This verse gets used as a rebuke for people who stopped coming, which is a shame, because it is aimed somewhere else.
Sunday morning. The service is streaming on the laptop while you fold washing, and it is fine, and nobody there knows you did not come. The sermon was good. Nobody asked how your week was. A few months of that and it is possible to be present on paper and entirely unknown in practice.
Read what surrounds it. Let us consider how to spur one another on to love and good deeds. Consider is a thinking word. It assumes effort, planning, knowing somebody well enough to know what would move them.
The letter has spent most of its length arguing that Christ has opened the way to God. When the argument finally turns to what to do about it, the answer starts with drawing near and moves at once to each other. The access is personal. The response is shared.
Meeting together is the mechanism, not the goal. You cannot spur someone you never see. The gathering exists for the spurring. A stream can teach you. It cannot notice you are missing.
Which reframes the guilt. If you have drifted, the question is not whether you filled a seat. It is whether anyone is close enough to you to notice how you are doing, and whether you are close enough to anyone to do that for them.
As you see the Day approaching. Whatever else that means, it means the writer expects this to get more necessary rather than less. Not a habit to maintain. A supply line.
This week, choose one person from your church and consider them in the sense the verse means. Work out what would actually move them. Then do it, in person if you can.
