit down in his living room and you have a stack of books next to this chair and a stack of books next to this chair and a stack of books on this table and then on his desk and he had papers from missionaries from all over the world, newsletters and prayer updates and everything that he would print up and they were scattered, not in a cluttering way, but in an organized and purposeful way in almost every room of his house.

And you could sit down and I would ask him some theological question of something that I was hearing in class or I had heard or I was wondering about and he would start to give me sort of this real humble answer and answer me and we'd have a little bit of a conversation.

Then he would say, you know, it's funny, I was just reading about that somewhere this last week. Where was that? And he would look at his books and stack and he'd pull out a book and he would flip through it, go here, go there, a little forward, a little backward, here it is and then he would read me a paragraph about that.

He was a voluminous reader with almost a photographic memory. And then he would start to tell me about some missionary who was a graduate from the 1960s who was serving on the mission field with this other graduate from the 1970s and how they were planting a church together and what they had done when they were on campus and then what they were doing on the mission field today, a photographic memory.

He was 80 years old when I showed up and the staff told us as students that the week before we arrived on campus, they had a staff retreat at a hotel with a swimming pool and they were kind of enjoying their time there.

And Mr. Peeler was doing back flips off of the swimming pool at 80 years old. His wife died my first year at Bible college and he missed one class on the day before a long weekend. They had the funeral and buried her during that weekend and on the day we got back to class, he spoke and taught those classes.

That was the kind of man he was. He finally died at 93 years old in a ditch behind his house burning the grass with a rake in his hand. The Lord took him and he fell down and the fire passed him by. Those are the type of people that we look at and we say that is an example worth remembering.

He served well, he ran his race well, he crossed the finish line well, he finished well. We should never underestimate the power of a good example. Those who have gone before us and run their race, they are worthy of remembering and they are worthy of remembering in a particular way.

You shouldn't underestimate the power and the value of imitating the example of those that the Lord brings into our lives and uses as examples for us. And that is what the author calls us to in this passage that is before us today.

In chapter 13, verse 7, read it with me. Remember those who led you, who spoke the word of God to you and considering the result of their conduct, imitate their faith. Chapter 13, as we've seen so far, is loaded with exhortations that we are to heed, exhortations that are given to those who have received an imperishable and unshakable kingdom.

And so all of these things that we are called to obey, to love the brethren, verse 1, to love strangers, verse 2, to love prisoners, verse 3, to honor our marriage vows and our relationships with our wives and husbands, verse 4, and to eschew the love of money, verse 5, these are things that we are to do in light of the fact that we have been given this unshakable kingdom that the author mentions at the end of chapter 12, verses 28 and 29.

And now verse 7 is the next in this line of exhortations. We are to remember godly and exemplary leaders and then we are to imitate their faith. Now leaders are mentioned three times in the rest of the chapter and I want you to notice them because noticing how they are described is going to tell us something about what kind of leaders the author has in mind in verse 7.

The author mentions here in verse 7, former leaders, and I'll show you why I think he's talking about those who have died and gone ahead of us in verse 7. But look down at verse 17, chapter 13, verse 17, there he speaks of current leaders, obey your leaders and submit to them for they keep watch over your souls as those who will give an account.

Let them do this with joy and not with grief for this would be unprofitable to you. Then the third mention of leaders is in verse 24, it's just a reference to greet all of your leaders and all the saints, those from Italy greet you.

So here are some particular exhortations towards our relationship to those who have led us in the past and those who are leading us presently. We are to remember those who have gone before and considering the outcome of their faith, the result of their faith and behavior, we are to imitate that faith.

And then concerning leaders today, verse 17, we are to submit to them and to honor them and obey them, as Scripture says, because they keep watch over our souls. And then sandwiched between verse 7 and verse 17 is these other exhortations in this doctrinal section that deals with some false teachings and how to deal with hostility and ostracization from the world.

So it is dead teachers that are mentioned in verse 17, like Mr. Peeler, and living teachers that are mentioned in, or sorry, dead teachers mentioned in verse 7, like Mr. Peeler, and then living teachers that are mentioned in verse 17.

Verse 8 seems a little out of place, doesn't it? I'm just giving you a glimpse here of the context before we jump into verse 7. Verse 8 seems a little bit out of place. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.

Well, did He just like have a systematic theology open on His desktop and He grabbed that and just sort of pasted that in there? This might be a good place to mention that because it does seem like it doesn't fit, right?

Remember those who led you the Word of God? Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Don't be carried away by strange teachings. The strange teachings would not be new, would they? They would be things that would change and would not have been there that the original leaders would have taught them, and I think that's the connection with verse 8.

The reminder that Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever is a reminder that that truth is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and the Christ who was faithful to the leaders that we remember and who carried them through is the same today as He was back then, and He will be the same when we need Him in the future as He is today.

That's where I think verse 8 plugs into that. We can remember our good leaders who have passed on because the same Christ who brought Herb Peeler across the finish line and gave Him grace to finish well, to persevere to the end, that Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

So He will and can sustain us today, and He will and can sustain us in the future when it's our turn to cross that finish line. Now there are two commands in this passage in verse 7, two commands, really three verbs, but two commands.

We are to remember them and to imitate them. The three verbs are remember them, consider their outcome, and imitate them, though the considering there is really an adjective, functions as an adjective.

It describes how we are to remember them and how we are to imitate them. So for lack of a better outline, and I do lack a better outline, those three verbs are going to form our sermon for this morning.

We are to remember former leaders, we are to consider the outcome of their behavior, and we are to imitate their faith. That is how we are to treat them. Let's look at the first one. We are to remember them.

And by the way, that's not going to be three sermons, that's going to be just one sermon. We're going to get through all three of those points today. I can see some of you look worried, others of you now are breathing a sigh of relief.

So who are these people who led us, who spoke the Word of God to us? These, I think, are the leaders who have passed away. You'll notice that we are called to remember them, which suggests that whoever it is that the author is speaking of was not in the congregation at the time that they are receiving this letter.

He is referring to those whom they had known from the past, who had passed on, possibly some who had passed on and gone to different locations, they no longer had access to them, but very likely some of the believers of the previous generation.

It's possible that the author has in mind there some who had initially brought the gospel to these early Christians, maybe some who had brought them to faith in Christ and been instrumental in that way, and then had discipled them, maybe the first pastors of this Hebrew congregation, a previous generation of believers, it may even be possible that the author here is referring to the apostles of the Lord.

By the time this is written, you're talking about being 30, 40 years into the history of Christianity, that's enough time for people to get saved, to serve faithfully and to pass on and the author here is basically saying to them, remember those who have gone before, who spoke the Word of God to you and led you, it's past tense, notice that the responsibility to the living leaders is handled in verse 17, we're to obey them and submit to them.

Our responsibility to dead leaders is different, our responsibility to dead leaders is to remember them and to imitate their faith. There are always people who want to submit to and obey the dead leaders and not submit to and obey the current leaders.

So they always say, well, look, I mean, the previous pastor, yeah, he's dead, Lord rest his soul, but he said we're to do it this way and so we're just going to obey that. We're to remember them and we're to imitate their faith, that is what we should do to men who are worthy of that kind of emulation.

But currently we have leaders amongst us and we have leaders in our lives, even I do, as a pastor of this church, I'm accountable to other men, I have responsibility to those men and it is to submit to them and to obey them because there are other men here who are my leaders and I am their leaders, there's mutual accountability there.

That's why I think he is describing here the dead leaders. Notice that verse 7 talks about the result of their conduct and I'm going to show you in a moment that I think he is speaking there of the end of their lives, the result of their conduct, the end of their conduct, we're to look back upon that, these are the people who have died.

Two things are noted concerning these people that we are to remember, they led us and they spoke the Word of God to us. Those two things are significant. These were leaders or teachers or preachers or disciple makers, they're not named but what is notable about them or remarkable about them is that they had led this congregation and men and women in this congregation and they had spoken the Word of God to them, meaning that the role of the Word of God in forming and shaping these people through these leaders and influencers, that role of the Word of God is what makes them notable, worthy of being imitated.

They led you and they spoke the Word of God to you and those are things for which we should.

Be thankful.

I will forever be grateful to the men who have come into my life and the life of people that I know whose input in the Word of God has shaped and formed and developed them. R .C. Sproul has passed from the scene, James Montgomery Boyce has passed from the scene.

Men like that who have spoke the Word of God and whose effect of their preaching and their mentoring and the work that they have done still reverberates through the Christian church.

Today.

Some of you have been profoundly impacted by the work of John MacArthur, though you have never met him. Some of you have been profoundly helped by the work of R .C. Sproul and you've never met.

Him.

Those are the kind of men that you look at and they spoke the Word of God. They were leaders amongst us. We should remember them and imitate them and honor them. We're not to honor them for their philosophy, for their business sense, for their charisma, or their giftedness, or their publishing empire, or their political influence, or their social media following, or their cultural cachet.

Instead, we are to honor them because they led us and they spoke the Word of God to us and they finished well. And therefore, they are worthy of our imitation. By the Word of God, they charted the way and that is what makes them remarkable.

The value of remembering them is that it shows to us the blessed state of the soul that trusts in God. When you look at somebody who runs their race all the way to the very end and then finishes that race in faithfulness and dies in faith, then you see the blessed state of the one who reposes himself upon God and upon His Word and trusts in that Word.

And therefore, it calls out of us a responsibility to imitate that kind of faith and that kind of life. It reminds us also of what the others who have gone before us have overcome. You see, we ought to be reminded of the fact that those who have gone before us have faced the same temptations that we have faced and resisted them.

They have dealt with the same indwelling sin that we have dealt with and they have mortified.

It.

They have faced the same hostility from the world that we are facing and they overcame.

That.

And they faced the same looming shadow of death that hung over their heads that we face and they walked through it all the way right into glory. So, remembering those who have gone before strengthens us for our journey ahead and for facing the weaknesses of the flesh and the hostility of the world and the power of indwelling.

Sin.

Remember those who spoke the Word to you and hold fast to that truth. These are the men that are worth remembering. Dave Rich and I have written a new book and working on that. We dedicated it to the men, past and present, who have taught us the sovereignty of God in both Word and example.

That's our way of kind of remembering that, that we all stand on the shoulders of giants. And we know and we've seen in Christianity, even in the last few years, men and women who were once great leaders who have made shipwreck of the faith through their compromise, either morally or theologically, who have chased after doctrinal fancies and been blown about by wind and the errors and all kinds of strange teachings, some, like I mentioned in verse 9, leaders who have looked for some fresh look or some new truth.

And then when you see one who just steps across the finish line and does so faithfully, yeah, man, I'm just, I'm thankful for that guy. I was just at Shepherd's Conference last week, last weekend. And to see the example of John MacArthur, who now has been 55 years in the pulpit, 84 years old, to stand up and just to do what he has done for five and a half decades, open the Word, read the Word, explain the Word, shut the Word, and sit down.

You know how refreshing that is? Nothing new, nothing groundbreaking, nothing, he's not pulling anything out of ancient history. He's not coming up with some new fashion to wow people with. It's just the same pattern of habitual faithfulness that has marked him for all of these years.

Maybe you don't agree with every theological nuance of John MacArthur, fine, whatever, but he's a faithful man, certainly. And there are men like him. I don't agree with all the theological nuances of R .C. Sproul, but he died in faithfulness.

And that's worth remembering and imitating his faith. Imitating the faith of others also guards us against apostasy, like the heroes of Hebrews chapter 11. Remember, the author did the very thing in Hebrews chapter 11 that he is encouraging us to do here.

Isn't chapter 11 basically a list of people who have gone before, who finished the race well in faithfulness, were faithful all the way to the end, even while not seeing the fulfillment of the promises in their own lifetime, like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, Moses, and others, who looked forward to the fulfillment of that promise, and the author points back to them and says, remember this, remember this, remember this, and he is calling us in chapter 11 to emulate that faith.

And here's the straightforward application of all of chapter 11. In fact, if you were to summarize chapter 11, it would be verse 7, remember those who led you, who spoke the Word of God to you, and considering the result of their conduct, imitate their faith.

You can summarize all of chapter 11 in verse 7, which might make you wonder why I didn't do that instead of spending like eight months on chapter 11, but that's the point of the.

Author.

Look to them and see those things that were worth emulating, and then imitate the faith that carried those men through to the very end. You can think of examples in your own life of pastors and teachers and parents and grandparents.

All of us stand on the shoulders of giants, and if you don't know any giants upon whose shoulders to stand, you need to find some giants of the faith and learn from them. Learn their example and then follow it, and remember them.

Consider the Outcome of Their Conduct

Second is to consider the outcome. We are to remember them. We are to consider the outcome of their behavior. The word consider there means to observe or to notice, to reflect upon, to put our mind to thinking about the outcome of their faith.

Not just to call to our mind, oh yeah, I remember Herb Peeler, yeah, I remember David Pollard, yeah, I remember this guy, Johnny McNeil, I remember this, yeah, those were great guys, but to put our mind and our heart to the effort of looking at the outcome of their behavior.

What was the outcome of it? What was the fruit of it? What did God do through that? Consider the result of their conduct. The word conduct means behavior or way of life. It's used both negatively, conduct is, this word conduct, it's used both negatively as well as positively in Scripture.

Paul talks about his former manner of life, that's the word, in Judaism when he persecuted the church of God in Galatians 1. Peter talks about our futile way of life, our futile behavior that we inherited from our forefathers that we were saved out of by God's Word.

And then it is used here, obviously, in a good way of our walk before God and what issues out of our obedience and our faith, a godly behavior, a godly conduct, a holy way of living. We are to remember those who have gone before and observe the outcome or the result of their holy conduct.

And the word result here is a word that is only used twice in Scripture, twice in the New Testament. Interestingly, the word result here is used to describe death outside of Scripture, but in Scripture it's used twice, once here and once in 1 Corinthians 10, verse 13.

This is interesting, listen, no temptation has overtaken you, but such as is common to man and God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will provide the, here's the word, way of escape, the way of escape, so that you will be able to endure it.

So the word is used, and it's only other New Testament reference, the word is used to describe being in a difficult and pressing circumstance, a temptation to our flesh, and God providing an escape route, the way of escape out of that.

And it suggests that what is being described here is an escape or triumph over something difficult or dangerous, a way out, escape, or an exit, or a means of escape. In other words, the result of their conduct is their escape from the same difficulties that you face.

Consider those who have gone before, or sorry, remember those who have gone before, considering or thinking upon the outcome of their escape from difficulty. Again, that's Hebrews chapter 11, it also suggests that what is being described here is the way in which they died and escaped the kind of difficulty that the readers were in their current circumstances enduring, and the kind of difficulties that you and I face.

The temptations, the tribulations, the afflictions, the physical suffering, when things don't go well, these are the difficulties that press upon us. Well they're going to press upon us all the way to the end.

You're going to be afflicted all the way to the end. You're going to be under God's discipline all the way to the end because He loves you. But eventually, there's going to come that moment of escape when you slip beyond the veil into the glories of the world to come.

And when you think about those who have gone before, think about how their faith and their faithfulness carried them not only up to death, but also into death itself, victorious and triumphant. God gave to them the exit.

Consider the outcome of their, the result, the exit of their conduct and how they lived in faithfulness. This, by the way, is the very thing that we did yesterday at a memorial service here for George Swanson.

It was great to hear his daughter, Julia, get up and talk about the faithfulness and the integrity and the testimony that he had for all of those years. And it helps us to look back upon those who have lived faithfully and then faced death well and then entered into death without ever compromising and to appreciate God for them and then to honor the integrity and the faithfulness, not by suggesting that that was the work of the person who has passed, but by recognizing that that is the testimony of one who lived faithfully for his whole life and that that itself is the work of God in the saints.

So now the author is saying to those faithful saints who have gone before us that they've gone on to be greeted by the Savior and they've been welcomed into an unshakable kingdom and give some thought to the outcome, the result, the escape of their way of life and how they finished their race.

Imitate Their Faith

And then third, imitate them. This is the word mimeomai. It sounds interesting. It's fun to say, which is why I said that. I obviously don't say every Greek word up here, but mimeomai means to copy or to imitate or to portray or to mimic.

In fact, it is the word from which we get our word mimic or mimeograph. Some of you are old enough to remember mimeograph machines, right? In fact, one of my heroes of the faith at Bible College was a man named David Pollard and down in the basement of the school, they had, for lack of a better word, a mimeograph machine that they would crank out all the school newspapers on.

And as long as David Pollard was alive, they were going to use that thing. And he would be down there cranking out papers and then he would come upstairs to teach and he would have ink on his hands and you could tell he had put on a white shirt and did his tie and there was little stains of ink all over his shirt and his tie.

He would teach a class, take all of that off, go right back down to the mimeograph machine. This word means to stamp out or to make a duplicate from something, to make a copy of it. It's used three times in the New Testament, 2 Thessalonians 3, verse 7, listen to how Paul uses it here twice, for you yourselves know how you ought to follow our example, to mimic us, to mimeograph us, because we did not act in an undisciplined manner among you nor did we eat anyone's bread without paying for it, but with labor and hardship we kept working night and day so that we would not be a burden to any of you, not because we don't have the right to this, but in order to offer ourselves as a model for you so that you would mimeograph our example, that you would mimic our example, 2 Thessalonians 3.

Then it's used negatively in 3 John, verse 11, beloved, do not imitate or mimic what.

Is evil.

You see, we have good examples and we have bad examples. Wisdom is knowing which one to follow. We have those two kinds of examples. So consider the outcome, the issue and the result, the way of escape of those who have gone before and then we are to mimic their example.

We are called to follow good examples in Scripture and I could give you a number of examples of passages here, I'll just give you a couple. First Corinthians 4, verse 16, Paul says, I exhort you be imitators of me.

First Corinthians 11, verse 1, be imitators of me just as I also am of Christ. Philippians 3, verse 17, brethren, join in following my example, Ephesians 5, 1, be imitators of God. 1 Thessalonians 1, verse 6, you became imitators of us and of the Lord.

That's a commendation by the way. 1 Thessalonians 2, verse 14, for you brethren became imitators of the churches of God. And then Hebrews 6, this word, this idea of imitation is used previously in chapter 6 where it says that you will not be sluggish but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.

There's the idea of mimicking or imitating somebody who through faith inherits what has been promised. We are to imitate those who have been, through faith, inherited the promises. We are not called to pursue some novel course that has been uncharted by others.

We are not called to be pioneers or trailblazers or innovators or inventors to invent some novel path or come up with some new way of living. That is not what we are called to do. We are called to, in the words of the independent fundamentalist Baptist movement, we are called to walk in the old paths.

That's it.

Thank you.

I knew I could get an amen for that. We are called to imitate the faith of those who have gone before. And somebody, some Johnny come lately who hops on the scene and says, hey, I have a new way of living the Christian life.

I have some new secret. Here's my new book with this, this new recipe for this. It's almost always garbage. Almost always garbage. No, it is always garbage because it's the new way of doing things. So it is always garbage.

And we're not called to be innovators, called to be imitators. And we have plenty of examples to imitate. When you were a kid and you did something that somebody else on the playground did, they would call you a copycat.

And that was the worst thing you could hear on the playground. Some kid would slide down the slide backwards and you'd think, that looks cool. I never thought of that. You'd slide down the slide backwards and he'd yell at the top of his voice, copycat, you just copy me.

And that, of course, would embarrass you and you don't want to be a copycat. As if that clown thought of going down the slide backwards. He didn't. It wasn't his invention. He probably saw it the day before and he copied that.