Hebrews 13 is not mainly about leadership, even though verse 7 says to imitate your leaders, and verse 17 says to obey and gladden your leaders, and verse 24 says to greet your leaders. This chapter is mainly about a radical Christian way of life, which is purchased by Jesus Christ through his suffering, and then worked out through us by God the Father through Christ.

Nevertheless, as much as any other chapter in the New Testament, Hebrews 13 relates that radical Christian way of life to the leadership of the church. So, in an unusual way, this chapter gives me the opportunity to summon you, South Cities Church, to this radical Christian way of life, and to draw attention to the gift that you and I have received for 35 years in David Livingston’s pastoral leadership.

Let me draw your attention to the radical Christian way of life in this chapter, and then we’ll focus on how it was purchased for us by Jesus and how it is worked out through us by God the Father through Jesus. Then we’ll close with a look at how leadership in the church relates to all of that, as we give thanks for God’s faithfulness to us and to David and Karin Livingston, in 52 years of pastoral ministry.

Four Marks of Radical Christian Living

The first six verses of the chapter give some examples of this radical Christian way of living. They address brotherly love, hospitality, compassion for imprisoned Christians, marital fidelity, and the dangers of the love of money.

Let brotherly love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body. Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous. Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have. (Hebrews 13:1–5)

So, the first and overarching command is to keep on loving each other in the Christian community (v. 1). Then he gives four examples of what love looks like.

First, open your homes to Christians in need (v. 2). This command is not mainly about friends hanging out; it is mainly about Christians being driven out of certain areas into others and having no place to stay. They need brothers and sisters to open their homes, lest they sleep on the streets. You can tell that this verse is mainly about strangers because it says you might wind up “entertain[ing] angels unawares.” If you were not aware that it was an angel, clearly you didn’t know the person. The people you know are not angels. They are people you don’t know, which is one reason I call it a radical way of life.

Second, when fellow Christians are arrested and put in prison, be courageous enough to go visit them and supply what they need, even if you risk getting in trouble (v. 3).

Third, never commit adultery, and never commit fornication (v. 4). Notice how at the end of this verse both kinds of sexual immorality are mentioned: “God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous.” In other words, sexual immorality before marriage and in marriage is not only about your own personal purity before God, but also about being a loving person toward others.

“Jesus died to provide not only pardon for sins, but also power to stop sinning and start loving.”

We are still under the banner of verse 1. It is never, ever loving to sleep with somebody who is not your spouse. It doesn’t matter how good it feels. If you, as a man, sleep with a woman who is not your spouse, you are hating her. And if you, as a woman, yield to a man who is not your spouse, you are hating him. I say that because, as you can see at the end of verse 4, you are confirming the other person in the path of God’s judgment. Only sexual purity is an act of love, no matter how “loving” sexual immorality feels.

And fourth, keep your life free from the love of money (v. 5). Covetousness and greed are great love-killers. As soon as money-craving takes over your heart, love for people moves to the back burner (at best). Money and God, Jesus said, cannot both be your God (Matthew 6:24). And when God is not your God, you can’t love people — not in a way that honors God and does people good forever.

So, there’s a glimpse of the radical Christian life that Hebrews 13 is calling for: persevering, sacrificial love expressed in open, welcoming homes; compassion for persecuted, imprisoned Christians; sexual purity inside and outside marriage; and putting greed to death so that the love of money does not get in the way of loving people.

Radical Through and Through

There are several other references to this radical Christian life. Notice verses 12–13: “Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood. Therefore let us go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured.” That’s a picture of a lifestyle of risk-taking. Going “outside the camp” means going outside the places we feel secure. Christians move toward need, not comfort. And “bear[ing] the reproach he endured” means that we are willing to follow Jesus into the very circumstances where we know people will not like us.

Verses 15–16 give us another look at the radical Christian life for which this chapter calls:

Through [Christ] then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name. Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.

So, there are two kinds of sacrifices we are called to make: the sacrifice of lips in praise to God (v. 15) and the sacrifice of life in practical service as we seek to meet needs (v. 16). When this passage says, “Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God,” we know that this “doing good” is the same as what we saw in verses 1–5 — namely, love, hospitality, prison ministry, not defrauding anyone sexually, freedom from greed.

Let’s look at one last reference in the chapter to this radical Christian life: verses 20–21. It’s part of the closing benediction, which says, “May God . . . equip you with everything good that you may do his will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.” Doing God’s will — namely, doing what is pleasing in his sight — is the aim of the Christian life.

So, that’s the radical Christian way of life Hebrews 13 calls for: doing God’s will, pleasing him (v. 21); doing good, sharing what you have as a kind of sacrifice to God, praising him at all times (vv. 15–16); and persevering love, open homes, compassion for prisoners, sexual fidelity, and freedom from the love of money (vv. 1–5).

Purchased for Us

We turn now to the origin of such a way of life. Where does it come from? I suggested it was purchased for us by Jesus and worked out through us by God the Father through Jesus. Where do I see that? First, consider verses 9–12:

Do not be led away by diverse and strange teachings, for it is good for the heart to be strengthened by grace, not by foods, which have not benefited those devoted to them. We have an altar from which those who serve the tent have no right to eat. For the bodies of those animals whose blood is brought into the holy places by the high priest as a sacrifice for sin are burned outside the camp. So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood.

The “diverse and strange teachings” of verse 9 are tempting Christians to go back to Jewish sacrifices and to get strength from eating meat that has been sacrificed on a Jewish altar, the remains burned outside the camp. To this the writer says, “No!” As verse 9 puts it, we will be strengthened by grace, not foods. Then he compares Christ to the old sacrifices to show where the power for our sanctification — for this new way of life — comes from. Verse 12: “So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood.”

Jesus has taken the place of all animal sacrifices. His blood replaces and brings to an end all blood-shedding as a way of strengthening or purifying God’s people. From now on, all our strength comes from the grace purchased by Jesus’s sacrifice.

And notice in verse 12 precisely what he suffered to achieve: “Jesus suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood.” In other words, this radical, sanctified way of living that we have seen in Hebrews 13 was purchased for us by the blood of Jesus. Jesus died to provide not only pardon for sins, but also power to stop sinning and start loving.

It’s power for sanctification, power for the radical Christian life that Hebrews 13 describes. God’s power for this kind of life flows to us because the death of Jesus removes the barriers of guilt and wrath. When they are gone, omnipotent grace flows out to help us live this life.

Worked Out Through Us

I said this life was not only purchased for us by Jesus, but also worked out through us by God the Father through Jesus. You can see this fact in the chapter’s beautiful benediction, verses 20–21, which we partially read before:

Now may the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant, equip you with everything good that you may do his will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.

The radical Christian life of Hebrews 13 is not only purchased by Jesus; it is worked out through us by God the Father through Jesus. We see this twice in verse 21: he “equip[s us] with everything good that [we] may do his will,” and he “work[s] in us that which is pleasing in his sight.” This is how it happens. We don’t just wind up our willpower and become radical risk-takers. It’s a gift. It’s a miracle. God works in us and through us.

And one of the ways he does this work is by securing all his promises for us in Christ. How shall we be freed from the love of money? How shall we be freed from the deceitful promise of sexual sins? How shall we have the courage to visit the prison and open our homes and take the risks of love? How can we have contentment in God that frees us for risk-taking love? Look back at verses 5–6: “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?’”

“We break the back of sin’s deceitful promises by believing the superior promises of God.”

We break the back of sin’s deceitful promises by believing the superior promises of God, who says, “I’ll never leave you. I’ll never forsake you. I’ll always help you. Don’t be afraid of strangers, prisons, a lifetime of sexual chastity, or the scarcity of money. Don’t be afraid to go outside the camp. Don’t be afraid. Trust me. Look to the blood of Jesus, and realize how committed I am to you! I will keep my promises.”

Imitate the Faith of Past Leaders

We have seen the radical Christian life Hebrews 13 calls for, and we’ve seen the way Christ purchased this radical, holy life by his blood, alongside the way the Father works it in us through Christ by his superior promises. Now we look, finally, at how leadership in the church relates to all of this, as we give thanks for God’s faithfulness to us and to David and Karin, through 52 years of pastoral ministry. Three times, the writer calls us to think about our leaders in the church.

Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. (Hebrews 13:7–8)

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. (Hebrews 13:17)

Greet all your leaders and all the saints. (Hebrews 13:24)

The “leaders” of verse 7 are leaders of the past. You can see this in the words remember (your leaders), spoke (to you), and outcome (of their way of life). Evidently, significant leaders had passed off the scene. They had spoken the word of God. They had modeled a life of faith.

The way these leaders relate to this radical Christian life of love is that they spoke it and they lived it. They spoke the word of God — the will of God and the work of God in Christ. And they lived a life of faith in God’s promises. This is Christian leadership: preach the word, and practice what you preach. Then the job of the church is to listen to the word, to look at the life, and to imitate the faith. After 52 years of pastoral leadership in three churches, David Livingston never brought any reproach on the gospel. He has spoken it, and he has lived it, and many of us have been inspired to imitate it.

I think the reason this word about leaders in verse 7 is followed by verse 8, which says, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever,” is because the writer wants us to realize that even though those beloved leaders are gone, Jesus is not gone. The Jesus those leaders trusted — the Jesus that enabled them to live the radical life of risk-taking love — is the same Jesus who is alive and at work in the church now. The turnover of leadership is never a turnover of lordship. He is the same yesterday and today and forever.

Gladden the Hearts of Present Leaders

But the leaders in verse 17 are present, not past: “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.” The basic idea is this: when your leaders — your elders — bring forward a proposal, a vision, a plan, let your inner response be support, not suspicion.

We know that all the biblical relationships of authority and submission are not absolute. Government and citizen, husband and wife, parent and child, master and servant, pastors and people — all of these imply real authority, but it is not absolute. Allegiance to Jesus is always greater than allegiance to any human authority. Nevertheless, God has put in place these authority structures for the good of his people and the good of the world. In a healthy church, the elders are wise and loving shepherd-leaders, and the people are glad supporters of that leadership.

But the really unusual thing about verse 17 is the second half: “Let [the leaders] do this [watch-care over your souls] with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you.” In other words, your job as a church is to gladden the hearts of your pastors and elders. Do all you reasonably can to make the ministry of your pastors a happy ministry. Why? Because a sullen pastor, a groaning pastor, will be of no advantage to you.

“If you seek the gladness of your pastors, you seek the health of your own souls.”

Which has this amazing implication: If a pastor does not find his own delight in serving his people, he will be of no advantage to them, and he will not be loving them. To love them is to delight in serving them. Unhappy pastors make unhealthy churches. This means that if the people would be a happy and healthy people — if they would flourish in this radical, risk-taking life — they must seek the joy of their leaders. If you seek the gladness of your pastors, you seek the health of your own souls.

Over Fifty Years Faithful

So, David, thank you for speaking the word of God to your people — to Olivet and to Elkhorn, to Bethlehem and to South Cities Church, in season and out of season, to groups large and small. Thank you that the outcome of your faith has been 52 years of ministry unsullied by moral failure. You have never brought disrepute on the people of God. Your stability and constancy in Christ are worthy of imitation.

And thank you for being a glad pastor, a happy partner in the work. We were on the same pastoral team at Bethlehem for 26 years. We have been friends for almost 50 years. You have been a rock of happy constancy for me in the ups and downs. You have made me healthier in the ministry and in my marriage, and you have been a glad shepherd of a healthy South Cities Church from the beginning. We thank you.

The other text about leaders in this chapter is verse 24, which simply says, “Greet all your leaders.” You might say that this is what this day is for — to greet you and Karin and to say, “Well done.”

The word priority refers to “precedence in time or rank.” A priority is the “thing regarded as more important than another or others.”

Interestingly, according to the Google Books Ngram, the use of the word priority in English spiked in use around 1940 (leading up to and during WWII), then plateaued in the fifties. Then usage rose again sharply in the sixties and seventies, and priority enjoyed its heyday in the eighties and nineties. Since around 2000, usage has declined precipitously and returned about to where it was in the 1960s. And I can’t help but wonder if our ability to prioritize well, or the energy and attention we give to prioritizing well, may have declined with the use of the word. (And how it relates to the advent of the Internet in the same twenty-five-year period!)

Priority can be a tricky concept. To prioritize one entity over another clearly means something, but it services a range of applications. And in this session of talking about the priority of the church, however theological we take it, this inevitably relates to our priorities, both as Christians, and in particular as pastors — since this is a pastors conference. It would be one thing to speak to the priority of the church in a local-church congregation — or imagine this, to a gathering of Christian lawyers or athletes. And we could. I hope we will.

But brothers, this is a pastors conference. This is a message for lead officers in local churches (variously called pastors, elders, overseers — three names for one lead office in the New Testament). And the applications here of “the priority of the church” are especially significant for those whose breadwinning vocation is leading and teaching the local church. I know there are nonvocational pastors in the room with other breadwinning jobs. But for the vocational guys, the full-time pastors, there is no vocational disconnect between Christ’s priority of his church and ours. If Christ’s priority is echoed practically and substantiated anywhere, where will that be if not first and foremost in the lead officers who are the church’s preachers and teachers?

Paul’s Pastoral Priority

And so, we come to Ephesians 3, and especially verse 10, which is not a complete sentence:

. . . so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.

In chapter 2, the first half (verses 1–10) has celebrated our salvation in Christ by grace through faith, and then the second half has marveled at the stunning (horizontal) development of Gentile inclusion. For centuries, God focused publicly on the Jews. He prioritized Israel. By and large, Gentiles were separated from the true God, “alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world” (2:12). They were “far off” (2:13, 17).

But now, amazingly, in Christ, even Gentiles “have been brought near by the blood of Christ” (2:13). Jesus “has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility [between Jews and Gentiles] by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two” (2:14–15).

This reality, this “one new man,” made up of believing Jews and Gentiles, Paul has already called “the church” in 1:22, and that’s the term he uses again in 3:10 (and then 3:21 and then six times in 5:23–32).

In 3:1, Paul starts moving toward a prayer. He writes, “For this reason I, Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus on behalf of you Gentiles . . .” Then he breaks off and gives us the glorious aside of verses 2–13. He’ll come back to his prayer in verse 14, but first he wants to make sure we understand his special calling, and then the church’s. Paul’s is “the stewardship of God’s grace that was given to me for you” (3:2). He then speaks about “the mystery of Christ” — which is not an unsolved mystery but one that now has been made known. Previously it was hidden, until Jesus came. Now, it’s revealed. What is this mystery, once unsolved, now made known? Verses 6–11:

This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.

Of this gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace, which was given me by the working of his power. To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things, so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. This was according to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord.

I take it that our focus in this session is this: What is the priority of the church for Christians? And in particular, for pastors: What’s the priority of the church for us? That’s where we’re headed: “The Church Prioritized” in the hearts and habits of her members and her ministers.

But might we first get our bearings, and spend our best focus, on a far more important prioritizer? Ephesians 3 is not concerned with our prioritizing. Not yet. Rather, here we marvel at God’s prioritizing of the church. And not just God as one, but also God as three.

So, before we get to us, as Christians and as pastors, let’s look at the priority of the church for God the Father, for God the Son, and for God the Spirit. (And hopefully this will be an exercise in proper prioritizing!) So, four truths about the priority of the church, with our hearts and habits coming last.

1. The Father prioritizes the church in his plan and purpose.

Verse 9 mentions his “plan”; verse 11, his “eternal purpose.” Let’s pick it up at verse 9:

[Paul’s calling is] to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things. . . . This was according to the eternal purpose that [the Father] has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord. (verses 9, 11)

Verse 11 mentions God’s “eternal purpose” (prothesin), and verse 9, “the plan [oikonomia] of the mystery hidden for ages [and now revealed] in God, who created all things.” It’s the same language Paul has already used in Ephesians 1:9–11. In the gospel, he says,

[God has made] known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan [oikonomian] for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose [prothesin] of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will.

God the Father has an eternal purpose, before creation, and he has a plan that he works out, in his perfect timing, in history — as Lord of creation and Lord of history.

What is this eternal purpose and plan? Now we need chapter 3, verse 10. Paul says he preaches to bright to light God’s plan,

that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.

We have three parts here to verse 10 (working backward): (1) the rulers and authorities, (2) the manifold wisdom of God, and (3) how all that relates to the church.

Rulers and Authorities

In Ephesians 6:12, Paul will write — and this might be a helpful reminder in times when algorithms condition us for digital “culture war” — “We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” And we have “in the heavenly places” here in Ephesians 3:10 as well.

“The rulers and authorities” are minimally, or mainly, “spiritual forces of evil,” the devil and demons, “the cosmic powers over this present darkness.” They are not earthly creatures, but heavenly ones, in the upper register or another dimension (however it works). And we might assume that good angels are looking on as well, as Peter says of the good news of Jesus — of his sufferings and subsequent glories, of his grace and our salvation — these are “things into which angels long to look” (1 Peter 1:12).

So, Ephesians 3:10 expands the audience. Previously, Paul has talked of (potentially) preaching “for everyone” (3:9) on earth, Jews and Gentiles, but now he says that also in view (presently) are “the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.”

Manifold Wisdom of God

God’s wisdom is what lies behind and is revealed alongside this mystery long hidden and now revealed in Christ. Remember what we saw in verse 6: “This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.”

God’s wisdom becomes evident in the great unveiling that is the preaching of Christ. And God’s wisdom is said to be manifold, many-sided, varied. The gospel may be a simple message, and yet the divine wisdom it reveals is no simple, basic, one-dimensional wisdom.

The gospel of Christ overturns and surpasses and puts to shame the wisdom of man, and does so over and over again. That God would become man, with an ignoble birth and childhood in a backwater; that he would live in obscurity for three decades, and be despised and rejected by his own people at the height of his influence, and be crucified (of all deaths!) as a slave; then, after rising from the dead, that he would ascend and be enthroned in heaven (not in Rome), and pour out his Spirit, and bring the far-off Gentiles near with believing Jews into his new-covenant church — this is stunning, multifaceted, many-sided wisdom!

In the simple gospel of Christ, the manifold wisdom of God is on display in turning upside down the world’s wisdom and strength and nobility. Christ crucified is “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:23–24).

“There is no more important gathering in the world than the church.”

And that phrase “both Jews and Greeks” — in one body, one new man from the two — is at the heart of what makes the wisdom of God so horrifying to “the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” (As Paul preached in Athens, “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent,” Acts 17:30.)

Which leads us to the last key phrase in verse 10: “through the church.”

Through the Church

How does God’s making known his manifold wisdom, to the hosts of angels and demons, relate to the church?

My prayer here, for us as pastors, is that God might be pleased to lift our eyes up from the ordinariness and the smallness and the annoyances and the frustrations of everyday practical church life — that we might see the church more like our God sees his church. In the immeasurable riches of his divine and Trinitarian fullness — infinitely happy, and overflowing in joy and creative energy and redeeming grace — our God, in the gospel of his Son, is making known his manifold wisdom to the spiritual forces of evil.

And how does he do it? Verse 10 says “through the church” — not armies, not technology, not sports, not entertainment, not political maneuvering — but “through the church the manifold wisdom of God [is] now be[ing] made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.”

The church is his chosen instrument for showing the cosmic powers, good and evil, “the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!” (Romans 11:33). The reality and existence of the church — this seemingly unimpressive, lowly, ignoble, unwise, unwealthy, unaccomplished body of local Christians, covenanted to each other — his ragtag church, this otherwise unremarkable church shows Satan and his minions that their time is short. In effect: “You see the church, believing Gentiles joining with the Jews as one body? Checkmate.”

How does that work? God the Son takes human flesh and lives a lowly life in obscurity for thirty years. Then, just when he really begins to turn heads, Jews and Gentiles conspire to cut him down and end the story. The crucifixion looks like utter folly, not manifold wisdom. Then he rises again! But forty days later, he ascends to heaven and is gone. Now what? From heaven’s throne, the risen Christ pours out his Spirit, his gospel spreads through faith and repentance, and the church begins to grow and increase and multiply, and not only among Jews, but also Gentiles.

And as the church spreads from city to city and nation to nation, the seeming folly of the incarnation and the cross and the ascension is shown visibly to be manifold wisdom. Not all the earth sees it yet, but all the heavens do. And as this gospel advances, and the church grows, and Gentiles stream into the church, the manifold wisdom shines ever brighter.

So, the church — normal, local, ragtag, seemingly unimpressive, including Gentiles — bursts with spectacular cosmic significance, demonstrates the manifold wisdom of God, and shows the evil powers the surety of their doom.

God channels his global glory specially through his church. He is making known his manifold wisdom, not just in the physical realm but also in the spiritual — for all the universe to see. And how? Through the church.

Brothers, the main thing happening in the world right now, and at all times, is what Jesus Christ is doing in and through his church. And you are pastors! Is this still your priority?

In reflecting on the Father prioritizing the church in his purpose and plan, I couldn’t help but think about how Jonathan Edwards, on several occasions, writes of how God made the world to prepare a bride for his Son:

The spouse of the Son of God, the Lamb’s wife . . . is that for which all of the universe was made. Heaven and earth were created that the Son of God might be complete in a spouse. (Works of Jonathan Edwards, 13:271)

God created the world for His Son, that He might prepare a spouse or bride for Him to bestow His love upon; so that the mutual joys between this bride and bridegroom are the end of the creation. (Works, 13:374)

The creation of the world seems to have been especially for this end, that the eternal Son of God might obtain a spouse, toward whom he might fully exercise the infinite benevolence of his nature, and to whom he might, as it were, open and pour forth all that immense fountain of condescension, love, and grace that was in his heart, and that in this way God might be glorified. (Works, 25:187)

Let’s say more, then, about the Son.

2. The Son prioritizes the church in his purchase and his presiding.

Enthroned in heaven, Christ now presides over the universe. He reigns over all. He rules over the nations and the angelic realm with sovereign power, all authority in heaven and on earth given to him. And as he presides, he prioritizes his church.

We could turn to John 17 to see his priority, but let’s stay here in Ephesians: first, chapter 5, verses 23–30.

Chapter 5 makes the connection between human marriage and Christ and his church. Now, Paul’s “mystery” language relates to marriage. What was hidden for ages, and now revealed, is that all along, from the garden until now, human marriage has been patterned on the Son’s love for his church. And in our considering how the Son prioritizes his church, we have here both the decisive act, at the cross, in the past (the purchase), and his present attention to the church, as he reigns in heaven (presiding), for the good of his church.

In the past, says verse 25, referring to the cross, “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” Jesus prioritized the church in his sacrificial death — to say the very least. He did not simply love humanity in general and so go to the cross to make salvation possible to any who might later decide to take him up on it. Rather, he loved the church, Paul says. He gave himself up for her. He had his bride in view, his people, his flock, his church. It was a particular redemption, a specific purchase, a definite atonement. Sufficient as his cross is for the sins of all, it is effective for his church. As Paul says in Acts 20:28, the Son obtained the church with his own blood.

But that’s not all. There are also present dimensions in verses 26–27:

[Jesus died] that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.

Then, verses 29–30:

No one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.

The Son bought the church with his own blood. And the Son rules the universe to sanctify her, cleanse her, wash her, prepare her to be presented to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any smear or smudge. From heaven’s throne, he nourishes and cherishes his church as his own body. He builds her and protects her and upholds her. He pays special attention to his church and her progress and health and joy.

The old confessions refer to this priority of the church as his “most special manner.” Westminster and 1689 say, “As the Providence of God doth in general reach to all Creatures, so after a most special manner it taketh care of his Church, and disposeth of all things to the good thereof” (5.7).

But there is one more thing we might say from Ephesians about the priority of the church in the eyes of the Son — which Michael Reeves celebrated for us so well last night as the climax of Ephesians 1: the church is “the fullness of him who fills all in all” (1:23).

The church, as his body, not only receives his care; the body also acts for him and from him. The head acts through his body. The body extends the will and heart and grace and designs of the head out into the world. Christ fulfills Adam’s mandate to fill the earth as the church grows and increases and multiplies — as his fullness, the church, fills all in all.

What priority, what privilege, what an unimaginably elevated role for the church — not only as beneficiaries but as agents, actors, arms, legs, hands, feet.

“Pastoral work is ‘get to’ work, not ‘have to’ work.”

So, what is Jesus doing in the world today? He is building his church, purifying his church, nourishing his church, cherishing his church — prioritizing his church. Yes, he rules over wars and natural disasters, over human sin, and over Satan, over rulers and authorities — and in it all, and through it all, his priority is building his church, and through his church extending the fullness of his reign to every tongue and tribe and people.

We have observed Christ’s “most special manner,” his priority of the church. What about the Spirit?

3. The Spirit prioritizes the church in his power.

Talk as we might about how the Spirit is active in the world outside the church — upholding the natural order, extending God’s common kindness, inspiring and assisting works of justice and mercy, and even industry and art and literature — when we look at what the Spirit does in Ephesians, and throughout the New Testament, it’s fair to say at minimum that he prioritizes the church. (The language of priority feels grossly inadequate.)

Just in Ephesians:

Those who believe the gospel, he seals “for the day of redemption” (1:13; 4:30).
He is given to us, as “the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of [God]” (1:17).
He gives us access to the Father (2:18).
By him, we “are being built together into a dwelling place for God” (2:22).
By him, the gospel has been revealed to the prophets and apostles (3:5).
By him, we are strengthened with divine power (3:16).
He is “the power at work within us” (3:20).
He unifies the church (4:3).
He fills us, leading us to address “one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart” and to give “thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” and to submit “to one another out of reverence for Christ” (5:18–21).
“The sword of the Spirit . . . is the word of God” and our offensive weapon (6:17).
He even helps us pray (6:18).

And when Paul finishes his glorious aside in chapter 3 (verses 2–13) and begins his prayer in 3:14, he prays in essence for the Spirit’s work in the church. And just to round out chapter 3, this prayer for the Spirit’s work in the church, which comes with the confidence that he will indeed answer this prayer, spills over into the doxology celebrating God’s ability “to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think.” And again the priority of the church is striking:

Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen. (3:20–21)

How is God being glorified in our world today, and at this time? Stand in awe: in the church and in Christ Jesus. Through Christ, seated in heaven, and through his church, displaying him around the world in every major city and advancing on every tongue, tribe, people, and nation.

So, the Spirit seals, builds, reveals, strengthens, and fills the church. The bride of Christ is his priority (to say the least). However much he works (unsavingly) outside the church, his work is decidedly, emphatically, pronouncedly asymmetrical. He prioritizes the church.

4. We prioritize the church in our hearts and our habits.

Finally, then, what about the priority of the church in our lives?

Our Christian Priorities

1. We adopt the priorities of the Father, Son, and Spirit and resolve to rehearse the glories that our world conditions us to forget. Jesus Christ has triumphed and sat down at his Father’s right hand. He, our head, rules over the universe, and does so, amazingly, for and through the church. Don’t be snookered by the unbelieving world that what matters most is politics and sports, or whatever else seems for the moment so electric with importance. There is no more important gathering in the world than the church.

2. We prioritize the church over all other groups and associations in our lives, whether Christian or otherwise: institutions, workplaces, neighborhoods, teams, even ministries. In time, they all will perish. God will roll them up like a garment, but not the church. The church will remain. She will go through the final fire and endure. In time, the gates of Hades will prevail against all other societies, but not against the church.

3. We prioritize the church in the good we seek to do in the world. Among other good we might seek to do in our cities and towns, most important is our involvement in the body of Christ, in which eternal human souls find rescue from eternal suffering. As pastors, we help our people realize, whatever their vocation, that their single most important involvement for the good of others, among other noble causes, is engaging with and investing in the life, health, and mission of the local church.

4. We prioritize the church in our affection for individual believers. We learn to love with the eyes of Jesus: the weak, ignoble, and foolish (in the world’s eyes!) to whom we are joined, in Christ, in his church.

5. We take care to leverage what a resource we have in the church: for counseling and advice, for arbitration in disputes among Christians:

When one of you has a grievance against another, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints? Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases? Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much more, then, matters pertaining to this life! So if you have such cases, why do you lay them before those who have no standing in the church? (1 Corinthians 6:1–4)

6. We prioritize the church through covenant membership. Committing to a particular local church, and actively fulfilling our covenant, is the first concrete way the priority of the church takes root in our lives. We voice such a priority implicitly in our church covenants, as we make promises to each other to be the church for each other, not just in the good and easy times, but the bad. That’s what covenants are especially for: the hard times. It’s easy to stay with a church when it’s easy. It’s hard to stay when it’s hard. The priority of the church in our hearts finds expression in covenant membership in a particular local church. Christians will not adequately prioritize the church without committing to the fellowship and being held accountable.

Our Pastoral Priorities

Last, what about us as pastors?

1. Marvel at this calling. Brother pastors, without minimizing the righteous vocations of any non-pastors in our congregations, can you believe that we get to do this work? Pastoral work is “get to” work, not “have to” work. You don’t have to do this. You can get out of it if you’ve been stuck on “have to” for too long. I know there are hard days and hard seasons; there are stresses and strains that make our “get to” work feel like “have to” work. But brothers, in light of the Godhead’s priority of the church, is there any greater privilege and blessing in vocational life than getting to work on the one institution that has the special attention of God and over which the gates of Hades will not prevail?

If the rough and tumble of ministry has caused your vision of the church and its priority to get small and dull and boring, ask God to raise your head. Linger in Ephesians 1–3. Ask God to put his church back where it belongs on the map of your heart.

2. Seek to win your people to prioritize the church in their schedules. Some want “family-friendly churches” — to cater to their family idolatry. What if we cast a vision for “church-friendly families”? Instead of presuming the church adjust to dozens or hundreds of families, what if godly dads and moms adjusted their family rhythms to prioritize the church? What if we built our family lives around the few but important weekly flashpoints of church life?

3. Hold your people accountable to their membership covenant. The pastors set the tone for how seriously the congregation takes church membership. If the pastors aren’t diligent to oversee the flock, give regular upkeep to the roster, and pursue drifting members, your people will treat their church membership as a small, empty reality, and they will not prioritize the church.

4. In light of the priority of the church in the Godhead, we pastors might resist the temptation to ask less and less of people. When overly busy congregants complain that the church is doing too much or offering too much or gathering too often or for too long, we might patiently, graciously resist the impulse. We might say, “No, we’re not going to keep cutting and shortening and abbreviating and rushing. This is a priority in our lives as Christians — over work demands, over hobbies, over personal and family conveniences and comforts. We’re not going to apologize for opening the church doors. We’re not going to apologize for gathering Christ’s people for worship, for teaching, for prayer, for meals together. Church is priority enough to arrive early and stay late.”

5. In our own lives, exercise wisdom with news, social media, hobbies, and entertainment (including ESPN). Brothers, if you take out your phones and go to Settings, then Screen Time, you can see how many minutes per day are you on ESPN, or X (which is now largely overrun with politics), or some other social media, or YouTube TV, or Netflix. Do you know what you’re likely not doing well while you’re there in the digital world? Just a sampling: Communing with the risen Christ. Husbanding. Fathering. Pastoring a flock of eternal souls for whom you will give an account. That doesn’t mean there’s no space for rhythms of life and rest and pastimes and news. But that is a precious list to let slide.

Brothers, how much news? There was no telegraph until the mid-1800s. No radio until the 1920s. No television until the 1950s. No cable until the 1980s. No round-the-clock, nonstop news until 9/11, and until news (and commentary on it) essentially took over what was formerly social media, which continued the takeover of news by content that is more or less political. Today, without even trying at all (but just living in society), you will be far more informed and aware of national and world events than even the most diligent news-lovers could have been just two hundred years ago. Without even trying.

Would you fancy yourself a man “of Issachar” with “understanding of the times” to know what Christians ought to do and tweet about it (1 Chronicles 12:32)? Perhaps consider a serious audit and on your social media and news consumption. No wise, healthy pastor can just go with the world’s flow and saunter through the digital world without great vigilance.

6. If your priorities have drifted — over years, or through coasting, or through getting interested in other things, or through the disorientation of the pandemic and recent years — return to your former love and priorities. Perhaps as the years have passed, with complex influences and pressures, have you become “entangled in civilian pursuits,” to use the image of 2 Timothy 2:4?

What started as being where your people are, to provide spiritual leadership for them, has slowly become, over time, entanglement in secular affairs and undue distraction from your calling. I pray this conference is an opportunity to freshly see the glory of your work and make midcourse corrections, if needed.

7. Enjoy being a man of the Book. This last point is another “get to” point. Start your day in the Book. Linger over God’s word, without hurry, steeping your soul in it, meditating on it. And if you daily set your mind on the things above, you will become and remain the kind of man who prioritizes the church and whose instincts and heartbeat prioritize the church. You won’t first and foremost think of human solutions to the deepest, most intractable problems in our world, but you’ll think of conversion to Christ and life in his church — and perhaps God would be pleased to use that to restore to you the deep, durable joys of the pastoral calling.

In July of 1741, a 37-year-old Jonathan Edwards grabbed a sermon already preached in Northampton and took it on the road to Enfield. There it was “attended with remarkable Impressions on many of the Hearers.”1 Edwards spoke of sinners in the hands of an angry God and grace to those in Christ in a message that would come to represent the First Great Awakening. “What are we,” Edwards asked, “that we should think to stand before him, at whose rebuke the earth trembles, and before whom the rocks are thrown down?”

Thirty years later, the spirit of Edwards was alive and well — yet in a most unlikely place and through a most unlikely pen. In August of 1772, a hurricane, described as “one of the most dreadful . . . that memory or any records whatever can trace,”2 swept through the Caribbean island of St. Croix. The fury came at dusk and “raged very violently till ten o’clock.” Then followed the eye, “a sudden and unexpected interval, which lasted about an hour.” Finally came four more hours of “redoubled fury . . . till near three o’clock in the morning.”

A few days later, after hearing a Sunday sermon, “a Youth of [the] Island,”3 seventeen years old, composed a letter to his derelict father, who was living on another island. The youth wrote, “It seemed as if a total dissolution of nature was taking place. . . . In a word, misery, in all its most hideous shapes, spread over the whole face of the country.” But this rare teen, in Edwards-like fashion, saw more than natural causation: “That which, in a calm unruffled temper, we call a natural cause, seemed then like the correction of the Deity.”4

Reforming Influences

It was no accident that this youth, named Alexander Hamilton, would take up such a perspective on the hurricane. Earlier that year, a Princeton graduate and pastor named Hugh Knox (1733–1790) had arrived on the island, discovered the precocious orphan, and begun to serve as a spiritual father to him.

In the 1750s, Knox had been student and good friend of Aaron Burr Sr. (1716–1757), founder and second president of the college in Princeton, New Jersey. Burr had married Esther Edwards, Jonathan’s third child (of eleven), and Burr himself greatly admired Edwards. Knox admired Burr. Now the young Hamilton sat at the feet of Knox, on September 6, 1772, as he preached on the hurricane. Later that day, the young Hamilton, imbibing the Calvinist theology, sat to compose the now-famous letter to his father.

Hamilton’s Christian interests cooled as they were eclipsed by political ambition and zeal for his work.

Doubtless, the first time Hamilton would have heard the name “Aaron Burr” was from Knox, speaking about the father, rather than his son. Burr Sr. died in 1757, just a year after the birth of his son. (Edwards then became the third president at Princeton and would have raised his grandson, Aaron Jr., had Edwards not died of a botched smallpox inoculation in 1758.)

In the fall of 1772, Knox was so impressed with Hamilton’s hurricane letter that he steered it to the local paper (published October 3, 1772), and it became the occasion for raising funds to send this gifted “Youth of this Island” to the mainland, in hopes he would study, as Knox had, at the college in Princeton.

‘Adore Thy God’

What did the seventeen-year-old Hamilton write? The hurricane had thundered, he claimed, “Despise thyself and adore thy God.” Yet Hamilton, in his Christian faith, found refuge:

See thy wretched helpless state, and learn to know thyself. Learn to know thy best support. Despise thyself, and adore thy God. . . . What have I to dread? My staff can never be broken — in Omnipotence I trusted. . . . He who gave the winds to blow, and the lightnings to rage — even him have I always loved and served. His precepts have I observed. His commandments have I obeyed — and his perfections have I adored. He will snatch me from ruin. He will exalt me to the fellowship of Angels and Seraphs, and to the fullness of never ending joys.

The young Hamilton then exhorts his readers, “Oh vain mortal! Check thy ill timed joy,” and he ends with this plea: “Oh Lord help. Jesus be merciful!”5

That same year, Hamilton wrote a Christian hymn, one that his future wife, Eliza, would come to prize and cling to during the half-century she outlived him. In the hymn, Hamilton confessed,

O Lamb of God! thrice gracious LordNow, now I feel how true thy word.6

Yet this early Hamilton is not the one we typically remember today, nor the one celebrated in the award-winning musical (which Lin-Manuel Miranda spent seven years writing, from 2008 until its debut on Broadway in 2015).

What Hamilton is perhaps most famous for is the circumstances of his death, in a so-called “affair of honor.” In the summer of 1804, Hamilton took a duel with Edwards’s grandson, Aaron Burr Jr., who was the sitting vice president of the United States. Strangely enough, citing Christian conviction, Hamilton “threw away his shot” by not firing at his opponent. Burr, however, took aim and struck his rival. Hamilton died 31 hours later on July 12, 1804.

Hamilton’s Four Stages

Remarkably, in 2004, Ron Chernow’s eight-hundred-page biography began the work of doing justice to Hamilton’s memory in the twenty-first century. More than a decade later, Miranda’s musical, inspired by the biography and with Chernow as historical consultant, sent Hamilton skyrocketing back into broader American awareness — and just in time to save his face on the ten-dollar bill.

Of our interest, Hamilton seems to have experienced a Christian conversion, under Reformed (and Edwardsean) teaching, when the Great Awakening came to the West Indies in the early 1770s. Yet from a Christian perspective, Hamilton’s story is complicated, to say the least.

In his late teens, he professed faith, wrote hymns and commentaries on the Bible, and daily knelt to pray. But in his youthful zeal to rise above his station and in his ascent to political prominence, he became a prodigal. None rose so fast and then fell so far as Hamilton. But when he was finally humbled, neither Chernow nor Miranda could ignore his “late-flowering religious interests.”7

In this complex life of Hamilton, Douglass Adair and Marvin Harvey, writing in 1955, identified “four distinct stages” in his spiritual development:

his early piety, from 1772–1777
a “fifteen-year period of complete religious indifference,” from 1777–1792
his “opportunistic religiosity,” from 1792 to 1800
his final season, from 1800 until his death in 1804, when he “began sincerely seeking God in this time of failure and suffering”8

Jesus told a parable in Luke 15 of a youth who left home for a far country, squandered his life in reckless living, and eventually realized the world could not satisfy. In time, the young man “came to himself” and returned home to his father (Luke 15:17).

Whether there was a celebration in heaven on July 12, 1804, for the final homecoming of Alexander Hamilton, I cannot tell you with certainty. But I want you to hear the rest of the story, so far as we can tell, as we weave together both Jesus’s parable of the prodigal with these four distinct stages in Hamilton’s spiritual development.

A challenge here is that Hamilton’s life will look very different to a political scientist and a Christian pastor. I’m a pastor. Without doing injustice to his life as a statesman, I want to draw out, with special emphasis, the often-muted story of Hamilton’s prodigal journey and late-flowering faith.9

1. His Early Piety (1772–1777)

The younger son gathered all he had and took a journey into a far country. (Luke 15:13)

Hamilton was born in 1755 on the island of Nevis. Due to his mother’s previous marriage and alleged infidelity, his parents were not legally married. He had an older brother, and his father abandoned them when he was ten. Two years later, his mother died of yellow fever. Orphaned, Alexander and his brother went to live with a cousin, who soon thereafter committed suicide. At age fourteen, he went to work as a clerk for an importer-exporter on the island of St. Croix and excelled. In 1772, Knox arrived on St. Croix and took an interest in him.

After the publication of the hurricane letter, Hamilton came to New Jersey, hoping to enroll in Princeton. He proposed an abbreviated course of study to president John Witherspoon, who denied his request. (Recently a student named James Madison had completed a two-year fast-track at Princeton and worked himself into a nervous breakdown. Perhaps Witherspoon had Madison in mind when he declined Hamilton’s request.)

Undeterred, Hamilton took his proposal to King’s College in New York, where it was approved, and he began classes in the fall of 1773. As early as that summer, he made his first public speech in favor of the revolutionary cause. His college roommate, Robert Troup, remembered Hamilton’s “habit of praying upon his knees both night and morning” and that “he was a zealous believer in the fundamental doctrines of Christianity.”10

However, Hamilton’s physical and social journey into the far country soon led to a spiritual pilgrimage — or better, to spiritual lethargy and distraction, as the revolutionary spirit was fomenting in New York and began to draw forcefully on his energies. However devout he may have been at arrival, his unusually able brain and pen were soon captured by the feverish energy of the day. Rather than to Christian jeremiads and hymns, his attention turned to the revolution.

Ashbel Green (1762–1848), who would later serve as the eighth president of Princeton, reflected on those prewar days in the British colonies: “The military spirit that pervaded the whole land was exceedingly unfriendly to vital piety, among all descriptions of the citizens.” And this was especially so at the colleges:

Military enthusiasm had seized the minds of the students, to such a degree that they could think of little else than warlike operations. By the time the cloud of war had passed over, the colleges were more enamored of Deism and the French Revolution’s Cult of the Supreme Being than of orthodox piety.11

Hamilton too, alongside his fellow collegiates, was swept up into what was trending, into the talk of the cultural moment. And he had manifest abilities — skilled with words, brave enough for battle, and a natural leader. His revolutionary success quickly pulled him into the heart of American cause and its politics from 1775 to 1800, perhaps surpassed only by George Washington in that quarter century.

His Christian interests, however, cooled as they were eclipsed by political ambition and zeal for his work as Washington’s aide-de-camp, then in establishing a law practice in New York, and climactically as the nation’s first secretary of the treasury from 1789 to 1795. Alongside Madison, this young Hamilton would prove to be one of the great intellects of the founding generation. And while being every bit Madison’s match in political thought (if not exceeding him), he far surpassed Madison, and the other leading founders, in economics.

2. Fifteen Years of Indifference (1777–1792)

There [in the far country] he squandered his property in reckless living. (Luke 15:13)

Adair and Harvey call this the “fifteen-year period of complete religious indifference,” when politically he “shot up like a skyrocket.”12 Hamilton’s wordsmithing and courage had propelled him to revolutionary leadership. In 1777, he was promoted to Washington’s side.

Now 22 years old, he would be Washington’s right-hand man during the revolution and, later, under the new constitution, the first secretary of the treasury from 1789 until 1795. Then he would essentially function as the prime minister and occupy the most powerful seat in the first executive administration. Hamilton’s long-standing relationship with Washington proved to be a stabilizing force, at least in public life. In hindsight, his most productive (and least self-destructive) work came when he was most proximate to Washington.

But it was not only Washington (whose guidance was political) who influenced him, but also Eliza, whose sway was gently but relentlessly spiritual. He married her in 1780. She was, even then, what we would call an “evangelical Christian” today, and she became only more so as she aged.

“As a woman of deep spirituality, Eliza believed firmly in [Christian] instruction for her [eight] children,”13 and it would prove to have effects on her husband as they raised them together, and particularly as his great humblings came later. She endured his wandering and, in the end, may have won him with her life and conduct (1 Peter 3:1).

Hamilton was there at the battle of Yorktown in 1781, leading a battalion and with distinction. After the war, his ascending career seemed nonstop. In 1782, he was appointed to Congress from New York, under the Articles of Confederation. Here he would see firsthand how weak and inadequate they were for a league of thirteen states.

In 1783, he resigned from Congress to establish a law practice in New York. In 1786, he wrote the letter calling delegates to a convention in Philadelphia for the summer of 1787. He attended this Constitutional Convention, and the following year he organized and edited The Federalist Papers, partnering with Madison and John Jay to persuade New Yorkers to ratify the new Constitution.

Under Hamilton’s lead in 1789–1795, the Treasury Department drove the executive branch and new government. He grew the department to more than five hundred employees, while the War Department had a dozen employees, and Jefferson’s State Department only six.

And yet it was in this rapid rise, in his shooting up like a rocket, that cracks began to show — in particular, in 1791, in the adultery that Chernow calls “one of history’s most mystifying cases of bad judgment.”14 It would be whispered in private rooms until 1797 and then proclaimed from rooftops. We’ll come back to this in the next section.15

3. His ‘Opportunistic Religiosity’ (1792–1800)

When he had spent everything, a severe famine arose in that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed pigs. And he was longing to be fed with the pods that the pigs ate, and no one gave him anything. (Luke 15:14–16)

Washington began his second term in 1793. In January, France’s Louis XVI was executed. By June, the Committee of Public Safety came to power in Paris with its Reign of Terror. France became the unceasing controversy of Washington’s second term, driving party divisions deeper between Hamilton and Jefferson, who soon resigned.

With the furor over the French Revolution came fresh atheistic fears among many faithful Christians. Hamilton saw the pro-French Jeffersonians exposed and “attempted to enlist God in the Federalist party to buttress that party’s temporal power,” write Adair and Harvey.16

Unfortunately Hamilton’s blasphemous attempts to use God for his all-too-human ends were extremely successful with large numbers of the clergy. . . . Actually it is during these years when religious slogans were so often on his lips that Hamilton seems farther from God and from any understanding of his Son, Jesus Christ, than at any time in his whole career.17

Like Jefferson, Hamilton was eventually worn down by political libel and public slander. In debt, with a growing family at home, he decided to return to New York in 1795. In this season, his early forties, he would experience the beginning of his many humblings.

The Adams administration, beginning in 1797, would bring mounting frustrations — both for him and him for Adams. He began to make several terrible judgment calls. In October of 1799, Adams broke with his cabinet (and Hamilton) to send an envoy to France, and in the wake of that came what Chernow calls “a total loss of perspective by Hamilton, the nadir of his judgment.”18

The dominoes began to fall, and Hamilton with them. In December of 1799, Washington died, his surrogate father. By February 1800, it became clear that the Federalist party was turning from Hamilton to Adams. Then, by the end of April, Aaron Burr and his opposing coalition won control of New York. In a matter of months, Hamilton’s political power and influence crumbled.

To top it all off, in the election of 1800, his old cabinet rival Jefferson won the presidency — and with Burr as vice president. As Adair and Harvey write, “Perhaps never in all American political history has there been a fall from power so rapid, so complete, so final as Hamilton’s in the period from October 1799 to November 1800.”19

And all this just eighteen months after the papers got ahold of his six-year secret, the adultery of 1791. Hamilton, hoping to protect his financial reputation, published a painfully long and detailed pamphlet confessing to his marital infidelity. He plainly did not know when to stop. His finances may have been in order. His soul was not.

Back to the Squalor

From a Christian perspective, Hamilton’s adultery appears as his most glaring flaw, even more obviously and unqualifiedly than the duel. His adultery showed how far his heart had wandered — and reminds us of the delusion of power and success. We can indeed be most vulnerable when we feel strongest.

There once was a great king in Israel who, as a prelude to infidelity, remained in the city when others went to war (2 Samuel 11:1). So too Hamilton, at the height of his power in 1791 — and with so much work to do — stayed in Philadelphia while his family summered upstate.

That summer, a 23-year-old woman approached him, telling of an abusive husband and asking for help. Later, in the notorious Reynolds Pamphlet, his extended public confession in 1797, he would write that he came to her door with monetary assistance. “Some conversation ensued from which it was quickly apparent that other than pecuniary consolation would be acceptable.”20 This is the first of several 1790s instances about which Chernow, even as the cool-headed biographer (and measured admirer), appears stunned by Hamilton’s folly:

Such stellar success might have bred an intoxicating sense of invincibility. But his vigorous reign had also made him the enfant terrible of the early republic, and a substantial minority of the country was mobilized against him. This should have made him especially watchful of his reputation. Instead, in one of history’s most mystifying cases of bad judgment, he entered into a sordid affair with a married woman named Maria Reynolds that, if it did not blacken his name forever, certainly sullied it. From the lofty heights of statesmanship, Hamilton fell back into something reminiscent of the squalid world of his West Indian boyhood.21

Yet even with the Reynolds affair made public, devastating as it was, it was still another eighteen months before Hamilton began to utterly crumble.

4. His Final Season of Suffering and Seeking (1800–1804)

When he came to himself, he said, “How many of my father’s hired servants have more than enough bread, but I perish here with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants.’” And he arose and came to his father. (Luke 15:17–20)

One great irony of Hamilton’s story, and caution for us today, is that when he was at his best politically, he was at his worst in relation to Christ. And yet as he was humbled, turning again to Jesus, he could have been at his worst politically.

More terrible judgments followed the Reynolds Pamphlet.22 Even as late as the spring of 1802, he wrote a letter to fellow Federalist James Bayard proposing what he called a “Christian Constitutional Society.” I suspect this to be a genuine, though terribly naive, expression of his renewed Christian faith. It may also be one last gasp of his 1790s opportunism.

When Hamilton was at his best politically, he was at his worst in relation to Christ.

To counter Jefferson’s French-friendly Democratic Societies, Hamilton proposed a new society that would exist to promote (1) the Christian religion and (2) the Constitution of the United States. He saw both under Jeffersonian threat, but his Federalist interests were clearly political, or at least politically expedient.

“By signing up God against Thomas Jefferson,” says Chernow, “Hamilton hoped to make a more potent political appeal. . . . Hamilton was not honoring religion but exploiting it for political ends.” However misguided the effort, Chernow can’t help but recognize, “It is striking how religion preoccupied Hamilton during his final years.”23

Quiet Uptown

In November of 1801, the most devastating domino fell: his eldest child, Philip, age nineteen, died in a duel, defending his father’s honor. Learning of the duel, Hamilton had advised his son to take the righteous course and throw away his shot, that is, shoot into the air. But his son’s opponent did not. This would prove to be Alexander’s greatest devastation. Soon he would write to a friend that Philip’s death was “beyond comparison the most afflicting of my life.”24

Yet by late 1801, Hamilton was plainly taking deep solace in Christianity and Philip’s profession of faith: “It was the will of heaven and [Philip] is now out of the reach of the seductions and calamities of a world full of folly, full of vice, full of danger, of least value in proportion as it is best known. I firmly trust also that he has safely reached the haven of eternal repose and felicity.”25

“While the sufferings and frustrations resulting from political failure started Hamilton’s religious conversion,” claim Adair and Harvey, it was this “terrible personal tragedy [that] crystalized the change.”26 “This plenitude of sorrow . . . accounts for a totally new note — the first echo in all his writings of ‘Thy will be done’ — that now appears in certain Hamilton letters. . . . The old Hamilton arrogance had disappeared.”27

Hamilton’s spiritual renewal in this last season is too pronounced to ignore, whether in a first-rate biography or on Broadway. His reawakening appears to have just preceded (and prepared him for) Philip’s death. Miranda partially captures it in the aftermath of his loss, in the culminating song “Quiet Uptown,” where Hamilton sings,

I take the children to church on Sunday,A sign of the cross at the door,And I pray.That never used to happen before.

What may be a “grace too powerful to name” on Broadway is precisely the name we in the church know as powerful. And we name the name: Jesus.

In July of 1804, on the night before his own deadly duel, he would write,

This letter, my very dear Eliza, will not be delivered to you unless I shall first have terminated my earthly career to begin, as I humbly hope from redeeming grace and divine mercy, a happy immortality. . . . The consolations of [Christianity], my beloved, can alone support you and these you have a right to enjoy. Fly to the bosom of your God and be comforted. With my last idea, I shall cherish the sweet hope of meeting you in a better world. Adieu best of wives and best of women.28

And so we ask, Why the duel with Burr? Just three years prior, he had lost his firstborn to a duel. On multiple occasions, he publicly had expressed his own disavowal of dueling. How could he agree to this, and especially now as a professing Christian?

Instead of engaging in speculation, I’ll let Oliver Wolcott Jr., Hamilton’s successor as secretary of the treasury, express his sense of its senselessness. On the day of the duel, Wolcott wrote to his wife that

Gen’l Hamilton . . . reasoned himself into a belief, that though the custom [of dueling] was in the highest degree criminal, yet there were peculiar reasons which rendered it proper for him, to expose himself to Col. Burr in particular. This instance of the derangement of intellect of a great mind, on a single point, has often been noticed as one of the most common yet unaccountable frailties of human nature.29

This was, thought Wolcott, “the derangement of intellect of a great mind, on a single point.” Wolcott added at the end his letter, “Gen’l Hamilton has of late years expressed his conviction of the truths of the Christian Religion.”

However tragic and ill-conceived his decision to row across the river to the dueling grounds in New Jersey, that would be not the place of his death. Hamilton threw away his shot while Burr’s bullet struck him in the liver and lodged in his spine. Hamilton seemed dead onsite but revived on the open water while being rowed back to New York. He lived another 31 hours, until 2:00pm the following day.

Mercy Through the Redeemer

Hamilton’s professions of faith on his deathbed are by no means his only indications of Christian faith, but they are his clearest and most documented.

First, he called for Benjamin Moore, episcopal bishop of New York and president of Columbia (formerly King’s) College. He asked to receive the Lord’s Supper. Hamilton was not a church member, so Moore hesitated to administer the sacrament (he would return later and administer it). Moore asked him, “Do you sincerely repent of your sins past? Have you a lively faith in God’s mercy through Christ, with a thankful remembrance of the death of Christ? And are you disposed to live in love and charity with all men?”30

According to Moore, Hamilton “lifted up his hands and said, ‘With the utmost sincerity of heart I can answer those questions in the affirmative — I have no ill will against Col. Burr. I met him with a fixed resolution to do him no harm. I forgive all that happened.’” Moore says that he “had no reason to doubt [Hamilton’s] sincerity.”31

Rich Grace, Only Refuge

A second minister also visited Hamilton on his deathbed — his old friend Rev. John M. Mason, pastor of the Scotch Presbyterian Church.32 Mason told Hamilton that he

had nothing to address him in his affliction, but that same gospel of the grace of God, which it is my office to preach to the most obscure and illiterate: that in the sight of God all men are on a level, as all men have sinned and come short of his glory [Romans 3:23]; and that they must apply to him for pardon and life, as sinners, whose only refuge is in his grace by righteousness through our Lord Jesus Christ [Romans 5:21].

Hamilton responded, “I perceive it to be so. I am a sinner: I look to his mercy.” Mason then turned his attention to

the infinite merit of the Redeemer, as the propitiation for sin, the sole ground of our acceptance with God; the sole channel of his favor to us; and cited the following passages of Scripture: There is no name given under heaven among men, whereby we must be saved, but the name of Jesus [Acts 4:12]. He is able to save them to the uttermost who come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them [Hebrews 7:25]. The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin [1 John 1:7].

Mason reminded him that “the precious blood of Christ was as effectual and as necessary to wash away the transgression which had involved him in suffering, as any other transgression; and that he must there, and there alone, seek peace for his conscience. . . . He assented, with strong emotions, to these representations, and declared his abhorrence of the whole transaction.”33 Mason then

recurred to the topic of the divine compassions; the freedom of pardon in the Redeemer Jesus to perishing sinners. “That grace, my dear General, which brings salvation is rich, rich.”

“Yes,” interrupted [Hamilton], “it is rich grace.”

“And on that grace,” continued [Mason], “a sinner has the highest encouragement to repose his confidence, because it is tendered to him upon the surest foundation; the scripture testifying that ‘we have redemption through the blood of Jesus, the forgiveness of sins according to the riches of his grace’ [Ephesians 1:7].”

At this point, Hamilton looked upward and said with emphasis, “I have a tender reliance on the mercy of the Almighty, through the merits of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Mason’s narrative continues with more Scripture and further affirmations from Hamilton.

Finally, writes Mason,

As I was retiring, [Hamilton] lifted up his hands in the attitude of prayer, and said feebly, “God be merciful to — ” His voice sunk, so that I heard not the rest distinctly, but understood him to quote the words of the publican in the Gospel, and to end with “me a sinner.”34

Puritan Roots and Prayers

Clearly Hamilton’s late-life return to his early faith and his deathbed confessions raise questions. As Christians, many of us may feel both relief and some uneasiness at the whole scene. That Hamilton never joined a church is troubling. Not many thieves on the cross have God as their Father but not the church as their mother. That is sobering.35 Perhaps he was an exception.

And those of us who grieve his long, tragic journey into the far country of political success and pride want to redouble our resolve to live now for what matters eternally and to welcome God’s humbling hand if we realize ourselves to have strayed.

Lest Hamilton’s late-life Christian faith contribute to a distorted impression of the nation’s founding, we’re wise to concede that this, meager as it is, may be one of the clearer affirmations of evangelical faith among the inner circle of the founders. You will not find such in Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, or Madison. (One exception is John Jay.) This is not to make much of Hamilton’s reticent and late-flowering faith but to own how unevangelical was the nation’s founding.

Hamilton’s political career is a warning to those today who pine to be in the room “where it happens.” Hamilton was there. It did not satisfy. For him, it led to the eroding and near ruin of what mattered most. His life is a cautionary tale.

Hamilton’s succession of humblings and his late-flowering Christian faith show us a man who rose to the top and was not satisfied with what this world alone has on offer. Military achievement and fame, political influence and position, success as a lawyer, an adoring wife, and eight children — his heart remained restless until, through much of his own sin and folly, he fell headlong.

But in his great humblings, he did seem to “come to himself” and find rest in the Savior in whom he first professed faith in his youth. For years, his life looked to Christian eyes like the third soil, “choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life” (Luke 8:14). But perhaps, as Hamilton wrote in his hurricane letter, his Lord did “snatch me from ruin.” In his final season, and particularly in his clear final confessions, he professed “tender reliance on the mercy of the Almighty, through the merits of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

May we too not only depart, but live now with such a reliance — and observing Hamilton’s follies, be spared some of our own.