The letter to the Hebrews was written to believers who were tired. They had come to faith, paid a social cost for it, and the first flush of it had worn off. Some had quietly stopped gathering. So the writer, near the end of a long argument about the superiority of Christ, turns to plain, practical exhortation: consider how to spur one another on toward love and good deeds, and do not give up meeting together.
The word behind "consider" is closer to fixing your attention on something — studying it, watching for it. This is not a vague warm feeling about other Christians. It is deliberate thought about how to move another person forward in love and good deeds, the kind of thinking you give to something that matters to you.
Then comes the striking phrase: spur one another on. In Greek it is a word that normally carries the sense of provoking — provoking to anger, provoking to a fight. The writer takes that sharp word and turns it toward holy ends. Believers are meant to stir each other up, the way iron strikes iron. Not with sentiment, but with a real push toward love and good deeds.
And that push happens where people actually are: gathered. The writer names the drift plainly — some are in the habit of giving up meeting together. He does not treat it as a minor lapse. Absence from the gathering is usually where spiritual erosion begins, quietly, one missed week at a time.
Notice the two directions in this passage. You are to encourage, and you are to be encouraged. You cannot do either one alone on your sofa. Encouragement is embodied. It travels through voices, faces, shared meals, and someone remembering your name.
God is near in the silent apartment. That is true, and it is not nothing. But his ordinary way of reaching us is through one another. Which means the empty Saturday night is often not only an invitation to rest in him, but a nudge to send the message first. Joan Swee sat in that emptiness for two years before she met Joyce — and God met her there too. He does not always remove the loneliness before he sends the friend. Sometimes the reaching out is the first act of faith.
🌌Loneliness
Do Not Give Up Meeting Together
God is near in the quiet — and often sends us to reach out first.
October 15, 20266 min readNIV
And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.
— Hebrews 10:24-25 (NIV)
Paul's warning and exhortation
Today's Story
📖True Story
Joan Swee was thirty-five, with two young sons and no home of her own to return to. Her husband, Henry Chia, had died of recurrent cancer in July 1994, and the life the family had built in Hong Kong was now behind them. She came back to Singapore with the boys and with nowhere to live.
For nine months they stayed with her brother-in-law's family. Her sister-in-law hugged the boys and cared for them. Sunday School friends from the family's church came alongside, and so did the boys' godparents. In that house, Joan and her sons were held.
And still, she felt alone.
The support was real. But among her relatives and her friends, she knew no other widow — no one who had stood where she was standing, raising fatherless boys, facing a future Henry would not be in. Grief had made her fluent in a language almost no one around her spoke.
So she went looking for God's love. She attended a church retreat. She travelled to Israel with friends from church. She needed to know — really know — if God still loved her. What she came to believe on that search was that even Henry's death could not separate her from that love. That was the ground she stood on.
Two years after Henry died, she met Joyce Lye. Joyce was a widow too. Something in that meeting mattered more than either woman could have planned for. They began gathering informally with other widows, and those gatherings grew into the Wicare Support Group for widows and their children, officially established in October 1998. Joan later founded Whispering Hope Singapore, a grief-recovery consultancy.
She had wanted one person who understood. God gave her a room full of them — and then gave her a lifetime of building rooms for others.
SOURCE: “I needed to know if God still loved me”: Heartbroken widow who lost her husband, but went on to found a place for those who grieve (Salt&Light, 2021) / https://saltandlight.sg/family/i-needed-to-know-if-god-still-loved-me-heartbroken-widow/
Source citation: “I needed to know if God still loved me”: Heartbroken widow who lost her husband, but went on to found a place for those who grieve (Salt&Light, 2021) / https://saltandlight.sg/family/i-needed-to-know-if-god-still-loved-me-heartbroken-widow/
Reflection
Think About It
• Where have you quietly stopped gathering — not by a decision, but by drift — and what would it cost you to return this week? • Who near you is carrying something alone right now, and what would spurring them on toward love and good deeds look like in a message or a coffee? • In the empty hours, what do you reach for first — and what might it look like to bring that emptiness to God instead of only filling it?
Prayer
Lord, I will be honest with you. Some nights the apartment is very quiet, and the quiet is not peaceful — it is loud with everything I am carrying. I have people I could call, and I do not call. I have been left out of the conversation, and I have also been the one who withdrew. How long, O Lord?
I know you are here. I believe it even when I do not feel it. But I need your people too, and I need to be your people for someone else. Give me the courage to reach out first, to send the message, to sit with someone the way your Son sat with us.
You have never once given up on meeting with me. Yet I will trust you — and today I will trust you enough to reach for someone else. Amen.
Live It Out
Send one message today to someone you have lost touch with, or invite a person for coffee. Do it before the day ends, while it is still a small, ordinary act of obedience.