Hebrews 13:3
Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body.
The word prison used here will include all instances where “bonds, shackles, chains were ever used.” The word “remember” implies more than that we are merely to “think” of them; It means that we are to remember them “with appropriate sympathy;” or as we should wish others to remember us if we were in their circumstances. That is, we are
(1) to feel deep compassion for them;
(2) we are to remember them in our prayers;
(3) we are to remember with aid for their relief.
Christianity teaches us to sympathize with all who are oppressed, suffering, and sad; We are to care about the ones in prison as much as we care about our physical church.
In America there are not far from ten thousand confined in prison – the mother separated from her children; the husband from his wife; the brother from his sister; and all cut off from the living world.
Many of the jails feel like solitary dungeons; all of them are sad and melancholy. True, people are there for crimes; but they are women – they are our sisters. They still have feelings of our common humanity, and many of them feel their separation from husbands, and children, and home, as keenly as we would.
God who has mercifully made our lot different from theirs, has commanded us to sympathize with them – and we should sympathize all the more when we remember that but for his restraining grace we should have been in the same condition.
We should remember them, and sympathize with them as if they were our mothers, sisters, or daughters.
Though of different circumstance, yet the same blood flows in their veins as in ours Acts 17:26; they are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. By nature they have the same right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”
They have the same God who has kept us from that hard lot has commanded us to remember them.
That kind remembrance, in the scripture, means we should be in prayer for them, by efforts to send them the gospel, and to disciple them in the ways of God.
Remember, Christianity unites all hearts in one and binds us all to one race.
As being ourselves also in the body – As being yourselves exposed to persecution and suffering, and liable to be injured.
That is, do to them as you would wish them to do to you if you were the sufferer.
When we see an oppressed and injured, we should remember that it is possible that we may be in the same circumstances, and that then we shall need and desire the sympathy of others.
